Sound and Video Anthology: Program Notes

Media Compositions and Performances: Doug Van Nort, Curator

Supplemental Content

Sound and Video Anthology 2014, Doug Van Nort, Curator

Part A: Distributed Composition

(note: Part A is audio and video, while part B is audio-only)
• Track 1 (.mp4 433 mb) Chris Chafe ñ Polartides (10:00)
• Track 2 (.mp4 87 mb) Pedro Rebelo - Netrooms (13:41)
• Track 3 (.mp4 238 mb) The HUB - Multiple Issues (4:33)
• Track 4 (.mp4 529 mb) CLOrk - Dancing with Laptops (8:34)
• Track 5 (.mov 368 mb) Bill Hsu/Chris Burns - Xenoglossia/Leishmania (6:55)

Part B: Musical Metacreation

• Track 1 (.mp3 22 mb) Paul Hession - drums, Isambard Khroustaliov - software (9:35)
• Track 2 (.mp3 9 mb) Paul Hession - drums, Arne Eigenfeldt- software (9:55)
• Track 3 (.mp3 9 mb) Paul Hession - drums, Doug Van Nort - software (3:50)
• Track 4 (.mp3 9 mb) Finn Peters - saxophone, Ollie Bown - software (9:58)
• Track 5 (.mp3 5 mb) Finn Peters - saxophone, Nick Collins - software (5:31)
• Track 6 (.mp3 8 mb) Finn Peters - sax/fute, Shlomo Dubnov and Greg Surges - software (8:29)
• Track 7 (.mp3 11 mb) piano_prosthesis - Michael Young - piano, software (11:43)
• Track 8 (.mp3 11 mb) Finn Peters - sax/fute, Paul Hession - drums, Matt Yee-King - software (8:24)

Curator’s Note

It is with great pleasure that I have curated Computer Music Journal’s 2014 Sound and Video Anthology. I decided upon a theme of distributed agency in digitally mediated performance. In particular, my interest here is to showcase a multiplicity of ways in which shared agency manifests between human performers, as well as between human and machine performers. The collection begins with “Part A: Distributed Composition”; this section presents audio/video documents that highlight five unique approaches to distributing and sharing expressive voices between composer-performers. In these works, the resulting compositional voice does not reside in one central location, but rather is a product of collective co-creation, at varying levels of spatial and temporal remove. This set includes a work by Chris Chafe and colleagues, wherein large-scale compositional qualities are influenced by global sea levels as well as by a live audience, resulting in a piece that is not only artful but consciousness-raising at the same time. In contrast to this “outsourcing” of the details of compositional form, the works by Pedro Rebelo and The Hub both present two very different takes on “network music”: Rebelo’s work defines a global feedback network whose sonic character and overall shape are the product of a large-scale interconnection of disparate acoustic spaces and performers, whereas The Hub—the fathers of “computer network music”—present us with a canonical example of their ever-groundbreaking approach to composing for shared, living network structures. The piece by CLOrk (the Concordia Laptop Orchestra) eschews the classically calculated and precise world of the laptop orchestra in favor of the messy and risky world of interdisciplinary improvisation. The result is a work whose shared agency is a product of listening for gestural engagement across forms (kinetic, sonic). Finally, Bill Hsu and Chris Burns present a piece that intersects this world of cross-media improvisation with shared control at the level of their interactive performance systems, resulting in a document that demonstrates the possible richness discovered when sharing gestures across media, between human performers, and with the system itself.

This sharing of system-level gestural and compositional forms is the focus of “Part B: Musical Metacreation.” This section highlights cutting-edge machine improvisation systems in performance with two top-level human improvisers: Paul Hession on drums and Finn Peters on flute and saxophone. Hearing these disparate systems at play with the same performer begins to hint at the stylistic differences of their composer-designers, as well as the virtuosic flexibility of the human players. In order to bring focus towards listening to these differences, I have decided that this section should be audio-only. Each of these excerpts comes from a single concert of the same name that took place at Cafe OTO in London in July 2014. The curation of this concert was the work of Ollie Bown, and so the excellent selection of the included...