Text, including the two scores - Columbia University Department of ...

individual instead of the machine. Whatever social or political ramifications digital design may imply, Kittler still seems to support, as I do, the appreciation of a computational process as an aesthetic event: ‘Whoever manages to hear the circuit diagram the
in the synthesizer sounds of the compact disc, or to see the circuit diagram in the laser storm of the discotheque, finds happiness itself’ [6]. It is precisely this type of sublime awareness that I strive to create by compacting distinct media into a unified work. The ambiguity in such a quotation is itself
the circuit is to be appreciated as a reflection of the composer’s mind, or as the site of the art-making itself. I consider my synchronized audio and whether
works as a simultaneous dual view into that circuit, i.e. two windows onto the ‘composed’ computational process that is the heart of the work. I take particular delight when this dual view, as in ‘Oscilloscope 3D’, is naturally intelligible or intuitable to non-musicians. Likewise, my simultaneous video
of sampled sounds and spectrally-informed instrumental notes are this same dual view extrapolated outside the computer; the chaotic and infinitely complex circuit of nature and natural sound is juxtaposed with its computational reduction into discrete pitches and durations. presentation
ordeal of computational composition has another inherent ambiguity within computational aesthetics which continues to perplex me. The The
of reducing an audio sample into an orchestrated series of notes inherently causes the loss of a great deal of data. This seems to posit that reality cannot be reducible into a discrete description (i.e. music), a fact that seems to diminish computer artistic power (in the lyrical, not technical, usage
process
64