Sound and Video Anthology: Program Notes
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Sound and Video Anthology: Program Notes Biophysical Music: Marco her gestural manipulation of digital thing that resonates with Terminal Donnarumma, Curator sound processing and matchless vocal Beach’s audiovisual orchestral work. skill. Their piece has no predetermined But what happens when the bioa- score, for this is composed in real Curator’s Note coustic sounds of multiple bodies time using the variations in the heart are networked into a large-scale rate of twelve musicians throughout It is with great delight that I intro- instrument? Heidi J. Boisvert and the performance. duce the reader to Computer Music colleagues feed the sound and data Their work allows us to intro- Journal’s 2015 Sound and Video An- from muscles and blood flow of five duce another area of investigation: thology. I have curated a series of dancers to genetic algorithms that, in the intermix of traditional and phys- diverse, yet interrelated, works on turn, produce organic, multilayered iologically informed performance the theme of biophysical music. With sonic and visual bodies. The result techniques. To explore this hybrid this term, I refer to live music pieces is a gracefully dark audio and video practice further, we look at the work based on a combination of physi- composition manifesting a creative by the influential BioMuse Trio, ological technology and markedly and physical tension between human where a violin player and a performer, physical, gestural performance. In and algorithmic agents. Shifting from the latter wearing the BioMuse bio- these works, the physical and physi- dance to body art, we see the con- electrical instrument, interact closely ological properties of the performers’ cept of the performer’s body as an with each other through sound and bodies are interlaced with the mate- instrument stretched to its limits. In programmatic actions. The musical rial and computational qualities of the the work by Marcel.lıAnt´ unez´ Roca experience they create demonstrates electronic instruments, with varying and his colleagues, pioneers of inter- a transporting power, which emerges degrees of mutual influence. Musical active audio and video performance, from an unlikely meeting between expression thus arises from an inti- audience members trigger physical human performers, traditional in- mate and, often, not fully predictable contractions of the performer’s body struments, and physiological instru- negotiation of human bodies, instru- by activating pneumatic devices at- ments. To bring this journey to an ments, and programmatic musical tached to the performer’s muscles and end, Atau Tanaka, a crucial figure in ideas. limbs. Each trigger initiates a tense the field of physiologically informed We begin with a rare audio record- series of rhythms, timbre variations, physical performance, offers us an ing of a solo improvisation by seminal and visual animations—and there is exclusive audiovisual recording of a composer Michel Waisvisz in which room for some fire, too. recent solo performance for a custom he creates rhythmic textures and Taking the cue from the dense bioelectrical musical instrument. As frantic glitches of analog electronic sound forms and intense gestural he performs gestures with varying sounds by altering, with the touch performance of Antunez´ Roca, we in- degrees of muscular force, multiple of his hands, the voltages of the troduce the practice of gestural music channels of raw electrical signals Crackle Synthesizer circuits. The performance with a piece by Miguel from his muscles are digitally soni- sonic aesthetic of Waisvisz’s piece Ortiz. By blending the processed fied into an increasingly dense sound resonates with the work by Shiori sounds of an electric viola with the composition; sound becomes a direct Usui, who, drawing on a similarly bioelectrical signals from his arms as externalization of the inner body granular sonic palette, presents an he performs, he constructs a complex mechanisms underlying the player’s enthralling composition for double and vivid musical composition that physical effort. bass, trombone, and the XTH Sense compellingly explores the auditory With this anthology, I intended to biophysical instrument. Here, two thresholds of human hearing. In my emphasize the broad range of strate- performers interact not only through performance for XTH Sense and light, gies and techniques that, during the the sound of their traditional instru- I share Ortiz’s interest in exciting past 30 years, have established the ments, but also by listening to the human auditory thresholds, but I do practice of biophysical music as an amplified and processed sounds of so by making the digital instrument expanding and heterogeneous field of their muscles. The idea of the body as accumulate the very low frequencies musical and technological investiga- a source of sonic material lies at the of muscle sounds and blood flow until tion; the collection therefore spans core of the performance by Pamela Z, an unstable mass of acoustic energy across music improvisation, algo- where grains of breath sounds mutate unfolds and explodes in my hands. It rithmic and traditional composition, into multiple virtual voices in a com- is an approach that emphasizes the sound-based body art performance, plex counterpoint, elegantly mixing expressive potential of the unbalance and interactive dance. At the same between control and emergence in time, I have envisioned this anthol- doi:10.1162/COMJ a 00333 bodily musical performance, some- ogy as a musical journey, rather than 132 Computer Music Journal Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/COMJ_a_00333 by guest on 24 September 2021 a chronological history; the aim is to the immediate musical pleasure of musicians’ muscle movements and to convey how idiosyncratic musical performed sound. the bioacoustic sound captured by ideas have echoed through diverse the XTH Sense from the performers’ decades, and thus how they have rein- Michel Waisvisz was a composer/ bodies as they play their instruments. forced, altered, or disrupted different performer of live electronic music conceptions of the intimate relation- who developed new ways to achieve Into the Flesh I ships between sound frequencies, physical touch with electronic music musical ideas, circuits, algorithms, instruments. Sometimes this was This first section explores some and human bodies. done by literally touching the elec- minute movements of muscles such tric circuits inside the instrument, as the light trembling of fingers and thereby becoming a thinking compo- arms. The data captured by the XTH 1. CrackleBox Solo Live in nent of the machine. He was among Sense triggers extremely high pitches Ottawa 1978—Michel the first play with synthesizers on that resonate at the beginning. The Waisvisz stage and very early on he developed sound increasingly becomes distorted and performed using gestural con- and there is the introduction of The Crackle Synthesizer consisted trollers. He also is the inventor of harsh inhaled vocals as the music of the components of three Crack- the Cracklebox, The Web, and other progresses. leboxes. These could be linked by instruments based on touch interac- tion. Together with Frank Baldehe´ touching special conductive pads. Into the Flesh II Potentiometers were used to con- designed live performance software trol the amount of controllability of such as LiSa and JunXion. Start- In this section, the original sounds this instrument. “Minimum control” ing in 1989 he directed the STEIM of the muscles captured by the XTH meant that the Crackle Synthesizer foundation in Amsterdam—where Sense are preserved as much as would easily play on its own for performance artists from music, possible, creating heartbeat-like ef- hours. Nowadays, many people re- theater, dance, and new media art, fects from the movements of the fer to the the Cracklebox as the together with DJs and VJs, work to musicians’ arms, combined with a archetype of “glitch” or “circuit develop personal electronic instru- percussive sound created by the dou- bending.” At some point I started ments. He advocated that artists, in ble bass. The piece ends by returning playing by placing my fingers on the order to not have their work polluted to the high resonant pitches heard at print board of a damaged electronic by the generic typicality of applied the beginning of section I. organ. By patching the different parts tools, should appropriate their tools Tenor trombone and XTH Sense: John of the circuit through my (conduc- and instruments by modification, Kenny tive) fingers and hands I became the or even complete custom builds—a thinking [wet] part of a electronic mindset summarized in his slogan, Double Bass and XTH Sense: Andres circuit and I started seeing my skin “If you don’t open it, you don’t own Kungla as a patchable cable, potentiometer, it.” This statement is at the root This work was produced as a part of and condensator. The great advantage of the work philosophy at STEIM: Inventor Composer Coaction (ICC) was that by intuitively touching the Music makers are encouraged to play project, Edinburgh, Scotland. electronics one could learn to play an important role in the design and this new instrument without having construction of their authentic live Originally from Japan, Shiori Usui is to have schematic knowledge about electronic performance instruments. described as a composer with “indi- the circuitry—very much like a tradi- vidual ears” (The Times). Her works tional music instrument. It could be have been performed in Japan, Eu- learned by playing by ear and devel- 2. Into the Flesh—Shiori Usui rope, and the USA by a diverse range oping experience and manual/mental of soloists, ensembles, and orches- skills instead of having to dive into The work was composed for the tras, including the pianist Rolf Hind, a world of logic, functions, inter- XTH Sense (a biophysical musical the Duke Quartet, BCMG, members action schemes, electronic circuit instrument), tenor trombone, and of Klangforum Wien, members of theory, and mathematical synthesis double bass.