Dérive (2017) for string quartet and live electronics explores the aesthetic implications of different conceptions of subjectivity in sonification processes, the idea of dérive (drift), and the notion of musical structure as a translation of real physical space.
Dérive was commissioned by the Sonifikationsfestival der bgnm 2017. It was premiered by the Kairos Quartett at Villa Elisabeth in Berlin, in November 2017.
In sonification processes, there is always an element of subjectivity in interpreting data into musical parameters or transformations. As molecular biologist and philosopher Hans-Jörg Rheinberger points out, the data collected in scientific experiments are not strictly objective; rather, they are representations of phenomena. Data, therefore, do not present the phenomena in itself; instead, they represent it. Hence, they include elements of interpretation and, consequently, subjectivity.
Following this perspective, the piece Dérive investigates the repercussions of this subjectivity not only in the translation of data into music but also in the collection and creation of the data themselves. The project thus comprises two parts: the collection and creation of data, and their sonification in a composition for string quartet and live electronics.
Collection of Data:
The data to be sonified in the piece were collected by a walker (myself) during a Wanderung, a dérive lasting one hour through the city of Berlin. I used a tracking application installed on my smartphone to record my path. This application also provided various tools for recording and attaching media and data files (text, video, and audio), which I used to document specific observations, impressions, thoughts, and decisions made during the walk. Additionally, I created field recordings along the route.
As in Guy Debord’s concept of the dérive, the walk was guided by subjective decisions within a specific urban environment. Debord’s method, as he proposes, “entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects;”1 In a dérive “one or more persons during a certain period drop their motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there”2. Thus, every change of direction and every variation in walking speed was influenced by the urban architecture, the surrounding environment, and encounters with people, as well as by factors such as taste, curiosity, aversion, discomfort, or fear. These decisions were documented in a walk diary. The data set from a walk in the Kreuzberg area served as the source material to be sonified in the piece. The collected data fall into two categories:
- Quantitative Data:
- Movements, trajectories, and walked area were collected by the tracking application. (Trajectories and movements are represented as a red line on the map. The beginning of the walk is marked by a red triangle; the end, by a red square. The walked area is indicated in red on the map.)
- Duration and velocities of the trajectories, along with pauses, were also recorded by the application. (Pauses are marked on the map with orange dots.)
- Qualitative data “Walk diary”:
- Events and motivations behind each change of direction (Marked on the map with green dots.)
- Subjective impressions, documented through photographs, written texts, sound recordings, and videos
- Field recordings, captured during the walk
Aesthetical Implications:
Using a concrete physical space - specifically, an urban space - as the data source for a musical composition carries aesthetic consequences. The trajectory and velocity data from the walk inform both the structural design and the spatialization of the piece. A fluid and open physical environment gives rise to a form that is equally fluid and continuously evolving, differing markedly from the compartmentalized structures typical of traditional musical forms.
This is a form that unfolds through its own material and the physical space from which it emerges - a form constructed through movement and more closely tied to time than to any fixed architectural model. It also reveals the “scars” of the city: its planning failures, its misuses, resisting any idealized notion of harmonic or symmetrical form.
Nevertheless, Berlin’s urban layout, like that of most European cities shaped during the 18th and 19th centuries under the influence of Enlightenment and Idealist thought, imposes a certain constraint on movement through its orthogonal street grid. In Berlin, however, this geometric order is punctuated and disrupted by the material remnants of World War II and the city’s former division.
Political/Social Implications - Nomadic Movements:
Through the decisions and itinerary of the walker, what can be seen as a form of auto-ethnographic research, various political and social aspects of the city are brought to light: how public spaces and urban architecture are designed and regulated; how heteropatriarchal and capitalist ideologies are embedded in the built environment and its usage. This approach also reveals for whom and for what purposes the city is constructed: is it intended for pedestrians or vehicular traffic, for consumption, for rest and contemplation, for social gathering? For which gender, age, or socioeconomic group? It also brings into view the subversive or alternative uses of space that emerge from individual and collective agency.
Kreuzberg is a heterogeneous, economically disadvantaged, and international district, marked by frictions in social coexistence. The descendants of Turkish migration, new migrants from the Global South, people from other parts of Germany, sans papiers, artists, and party tourists coexist in a demographically dense and diverse area grappling with poverty, gentrification, and the effects of late capitalism.
The intention of this piece is neither to produce a cheerful collage of this part of Berlin nor to demonize it. Rather, it seeks to make the collective experience and its realities visible, to present, or re-present, something often rendered invisible, ignored, or disregarded. This presentation is not intended as a definitive statement or diagnosis of the problem, but rather, following Rosi Braidotti, as a “nomadic figuration”3; an articulation of an ever-changing condition in continuous flux, one that is embodied and materialized in the form of a fluid musical composition.
Interpretation of the Data:
The collected data form the basis for the development of both the macro- and meso-structure of the piece, as well as a model for the spatialization of the sound.
The original duration of the walk - 60 minutes - and the varying speeds and rhythms experienced during it are scaled down by a factor of four (resulting in a total piece duration of 15 minutes). These temporal elements inform the overall structure of the composition, as well as the speeds, velocities, and rhythmic qualities of the musical material.
The total area covered during the walk is proportionally reduced to fit the dimensions of the performance space, the hall of Villa Elisabeth. Within this space, the sound sources (the four instruments of the quartet and four speakers) are positioned in a way that outlines the contour of the walked area. The audience is seated within this mapped zone. The trajectories of the sonic material, moving between instruments and speakers, emulate the dérive of the walker.
The walk diary provides the narrative events that are translated into musical events. These events trigger not only changes in the trajectory of the sound between sources but also changes in register (a dérive in the "vertical space" of sound), as well as shifts in material density, amplitude, texture, and spectral quality. Elements of the field recordings are transformed and transcribed, becoming source material for both the string quartet and the electronics.
This process of translation or mapping, is necessarily a subjective interpretation. However, this does not imply that the music offers a simplistic emotional recreation of the walker's experience. Rather, the diary entries serve as indicators for the degree and nature of change, guiding the categories and gradations of transformation within the piece.