SAEM
“SOUND EXPERIENCE” AND OTHER EVENTS OF Spontaneous Abstract Electronic Music (SAEM)
AS PRESENTED BY CYNTHIA PAYNE, MFA CANDIDATE University of California at Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media November 30, 2005
Introduction First I want to thank Beth for suggesting that I present on some of the work I’ve been doing. As a first year graduate student one of the hardest things I have been dealing with is deciding what to focus on in my research. My undergrad program was film and digital media and electronic music, and I made lots of short video pieces. I’d like to do more, but electronic soundart usually gets most of my attention. I’ve got a whole lot of audio from road trips I took during the early 1990s that I am inspired to resurrect after seeing Chris Robbins’ work couple of weeks ago, but all of it is on cassette so I’m trying to think of how I can include that medium with the digital realm. I’m also extremely interested in gesture control devices like Laetitia Sonami and Butch Rovan are using to trigger sounds. Holographic video has captured my attention, but I don’t know much about it, and I need to research and develop things I can actually do over the next couple of years.
Bleeding TVs About ten years ago in Denver, Colorado I was heavily into coffeehouse poetry and I put out a couple of audio compilations of poets reading their own work. Some of the younger bards and I started doing these free-for-all events called, Bleeding TVs of Angels where we had a half dozen things going on all at once. Music, dance, video, drawing, painting, typing, open mic. Everyone participating as performers or as active observers. No rehearsals. Nothing planned. All improvisational. Total Mayhem. I’ve always been into all kinds of improv – music, dance, and theatre but this – this was much broader in social scale and scope. It was a happening. A TAZ . People started having mini-events in their living rooms, and in basements. I was beginning to discover that spontaneous artistic collaboration, improvisational art if you will, is a key component to my life’s work. Not necessarily for profit, but for the participant’s pleasure. I have no images to show you of those bawdy days in Denver. There is a bit of recognition in these Denver tabloids – and a hundred or so different audio cassettes. It was a very exciting time when the possibility of a deeper sense of meaning in my artistic work began to materialize. The Bleeding TVs went on for a while, and I played and sang and did poetry in a million different experimental ensembles like Floating World, Candor, and my personal favorite, Shitbox – named that because we recorded everything on one of those Karaoke boxes, using cassettes, layer upon layer – completely spontaneous, raucous and raw. By 1998, the Bleeding TVs thing was pretty much over – and the Shitbox girls had moved to Portland. When Michael Mayers, my fiancé at the time got a job with a video games company in Santa Cruz, I joined him, and found myself in the right place at the right time to work on sound effects for a couple of Playstation games. Mike and I never married but we’re still good friends. The past few years have been focused on college, but I’ve consistently played experimental music where everyone brings their gear and plays spontaneously. I call it spontaneous abstract electronic music (SAEM). Yes, I’m the queen of acronyms.
Sound Experience I made this non-linear video for Sharon Daniel’s Film 170A class a year or so ago: Sound Experience is a non-linear DVD that documents with images and interviews some of the electronic music events and musicians I have played with in Santa Cruz. It’s made with the Korsakow System developed by Florian Thalhofer. I used it to make my senior project which was a documentary on the UCSC student worker awards.
Late Music is a term coined by the author for the purposes of this research paper to describe the music that is created in a ROCM system that actively incorporates latency as essential to participation. That is, users play with the latency as opposed to programmers trying to make it unnoticeable. They play with it almost as if it were another instrument. As is the case with John Cage’s Chance Music, where intentionality is to be avoided, Late Music compels participants to become more open-minded when they do not immediately hear what they expected. Roland Barthes might say that Late Music is another nail in the coffin of the author, because even though it might sound similar to established genres as musicians bring along their influences, it will be a hybrid of those styles, rather than deriving its source from a single one. Latency issues are an inherent challenge in realtime online collaboration of music (ROCM). That is, the time it takes for each side to receive and respond to what is heard over the Internet exceeds tolerable limits for response times necessary in the performance of traditional musical techniques and styles . In addition to physics-based speed-of-light type of latency, delays can also be caused by network congestion and the machines themselves. Most organizations engaged in the development of ROCM systems strive to devise ways of making various delays imperceptible to participants. Two major developers are McGill? University in Canada and Digital Worlds Institute in Florida present ROCM with fullscreen video, which adds even more delay to the somewhat unstable performance, however, they proved the possibility of an almost imperceptible delay. The problem is that almost in sync just doesn’t work for most methods of musicmaking. An application online for download is NINJAM, an audio-only ROCM system that manages latency by making it a part of the system’s functionality. Participants are advised to expect a one-measure delay in hearing what they’ve just played. Thus the playing field is somewhat leveled as everyone must adjust their approach to playing, hearing, and even thinking about the composition and performance of music. My personal experience and resultant music created in the NINJAM’s ROCM system is inspiring. Actively playing with latency in NINJAM’s ROCM is quite enjoyable and more fun to play and listen to than the results from systems where participants struggle to overcome latency issues. Late Music doesn’t necessarily have to sound like free jazz or something abstract, but it can be completely indeterministic , and players must be willing to anticipate immediate changes to establish structures and “go with the flow”. This might include being able to keep the piece going when there is what sounds like an incomplete phrase, a shortened verse, or sporadic interruptions. But the defining quality of Late Music is that it is fun - fun to play and fun to hear as participants giggle and cavort their way through a perceptual and auditory adventure.
Conclusion The notion of “controlled randomness” from the beginning of Digital Art by Christiane Paul is stimulating for me because that is what in my mind is at the foundation of SAEM. We use the machines and programs, as our methods of controlling the interactions between one another. Then we see where that goes. Paul writes, “The element of controlled randomness that emerges in Dada, OULIPO, and the works of Duchamp and Cage points to one of the basic principles and most common paradigms of the digital medium: the concept of random access as a basis for processing and assembling information.”
References
Christiane Paul, Digital Art (London: Thames and Hudson. 2003
Barthes, Roland. 1977. The Death of the Author.
NINJAM
http://NINJAM.com/
Chance Music
http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/edu/student_pages/2000/ajohnson/chance.htm