This piece resulted from a collaboration with the Topological Media Lab (TML) of Concordia University. Composition and Sound/Interaction Design is by Doug Van Nort. The instrument is known simply as the Tapestry, created in the context of the WYSIWYG project by XS labs at Concordia with Custom Electronics by David Gauthier and Elliot Sinyor.
Tapestry is a 20' x 6' ornate fabric created from conductive thread, which senses human proximity and touch. For this piece, Van Nort exploited the very volatile and nonlinear nature of the design in order to compose an interaction that changed depending on the nature of one's touch, where gestures such as bunching, rubbing and lightly stroking all led to different sound worlds. The energy and number of inter-actors also defined the complexity of the sound evolution over time.
Below is a video that demonstrates the responsiveness of the piece and the reaction to different gestures, and then moves on to a situation in which the presence of more hands direct the piece into a different state, wherein the tapestry exhibits more life and complexity
Below is a video that demonstrates the responsiveness of the piece and the reaction to different gestures, and then moves on to a situation in which the presence of more hands direct the piece into a different state, wherein the tapestry exhibits more life and complexity.
This piece was first shown at the Remedios Terrarium gallery show (2007) at Concordia University, and later at the International Computer Music Conference (2009).
This piece exhibits another unique collaboration. I was asked to co-instruct a course at RPI which brought together architecture and media arts students. I then invited sound artist Francisco Lopez to collaborate with myself, co-instructor Michael Oatman and the 16 students on a large scale sound project. The result was Blindfield - a play on Lopez's practice of blindfolding his audience during his electroacoustic performances. The piece presents a radically transformative environment in which a dense forest of panels gives rise to a highly immersive environment, having an enormous sense of scale. For my part, I challenged all collaborators to create a work in which the architecture itself was performed, sonically, in a very tangible way. This was achieved through a design of speaker-objects driven by inexpensive transducers and constructed from MDF wood and opaque fabrics. The play of light and sound, as one adjusts to their surrounds, gives rise to a very productive state of disorientation that is hard to capture on camera. This video is the best known documentation of this experience, and also shows elements of the panel designs. Special thanks to Jim de Seve for the video work.
GREIS (pronounced "grace") is the Granular-Feedback Expanded Instrument System. my ever-evolving performance system and digital music instrument and is now 10 years in the making. The name GREIS is an homage to pioneering work by Pauline Oliveros who performs with her so-called Expanded Instrument System (EIS). GREIS is Created in Max/MSP - a collection of many custom modules from various sub-projects I've done over the years. The system focuses on sculpting and re-shaping incoming sounds through spectral and textural transformations, largely performed with hand gestures on a Wacom tablet (right hand) while modulating the sound in some way (left hand). The unit of a "grain" - which may be a temporal fragment, a single partial or a transient component - is dispersed to different processes and fed-back through the system. GREIS includes granular and spectral analysis/synthesis, complex mapping techniques and generative processes that surprise me with machine-based decisions, forcing me to react in the moment. The system is intended for the total flexibility of free improvisation, and I often play with acoustic musicians - sometimes using their sound as source material. In other projects and solo, I work with particular sets of recorded material, grouped according to their qualities and re-called in the moment of performance for sculpting and transformation.
(Below is a screen shot from one possible orientation of the system.)
This work is about being able to immediately shape sound objects in both dramatic and subtle ways, and to achieve a particular musical structure by building loops, textures and layers "by hand" in collaboration with the machine. Sonic gestures are thus a very essential part of my work, while theatrical gestures are not my concern. That said, I often encounter interest in my manual, active style of improvisatory sound sculpting and so I've begun displaying my hands in performance in certain contexts. Below is one such improvised performance with GREIS that was streamed as part of a festival of telematic music.
A newer performance element and feature that I've added is the use of my voice, which I use in two ways. The first is a cross-synthesis between various sounds that arise from the system - creating a new sonic object that contains some elements of my voice and some of the given sound materials. The other is to use my voice in an "audio mosaic" type of fashion, where the timbral qualities of my voice cause different materials to be recalled from a sonic pool. Think of vocalizations that are used to navigate through a field of possible sound events. In practice I rapidly switch between these two modes or use both in parallel. Here are two videos from a recent session that begin with such a vocal performance style:
Triple Point - Pauline Oliveros, Doug Van Nort, Jonas Braasch - is an improvising trio whose core instrumentation is GREIS, soprano saxophone and digital accordion synthesizer. The name refers to the point of equilibrium on a phase plot, which is a metaphor for how we create dialogue as performers. Our musical interaction is centered around an interplay with proper acoustics, modeled acoustics (from the Roland V-accordion) and electronics. Van Nort captures the sound of the other players on-the-fly, either transforming these to create new sonic gesture or holding them for return in the near future. Oliveros changes between timbres and "bends" the presets of the instrument through idiosyncratic use of the virtual instrument, while Braasch explores extended technique including long circular-breathing tones and multiphonics. This mode of interaction has resulted in situations where acoustic/electronics source is indistinguishable without very careful listening, while other times this becomes wildly apparent. This morphing is based on timbral transformations of the "acoustic" players, but just as much is a product of these players playing into the process of transformation as it occurs.
I call this project FILTER: Freely Improvising, Learning and Transforming Evolutionary Recombination system. For me this is both a design of an "intelligent" interactive machine performer and a generative composition, as I've endowed it with a universe of possible musical actions that fit with my own aesthetic. My interest is in creating a system that can listen to the textural and gestural qualities as well as the stylistic tendencies of a performer and to take musical actions, improvising as a partner with the player and using their own audio as source material. FILTER does this by recombining, transforming and re-presenting this material in a radically new form as a new musical offering, in dialogue with its human partner. In some sense, I consider this as a project that is a reflection and genetic re-creation of what I do as an improvising "laptop musician" with GREIS wherein I capture sounds on the fly and transform them.
I have undertaken this work in the context of a larger project called CAIRA: creative, artificially-intuitive and reasoning agent that is underway at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute involving myself, Jonas Braasch, Pauline Oliveros and faculty and students from Architecture and Cognitive Science. I am working to integrate my project as one aspect of this larger research endeavor, and meanwhile I continue to develop FILTER as an interesting performance partner and as a generative composition of sorts - perpetually providing new music and new ideas.
As one example I've chosen the following session with Sam Sowyrda (of Cloud Becomes your Hands and the Dan Deacon live band) because Sam uses a wide timbral variety of objects, and because he is a Deep Listener who respects the system as a fellow player. This is clear in that the dynamics are well matched; also I find the interplay quite nice where Sam sometimes takes the lead and FILTER created textural layers or loops, while other times it switches to more varied events and Sam creates his own rhythmic "loops" in support of this. Listen for the materials selected by the machine, and realize that there is no human hand in terms of decision making (content, dynamics, timing, etc.).
A second example I've chosen is the following session with Pauline Oliveros for several reasons. First she knows a thing or two about improvising with electronic music systems that transform her sound, as she has done this for years with her Expanded Instrument System. In many ways, my work with my GREIS performance system and now FILTER is directly taking off from this lineage, trying to project this into the future with systems that listen, evolve, morph, and so on. Pauline has interacted a lot with me playing GREIS in the context of our trio Triple Point, and also in duo with the FILTER system. This session in particular is interesting to my mind as it shows FILTER's range: it sometimes acts in a call/response delay-line fashion, and other times takes its own initiative with wildly different gestures and timbres. For me, some of the dialogue and interaction between these two players is uncanny. Finally, the version of FILTER from this video is capable of spatial gestures as well. Though it is only a stereo mix-down from four channels, note that the FILTER sound moves in the stereo field with varying reverberation characteristics - sometimes as quick gestures and sometimes a slowly shifting one.
I have developed a series of "laptop orchestra" pieces around a basic concept that I learned in 2006 from composer Kim Cascone when I invited him to Montreal for a workshop. This basic premise is that participants somehow rate sound files and more "fit" members of the population are chosen for "mutation" (sound alteration) and "mating" (essentially digital tape splicing). Using this genetic metaphor I have developed a complete scheme in which performers-turned-sound-mutators rate files which are then selected through an algorithmic process based on the cumulative fitness ratings. In the set of works this evolutionary paradigm is directed by compositional rules, including the nature of the beginning "gene pool" and the type of mutation/crossover. At the same time, the process directs the structure of the score itself, determining the number of sections, number of players in this section, which sonic "generation" each player can draw from and so on. Within these confines, the performance is improvisatory, drawing on each epoch of the evolved sonic gene pool. In this way, there are actually two pieces to speak of: the first is the process and experience of creating this pool -- where the participants experience their own sounds and mutations interacting with other players over time. This is an anonymous process where identities and dialogues are formed completely through the digital media. The second piece is the performance and score, when this entire multiple day-or-week process of the pool's unfolding is collapsed into 20-40 minutes of a performance. Each performer at this point has an intimate understanding of the material, and modulates this pool in attempt to convey this process to a new audience. These series of pieces are collectively titled "Genetic Orchestras", generally being named "X Genetic Orchestra" where X is the name of the ensemble. There currently exist seven pieces in the repertoire, which have been performed on at least eight occasions, including the International Society of Improvised Music conference in 2007, in performance with the Florida Electronic Arts Ensemble (FLEA) directed by composer Paula Matthusen at several festivals in the Miami area, and by students groups at universities including RPI.
The very first piece was commissioned by the Deep Listening Institute for the "Deep Listening Convergence" event in June of 2007, which brought together 40+ musicians over the internet in a six-month long "virtual residency", before the final convergence of performances. As such this version is titled "Deep Listening Convergence Genetic Orchestra" or, DLCGO. This version was special not only because it was the first, but because we evolved the piece completely over the internet, and over such a long time period. The recording of the premiere performance (pictured below) was presented on the CD compilation "Listening for Music Through Community" released with the 2009 Leonardo Music Journal.
More recently (May 2011), Genetic Orchestra #6 - which focused on spatial composition and sharing "gestures" between sub-groups - was performed by 25+ members of Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening class. Below is a video of the performance, which was streamed over Ustream.tv.
For this and other more recent pieces, I've created a simple piece of software that was designed with the intention of allowing players to loop and mix the sound files while independently changing the pitch or timbre. This also allows players to tap in a tempo and to change the character of the sound in simple but uniform ways. This application has become a central part of the pieces, allowing me to compose for the software instrument as well as for the process.
This quartet project involves Pauline Oliveros, Francisco Lopez and Jonas Braasch. It brings together devoted improvisers on one hand and electroacoustic composers on the other. The project explores a new synthesis of improvised electro/acoustics, and studio-based composition. The process has been to begin with free improvisations, from which recordings are then crafted into personal compositions by each member (which have then found their way back into performance, thereby closing the loop). We have released an album on Pogus in April 2011, which has received some very nice reviews. This can be purchases directly from me, from Pogus or at the iTunes music store.
Discography:
Quartet for the end of Space (Pogus, 2011)
An active duo collaboration that I currently have with composer Al Margolis, also known as If, Bwana. In this project, Al uses acoustic instrumental recordings as source material and I begin from very small fragments of various recordings. A musical feedback loop is formed and sonic materials are traded, as I capture the large chunks of sound that Al has produced in order to re-sculpt and define new gestures, while Al captures my sound in order to transpose, stretch and loop the output. We are actively performing with several dates set up for 2012 and a new release on Zeromoon (2011) that presents an unedited live performance in it's entirety. "The result is a rich palette of sound informed by classic electronic composition, minimalist drone works, and modern noise music. Structure to chaos, drone to acoustic collages..."
Performing over the internet is something that I have been actively involved in for nearly 10 years now, having taken part in many telematic performances. From an early Supecollider project with Tasdashi Usami at Mills to weekly sessions between Triple Point and Chris Chafe over Jacktrip, it has become an important venue for me.
My primary interest is in exploring the idiosyncracies of the telematic venue, from the errors and glitches to the wildly different experience of presence for co-located audiences. I also enjoy the musical challenges of timing and interacting across time and space, which I like to extend by capturing the sounds of distant collaborators. Below is an example of a three-site telematic performance from the Guelph Jazz festival, which was co-produced with EMPAC. The Guelph location featured Pauline Oliveros (V-accordion), Anne Bourne (voice,cello), Jesse Stewart (percussion) and Ben Grossman (hurdy gurdy), while Ricardo Arias (balloons) joined in from Bogota. The trio of myself, Jonas Braasch and Curtis Bahn joined in from EMPAC. I like this clip as it illustrates the potentials and pitfalls (note the dropouts at times) of Internet2 streaming, the varying staging and presentation of the sides, and this sharing of material across networks.
So much more to say in this area, I will leave it to the performance arena for the time being.
Select related compositions and performances:
Distributed Composition #1, NIME, Oslo, NO audience (2011)
Guelph Jazz festival (2010)
Latent Sea, with Chris Chafe and Triple Point, Sound and Music Computing Conference, Porto, PT audience (2009)
Sonorities Festival, Triple Point and Rebelo/Schroeder/Renault, SARC/Belfast audience (2008)
Mixed Realities between Tintinnabulate ensemble (EMPAC) and Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (Second Life) (2008)
International Society of Improvised Music (2007)
Genetic Orchestra #1: DLCGO (2006)
8-channel performance with Pauline Oliveros, Zack Settel, S.A.T. in Montreal and RPI in Troy, NY (2005)
Network performance with the HUB, remote from Montreal, part of Dutch Electronic Arts Festival (2004)
Awakening w/ Tadashi Usami, Mills/RPI co-located concert (2002)
Following up on my series of Genetic Orchestra pieces, I've recently worked on two ensemble pieces for acoustic instruments and electronics. The idea is that each sonic gesture is a meme that enters into a system and whose general gestural character evolves over generations, "cross-breeding" with the sounds of fellow performers.
Memetic Orchestra #1 was written for Triple Point and an early version of the FILTER system. It was premiered at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival in April 2009. The work explores the use of timbral/textural analysis, gesture recognition and evolutionary algorithms. The sound qualities of the sax and accordion are analyzed and the 'sonic gestures' are recognized on the fly by an artificial 'agent' who then steers a genetic algorithm, influencing Van Nort's software performance system. Therefore, acoustic performers influence an agent, who in turn influences the software system that is being performed by a laptop performer who influences the listening of the agent and all are influenced by the overall sound output.
In the first few minutes of this piece the agent controls the sound processing with minor human tuning, and then over the final 7-8 minutes the laptop performer first plays in concert with the agent before taking over to play the GREIS system as well as the evolutionary process itself.
While the piece does explore complex systems and some heavy algorithms (the power of two laptops were needed to run all software), at its heart it is really about listening for all three performers - to the electronic/acoustic balance, to the role of the agent, to the intentions past and present, to the evolutionary trajectory, and so on.
Below is a video of the second half from the premiere performance of this 15-minute piece.
Memetic Orchestra #2 was written for an ensemble of instruments and cross-synthesis algorithms. It was invited for a performance at the Flea Theatre's "Music with a View" series in November 2009. An exploration in textural transformation and timbral sustain, the piece extracts audio qualities from each player to provide a form within which players articulate subtle inflections, their timbres merging to form a sometimes sparse, sometimes dense collage of each sound's internal matter.
Performers for this premiere included:
Van Nort, harmonica
NF Chase, Bowed Music Stand
Jonathan Chen, Violin
Cristyn Magnus, Melodica
Al Margolis, Clarinet and Toys
Jefferson Pitcher, Electric Guitar
I am very interested in the sonification of different evolutionary processes. In 2005 I wrote some code (an external) in Max/MSP that defines a Genetic Algorithm (GA). It is an interactive GA in which users may rate each "member" individually, or define ideal fittest members while having control of mutation rate, replacement method, etc. These members are data and can be used for anything - parameters describing sound, video, etc.
I have used this code to drive many sorts of processes and continue to do so in my GREIS patch - most important for me is the notion that one is listening to the evolutionary process itself rather than as a means to some ideal ending. That said, it could be used for sound design as well, if one so chooses.
Here you can find a Max/MSP patch that demonstrates this principle using granular synthesis for sound output. I like this particular implementation in its own right, but further it demonstrates said principle of sonification of a process.
I've been involved in composing electroacoustic (studio) pieces since I was an electronic composition student at the Crane School of Music (not counting four-track experiments from high school, that is...). Here is a partial list of pieces and their initial forum.
Inner (2011) - CD, Pogus
Outer (2011) - CD, Pogus
Imbalance 2009 (2009) - 5.1 DVD piece, "Sonicities" sound art event, RPI school of Architecture, Troy, NY
Imbalance (2007) - CD, le-son 666
[a]wash in [a] dvnt.sea #2 (binaural version) (2007) - International Conference on Auditory Display, Montreal, QC
untitled (2007) - Espace Sono event, [sat], Montreal, QC
[a]wash in [a] dvnt.sea #1 (2006) - Upgrade International Festival, Oklahoma City, OK
noise:nature:shift (2003) - 5.1 DVD piece, MFA Thesis concert, Arts Center of the Capital Region, Troy, NY
Prelude:Storm (2002) - CD, and/oar
Rusty Swingset (2001) - Crane composer's forum and masterclass (w/ Libby Larsen), Potsdam, NY
Lemniscate (2000) - Crane composer's forum and masterclass (w/ George Crumb), Potsdam, NY
Cat Fight (Pig Resolution) (1999) - Crane composer's concert, Potsdam, NY
Triple Point, Quartet for the end of Space and the duo with Margolis all have specific styles and modes of engagement. More generally, I love the challenge of improvising with disparate personalities in varying musical contexts where I have not seen a player before. Some favorite recent examples of this include:
Triple Point and Chris Cafe (celleto) in various telematic concerts
With Mike Bullock (contrabass) and Triple Point at the Red Room in Baltimore, MD
The "American Space Quartet": myself, Andrew Raffo Dewar (sax), Phillip Schulze (laptop) and Jonathan Chen (violin)
With Ben Miller (multiphonic guitar, former Destroy All Monsters guitar/sax)
With Gerry Hemingway (drums), Ned Rothenberg (clarinet), Jane Ira Bloom (sax), Dave Taylor (trombone), Jin Hi Kim (komungo), Kenta Nagai (shamisen), directed by Sarah Weaver, at the Stone
With Anne Bourne (cello)
In transmission-mediated performances with Judy Dunaway
To work with that element of sound we might call it's "texture", to create work that is itself "textural" is a very contemporary idea. I have spent some time thinking about this phenomenon as an aesthetic interest, as a perceptual phenomenon and as a behavior of sound signals. I am keenly interested in ways to extract, sense, transform or synthesize textural elements, and how to create machines that can identify, parse and re-define textural qualities. My work in creative, listening and reacting machines has largely centered around this aesthetic concern, which has most recently led to my exploration of of the use of nonlinear time/frequency analysis techniques - something that finds its way into other software projects including FILTER and recently GREIS. This recent "experimental signals and systems" work is built around the emd~ external and ideas from systems modeling.
Related writings:
Doug VanNort. Instrumental Listening: sonic gesture as design principle. Organised Sound 14(2):177-187, August 2009.
Doug Van Nort, Jonas Braasch and Pauline Oliveros, Sound Texture Analysis based on a Dynamical Systems Model and Empirical Mode Decomposition, Proceedings of the 129th Convention of the Audio Engineering Society, San Francisco, CA, November 2010.
Doug Van Nort, Texture Perception: Signal Modeling and Compositional Approaches, in Proc. of the 2007 Conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC-07), Montreal, QC, August 2007.
The notion of "mapping" in the context of digital music performance takes on a variety of meanings related to associating of gestural action to sound result, which includes a perception-of-intentionality point of view, a parameter-association point of view as well as a music theoretic one when discussed in relation to musical composition and form. I've felt this issue to be overlooked and so I devoted a good deal of my dissertation work to discussion of mapping from several angles that incorporates aesthetic, mathematical, perceptual and systems-oriented views on the subject. With the purpose of moving towards a more holistic view on instrument design, the tangible outcomes of this work have included a psychophysical experiment and software tools for continuous control of high-dimensional spaces of sound parameters by appropriation of methods from computational geometry and geographic information systems (GIS) research.
Related writings:
Doug VanNort. Instrumental Listening: sonic gesture as design principle. Organised Sound 14(2):177-187, August 2009.
Doug Van Nort. Modular and Adaptive Control of Sound Processing, PhD Dissertation, 2009.
Doug Van Nort. 2 entries: "Mapping" and "Mapping, in Digital Musical Instruments", in A Luciani and C Cadoz (ed.) Enaction and Enactive Interfaces: a Handbook of Terms, Enactive Systems Books, Grenoble, 2007.
Doug Van Nort and Marcelo Wanderley, Control Strategies for Navigation of Complex Sonic Spaces, in Proc. of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression 2007 (NIME-07), New York, NY, June 2007.
Doug Van Nort and Marcelo Wanderley, The LoM Mapping Toolbox for Max/Msp/Jitter, Proc. Of the 2006 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 06), New Orleans, LA, Novermber, 2006.
Doug Van Nort and Marcelo Wanderley, Exploring the Effect of Mapping Trajectories on Musical Performance, in the International Conference of Sound and Music Computing (SMC 06), Marseille, France, May 18-20, 2006.
Doug Van Nort, Le Mappings Geometrique et Trajectoires Musicale, in L'interdisciplinarite dans les sciences et technologies de la musique colloquium, part of La Reunion 2006 de l'Association Francophone pour le Savoir (ACFAS), Montreal, QC, May 17, 2006.
Doug Van Nort, Marcelo M. Wanderley and Philippe Depalle. On the Choice of Mappings based on Geometric Properties. Proc. of the 2004 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 04), Hamamatsu, Japan, June 3-5, 2004.
