Music, Sound, and New Media
Screaming noise improvisation on 54HP Eurorack at the peaceful Hanamaki “English Coast” (花巻イギリス海岸).
There’s a feedback loop going here with spring reverb and ring modulation, plus quite a bit of contribution from the After Later Audio Benjolin V2.
More “MU” on the Hanamaki English Coast:
Beth Ratay has shared a wonderful performance of my 2009 piece “membrana tympaniformis” (or just “membrana”) for solo piccolo:
Originally written for Cassie Lear, this piece takes sonic inspiration from the Japanese bush warbler (ウグイス), but develops into a short but exciting showcase for the piccolo.
In order not to bury the lead, let me start by saying, Plurality Spring, a new game piece by me and Paul Turowski, is available for free download:
In the game, players use acoustic musical performance (via the computer’s microphone) to control robots exploring an orb in deep space.
This idea of a “game piece,” where an musical work emerges from performers playing within a set of rules, draws from historical models like John Zorn’s Cobra, or Christian Wolff’s For 1, 2, or 3 People. Since Plurality Spring is a digital video game, though, the performers’ live audio mixes with the in-game sound to create a kind of augmented reality performance piece (whether you perform in front of an audience or just on your own).
It’s been an interesting journey working on this piece and wonderful collaborating with Paul, who’s been working with these ideas for quite some time now. (My previous games feature dynamic or emergent musical ideas as an overall theme but aren’t specifically for musicians.)
One of the things that was particularly enjoyable about the collaboration was both of our willingness to be flexible about the game as it evolved.
The game was originally about this “kid” following a glowing orb. The players directly controlled the orb, but not the kid.
Here is a screenshot of the early prototype:
It’s cute! It’s neat! But without picking apart our whole creative process (maybe another time…), ultimately we ended up with something very different, and ultimately much better.
Our “kid” became three robots, and the orb is no longer something players chase, it’s a traversable planet. Our aesthetic ideas, too, became much more developed, and we ended up with a really pleasing balance of cute and “gritty” in our final visual and audio design.
We premiered the piece on March 24th, 2017 at the Open Circuit Festival in Liverpool, and now it’s available for everyone.
Play it on your own! Perform it for an audience! Share your videos!
We’re excited to hear what kind of AR music you create.
I wrote previously about the Kyma International Sound Symposium in Lübeck last October, and Symbolic Sound the KISS2104 organizers have started posting some videos of the performances at the symposium, including my NOPera.
Enjoy!
KISS2014 — NOPera: Simon Hutchinson from Symbolic Sound on Vimeo.
I’ve just returned from a fun and educational week at the Kyma International Sound Symposium in Lübeck, Germany. The conference (like last year’s) consisted of four days of thought-provoking lectures on variety of topics and concerts in a variety of musical styles, all unified in the implementation of Symbolic Sound’s Kyma System.
The theme of this year’s symposium was “Organic Sound.”
I’m a bit ambivalent in the use of the term “organic” in regard to music and sound art, mostly because I never understood what my composition teachers meant when they said that my music needed to develop more “organically.”
I now believe that this was kind of a way of saying: “I don’t know what’s unnatural (uncanny?) about how this piece you wrote progresses, but it’s just not right.”
Of course this understandable, as form and development are possibly the most challenging aspects of composition for many students, due, in part, to the enormous amount of subjectivity in composition and absence of “right” and “wrong” (but, arguably, the presence of “good” and “better”).
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.” –Richard Feynman
This is why, for my organic KISS2014 piece, I found the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) guidelines, a set of rules and regulations: binary and infallible! Then, I fed the text of these guidelines into an algorithm (another rule!), which produced a wonderfully organic text for my NOPera.
It was a pleasure, then, to collaborate with a number of other organic entities in performing the piece, including mezzo-soprano Kimberly Gratland James, and the young instrumentalists from the Musikhochschule Lübeck
At the conference, though, I found many of my international colleagues had spent a little more serious effort in engaging with the question: “What is organic sound?”
“What is the pattern that connects all living creatures?” –Gregory Bateson
Composers, sound artists, and researchers shared a wide range of ideas over the course of the conference, and there were a significant number of discussions of capacitive sensors, sensors that react to the capacitance of the human body, including a performance by former Oregon colleague Nayla Mehdi, and a presentation on “plantification” (using plants as capacitive sensors) by Damien Grobet, Ludovic Laffineur, and Rudi Giot.
Ms. Mehdi called capacitive sensors a “interdependent symbiotic sensor system” (and thus “organic”), a point I wish I had a greater understanding of last year, when working with a student frustrated by the inconsistency of capacitive sensors.
Of all the discussions of organic sound, however, particularly striking was Kyma creator Carla Scaletti’s talk “What is the Most Organic Sound.” Engaging with the work of researchers in the scientific community, Dr. Scaletti made a compelling argument that the description of “organic”–interdependent, modular, evolving, concerned with change–in regard to sound aptly defines “music” (and perhaps better than the “organized sound” definition commonly used).
So, post-conference, while my ambivalence about the imprecision of term “organic” remains, I appreciate my international colleagues’ engagement with the idea, and I understand that perhaps my ambivalence stems from inorganicism in my own thinking (scientism?).
I mean, since sound is a vibration in a physical medium as perceived by the ear, isn’t all sound organic?
Did I miss the point?