Hidden City: 'Being with' in Improvised Performance (original) (raw)
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Hidden City : ‘ Being with ’ in Improvised
2011
This paper explores group improvisation and interaction through the concept of Mitsein (being with). The activities of the electro-acoustic ensemble ‘Hidden City’ are discussed, with emphasis on the way the group’s approach to improvisation has expanded through the use of technology to incorporate not only the ensemble members, but collaborative machines and the audience.
Emergent Qualities of Collectively Improvised Performance
1997
This article is based on ethnomusicological fieldwork with a trio of improvising musicians in Los Angeles and discusses the emergent qualities of collectively improvised musical performances. Related research from anthropology, performance studies, sociolinguistics, and most importantly the rapidly developing fields of chaos and complexity studies, supports the articles emphasis on qualitative and context sensitive analysis. Interview materials from the musicians and a transcription of a three minute excerpt from one of their performances illuminate the importance of musical interaction and emergent phenomena in collectively improvised performance.
Configurin (g) KaiBorg: Interactivity, ideology, and agency in electro-acoustic improvised music
btc.web.auth.gr
Drawing on our experiences as electro-acoustic improvisers in the duo KaiBorg (http://kaiborg.com) and on emerging theory in the social studies of technology and neocybernetics, this paper interrogates the ideologies that underpin notions of interaction and interactivity and it theorizes a notion of agency of a far more complex variety than that of traditional humanism. We suggest configurin(g) as a useful theoretical orientation in which users, technologies, and environments mutually constitute one another via strange loops of perturbation/compensation.
Doctoral thesis, 2020
Musicians in space (MiS) is a practice-based research project investigating the impact of spatialization on the performance of free improvised music (FiM). It draws heavily on Christopher Small’s idea of musicking to contextualize the argument that in the fifty year history of FiM, improvisers have failed to fully explore possible alternatives to the formal separation and static positioning of the audience and performer. While the conventional performance situation is seen as being integral to the pageantry of the performative experience, I argue that the fixity of the spatial and social arrangement has done little to support the allencompassing and heterarchical aspirations that had once been a noted rallying cry of the free improviser. The thesis traces a journey through a series of live performances involving experienced free improvisers, on the UK and European improvised music scene, and incorporates the voices of over 70 participants. The thesis establishes a separation between hierarchical and heterarchical forms of musicking, where the former emphasizes the convergence of more unifying and fixed ideals associated with the construction and organisation of a musical process, while the later celebrates a more decentralized, polysemic, and self-organizing musicking practice. This categorization is used throughout this research to support a greater degree of understanding of the particular characteristics of FiM within the broader context of music-making. MiS, in essence, simply invites all the participants the option to modify their spatial relationship to the musicking process in order to expand their listening and playing experiences. It was found that this single change, in the approach to performance, greatly influenced many aspects of the FiM process, providing new insights into ways of engaging and listening for both the improviser and the listener. It afforded the improviser new opportunities to connect musically with the ensemble, while elevating the profile of the audience member from a focused listener to a visible participant and active collaborator in the process. This document attempts to establish a clear impression of what was uncovered by this research, while also celebrating the impossibility of capturing in words the complexity of an improvisation experience. It does this by incorporating a range of different forms of writing and a collection of personal depictions of a number of performances and improvising participants. This document also includes links to multi-perspective audio and visual footage of all the performances. This can be found at: http://www.dafmusic.com/Musicians\_in\_Space/mis\_projectbrief.html .
Losperus: An Approach to Improvised Sound Performance
Losperus is a performance piece by Evidence (Stephan Moore + Scott Smallwood) that uses small microphones, resonant objects and commonplace motorized devices to create a dense, evolving texture of amplified sound. Built by human caretakers into spontaneous kinetic sculptures that swiftly form, interact, and disintegrate, the true performers are the objects themselves, speaking and moving with a volition that eerily emulates animal awareness. In this paper we discuss the process of developing and performing Losperus, with examples from previous performances. We trace how this work grew out of our heavily field recording-based laptop performance practice, translating a software-based improvisational language steeped in acoustic ecology into a parallel method of musical expression realized with physical objects. We will also discuss the role that the drama of enforced entropy and the threat of disaster plays in creating
Third City 2017: Improvisational Roles in Performances Using Live Sampling
Open Cultural Studies, 2018
The 2017 set by the electroacoustic duo Third City comprised five pieces, each defined by an audio path linking different acoustic musical instruments to digital musical instruments to enable live sampling. Performances were then improvised within structures developed in rehearsal. The authors here ask how the different instruments and audio paths influenced the improvisational roles taken by the performers. Previously established differences between acoustic musical instruments and digital musical instruments are highlighted, and questions regarding their use within improvisation are articulated. A taxonomy of improvisational roles is then selected and applied to the pieces. In identifying correlations between the instruments and audio paths of the five pieces and the improvisational roles used by the performers, conclusions are reached to serve as guidance in the setting up of audio paths for other electroacoustic improvisation pieces using live sampling. This article is the resul...
Beyond the Here and Now: Exploring Threaded Presence in Mediated, Improvised Performance
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2017
Presence is a prominent component of our conscious human experience. Many researchers and philosophers have described presence simply as a state of being there, or in improvisation, the here and now. We explore presence by examining performers’ experiences in an improvisational, telematic performance, Presence in a Box: Crossing Liminal Spaces (see Figure 1). Through our analysis of this performance we define the concept of “Threaded Presence” which we bridge to existing literature in “Situated” and “Extended Presence.” We discuss the role of technology in creating threaded presence by acting as an additional performer, adding a layer of glitch and unpredictability to a performance that requires negotiation from the entire team. We suggest that technology does not need to be transparent in order to experience presence in a performance space and focus on three main components of experiencing presence: creating a container of presence, blending boundaries of time and space, and implem...
‘Making Life Lively’: Co-estrangement in live electroacoustic improvisation
Organised Sound, 2021
The use of live electronic processing to extend, modify or transform an acoustic musical instrument has its roots in the recording and broadcast technologies that were developed in the first few decades of the twentieth century. In the second half of the century these tools were adopted by composers and musicians in many musical genres and have become commonplace and in some musics, ubiquitous. The perceived musical relationship between instrument and its electronic ‘other’ has been discussed largely from the point of view of listener and composer. This paper focuses on theperformers’ perspective through reflection on and discussion of the author’s working methods in improvising duo contexts. The author suggests ‘estrangement’ as a term to describe and understand aspects of the performer’s experience of live transformation and discusses how this estrangement might influence the relationship between musicians and the resulting musical interaction in improvisation, and finally offers ...
Listening Through the Firewall: Semiotics of sound in networked improvisation
Organised Sound, 2012
Maturation of network technologies and high-speed broadband has led to significant developments in multi-user platforms that enable synchronous networked improvisation across global distances. However sophisticated the interface, nuances of face-to-face communication such as gesture, facial expression, and body language are not available to the remote improviser. Sound artists and musicians must rely on listening and the semiotics of sound to mediate their interaction and the resulting collaboration. This paper examines two case studies of networked improvisatory performances by the inter-cultural tele-music ensemble Ethernet Orchestra.It focuses on qualities of sound (e.g. timbre, frequency, amplitude) in the group's networked improvisation, examining how they become arbiters of meaning in dialogical musical interactions without visual gestural signifiers. The evaluation is achieved through a framework of Distributed Cognition, highlighting the centrality of culture, artefact a...
Electroacoustic Performance Practice in Interdisciplinary Improvisation
Over the past several years I've had the opportunity to participate in or observe a number of Helsinkibased research projects and performance groups focusing on interdisciplinary free improvisation, including the Research Group in Interdisciplinary Improvisation, the Liikutus project, Sound & Motion, El Hueso y La Cuerda, and the Helsinki Meeting Point. While none of these deliberately focuses on electroacoustic practices, all of them, in fact, include one or several electroacoustic performers; so while the core research focus for most of these groups lies elsewhere, there is nevertheless much that can be observed and considered here as electroacoustic performance practice confronts these wide, diffuse, and fluid performance contexts. The key words here are interdisciplinary improvisation, and free improvisation, primarily because each of these offers something of an extreme case study, doubly so when taken in combination, and therefore set particular challenges for the electroacoustic performer.