User:Eastwood/thesis

⊥hesis

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

The history of systemisation through the history of music and how the standardisation of technology 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.

Next

• Reactivity to my playing in the software
• Restrict tonality per-generation?
• Tone, Amplitude and Rhythm analysis?
• Regular Saxophone practice

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.

Bibliography

Media Ecologies, Fuller, Matthew, 2005 Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Demos, T. J., 2016