In teoria è tutto aperto, free, non ci sono quasi pre-istruzioni, tranne la durata approssimativa della performance — come in qualunque contesto improvvisativo — che va inserita nel sistema. Ogni atto — suono, rumore — è del tutto autonomo o almeno sotto la supervisione di ciascun agente interattivo, uomo o macchina che sia. io 0.0.1 beta++ è stato costruito secondo le pratiche comuni dell’improvvisazione aperta: non ci sono interventi non-musicali, quindi nessun interruttore a pedale, niente tonalità o tempi prestabiliti — per certi versi una blackbox. In pratica traccia i confini attorno al possibile: vedi le discrepanze tra finzione scientifica e realtà pratica, ma sono più che compensate dai musicisti umani. Se c’è qualcosa che manca, qualcosa che è divenuto sempre più evidente in questo lavoro di anni a stretto contatto con Bruce [Coates] e Franziska [Schroeder] nel perfezionare e costruire il sistema è il senso di evoluzione individuale.

[In theory, entirely open—free—almost no prescription (except for the rough duration of each performance which can be set in the system) just like it would be in any other open improvisative context. Every gesture, every bloop and bleep, is entirely autonomous, or at least under the supervision of each interactive agent whether human or machine. io 0.0.1 beta++ was constructed according to the common practices of open improvisation: no non-musical cues (thus no ‘footswitch’), no prearranged tempo, key, etc (it is, to some extent, a blackbox). In practice, there’s some interesting… boundaries around the possible (where you see the discrepancy between science fiction and practical reality), but those are more than compensated for by the human performers. If there’s one thing the system lacks, something that became increasingly apparent working closely with Bruce [Coates] and Franziska [Schroeder] over the years debugging and constructing the system, it is a sense of individual evolution.]

You can read more in the current issue of jazzColo[u]rs. [More from this interview…]

Franziska Schroeder and io 0.0.1 beta++ (prototype) (Cork, March 26, 2009)

On the 10th of November 2008 I had the great pleasure to meet io.

She seemed a rather calm, clandestine creature, not saying much… not moving much, in fact not engaging with me much at all. However, she appeared to be a ‘saxophonistic’ persona—shiny, slightly shimmering in the sunlit surroundings.

But who is io? What does she sound like? How would she react to me? Would she respond? Would she challenge me (musically, that is). In other words, would she adopt sensitively to changes, make creative contributions and develop musical ideas suggested by me?

All sorts of questions went through my head before I even had played a note.
I was not told much about io in advance, in order to engage with her without any preconceptions.

I played and I listened…. io’s steady, breathy and rather regular sighs reminded me of a machinic engagement I had in 2000 when working on a piece entitled “Aquas Liberas.” That piece was based on recordings made in the Águas Livres Aqueduct, in Lisbon, Portugal. I had visited several machine rooms where water was pumped across pipes and the breathy machinic air sounds from the Lisbon site were reminiscent of io’s, at times, dis-engaged, de-contextualised replies.

I stopped. We talked. I played again and listened. I had found out a bit more about io and the next time I tried to ‘please’ her. I tried to soothe her into a calm, less hasty, more spacious musical dialogue. We engaged a little better.

I stopped. We talked. I played again. I wanted her to listen. This time she would need to be ‘with’ me. If the musical ideas dried up and we needed to stop she would need to listen. But she ignored me. The musical journey seemed to come to a halt (from my point of listening).

io carried on. I went along, trying to get her to conclude, to find a musical ending. io carried on. Why won’t she listen? Why won’t she acknowledge that we need to finish? io carried on. No surprises. No quest for anything new. No fresh ideas. No aspirations. No ending…

Improvisation, as George Lewis notes, shall become “not so much a practice, but an aspiration toward freedom…” …with io there is not yet in sight this “dangerous hybrid formed by agency and indeterminacy whose ultimate outcome is a continuous transformation of both Other and Self” (Lewis, 2007: Parallax, p.120).

io, we will meet again. I will transform you. You will transform me. Maybe.

[Original article…] [Audio documentation of the testing session…]

Image © 2012 Leonardo Electronic Almanac

The Leonardo Electronic Almanac’s archives, a project to reissue articles that document over fifteen years of techno-cultural activity, has caught up with ‘My Favorite Things: The Joy of the Gizmo’ (Volume 15, No. 11-12, November–December 2007). That issue of the LEA, a companion to Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 17, featured my article, ‘In Conversation with an Automaton: Identities and Agency in a Heterogeneous Social and Musical Network’:

Abstract

io 0.0.1 beta is an interactive, semi-autonomous technological artifact that, in partnership with its human associates, performs a deliberately amplified staging of a socio-technical network—a network in which primary protocol is improvisation. In this paper, I explore the performance of identities, hybrids and relationships, illustrating the space between myself (human partner and constructor) and io through imaginary conversations between us. Considering that io highlights, in particular, the social agency of artifacts, I find it fitting that my own notions about the nature of improvisation, the technical and the social have changed through my interactions with io.

[Read the article…]

HZ: ‘simple-pattern’ (click to hear…)

[Continued from part 0…]

Talking to Melanie L. Marshall after she read the previous post on musical time clarified some matters that were left unstated.

The issue is not so much that a musicality built up from a simple ‘beat detection’ is not possible (such notions of musicality surround us in our music schools, in our writing about music, and, unsurprisingly, in our art-science research). The issue is the implications of seeking and defining, in research, such a trait; valuing such a musicality; and, by extension, practicing such a music.

As argued by Suzanne Cusick, George E. Lewis, Christopher Small and others, musical practice constitutes a political schema—music performs society. The command-control model embedded in a musicality built upon ‘beat detection’ has profound consequences for constructing alternative politics.

As improvisers we desire to step off the simple line that posits anarchy at one end and control at the other—a line that is as familiar as the Cagian denial of agency and the heroic single author.

As creative musicians we struggle to perform freedom—not the ‘freedom’ of Ron Paul’s privileged idiots, but the freedom of Civil Rights, freedom of anti-colonialism, freedom of feminism, freedom of queer politics. The ‘free’ in (so-called) jazz.

We know rhythm is a site of interdependence, but we also know that it is shaped by the agency of all; it is compromise, yes, it is negotiation, yes, it is collective, yes, but it is also play, and it is mutation, and it also holds the potential for revolution.

[Continued in part 0.2…]

HZ: ‘wind-chimes’ (click to hear…)

Melanie L. Marshall, in asking questions about musicality, takes a Foucauldian track and asks about musicality’s opposite, and in doing so, discusses and critiques some modern attempts at drawing a boundary between the musical and the unmusical. Melanie pulls up research by Henkjan Honing as an interesting, if problematic, example of such an attempt at drawing the boundary. Honing sketches out some provocative research as part of his TEDxAmsterdam talk. Honing suggests that we have inbuilt, hard-wired musical abilities.

Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues of whether we (scientists, researchers) have access to these pre-cultural, intrinsic abilities (as Bruno Latour might point out, we, at best, have access only to mediation—graphs, charts, sensor data, etc.), and whether our cultural tools, technology and language might make us observe phenomena in specifically cultural ways (can Honing’s ‘beat’ be defined para-culturally?), I think there’s a secondary problem: is ‘beat detection,’ however defined, an intrinsically musical ability? or, put it another way, what kind of ‘beat detection’ might be musical, and does it resemble, or require, the infant ‘beat detection’ as studied by Honing?

A couple of (personal) experiences lead me to be skeptical of the proposition that such simple ‘beat detection’ might be foundational to practical musicality in general, and to latter-day improvised musics in particular.

• A big part of teaching real-time interactive performance or group improvisation, I found, was getting students not to lockstep; for them to ‘hold their ground,’ to ‘find their own rhythm,’ to express, embody and perform autonomy. (Once we can do that, lock-stepping becomes a choice, but that’s a story for another time…)
• In group improvisation, input parsing is not an unambiguous matter. There isn’t one correct answer to, say, where the beat is. Furthermore, creative (mis)understandings may be a significant component of the generative engine in improvisation. (I’ll return to the subject of ambiguity in stimulus-response in the context of machine improvisation in a future post.)
• I’ve been fascinated by creative improvising drummers’ ability to simultaneously generate multiple senses of time (e.g. Oxley, Sanders), to switch and morph between multiple pulses (e.g. Cyrille, Hayward), or blur the boundary between in and out of time (e.g. Black). Inspired, I found a way to do this on guitar by delegating timekeeping to my limbs, joints, digits—to my body and its interaction with the instrument. Charles Hayward talked about drumming as an interaction between physiology and physics. Might the cognitive dimension of Honing’s ‘beat’ be peripheral, perhaps irrelevant, to this cyborgian practice of musicking?

It seems to me that the assumed importance of beat detection as a marker of musicality is itself a form of, in the Foucauldian sense, regulation. Perhaps the assumption of a foundational importance to musicality of a simple ‘beat detection’ stems from subscribing to a command-control model of musicality. In this model the mind is the central hub of the musical. In this model, rhythm is constant, inherited, external and which must be followed. This model, in turn, arises from certain, widely held to be sure, cultural assumptions about desirable and ‘natural’ social and political interactions. What do these assumptions blind us from?

[Continued in part 0.1…]

Il titolo da romanzo o di sigla di messaggio segreto è il nome della macchina sparamusica/rumori che fa bella mostra di sè sul palco e che senza alcun intervento dei musicisti intorno tira giù il suo catalogo di suoni con cui gli altri si trovano a confrontarsi. Un´idea che sarebbe piaciuta ai futuristi di omai un secolo fa, un inno totale alla modernità. Altro che strumenti acustici!

I tre musicisti coinvolti insieme alla macchina sono Han-earl Park alla chitarra, Bruce Coates al sax alto e sopranino e Franziska Schroeder al sax soprano. Non hanno nessuna paura per il confronto e così si avventano con passione sulla proposta dell´oggetto inanimato.

La session completamente improvvisata richiede molta attenzione da parte dell´ascoltatore, ripagata completamente da quello che è un esperimento riuscito. Non siamo qui in presenza di programmi che danno un risultato che il compositore/programmatore si aspetta già bensì di una macchina lasciata in balia di se stessa a proporre, rispondere, per quel che è la sua comprensione, rilanciare, su cui il trio dei musicisti umani crea interazione all´istante, improvvisazioni che a tratti acquistano atmosfere molto forti.

I tre non stanno solo a scoprire le possibilità intrinseche ai loro strumenti al di fuori delle tecniche ortodosse. Stanno anche ad esplorare, a farsi prendere dalle possibilità intrinseche al suono in quanto tale ed a volte sembra di ascoltare la lezione di uno Steve Lacy. È cosí che il tutto acquista una dimensione più terrestre e l´incontro/scontro con la macchina improvvisante regala paesaggi sonori inconsueti e densi di idee. [Original article…]

Translation:

The title of the romance or cypher of the secret message is the name of the sparamusica/noise machine that makes a fine show of itself on stage and without any intervention from musicians around, draws from its catalog of sounds with which the others find themselves confronted. An idea that would be pleasing to the Futurists of a century ago, a total hymn to modernity. Nothing but acoustic instruments!

The three musicians involved with the machine are Han-earl Park on guitar, Bruce Coates on alto and sopranino, and Franziska Schroeder on soprano sax. They have no fear for the confrontation, and they throw themselves with passion on the ideas from the inanimate object.

The completely improvised session requires a lot of attention from the listener, to be fully repaid by that which is a successful experiment. Here we are not in the presence of programs that give a result that the composer/programmer expects but of a machine left to propose, to answer without any help, for what it is its understanding, raise the stakes, on which the trio of human musicians create instant interactions, improvisations that at times acquires a very intense atmosphere.

The three do not only discover the intrinsic possibilities of their instruments outside orthodox techniques. They also explore, make themselves take from the intrinsic possibilities of the sound, and sometimes seems like listening to a lesson by Steve Lacy. So the whole acquires a more earthly dimension and the encounter/clash with the improvising machine presents unusual soundscapes full of ideas.

[More info on the recording…] [All reviews…]

‘io 0.0.1 beta++’ (SLAMCD 531) is available from SLAM Productions. [Details…]

personnel: io 0.0.1 beta++ (itself), Han-earl Park (guitar), Bruce Coates (alto and sopranino saxophones) and Franziska Schroeder (soprano saxophone).

© 2011 Han-earl Park.
℗ 2011 SLAM Productions.