Too Many Notes: Computers, Complexity and Culture in Voyager

W A Y S WAYS & MEANS & M Too Many Notes: Computers, E A N S Complexity and Culture in Voyager ABSTRACT The author discusses his computer music composition, Voyager, which employs a com- George E. Lewis puter-driven, interactive “virtual improvising orchestra” that analyzes an improvisor’s performance in real time, generating both complex responses to the musician’s playing and independent behavior arising from the program’s own in- oyager [1,2] is a nonhierarchical, interactive mu- pears to stand practically alone in ternal processes. The author con- V the trenchancy and thoroughness tends that notions about the na- sical environment that privileges improvisation. In Voyager, improvisors engage in dialogue with a computer-driven, inter- of its analysis of these issues with ture and function of music are active “virtual improvising orchestra.” A computer program respect to computer music. This embedded in the structure of software-based music systems and analyzes aspects of a human improvisor’s performance in real viewpoint contrasts markedly that interactions with these sys- time, using that analysis to guide an automatic composition with Catherine M. Cameron’s [7] tems tend to reveal characteris- (or, if you will, improvisation) program that generates both rather celebratory ethnography- tics of the community of thought complex responses to the musician’s playing and indepen- at-a-distance of what she terms and culture that produced them. “American experimentalism,” in Thus, Voyager is considered as a dent behavior that arises from its own internal processes. kind of computer music-making This work, which is one of my most widely performed com- which the word “race” never ap- embodying African-American aes- positions, deals with the nature of music and, in particular, pears, and in which her notion of thetics and musical practices. the processes by which improvising musicians produce it. a “musical class structure” is These questions can encompass not only technological or framed largely in terms of a now- music-theoretical interests but philosophical, political, cul- moribund debate about relative tural and social concerns as well. This is consistent with the privilege between Europe and America. instrumental dimension or tendency in African musical orga- In contrast, Born’s explicit identification of the nearly all- nization, or what Robert Farris Thompson [3] identifies as male, all-white musical and cultural canon articulated not “songs and dances of social allusion,” one of several “ancient only by the French institute, but by its American equivalents, African organizing principles of song and dance that crossed traces the outlines of the development of a post-1950s aes- the seas from the Old World to the New.” thetic of trans-European experimentalism. Given her so far Voyager’s unusual amalgamation of improvisation, indeter- unrefuted thesis that the overwhelming majority of computer minacy, empathy and the logical, utterly systematic structure music research and compositional activity locates itself (how- of the computer program is described throughout this article ever unsteadily at times) within the belief systems and cul- not only as an environment, but as a “program,” a “system” tural practices of European concert music, one can easily and a “composition,” in the musical sense of that term. In imagine a work that, like Voyager, exemplifies an area of musi- fact, the work can take on aspects of all of these terms simul- cal discourse using computers that is not viewed culturally taneously—considering the conceptual level, the process of and historically as a branch of trans-European contemporary creating the software and the real-time, real-world encounter concert music and, moreover, is not necessarily modeled as a with the work as performer or listener. Flowing across these narrative about “composition.” seemingly rigid conceptual boundaries encourages both improvisors and listeners to recognize the inherent instability of such taxonomies. THE AESTHETICS OF MULTIDOMINANCE Musical computer programs, like any texts, are not “objec- In an influential 1990s essay, the artist and critic Robert L. tive” or “universal,” but instead represent the particular ideas Douglas [8] sought to formalize an African-American aes- of their creators. As notions about the nature and function of thetic, synthesizing visual and musical elements of what the music become embedded into the structure of software-based painter Jeff Donaldson, founder of the Africobra art move- musical systems and compositions, interactions with these sys- ment [9], has called “Trans-African” culture. The aspect of tems tend to reveal characteristics of the community of thought Douglas’s theory that I wish to highlight here is the notion of and culture that produced them. Thus, it would be useful here “multidominant elements,” which I will henceforth call to examine the implications of the experience of programming “multidominance.” According to Douglas, the aesthetics of and performing with Voyager as a kind of computer music-mak- multidominance, involving “the multiple use of colors in in- ing embodying African-American cultural practice. tense degrees, or the multiple use of textures, design pat- Among the fair number of studies by artists/theorists who terns, or shapes” [10] are found quite routinely in musical have written cogently on issues of race, gender and class in new technological media (such as Loretta Todd [4] and Cameron Bailey [5]), the ethnographic study of Institut Re- George E. Lewis (trombonist, composer, computer/installation artist), Department of Music, Critical Studies/Experimental Practices Area, University of California, San Di- cherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) by ego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0326, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. the anthropologist and improvisor Georgina Born [6] ap- Website: <http://www.ucsd.edu/music/lewis.html>. © 2000 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 10, pp. 33–39, 2000 33 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/096112100570585 by guest on 01 October 2021 W A Y S and visual works of Africa and its border between form and content is dif- Miyake, and extended cellist Jon Rose. & diaspora. ficult to police. Moreover, these formal The work has been performed in venues M By way of introduction to his theory, abstractions are not universals; as diverse as the IRCAM Summer Acad- E A Douglas recalls from his art-student days multidominance is not present in all emy, the Groningen Jazz Marathon, In- N S that interviews with “most African-Ameri- trans-African music and art and cer- ternational Computer Music Confer- can artists with Eurocentric art training tainly must not be applied as a sonic lit- ences in 1988 and 1994, Xebec Hall will reveal that they received similar in- mus test. In the particular case of Voy- (Kobe, Japan) and the Velvet Lounge in structions, such as ‘tone down your col- ager, however, the composition’s Chicago [24]. ors, too many colors’” [11]. Apparently, African-American cultural provenance The various versions of Voyager have these “helpful” pedagogical interven- lends particular credence to an identifi- all been written in dialects of Forth, the tions were presented as somehow univer- cation of multidominance at the levels curiously hybrid compiled/interpreted sal and transcendent, rather than as ema- of both the logical structure of the soft- environment created by Charles Moore nating from a particular culturally or ware and its performative articulation. around 1970 [25,26]. Seemingly anti-au- historically situated worldview, or as Moreover, whether or not these thoritarian in nature, during the early based in networks of political or social multidominant forms have been con- 1980s Forth appealed to a community of power. Douglas, in observing that “such sciously conceptualized, exploited and composers who wanted an environment culturally narrow aesthetic views would extended by artists with full awareness of in which a momentary inspiration could have separated us altogether from our their implications, they must be viewed quickly lead to its sonic realization—a rich African heritage if we had accepted as culturally contingent, historically dialogic creative process, emblematic of them without question,” goes on to com- emergent and linked to situated struc- an improvisor’s way of working. As the pare this aspect of Eurocentric art train- tures of power and dialogue. Forth culture developed, languages ing to Eurocentric music training, which The African-American composer Olly such as Hierarchical Music Specification in his view does not equip its students to Wilson [17] has identified a set of ten- Language (HMSL) [27] and, later, FOR- hear music with multidominant rhythmic dencies and principles characteristic of MULA (FORth MUsic LAnguage) and melodic elements as anything but African and Afro-American music-mak- [28,29], created by artists working in the “noise,” “frenzy” or perhaps “chaos” [12]. ing, while quite similar principles are field, made Forth and its dialects per- In fact, virtually every extant form of identified by Robert Farris Thompson in haps the most widely used language black music has been characterized as examining African visual forms [18]. In group for interactive music before the “noise.” As historian Jon Cruz notes, the particular, Douglas, Wilson and Thomp- advent of Max, a language that similarly history of this trope in the United States son all identify rhythm as a critically im- centers the dialogic as part of the soft- dates back at least as far as the slavery portant structural element in African- ware construction process. period: “Prior to the mid-19th Century derived music. Wilson notices in My analysis of Voyager as an interactive black music appears to have been heard African-derived music a “principle of computer music system uses Robert by captors and overseers primarily as rhythmic and implied metrical contrast” Rowe’s taxonomy of “player” and “instru- noise—that is, as strange, unfathomable, [19]. Thompson sees the black Atlantic ment” paradigms [30], although these and incomprehensible” [13].

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