Playing into the Machine: Improvising across the Electronic Abyss David Rothenberg and Ben Neill The initial reason we play into machines is The electric guitar is the most per- for the enhancement that basic sound effects offer. The first fect musical sound to be effected, a b s t r a c t sound effect every acoustic player loves is reverb, which can because it is a pure, high-volume, make us sound as if we are playing inside any space imaginable. clear tone, crying out for effects to Two musicians who have A single tone can be quickly played and then remain endlessly shape it in myriad ways. Effects de- focused on playing acoustic ringing on in artificial space. Only a few notes are needed, with fine the personality of guitar play- wind instruments into electron- plenty of silence between them, to make a melody fill the air. In ers, and it is probably with them in ics for the purposes of enhanc- ing their original sound reflect reverb’s earliest incarnation, sounds were piped into resonat- mind that the whole industry has on how the use of such new ing chambers or blasted against springs and plates to create developed. However, wind players technologies inherently pushes the effect, but now it can be expertly synthesized with digital learn their individuality through “old technologies” toward a new precision, and actual acoustic spaces from all over the planet years of practice at personalizing aesthetics of improvisation. can be sampled with the technique known as convolution [1]. a tone, so when we confront the Here a conflict emerges: The regularity of delays adds or- machine, we have a whole different der and rhythm to melodies that otherwise might be free. challenge. Our instrument and its This rhythm brings a welcome beat that gives the audience tradition seem somehow opposed to mashing up the sound something to hold onto. But it quickly becomes expected and in odd electronic ways. listeners figure it out. We know how delays sound, and we’re After delaying comes looping, an obvious way to play a all used to it. So we seek out ways to randomize and make the fragment, make it repeat so it can have a piece of musical/ echoes less predictable—shuffle delays, randomized delays, rhythmic ground to stand on; then we can add ourselves to cascading delays. At the same time, these effects can start to ourselves. Another way to increase the ego is to do everything sound disturbing, confusing, no longer creating a beat out of alone. But is it another way to become additionally empow- the single melody. How carefully should we lead the listeners ered or another way to make boring music? People used to along through our effects? Or is this completely the wrong way think so; now we are so used to loops that we crave their exact- to approach sonic experimentation? ness. Perfect repeating rhythms are preferred by some to real, Although there are plenty of software plugins that offer un- varying, studied drummers. The repetitiveness is no longer even and randomized delay possibilities (GRM Tools Shuffle, bothersome to many, because we are so used to music as con- NI Spektral Delay, MDSP Fire, KT Granulator, Soundhack Bub- venienced by the machine. bler, Artificial Audio’s Obelisk), the challenge is to use them We have come to enjoy what the machine is good at. Precise in a way that is both musical and spontaneous. It is easiest to repetition, predictability, reliability (most of the time), consis- add these effects to a track after it is recorded; then the player tency. All these elements have always been part of music. With can precisely control exactly what the effect adds to the music. technology, we bring them to the fore. But when playing live, improvising into the machine, it is easy At the same time, the inexactness of digital technology adds to become so wrapped up in what the machine is doing that its own uniqueness. Digital errors were once said to be less the player no longer knows what is musical and what is not. forgiving than analog ones, but they have given rise to their These effects are often most successful when they are turned own aesthetic of “glitch”—noisy, uneven, but still somehow down to their absolute minimum, where there is just enough precise sounds that come easily to digital devices. Turn a clari- effect so that the player can hear what the effect is doing but net into these kinds of sounds, and the immediate conflict not enough so that it is too easy for listeners to figure out what between resonating air and strange machinations comes to the is happening. The effect should be familiar and ambiguous at fore. The war begins! The primal human quandary between the same time. extending ourselves with technology and just getting the song A clarinet is not an obvious instrument to play into an ef- out appears right there. Music comments on the great battle fects machine. Trumpet, being so much louder, fares better. of our age. We trace a trajectory here, following levels of sound effect that extend the singly played acoustic tone: reverb, echo, de- David Rothenberg (composer, musician, educator), Professor of Philosophy and Music, lay, looping, distortion, unevenness, confusion dissolve into New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ, U.S.A. E-mail: <terranova@highlands. com>. a sonic intelligence of which we are barely in control. One Ben Neill (composer, musician, educator), Assistant Professor of Music, Ramapo College, thing left out of the story here is a much more intelligent Mahwah, NJ, U.S.A. E-mail: <[email protected]>. kind of machine behavior, wherein computers are carefully ©2010 ISAST LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, Vol. 20, pp. 19–20, 2010 19 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LMJ_a_00006 by guest on 24 September 2021 programmed to respond to the sounds tion for him has been: What are the Clarinetist David Rothenberg has performed played into them and make many more most important aesthetic tendencies to and recorded with Jan Bang, Scanner, Glen decisions on their own than the direct emerge out of the recent landscape of Velez, Karl Berger, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri sound effects we usually use. One rea- digital music and media performance? and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He son the brilliant sonic programming We all start with too much ennui— has seven CDs out under his own name, in- cluding On the Cliffs of the Heart, named language Max has not appealed to us is picking up the horns, already bored, hav- one of the top ten releases of 1995 by Jazziz that much of what is composed using it ing heard it all before, too many songs on magazine. His first CD on ECM Records, One sounds like the computer is making too our iPods, too much music all around, Dark Night I Left My Silent House, a duet many decisions, taking too much control. why add even a single sound? We play album with pianist Marilyn Crispell, appeared The classic sound effect is simple at its to forget our sense of being fed up with in 2010. He is the author of Why Birds Sing, root, easier to connect to the sound that it all, the incessant ring of music in our a book and CD, published in seven languages comes into it, so the hand and breath head whether or not we turn on the ma- and the subject of a BBC television documen- of the player is more clear than in more chine. Too much music already done, all tary. His previous books include Sudden purely computer music, when a greater captured and ready to be consumed. Too Music: Improvisation, Sound, Nature, aesthetic of the machine shines through. many possibilities of what to do. We need and The Book of Music and Nature, co- edited with Marta Ulvaeus. His latest book is But is this anything more than per- to forget all of this to make the making of Thousand Mile Song, about making music sonal prejudice, when computers can music into something fun again. with whales, and he is currently working on now be programmed to emulate almost a film version. Rothenberg is professor of phi- anything, artificial or natural? Rothen- losophy and music at the New Jersey Institute references berg has always believed in an aesthetic of Technology. inspired by nature in his music, so if he 1. David Rothenberg, “The Phenomenology of Reverb,” Hermenaut (March 2000). See <www. Ben Neill is a composer, performer, producer chooses to play into the machine, it is hermenaut.com/a101.shtml>. only to make the sounds akin to some and inventor of the mutantrumpet, a hybrid living, breathing instrument that might 2. David Rothenberg, Hand’s End: Technology and electroacoustic instrument. Neill’s music blurs the Limits of Nature (Berkeley: Univ. of California the lines between DJ culture and acoustic in- exist in a parallel universe if it is only Press, 1993) pp. 216–219. strument performance. He has recorded seven something virtual in this one [2]. CDs on a variety of labels including Verve, As- Over his years of experience as a com- tralwerks and Six Degrees. He has performed poser and performer, Neill has often felt internationally in venues such as Etnafest It- bibliography that the discourse of digital/electronic aly, Cite de la Musique Paris, Spoleto Festival art has been too strongly focused on Augoyard, Jean-François, and Torgue, Henry, eds., Italy, Umbria Jazz, Bang on a Can, ICA Lon- Sonic Experience: A Guide to Everyday Sounds, Andra don, Istanbul Jazz Festival, House of Blues, technical issues.