Here's an abstract I submitted to a conference on "practice,
participation and method in live electronic music".
If our understanding of music is grounded in the body, then what
hope is there for those who write software to generate music? This
problem is particularly true of live coders, who write dynamically
interpreted source code to make music while an audience listens and
watches \citep{Collins03a}. When we are engrossed in computation,
the manipulation of discrete symbols, are we too far from bodily
movements to make music? Some creators of tangible interfaces to
computer music might think so, instead working tirelessly to hide
their computation backstage, bringing the human body to the fore
once again.
But lets not forget, symbols are part of musical understanding too.
Scottish pipers chant the Gaellic syllables of Canntaireachd to
relate articulation of their instruments \citep{Chambers80}. Indian
drummers represent movements of the hands over the tabla drums with
a vocabulary of onomatopoeic bol syllables \citep{Patel03b}. Indeed
symbols themselves are represented relative to movements of our
vocal tract \citep{Ladefoged90}, and we understand our instruments
in terms of those same movements \citep{Traube05}.
A great hope for live coding then is in helping us understand the
relationship between symbolic and perceptual/conceptual
representations of music through experimental artistic practice. We
can think of symbols as waymarkers in our perceptually grounded
conceptual understanding of movement, and music as a dance between
human computation and perceptual understanding. Live coders have
the opportunity to lay this dance bare.
In this paper some possibilities of reframing live coding as a
symbolic interaction with spatial representations are outlined,
including the notion of \emph{vocable synthesis}, using the
typewritten word as a sequence of articulations of an instrument.
The paper was rejected because the focus was too computational. This
sounds like sour grapes (and probably is) but my point was that the
field wasn't computational enough, considering this music is usually
made using computers, music tradition is full of symbolic
representations, and human symbols and articulations are inextricably
entwined.
I think we need another conference on live coding. Who'd be up for hosting it?
alex
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http://yaxu.org/
Received on Fri Oct 02 2009 - 08:43:18 BST