Intersections - Nguyen Dang Binh

Benjamin Vigoda
MANDALA
Musical improvisation mediated by computer graphics
ARTIST STATEMENT
Computers have enabled widespread changes in how music is created
and shared, but in the area of musical notation, innovation has
been mainly limited to improvements in the ability to edit conventional
sheet music. MANDALA is an animated graphical language for
guiding improvisation, an electronically mediated game piece, drawing
inspiration from the musical and theatrical game pieces of artists
such as John Zorn, Viola Spolin, and Del Close. The piece seeks to
provide an architecture for musical expression that simultaneously
allows for both emotional spontaneity and formal satisfaction.
In the earliest Indo-European religions, “mandala” was the term for
a chapter or collection of mantras or chanted hymns. Today, the
word more commonly refers to visual artworks with ceremonial
and spiritual significance in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, often
composed by multiple monks/artists working simultaneously.
Similarly, MANDALA seeks to create a spatial/temporal structure
for guiding collaborative creativity. To compose with MANDALA, we
write algorithms that encode a grammar for a set of allowed intermusician
interactions or activities. The instruments employed by the
musicians must be flexible enough to allow each musician to play
various roles that are proposed to them during the piece. The players
gather around a circle of light. Within this circle, are many smaller
circles of light in varying sizes and colors. Ornamented, translucent,
spinning, these images communicate the structure of a particular
musical piece to the participants while simultaneously creating a
synaesthetic theater space for the music.
CONTACT
Benjamin Vigoda
Mitsubishi Electric Research
laboratories (MERl)
201 Broadway
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 USA
vigoda@merl.com
www.media.mit.edu/~vigoda/
mandala/mandala.html
COLLABORATORS
David Merrill
Shawn Hershey
Erik Nugent
TECHNICAl STATEMENT
MANDALA employs a video projector and Mitsubishi DiamondTouch
table to provide an interactive musical notation that all of the musicians
can see and interact with simultaneously. The DiamondTouch
table multiplexes the rows and columns of its surface with a signal
that is capacitively sensed by individual receivers in each musician’s
seat, enabling multi-user, multi-hand touch position tracking.
The MANDALA grammar is composed of a number of graphical
elements representing instructions to the musicians. For example,
if a MANDALA icon is approaching you, prepare to begin playing
abruptly when it reaches your place setting. Similarly, you must
abruptly stop when your MANDALA icon returns to the center of the
table. Fade in and fade out of a MANDALA icon represent crescendo
and decrescendo, respectively.
Each MANDALA icon may also present information (traditional notation,
text, a countdown timer, visual imagery, etc.) suggesting an
activity to a musician. An arrow from one MANDALA icon to another
represents temporal dependence and therefore indicates leadership
and supporting roles. We have found that a satisfying MANDALA
piece tends to involve most musicians in both following and leading
roles, often at the same time. More generally, we have found
that many social interactions in music or violations thereof can be
encoded by the presence or absence of various rules in a MANDALA
composition.
Electronically Mediated Performances Art Gallery Electronic Art and Animation Catalog