Multimodal Performance Approaches in Electronic Music

This research examines non-traditional music performance and composition practices utilising experimental electronic and acoustic performance strategies for scoring films. It looks at innovation within screen sound by examining how technological practices, both innovative and more established, are facilitating and shaping the creative processes of screen composition and sound design. At the forefront of this research is taking into account new forms of electronic and musician interface to the improvisation process when composing in real time, which includes controllers that manipulate sound in real time, musical gesture and notation for live performance, and new compositional structure as pertains to dramatic flow when working to picture.

During the twentieth century, electronic technology enabled the explosive development of new tools for the production, performance, dissemination and conservation of music. The era of the mechanical reproduction of music has, rather ironically, opened up new perspectives, which have contributed to the revitalisation of the performer's role and the concept of music as performance. This book examines questions related to music that cannot be set in conventional notation, reporting and reflecting on current research and creative practice primarily in live electronic music. It studies compositions for which the musical text is problematic, that is, nonexistent, incomplete, insufficiently precise or transmitted in a nontraditional format. Thus, at the core of this project is an absence. The objects of study lack a reliably precise graphical representation of the work as the composer or the composer/ performer conceived or imagined it. How do we compose, perform and study music that cannot be set in conventional notation?

Tanzende Bilder. Interaktionen von Musik und Film, 2008

The aesthetic characteristics of visual music today are as diverse as the context in which they appear: visual music can be performed live in clubs, within a New Music framework, or it can be created in a studio as an audiovisual production for DVD. Mostly the aesthetics are informed by the features and possibilities of digital software and hardware, but also by analog devices, for example slide and overhead projectors on the visual side of things. Even if many forms of visual music explore dance or dance-like characteristics, they do not always feature dancing images. The focus of this essay will be on tendencies in contemporary visual music where images are made to dance in various ways. These tendencies are based on refinements and new developments in software and hardware. In the first part, “The New Elasticity of Images,” the essay examines new possibilities to set images in dance in relation to music; in the second part, “Film Beat,” it explores experiments that simultaneously process image and sound, and their resulting audiovisual products. First published Cornelia Lund, Holger Lund. “Beat the Film—zur Ästhetik zeitgenössischer Visual Music,” in: Klaus Krüger, Matthias Weiss (eds.). Tanzende Bilder. Interaktionen von Musik und Film. Munich: Fink, 2008, pp. 131–147. Quote as Cornelia Lund, Holger Lund. “On the Aesthetics of Contemporary Visual Music,” in: Cornelia Lund, Holger Lund (eds.). Lund Audiovisual Writings, 2017, http://www.lundaudiovisualwritings.org/aesthetics

2014

This research project investigated techniques for composing visual music and achieving balance in the relationship between sound and image. It comprises this thesis and a portfolio of compositions. The investigation began with an interest in the relationships between colour and sound and later expanded to include form and motion, the remaining factors of Thomas Wilfred’s lumia (1947). Working with a cohesive theme, such as lumia, proved to be an effective way of creating a coherent aesthetic in portfolio pieces. Other themes were therefore investigated including composing with visual and audio materials recorded from the single source of Thailand, the wave phenomena of refraction and diffraction and a filmed natural sunset interpreted in electroacoustic music. Two distinct compositional techniques were used, material transference, where qualities were transferred between sound and image, and compositional thinking, which assisted in creating audio-visual compositions that possessed ...

2014

I propose the panoramic, but there is always detail in the terrain. My music resembles a topographic vista that is long and wide, but this should not infer stasis. On a macro level I aim for the sonic as landscape, containing intricacy and particularity, proposing an aura of curiosity, delight, fascination and occasionally antipathy and shock. I desire conflict, friction and incongruity in music—broken detail, fractured sound, noise, silence, ugliness, flexibility and constraint, violence and beauty—sometimes as a device to reveal or mask and at other moments to highlight subtleties that might otherwise go unobserved. It is the stuff that disrupts, interferes or disturbs on which I fix my gaze. Equally it is the influence of gaps, spaces and silences between the details that can often generate the most fascinating results. By layering seemingly incongruous material one can alter the way it is formed, creating interesting gestural quirks and intriguing inconsistency. Seemingly incong...

Abstract:

Body, Space & Technology

Creators of visual music face the challenge of retaining their own artistic impetus amidst an overwhelming choice of instruments, aesthetics, practice, techniques and technologies brought about by the impinging presence of a vast sea of data and tools. Navigating the data-driven ephemerality of artistic technology and its market-driven constraints by utilising strategies similar to composer Ron Kuivila's (1998) for getting 'under', 'over' and 'into' will be examined with the aim of elucidating methodologies for creating works that other artistic practitioners may find useful. Leading pioneers of visual music were, of necessity, innovators of technology as well as visual musicians and artists. There is an intrinsic tension between developing new technology in order to re-imagine how music can be made visible and technological pioneers succumbing to the fascination of exploring the technology itself. Understanding aspects of perception, such as rhythm, is key to developing new technologies and processes in ways that avoid this pitfall and keep the experience of visual music central. Audiovisual synchronisation and rhythm are vital to create, in the seminal computer artist John Whitney's words: 'an art that should look like music sounds' (1980: front dust jacket). Integrating the body, human traces and especially the human voice into visual music compositions underpins the key objective which is to create work that is non-narrative, 'abstracted animation'[1] (Watkins, 2015), and yet suffused with human presence and emotion. Visual music can be perceived as overly repetitive, cold and alienating if it seems to embody a purely mechanical alignment of music to image, or if it seems disengaged from both human emotions and natural imagery. This paper is part of an ongoing investigation into developing methodologies for composing new abstract visual music pieces and, ultimately, parameters for a visual musical instrument.

ICMC, 2010

"This paper presents techniques for the novel use of projected video in a live improvised performance context. In particular, the use of digital video camera and computer to reveal information about an otherwise acousmatic performance will be discussed. An investigation of acousmatic musical performance which goes beyond fixed media works will be considered, where electroacoustic and instrumental performers are hidden from view and where video provides the only visual interface to the musicians. Aesthetic issues linked to the control of live video by the musicians will be discussed, including the expressive impact of using software to selectively revealing details of live instrumental and electronic techniques to the audience as part of an improvised performance. The potential ambiguity of the video interface will be explored where distortions of time are introduced using Max/MSP/Jitter to break direct causal relationships between visual gestures and sound, introducing moments of cross-modal discrepancy for audience members. Deliberate blurring of source identity between instrumental and electronic sounds in a live acousmatic context will also be considered."

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2011

ABSTRACTThe electromagnetic basis of video technology allowed sound and image to be recorded simultaneously: as a result, composers could visualize their music and artists could sound their images. Many believed that such intermedial audio-visuality signalled a brand-new art form that was free from lineage. Using Nam June Paik as an example, this article suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. The intermedial capabilities of video technology allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Understood in this way, music and art in the twentieth century cannot coherently be discussed as individual disciplines, but rather encourage a more lateral history – or spatial sensibility – that moves fluidly through the space between ...

Reflections on Process in Sound, 2012

Welcome to this first issue of Reflections on Process in Sound, a curated magazine which arose out of my research interest in the creative processes we engage in. It focuses on sound related activities but will also branch out into adjacent territories with the aim to provide a forum where artists can engage in discussions about how they create the work they do, what their practices are influenced by and how their ideas manifest themselves within the final artwork. Slippery work indeed! This first issue offers a variety of themes and perspectives: an interview with Alvin Lucier, a survey of collaborative working methods by the Sound & Motion Improvisation Research Group in Helsinki, a reflection on audiovisual relationships in live performance, a discussion of a sound/sculptural work, an investigation of feminist strategies emerging from the Her Noise project and a short text on sonic materiality. I would like to thank all contributors for their time, but also the inspiring conversations along the way. Thanks also to Cathy Lane, Angus Carlyle and Salomé Voegelin for their invaluable input. I'd also like to express my appreciation to Tony Herrington for opening the archive of The Wire and letting me use two images of Alvin Lucier. Last but not least thanks go to CRISAP for hosting this magazine and to Peter Smith for designing it!