LEOMJ17_pp001-008.ps - 10/29/2007 8:43 AM CALARTSALARALAL RTT School of Music Multi–focuscus Music TechnologTechnologies (BFA) Composition Program (BFA, MFA) Experimental Sound Practices (MFA)
Today’s music world offers a wide array of compositional tools for artists interested in exploring uncharted sonic domains. Increasingly, forward-looking composers and sound artists are turning to new forms emerging through sound installation, the digital studio, improvisation, interactive multimedia and acoustic experimentation—all of which are important additions to traditional compositional practices. More and more advanced musicmakers are able to traverse, and use to their artistic benefit, the traditional categorical oppositions between instrumental and electronic, digital and analog, theory and practice.
Since its founding, the School of Music has been recognized as a leading center for contemporary composition. In keeping with this legacy, the Composition Program’s faculty features internationally acclaimed composers who cultivate a vibrant environment for intensive learning and bold experimentation.
=[fc`ilhc[Chmncnon_i`nb_;lnm 00+(,//(+*/* ][f[lnm(_^o [^gcmm:][f[lnm(_^o 2007/2008 faculty includes:
Michael Jon Fink: Composition Vinny Golia: Jazz Woodwinds/Composition Arthur Jarvinen: Composition Anne LeBaron: Composition, Theory Michael Pisaro: Co-Chair Composition and Experimental Sound Practices Sara Roberts: Experimental Sound Practices Barry Schrader: Composition David Rosenboom: Dean; Composition, NCP Conductor Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith: African American Improvisational Music, Trumpet, Composition Mark Trayle: Co-Chair Composition and Experimental Sound Practices
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Leonardo on the Web
Recent Content Highlights
LEONARDO ON-LINE leonardo.info Events and Announcements Information on Leonardo/ISAST projects and publications, including: Find listings of events and activities of interest • Journal Special Projects: descriptions, calls for papers. to the art and technology community at: •Leonardo Book Series: titles, summaries and proposal guidelines. leonardo.info/whatsnew.html • Subscription and order information and links. • Information for prospective authors.
LEONARDO ELECTRONIC ALMANAC Upcoming Issues: leoalmanac.org Tables of Contents & Abstracts Leonardo’s electronic journal and archive. Recent articles of interest include: See what’s coming up in future Leonardo and •PARICIO GARCÍA, RAQUEL, and ARÓSTEGUI, J. MANUEL MORENO. LMJ issues at: “Adaptive Methods for the Development of Interaction in Artistic Installa- leonardo.info/isast/journal/journal.html tions,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 15, No. 5/6 (2007). Take a look at the journals’ Calls for Papers: •WEBB, ANDREW; KERNE, ANDRUID; and KOH, EUNYEE. “Human leonardo.info/isast/journal/call.html Movement and Clear Affordances Promote Social Interaction,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 15, No. 5/6 (2007). • JO, KAZUHIRO; FURUDATE, KEN; ISHIDA, DAISUKE; and NOGUCHI, MIZUKI. “Two Approaches to Collective Sound Creation in Different Free LEA e-digest Temporal Settings: The SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA stay and The SINE To receive free LEA e-digest, sign up at: WAVE ORCHESTRA mediate,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 15, No. 5/6 leoalmanac.org (2007). •TANAKA, ATAU. “Facilitating Musical Creativity: In Collectivity and Mo- bility,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 15, No. 5/6 (2007). On-Line Access to Print Journals LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL Archives of electronic versions of Leonardo and leonardo.info/lmj LMJ are available to subscribers online. See: Special topic volumes include: http://mitpressjournals.org/leon • Not Necessarily “English Music” (2001). (for Leonardo) • Pleasure (2002). http://mitpressjournals.org/lmj • Groove, Pit and Wave: Recording, Transmission and Music (2003). (for LMJ) • Composers inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor (2004). For more information about on-line access • The Word: Voice, Language and Technology (2005). to Leonardo and LMJ, contact: • Noises Off: Sound Beyond Music (2006). [email protected] • My Favorite Things: The Joy of the Gizmo (2007).
LEONARDO REVIEWS On-Line Staff leonardo.info/ldr.html Leonardo On-Line: Patricia Bentson, Nicholas Recent reviews include: Cronbach, Kathleen Quillian. Leonardo • All Creatures: Naturalists, Collectors, and Biodiversity, 1850–1950, by Robert E. Electronic Almanac: Nisar Keshvani, Natra Kohler. Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg. Haniff. Leonardo Reviews: Michael Punt, • Design Anarchy, by Kalle Lasn. Reviewed by John F. Barber. Bryony Dalefield, Robert Pepperell, Dene Grigar. • From Technological to Virtual Art, by Frank Popper. Reviewed by Paul Hertz. OLATS: Annick Bureaud, Carmen Tanase, • Imagining MIT: Designing a Campus for the Twenty-First Century, by William J. Julien Knebusch. Mitchell. Reviewed by Dr Eugenia Fratzeskou. • Notes on Marie Menken, by Martina Kudlácek, director. Reviewed by Kathryn Adams. Leonardo Archives OBSERVATOIRE LEONARDO DES ARTS ET TECHNOSCIENCES Now Available olats.org Current subscribers can search for and access Special projects include: early Leonardo and LMJ Volumes through •Pionniers et précurseurs (Pioneers & Pathbreakers) Projet. jstor.org for a $25 annual fee through the MIT •Afrique Virtuelle (Virtual Africa) Projet. Press. Individuals may also access the archives • Space and the Arts Project. through participating libraries and institutions.
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In This Issue of LMJ
The presence of loss The feedback of his late father’s hearing aids drove the creation of John Wynne’s installation Hearing Loss. He reflects on exploring an absent space. full article on page 31 ➔
(Photo © Anne Walsh)
Bows arts Jane Henry’s alternative bows and altered microchips allow her to be a one-woman band. She describes some of these custom creations and the noises they make. ➔ full article on page 41
(Image © Simon Biggs)
Cloudy, with the chance of percussion Relying on a backyard weather monitor, Richard Garrett keeps up a project converting atmospheric data into musical phrases. full article on page 32 ➔
(Photo © Louise K. Wilson)
Inside the box James Fei tinkered with STEIM’s Crackle Box, making it more adapt- able in performance. Take a look inside the works. ➔ full article on page 38
(Photo © Sue Clites)
CD INCLUDED IN THIS ISSUE OF LMJ: The Art of the Gremlin: Inventive Musicians, Curious Devices The LMJ CD The Art of the Gremlin, curated by Sarah Washington, presents record- ings by Dan Wilson, NotTheSameColor, Rotted Orange, Kunst.ruch.ter, Owl Pro- ject, Norbert Möslang, Moshi Honen, Grace and Delete, Haco, Leonardo Di Crappio, Ferran Fages, Oscillatorial Binnage, Børre Mølstad, Rhodri Davies, Knut Aufermann and Tetsuo Kogawa, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Ivan Palacky.
©2007 ISAST
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CALL FOR PAPERS
LMJ 18: Why Live? Performance in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Downloads and file exchanges have altered the economics of music of consumption, but have they also rendered the concert hall obsolete? Or have the isolation of ear buds and the ephemerality of digital files actually served to highlight the social significance and sweaty substantiality of live performance? Or are we witnessing the birth of a new “live,” virtually social but vitally sweat-free? For LMJ 18 we solicit writing on the significance or irrelevance of contemporary performance practice and its alternatives.
DEADLINES
1 January 2008: Final texts and all materials to the LMJ Editorial Office. Contact Nicolas Collins
ANNOUNCEMENT
Leonardo Celebrates Leonardo da Vinci Special Section of Leonardo, 2008
In celebration of Leonardo journal’s 40th anniversary, we are publishing essays related to Leonardo da Vinci and his concerns regarding the relationship between art and science. In the upcoming special section, Leonardo’s own concerns serve as a springboard for looking toward the present. What, building upon Leonardo’s ways of thinking, can artists and scientists tell each other today? Accounts of Leonardo’s visual art, of his achievements as a proto-scientist and of the relation between his concerns with science and with visual art are also highlighted in articles guest-edited by David Carrier over the coming year.
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MUSIC JOURNAL Volume 17 2007 JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE ARTS, SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY MY FAVORITE THINGS: THE JOY OF THE GIZMO
Introduction HANS W. KOCH: Computers as Musical Instruments? From computermusic I NICOLAS COLLINS: My Favorite Things:
BERT BONGERS: Electronic Musical Instruments: LAURA EMELIANOFF: The Transfigured Experiences of a New Luthier 9 Instrument: Player Piano 48 ERIC LEONARDSON: The Springboard: The Joy MARC BERGHAUS: Simulated Chance and of Piezo Disk Pickups for Amplified Coil Springs 17 Staggered Gear Ratios 49 DAVID TOOP: Rush Pep Box 21 BRUCE CANA FOX: Drum Circle Instruments 50 PETER BLASSER: Pretty Paper Rolls: More Articles and Notes Experiments in Woven Circuits 25 M.R. DUFFEY: The Vocal Memnon Artists’ Statements and Solar Thermal Automata 51
PHIL ARCHER: Clip Art 29 CHARLES STANKIEVECH: From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization ANDY KEEP: Audio Y Connectors: My Secret of Subjectivity 55 for Instant Guerrilla Oscillators, Raw Synthesis and Dirty Cross Modulations 30 JURAJ KOJS, STEFANIA SERAFIN AND CHRIS CHAFE: Cyberinstruments via Physical JOHN WYNNE: Hearing Loss 31 Modeling Synthesis: Compositional Applications 61 RICHARD GARRETT: The Davis Instruments Vantage Pro Weather Station 32 LMJ17 CD Companion The Art of the Gremlin: JAMES SAUNDERS: The Dictaphone in My Life 33 Inventive Musicians, Curious Devices RICHARD LERMAN: A Sony Walkman Pro Cassette Tape Delay 34 Tracklist and Credits 68 BRETT IAN BALOGH: When Airwaves Swing: SARAH WASHINGTON: CD Companion Confessions of a Radio Enthusiast 35 Introduction: The Art of the Gremlin 70 CÉSAR DÁVILA-IRIZARRY: Distorted RF Lullabies 36 CD Contributors’ Notes VIC RAWLINGS: The Boss GE-7 E.Q. and Flexible Speaker Array as Tonal Filters 37 Notes on CD tracks by Dan Wilson, NotTheSameColor, Rotted Orange, Kunst.ruch.ter, Owl Project, Norbert Mös- JAMES FEI: Real-Time Prototyping in Live lang, Moshi Honen, Grace and Delete, Haco, Leonardo Electronic Music: A Modular Crackle Instrument 38 Di Crappio, Ferran Fages, Oscillatorial Binnage, JOHN BOWERS AND VANESSA YAREMCHUK: Børre Mølstad, Rhodri Davies, Knut Aufermann and The Priority of the Component, or In Praise Tetsuo Kogawa, Toshimaru Nakamura, Ivan Palacky 73 of Capricious Circuitry 39 2007 Leonardo and Leonardo Music GUILLERMO GALINDO-GAL*IN_DOG: MAIZ: A Cybertotemic Instrument 40 Journal Author Index 83 JANE HENRY: Arrowbows, Chips and Chirps 41 2007 Leonardo Electronic Almanac Author Index 87 NEIL FEATHER: Former Guitars and Cocolinas 42 Leonardo Network News ROBERT POSS: The G&L SC-1: 89 Obscure Object of Sonic Desire 42 ABOUT THE COVER JEREMY HIGHT: Sound Shapes, Drumming Infomercials and the Wonders of the Casio Sk1 44 Marc Berghaus, Mandala #2, 16 dice arranged in a grid under a bell jar, rolling at different speeds, powered by a motor hid- KYLE LAPIDUS AND TALI HINKIS: den under the base, 2000. (© Marc Berghaus. Photo © Doug LoVid’s Kiss Blink Sync Vessel 44 Koch.) See article by Marc Berghaus.
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Happy 40th Birthday, Leonardo!
Forty years ago in Paris, a group of artists, scientists and engineers got together and decried the lack of professional venues where emerging work bridging the two cultures could be presented, debated and pro- moted. Frank Malina, himself a research engineer and a professional artist, convinced publisher Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press to take on the challenge of publishing a peer-reviewed scholarly art-science- technology journal, the first time such a project had been attempted. To date we have published the work of 5,538 artists, researchers and scholars; we wish we could bring this community together for a celebration, but in keeping with our networked times, we are collaborating with groups around the world on a variety of events: Leonardo Celebrates Leonardo da Vinci Special Section of Leonardo, 2007–2008, edited by David Carrier What, building upon Leonardo’s ways of thinking, can artists and scientists tell each other today? Full call for papers:
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Introduction
My Favorite Things: The Joy of the Gizmo
There is no art that does not bear some burden of physicality. To deny it is to descend to irony. —Mel Bochner [1]
There is no question that Art is about things and thinginess. Even when no physical object is present (at a “happening,” for example), the thing is implicit in its absence—as in the old roué’s quip that “a drink before and a cigarette after are the three best things in life.” Music, on the other hand, is about “!thing”—the “not-thing.” It is physical, to be sure—the delicious sound-pressure levels of symphonies and death metal do not bypass the body on the way to the brain. The essence of music, however, lies in the ear of the beholder, on the other side of the tympanum from the club floor. When we extol the beauty of the varnish on a Stradivarius, or the Klee-like elegance of a modern score, or the cling of the spandex, we are artifying the tools of music production and doing so at the expense of their musical utility. Whereas artists have traditionally made objects, composers and musicians have made sound and left instrument construction to a slightly lower-status artisan, the luthier. Starting in the 1960s, however, these job descriptions became a bit muddled. Composers such as David Behrman, Gordon Mumma and David Tudor began building their own electronic instru- ments. Tudor spoke of “composing inside electronics”—his practice of embedding the score in silicon precluded the composer’s delegation of the job to an engineer. Composer/luthiers flourished in the 1970s, as flocks of little boxes grazed across tabletops in alternative performance spaces. However, with the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s, software supplanted solder, and putty-colored office equipment replaced the colorful spaghetti of patch cords. Most electronic composers put their toys back in the chest and returned to thinking about sound. By the flop of the millennial clock, however, “circuit bending”—the autodidactic repurpos- ing of cheap electronic toys—had brought gizmos back to the stage and public awareness. The annual Bent Festival, currently in its fourth year, draws hundreds of participants to its concerts, installations, workshops and demonstrations [2]. Classes in “hardware hacking” sell out in cities from Beijing to Brussels. In electronic performance today, idiosyncratic circuits are circling the laptops like wolves. Working musicians, of course, from baroque violinists to rock guitarists, have long fetishized the tools of their trade, the mere naming of which can provoke a vehement reac- tion—shout “Tourte bow,” “LA-2A,” “TR-808” or “JTM45” in a room full of musicians, and one will notice the eyes brighten, the breath shorten and the anecdotes pour forth (but only to a point: many a “secret weapon” is held close to the chest, and some people simply find their technophilia too embarrassing to talk about in public). This issue of Leonardo Music Journal was intended as a confessional and 12-step program of sorts, an opportunity for sound artists to reveal their secrets in the company of sympathetic peers. We solicited papers and artist’s statements on the role of purchased or homemade instruments, effect boxes, pieces of studio gear, “bent” toys, self-built circuits and so on from composers, performers, multimedia artists, producers and recording engineers.
©2007 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 17, pp. 7–8, 2007 7
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We obviously hit a nerve. We received the greatest number of submissions I have seen in my 10 years as editor-in-chief and far too many to fit within the page limitations of our print issue. Therefore we have split the content between the printed journal and a special issue of Leonardo Electronic Almanac [3]. The objects honored are as varied as hearing aids, weather stations, heat engines, Dictaphones, clip-leads, Y-cords, mobile phones, fuzz tones, bent toys, laptops, equalizers, synthesizers, electric guitars, tape delays, contact mikes, radios, mechani- cal gears, violin bows, mixing bowls, drums and woven circuits. I invited Sarah Washington, a luminary on the vibrant London circuit-bending scene, to curate the accompanying audio CD, for which she has assembled an extraordinary range of music, originating in everything from an over-amplified computer printer to video feedback. Every human product is a collaboration between initiating concept and available materials, and while music has long claimed the distinction of the “most abstract” of art forms, it is nonetheless firmly rooted in a world of bodies and bibelots. As the passionate, geeky and erudite contributions to this issue demonstrate, however, dependence on (and fondness for) the stuff of things is not a limitation, but an inspiration—the slippery slope between transcen- dence and materiality, where the sweetest-smelling shrubbery grows.
NICOLAS COLLINS Editor-in-Chief
References 1. Mel Bochner, “Excerpts From Speculation (1967–1970),” ArtForum (May 1970). See
8 Introduction
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