The Institute of Constrained Chaos
(2024)
author(s): Tijs Ham
published in: Research Catalogue
This supportive narrative is connected to the graduation project 'The Institute of Constrained Chaos' (TIOCC) which investigates the use of chaotic processes in order to enhance musical expression of a live electronics performance. Inspired by the chaotic, expressive, musical power of overblown brass instruments, the project aims to develop a live electronics performance that utilizes a combination of new and existing hardware and software such as no-input mixing, circuit bending, digital signal processing and sensor based controlling to create an instrument that navigates the musical edges between order and chaos. The project has resulted in a ten minute improvised performance in collaboration with Bart van Gemert, a drummer, as part of a concert series organized and executed by a group of HKU graduate students operating under the name 'Custom Made Music' (CMM). Through many tryout concerts and several iterations of the instrument it can be concluded that the use of chaotic processes can enrich the expressive musicality of a live electronics performance.
From culture to nature and back. A personal journey through the soundscapes of Colombia
(2020)
author(s): Lamberto Coccioli
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies, Birmingham City University
The purpose of this essay is twofold: to celebrate the astonishing richness and diversity of Colombia’s natural and human soundscapes, and to reconstruct the process through which my direct experience of those soundscapes has influenced my own creative work as a composer. Reflecting on a long personal and intellectual journey of discovery that plays out on many levels – musical, anthropological, aesthetical – helps bring to the fore important questions on music composition as the locus of cultural appropriation and reinterpretation. How far can the belief system of a distant culture travel before it loses its meaning? From a post-colonial perspective, can a European composer justify the use and repurposing of ideas, sounds and songs from marginalised indigenous communities? In trying to give an answer to these questions through the lens of my own experience I keep unravelling layer upon layer of complexity, in a fascinating game of mirrors where my own identity as a "Western" composer starts crumbling away.
The Lost and Found project: Imagineering Fragmedialities
(2019)
author(s): Jenny Sunesson
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The Lost and Found project began as an attempt to challenge my own sound making in opposition to a linear, capitalist, narrative tradition, dominated by visual culture.
I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound as a counterpart material risking our perception of what sound is and what it can do.
To reach beyond my own aesthetic and sociocultural baggage, I started to experiment with chance operated live performance as a method.
By multilayering uncategorised sound scraps the work emerged to “produce itself” and I began to catch glimpses of alternative sound worlds and sites.
I called the method fragmenturgy (fragmented dramaturgy) and the alternative realities that were created; fragmedialities (fragmented mediality, fragmented reality).
Proposing Live Electronics as an Alternative to Larger Performance Set-Ups
(2014)
author(s): Mario Garcia Cortizo
published in: KC Research Portal
Name: Mario García Cortizo
Main Subject: Classical and Contemporary Percussion Research Coaches: Anna Scott and Richard Barrett
Title of Research: Proposing Live Electronics as an Alternative to Larger Performance Set-Ups
Research Question:
How can the inclusion of live electronics reduce required equipment while increasing performer efficiency?
Research Process:
After deciding on the topic of my research, I began reading and collecting all kinds of information related to the historical relationship between the arts and artists during major social and financial crises of the 20th Century. This included books, websites, journal and magazine articles, and museum exhibitions.
In a practical sense, during the first year of the research process I was mainly focused on trying out different things by experimenting with live electronics both in improvised and concert music. For my second year, I have commissioned a new piece involving percussion and live electronics to be performed by composition student Siamak Anvari. I will also be the second person ever to play Hugo Morales’ piece 150pF, “for body capacitance and amplification system.” This piece involves a new instrument that I built myself, consisting of four jack connectors that are split into a four-channel system. As a complement for the program, I am doing a reduction of Frederic Rzewski’s
Coming Together for one single player and an actress.
Summary of Results:
Throughout this text we have seen different proposals that have come out of limitations faced by artists during crisis periods: where creativity is forced to develop in very significant ways in order to keep creating pieces, performances - art that riches everybody, regardless of culture, politics, age, or other aspects. These limitations have provided artists with a lot of new instruments, technologies and techniques: tools that have helped composers and performers to develop new languages and frameworks within which to organize many different materials.
Is very important to point out that the use of non-conventional instruments and live electronics can be considered when there are limitations, but we do not have to use these resources just because of the presence of a limitation, but rather as a part of an on-going research process that leads us to these resources as part of a particular creative solution. After going through all the practical examples experimented with and contained in this research, we can conclude that live electronics and non-conventional instruments are indeed an alternative to larger performance set-ups, not only when the economic situation is unfavorable, but even as a matter of taste.
The Act of Patching: Musicking with Modular Systems
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): E. Mattias Petersson
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This artistic PhD project is a composer-performer oriented exploration of live electronics understood as modular musicking systems. The conceptual framework draws upon an understanding of agency that views musical instruments as real or virtual objects-in-time that come into existence through the act of musicking. The systems created and presented in the thesis are explored through various scenarios presented as patches that include compositions, performance systems, and strategies for musicking. The project seeks to gain knowledge about the co-evolutionary processes found within the acts of composing and performing with such systems.
At the core of the research is an exploration of the field of tension between the relative stability and flexibility in the affordances of live electronic instruments. It presents strategies for the design of live electronic systems in order to obtain a balance between these two states, and to understand how instruments are adapted in relation to the artistic processes of composing and performing. The thesis addresses the following research questions:
1. In what ways are my live electronic setups adapted within the acts of composing and performing?
2. How do my live electronic instruments manifest the field of tension between stability and flexibility?
3. What type of strategies can be used to create a predictable field of affordances of live electronic instruments?
Through artistic research methods of meletē, transcription, and re-composition, the project gains a deeper understanding of when, how, and why human and non-human agents co-evolve in musicking with live electronics. It presents four core systems developed and refined within the project: Paragraph – a live coding environment, Parsimonia – a modular digital musical instrument, the EMP Triangle – a serial and modular composition tool, and the Sinew0od feedback system – used as a foundation for three transcriptions. The artistic outcomes are further studied using qualitative methods for data collection and analysis.
The main contribution of this thesis is a novel understanding of live electronic musicking as co-evolutionary acts of patching. These acts entail processes of making and breaking connections between human and non-human agencies, and through patching create, transform, and manipulate compositions and performance setups, in order to achieve metastable systems. Hereby, the thesis proposes a cybernetic understanding of musicking as a process, challenging the traditional notion of fixed musical works, blurring the lines between compositions, instruments, interpretations, and performances.
On Stockhausen Solo(s)
(last edited: 2016)
author(s): Juan Parra, Johannes (Jos) Mulder
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Using Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Solo für Melodieinstrument und Rückkoppelung (1965 - 66) as starting point for investigating the affect and effect of technological transference when reproducing historical repertoire with live electronics, we aim to shed light on the misconception of “transparency” of sound reinforcement and current digital media, and how this colouring can (and perhaps should) be used to inject new life and ask new questions to the works it aims to preserve. On the footprint of a rendition that will aim to reflect as close as possible the original performance tradition of the piece, we will later allow the possibilities of current Network, signal processing and reinforcement technology shape and colour a radical interpretation of simultaneous Solo(s).
The Lost and Found project began as an attempt to challenge my own sound making in opposition to a linear, capitalist, narrative tradition, dominated by visual culture. I wanted to explore the possibilities of sound as a counterpart material risking our perception of what sound is and what it can do. To reach beyond my own aesthetic and sociocultural baggage, I started to experiment with chance operated live performance as a method. By multilayering uncategorised sound scraps the work emerged to “produce itself” and I began to catch glimpses of alternative sound worlds and sites. I called the method fragmenturgy (fragmented dramaturgy) and the alternative realities that were created; fragmedialities (fragmented mediality, fragmented reality).open exposition comments (0)
Using Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Solo für Melodieinstrument und Rückkoppelung (1965 - 66) as starting point for investigating the affect and effect of technological transference when reproducing historical repertoire with live electronics, we aim to shed light on the misconception of “transparency” of sound reinforcement and current digital media, and how this colouring can (and perhaps should) be used to inject new life and ask new questions to the works it aims to preserve. On the footprint of a rendition that will aim to reflect as close as possible the original performance tradition of the piece, we will later allow the possibilities of current Network, signal processing and reinforcement technology shape and colour a radical interpretation of simultaneous Solo(s).open exposition comments (0)