Conference program 41 International Computer Music Conference

Antony: A Reimagining is a ground-breaking and iconic work by David Wessel, which found its first realization in 1977 at the
Paris suburb Antony, Hauts-de-Seine, from which the piece took its name. The piece emerged out of his work at IRCAM
with Giuseppe Di Giugno, who had recently created the 4A machine which was capable of generating 128 oscillators in
real-time, and each of whose frequency, amplitude, and phase controlled independently. (This machine was the first in the
series which led to the famous 4X machine.) Working closely with Di Giugno, and heavily influenced by the micopolyphonic
works of György Ligeti and the French Spectralists, Wessel sought to create a work that was a continuous flow, a single
timbral evolution without breaks or changes. He developed software which would allow the migration, oscillator by oscillator,
from one harmonic map to another. Layering the 128 voices over themselves four times, he setup frequency maps in real
time as an improvisation, staying one step ahead of the map being migrated toward. This technique of timbral migration
came to have a huge influence on electronic music over the coming decades, and the process was re-designed and refined
in numerous iterations and realizations in a variety of software environments.There is no score for Antony: at the core of the
piece is its process, and the famous Wergo recording is simply one possible iteration. This realization is an extension of that
process, drawing on the tools built and influenced by Wessel in recent years along with John McCallum and Adrian Freed
at CNMAT in Berkeley. We have created this version as a tribute to this innovative and forward thinking artist, composer,
scholar, and teacher, whose interests, work, and influence span the breadth of the contemporary music world.
Ricercare #1 (the second piece in the collection Inventions for data streams) is constructed using the principles of materialssoundmusic,
a new computer-aided data-driven composition (CADDC) environment based on the sonification and remix
of scientific data streams (www.materialssoundmusic.com). The CADDC environment utilizes the materials property data
from the online computational materials science repository AFLOWLIB.org. AFLOWLIB is an extensive (more than 630,000
entries and growing) repository of materials property data (phase-diagrams, electronic structure and magnetic properties to
name a few) generated using high-throughput computational frameworks and freely available on the website of the AFLOW
research consortium. These data are transformed into sound material (frequencies, MIDI numbers, pitch class sets, note
durations, rhythmic patterns, amplitudes/gain, audio effects, etc.) in an automated fashion and then fed to audio generating
patches for further musical remix. The structure of Ricercare is a reinterpretation of the original “ricercare” style of the late
renaissance and early baroque period. Here the word “ricercare“ (Italian for “to research”) takes a double meaning: on one
hand is the research the performer does to find the optimal connection between the flute and the sonification of the data
stream in the basso continuo accompaniment; on the other, it refers to the scientific research work that has led to the data on
which this composition is based. All the parts are directly based on the remix and sonification of the materials property data
for Silicon, Germanium and Tin (Si1_ICSD_60389, Ge1_ICSD_181071 and Sn1_ICSD_53789 in AFLOWLIB.org), some of
the group IVa elements of the periodic table. The flute part is built on the materials data mapped to pitch class sets (one of
the output of the data manipulation algorithm). These pitch class sets are used in the original form found by the mapping procedure
- no operation (translation, inversion or multiplication) is done on the sets. The rhythmic patterns oscillate between
quasi-random sequences and continuous virtuosity runs as in a baroque solo section. The basso continuo is split in one harmonic
and one percussive part. The harmonic part comes from the direct mapping of the materials data into MIDI note-on/
note-off events streamed live through the DataPlayer app, a patch written for MAX for Live (see www.materialssoundmusic.
com for more details on the mapping and sonification procedure). The percussive section doubles the flute part in a rhythmic
unison triggered by the flute through an audio-to-MIDI pitch recognition Max for Live patch.
After many years of apparent expanding openness brought about by the Information Revolution, it appears increasing redaction
is the new direction for global media: be it “the right to be forgotten” by Google or the blank pages of the shooting
incident report for Ferguson resident Michael Brown. In The Semantics of Redaction the performer loads a recording of a
topical recent news item into the scoreplayer which renders and redacts it as scrolling percussion notation. Musical “stems”
and “noteheads” are generated to correspond with accents detected by a realtime analysis of the recorded speech and the
noteheads are colour-coded to represent five instruments or families. The notation is also sometimes obscured graphical
symbols and/or by large black “redactangles” and accompanying sonic bleeps. Like its sister work Lyrebird, the instrumentation
is chosen by the performer as a commentary upon the subject matter of the recording (for example a clown horn might
be appropriate for some political speeches). The work was written for and is dedicated to Vanessa Tomlinson.
Old Batman FX, breakfast cereal, an exercise, something you do to numbers, a crisis, something it comes to, the final singularity
or maybe a new beginning. crunch! is one of a series of works created using software of the composer’s own design
called Audio Spray Gun, which simultaneously generates and spatialises large groups of static sound events, all derived
from a single sample. In this work, two variants of program are used: one to produce random “clouds” of points within the
locus and the other to make more swirling forms. This is the first of these works to explore three-dimensional spatialisation.
Culture of Fire is a piece to remember legacy hardware. After working with David Tudor and the Music Box 2 Neural Net
Synthesis designer Mark Holler, this piece evolved from my opportunity to use the unique synthesis technique that Holler
and Tudor developed using Intel’s ETANN (Electronically Trainable Analog Neural Net) chip . http://camalie.com/MusicBox2/
Mbox2.htm. I have created a hardware system that is triggered from 4 GeigerMuller detectors that process radioactive mutation
and trigger sounds that are based on the samples created with the Neural Net synthesizer. I can not guarantee that the
performance will include live interactions with the ETANN synthesizer over the internet, as the URL provided indicates, this
has been done, but it is a rare instrument and requires open TCP/IP paths to be played live. I am providing a performance
based on samples of the instrument, at a minimum, but I am hoping to play this exotic and historic instrument from Napa,
CA over the internet, if possible.
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