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Active Imaginative Reading . . . and Listening
Rosenboom D.
Q3
Minding the Gap: Conceptualizing “Perceptualized” Timbre in Music Analysis
Engebretsen N.
Q3
In the past decade, a growing music-analytic practice has emerged around timbre, a parameter long considered either irrelevant to musical structure or too unwieldy to tackle. This new practice centers on an understanding of timbre as a perceptual rather than physical (acoustical) attribute and privileges timbre as a bearer of musical meaning. Through a focused survey of scholarship on timbre from the 1980s to present, this article considers theoretical commitments and challenges that have attended the shift toward this subjective, “perceptualized” conception of timbre, particularly in light of music theory's objectivist and structuralist disciplinary leanings.
Musicking with Music-Generation Software in Virtutes Occultae
Brook T.
Q3
This article explores concepts of compositional meaning that arise from cocreative composing with music-generation software. Drawing from an analysis of the 2017 electroacoustic composition Virtutes Occultae, the composer discusses the implications of computer-generated music for the role of the composer. After an overview of how the music-generation software he developed contributed to the creation of Virtutes Occultae, the composer makes comparisons between his process and the use of generative commercial music software to create music, in order to draw distinctions between creating computer-generated music to extend aesthetic sensibilities and creating computer-generated music that iterates based on established commercial styles. Finally, the composer proposes future paths for further investigation involving the development of new musical styles through computer-generated music and reactive computer improvisation.
Tactical Soundwalking in the City: A Feminist Turn from Eye to Ear
Loveless S.
Q3
This article investigates a turn from eye to ear in the literature and practice of walking-as-art. Arguing for listening as a feminist and ecologically oriented mode of engaging with the world, the author examines the practice of soundwalking (Westerkamp) and Deep Listening (Oliveros), placing them in conversation with the work of Michel de Certeau, and concludes with a discussion of the creative projects of Suzanne Thorpe, Viv Corringham and Amanda Gutierrez in order to chart the importance of relational listening practices today.
Exploring the Nexus of Holography and Holophony in Visual Music Composition
Rhoades M.
Q3
In this article the author explores the idea that, owing to their shared three-dimensional nature, holophons and virtual holograms are well suited as mediums for visual music composition. This union is ripe with creative opportunity and fraught with challenges in the areas of aesthetics and technical implementation. Squarely situated upon the bleeding edge of phenomenological research and creative practice, this novel medium is within reach. Here, one methodological pipeline is delineated that employs the convergence of holophony, virtual holography and supercomputing toward the creation of visual music compositions intended for head-mounted displays or large-scale 3D/360-degree projection screens and high-density loudspeaker arrays.
Topology of Networks in Generalized Musical Spaces
Buongiorno Nardelli M.
Q3
The abstraction of musical structures as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the major accomplishments of contemporary music theory. The author generalizes the concept of musical spaces as networks and derives compositional design principles via network topology analysis. This approach provides a framework for analysis and quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures and suggests a way to relate such measures to human perception of different musical entities. Finally, network analysis provides alternative ways of interpreting the compositional process by quantifying emergent behaviors with well-established statistical mechanics. Interpreting the latter as probabilistic randomness in the network, the author develops novel compositional design frameworks.
Mimesis, Murakami and Multimedia Art: Parallel Worlds in Performance
Underriner C.
Q3
The artistic techniques of mimesis—the representation of reality in art—make it possible to “render the unreal familiar or the real strangely unfamiliar.” The author, a composer and intermedia artist, uses mimetic techniques in acoustic composition, video art and field recording to reimagine everyday experience, as in his multimedia piece Landscape: Home. The author analyzes passages from the novel Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami to understand Murakami’s use of “parallel worlds” and the “reality effect.” This literary analysis aims to highlight the potential of mimetic techniques for artistic practice in sound and image, particularly in the author’s Landscape series.
The Loom Machines of Boott Mill (Lowell): A Composition from the New England Soundscape Project
Walzer D.A.
Q3
The author reports on the development of an original piece, Boott Mill (Lowell), in which he takes field recordings of loom machines from the Boott Mill Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, and uses the recordings as the foundation for a fully realized composition featuring percussion, strings, keyboards and assorted musical textures.
Enacting Sonic-Cyborg Performance through the Hybrid Body in Teka-Mori and Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
Hsu A., Kemper S.
Q3
In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway explores implications of the increasing hybridization of humans and machines. While society has long been concerned with the encroachment of technology onto human activity, Haraway challenges this concern, suggesting instead a kinship between organism and machine, a hybrid body. A sonic-cyborg performance realizes this understanding of the human-machine hybrid through movement and sound, incorporating a “kinesonic” approach to composition and an exploration of “mechatronic” expression. In this article, the authors describe their approach to enacting sonic-cyborg performance by outlining the creative framework and associated technologies involved in two collaborative pieces that explore questions of fluidity between organism and machine: Teka-Mori and Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
Summerland: Exploring the Intersection of Spiritualism and Technology at the Dawn of the Electrical Age
Ostrowski M.
Q3
The author describes Summerland, a generative installation for 24 computer-controlled telegraph sounders. This work uses texts from Samuel F.B. Morse and his contemporary, the Spiritualist medium Kate Fox, as source material, driving the sounders through both linguistic and spectral encoding of their words.
Nam June Paik’s Unpublished Korean Article and His Interactive Musique Concrète Projects
Ha B.
Q3
Nam June Paik was a pioneering creator of interactive sound art before he became a cult figure in the field of video art. While Paik gradually developed interactive sound art in West Germany, he wrote several articles about contemporary music in Europe. Specifically, a musique concrète article for Korean readers is significant as a seed of his interactive projects. This study examines the content of the music article and articulates the relationship between musique concrète and Paik’s interactive sound projects: Record Shashlik (1963) and Random Access (1963).
Reducing the Effect of Imperfect Microphone and Speaker in Audio Feedback Systems
Atassi L.
Q3
An audio feedback system that iteratively uses a room as a sound filter can be an artistic medium generating fascinating sounds. In this system, the room is not the only component acting as a filter. The sound system component, i.e. the speaker and microphone, also can have a sizeable impact on the sound in each iteration. To make sure the relative influence of the room on the sound is revealed and not masked by the audio system, the author proposes using a common calibration method at the end of each iteration. The mathematical model of the system is used to explain the reasoning behind the use of this method. Following this procedure, the author conducted an experiment that shows sound interaction with the room over time being captured in the artwork.
Sound Appropriation and Musical Borrowing as a Compositional Tool in New Electroacoustic Music
Vasquez J.C.
Q3
This text presents a compact historical survey of musical borrowing and sound appropriation from medieval chant through the latest digital experiments outside popular music involving extensive use of sampling. It then describes two artistic research projects consisting of a series of pieces that digitally reimagine selected works from the classical music repertoire, including thoughts about the contemporary relevance of giving new life to classical music through the perspective of new media.
A Computational System for Violin: Synthesis and Dissolution in Windowless
Thorn S.D.
Q3
This article provides an overview of a real-time, hybrid computational system for the violin, Windowless. The system uses a custom sensor glove, the alto.glove, to track the violinist’s movements and drive a panoply of unique digital sound processing effects. The author describes the operations of the system in terms of a broad notion of synthesis, consis-tency, microintervallic motions and molecular operations. A threefold approach combining dense sonic physics, “loose” computational procedures and high system responsiveness creates a rich and thick performative medium with a vapor-like, particulate level of textural and bitwise computational detail.
The Music of the Trees: The Blued Trees Symphony and Opera as Environmental Research and Legal Activism
Rahmani A.
Q3
The Blued Trees project is a transdisciplinary thought experiment, physically manifested across miles of the North American continent. It melds ideas about music, acoustics, art and environmental policy. Hundreds of GPS-located individual trees in the path of proposed natural gas pipelines were painted with a sine wave sigil. Each “treenote” contributed to an aerially perceivable composition employing the local terrain. The score is the formal skeleton for systemic changes challenging several laws. A mock trial explored how this project might open new directions in legal activism for Earth rights and contribute to an operatic libretto.
Hyperreal Instruments: Bridging VR and Digital Fabrication to Facilitate New Forms of Musical Expression
Çamcı A., Granzow J.
Q3
Virtual Reality (VR) and digital fabrication technologies today are ushering in a new wave of opportunities in instrument design; the marriage of these two domains, seemingly at odds with each other, can bring impossible instruments to life. In this article, the authors first sample such instruments throughout history. The authors also look at how technology has facilitated the materialization of impossible instruments from the twentieth century on. They then discuss the bridging of VR and fabrication as a new frontier in instrument design, where synthetic sounds can be used to condition an equally synthetic sensory scaffolding upon which the time-varying spectra can be interactively anchored: The result is new instruments that can defy our sense of audiovisual reality while satisfying our proprioceptive and haptic expectations. The authors report on their ongoing work as well as their projections of how emerging technologies in VR and fabrication will shape the design of new musical interfaces.
A Musical Suite Composed by an Electronic Brain: Reexamining the Illiac Suite and the Legacy of Lejaren A. Hiller Jr.
Funk T.
Q3
In 1956, Lejaren A. Hiller, Jr., and Leonard Isaacson debuted the Illiac Suite, the first score composed with a computer. Its reception anticipated Hiller’s embattled career as an experimental composer. Though the Suite is an influential work of modern electronic music, Hiller’s accomplishment in computational experimentation is above all an impressive feat of postwar conceptual performance art. A reexamination of theoretical and methodological processes resulting in the Illiac Suite reveals a conceptual and performative emphasis reflecting larger trends in the experimental visual arts of the 1950s and 1960s, illuminating his eventual collaborations with John Cage and establishing his legacy in digital art practices.
Sound Technologies as Agency-Granting Prosthesis to Vocal Body
Warren K.
Q3
Western voice is historically de-agentialized, that is, gendered female, opposed to performer self-listening, de-privileged relative to composition and rendered ocularcentric by recording technologies. However, by employing sound technologies as prosthesis to the vocal body, and by self-listening to manage the body-prosthesis relationship, contemporary extended voice practitioners figure as cyborgs reclaiming vocal agency, that is, input into mediation of and by one’s technologized vocal body.
The Public Utteraton Machines: Recording What People Think of Public Art in New York City
Hackemann R.
Q3
In 2015–2016 the author installed interactive public artworks on sidewalks in Brooklyn and Queens using ordinary city permits. The locations were chosen in counterbalance to the dominant choices of location for public art in New York, which tends to be placed in Manhattan or other tourist-concentrated areas. The works are entitled the Public Utteraton Machines and enable passersby to utter their opinions about other public art in the city as well as art’s role in society. The device’s earpiece recorded over 100 open-ended narratives and 391 responses to quantitative data questions via an integrated e-paper display screen. This public art project combines social practice with object-based public art into a conceptual public art practice that forms a commons or civic art. Sound archives of the responses can be found at local libraries in Queens and Brooklyn and at http://utteraton.com/ .
Heavy Metal: An Interactive Environmental Art Installation
Helyer N., Potts J., Taylor M.P.
Q3
This article discusses Heavy Metal, an interactive installation work by Nigel Helyer. The authors situate this work within the context of a collaboration among environmental science, art and media theory, a three-year research project entitled When Science Meets Art: An Environmental Portrait of the Shoalhaven River Valley.
A Personal Reminiscence on the Roots of Computer Network Music
Gresham-Lancaster S.
Q3
This historical reminiscence details the evolution of a type of electronic music called “computer network music.” Early computer network music had a heterogeneous quality, with independent composers forming a collective; over time, it has transitioned into the more autonomous form of university-centered “laptop orchestra.” This transition points to a fundamental shift in the cultural contexts in which this artistic practice was and is embedded: The early work derived from the post-hippie, neo-punk anarchism of cooperatives whose members dreamed that machines would enable a kind of utopia. The latter is a direct outgrowth of the potential inherent in what networks actually are and of a sense of social cohesion based on uniformity and standardization. The discovery that this style of computer music-making can be effectively used as a curricular tool has also deeply affected the evolution and approaches of many in the field.
Times Square: Strategies and Contingencies of Preserving Sonic Art
Eppley C.
Q3
The author traces the artistic and institutional complexities of preserving sonic art. He situates these problems in an analysis of the iconic public sound installation Times Square (1977–1992; 2002–present), which was constructed in an abandoned subway ventilation chamber by sonic artist Max Neuhaus (1939–2009). Next, the author describes how it aided a revitalization of the Times Square district but fell into disrepair and was dismantled in 1992. The author then describes a 2002 reconstruction that incorporated long-term speculative self-preservation strategies. Finally, the author discusses the acquisition of Times Square by the Dia Art Foundation, highlighting challenges that circumscribe preserving sonic art.
Sounds of Wow: Tape Composition and the Poetics of the Index
Kramer J.
Q3
Sound artist Joseph Kramer discusses the function of indexical signs when working with magnetic tape and tape loops to elicit a nonsymbolic connection to the past. Compositional and technological strategies using custom devices to employ indexical signification are described.
A Work for the Jewish Soul of Warsaw, Old and New
Ligeti L.
Q3
In 2015, Lukas Ligeti created a site-specific, audience-interactive performance work while in residence at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Based on interviews with residents of Warsaw, the piece examined aural memories of Jewish life in the city, tracing the extermination and re-emergence of the Jewish community through speech and songs as well as creative musicians’ reimaginings of these memories, with computer technology as a mediator.
Environmental Histories and Personal Memory: Collaborative Works in Sonification and Virtual Reality
Graham R.
Q3
This short paper will present an overview of two historical data projects developed at the Sensory Computation/Experimental Narrative Environments Lab at Stevens Institute of Technology between 2015–2017. The first project focuses on the sonification of environmental data derived from a ubiquitous sensing network embedded in Tidmarsh Living Observatory in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The second project presented in this short paper explores a history of instrument gesture data as a basis for interactivity in a virtual scene. This short statement discusses these two projects and their creative implications.
