The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

A Formal and Functional Analysis of Gaze, Gestures, and Other Body Movements in a Contemporary Dance Improvisation Performance

UID/FIL/00183/2019 PTDC/FER‐FIL/28278/2017This study presents a microanalysis of what information performers “give” and “give off” to each other via their bodies during a contemporary dance improvisation. We compare what expert performers and non-performers (sufficiently trained to successfully perform) do with their bodies during a silent, multiparty improvisation exercise, in order to identify any differences and to provide insight into nonverbal communication in a less conventional setting. The coordinated collaboration of the participants (two groups of six) was examined in a frame-by-frame analysis focusing on all body movements, including gaze shifts as well as the formal and functional movement units produced in the head–face, upper-, and lower-body regions. The Methods section describes in detail the annotation process and inter-rater agreement. The results of this study indicate that expert performers during the improvisation are in “performance mode” and have embodied other social cognitive strategies and skills (e.g., endogenous orienting, gaze avoidance, greater motor control) that the non-performers do not have available. Expert performers avoid using intentional communication, relying on information to be inferentially communicated in order to coordinate collaboratively, with silence and stillness being construed as meaningful in that social practice and context. The information that expert performers produce is quantitatively less (i.e., producing fewer body movements) and qualitatively more inferential than intentional compared to a control group of non-performers, which affects the quality of the performance.publishersversionpublishe

Redesigning a Performance Practice: Synergising Woodwind Improvisation with Bespoke Software Technology.

This research examines how the designing of a new performance practice based on the incorporation of custom digital signal processing software impacts on solo improvised woodwind performance. Through the development of bespoke software, I investigate how these new technologies can be integrated into solo woodwind performance practice. This research presents a new improvised music practice as well as a suite of new software tools and performance techniques. Through a workshop and performance-­‐based research process, a suite of software processors are developed which respond, and are complementary, to a personalised style of improvised performance. This electronic augmentation of the woodwind instrument (clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone and xaphoon) is tested over the course of thirty solo improvised performances. These performances are documented as audio files and analysed using methods derived from electroacoustic music practice. This research represents an important development in the emerging field of improvised music performance engaging with new digital technologies. The research is practice-­‐led from the viewpoint of an experienced performer and tested in real-­‐world situations, resulting in a useful research outputs embedded in the peer community. Examining the history of live electronic performance practice, this research situates itself within the field of expert performers who use digital processing in free improvisation contexts. A critical understanding of the processes involved allows this researcher to design a new performance practice more effectively. While research necessarily draws on my own performance practice, the knowledge generated will have broad relevance in the field and much of this work is applicable to non-­‐woodwind instrumentalists and singers. The research outputs include freely distributable software created during this project

Creative Process in Free Improvisation

This research investigates the creative and communicational processes used by improvisers in free improvised performance and the ideologies behind those processes. Two studies were conducted: In Study 1 quantitative data was extracted from a recorded performance with Music Information Retrieval (M.I.R) software with special focus on moments consensually considered by the musicians as “best”. Study 2 analysed qualitative data extracted from interviews with improvisers and retrospective verbal protocol regarding the whole performance with special focus on “best moments”. The results of Study 1 reveal the use of alterations of musical features such as energy, note density and spectral changes in order to create points of qualitative change in improvised music. Creative strategies revealed by Study 2 include reiteration, the use of error as a motor for generation of music materials, real-time use of processes of musical composition and automatic playing. Improved conditions of separation of recorded instruments are advised in future research on this subject

Distributed Networks of Listening and Sounding: 20 Years of Telematic Musicking

This paper traces a twenty-year arc of my performance and compositional practice in the medium of telematic music, focusing on a distinct approach to fostering interdependence and emergence through the integration of listening strategies, electroacoustic improvisation, pre-composed structures, blended real/virtual acoustics, networked mutual-influence, shared signal transformations, gesture-concepts and machine agencies. Communities of collaboration and exchange over this time period are discussed, which span both pre- and post-pandemic approaches to the medium that range from metaphors of immersion and dispersion to diffraction

Improvisation and Music Education: From the Sonic to Social Attunement

In order to create a relationship to music, artists first need to create a relationship with their inner sound, and the way in which they approach the manifestation of sound from their instrument (whether it'd be through the use of hands, voice, or a plain manifestation of thoughts). Since this process is dialectic in its nature, the ability to develop this type of responsiveness, sometimes referred to as "attunement", is as important in the musical sphere as it is in social exchanges. Therefore, musical practice can play an important role in developing such aptitude among people of all ages. This paper focuses on the factors that stimulate or inhibit expression, through the lens of western classical and Javanese gamelan musical practice. It will be argued that the change of awareness in individual experience, gained through music improvisation can find its reflection on the interactive synchrony in a larger social and cultural frame

Instruments and Sounds as Objects of Improvisation in Collective Computer Music Practice

International audienceThis paper presents the authors' first attempt at a new (and unexpected) exercise: that of observing, contextualising and problema-tising their own collective Computer Music experiences. After two years practising emergent collective improvisation in private and public settings , which has led the authors to fundamentally reconsider both individual and collective musical creation, came the desire to methodologi-cally deconstruct this process-one that they never anticipated and, until now, had never formalised. By starting from the very notions or performance and improvisation in the context of Computer Music, and crossing prolific literature on these topics with humble observations from their own experience, the authors then elaborate on what appears to them as the most enticing perspective of this creative context: the systematic improvisation of both their tools and sounds in an unique flow

Rebecoming analogue : groove, breakbeats and sampling

In this thesis I address two related questions: how does groove work in breakbeats, and how might it enable musical participation across time and space?In order to do this, I analyse breakbeats as they are heard in their original funk context and then in various subsequent genres for which they provide a percussive backbone via the process of recontextualization made possible by digital sampling. From this seemingly narrow focus, more broadly useful ideas about groove emerge and I discuss these in relation to current groovological thought. Of particular significance within my findings is the often‐overlooked role which timbre plays in groove. I propose that the groove in breakbeats operates as a result of timbral, as much as temporal, factors, and that breakbeats can therefore be seen to embody the complementary concepts of Wilson’s heterogeneous sound ideal and Small’s musicking. By exploring groove, breakbeats and sampling from a range of perspectives I show that the potent conceptual combination of musicking and the heterogeneous sound ideal accounts for the perennial appeal of breakbeats as a fundamental building block in contemporary popular music. In order to explore these ideas, following initial chapters that establish a theoretical framework, each successive chapter then deals with a particular manifestation of the breaks. Overall, this structure builds a kaleidoscopic conceptual picture that is appropriate to the multi--‐faceted nature of groove and the enduring versatility of breakbeats.[Note: audio samples available with hard copy of thesis only.