Graph Theory : Linking Online Musical Exploration to Concert Hall Performance

Recent technological and aesthetic developments have challenged us to become more engaged and active cultural consumers who help create the content we enjoy: we curate the playlists we listen to, we compete in the online games we play, and we collaboratively filter the media we watch. Within this context, traditional concert performance, particularly of classical and contemporary art music, seems increasingly anachronistic. Audiences sit in a dark hall, often looking at a conductor whose back is turned toward them, afraid to cough or sneeze lest they disturb their neighbors.

Fig. 1.

The user interface for Graph Theory (2006).

© Jason Freeman

Graph Theory aims to bridge this experiential gap. Through its availability on the Internet, it seeks to creatively engage audiences outside of the concert hall; the project then incorporates their activities into the context of a live concert performance. Web site visitors, who need not have specialized musical training, use a visual interface to navigate among short, looping musical fragments to create their own unique path through the open-form composition for solo violin. Before each concert performance, the violinist visits the web site to print out a new copy of the score, which linearly orders the fragments based on the decisions made by site visitors.

Background

Recent networked music research and practice has often focused on real-time, collaborative, networked performance systems. Termed "shared sonic environments" by Barbosa [1], they range from the NINJAM [2] software architecture, a networked, synced multi-track audio environment, to Phil Burk's WebDrum [3] drum machine, in which users edit voices of a looping drum pattern through a step-sequencer interface. And several recent works have linked such online environments to live concert performances, including Tod Machover's Brain Opera [4] and William Duckworth's Cathedral Project [5].

Like Machover and Duckworth's projects, Graph Theory links an online environment to concert performance, but it does so out of real time, following a paradigm closer to an online discussion forum than a chat. Each user contributes to an evolving musical score rather than improvising with other users in the moment. Participants need not log on during a live performance in order to influence it, and they need not participate simultaneously with others in order to contribute to a collective result. In this respect, Graph Theory is influenced by projects such as Splice Music [6], a collaborative remix tool; and Sergi Jordá's Faust Music On Line [7], a novel collective composition and synthesis environment.

Graph Theory also draws from a tradition of dynamically generated musical scores whose visual appearances transform from one concert performance to the next. In Earle Brown's Calder Piece [8], the movements of a mobile sculpture influence the music, and recent projects by Clay [9] and Winkler [10] render digital scores in real time based on the activities of performing musicians.

Graph Theory's structural paradigm, in which small musical fragments are reordered, is inspired by Brown's idea of open form [11], as exemplified in works such as Stockhausen's Klavierstuck XI [12], in which the performer's wandering eyes select the order of fragments during performance, and Saariaho's Mirrors [13], in which users manually order the fragments and play back the results. Graph Theory also refers to the graph structures common in computer science and to the hypertextual narrative structure of the web itself.

Design

The web interface (Fig. 1) enables users to explore the graph structure and create their own path through the composition. In the top section, they see piano-roll style representations of the current fragment, previous fragment, and possible next fragments. Because the work utilizes only twelve different pitches, with each pitch class frozen in a particular octave for the entire work, the fragments can be cleanly represented with 12 vertical steps.

The lower section of the interface features a visual representation of the entire graph structure. Different colors highlight the previous, current and possible next fragments, and the hues of possible next fragments indicate their relative popularity with previous web site visitors. The colors of the remaining fragments on...