Performance recordivity : studio music in a live context

A broad range of positions is articulated in the academic literature around the relationship between recordings and live performance. Auslander (2008) argues that “live performance ceased long ago to be the primary experience of popular music, with the result that most live performances of popular music now seek to replicate the music on the recording”. Elliott (1995) suggests that “hit songs are often conceived and produced as unambiguous and meticulously recorded performances that their originators often duplicate exactly in live performances”. Wurtzler (1992) argues that “as socially and historically produced, the categories of the live and the recorded are defined in a mutually exclusive relationship, in that the notion of the live is premised on the absence of recording and the defining fact of the recorded is the absence of the live”. Yet many artists perform in ways that fundamentally challenge such positions. Whilst it is common practice for musicians across many musical genres to compose and construct their musical works in the studio such that the recording is, in Auslander’s words, the ‘original performance’, the live version is not simply an attempt to replicate the recorded version. Indeed in some cases, such replication is impossible. There are well known historical examples. Queen, for example, never performed the a cappella sections of Bohemian Rhapsody because it they were too complex to perform live. A 1966 recording of the Beach Boys studio creation Good Vibrations shows them struggling through the song prior to its release. This paper argues that as technology develops, the lines between the recording studio and live performance change and become more blurred. New models for performance emerge. In a 2010 live performance given by Grammy Award winning artist Imogen Heap in New York, the artist undertakes a live, improvised construction of a piece as a performative act. She invites the audience to choose the key for the track and proceeds to layer up the various parts in front of the audience as a live performance act. Her recording process is thus revealed on stage in real time and she performs a process that what would have once been confined to the recording studio. So how do artists bring studio production processes into the live context? What aspects of studio production are now performable and what consistent models can be identified amongst the various approaches now seen? This paper will present an overview of approaches to performative realisations of studio produced tracks and will illuminate some emerging relationships between recorded music and performance across a range of contexts

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

Fleeting Strands

stereo acousmatic sound, fixed medi

Electrifying Opera, Amplifying Agency: Designing a performer-controlled interactive audio system for opera singers

This artistic research project examines the artistic, technical, and pedagogical challenges of developing a performer-controlled interactive technology for real-time vocal processing of the operatic voice. As a classically trained singer-composer, I have explored ways to merge the compositional aspects of transforming electronic sound with the performative aspects of embodied singing. I set out to design, develop, and test a prototype for an interactive vocal processing system using sampling and audio processing methods. The aim was to foreground and accommodate an unamplified operatic voice interacting with the room's acoustics and the extended disembodied voices of the same performer. The iterative prototyping explored the performer's relationship to the acoustic space, the relationship between the embodied acoustic voice and disembodied processed voice(s), and the relationship to memory and time. One of the core challenges was to design a system that would accommodate mobility and allow interaction based on auditory and haptic cues rather than visual. In other words, a system allowing the singer to control their sonic output without standing behind a laptop. I wished to highlight and amplify the performer's agency with a system that would enable nuanced and variable vocal processing, be robust, teachable, and suitable for use in various settings: solo performances, various types and sizes of ensembles, and opera. This entailed mediating different needs, training, and working methods of both electronic music and opera practitioners. One key finding was that even simple audio processing could achieve complex musical results. The audio processes used were primarily combinations of feedback and delay lines. However, performers could get complex musical results quickly through continuous gestural control and the ability to route signals to four channels. This complexity sometimes led to surprising results, eliciting improvisatory responses also from singers without musical improvisation experience. The project has resulted in numerous vocal solo, chamber, and operatic performances in Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States. The research contributes to developing emerging technologies for live electronic vocal processing in opera, developing the improvisational performance skills needed to engage with those technologies, and exploring alternatives for sound diffusion conducive to working with unamplified operatic voices. Links: Exposition and documentation of PhD research in Research Catalogue: Electrifying Opera, Amplifying Agency. Artistic results. Reflection and Public Presentations (PhD) (2023): https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=2222429 Home/Reflections: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2222429/2222460 Mapping & Prototyping: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2222429/2247120 Space & Speakers: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2222429/2222430 Presentations: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2222429/2247155 Artistic Results: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2222429/222248

Compositions Utilizing Fractal Flame Algorithms

“Music, by its very abstract nature, is the first of the arts to have attempted reconciliation of artistic creation with scientific thought” – Xenakis, 1992 This portfolio explores how the iterative and recursive processes employed within fractal flame algorithms can be used to create new and aesthetically pleasing micro and macro sounds from which coherent compositions can be created. A variety of existing electronic compositional procedures, including wave-set substitution and granular synthesis, as well as a number of classical compositional practices, such as hocketing, are deployed to generate a complex and diverse set of compositions. The portfolio shows how marrying these sound manipulating techniques and compositional processes with the sonic events produced by the unexplored field of fractal flame algorithms has allowed me to generate – in the words of Iannis Xenakis – ‘sounds that have never existed before’. The portfolio shows the creative potential fractal flame programs have for electronic music generation and how they offer a terra nova (new earth) upon which computergenerated music can lay down solid foundations and expand in new directions to harvest exciting results

Listening to yourself listen: spatial experience in music for acoustic instruments and electronic sound

This is a theoretical and practical research project which explores the listener’s experience of space in contemporary music for acoustic instruments both with and without electronic sound. Existing critical frameworks relating to spatial experience in music are reviewed and potential deficiencies identified. Suggestions are made as to novel approaches which could be used to characterise and abstract spatial experience, moving away from a focus on the geometric and instead based on a conceptualisation of space as fundamentally embodied, dynamic, and co-created. Three new descriptive terms are proposed to be used as lexical tools in both generative and analytical contexts. The thesis is completed by a discussion of the author’s portfolio of original compositions, music written from the author’s personal engagement with spatial experience as a key compositional concern, which both informed, and was informed by, the theoretical elements in an iterative process of experimentation,research and reflection

Infrasonority: exploration of sound energy below 20Hz in music

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music (MMus in Composition), 2017This thesis investigates an underdeveloped and little explored area of music and the arts: the use of infrasound (frequencies below 20Hz) as musical material in creative composition. Discussions, research and experiments conducted toward the prospect of exposing infrasonic characteristics were fundamental to the composition and recital that informed the thesis. The infrasonic material from which the composition was created contained synthesized wave forms, recordings of elephant vocalisation and thunderstorms. The infrasonic reproduction for the concert required explicit attention and enquiry regarding physical properties of the sonic phenomenon, equipment infrastructure and limitations in human perception.XL201