This page is a place for me to collect information about upcoming performances that I will appear in, or that are being staged by collaborators and friends, or that I attended and found notable.
found music for the new year
I enjoyed singing in the premiere of Richard Toensing’s lush new Christmas Kontakion in Portland last night. For the occasion, Cappella Romana morphed into a large double choir, with the numerous solo roles pulled from within the choir, much like a passion. It is a beautiful piece, and Cappella’s just-released recording is worth hearing.
After the performance, anticipating the drive back to Seattle late in the snowy evening, I fired up the iPod using an adapter that broadcasts the music to my truck’s radio via a weak FM signal. And while listening to Ingrid Matthews playing a solo Bach partita in the cocoon of the truck cab, wiper blades beating over the hiss of the wet pavement, a wonderful thing happened. A radio signal from a small-town religious station began to come into range, sometimes becoming strong enough to interfere, sometimes ebbing away. Being the electronic music guy that I am, I often let these moments play themselves out rather than fiddling with the equipment, just in case. The station was playing very mellow a cappella gospel music - nearly barbershop, but squarer harmonically. The keys of these tunes were related to the key of the partita, and their slow-moving harmonic rhythms melded the two pieces, in granulated and randomly varying form, together in a completely unexpected way. As the station got stronger, the wiper blades began to interact with the reception, eventually forming a simple rhytmic switching between the two signals. Again, both the tempi and the keys of the pieces (and of the wiper blades) were strangely synchronized. While not identical, they were close enough to fit as though written as counterpoint. Finally, after about 15 minutes of slowly evolving ambience, the station won out, mid-sentence, as the preacher cut in with a colorful and colloquial commentary. Wow.
I could not have created this collage, yet it was a brilliant musical moment. A a fine contrasting palette cleansing after the ultra-carefully-crafted Toensing. A memorable evening, on both counts.
more musical Turing machines
During the Anathem music project, I tried to imagine many different ways that music might be integrated into the daily lives of the avout, not only in the obvious celebratory liturgical uses, but also as a tool for learning, remembering, and computing. One manifestation of this, geometric games for exercising the learning mind, I’ve already posted about. In this post, I’ll cover another: how the avout might perform calculations using music. A warning and an apology in advance: this post contains a pretty high proportion of propeller-head material.
The age of enlightenment brought with it the hope that all problems, be they physics or metaphysics, could be reduced to the logical manipulation of symbols. As we learned in The Baroque Cycle, Gottfried Leibniz was obsessed not only with metaphysics, with mining technology, with claiming precedence as the inventor of calculus, and with escorting globe-trotting princesses, but also with building a machine that could, by manipulating symbols, separate truth from falsehood. High hopes, such as his, for the power of symbolic representation thrived over the next 200 years as mathematicians, armed with the scientific method, picked apart the basics of arithmetic, algebra, rhetoric, and geometry, teasing out their underlying structures and essential concepts, and coincidentally spawning entire new disciplines such as group theory and mathematical logic. But in the early 20th century, the search for the everything-solver unraveled. Kurt Gödel started the ball rolling with his incompleteness theorem, and around the same time, David Hilbert posed his infamous Entscheidungsproblem (paraphrased by Roger Penrose as “is there some mechanical procedure for answering all mathematical problems?”) Two mathematicians, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing (who appears in Cryptonomicon), independently delivered the coup de grâce by answering Hilbert’s question in the negative, proving once again that there is no free lunch.
As an unintended but very useful side-effect, these guys effectively invented the modern computer.
As part of his proof, Alan Turing invented a “device” capable of executing a finite series of instructions in order to perform a calculation. This device, described using prose alone, was the specification for a very general model of computation now referred to as a Turing machine. A Turing machine has two parts, a “head” and a “tape.” The head can read and write symbols to spots on the tape, and can move along the tape left and right one spot at a time. The head embodies a table of instructions, or “states,” that it uses to perform its computation. The state of the head, plus the value of the symbol currently under the head, completely determine the next action taken, which is determined using a set of transition rules. The initial state of the head and the tape, plus the transition rules, define the computational process.
Because of their generality, it is possible to implement operational Turing machines in diverse ways. (In fact, producing bizarre Turing machine implementations has been a bit of a longtime hobby for computer science grad students with too much time on their hands.) So it should be no surprise that they can be built using musical materials. As an arbitrary example, imagine a solo singer and a long line of choristers. The solo singer plays the role of the Turing machine head, while the individual choristers represent individual storage locations on the tape. The choristers share a palette of distinguishable and repeatable musical events amongst themselves with which to represent symbols, and these symbols are read and written by the soloist as he or she moved left or right along the chorus line. The soloist, in addition to transmitting and receiving symbol values via song, is also free to express both the state of the head and the act of reading and writing as additional musical material, interwoven with and related to the choral sound being emitted by the “tape.”
At the Anathem launch event in San Francisco, I demonstrated exactly how this scenario might sound by leading a choral performance of a three symbol, two state machine that computed binary addition. On the tape, blank spots were indicated by silence, the digit zero was indicated by singing a repeated stacatto note pattern, and the digit one was indicated by singing a sustained tone. The pitches, dynamics, and vowels for these patterns were chosen at liberty by the singer representing the head, who sequentially taught each tape singer what they should be singing as he moved along the tape executing his algorithm. In this performance, the singer playing the “head” had control over changes in musical texture, since changes could not be instigated by the singers constituting the tape. The “head” had additional control: he could move at whatever speed he chose, and could select pitches and patterns based upon the currently sounding musical texture. The result was musically interesting, but the performing life of a member of the tape was pretty boring and unrewarding, since he or she did nothing but repeat motives passed on by the soloist.
A cardboard tetrahedral Turing machine head
To make life as a member of the tape more interesting, I then demonstrated a variation on this technique which reversed these roles and put the individual singers of the tape in control. Rather than embodying the head as a separate all-powerful singer, the “head” in this variation was a physical token that could be passed from singer to singer along the tape, and which was read and interpreted by the singers themselves. It is easier to show this by example than to explain it; look at the photograph to the left to see a token in the form of a tetrahedron, each face of which is a different color. The colors represent the states that the head can take, and the flow of logic within each state is represented by flowcharts printed on each face of the tetrahedron. Changes of state and movement of the head along the tape are meant to be accomplished by the singers as they change the exposed upper face of the tetrahedron (the “current state”) and pass it to their neighbors, following the instructions printed on the token.
In a token-passing performance of this sort, the musical interest is generated by the movement of the tetrahedron along the line of singers, and the decisions that they make while interacting with it. It is easy to adapt such a machine to two dimensions, which also adds depth. In this case the tetrahedron is not only passed left and right, but also forward and backwards. (Two dimension Turing machines such as this are often called Turmites - this link shows the plan for a tetrahedral head for a four state, two symbol, Turmite.) Although the performance is very sensitive to the algorithm used (members of the tape can still be stuck singing the same thing over and over again) the process of producing the music is slightly more interactive, and this technique definitely shows promise as a basis for collaboratively produced generative music.
Turing’s machine was one of the first in a long line of what those of us who study computers or discrete math call finite automata. In another post, I will examine some of the musical features of another form of automaton: the cellular automaton. This machine, coupled with music-specific algorithms, has already proved a fruitful source of structure for many composers, generative musicians, and instrument builders.
installing bottled water
Kidnapping Water at the Kubota Gardens
Byron Au Yong’s Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas is a shapeshifter of a piece. First, it was guerilla art, performed for audiences of one or two or a dozen people from within bodies of water in King County. Next, it was formally packaged, blocked, and turned into a ritual at Bumbershoot. In its current phase, it is an installation at the Jack Straw New Media Gallery, a collaboration between Byron and Randy Moss.
At its heart, the piece is 64 exquisitely crafted songs for solo singer and accompanying percussionist. There is also a percussion quartet. I had heard neither the quartet nor any of the songs written for the other singers, since we all performed on different days in different locations. So for me, the installation was a great chance to hear performances of the rest of the piece - very beautiful, and very restful to listen to in the gallery space with its watery circle of flickering LEDs.
The performances were recorded in the Jack Straw studio after Bumbershoot. Recording water percussion in a studio is an activity fraught with danger! Mics and fancy electronic recording gear don’t necessary mix well with flailing percussionists, tubs of water, and flying droplets. In the end, they were successful: the combination of water, gongs, metal scraps, wooden bowls, stones, bones, and the human voice form an intimate mix that flickers and ripples across many emotional states.
Anathem launch and CD availability
A picture taken by Kenneth Lu at the Anathem launch.
The Long Now Foundation hosted the launch event for Anathem on Tuesday evening in San Francisco, and as part of that event, I had the good fortune to present some of the Anathem math-music, live. All of the singers enjoyed having the opportunity to act as avout ambassadors to the event, and we appreciated the good will of the audience, which seemed to enjoy our performances despite having to endure some long delays and some pretty drastic problems with the sound system. I was impressed, in particular, with the spirited participation in our experiments at creating Turing machines and cellular automata directly out of the attendees themselves. Thanks to all who participated!
In Pursuit of Mysteries has a very nice write-up of the musical side of the event, complete with tasteful pictures of our stylish bolts (whose wrapping techniques were developed by Domini). The martial arts demonstration was also pretty fun, as shown in Kenneth Lu’s Flickr set, which captures some of the dangerous moves. Oh, and did I mention that Neal Stephenson, Danny Hillis, and Stewart Brand were in dialogue? They said some pretty interesting things as well!
I’ve received several inquiries about availability of the Anathem CD in the wake of this event. The copies that were available for purchase at the performing hall had just arrived from manufacturing on Tuesday, and copies from that batch are now available at the store at the Fort Mason pier. As soon as CD Baby has processed the CDs, they will also be available there and for electronic distribution. Meanwhile, you can also listen to most of the tracks as MP3 files, which are posted at the Anathem book site.
Despite the availability of the MP3 files, I still encourage you to buy the CD, since all of the profits from their sale go to the Long Now and also because the sound quality is better! The CD also contains a long and beautiful additional track for women’s voices, which is similar to the meditative duet that was performed Tuesday night.
Thanks to everyone at the Long Now Foundation who worked so hard to make this event possible.
RADIUS unplugged
Over the weekend, Perri and I performed a new piece at Seattle’s “Arts in Nature Festival.” As is usual in Seattle, this site-specific piece was performed in a steady rain, but fortunately for us, our venue was inside a large geodesic dome in the center of a meadow. While the rain kept the number of participants low, it did created a pleasant background noise on the vinyl surface of the dome.
Because of the nature of the site, there was no power in the dome, and so rather than using our normal electronic setup, Perri and I decided to do a totally acoustic ambient piece, using passersby as our source of sound. Perri has a work-in-progress that involves “boxing the compass,” or reciting the points of the compass in order. Not only is this act full of symbol and meaning, but it is also a beautiful source of sound, since there are a small number of familiar words repeated in many combinations. We decided to use this as the sonic palette. As for the structure of the piece, I have been working with simple automata to generate music for the last several years, and so we decided to use an automaton similar to a Turing machine to generate the piece’s triggers.
We were both pleased with the result - I’ve put the score online so that folks can see how it worked, as well as a small excerpt from the performance which follows. (The sound quality is not great, but you can certainly hear the rain pelting down…)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Click on the arrow to listen to a few moments of this half-hour piece.
the RADIUS of fourstones
In RADiUS, Perri Lynch and I massage field recordings into electronic collages, live. To accomplish the live resampling part of this process, I use Ableton Live. It has a wonderfully simple user interface that is geared towards performing musicians who use samples, rather than towards engineers who think that forcing musicians to think like engineers is the way to make music. (Not that engineering isn’t important! It just isn’t the correct way to approach the right-brain activity of live performance and improvisation.) Ableton has been my favorite piece of software for last 3 years running, despite the appearance of many other interesting software works such as the massively refurbished Max/MSP, Processing, the horribly flawed but nontheless interesting ChucK, and other worthy digital media thingies that I will someday post about.
Victor Stone sits in with RADIUS
This week, my good friend Victor Stone, aka fourstones, was visiting Seattle. Back in the day, Victor taught me why samples are musically interesting and how to work with them, and he continues to preach this message as the man behind the excellent Creative Commons remix site ccMixter. He is also musically fearless and a big Ableton fan, and so we decided to plug him into the board at RADIUS world headquarters. It was a lot of fun, and Victor contributed a whole different layer - the photodoc is attached, and I grabbed a recording off of the board for later.
The trouble started when we tried to go to a less ambient and more beat-driven jam. I had neglected to bring an extra midi interface so that Victor’s laptop could slave to mine, or vice versa. What we were proposing to do was not rocket science: “let’s all play at 82 bpm,” says Victor. A musically simple idea, and one that 3 acoustic players would intuitively do without having to mention tempo or to speak about anything. But we knew right away that we were screwed - the current state of the art in laptop synchronization is to use one of several similar synchronization protocols, and if you don’t have the network connection, it is impossible to get your downbeats together, much less to change tempo together or to follow an acoustic musician’s lead. Pretty lame, eh?
I’ve seen a number of experimental DIY ways to synchronize laptop music with the real world, and I’ve used both transient detection and video tracking for this purpose myself, both of which sort of worked. The current state of the art in the commercial packages such as Ableton is “tap time, nudge the tempo, and pray,” which doesn’t work at all. But given that Ableton already has fantastic support for beat morphing, resampling, and recording external input, why not sniff that external input for a beat? Ableton designers, take note: it would be a very cool feature indeed to allow synchronization with human musicians!
Kidnapping Bottled Water
I’m singing in the premiere of Byron Au Yong’s epic performance piece “Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas” and tomorrow is the first day of our site-specific performances. There are 64 different sites involved in this piece - Byron is clearly fearless when it comes to logistics. Each site for this particular incarnation of the piece is a body of water in King County, Washington. When I say “body of water,” that includes man-made features such as fountains or culverts in addition to rivers, lakes, stream, and ocean.
The beautiful music that Byron has written is a set of very carefully crafted vignettes; each of the 64 miniatures is set for a single singer and a percussionist, and the percussionist uses his hands or implements made from natural materials to play the water found at the site. For this go, each singer has 16 pieces to learn. They are all quite different, and the longest that I have is probably five minutes. With pieces that short, in locations as unusual as we will be using, it should be clear that this is guerrilla art: you won’t find yourself trundling off to Echo Lake in order to wait around to hear me sing for three minutes. Like all good guerrilla art, this piece is political, taking on the issues that surround bottled water - world water supply, haves versus have-nots, indestructible plastic garbage, the destruction of our natural resources, etc.
The piece will be performed again as part of the Bumbershoot Festival, and the archival materials from both performances, such as sound recording, photographs, video, and water samples, will be used to create an installation piece at Jack Straw New Media Gallery that will be up in September. Besides tomorrow’s performance, I will be out and about, singing, on 16 August, so watch for me in your local bog, fountain, or watering trough! (Not kidding - I will perform in all of these…)
Smackdown! Tallis Scholars versus Tudor Choir
OK, maybe it is a little nicer than a smackdown…
Every year since 2004, Peter Phillips has brought his Tallis Scholars Summer School to Seattle, and every year the Tudor Choir has been invited to collaborate in producing the opening concert of Renaissance vocal polyphony at St. James Cathedral.
Four of the singers from The Tallis Scholars join around a dozen singers from The Tudor Choir under Peter’s direction this year for a concert of English music. I always enjoy singing this concert - the slightly different vocal composition of the group, and Peter’s insights into the music, make for a fun and fresh way to revisit the classic repertoire. This year, for example, we will do Verbum Caro by John Sheppard, which is a monumental and familiar piece; the opportunity to perform such a work with these folks is exciting. Now if I can just lobby for Media Vita next year…
RADIUS roxs the chapel
RADIUS at the Chapel Performance Space
Perri Lynch and I collaborate in making electronic ambient music from field recordings under the name RADIUS. Our newest efforts will be heard 19 July at the Chapel Performance Space - for this concert, we will be using field recording made by Perri all over the world as the raw material. As Perri creates a sound collage out of these recordings, I will sample her output live and electronically process the resulting samples using Ableton Live, Max/MSP, and various VST plugins. I inject the results of these transformations into the overall mix, and Perri comments upon my additions with new material, resulting in a feedback loop based on listening and responding. For this particular show, we’ve got the Chapel’s wonderful sound system to work with, and so we will be placing sounds in six-speaker surround. It should be fun!
tallis in tacoma
The Tudor Choir trundled off to the Tacoma Art Museum to sing an excellent concert of polyphony by Thomas Tallis last night. The concert was short format - one hour, no intermission - and the repertoire selected was just wonderful. From the opening Loquebantur to the bombastic Missa Puer Natus to my personal favorite Suscipe Quaso to the final Lamentations, one was reminded as to just how good a composer Tallis was. The room, which was the high-ceiling entry foyer to the museum, was also very well suited to this particular style of singing.
This event was in conjunction with the currently installed piece “The Forty Voice Motet”, by sound artist Janet Cardiff, which is a minimalist installation that loops a performance of Thomas Tallis’ “Spem in Alium” on 40 speakers, configured in a circle. The motet consists of forty parts, and each part for the installation was recorded from the individual singer perspectives. The Cardiff piece is surprisingly powerful, and it shows off the splendid architecture of Tallis’ work very well, since the 8 choirs are located in sequence around the room. The performance itself is fine, but not astonishing - there are pitch problems and the usual lost singers. This works, though, as it gives you a feel for what it is like to really perform the piece (which I am lucky enough to have done 3 times). Once you start, random people will be lost, pitch may go north or south, and you, as only one of the forty parts, have no real ability to correct things…
The concert was also held the day of the opening of the Tacoma exhibition of the St. John’s Bible, which is billed as the first handwritten, illuminated, Bible to have been produced in over 500 years. While other religions, noteably Islam and Judaism, as well as the more obvious Asian cohort, have continued their traditions of producing beautiful and painstakingly wrought handwritten holy texts, Christianity seems to have stopped once the printing press made things easier. Folios from the brand-new Bible were on display, and while I was impressed with the effort in so many ways, the artistic side of it seemed somehow stuck in the conservative 1960s, and left me flat. The book is sumptuous, however, and deserves to be seen close up, despite this extremely conservative approach to the illustrations. After all, monastic scribes are rarely thought of as the leading edge…