Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones (Deviant Resonances)
David Rosenboom (CalArts)
(1972 & 2015), Computer-electronics with BCMI (Brain-Computer Music Interface), auxiliary instrument, and two active imaginative listening brainwave performers (volunteers)
The “Philosopher’s Stone” is a mental symbol about the prima materia, the original substance and ultimate principle of the universe. It has been said that by returning from the qualities of sensation and thought, which we perceive through differentiation and specialization, to the undifferentiated purity of the prima materia, we might learn truths about creative power and the fundamental mutability of all phenomena. Combining this with the symbol, Portable Gold, was my way of emphasizing the timelessness and spacelessness of this idea, which we can carry with us anywhere. To manifest these symbols in music, I’ve made pieces that work with resonant coincidences detected among the physical brainwaves of performers and apply them inside the circuits of custom-built, live electronic music devices, to grow spontaneous musical forms. This version is realized with portable brainwave detectors, computer music software, and an auxiliary acoustic instrument.
Threaded through many of my musical works, one can find various versions of a propositional music model for investigating concepts associated with resonance and how they might be materialized in self-organizing musical forms. Many are about the emergence of perceivable substance from reinforcements among tiny perturbations in patterns of energy flow—or maybe like pinching an elastic field of essential tension in some idea of universe to produce differentiable, interacting entities. These might range from mere wisps of ineffable quantum resonances hinting at the existence of ponderable matter to brain/body/society holograms enfolding and enabling the creation of memories and histories.
Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones (Deviant Resonances) continues this investigation, paying particular attention to interesting goings on inside margins of uncertainty near boundaries of differentiation that might be associated with recognizable, resonant entities. It also explores how unpredictable, transient events may either reinforce or disturb emerging orders in resonant patterns, and what can result from collisions among differentiated resonances. All of this exploration is carried out within the framework of how we can fuse brainwave patterns and musical forms. In the context of musical performances like this one, our intentions are artistic and inclusive, melding products of scientific investigation and technology with aesthetic inquiries and speculations about the nature of human awareness and our ability to describe what we perceive as self and universe.
All the immersive electronic sounds heard in this performance are controlled by coincidences detected among spectral components extracted from performers’ brainwaves (EEG), along with occasional insertions of spontaneous musical impulses passing like breezes through the leaves of a neuromusical forest, which may react and then resettle according to whatever interactive dynamics might be then at play.
Thanks to InteraXon, Inc. for supporting this work by providing the Muse™ brain-sensing headbands.
Keynotes speaker : David Rosenboom
Deviant Resonances — Listening to Evolution
What happens when two forms of musical intelligence—either having emerged naturally from cosmological dynamics or been volitionally constructed by purposeful beings—attempt to initiate improvised co-communication with each other, while neither possess an a priori model describing the range and scope of manners in which either intelligence or music can be manifested? Will they even recognize each other? What predictive models can they use to search for something for which neither has a clear pre-definition? This is both a challenging and inspiring space to explore.
In advanced forms of BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) in the arts we also try to imagine and implement links among complex self-organizing systems—like brains or multi-person hyper-brains—with forms of synthetic intelligence—possibly imbedded in musical instruments—, which we try to endow with some faculty for self-organization. To build these realizations, we may posit propositional models. They are propositional, because we, too, often operate with limited pre-definitions, and frequently with declared intentions to do so. Furthermore, nature operates with myriad forms of uncertainty at fundamental levels, and ironically, from that uncertainty emerges order, deviant resonances.
This talk will draw from selected examples of this composer’s works over several decades that explore how propositional models for musical worlds have energized a composer-performer’s practice in spontaneous music making, which often collapses distinctions among formal percepts and embraces a dynamic dimensionality in musical structures that may be fundamentally emergent and/or co-creative. Selected examples that emphasize interaction strategies in music are explored along with their implications for designs and definitions of instruments.
Piano_prosthesis
Michael Young
The aspiration is to create a computational system able to collaborate with human improvisers in performance, i.e. able to cooperate proactively, on an equal basis. This is the agenda of the Live Algorithms for Music Network, created over ten years ago at Goldsmiths, University of London
This system is one of a series that bring together a specific instrument with a related (and transformed) library of samples and real-time manipulations. This is the material the computer can access and transform in performance in response to the musician's improvisation.
The player's improvisation is encoded by the computer through a statistical analysis of extracted features and by cataloguing these in real-time. The system assigns each of its observations to a specific set of materials and stochastic behaviours for audio output. Recurring aspects of the player’s performance are then recognised by the computer, and this recognition is ‘expressed’ by recalling the relevant set of output materials. As the improvisation develops, more behaviours are catalogued, leading to more variety in output. So, the machine expresses its recognition and creative response to the player by developing, and modifying, its own musical output, just as another player might. Both ‘musicians’ adapt to each other through mutual listening and response as the performance develops.
The metaphor of prosthetic – rather than conversation – has a currency in debates about user-computer interaction; in this performance there is mutually prosthetic relationship between both collaborators, in both sound material and quasi-intentional behaviour. Coding is in Max/MSP.