A performer\u27s guide to multimedia compositions for clarinet and visuals: a tutorial focusing on works by Joel Chabade, Merrill Ellis, William O. Smith, and Reynold Weidenaar.

The clarinetist of today is challenged by advancements in contemporary music and technology. In addition to the difficulties with contemporary clarinet techniques and with the onset of electronic music, multimedia compositions from the last forty years have presented an additional obstacle: the visual element. This written document provides a concise historical perspective of multimedia compositions utilizing clarinet and a tutorial focusing on the preparation of four multimedia works. A catalog of multimedia compositions for clarinet with visuals is included to provide information about literature and availability. This document contains an historical essay, summarizing developments in technology and changes in music composition from the late 1950s to the present, focusing on multimedia clarinet music. It also chronicles the development of multimedia music for the clarinet as both a solo and a chamber instrument. Four multimedia works are presented for study in this document. The pieces were selected according to several criteria such as date of composition, composer\u27s influence, availability, type of visual used, and success in performance or competition. Each piece is representative of one decade: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. These include Joel Chadabe\u27s Street Scene (1967), Merrill Ellis\u27s A Dream Fantasy (1974), William O. Smith\u27s Slow Motion (1987), and Reynold Weidenaar\u27s Swing Bridge (1997), respectively. A chapter is provided for each of the composers represented by compositions in the recital to provide a biography of the composer, and a description of the piece used for performance in the lecture recital. A tutorial section for each piece offers a preparation and rehearsal guide as well as suggestions for set-up and performance. Clarinetists may be unaware of multimedia literature due to the absence of a catalog. This document includes a catalog of multimedia compositions to aid clarinetists in their search for performance literature. The goal of this recital and written document is to create an awareness and interest in this art form as well as to provide useful strategies for its preparation and performance

16th Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC 2019 (28–31 May 2019, Malaga, Spain)

The 16th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2019) took place in Malaga, Spain, 28-31 May 2019 and it was organized by the Application of Information and Communication Technologies Research group (ATIC) of the University of Malaga (UMA). The SMC 2019 associated Summer School took place 25-28 May 2019. The First International Day of Women in Inclusive Engineering, Sound and Music Computing Research (WiSMC 2019) took place on 28 May 2019. The SMC 2019 TOPICS OF INTEREST included a wide selection of topics related to acoustics, psychoacoustics, music, technology for music, audio analysis, musicology, sonification, music games, machine learning, serious games, immersive audio, sound synthesis, etc

A microtonal wind controller building on Yamaha’s technology to facilitate the performance of music based on the “19-EDO” scale

We describe a project in which several collaborators adapted an existing instrument to make it capable of playing expressively in music based on the microtonal scale characterised by equal divsion of the octave into 19 tones (“19-EDO”). Our objective was not just to build this instrument, however, but also to produce a well-formed piece of music which would exploit it idiomatically, in a performance which would provide listeners with a pleasurable and satisfying musical experience. Hence, consideration of the extent and limits of the playing-techniques of the resulting instrument (a “Wind-Controller”) and of appropriate approaches to the composition of music for it were an integral part of the project from the start. Moreover, the intention was also that the piece, though grounded in the musical characteristics of the 19-EDO scale, would nevertheless have a recognisable relationship with what Dimitri Tymoczko (2010) has called the “Extended Common Practice” of the last millennium. So the article goes on to consider these matters, and to present a score of the resulting new piece, annotated with comments documenting some of the performance issues which it raises. Thus, bringing the project to fruition involved elements of composition, performance, engineering and computing, and the article describes how such an inter-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary collaboration was co-ordinated in a unified manner to achieve the envisaged outcome. Finally, we consider why the building of microtonal instruments is such a problematic issue in a contemporary (“high-tech”) society like ours

Morton Subotnick\u27s Ghost Scores: Interaction and Performance with Music Technology

This thesis investigates the ghost works of Morton Subotnick and their contribution to the world of sound art and electronic music technologies. Subotnick\u27s work in this area is an integral part of his outstanding achievements, on which there is little collected research. The discussion focuses on the development of Subotnick\u27s designs and techniques that he applied to the construction of the ghost works. Through an exploration of earlier background details, it is shown that tape recording, voltage-controlled technologies, and the analog sequencer provided Subotnick with the means to follow his vision and begin creating music as studio art. An examination of these technologies and the creative manner in which he applied them reveal how Subotnick established a vehicle for his life\u27s work in the early sixties, from which he created notable electronic works. An assessment of Subotnick\u27s work from the early seventies shows that the composer\u27s methods progressed using a variety of compositional elements, including electronics and traditional acoustic orchestral instruments, the culmination of which resulted in the creation of the ghost compositions in the mid-seventies. The evaluation of these works reveals Subotnick\u27s aptitude with real-time analog signal processing and his standing as a significant American composer

From Pre-Recorded Tape to Live Computer Processing: Piano Music from Davidovsky to the Present Day.

The 1920s and the 1930s first introduced the implementation of electronic effects to acoustic instruments and since this time the exploration of sound manipulation through electronic means has blossomed. Though technological advancement has always affected the way music is performed and composed, the 20th century has shaped the culture of music drastically, and with the advent of recording technology and electronics, the door to a whole new world of artificially generated and/or electronically manipulated sound has been created. The purpose of this study is to examine the history of technologies relevant to the development of electro-acoustic music and explore how their unnatural sounds and methods of sound production have influenced the development of music in the 20th century and beyond. To answer these questions, this study will incorporate analyses of works composed by Mario Davidovsky, Jacob Ter Veldhuis and Christopher Cerrone, showing some of the ways electro-acoustic composition with piano has evolved over the last fifty years

Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism

Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson’s fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts

Improvisatory music and painting interface

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-104).(cont.) theoretical section is accompanied by descriptions of historic and contemporary works that have influenced IMPI.Shaping collective free improvisations in order to obtain solid and succinct works with surprising and synchronized events is not an easy task. This thesis is a proposal towards that goal. It presents the theoretical, philosophical and technical framework of the Improvisatory Music and Painting Interface (IMPI) system: a new computer program for the creation of audiovisual improvisations performed in real time by ensembles of acoustic musicians. The coordination of these improvisations is obtained using a graphical language. This language is employed by one "conductor" in order to generate musical scores and abstract visual animations in real time. Doodling on a digital tablet following the syntax of the language allows both the creation of musical material with different levels of improvisatory participation from the ensemble and also the manipulation of the projected graphics in coordination with the music. The generated musical information is displayed in several formats on multiple computer screens that members of the ensemble play from. The digital graphics are also projected on a screen to be seen by an audience. This system is intended for a non-tonal, non-rhythmic, and texture-oriented musical style, which means that strong emphasis is put on the control of timbral qualities and continuum transitions. One of the main goals of the system is the translation of planned compositional elements (such as precise structure and synchronization between instruments) into the improvisatory domain. The graphics that IMPI generates are organic, fluid, vivid, dynamic, and unified with the music. The concept of controlled improvisation as well as the paradigm of the relationships between acoustic and visual material are both analyzed from an aesthetic point of view. TheHugo Solís García.S.M

Improvisation, Computers, and Interaction : Rethinking Human-Computer Interaction Through Music

Interaction is an integral part of all music. Interaction is part of listening, of playing, of composing and even of thinking about music. In this thesis the multiplicity of modes in which one may engage interactively in, through and with music is the starting point for rethinking Human-Computer Interaction in general and Interactive Music in particular. I propose that in Human-Computer interaction the methodology of control, interaction-as-control, in certain cases should be given up in favor for a more dynamic and reciprocal mode of interaction, interaction-as-difference: Interaction as an activity concerned with inducing differences that make a difference. Interaction-as-difference suggests a kind of parallelity rather than click-and-response. In essence, the movement from control to difference was a result of rediscovering the power of improvisation as a method for organizing and constructing musical content and is not to be understood as an opposition: It is rather a broadening of the more common paradigm of direct manipulation in Human-Computer Interaction. Improvisation is at the heart of all the sub-projects included in this thesis, also, in fact, in those that are not immediately related to music but more geared towards computation. Trusting the self-organizing aspect of musical improvisation, and allowing it to diffuse into other areas of my practice, constitutes the pivotal change that has radically influenced my artistic practice. Furthermore, is the work-in-movement (re-)introduced as a work kind that encompasses radically open works. The work-in-movement, presented and exemplified by a piece for guitar and computer, requires different modes of representation as the traditional musical score is too restrictive and is not able to communicate that which is the most central aspect: the collaboration, negotiation and interaction. The Integra framework and the relational database model with its corresponding XML representation is proposed as a means to produce annotated scores that carry past performances and version with it. The common nominator, the prerequisite, for interaction-as-difference and a improvisatory and self-organizing attitude towards musical practice it the notion of giving up of the Self. Only if the Self is able and willing to accept the loss the priority of interpretation (as for the composer) or the faithfulness to ideology or idiomatics (performer). Only is one is willing to forget is interaction-as-difference made possible. Among the artistic works that have been produced as part of this inquiry are some experimental tools in the form of computer software to support the proposed concepts of interactivity. These, along with the more traditional musical work make up both the object and the method in this PhD project. These sub-projects contained within the frame of the thesis, some (most) of which are still works-in-progress, are used to make inquiries into the larger question of the significance of interaction in the context of artistic practice involving computers

Electronics, music and computers

technical reportElectronic and computer technology has had and will continue to have a marked effect in the field of music. Through the years scientists, engineers, and musicians have applied available technology to new musical instruments, innovative musical sound production, sound analysis, and musicology. At the University of Utah we have designed and are implementing a communication network involving and electronic organ and a small computer to provide a tool to be used in music performance, the learning of music theory, the investigation of music notation, the composition of music, the perception of music, and the printing of music