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.
theatrical impact
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.)
Meanwhile 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.
a seattle concert and installation in honor of Alan Turing
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…
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.
quaternion actions: the Amazon comes to Burien
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
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
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…)
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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…)