Whirling Wall
A large wall of sheet metal is propped upright. Lots of spinning motors are attached to the back of the metal sheet knocking into the metal as they turn. A piezo microphone attached to each motor picks up each knock and feeds it into a Max/MSP patch which generates evocative music based on the beats and sounds of the motor knocks.

The performer wields a large heavy mallet and stake. By using the mallet to shape the sheet of metal, the timbre of the motor knocks and their speed is affected, which in turn alters the sound generated by the Max patch.

Heavy Metal Flower
Pieces of bendable metal sheet in a tulip-like shape about 4 ft. tall. The piece starts as incomprehensible noise. The performer stands in the middle of the flower twisting, bending, and trimming the metal with shears until it becomes apparent that there is a recognizable tune encoded within the metal. By bending in a step-by-step manner, the performer slowly exposes the tune until finally it is all very clear and obvious and sweet sounding.

This blog is a journal account of my experiences in the New Interfaces for Musical Expression class at ITP taught by Gideon D’arcangelo. This is a graduate level course exploring new relationships between human performance and musical instrument expression.

Throughout the semester, we will conceptualize, design, build, and perform a new musical instrument. I expect many issues will arise. Below I have summarized my thoughts on the subject having just a cursory understanding of the topic. The assigned readings were a good primer that evoked my thoughts on the basics of modern music and technology.

The article, “The Limitations of Mapping as a Structural Descriptive in Electronic Insturments” by Joel Chadabe addresses the traditional view of electronic instrument design as a means of designing a mapping between human input and instrument output. He concludes that viewing electronic instruments as purely mapping devices is outdated due to a continually blurring division between direct and indirect mapping.

This seems obvious. Having limited knowledge of history, I wonder why the question of mapping was ever considered to be of such magnitude. Modern electronic music technology allows for a direct musical reaction to a human gesture, for example, while still triggering other semi-autonomous musical reactions which are not so direct. In other words, that there will be a reaction to a human gesture can (and maybe should) be directly mapped, but very often, the details of just what this reaction will be cannot be predicted if the system is so designed.

In “Principles for Designing Computer Music Controllers”, Perry Cook points out some hard-learned guides to successful instrument design. The general gist of his article boils down to a few simple points: limit what the instrument is capable of, and design the instrument for a particular piece, not as a purely self-congratulatory feat. He argues that extra “options” on an instrument are extremely confusing and non-productive for the performer and the composer, since both are often overwhelmed with the possibilities of what the instrument “could” do, and never settle on any particular use for the instrument.

This is somewhat counter-intuitive in that the age of digital equipment is often flaunted for having “opened up the realm of the possible” to include just about everything. What Cook is saying, is that “everything is possible” is an utterly useless belief in real-life applications where one must dumb-down the instrument to make it useful to the performer and composer.

The issue of the instrument being designed for a particular musical piece is interesting. In my own experience composing music, I often tried to understand the meaning of composition with modern computer equipment. Working on one idea of sound for hours, you come to realize that what you are composing is the final product, the performance itself. The mass-reproducible sound file that sits on your hard drive is both composition and performance. Like that Jorge Luis Borges story, “On Exactitude in Science”, where the king’s mapmakers create a map so exact, it ends up being exactly the same size as the kingdom, the use of digital sound sculpting tools results in such a detailed documentation of the composition and the composer’s intentions, that the end composition is actually the sound of the composition itself being played.

Cook, by recommending that an instrument be built for a particular composition is further equating the instrument and the composition. It is interested to ponder whether all three – instrument, composition, and performance – are not antiquated terms which now represent one and the same thing. Is this just a phase, or have we totally moved past the classical terminology of music?

A related issue is the idea of reproducing what was possible before modern digital equipment arrived on the scene. Almost 100% of music on the radio and on TV is mostly artificial, meaning that the sounds are generated digitally and the rare recordings of actual instruments and performers are augmented and “touched up” in the editing studio afterwards. Yet the vast majority of this music replicates the sound and feel of “authentic” instruments and real performances such as those which existed before the digital era. Very rarely do you find a recording (except in electronica) in the which the sound is obviously digital and inauthentic.

Is the replication of “authenticity” an unavoidable preference of the human species (much like some argue linearity in films is a result of a human predisposition to straight stories). It seems relatively clear that the “postmodern reality” of art is one that is based upon sampling and simulation, but are these inherently related to “authenticity”?. Likewise, music and film both have time-based elements – what does this mean for the form of these arts? Are they dependent upon human limitations in our understanding of time? if so, have we already reached the limits of this man-made concept?