Category: Background

Research

8/27/2012

The following is a collection of core ideas upon which much of this project was based:

(Full references are given at the bottom of this page)

Improvisation is widely understood as a social as well as cognitive process, which involves continuous social interaction based on mutual listening and multiple, simultaneous strands of monitoring, comprehension and action. (Young, 2009)

Understood as a structured social process, human improvisation (jazz, free etc.). can be analysed in a similar way to other task-orientated social experiences: Goals are identified by group members – who actively assume and cast roles – in order to adapt to the changing environment. Goals might be attributable to ‘supra-personal’ social facts, (such as norms of acceptable behaviour, actions consistent with expectations or requirements). Even so, an entirely new, shared history evolves as the cooperative experience develops. Players become aware of the appropriateness of their response to others’ contributions and appraise their own ability to initiate behaviour from others, by proxy in the shared environment. (Young, 2009

Intimacy is a key measure of social interaction. In music technology, ‘intimacy’ is equated with notions of immediacy or physical sensitivity, and is accepted as a value measure in the design of tactile or visual controllers. In this context – for instance performing with a custom-designed, sensitive device – intimacy is identified with the extension of the self; the musical device becomes a prosthetic. Tactile feedback, responsiveness, a close relation between action and sonic outcome; these and other factors are recognised as attributes of this ‘control intimacy’, just as they might be with a conventional musical instrument. (Young, 2009)

Intimacy, as more commonly understood, refers not to an experience of technological embodiment, but to a social experience shared between individuals. It might also be an experience clearly evident to others. Social intimacy has been explored systematically in social science and psychology. Intimacy between two partners is described as an interactional process in which, for instance, revelatory self-disclosure finds validation through the other partner’s response; this is interpreted as evidence of an emergent and binding understanding. Intimacy is learned over time, through a series of transactions and negotiations; it cannot be designed or pre-arranged. Real intimacies are synonymous with trust, cohesiveness and psychological proximity; trust that a partner will provide what is expected, (or more to the point, what is of benefit rather than harm), and cohesive in the sharing of experiences and aims. (Young, 2009)

But force feedback and by extension, performer instrument feedback, are not the only feedback loops present in traditional music playing: acoustical instruments, for example, resonate (i.e. they are “conscious” of the sound they produce) and this acoustic feedback that exists between the controller and the generator subsystems, is in fact fundamental in the overall sound production process. While audio analysis, which could be extended to the concepts of music analysis or machine-listening, is a regular topic in many computer-music disciplines, this task is not usually undertaken by the controller subsystem, meaning that too often, controllers do not “know” the output they are generating. (Jorda, 2001)

The advent and use of new instrumentation and technology offers new insights to this philosophical investigation, as well as to the comprehension of the musical, and more broadly social experience of both performers and audience members. (Backstrom, 2009)

Studying the social aspect of musical improvisational practice becomes a way to better understand the constitution of the self within its social and cultural contexts. (Backstrom, 2009)

By acting as an interface between synthetic and non-synthetic, pre-recorded and live sound sources Live allows the realization of a sonic amalgamation that challenges, if not entirely disrupts, the hither-to-ostensible dichotomy of live versus recorded music (Backstrom, 2009)

But locked in front of their laptop screens manipulating minutiae that audience members, and possibly other performers, cannot see nor, perhaps, comprehend, such a musical practice might well only increase performers’ tendencies towards self-absorption and isolation. This is especially problematic in terms of realizing any kind of progressive praxis since it is precisely on account of its dialogicality—its enabling of freely constituted, non-coercive, inter-personal relationships—that improvisation is so highly valued. (Backstrom, 2009)

Real-time musical interfaces such as Ableton Live have the potential to realize a more interactive and improvisational laptop-based musical practice than has hither-to been possible; thereby providing a potential solution to some of the problems seen with older forms of electronic music. Analysis of such practices can in turn aid in understanding the musical experience of contemporary audience members and performers. But, although it opens new musical possibilities, such highly mediated, and increasingly complex systems also carry the risk of further isolating the performer-composer from audiences and fellow performers, thus problematizing these potential benefits. (Backstrom, 2009)

A number of questions result from these deliberations that we will begin to answer but that also deserve further research. What does “live” mean in the context of the real-time manipulation of sampled, live and synthetic sounds? Is it still a meaningful concept? Is there a model, aesthetic or otherwise, by which laptop-based music performance should be understood? And what can be made of the virtual absence of the body in its performative constitution? (Backstrom, 2009)

The nature of creativity in the arts and sciences has been of a topic of enduring human interest. But the dominant scholarly approach to the subject, until recently, has proceeded from the assumption that creativity is primarily an individual psychological process, and that the best way to investigate it is through the thoughts, emotions, and motivations of those individuals who are already thought to be gifted or innovative. In the past several decades, however, researchers have begun to focus more attention on the historical and social factors that shape and define creativity, and on its role in everyday activities and learning situations. Yet despite this shift in the field towards a systems perspective, the notion that creativity operates primarily on the level of individuals (albeit now situated within a rich and complex environment), or that creativity necessarily results in a creative product, has proved to be remarkably resilient. (Borgo, 2006)

Since roughly the middle of last century, an eclectic group of artist with diverse backgrounds in contemporary jazz and classical music – and increasingly in electronic, popular, and world music traditions as well – have pioneered an approach to improvisation that borrows freely from a panopoly of musical styles and traditions and at times seems unencumbered by any overt idiomatic constraints. This musical approach, often dubbed “free improvisation,” tends to devalue the two dimensions that have traditionally dominated music representation – quantized pitch and metered durations – in favour of the micro-subtleties of timbral and temporal modification and the surprising and emergent properties of collective creativity in the moment of performance. (Borgo, 2006)

In the community of free improvisors it is not uncommon for musicians to speak of the importance of developing a “group mind” during performance. This requires, at the very least, cultivating a sense of trust or empathy among group members, and, according to some, it may also involve reaching a certain egoless state in which the actions of individuals and the group perfectly harmonize. (Borgo, 2006)

Research on creativity has tended to make a distinction between an ideation stage, in which the non-conscious brain produces novelty through divergent thinking, and an evaluation stage, in which the conscious mind decides which new ideas are coherent with the creative domain. (Borgo, 2006)

Notion of “flow”– in which the skills of an individual are perfectly matched to the challenges of a task, and during which action and awareness become phenomenologically fused–to include the process of entire groups performing at their peak. Group flow, according to Sawyer, can inspire individuals to play things that they would not have been able to play alone or would not have explored without the inspiration of the group. (Borgo, 2006)

Models that focus on the creativity of individuals are not wrong, but like Newtonian science, they may be inappropriate for trying to make sense of certain types of phenomena. What we need are new models operating at a different level. In the increasingly complex and interconnected world that we inhabit it is becoming apparent that structure and organization can emerge both without lead and even without seed. What happens and how it happens depends on the nature of the network. (Borgo, 2006)

In music, networks organize not only the social world of performance (with whom you play) but also the ideascapes of creativity (by whom you are influenced and what or how you chose to create) (Borgo, 2006)

Finally, the notion that individuals and the group as a whole benefit from multiple interactions and perspectives is something of an axiom in ensemble forms of improvisation and in the community of improvisers. (Borgo, 2006)

Stigmergy describes the indirect interaction between individials when one of them modifies the environment and the other responds to the new environment rather than directly to the actions of the first individual. This helps to describe the process of “incremental construction” that many social insects use to build extremely complex structures or to arrange items in ways that might at first seem arbitrary or random. (Borgo, 2006)

Networks are by their very nature the fabric of most complex systems, and nodes and links deeply infuse all strategies aimed at approaching our interlocked universe (Borgo, 2006)

Steven Shaviro writes in his book Connected, Or What it Means to Live in the Network Society:

As it seems to us now, a network is a self-generating, self-organizing, self-sustaining system. It works through multiple feedback loops. These loops allow the system to monitor and modulate its own performance continually and thereby maintain a state of homeostatic equilibrium. At the same time, feedback loops induce effects of interference, amplifications, and resonance. And such effects permit the system to grow, both in size and in complexity. Beyond this, a network is always nested in a hierarchy. From the inside, it seems to be entirely self-contained, but from the outside, it turns out to be part of a still larger network (p. 10). (Borgo, 2006)

Music, as an inherently social practice, thrives on network organizations. On perhaps the most tangible level, a musician’s livelihood and creative opportunities frequently depend on the breadth and depth of one’s network of social and professional contacts. (Borgo, 2006)

Creative musicians may hope to find in network dynamics glimpses of future directions for innovation or influence, strategies for how to avoid or disrupt network hubs and established practices in hopes of alternative community reorganization, or the means by which they might increase their own professional contacts and opportunities. (Borgo, 2006)

Although network theory often focuses on large-scale behaviors, these large-scale behaviors are fundamentally provoked by the ability of one individual to influence another and the notion that people can change their strategies depending on what other people are doing. Through these dynamics alone, systems can self-organize in remarkably complex ways.(Borgo, 2006)

And improvised music’s particular penchant for the emergent and unexpected may even allow us to explore and expand our own homophily parameter–the sociological tendency of like to associate with familiar and less familiar sounds and people join together to find a common ground, even if only temporarily. (Borgo, 2006)

Improvising actors are taught that, instead of denying or rejecting hat has been previously introduced into the dramatic frame, they should accept the actions/word or others as dramatic “offers” and. In turn, add something to the dramatic frame, i.e. present a complimentary “offer”, or “revoice” and existing “offer”. The inherent challenge is to avoid circumscribing or over-directing the group flow. This does not, however, preclude the possibility of swiftly changing dramatic or musical directions, as the case may be, but care should be taken to do this in a way that keeps previous developments available for future moments of reference or expansion: a practice called “shelving”…Of course, evaluating exactly when “revoicing” or “shelving” the “offers” of others has been successful can be a tricky proposition. (Borgo, 2006)

Why do people tend to assume that systems are organized either by lead or by seed? In part, this is undoubtedly due to the fact that many if not most of our social institutions and artistic creations are organized in this way. Yet an extreme reliance on centralized organization and centralized metaphors in the past has led to a situation in which many people are unwilling or unable to imagine systems organizing in a decentralized fashion. When people hear music they tend to assume a composer, a leader, or, when that music is improvised, they tend to assume that creativity emerges solely from the individual. (Borgo, 2006)

Perhaps most encouraging of all, however, is the fact that creativity is increasingly being viewed as a web of network interactions operating on all scales, reflecting individual, social, cultural, and historical dimensions. (Borgo, 2006)

Through continual engagement with art – viewed as the successful performance of the perceiver’s role – we may in fact be better prepared to survive and flourish in our increasingly interconnected, and therefor interdependent world. (Borgo, 2006)

Music’s emphasis on pitting acquired skills and pre-composed materials against unanticipated ideas of unprogrammed opportunities, options, or hazards can offset conventional organizational tendencies towards control, formalizations, and routine. (Borgo, 2006)

In a similar way, the value of improvising music lies not in the outcome of a single performance, but rather it emerges over time through continued musical and social interactions. Improvising music together does not necessarily produce optimal outcomes, but the decision to improvise music together does. (Borgo, 2006)

The “butterfly effect” refers to the idea that small variations in the initial condition of a dynamical system may cause a chain of events leading to large alterations in the long term behavior of the system. The butterfly effect is related to the work of Edward Lorenz and is based in nonlinear dynamical system theory. ‘It is found that nonperiodic solutions are ordinarily unstable with respect to small modifications, so that slightly differing initial states can evolve into considerable different states, ’ Lorenz wrote in his famous 1963 article ‘Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow’. (Cobussen, 2009)

We think there is a rather strong connection between nonlinear dynamical systems and improvisation. Both deal with the interaction of and changing relationships between various factors in complex ways; that is, both involve multifaceted internal and collective dynamics. Both are systems in which the future emerges out of relationships that develop between individuals, objects, and/or events. And in both systems the interaction of innumerable forces – each leaving its indelible trace on the course of events – is central. (Cobussen, 2009)

The musical butterfly is a detail in the sound production that, when attended to or acknowledged by musicians, can generate alterations in the development of the music such that eventual outcomes are disproportionate to any initial causes. In other words, during an improvisation, each gesture can imaginably produce significant modifications in the total sound and musical development. (Cobussen, 2009)

The field of musical improvisation does not possess Euclidean boundaries, structures, or regularities…We insist on the instability and the diversity of the concept of field. Perhaps we ought to talk of the “formation” rather than the “form” of the field, of structuring instead of structures. (Cobussen, 2009)

The FMI [Field of Musical Interaction] is thus without central points, organizing principles, stable hierarchies. Nodality instead of centrality. It is a composition that continually shifts as a consequence of the activities of the factors that are working in and on it. The FMI is generative. (Cobussen, 2009)

It shifts the focus from isolated agents to changing relationships between these agents, that is, to complex internal dynamics. In The Other Side of Nowhere, Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble support the idea that improvisation is less about original acts of individual self-expression than about an ongoing process of community building. (Cobussen, 2009)

Cobra is not about structure and topology; it is about the dynamics, the interactions that take place. Process over product. As Dana Reason observes: ‘The group dynamic may push the improviser to relinquish control over the shape of the piece, adding pieces to a puzzle in which no one “owns” a finalized version.’ (Cobussen, 2009)

What should be kept in mind, however, is that the internalization of alternative value systems always already takes place in a social, cultural, and historical matrix. In other words, interactive behavior pervades and permeates every improvisation, and also a solo performance. (Cobussen, 2009)

The FMI [Field of Musical Interaction] is an assemblage: no indivisible substance, but an unlimited surface on which a play of relations takes place, without hierarchy, transcendence, eternity, or stable order. Order and coherence of the assemblage constitute themselves only secondarily, that is, from out of the existing relations. Put differently, the agents in the FMI work, affect, and operate on each other in constantly changing arrangements. (Cobussen, 2009)

Improvising is negotiating between fixity and fluidity, to learn and unlearn, a state of refinement and a state of becoming that have the power to undo each other’s work. (Cobussen, 2009)

Improvised music is ever different and changing and is created by a system. (Cobussen, 2009)

Im-pro-vise: not-fore-see (Cobussen, 2009)

The audience plays a crucial role in the realization and development of the musical work (Cobussen, 2009)

Multiple feedback loops to monitor and modulate its own performance and to induce effects of interference, amplifications, and resonance, permitting the system to grow in complexity. (Cobussen, 2009)

The nature of improvised music is inextricably bound up with personal, social, and cultural particulars. (Cobussen, 2009)

Sometimes, artists use the computers’ inherent maxims as a façade, to trick the audience into a flow of certain expectation that the artwork subsequently rapidly breaks out of. As a result, the spectator is forced to acknowledge that the computer is a closed assemblage based on a genealogy of conventions, while at the same time the computer is actually a machine that can be bent or used in many different ways. (Menkman, 2011)

With the creation of breaks with the political, social, and economic conventions of the technological machine, the audience may become aware of its inherent preprogrammed patterns. Then, a distributed awareness of a new interaction gestalt can take form. (Menkman, 2011)

References:

Backstrom, M. 2009, “Implications of Ableton Live for improvisationally-based electronic music practice” in Proceedings of the Conference of Interdisciplinary Musicology, Paris

Borgo, D. 2006, “Sync or Swarm: Musical Improvisation and the Complex Dynamics of Group Creativity” in Goguen Festschrift, LNCS 4060, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, pp1-24

Cobussen et al. 2009, The Field of Musical Improvisation, research paper, <http://musicalimprovisation.free.fr/index.php>, accessed 4/9/2012

Menkman, R. 2011, “Glitch Studies Manifesto” in Video Vortex Reader II, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam

Jorda, S. 2001, Improvising with Computers: A Personal Survey (1989-2001), research paper, Music Technology Group, Audiovisual Institute, Pompeu Fabra University

Young, M. 2009, “Creative Computers, Improvisation and Intimacy” from Proceedings of Dagstuhl Seminar on Computational Creativity, Germany

Introductory Background

Research

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