{"id":277145,"date":"2015-09-21T10:39:36","date_gmt":"2015-09-21T14:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newmusicbox.org\/?p=33660"},"modified":"2022-04-13T16:20:00","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T20:20:00","slug":"indeterminacy-2-0-under-the-hood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newmusicusa.org\/nmbx\/indeterminacy-2-0-under-the-hood\/","title":{"rendered":"Indeterminacy 2.0: Under the Hood"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"variant:SONiC<\/a>

Image from variant:SONiC<\/em> by Joshue Ott and Kenneth Kirschner<\/p><\/div>\n

This week, I want to talk about some of the actual work I\u2019ve done with indeterminate digital music, with a focus on both the technologies involved and the compositional methods that have proven useful to me in approaching this sort of work. Let me open with a disclaimer that this is going to be a hands-on discussion that really dives into how these pieces are built. It\u2019s intended primarily for composers who may be interested in writing this kind of music, or for listeners who really want to dig into the mechanics underlying the pieces. If that\u2019s not you, feel free to just skim it or fast-forward ahead to next week, when we\u2019ll get back into a more philosophical mode.<\/p>\n

For fellow composers, here\u2019s a first and very important caveat: as of right now, this is not music for which you can buy off-the-shelf software, boot it up, and start writing\u2014real, actual programming will be required. And if you, like me, are someone who has a panic attack at the sight of the simplest Max patch, much less actual code, then collaboration may be the way to go, as it has been for me. You\u2019ll ideally be looking to find and work with a \u201ccreative coder\u201d\u2014someone who\u2019s a programmer, but has interest and experience in experimental art and won\u2019t run away screaming (or perhaps laughing) at your crazy ideas.<\/p>\n

INITIAL CONCEPTS<\/strong><\/p>\n

Let me rewind a little and talk about how I first got interested in trying to write this sort of music. I had used chance procedures as an essential part of my compositional process for many years, but I\u2019d never developed an interest in working with true indeterminacy. That changed in the early 2000s, when my friend Taylor Deupree and I started talking about an idea for a series we wanted to call \u201cMusic for iPods.\u201d An unexpected side effect of the release of the original iPod had been that people really got into the shuffle feature, and suddenly you had all these inadvertent little Cageans running around shuffling their whole music collections right from their jean pockets. What we wanted to do was to write specifically for the shuffle feature on the iPod, to make a piece that was comprised of little fragments designed to be played in any order, and that would be different every time you listened. Like most of our bright ideas, we never got around to it\u2014but it did get me thinking on the subject.<\/p>\n

And as I thought about it, it seemed to me that having just one sound at a time wasn\u2019t really that interesting compositionally; there were only so many ways you could approach structuring the piece, so many ways you could put the thing together. But what if you could have two iPods on shuffle at once? Three? More? That would raise some compositional questions that struck me as really worth digging into. And under the hood, what was this newfangled iPod thing but a digital audio player\u2014a piece of software playing software. It increasingly seemed like the indeterminate music idea was something that should be built in software\u2014but I had no clue how to do it.<\/p>\n

FIRST INDETERMINATE SERIES (2004\u20132005)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2004, while performing at a festival in Spain, I met a Flash programmer, Craig Swann, who had just the skills needed to try out my crazy idea. The first piece we tried\u2014July 29, 2004<\/em> (all my pieces are titled by the date on which they\u2019re begun)\u2014was a simple proof of concept, a realization of the \u201cMusic for iPods\u201d idea; it\u2019s basically an iPod on shuffle play built in Flash. The music itself is a simple little piano composition which I\u2019ve never found particularly compelling\u2014but it was enough to test out the idea.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how it works: the piece consists of 35 short sound files, each about 10 seconds long, and each containing one piano chord. The Flash program randomly picks one mp3 at a time and plays it\u2014forever. You can let this thing go as long as you like, and it\u2019ll just keep going\u2014the piece is indefinite, not just indeterminate. Here\u2019s an example of what it sounds like<\/a>, and for this and all the other pieces in my first indeterminate series, you can download the functioning generative Flash app<\/a> freely from my website and give it a try. I say \u201cfunctioning,\u201d but these things are getting a bit long in the tooth; you may get a big security alert that pops up when you press the play button, but click \u201cOK\u201d on it and it still works fine. Also potentially interesting for fellow composers is that, by opening up the subfolders on each piece, you can see and play all of the underlying sound files individually and hopefully start to get a better sense of how these things are put together.<\/p>\n

It was with the next piece, August 26, 2004<\/em>, that this first series of indeterminate pieces for me really started to get interesting (here\u2019s a fixed excerpt<\/a>, and here\u2019s the generative version<\/a>). It\u2019s one thing to play just one sound, then another, then another, ad infinitum. But what if you\u2019ve got a bunch of sounds\u2014two or three or four different layers at once\u2014all happening in random simultaneous juxtapositions and colliding with one another? It\u2019s a much more challenging, much more interesting compositional question. How do you structure the piece? How do you make it make sense? All these sounds have to \u201cget along,\u201d to fit together in some musically meaningful way\u2014and yet you don\u2019t want it to be homogenous, static, boring. How do you balance the desire for harmonic complexity and development with the need to avoid what are called, in the technical parlance of DJs, \u201ctrainwrecks\u201d? Because sooner or later, anything that can<\/em> happen in these pieces will<\/em> happen, and you have to build the entire composition with that knowledge in mind.<\/p>\n

August 26, 2004<\/em> was one possible solution to this problem. There are three simultaneous layers playing\u2014three virtual \u201ciPods\u201d stacked shuffling on top of each other. One track plays a series of piano recordings, which here carry most of the harmonic content; there are 14 piano fragments, most around a minute long, each moving within a stable pitch space, and each able to transition more or less smoothly into the next. On top of that are two layers of electronics, drawn from a shared set of 21 sounds, and these I kept very sparse: each is harmonically open and ambiguous enough that it should, in theory, be able to hover over whatever piano fragment is playing as well as bump into the other electronic layer without causing too much trouble.<\/p>\n

As the series continued, however, I found myself increasingly taking a somewhat different approach: rather than divide up the sounds into different functional groups, with one group dominating the harmonic space, I instead designed all of the underlying fragments to be \u201ccompatible\u201d with one another\u2014every sound would potentially work with every other, so that any random juxtaposition of sounds that got loaded could safely coexist. To check out some of these subsequent pieces, you can scan through 2005 on my website<\/a> for any compositions marked \u201cindet.\u201d And again, for all of them you can freely download the generative version and open up the folders to explore their component parts.<\/p>\n

INTERMISSION (2006\u20132014)<\/strong><\/p>\n

By late 2005, I was beginning to drift away from this sort of work, for reasons both technological and artistic (some of which I\u2019ll talk about next week), and by 2006 I found myself again writing nothing but fully \u201cdeterminate\u201d work. Lacking the programming skills to push the work forward myself, indeterminacy became less of a focus\u2014though I still felt that there was great untapped potential there, and hoped to return to it one day.<\/p>\n

Another thing holding the pieces back was, quite simply, the technology of the time. They could only be played on a desktop computer, which just wasn\u2019t really a comfortable or desirable listening environment then (or, for that matter, now). These pieces really cried out for a mobile realization, for something you could throw in your pocket, pop some headphones on, and hit the streets with. So I kept thinking about the pieces, and kept kicking around ideas in my head and with friends. Then suddenly, over the course of just a few years, we all looked up and found that everyone around us was carrying in their pockets extremely powerful, highly capable computers\u2014computers that had more firepower than every piece of gear I\u2019d used in the first decade or two of my musical life put together. Except they were now called \u201cphones.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE VARIANTS (2014\u2013)<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2014, after years of talking over pad kee mao at our local Thai place, I started working with my friend Joshue Ott to finally move the indeterminate series forward. A visualist and software designer, Josh is best known in new music circles for superDraw, a \u201cvisual instrument\u201d on which he improvises live generative imagery for new music performances and on which he has performed at venues ranging from Mutek to Carnegie Hall. Josh is also an iOS developer, and his app Thicket<\/a>, created with composer Morgan Packard, is one of the best examples out there of what can be achieved when you bring together visuals, music, and an interactive touch screen.<\/p>\n