Technological and Computer-based Projects

The Genome Series: works for solo instrument and live electronics




Sevenless/Bride of Sevenless, Dog of Glass, Ladybird Early/Ladybird Late, and Bang Senseless/Bang Sensitive— all genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and all titles of pieces in the genome series.

This series, started in 2001 at the Aspen Music Festival, began simply as a series of pieces with live electronic processing and some playback elements, requiring a performer (usually me) on some sort of electronic gear. The first problem I ran into was one of rehearsal: because I was basically performing an accompanying role, making electronic chamber music, the other musician needed me around to practice. That is, me, my gear, microphones, PA/amplifier, cables, and setup time.

I loved rehearsing these pieces, but the amount of time it took to put them together was out of proportion to their relative lack of technical difficulty for the instrumentalist.

The second problem was that musicians enjoyed these pieces, and wanted to play them more. But, that would require me to travel to each performance and schedule rehearsal time in the venue. I was lucky to travel several times to perform Sevenless/Bride of Sevenless (in its first version) but by then I was starting to think about interchangeable parts for future pieces. After Sevenless I gave up external hardware and wrote for computer processing only.

Dog of Glass and Ladybird Early/Ladybird Late were transitional pieces: the electronic processing is based in Logic Pro, allowing a performer to download a session file, open it in that program, and rehearse alone. This requires the performer to own Apple's Logic Pro software, which is one drawback. But the biggest drawback was that Logic is inherently a timeline-based program.

Music, of course, is timeline-based, too, but unless the performer is to robotically maintain the same tempo in every performance situation, the electronics represent a superfluous and problematic timeline that will inevitably clash with the performer's expressivity. The performer starts the piece and plays, and must stay in sync with the playhead in order for the changing effects to fall at the right place in the score.

I got around this problem in a related piece of sound-design work I did for [Grammy-award-winning new music sextet] eighth blackbird. For their staged puppet-theater performance of Pierrot Lunaire and Jacob Druckman's Reflections on the Nature of Water with the Blair Thomas Puppet Theater at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, I was asked to create live, evolving multi-channel sound processing for the movements of the Druckman piece. This was done in a similar manner to Dog of Glass and Ladybird, and I used Logic Pro as a surround mixer and a series of busses to manage several microphones placed around the marimba. Prewritten automation on the bus tracks controlled myriad parameters of delay, reverb, gate, balance/width and level— and I simply built in a 'safety cushion' at the end of each movement, where the automation would continue long enough to account for an extra-slow performance, or my accidentally starting the playhead a little bit too early, or percussionist Matthew Duvall waiting a little longer than usual after his signal before starting. (Or even, though this would have shocked me, a memory slip on the part of the performer.) This required someone to 'babysit' the electronics at the performance, but didn't ask any special skills beyond concentration, score-following and remembering a simple keyboard shortcut.

Still, though, I knew: This could be better. And it was this thought that first led me to buy and learn Max/MSP, which has two giant advantages over Logic Pro[1] for this particular application: Firstly, it is not timeline-based, or rather, while it supports timelines, as the composer/designer/programmer you have the option to use zero, one, or multiple timelines, and to change their behavior in different parts of the piece. Secondly, it allows the creator of a piece to export it in a form that can be opened by the free Runtime version of Max/MSP, which is available as a direct-link download from Cycling74's website. Thus a download of the score can include a link to download the software needed to play the piece, and all the performer needs to bring to the table is a laptop, a microphone, and their instrument.

Conceptually, the rewrite of Sevenless/Bride of Sevenless was a great jumping-off point, an opportunity to rethink what it meant for me to write pieces for live electronics. Inspired by the series' biological roots, as well as more technically by some of what I'd learned about self-governing feedback systems in the meantime, I set out to make these pieces as "aware" as possible about their state, and able to manage effect parameters and levels as a human would, but without any input besides what the performer gives naturally, through playing the piece. Completely achieving this goal would mean that a performer would play chamber music with the computer as though playing with another human— leading, following, and most of all trusting, as we do when we know we're playing with a true fellow musician, that what we hear back will make sense in the context of the music we're making together.

With that in mind, I wrote tempo-sensing algorithms, feedback-detectors, delay-feedback-cycling loops, and many interrelated pseudo-randomizer functions (and found them, and borrowed ideas for them, as is the spirit of coding). The performer sets a gain slider in the dress rehearsal, to account for that particular hall, amplification and microphone setup, and taps a foot pedal to start the piece. Each time a major change occurs in the music, there is an instruction to tap the pedal again, and the processing shifts. (Because this piece is for solo snare, making those changes automatic would be very difficult. Even with a pitched instrument, I would be hesitant to simply allow a detected state to change sections— either a certain amount of time should be spent in the previous section, or the detector should be 'armed' with a tap on the foot pedal anywhere in the 8 bars or so prior to the change.) Whether auto-detection would ultimately be a benefit in terms of navigating a piece's large-scale form is an empirical question, which will only be answered by writing more pieces with intelligent sound environments, and talking with the musicians that play them.)







1. Logic is a powerful and deep program, despite a few flaws, and I use and recommend it for writing and scoring to picture. It has a powerful Environment feature, as well, offering some non-timeline-based functionality; but for those inclined to learn its distinct workflow, the power of Max/MSP is best suited for the projects I describe here. [jump back up]