Output details

“Speak” and the work-without-content

Speak is an interactive work for metatrumpet and computers, presented at Sonic Arts UEA (February 2013), Sonorities Belfast (April) and re-new 2013 digital arts confest Copenhagen (October). The present video documents the Copenhagen performance.

This work is part of a wider theoretical project, the work-without-content, a model that accounts for the distributed, embodied and situated nature of musical works, presented at ICMC 2011. It replaces polarities of composition and improvisation, score-based and sonic art, with a notion of cycles and layers of inscription distributed through time, technologies, people and contexts. The work is an adaptive dynamical system.

Speak is such a work – constituted of performer, technological assemblage (metatrumpet, C++, Max/MSP), dynamical system and context. It models the performance space as a volume of moving air in which performer and technology create and explore micro-acoustical phenomena – a view of sound as medium of illumination rather than object. Its fundamental material is a range of wave phenomena: reflection, refraction, diffraction, resonance, vibration and interference, as explored in the re-new 2013 paper. Underlying structures respond to and process the sound and movement of the performer to place sound-emitting objects in physical and virtual space. Their sound is transformed by a dynamic ecology of sound-transforming objects in virtual space, modeling various wave phenomena. The resultant micro-acoustic is modeled and analyzed to identify locations of interest, to which the listening of these virtual objects is directed and according to which they modify their behavior – an Artificial Life paradigm. We hear the polyphony of their listenings and the dynamic adapting of virtual and live performers to the evolving situation.

The ECAL 2013 paper explores techno-conceptual issues in implementing this approach: the identification of emergent phenomena in a proprioceptive system, hybrid emergence through domain-crossing between modes of representation and the nature of knowledge in simulation-based systems.