Sound and interaction in the arts

Feb 15, 2024

Henrik Frisk - henrik.frisk@kmh.se

About me

  • Musician and composer - electronic music and improvisation (saxophone and laptop)
  • Professor in SMC at KMH in Stockholm: artistic research and electroacoustic music composition
  • Research interests include:
    • artistic practices and interaction
    • aesthetics and ethics
    • historical instruments and their practice (last ~60 yrs) and spatialisation

Improvisation, Computers and Interaction

ImpCompInt-cover.jpg

What is interaction?

  • A vague term encompassing one of the most central practices of being a human being
  • Is there any music that doens't involve interaction at some level?

Interaction-as-control

A control paradigm to interaction

On/Off

Interaction-as-difference

The difference that makes a difference

More akin to social interction, and, Improvisation

What is electronic music composition?

Edgar Varèse coined the term Organized Sound:

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What is composition and why look at old instruments?

Edgar Varèse coined the term Organized Sound:

varese_quote-2.png

?? (????)

Organizing sounds

  • Technological development
    • Allows us to create sounds
    • Makes it easy to forget
    • Makes it easy to loose the focus
  • Our perspective makes old instrument different objects
  • What is past and future can get blurry, what is 'now' even more so

Contemporary Music

  • Suffers from an obsession of newness
  • Advantages, or knowledges of old practices may get lost
  • Interfaces of obsolete technologies may get lost

The focus

  • is not necessarily on how things were done in the past, but what the past looks like from where we stand now
  • is equally concerned with looking forward, beyond whatever material obstacles there may be

Historically informed design of sound synthesis

Our creative process will feed off a combination of heritage research, interaction design, and engineering research on sound synthesis and analysis, inspired by the experimentation in the early history of electronic instruments.

Composing

  • Temporal (perspective):

    past < > present < > future

  • Material (agency):

    object < > representation < > self

On historical electronic instruments

Comparatively short history

Stretching back to the late 19th century

Some early instruments include:

Ondes Martenot (1928)

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Telharmonium (1897)

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Thermin

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Post WWII: The great era for experimental instrument development

  • Following the war there was an increased activity to build new electronic instruments in both east and west.
  • This coincided with the strong urge to find new ways for artistic expression
  • In art in general a range of avant-garde movements emerged such as post-serialism, musique concrète, and new forms for musical theater.

RCA I-II synthesizer

Programmable with sequencer in binary code (punch cards). American composer Milton Babbit sas one of the composers that used it.

GRM (Groupes Recherche Musicales), Musique Concrète

Electronic Music Studios, London

EMS: Synthi 100 (1971)

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EMS: VCS3 (1969)

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EMS: Portable VCS3, Synthi A (1971)

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EMS Stockholm, director Knut Wiggen

Cologne, WDR

Stockhausen, the main figure in te German school of electroacoustic music.

Bidule en ut (1950)

It all started with a new series of exercises, the most famous of which is still Bidule en ut—a sort of "fugue" obtained by superimposing the false scale of a prepared piano with varying accelerations or retards

Pierre Henry (1027-2017) and Pierre Schaeffer (1910-1995), forst performed time March 16, 1950.

Rain will evaporate (2022)

Rain will evaporate is a composition with no end

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Rain will evaporate (2022)

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Rain will evaporate (2022)

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Rain (2023)

The installation was recorded twice a day and the current version is rendered from thos recordings using physical models of the original glass tubes.

rain_mesh1.png

rain_mesh2.png

Rain (2023)

Source code (excerpt) for the faust process to excite the virtual tube:

import("glassVase1.lib");

strike(g) = pm.strike(pos, sharpness, gn, g)
with {
  pos = hslider("pos", 0.5, 0, 1, 0.001);
  sharpness = hslider("sharpness", 0.5, 0, 1, 0.001);
  gn = hslider("ex_gain", 0.5, 0, 1, 0.001);
};

process = strike(gate) : glassVase1(exPos, 2, 0.2, 0.5)*gain <: _,_;

Rain (2023)

Pure data patch for playing the physical model:

pd1.png

pd2.png

Thank you!

Questions?

Henrik Frisk