As a composer whose process is inescapably linked to software, my output tends to veer towards either acousmatic music for presentation using different surround sound loudspeaker configurations or improvisatory works in which the performer often uses devices to manipulate algorithmic processes. Obsession is an example of how digital tools allow these areas of practice to intersect.
While discourses surrounding improvisation and digital instrumentality have grown substantially through the use of artistically designed sensor-based instruments from the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) community, composing electroacoustic pieces for fixed media has become a place for engaging with the sounds of familiar instruments – in which software acts as a virtual space for rediscovering centuries old music technologies in a way that is not bound by physical constraints. I am suggesting that the use of extended techniques, a term typically associated with non-standard approaches to striking, bowing, or blowing into a concert musical instrument, can be augmented to discuss the simulation of musical instrument shapes and behaviors that are not possible outside of the software domain. Since much of the performance practice for concert instruments grew from musical baroque and classical eras (where idiomatic writing started to become a greater priority), plundering non-melodic sounds outside of those practices (whether through physical interaction or software) presents a kind of negative space.
Cultivating instrument sounds using synthesizers or software has been a long-standing fascination for composers of experimental electronic music, which extends beyond imitation into the hybridization of different instruments and imagining the sounds of unusual playing techniques. While the sounds of familiar instruments can be invoked as cultural reference points, they work just as well as points of departure for experimentation. For example, computer music pioneer Jean Claude Risset comments on the interplay of experimentation and instrumentality inside of an electroacoustic composition by mentioning that: 'beyond producing pitch paradoxical behaviors, I also used synthesis to mimic instruments and produce an illusory phantasmatic mirror of the real world: sounds of immaterial instruments. I have resorted to such confrontations, which induce emotional reactions' (Cochrane 2013: 31). The extrapolation of electronic drone sounds from short rhythmic gestures with recognizable instrumental timbres is a stylistic marker in Risset’s music. For example, the opening of his piece Mutations (1969) draws on a gong-like sound that is initially presented with discernable harmonic gestures that form a chord before the sound is sustained to act as a textural device. The use of simulation as a liminal space between electronic and instrumental sound can be traced further with later techniques like FM synthesis, in which fixed media compositions, such as John Chowning's 1983 piece, Phoné, where he interpolates between realizations of sung vowels and bell sounds (Dodge and Jerse 1985: 138). The audible gradient between the realization of these two sources foregrounds the presence of the synthesizer.
Prior to creating Obsession, most of my interactions with instrumental sounds for electroacoustic composition took place using The Synthesis Toolkit (STK), one of the early examples of a shift from imitation towards simulation based on analysis of sound sources and not the use of synthesizers to reference them. The STK has been used by other composers to explore the sounds of new immaterial instruments, such as a model of a flute that is 20 feet long and 3 feet in diameter – as used in composer Paul Lansky's 1996 piece, Things She Carried (Gelineck, Böttcher and Serafin 2007: 34). My own fascination with The Synthesis Toolkit as a creative tool has been a matter of considering the notion of digitally extended techniques for musical instruments activated within software. As software models do not rely on physical materials or actions, opportunities become available for algorithmically imagining new playing techniques and highlighting the latent noise sounds that are not completely audible in real-world interactions.
In 2020, I used the STK within the ChucK programming language to create a set of algorithmic music compositions called Habitats. While the piece did not interrogate any cultural relationships with musical instruments, the compositional process was influenced by the idea of plundering the complex network of electronic oscillators, delay and filtering effects that form to the software model of a musical instrument in a way that uses them for purely non-referential digital sounds – in other words, reconfiguring the intricate digital music components inside of the model without much regard for accuracy in the resultant sound output. For example, the fifth piece of the set, Bromeliads, uses a saxophone model with programmable controls for features like vibrato, embouchure noise, breath pressure, and reed stiffness. By algorithmically bending or modulating the timing used to control such features, the saxophone model began to reveal sounds that would have been difficult to access using a commercial synthesizer or with a living and breathing performer.
This reframing of instrumentality in digital music has an overlapping relationship with twentieth-century music practices, where concert instruments reference constructs from electronic music, such as Helmut Lachenmann's musique concrète instrumentale, where ensembles such as the string quartet make extensive use of extended techniques for musical gestures akin to the transformation of sound recordings in early acousmatic sound works. But Lachenmann's use of noise proves inspirational in the way that it reconfigures the relationship between instrumental subject and object, as it 'brings to bear the conditions under which a sound—or noise—is physically produced, what materials and energies are involved and what resistances are encountered' (Tsao 2017). While in my earlier compositional work, revealing these so-called digitally extended techniques to highlight latent sonic features that are not associated with conventional music performance was often a means for exploring the timbral possibilities of a computer music environment, Obsession marked a turning point in my creative practice where such software interventions became part of the conceptual basis of the music.