Goals

To design an automotive music system that allows the control, maintenance and assistance of independent music layers into music performance. It would become a feature for Knurl that allows the performer to receive advice and suggestions from a machine system in order to trigger and manage music events from the instrument electroacoustic interface.

Application

The system is designed based on 2 concepts of music that Rafaele used to have in mind as a composer. One of them was collected in a reading of the book ‘Meta hodos + Meta Hedos’. The idea collected from the reading of this book is based on the fact that the longer and the further we listen to music or a sound, the more used to it we get to the sound and therefore, more time we need to listen to its event, understand, organize it and associate with the previous information. Tenney also mentioned that the degree of intensity can also influence this decay of attention, for example, if you play a percussive note for a second time louder and equally, this note won’t surprise you if you won’t prolong the silence time in between if it is short. Those thoughts can seem simple to understand by your own experiences but when you are composing complex structures, it can be a nice reminder and a simple general rule to have in mind.

Another concept that this system is based on is an own interpretation of sound material in a degree scale. This idea came from improvisation practices of Rafaele's cello and in the Music and Dementia classes with my teacher René van Munster. Once Rene mentioned to me that his previous teacher used the metaphor of ‘the mirror and the hammer’: a figurative idea of how a music material can be understood as a repetition (mirror) or development (hammer). With this in mind, I started to imagine a system, in which If a musical idea is presented it can be understood either as a repetition, variation or development. This is represented in a scale between 0 and 1 (illustrated below) and used as the basis of understanding to generate and give advice for the musician. As an example, If the musician is playing for a long time with only repetitive material, the system would trigger sound material that engages contrast and stimulate the musician to work for a development.

The longer the music is, the less often those analysis and advice are triggered. Some mechanisms designed at the digital buttons of one of the modes of performances (detection mode) can, although, manipulate those trigger frequencies allowing the musician to have a certain control . This is because those concepts can’t be followed literally in all music contexts and scenarios. The analysis stores only data from the beginning when the system is booted and in a music concert, multiple factors can also determine the generation of the material (program selection, duration of the whole concert, audience, etc.).

The system was tested with a composition called "Idalina". Therefore, most of the sound material organized to be triggered had influence from this artwork. The sound material selected for this prototype was a short event of electronic or live-synthesis sounds, in order to better perceive the reaction of the machine in combination with the musician’s performance.

Makers

• Rafaele Andrade