I intend to develop my live granulation platform to process our group's audio output in a meaningful, performative way. My goal is not to hijack the signals of the other performers, but rather to capture, change, and re-integrate the processed sound with the originals to augment the performance similar to the way in which Morris (2008) envisions: "Replayed material can participate in and influence new Nows and be recontextualized within the new web of connections."
My platform works by recording sound into several buffers that are then sampled to output granular impulses and textures. My goal is to be able to produce a wide variety of granular sounds from synchronous grain streams to asynchronous stochastic clouds, for example. Dense textures are already possible because of the instrument's 16 granulator units. The rate of grain playback for each granulator unit is independently controllable, however the problem of efficient and ergonomic control of grain rate remains a problem to be solved.
Aside from developing the granulation engine, I am trying to determine the best recording paradigm for the sound capture. The act of capturing sound, modifying it, and producing new material takes a certain amount of time, on the order of several milliseconds at minimum, so my instrument necessarily operates on and outputs the past. The question to answer is thus: how does the instrument present the past? Each granulator crossfades constantly between every buffer at an independent rate. Since each buffer is recorded and stored independently, this crossfading LFO translates effectively to traversing the past. The most compelling way of doing this seems to be to record 2 second windows of time constantly, although I may yet change the buffer lengths. As Fields (2012) notes: "the larger the buffer, the greater the mediational value." The goal here is in fact to modulate the mediational value or "immediacy" (Auslander, 1999), but there is a balance to be found to make immediacy a performable parameter while maintaining coherence, limited by the listener's short-term memory and the recognizability of the processed sound.
Auslander, P. (1999). Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York, NY: Routledge.
!netmusucsb reading "Network Fever" by Mark Wigley. It is interesting and confusing that the author does not locate the concept of networks in cybernetics but rather in real architecture. The certain concept was unfamiliar with me, and I could not clearly define what I should get from the reading. However, I believe being flexible with my knowledge is one of the most important property to learn from the new concept. I tried to follow Doxiadis's stream of consciousness and be inspired. From the statement "the real dimension of cities is not space, but time," I found the beauty of network music. In other words, no matter where music is played, if the players are at the same time, synchronized, we can assume that the players are in the same "city." Before I read this journal, and even while I was reading it, architecture was all about spaces composed of bizarre structures considering mechanics. However, the term "architecture" was actually all about human's life and philosophy. Likewise, I guess music can be the new "architecture" using the current worldwide network. Doxiadis and scholars made a lot of discussions and researches on existing architectural concepts such as settlement preparing network fever. Therefore, it is time for network musicians to reconsider, discuss, experiment, and study on the various concepts of music according to the new network fever.
!netmusucsb reading "Network Fever" by Mark Wigley. Interesting to hear about the pre-history of network discourse and to find out that people were talking about networks long before the internet took off. However, I found it hard at times to follow the thread of the article. Maybe it's because I'm not in the world of architecture at all but I just felt like it was taking too many detours at times. Still, neat to see the array of visions for the future. The message of the article often seemed to be "Young architects these days think they're so original thinking in terms of networks, but that's all been done", which, I guess would be more meaningful to me if I was a student of architecture. I do, however, see a parallel in music, where there are too many new music concerts filled with sounds echoed from 50-60 years ago from composers paradoxically trying to be pioneers by copying the pioneers.
!netmusucsb "Where Are We? Extended music practice on the internet".
Throughout the contexts, it was a good opportunity for me to understand the overall flow of network music. Meanwhile, it took more times and efforts than expected for me to comprehend the context since it was filled with a lot of musical concepts, terminologies, incidents, and important names. The procedure itself means a lot for me because, first of all, I enjoyed it and motivated.
Since I define myself as an engineer, I could not help to be attracted to the vision of the Artsmesh and the future of HNI. I do not think the future of the network music is only confined in front of the wired laptop. I believe the ultimate goal, which is actually my goal, of network music is ubiquitous music interaction that enables simultaneous musical interaction among people with musical inspiration. The network music will become eventually wireless. Of course, the system should satisfy establishing a shared perception of synchronization among the players. This may be problematic for the current wireless network, but the technical problem, such as the alignment of bandwidth and business models, will be solved eventually.
This situation reminds me of the case of machine learning. The concept of machine learning was derived in 1959, but the sensation of machine learning is actually caused by the development of GPU hardware in late 2000, which was highly affected by the game industry.
Likewise, we can assume the trend of network music will be drastically changed in the recent future according to the development of the network infrastructure. I do not know what will eventually accelerate the procedure. However, I believe we can try to raise public attention and creative fascination with musical interaction by producing meaningful musical results. Otherwise, we may have to wait until the porn market enables the network revolution.
mengyu's status on Tuesday, 09-Oct-2018 19:41:13 JST
mengyu"Where Are We? Extended music practice on the internet”. I was particularly interested in the multiple points of view brought by the distributed model of network performance, as it opens up the possibility to have a decentralized way of collaborative construction of a piece of work / many individual pieces based on the different perspectives of each node. Each node can have its own authority over both of the physical and digital aspect of the collaborative contribution, such as a manipulation / re-route on the network data, or a deliberate set up of the space. This autonomy of individual node at different space can give a lot of possibilities on the performance, and create very unique experiences of its own kind. Another aspect I was thinking is the potential reference or layer on the content of the work to be related to the geopolitical environment we are having. New meanings can be constructed via a geographical relationship over the network into the performance, which will be very interesting to look upon.
!netmusucsb Reading "Where Are We? Extended music practice on the internet". I was really taken by the parts that talked about the importance of the aggregate environment of a music performance in the perception of that music. In my music and as a concert producer, I've put a lot of consideration into the infinity of aspects of a concert that integrate into the music itself. I thought the extension of that line of thought into the equally limitless number of aspects that affect a network performance was compelling. There is a great tradition of experimental music that, rather than ignoring or mitigating the distracting factors present at a music performance, exploits them (Cage's 4'33" is an obvious example). I'm also imagining a version of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" performed collaboratively over a network. I am sitting in many rooms?
Rodney
Ken Fields
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