⊥hesis

Proposalz

Id3a 2

I want to explore the relationship we have with complexity as individuals, within society, and as a force for agency or oppression. Taking music as my subject focus, I plan to examine the process of practice, distribution, and education as it has been shaped by complexities within and from the outside.

Looking at events in music ranging from the music as a narrative tool, the birth of western musical notation, the birth of recorded music, the rise of radio, computer music, and where we are today. I want to explore not only the systems that make up different musics, technologically and culturally, but also the systems outside of music like politics and economics that both enabled and hindered its development in different ways.

As the existence of music is universal, it can be used as an example to examine these forces that not only affect this particular part of our existence. This also relates to my practice as it allows me to unite my disperse methodologies. I plan to explore these affects on my personal ability to understand, create, expand, perform and publish music. Outside music, this methodology too is readily applicable to many other of my practices.

Outline

Introduction
Oral Tradition
Systematisation
Distribution
Tools
Teachers
Traders
Makers
Agency
Conclusion

!dea 1

Loosely my thesis is based around human agency withing systemisation. I'm using technology and music as a playground to examine this issue in isolation, building up software to play with while trying to better understand pre-existing conceptual systems surrounding music, technology and society.

Eventually I would like to look at the societal context that both music and technology live in and the standardisation of both.

Standardisation as a strategy for :

Democratisation
Control
Simplicity

Examine the phenomena of systemisation through the history of music and how the standardisation affects the current state of human agency.

Using music to look at themes of system complexity, abstraction, and scale as applied to technology in general. Considering the roles of the specialist, and the everyman, the majorities and minorities, the able and the differently-able.

Experimentations

First

Sound experimentations in response to the Steve Challenge :

"what is the smallest action you can make to explore your idea?".

Rather than starting from scratch, I built upon the project I built for De Player. I removed the digital synthesis and connected it via MIDI to my modular synthesiser, and removed the TGC3 specific controls connecting it instead to my MIDI pedal. Initial result are quite unsuccessful...

It is sadly not musical, but it does outline the issue of agency vs the machine. As the machine has no technical or physical restrictions, it out plays me at every stage. It does also outline my personal ability and the work I need to invest into building up my stamina and technique. It is a nice challenge to at least try to keep up with the machine.

Sadly though, the experience is totally one sided, aside from the MIDI pedal, I have no interaction with the generative process. I would like to change this so that at the very least it will generate from my playing. Now I resort to really restricting the generative process so as to have some agency in the music making. By slowing down the tempo and limiting the length of phrases, I was at best able to play along with the generative melody. Also by changing up the pattern regularly there was no implied "correctness" to the playing and I was free to play around rather than imitate.

In keeping with the mentality of open source and the pursuit of knowing the systems we are working with, I plan to self-service my saxophone. This is not only well overdue, but a good step in understanding the construction of my instrument and possible hacks and modifications I can make down the road. Building in some hardware/software elements into a well established instrument could be very interesting.

Now

In a reflection of my difficulties playing with the algorithmic instrument, where I was forced to constrain it so as to have some agency while playing, I have thought about switching the roles. I want to take a tradition from jazz music, and transcribe the software instrument patterns, and apply them to my playing. This will not only have me somewhat succumb to the software, but also it will develop quite a strange hybrid language of my playing.

Also I will be thinking of patterns a little further outside the realm of the theory that I have been trained within. I'll be learning non-regular patterns which are unconstrained by meter, or key - yet still strictly rhythmical. By further applying traditional practice techniques, I plan to develop this language across my entire instrument in all twelve keys so that it can be applied outside the scope of this project.

Bibliography

Stenger, I., 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. United Kingdom: Open Humanities Press.
Mansoux, A., de Valk, M., 2008. FLOSS+art. London, United Kingdom: Mute Publishing Ltd.
- Particularly essay by Thor Magnusson
Radio Web Macba. (2017). SON[I]A - Matthew Fuller. 245. [ONLINE]. 11 August 2017. Available from: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/matthew-fuller-main/capsula [Accessed: 14 August 2017].
Radio Web Macba. (2017). SON[I]A - Michel Feher. 215. [ONLINE]. 15 October 2015. Available from: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/michel-feher-2/capsula [Accessed: 19 July 2017].
Radio Web Macba. (2017). SON[I]A - James Pritchett. 166. [ONLINE]. 15 November 2012. Available from: http://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia_james_pritchett/capsula [Accessed: 24 July 2017].
Fuller, M., 2007. Media Ecologies : Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture. Cambridge, Mass., United States: MIT Press Ltd.
Demos, T., 2016. Decolonizing Nature - Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. New York, United States: Sternberg Press.

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