User:Benitoelbonito/Interactive music notes

Becker, Howard ed. Art From Start to Finish (2006)

• essays collected from conference about “The Work Itself” – i.e. How sociologists can talk about artworks
• starting ideas:
  1. art is not an individual product
     • “We think, quite differently, that paying attention to all those details – to the struggle with recalcitrant physical, social, and economic realities, the attention to organizational constraints, collegial pressures, and career interests – gives more respect to the reality of art making than more idealistic analyses.”
     • “The collective character of art worlds affects works of art because all the parties involved in making those works might do what they do differently, or not at all, and everyone has to deal with the consequences of everyone else’s choices.”
  2. “The artwork is one of the actors involved in the drama of its own making.”
     • “material conditions of production, low-tech or high-tech – the actual substances, as well as the technical challenges – in relation to the creative process.”
  3. importance of process
     • “when is the artwork finished?”
       • “the analysis of works depends on there being a stable work for us to analyze”

Becker, Howard. “The Work Itself”

• “Fundamental Indeterminacy of the Artwork”
• “Any work of art can thus profitably be seen as a series of choices.”
  • “This opens the way to a kind of sociological analysis of the ‘work itself,’ even though the fundamental indeterminacy of the work makes clear that we can do that only by virtue of an arbitrary choice of a moment and state of the work that could itself have been made differently. A full understanding of any work means understanding what choices were made and from what range of possibilities they were made, things commonly known by practitioners of an art. These choices are made in a complicated social context, in an organized world of artistic activity which constrains the range of choices and provides motives for making one or another of them.” Sociology can do this-
• Becker meant to do an analysis of a Lester Young solo, but then decided he didn’t have enough knowledge of the context, etc., to do this analysis “that [he] believed could, in principle, be made”.
  • Jazz is particularly hard to pin down
  • ~ but isn’t this always the problem that undercuts analysis... so the ‘in principle’ is never possible, really…

Menger, Pierre-Michel. “Profiles of the Unfinished”

• people are obsessed with unfinished work – they pay more attention to these than finished ones
  • “the seminal unfinished work relates to so many following pieces that one can easily see and analyze the full set as a hypertext-like creation.”

Joyce, Michael. “‘How do I know that I am Finnish?’”

• “Something that does not finish is infernal, damned by what gods there be, damned as only a god may be.”
• “a traditional sense of what we mean by authority. Authority is control over ends, very often in the direst sense of having control over life and death. Authority resides in being able to say when something is done and enforcing that claim.”
• early criticisms of afternoon (a hypertext story) “decried hypertext’s dismantling of an ethical construct: the social compact of causality and comity that the poetics of beginning, middle and end have represented since Aristotle.”
• “you just know”? ~ i dunno
• “This paradoxical situation – of things that open into transitory closure, that close into recurrent opening – is the nature of what I have called network (as opposed to networked) culture.”
  • “the computer paradoxically keeps things endlessly available, present and unfinished even as by its inherent nextness it finishes them, archives them.”

Faulkner, Robert R. “Shedding Culture”

• on playing, practicing jazz
• “Musical lines are cultural objects and the result of choices; these cultural objects and enacted decisions are closely attended to and heard by others and hearing them then alters the choices people make and affects the culture of playing, the meaning and form of the original objects.”
  • “In this way improvisation is a highly social and highly interactive relationship; analyzing the consumption of musical objects, is in principle impossible.”

DeVeaux, Scott. “This is What I Do”

• problem with studying jazz:
  • doesn’t think jazz consists of “works of art”
• “a recording is not alive. It cannot produce multiple versions of itself. And a live performer … can.”
• copyright
• but most jazz artists don’t make money from recordings
  • recordings are “advertisements” for their live playing – not art
  • commercial necessity

Berliner, Paul. “Grasping Shona Musical Works”

• “As artists continue to develop their skills and deepen their understanding, the changing configuration of musical knowledge shapes their improvised performances.”
• “With growing appreciation for the vastness of their musical tradition, students display great pride in their aspirations to become knowledgeable specialists, and in their evolving skills – not simply as performers – but as analysts and creators.”
  • “the objective of performers is not simply the re-creation of a particular composition or a musical event. Rather, within the bounds of the mbira community’s distinctive musical forms and language, performance is a medium for the ongoing production of musical knowledge.”
  • “In this context, the fluidity of the concept of the ‘artwork itself,’ co-produced with practices of learning, invigorates the tradition.”

Gross, Larry. “The Fragment Itself”

• shifts in status of artist
• Romantic conception of artist

Kagan, Larry. “Object/Shadows: Notes on a Developing Art Form”

• embracing the shadow
• drawing with shadows

Follmer, Golo. “Electronic, aesthetic and social factors in Net music”

• “The term ‘Net music’ comprises all formal and stylistic kinds of music upon which the specifics of electronic networks leave considerable traces, whereby the electronic networks strongly influence the process of musical production, the musical aesthetic, or the way music is received.”
  • Electronic space in non-Euclidean (example of disparate strings that initiate sounds that are all synthesized by central server)
  • problem of presence: no physical space means users encounter each other via actions (example of League of Automatic Music Composers – networked computers used to collaboratively produce c.m.). Intra-action produces presence.
  • Problem of machine (example of nebula.m81 by Netochka Nezvanova – program that autonomously downloads html files and plays them as audio)
  • “For music, this difference is essential as evidenced by the fact that the step from concepts based on processes of regulation – as in most forms of communal and ritual music – to those dominated by score-based control or conducting – as in major parts of Western art music – is understood as a key development in music history (Kaden 1996).”

typology of Net music:

• three dimensions
  1. interplay with network characteristics
  2. interactivity/openness
  3. complexity/flexibility
• 5 groupings, 12 total types (II and III, minus G, are mine – possibly IV):
  1. The Forum – “internet does not directly intrude into the production process”
     • A. Discussion forums
     • B. remix lists
     • C. archive projects
  2. The Game -
     • D. Soundtoys
     • E. Flash/Shockwave soundtoys
  3. Algorithm and installation
     • F. Hypermusic - “can be described as fields of sounds that are not so much ‘played’, but ‘navigated through’ by the listener.”
     • G. Real/Virtual Space installation
     • H. algorithmic installation - “offer sensual experiences or critical reflections of the properties of electronic space.”
  4. Instrument and workshop
     • I. instruments
     • J. authoring software
  5. Performance
     • K. networked performances
     • L. staged projects

• “The specific electronic structures of the Internet are playing a vital role for networked music making. They offer new possibilities, including easy access to complex music software and simple instruments, ensemble playing between dislocated players, and the option to play in intra-active system setups.”
• two opposing paradigms: “composition” and “communication”
• Bits & Pieces, electra
• ‘Musical steering’ is present when the actions of the user can be influenced by more long-term planning and have a wider range of possibilities.
• “The pop music industry employs soundtoys to give users the feeling of being close to star performers by allowing them a sort of interaction with, say, the sounds of DJ Spooky or Madonna.”
• “Net music must be viewed as a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. The basic element of the Internet – the computer, a process-oriented and flexible machine – establishes the general nature of Net music in its being constructed as an open and flexible composition of electronic processes.”
• “Following a composition paradigm, the implementation of flexible network structures is employed in a quest for new kinds of compositional structuring, musical communication, and sound aesthetics. The problematic of presence in terms of a ‘deficit’ in networked human interplay encourages the development of new forms of musical interaction, while easy accessibility of nontrivial machines over the Internet spreads their use in musical applications and for playful forms of music in general. Following a communication paradigm, on the other hand, music is employed in a quest for a deeper understanding of electronic networks and their impact on social interaction.”

Garnett, Guy. “The Aesthetics of Interactive Computer Music”

• Concerns interactive vs. other computer musics
• sub-genre of “performance-oriented” c.m.
• human & computer contribution to each other's performances
• “aesthetic of the machine”
• technology now starting to empower individuals
• humanist/formalist dichotomy often comes into play “insidiously” in thinking about this
• contesting objective valuation of music
• “music can be roughly considered to be sounds made with aesthetic intent, or even sounds listened to with aesthetic interest”
• what is aesthetics? Not much answer...
• what kinds of interactivity?
• What human presence brings to c.m.: 1) gestural nuance. 2) physical & cognitive restraints. 3) interpretation
• c.m. historically linked to objective approach in the extreme (formalism)
• Adornian stimmig (timeliness or somesuch), while maybe formalist in the 50s, is different now
• not newness for its own sake; rather new as “byproduct” of making art appropriate for new criteria
• introduction of human into c.m. performance a way of disrupting formalism?
• “The consanguinity between human interaction and humanist values is an important driving element for the field of interactive computer music.”
• the computer “the computer to become an extension of the performer in a 'cyber performance'.”
  • e.g. Dan Trueman's violin/speaker array
• human involvement means that action and thought will stay within bounds of human capacity
• “interactive computer music takes the fullest advantage of the ideas and technologies of today and unites them with a vision of what they could be.”

Krueger, Myron. “Towards Interactive Aesthetics”

• rules for interactive art

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (2001)

• principles of new media (ch. 1):
  1. numerical representation
     • making it subject to algorithmic manipulation
     • discretization
  2. modularity
     • editability
     • ~ interferes with synthesis?
  3. automation
  4. variability
     • interactivity
     • hypermedia
  5. transcoding

• “interactive” is meaningless; a consequence of it being computerized (55)
• HCI – representation vs. control
  • cultural interface mediates b/t fixed and control
• operations:
  • selection: pomo remixing
  • compositing: modularity
    • DJ also
  • teleaction
• illusions – photorealism – folksong?
  • “the user invests in the illusion precisely because she is given control over it.”
• forms:
  • database
    • data, algorithm
  • navigable space
    • web is “Wild West” (258)
    • “In fact, the actual multi-user spaces built on the Web can be seen precisely as a reaction against the anticommunal and discrete nature of American society, an attempt to compensate for the much discussed disappearance of traditional community by creating virtual ones.”
    • “Art historians and literary and film scholars have traditionally analyzed the structure of cultural objects as reflecting larger cultural patterns … in the case of new media, we should look not only at the finished objects but first of all at the software tools, their organization and default settings. This is particularly important because in new media the relation between production tools and media objects is one of continuity; in fact, it is often hard to establish the boundary between them.”

Poster, Mark. “CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere”

• “The question of potentials for new forms of social space that might empower individuals in new ways are foreclosed in favor of preserving existing relations of force as they are viewed by the most powerful institution in the history of the world, the government of the United States.”
• “For example, if one understands politics as the restriction or expansion of the existing executive, legislative and judicial branches of government, one will not be able even to broach the question of new types of participation in government. To ask then about the relation of the Internet to democracy is to challenge or to risk challenging our existing theoretical approaches and concepts as they concern these questions.”
• left/right dichotomy problematic: 1) linear; 2) posits individual “outside of history” | pomo theory concentrates on construction of identity: so it's less directed than modern theory
• democracy is a modern construction; but pomo versions of it can be chosen.
  • e.g. Laclau. “One may characterize postmodern or postMarxist democracy in Laclau's terms as one that opens new positions of speech, empowering previously excluded groups and enabling new aspects of social life to become part of the political process.”
• “And the term may yet contain critical potentials since existing forms of democracy surely do not fulfill the promise of freedom and equality. The colonization of the term by existing institutions encourages one to look elsewhere for the means to name the new patterns of force relations emerging in certain parts of the Internet.”
• internet is decentralized (due to cold war, hackers, universities).
• THE WRONG QUESTION: “If the technological structure of the Internet institutes costless reproduction, instantaneous dissemination and radical decentralization, what might be its effects upon the society, the culture and the political institutions?”
  • “what the Internet technology imposes is a dematerialization of communication and in many of its aspects a transformation of the subject position of the individual who engages within it.”
• “The question that needs to be asked about the relation of the Internet to democracy is this: are there new kinds of relations occuring within it which suggest new forms of power configurations between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet?”
• media are the public sphere now
• Habermas saw decline of public sphere, argued it should be built up – rational debate, etc.
  • Pomos criticized his emphasis on Enlightemement. Feminists criticized gender-blindness. Others criticized it's universality, homogeneity.
  • “public” is problematic word to use in discussion of politics of emancipation; how do you divide public and private on the internet?
    • “For Habermas, the public sphere is a homogeneous space of embodied subjects in symmetrical relations, pursuing consensus through the critique of arguments and the presentation of validity claims. This model, I contend, is systematically denied in the arenas of electronic politics. We are advised then to abandon Habermas' concept of the public sphere in assessing the Internet as a political domain.”
• critique of active/passive dichotomy
• “On the Internet individuals construct their identities, doing so in relation to ongoing dialogues not as acts of pure consciousness. But such activity does not count as freedom in the liberal-Marxist sense because it does not refer back to a foundational subject. Yet it does connote a "democratization" of subject constitution because the acts of discourse are not limited to one-way address and not constrained by the gender and ethnic traces inscribed in face-to-face communications. The "magic" of the Internet is that it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production.”
• “Still in the "worst" cases, one must admit that the mere fact of communicating under the conditions of the new technology does not cancel the marks of power relations constituted under the conditions of face-to-face, print and electronic broadcasting modes of intercourse. Nonetheless the structural conditions of communicating in Internet communities do introduce resistances to and breaks with these gender determinations. ”

Rowe, Robert. “The Aesthetics of Interactive Music Systems”

• “An equally important motivation for me, however, is the fact that interactive systems require the participation of humans making music to work. If interactive music systems are engaging enough partners, they may encourage more people to make music at whatever level they can. I believe that it is critical to the vitality and viability of music in our culture that significant numbers of people continue (or begin) to engage in active music making rather than to simply absorb the music coming at them from loudspeakers on every side. Therefore, though the argument presented here will concentrate on musical issues, the social and cultural implications of interactive music systems are an equally important and compelling gauge of their aesthetic value.”