Notes On the Margins

onthemargins.com

I recently read a post on Create Digital Music about the makers of a new virtual audio synth called Circle. What the makers at Future Audio Workshop (FAW) aim for with this design is to keep you in flow while you produce your music and sounds. In fact, they take care to make this reference to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of Flow in their product description:

“Circle – stay in flow

Flow refers to the state of mind in which you are at your most creative and productive, a place where hours pass like minutes and musical ideas become reality. Staying in flow becomes increasingly difficult however, when dealing with the complexities of modern software synthesizers.”
- Taken from FAW’S site

Flow refers to a sweetspot when it comes to humans doing things. Symptoms of Flow include time passing quickly, being focused, not distracted, feeling adequately challenged, feeling in control and not stressed, enjoying yourself. These are the characteristics of a person in Flow, and an interface can play a big role in helping a person reach this state in one’s activity. Perhaps Flow can be somehow related to the “unmonitored” feeling that is necessary for authentic creation - (think about component #3 - A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness).

Back to Circle and the interface:

I would love to experience how this interface measures up to Ableton Live in usability. What I have noticed with past midi sequencing software such as Logic, Cubase, Reason is that, even ignoring the fact that the learning curve is high, the interactions are somewhat longwinded or nondescriptive. Longwinded in that they take too many steps, involve disparate controls or menus etc. I know that much software is not intended for performance, but even if you had all the time in the world to tweak a loop which was never to be performed live, you would still want the process to be intuitive and feel hands on so as not to drain on your creative energies.

I would love to see these principles of workflow and usability at the center of more sound software, especially djing programs like Traktor and Serato, where flow in performance is key (haven’t been too happy with either). Information design/visualization can also be utilized in conjunction to surface what is happening digitally to the sound - and to give different forms of feedback.

The new audio-visual software instruments that will be developed now and in the future need to take these principles seriously if they wish to be considered more instrument than computer program.

I guess I should put my $ where my mouth is and post my ideal djing interface soon.

In the face of the challenge of making our creative interfaces more transparent, I do think that there is a limit - and that ….

Interfaces are necessary for the creative process

Aren’t they? I mean, we have all thought about plugging our brains in directly to manipulate sounds or images, to get total control without requiring interface (um, haven’t we all?) But the best interfaces are actually engaging to deal with and add to the final creation, shaping the output and allowing us to be submerged in a process.

Sunday, May 12th, I saw artists from Raster Noton perform at Issue Project Room, between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. The environment was intimate and well suited for their music - there were a network of speakers throughout the room which were able to handle the frequency and sound limits these artists play in. There was also a large video screen.
I had previously seen Olaf Bender (Byetone), Frank Bretschneider, and Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nikolai at Mutek in 2004. There the show had a very important visual component, so I knew that this show would likely be an audio-visual one. Actually, Carsten Nikolai also does installations on the side for extra cash, many of which explore this audio and visual relationship. On Wikipedia it says he used principles of cymatics for creating visualizations. Thee principles weren’t apparent in his visuals for the evening.
The visual accompaniments differed from those of Meat Beat Manifesto - they represented the other pole of the sound-visualization spectrum - (which I have yet to lay out). There were no literal visual samplings, video clips of people talking or objects making the sounds being lifted for the music. The Raster Noton aesthetic is abstract in the sense that I have yet to hear anything in their work that refers to something outside of sound itself. With this strict abstraction comes a visual component of abstract forms and colors.

Static and lines, feedback dominated the performances of Alva Noto, Byetone, and Signal (Signal is the collaboration consisting of all 3 artists). It reminded me of Scott Arford’s Static Room
What stood out among the 3 was Bretschneider’s performance. It was done in such a way that the visual and sound components seemed to be interdependent - he seemed to be playing his visuals - or his music was coming from a visual instrument that we were all watching on the screen.

(Sorry for my lousy clip that doesn’t do it justice)

This is a good example of differential dynamics.

Most of Frank Bretschneider’s visuals were white light on black, mostly consisting of cylindrical or spheroid constellations that were directly affected by the music. When I asked him after the show about how he hooks his music and visuals up in real time, he said most of it is done beforehand, and he uses Modul8 for basic things like having amplitude control the visuals. “I like to keep it simple” he said.
I was a bit in disbelief when he said this, since his visuals and sounds seemed to be so inseparable. It definitely looked like one could generate the other - which is the mark of a good audio-visual work. There is an inseparability, which I think both this highly abstracted pole, ad the direct video sampling method can accomplish.

About a week ago, April 30th to be exact, I saw one of my favorite all time bands, Meat Beat Manifesto (that makes two this month, including Autechre). They played at the Highline Ballroom in NYC. This performance was very special for me because I also got to meet one of my all time heroes, Jack Dangers, while tagging along for an interview.

I promised not so say much, and the interview was rather short, so I was left with many unanswered questions, some of which bubbled up during the conversation and the show. Jack has always been an innovator, even as, but also because - he holds onto older technologies, like the Synthi 100, and references past musical movements - he is still very much influence by Jamaican dub. The creation of something new by recycling cultural references and influences has been perfected by Meat Beat Manifesto over the course of their twenty year career.

What I really wanted to pick Jack’s brain about, aside from what he likes most about the Jamaican sound system days and the UK Bubblers (I have the record too), is why putting together the sound and image has become central to MBM’s art.

During the interview, and in many others, Jack talks about this kind of visual sampling style, similar to what EBN and Hexstatic were doing at the same time in the 90’s. He briefly commented about the use of video sampling as a way of engaging the audience while still relating to the music. This kind of display he contrasted with the eyecandy that often results from a visual counterpart that doesn’t come from sound samples since it is not directly connected to the music.

I agree that seeing video samples scratched and manipulated on screen, and hearing them directly add to the performance, does the job of making an explicit connection and creating a more complete sensual experience. I would add that it has the effect, possibly also intended, of expressing a stream of consciousness or exposing what could be locked into our subconscious. What we are seeing on the screen is so many cultural images that we have ingested over the years, sometimes accessible by memory, sometimes buried - these references are selected, orchestrated and manipulated on screen by Jack Dangers and Ben Stokes, then they are freeze-framed and fade away.

This kind of visual expression of sound is a literal connection - What is seen is heard. It can tell a story (or we somehow need to create a story out of what we see). Video sampling leaves us with an impression, a visual memory of the music. Rather than it being superior or more relevant than a more abstract visual counterpart, I think it is just one pole of the spectrum. Both poles serve to provide more information about the sound - in this case the direct video representation reveals the context of the original, carrying with it cultural references (which may or may not actually mean anything when pieced together).

More about this spectrum later.