Dismantling the time: a theoretical and practical basis for sinusoidal deconstruction Ángel Arranz Master Thesis Institute of Sonology Royal Conservatory of The Hague 2008 Music gives soul to the universe, wings to the thought, flying to the imagination, charm to the sadness, bliss and life to everything. (Plato) Aeterna Renovatio 2 Abstract “The basic purpose of this project is to build an auto-conductive non-harmonic musical system with nine instrumental parts and/or a live electronics field. One of the main properties is dispensability: any of the parts may be omitted without damage in the macrostructure. As the absence of some parts as the combinatorial variability of them do not affect the musical efficacy of the composition. Such a system will be possible thanks to the observation of some compositional conductive models of the past (Flemish polyphony) and some more present, as Xenakis’s stochastic music. Fundamentally, this task is made by means of ‘seeds’, minimal elemental shapes, which create the macro and micro levels of the work. In the first level of the composition, the macroform level, the seeds are implemented in a computer-assisted composition environment using the AC Toolbox program, where a graphics-based grammar is set on a discourse that is drawn in a unique stochastic gesture and later deconstructed. In the second level of composition, the microform level, the seed’s data are used as a controller of electronic gestures implemented in the Max/MSP program. The principal purpose of this level will be to enlarge the compositional domain and give an opportunity of extension to the physical possibilities of instruments, driving it towards the micro-sounds and other parallel temporal processes and having their own self-sufficient process inside the work”. 3 Acknowledgements Matter. Firstly of all, I would like to thank to Paul Berg because a lot of reasons, among other things, the possibility to work with such a compositional environment, AC Toolbox, in which I have found an infinite feasible field, plenty of imagination. His well-aimed insights, his advise during the entire creative process and also his patient corrections of my English written have been (and are) invaluable for me. Thanks for it. Inspiration. Thanks to Kees Tazelaar for our intense and rich formation weeks in the voltage control studio, because it served to me as a very suggestive and powerful beginning, using controllers as media of going beyond composed sounds, as a designer. He represented to me the necessary initial impulse to develop this present project. Movement. As well, I would like to express my gratitude to Johan van Kreij, always kind and open-minded to my proposals and ideas, for his clever conversations, always ready in finding a proper conversion from my abstract plans. His help as long as we dealt with patches has been inestimable to me. Arts. Thanks to Isidro Blasco for providing me personally with graphic materials and writings of his more recent works, and for his encouragements during the realization of this thesis. Realization. A very special ‘thanks’ to Paul Jeukendrup, for showing me the constructive professional way to do things on stage, for teaching me that composition actually is an aspect that can continue after the finished musical work. Love!! Equals ‘everything’. To my dear Beatriz, the First Lady of my little republic, for her constant support and another reasons that naturally only belongs to the intimacy. Without her, simply this had not been possible. 4 Overview of the thesis The present thesis revolves around a new compositional system invented by me, the sinusoidal deconstruction, in the framework of computer-assisted composition, using both acoustical instruments and live electronic processing. The sinusoidal deconstruction allows the composer to hybridise effectively two opposed realms, the acoustical instruments and the electronic means, from a personal insight, in which seeds are the basis. Thanks to ‘seed’, the minimum compositional element, the composer finds a neutral environment where it is possible to express equally the musical ideas and to put in close relationship these two distinct worlds. From this neutral position, that I have called ‘the scale 1:1’, the seeds control each one of the two realms in both directions: upwards, the macroform, which dimension is from the scale 1:1, the microstructure, to the whole design, the macrostructure, where seeds handle all decisions about how to control the instrumental ensemble; downwards, the microform, which covers the space between the scale 1:1, the microstructure, towards the nanostructure, where seeds control the last minimal expressions of the electronic sounds. The thesis is divided in two big blocks, being the first of them substantially bigger than the second. The first concerns with the macroform, the acoustical domain, and the second concerns with the microform, the electronic domain. In the first block, the macroform or acoustical domain, a subdivision exists between theory and praxis. In the sub-block of the macroform about theory, some issues are dealt. First of all, I will speak about a relevant fact, the emancipation of spatiality, as a decisive feature of the present music of the 21st century; in this chapter, I will plan some topics around spatiality as a new means of expression, making an itinerary over the limitations of the representation of music using temporal elements, passing through some specific historical insights and technical approaches around systems of graphical musical representations, and finally I will make some remarks about psychoacoustic experiences about rhythm. In the second chapter of the block macroform I will treat to describe with prolixity the artistic environment where the present project is situated, deconstruction. Historical and aesthetical precedents will be examined, as for some manifestations in other artistic or ideological branches, as painting, architecture or philosophy. In the next chapter, the reader will find a small but clear retrospective about the seeds in some of my last works, in order to offer a complete landscape of the previous development of such elements and their functions in some different spatial environments. The fourth chapter will be in charge of informing about one important concept of the project, the tactility of time. Here I will speak about another spatial elements of construction, which are very 5 important for the growing of sinusoidal deconstruction. The concept sequenza and other similar forms will be analyzed. Some considerations will be dealt in the margins between duration and pitch, as far some personal insights about rhythm will be scrutinized from the most basic state. Here we will speak finally about a new rhythmic perspective that my system offers, the seed/anti-rhythm. The next chapter will deal with another concepts based in my own experiences with AC Toolbox. Some experiments will be related, according with the progressive use of generators and another resources. We analyze some musical textures achieved by means of these generators, establishing a parallelism with a couple of polyphonic systems of the past. Some Koenig’s reflections will be the argumentative web of this chapter. Lastly, this sub-block about theory will be closed by the sixth chapter, in which will be treated the meanest concept here, dispensability. In this chapter, some thoughts around the minima necessary conditions to construct a non-harmonic system made from dispensable parts will be described. Another topics will be widely discussed, as ‘combinatoriality of the parts’ or ‘modular composition’, taking into account another modular systems, discerning its properties and peculiarities –and low points-, in order to the reader can recreate a complete landscape of such a systems in the last twenty years. Another interesting concepts, as ‘autonomy’ will be dealt; as well the Koenig’s chain ‘condition-instruction- execution’ will be discretely renewed in detriment of new insights that my compositional system offers. ‘Conduction’ will be show here, a new concept that I have invented in order to reconsider some discursive qualities of the musical systems, and lastly ‘composition’ will be dismantled here, as a fact related at the same time to articulation and organization. The second sub-block of the macroform will be in charge of describing the praxis, according to the multi-layered process of realization of the composition, from its early stage to the last finished, in order to the reader could extract some practical conclusions about dealing with some specific tools. As well this sub-block has got six chapters: The first chapter will speak about the first decisions of the composer, about how the matrix was generated and the sense of all that. Some inspirations based in previous compositions and another composer will be told as well. The second one will be about the deconstruction of the matrix and its principal compositional utilities, and how such a deconstruction was achieved. Some algorithms will describe the whole process. Later, the generation and utilization of the palettes of seeds will be the principal topic of the third chapter. Some concrete procedures in AC Toolbox also will be detailed here. The next chapter will describe the process of distributing the seeds, after making each single one. Some statistics-based controllers will be used to accomplish this task. Examples about how to put in some information in the AC Toolbox in order to achieve a first basic data will be explained. The fifth chapter will be about how to transform the obtained data in the previous chains of processes in more usable spatial information. In order to do that, some tables with equivalences and different scales of conversions will be used. 6 The last chapter will speak about the level of the craftsman, as a gradual path from data to the direct praxis of the composer’s hand. Some secondary important processes will be described, as the utilities of rests and pitches, and another instrumental resources around the use of strategic displacements of materials, with inner logic along the work.