Database Music A History, Technology, and Aesthetics of the Database in Music Composition by Federico Nicolás Cámara Halac A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music New York University May, 2019 Jaime Oliver La Rosa c Federico Nicolás Cámara Halac All Rights Reserved, 2019 Dedication For my mother and father, who have always taught me to never give up with my research, even during the most difficult times. Also to my advisor, Jaime Oliver La Rosa, without his help and continuous guidance, this would have never been possible. For Elizabeth Hoffman and Judy Klein, who always believed in me, and whose words and music I bring everywhere. Finally to Aye, whose love I cannot even begin to describe. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Jaime Oliver La Rosa, for his role in inspiring this project, as well as his commitment to research, clarity, and academic rigor. I am also indebted to committee members Martin Daughtry and Elizabeth Hoffman, for their ongoing guidance and support even at the very early stages of this project, and William Brent and Robert Rowe, whose insightful, thought-provoking input made this dissertation come to fruition. I am also everlastingly grateful to Judy Klein, for always being available to listen and share her listening. As well as to Aye, for her endless support and her helping me maintain hope in developing this project. I would also like to thank my parents, Ana and Hector, who inspired and nurtured my interest in music from a young age, and my sister Flor and my brother Joaquin who were always with me, next to every word. Finally, this dissertation could not have been possible without the support and help of my friends, some of which I would like to mention by name because they affected directly certain aspects of this text. I would like to thank Matias Delgadino and Lucia Simonelli, for their continuous layers of abstraction; Matias Borg Oviedo, for those endless conversations; Ioannis Angelakis, for his glass sculptures. v Preface Dataloquy (you don’t need to write this) (The initial title that explains how databases are ev- erywhere) The name of the database. (Now think of the data, and the base, and how these relate) These words must point to two things placed one inside the other. (Is it base in data or is it data in base?) The base (of the data). A basement, a basis, a basic foundation for data. The house where data resides. (Is it the base or the data that is economical? Or both?) The addresses in which they are located. (Clearly, you are talking about pointers) The discretized space that guards data. (Guardians of space? This starts to look like a bad sci-fi thing. ) Data as in the plurality of datum, and database as the plain (planicie in spanish) or the lattice upon which the address space is laid for data. (Data under house arrest) Datum as in bit, as the zero or the one, and nothing in between (Are you sure there is nothing in the middle?) Data as in bytes, and the eight bits that follow it around (like ducklings without mom [pata in spanish]) Data as in data types, the many names of the binary words representing the values of almost all numbers (and this ‘almost’ is still more than enough (Some would disagree)). Data as in data structures and their unions, symbols, lists, tables, arrays, sequences, dictionaries, simultaneously pointing to their interfaces and their implementations and assemblage (The assembly is in order) Data as in files fichiers in french, archivos in spanish, and their kilobytes and megabytes (inside directories and folders, etc.) Data as in data flow and data streams (are there data fountains?) Data you translate from slot to slot, transmit from client to server to client, transduce to and fro with adc and dac , transcode from format to format (transgress from torrent to torrent) Data as in dataset for your algorithms to test, vi to improve, to fit, to make them more efficient, to teach them the right tendencies, to drive your models data-driven (You are driving me crazy) Data as in data banks (also its transactions and cur- rency) Data as in data corpus (Oh, so it has body?) Data as in database (finally), basing gigabytes with models meant for system management and warehouses, repositories, terabytes, their mining, and their subsequent data clouds, clusters, spacing out into the (in)famous big data leap from bit to big. vii Abstract The aim of this dissertation is to outline a framework to discuss the aesthetic agency of the database in music composition. I place my dissertation in relation to existing scholarship, artists, and de- velopers working in the fields of music composition, computer science, affect, and ontology, with emphasis on the ubiquity of databases and on the need to reflect on their practice, particularly in relation to databasing and music composition. There is a database everywhere, anytime, always already affecting our lives; it is an agent in our aesthetic and political lives just as much as we are agents in its composition and performance. Database music lives in between computers and sound. My argument is that in order to conceptualize the agency of the database in music composition, we need to trace the history of the practice, in both its technical and its artistic use, so as to find nodes of action that have an effect on the resulting aesthetics. Therefore, this dissertation is composed of two main sections. In the first part, I trace a history of database practices from three points of view. The first is from new media theory, emphasizing the intersection between the database and the body. The second is from the history of the database in computer science, giving a panoramic view of the tools and concepts behind database systems, models, structures. The third is from their use in sound practices, describing different approaches to databasing from the fields of music information retrieval, sonification, and computer music. In the second part, I discuss the agency of the database under the broader concepts of sound, self, and community. These three axes are addressed in four sections, each with a different viii perspective. First I focus on listening and present the database as a resonant subject in a networked relation and community with the human. Second, I focus on memory, comparing human mem- ory and writing with digital information storing, thus relating databasing and composition with memory, archives, and their spectrality. Third, I analyze the performativity of databasing, under- standing the database as gendered, in its temporality, repetition, and in its contingent appearance as style, skin, and timbre. In the last section, I revise the notion of music work, reflecting on the consequences of the anarchic and the inoperative in the community of database music. As an appendix, I present an open-source library for making and performing a mul- timodal database that combines computer vision and timbre analysis algorithms to generate a database of image and audio descriptors suitable for automated navigation, querying, and live audio-visual performance. ix Contents Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Preface vi Abstract viii List of Figures xv List of Tables xvii Introduction 1 I Database Art 5 1 The Database In New Media Theory 6 1.1 Database As Form . .6 1.2 A Semiotic Trap . .7 1.3 Digital Convergence . 10 1.4 Bodiless Information . 12 x 1.5 Embodying Databasing . 14 1.6 Filtering And Framing . 15 1.7 Interlude: An Embodied Database . 17 1.8 Closing Remarks . 22 2 Databasing And The History Of Databases 24 2.1 Databasing: The Performance Of The Database . 24 2.1.1 Data types and structures . 25 2.1.2 Temporality of Databasing . 26 2.1.3 Databasing and Writing . 27 2.1.4 The Von Neumann Architecture . 30 2.2 A Database Tree . 31 2.3 The Realm Of Data Structures . 34 2.4 A Brief History Of Database Models . 36 2.4.1 Hierarchical . 38 2.4.2 Network . 39 2.4.3 Relational . 40 2.4.4 Non-Relational . 41 2.4.5 Graph . 42 2.4.6 Object . 42 2.4.7 Semi-structured . 43 2.4.8 Pure Data as Database System . 44 3 Databasing Sound: Applications Of Databases In Sound 47 3.1 Music Information Retrieval . 48 3.2 Sonification . 52 3.2.1 Parameter mapping . 54 xi 3.2.2 Model-based sonification . 55 3.2.3 Artistic sonification . 55 3.2.4 Sonification Installations . 57 3.2.5 Sonification Software . 59 3.3 Computer Music . 60 3.3.1 Hierarchical environments . 61 3.3.2 Music Notation Software . 67 3.3.3 Enter Objects . 70 3.4 Intersections . 77 3.4.1 Corpus-based Approaches . 77 3.4.2 Querying Methods . 80 3.4.3 Traversing Methods . 82 3.4.4 Resource Sharing . 85 3.4.5 Closing Remarks . 88 II Database Aesthetics 91 4 Listening Databases 94 4.1 Interlude: I Am Sitting In A Room... 94 4.2 The Resonance Of A Return . 95 4.3 Resonant Network . 99 4.4 The Unworking Network . 103 5 Databases And Memory 111 5.1 The Effraction Of The Trace . 111 5.2 The Archontic Principle . 116 xii 5.3 The Spectral Database . 121 6 Performativity Of Databases 126 6.1 Gendered Database . 126 6.2 Towards The Limits . 130 6.3 Contingencies Of Style . 131 6.4 A Specter Of Authority . 137 7 Rethinking Composition 141 7.1 Interlude: Hyperbolic Reactions . 141 7.2 Working Composition .