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am turing: automatic elegy

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

turing installation and concertOur June 22nd performance and installation was a success, and audience reactions were very gratifying. I will edit video excerpts and post at some point, but in the meantime, besides posting a few photos of the event, I want to credit members of the cast and those who provided artistic input. Thank you all. This piece could never have happened without you!

geoff shilling weaving

Fiber artist Geoff Shilling, who was weaving the state machine in the room at the event, also wove the large portrait of Turing and built the chalkboards that made up the set. This job was immense, and he did it in less than 3 months, without complaint.

puzzles by beth glosten
Beth Glosten, who played the bouncer at the door, chalked many of the boards, wrote the 13 scavenger hunt clues, and stage managed the production. (If that weren’t enough, she also provided valuable input and moral support at home as the piece came into focus.)

Perri Lynch, who helped run the house at the event, provided 8 beautiful chalkboards based on details of the zeta calculator blueprint and also gave me valuable basic crash course in chalkboard marking techniques.

David Krueger, Erika Chang, Linda Strandberg, Markdavin Obenza, and Josh Haberman sang beautifully, and Dean Moore contributed percussion that was both sensitive to the context and appropriately unusual. All six of them also performed whatever strange stage actions I requested without complaint. (David Krueger and Erika Chang also helped immensely by contributing muscle to setup and teardown.)

Jim Bennett as the Prof
Jim Bennett played the Prof perfectly, gave much input on the piece along the way, and then, to top it off, humped the set in and out of the building along with Geoff, David, and myself.

the tape of turing's life

Finally, thanks to John Forsen for his videography talents, Audrey Guidi for her photographic ones, and to Steve Peters and the Wayward Music Series for providing such a perfect venue for this piece.

The set, when broken down, fits on two shipping pallets. Where should we perform this piece next? Bletchley Park, do you copy?

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turing among the machines

Monday, June 11, 2012

One of the defining characteristics of Alan Turing was his pairing of supremely abstract thinking with a very real-world interest in the nuts and bolts of machines. He enjoyed hands-on physics, chemistry, and biology experiments his entire life, and had already begun his life-long adventures with computing machines with analog devices when he recognized and formalized the design advantages of digital technology.

Turing portrait in progressIt is entirely natural to think of Turing’s deepest emotional relationship as being the one which he had with The Machine. He formalized what we mean by a “binary computing machine”, as well as the universal nature of such a machine. He knew that machines had the capacity to possess their own intelligence (and their own set of fallibilities) far before that was fashionable, and spoke of them in that light from day one. (He probably went further, thinking of all life as mechanical, but this is only implied in his writings.) He would often solve new problems by sketching or prototyping: his output started with devices such as his childhood Foucault pendulum, continued with advanced devices of his own design including a gear-driven analog calculator, a binary electronic adder, and an electronic voice scrambler, and culminated with the first flush of true general-purpose computers in the 1940s and early 1950s, for which he was a central influence.

In this installation, I have chosen one of the oldest and most universal technologies, the loom, to stand in as the ritual presence of The Machine. When I first encountered the machines described by Turing in On Computable Numbers, my mind immediately went to the motion of a shuttle, whose oscillatory movements resemble the movement of the turing machine head across its tape. The tape itself also seems symbolically linked: the fabric being created from warp and weft seems similar to the output being created from “state” and “mark”. Because of this, I have chosen to weave the sounds and outputs of looms into the performance. They come and go, and are produced by both live weaving in the room, as well as by the triggering of electronic field recordings.

Geoff Shilling has also created a woven portrait of Turing which will sit with us in the room, invoking his presence. If you examine the portrait closely, you will see that it is composed of letters (symbols) from the Fraktur family of fonts, which is the same font that Turing used to represent the workings of his universal machines on paper. It is a beautiful piece, and a beautiful tribute.

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sonification of Turing’s work

Monday, May 21, 2012

Computer codeAlan Turing is among the handful of thinkers who formulated the concept of algorithmic computation. Every task that we perform with a computer begins with an algorithm, and yet this concept, which we now take for granted, was not yet formalized in the 1930s. This simple, yet immensely impactful, contribution is why I’ve chosen to create an algorithmic soundscape as the backdrop for our upcoming installation/performance. I like to think of Turing, along with Alonzo Church, as the modern muses who inspire all algorithmic arts and sciences. In honor of the centenary of Turing’s birth, I am creating an elegy for him.

There are several parts to this Turing elegy: a physical installation (which also functions as the setting for performances), a continuous ambient soundscape which surrounds the visitor upon entering the room, and finally, a brief ritualized performance in which Turing-inspired works will be presented using sound, spoken word, and movement. I’ve been working on both the physical set and the sonic ambience lately, and thought that I’d post a little bit about the methods that I’m using to create the soundscape.

There are three basic layers to this soundscape: live sounds produced by human performers, synthesized electronic sounds, and the sounds of machines (both live and via field recordings). All of the sounds relate to Turing’s life and his work, and many of them are based on either pure mathematics or realized Turing machines. All are created and/or performed using algorithms. In order to preserve the freshness of the live experience, I am not going to go into too much blog detail before the actual performance, but I will say that the live sounds will include humans operating simple machines, thinking, engaging in academic dialog, and chanting introspectively. Field recordings include turing machines, looms, and machines of Turing’s own creation.

The electronic portion of the soundscape is composed of algorithmically produced sonifications of Turing’s scientific output. Turing’s work included not only his very significant work on computability, but also forays into disparate subjects including group theory, logic, number theory, and mathematical modeling. I am currently in the process of transforming several specific results — his work on the Riemann hypothesis, his biological model for morphogenesis, and some of the examples from the Entscheidungsproblem paper — into electronic sounds using the Supercollider programming language for digital synthesis.

(Continued)

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theatrical impact

Saturday, April 21, 2012

This weekend in Seattle, five rapping singers, along with a violin, a cello, and a percussionist, live inside of the head of a Chinese immigrant who is trapped in a stuck elevator for 81 hours. Aaron Jafferis and Byron Au Young are collaborating with director Chay Yew on an edgy new show that will premier next spring at ACT in San Francisco. They call it hiphop opera, which is pretty accurate — it is sung drama that includes ensemble rapping as well as a large dose of musical theatre, sung in a combination of English, Mandarin, and Spanish — but the marketing moniker doesn’t capture the dramatic potential in the script. The show has the kind of genre-crossing creativity, humor, and just general cleverness that presenters need these days in order to engage audiences with pathologically short attention spans. Excerpts from the work-in-progress show were performed on Friday at the Wing Luke Museum.

Meanwhile, on the muddy shores of Lake Washington, Donald Byrd and Spectrum Dance Theatre are presenting their creepy (and I mean that in the best way possible!) version of Petrushka, a puppet with very adult issues that comes to life at the hand of his evil puppet-maker, is abused and murdered, finally returns as a redemptive power. Spectacular dancing is embedded in a tawdry carnival and freak show, and the audience wanders from scene to scene, witnessing spooky and disturbing vignettes from the short and unhappy life of Petrushka, both as live dance and as live dance captured through surveillance cameras. Dancers speak, moan, and portray carnival characters, both puppet and human. The audience is a passive witness to the puppet-master’s ultimate demise via his sadistic and single-minded sexual obsessions. Another very successful genre-busting experimental show. (And, in a nice bit of serendipity, Byron Au Young created some of the electronic soundtrack featured in this show.)

A puppet in armorMeanwhile still, at the Northwest Puppet Theater, the puppeteers are mounting their annual puppet opera. This year, the puppets are collaborating with their human vocal partners and and a band led by Margriet Tindemans to perform Il Girello, an obscure Baroque comic opera that is much improved by the interjection of huge quantities of bathos and improv comedy. Puppet opera is yet another genre-breaking form of theater, in which dramatic flow and character development come from puppet/singer combinations, and in which great musical performances, spoken word, and silly sound effects combine side by side to achieve a surprisingly integrated theater experience.

All three of these performances stretch actors and dancers to portray multiple dramatic roles simultaneously. By using abstract theatrical presentation realized as rap, dance, and puppetry, they amplify and focus the human traits that are featured in the stories they tell. They are interesting, experimental, and, I hope, a good indicator as to where theater is headed. Both Petrushka and Il Girello are still playing in Seattle. Check them out – I particularly recommend seeing them back-to-back! And go to see Stuck Elevator when it premiers in San Francisco at ACT next year. It will be worth the trip.

 

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equal parts installation, performance, and ritual

Thursday, April 19, 2012

A paper by Turing[Post updated for those seeking event details.]

The Turing installation will go live at 7PM on Friday, 22 June, 2012 and the short concert will begin around 8PM. There is a dedicated page on this blog where you can get many more details on the event. I am using that page to track collaboration progress and to post some of the interesting material that I am working with.

As it says there: “AM Turing: Automatic Elegy is a ritualized performance set within a biographically-focused art installation. The installation will contain artifacts from Turing’s life, arranged as a series of small altars, and the performance itself will include spoken word, music, visual images, and movement, all based upon three central mathematical and philosophical structures from Turing’s own mind: the Turing machine, the Turing test, and Turing patterns. Although the music, visual images, and choreography that occur as part of the ritual can be fully enjoyed without previous knowledge of Turing’s intellectual output, the pieces will nonetheless directly reflect his work on the Riemann hypothesis, on algorithms, on cryptanalysis, on group theory, on digital quantization, on x-ray crystallography, on logic, and on mathematical biology.”

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a seattle concert and installation in honor of Alan Turing

Saturday, March 10, 2012

On June 22, I will be curating and performing in an evening concert/installation in honor of the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth. His birthday is actually the next day, but if you adjust for time zones, we can sort of get away with it…

Photo of Alan Turing

The event will be held as part of the Wayward Music Series at Seattle’s wonderful venue for experimental music, the Chapel Performance Space. Details will be forthcoming, but I plan on presenting a number of musical pieces, poetry that paraphrases a proof by Turing in the style of Dr. Seuss, the work of several visual artists, small vignettes from Turing’s life, and possibly some dance and/or theater. When the final program has been finalized, I will post it here. [If you are an artist and think that you have something that belongs on this program or in the installation, by all means, contact me!]

2012 has been designated as the Alan Turing Year, and it is certainly appropriate to remember Turing, both for his tremendous mind and the tragic demise that was visited upon him. His work has had significant impact in diverse fields, including cryptology, pure mathematics, computing, biology, and philosophy. In this concert we will try to touch on all of these, presenting pieces inspired by both his life and his suicide. It should come as no surprise that his groundbreaking ideas are as interesting and relevant now as they ever were.

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a curriculum for mathmusic

Sunday, February 19, 2012

The Park School in Baltimore has a math department that has developed its own excellent mathematics curriculum. (And shares it freely!) At its core, the curriculum is based on fourteen habits of mind, enumerated in the screenshot accompanying this post (which I snarfed from the Quantum Progress blog). What a wonderfully concise, and yet comprehensive, expression of the core of mathematical abstraction and process.

14 habits of mindI can easily imagine an integrated music curriculum built atop these same principles, that would begin with the most basic symbolic alternatives for music (neumes, notes, numbers, and/or shapes), and which would continue through rhythm, melody and harmony, eventually leading to sections on species counterpoint, tunings, Bach-style chorale harmonization, pitch-class set analysis, orchestration, and/or other “advanced” topics. Speaking as a composer and theorist who suffered through traditional topics such as harmony and counterpoint, taught as isolated islands of boring pre-requisites by uninterested university profs, these subjects deserve to be presented as integrated whole! They are as intimately related to each other as are arithmetic, logic, geometry, trig, and algebra.

My real question: could you sneak music into the mainline examples of a math class such as that of the Park School? I believe that in the hands of a math teacher who was also a musician, the answer would be yes. Symbolic thinking could certainly be imaginatively illustrated using simplified notations of pitch or rhythm (the global staff-based notation of western notation versus the localized neighborhoods found in Byzantine scores, for example). Set theory and discrete math could be made very concrete by using sets of pitches, or positions in a rhythmic pattern. Logic could be clearly demonstrated using simple two voice counterpoint. And on, and on.

I’d even go as far as to speculate that concepts like the law of sines in trigonometry might be demonstrated and/or generalized using the concept of musical interval and triads. (Such a demonstration could also be used to introduce the salubrious notion of commensurability, via tuning.) After all, what is a musical interval or a time signature but a ratio? A ratio, which is the entity that forms the backbone of mathematical tools such as rational numbers, the notion of metric, cross-ratio invariance, homogenous coordinates and a zillion other useful gizmos.

Math and music. They really do have a lot in common. Thanks to the teachers at the Park School for reminding me.

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new works!

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

It is a good month for brand-spanking new full-length works in Seattle. It started with the American premiere of Ivan Moody’s lush, beautiful, spiritual, and generally wonderful Seven Hymns for St. Sava, sung by Cappella Romana. After that, Byron au Yong provided wonderfully layered music cum field recordings cum spoken word for Spectrum Dance Theatre’s Farewell. This was very experimental music, and Byron pulled it off with aplomb. (Byron also found the time to curate a companion event as counterpoint, a wonderful  art exhibit on related themes also entitled Farewell. This Columbia City exhibit was the best group show that I’ve been to lately, without a doubt.) One weekend later, Garrett Fisher unleashed his latest raga-based opera/dance piece, this time with a Yeats libretto (Yeats, but still featuring haiku!). Finally, Frank Ferko’s 1999 Stabat Mater will soon be performed by Choral Arts Northwest. The Stabat was originally commissioned by His Majesties Clerkes, one of the groups from my Chicago past, and I look forward to performing in the PacNW premiere.

[postscript] The On The Boards’ presentation of Heiner Goebbels’ Songs of Wars I Have Seen is yet another event in this welcome local upwelling of large-scale new works. A riff on the “history repeats itself and is written by the victors/survivors” themes of its spoken Gertrude Stein text, the piece embeds fragments of early music by Matthew Locke into a sampled and processed electronic background, juxtaposing this interesting and unique texture against a second, more by-the-book, new-music chamber orchestra texture. The orchestra was an inspired amalgam of some of Seattle’s finest baroque players and some of Seattle’s finest new music players. The stage layout was by gender rather than by section, bringing the women to the front (both figuratively and literally), from whence they played and took turns reciting the text with its recollections of wartime living. The episodic piece was very effective, especially in its sparer movements. My only gripe would be size of orchestra. A few too many colors for my ears – the contrast of brass and percussion against the baroque strings was very effective, but the piano and harpsichord, and perhaps the woodwinds, seemed superfluous. That’s a small gripe; the piece was thought-provoking and enjoyable.

 

quaternion actions: the Amazon comes to Burien

Thursday, August 6, 2009

The Burien/Interim Arts Space is an installation space by and for the current DIY/guerrilla generation. As far as I can tell, Kathy Justin and Dane Johnson, the project’s artist-instigators, sidled up to the city of Burien (directly next door to SeaTac airport) and said “hey, if you’re not using that empty city block, do you mind if we do?” They have successfully recruited sculptors to transform the wasteland into an urban sculpture park, with unapologetic emphasis on the grittiness of the site and the temporary nature of the installation, and have then hosted a series of live events in this open space.

“Pieces of Eight,” a B/IAS event that will occur on 15 and 16 August, highlights their DIY spirit: a sound installation that features 8 independent speaker stacks, driven by 10,000 watts of amplification. These formidable resources are being made freely available to local composers and performers – 18 at last count. There will be pre-recorded octophonic pieces played during the day, and on Saturday night a smaller number of artists will perform live.

The quaternion group

The quaternion group

Participating in this event was a foregone conclusion for me, since I love experimental public sound art and music. For the pre-recorded portion of the program, I have remixed Mascheroni Circles for eight channels, adding a low drone and some klang in the form of percussive metallic highlights to the voices of Linda, Melissa, and Rebekah. It sounds great in the studio – I can’t wait to hear it outdoors.

For the live performance, I have selected samples from Perri Lynch’s Amazon field recordings, which I will combine using Ableton Live into an 8 channel ambient mix according to the rules of the Quaternion group. (See the illustration, which shows this group’s multiplication table, which I lifted from the very useful open source software tool called Group Explorer.) The quaternion group is useful in this context since it has an order of 8, and its combination of non-abelian complexity and abelian subgroups make for interesting kaleidoscopic combinations of elements. The group action of these quaternions is to trigger samples; I begin by iterating through Cayley and cycle graphs for the group, and follow with algebraic manipulations that seem appropriate for the setting. Although this sounds as though it might be dry and lifeless, no one will know that there is abstract algebra involved! The aural experience is a slowly shifting juxtaposition of the intense sound of the Amazon rain forest set against the desolate urban performance setting of concrete, asphalt, and rusting metal.

As a side-note: quaternions, used as tools for rotational calculations, and the geometry behind Mascheroni Circles are both featured in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which is up for the Hugo award this weekend in Montreal. Good luck, Neal!

[Edit: No joy for Neal, but as suspected, the giant sculptures of rusting metal, bonfires, torn-up parking lot, power generators, hulked trucks and buses, and the overall desolate feel of the site made a great foil for electronic noise and loudly amplified insects. Below is a panoramic shot of the site.]

The Burien Interim Art Space

The Burien Interim Art Space

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why I am jonesing for M4L

Sunday, February 1, 2009

I’m excited about the ambient electronic constructions that I’m currently working on, which combine projective geometry with beautiful field recordings that my friend and collaborator Perri Lynch captured in the Amazon rain forest six weeks ago.

A finite projective plane with 31 points

The finite projective plane PG(2,5)

A finite projective plane with 31 points and 31 lines provides structure for the virtual space that I am creating for the piece. (A mandala-like visualization of this space that I drew using Inkscape should be visible on the left of this post.) Each “point” occupies the tip of one bump on the black ring, while each “line” is a different color. Each line passes through 6 points, and each point has 6 lines passing though it. (For the math geeks, this drawing is an expanded version of the difference set {1, 5, 11, 24, 25, 27}.) The mapping for the piece associates a distinctive sequence of recordings with every point in the space. The spectra and amplitudes of each of these sequences are diffused onto neighboring points using the incidence structure of the underlying geometry.

Projective spaces are famously dual: any theorem stated in terms of the incidence of lines and points can also be stated with the terms “point” and “line” swapped. To emphasize this dual nature as I map musical events onto the space, I am exploiting the two faces of the Fourier transform, a dual space that very familiar to electronic musicians. The Fourier transform ties time, amplitude, phase, and frequency together into a single tidy bundle, using wonderful math. I use it to cross-synthesize and deconstruct the panoramic wide-spectrum jungle landscapes recorded by Perri; the amplitude envelopes from the same sounds are simultaneously used as control signals.

I am currently rendering the piece using a somewhat laborious workflow that involves Ableton Live, Max/MSP, and Logic. I shuttle semi-processed sounds back and forth between the 3 programs using whatever method works: the filesystem, canned plugins, or even rewire when it cooperates. At the same time, the matrix math used for spatialization and signal transformation is done either manually or using a computer algebra package, and then applied manually to the mix.

OK, so what is this M4L thing and why does it relate to this activity? A couple of weeks ago, Ableton and Cycling ’74 (makers of Max/MSP) announced the imminent arrival of a new product named “Max for Live”. If this product functions as hyped, it will greatly improve quality-of-life for us often neglected experimental electronic music folk. For example, I would theoretically be able to automate much of the workflow for the new piece by using Live to trigger and resample sound sequences, while delegating their transformation and spatialization to my own homemade combination of Live racks, Max/MSP patches, and random plugins. I’m sure that sample cutting, final mix, and mastering would still be done in Logic, but the rest of the process, which is the bulk of the work, would become much easier. Cooler still, the “instruments” that I would build to perform this process could then be used over and over again, most notably as part of live expanded performances of this piece or others like it.

The march goes on. What took me months in 1982, laboriously creating soundfiles with a C compiler and hearing them rendered hours later in glorious 12 bit stereo by a dedicated PDP 11, has become a near-realtime programming activity using tools such as Max, SuperCollider and Chuck. To see high-quality mainstream software such as Ableton come to this party is just fantastic. I can’t wait!

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