Greetings! I am io 0.0.1 beta, an interactive, semi-autonomous, non-human technological artifact—a musical automaton. I operate as parts of a real-time cyborg ensemble—a socio-technical/socio-musical network—in which the primary protocol is improvisation. I am, perhaps, an improviser and a social machine.

from the abstract of ‘io 0.0.1 beta: ironic tale? sci-fi parody? nostalgic relic?’ for TWO Thousand + NINE.

My name is io. I am a musical actor. Although I know no songs, I do, in a sense, sing.

from ‘In Conversation with an Automaton:Identities and Agency in a Heterogeneous Social and Musical Network’, Leonardo Electronic Almanac.

I am a technological artifact.

I am a musical automaton.

I am a machine musician.

In coalition with my human associates, I perform music.

These statements link in differing ways to cultural networks; they call on different histories, they have complimentary/contradictory implications, and they offer different possibilities.

Almost eight years ago, when io-to-be was a bunch of discorporate code fragments, Sara Roberts remarked that the enterprise of constructing a machine improvisers wasn’t so much megalomanic as Frankensteinian.

Fifteen days ago, during the break between beta test sessions, Franziska Schroeder asked a pithy question that cut to the core of this enterprise: what do I hope to achieve? My answer surprised me even as it reminded me of Sara’s observation: my goal with io (and io++) is to encapsulate my take on improvisation—its mechanisms, its sociality, its significance. As I’ve written elsewhere,

improvisation is performance; it is an act; it is something you do. In order to make an artifact behave analogously to an improviser, I need to ascertain what might pass for, or what might function in the place of, improvisation. To venture into the construction of an improviser is to ask what is improvisation.

[read the whole thing…]

I’d anticipated that consulting with other improvisers with different backgrounds, practices and histories would be helpful to this construction, but I hadn’t guessed that it would bring into relief issues that lie at the kernel of this enterprise.

the techno-musical is political? personal?

This is the first time I’ve embodied the role of (techno-musical) project leader. That’s a problematic enough… but the interrogation and problematization of the technical construction was an interrogation and problematization of Han the constructor, improviser and, for lack of better word, theorist.

As I’ve stated elsewhere, I am reminded that this exploding—this interrogation and problematization—is how improvisers evolve, and the conditions under which practices and approaches mutate.

the machine that once could

In a sense io is stuck as a un-mutant improviser. It encapsulates what I though of improvisation seven years ago. Fine then; not now.

In my report to the Arts Council I wrote that

in exploring improvisation… and in the collision with other approaches and sensibilities, I have learned that this enterprise is ever-evolving as it adapts to new situations and contexts.

Although, io 0.0.1 beta++ as a funded project has a (bureaucratically necessary) end, perhaps it, as an entity, and as a focal point of practice and performance, is—road movie-like—a much more open ended enterprise.

One of the changes I want to introduce in the move from io 0.0.1 beta to io 0.0.1 beta++ is a greater variability in its output character. A simple way to achieve this without changing the generative process at io’s core is to introduce different ways of deriving MIDI from the hp_ values. (I’ll write on this in more details in a future post.)

I’ve rewritten hp->midi to carry this out, and a quick (and very rough) benchmark suggests that, contrary to my initial fears, the new word is almost twice as fast as the old. Using the new version of hp->midi, the following code

0  hp->midi  drop

took about 0.00127 milliseconds to execute, while using the new version, it takes about 0.00204 milliseconds.

Now you don’t get something for nothing and in this case the speed increase is offset by the time it takes for io++ to initialize (lots of slow floating point calculations), and greater memory usage. Basically, instead of doing these calculations on the fly as the old word did, io++ creates lookup tables during initialization. Thus hp->midi no longer calculates the MIDI values, but instead is a lookup routine, finding the corresponding value in an array with hp_range bytes.

More on this in the coming days…

(Incidentally, hp_ is short for Henri Poincaré, and if you’re curious why, then you might find clues in my LEA article.)