Human Bodies, Computer Music Bob Osiertag P.. Hébert. a frequent collaborator of mine sss the measure of a work of artis whether one can sense in it the presence of the artis’s body. Iso, the and ifnot, it’s failure, think this isan important insight. [tisclosely related 0 the {issue of virtuosity, by which | mean what happens when some- ‘one acquires such facility with an instrument or paintbrush, or g physically manipatable,d gence and ‘ereativiny is actualy written into the artis’ bones swith an Testops residing onlyin the brain nel arms and legs en out of fashion for years now, ever since artand othermosements than its execution. Neverthe- yent of almost that emphasize the idea rath les, virtuosity of some sort is a necessary el any performance. Wealllive in human bodies every day of our lives tomake them dod very one of us Hives through the reality of our bodies. We s c things we want thea to do, We hav and pains, We know the joyof using our bodies in an expres: sive and wonderful way, the frustrations of failure, and w was Fike to learn wh bike. playing a sport, yping, being sextal wolutely every person has in common. So when yout performance that takes yous body out of the mt nd into something extraordinary through art, it has a pro- found appeal—this appeal is the foundation of all pertor- ‘mance. Itneed not be limited to virtuosity in the conventional sense of, say,a olin maser. There are pank rockers who can their Instruments but whose physic: pres cences—in body moti Just facta expres ver physical sills we have—riding nyhing. I icone barely es are proba nic music today, and the crucial missing element isthe hoely: Many of ws ha been tying to solve this problem for years but we have been notoriously unsuccessful ati. How to get one’s body into art that is as technologically mediated as so much technology between your ph ‘outcome, isa thoray problem. Ofcourse, Hebert s dictum, which began this article, about sensing the body ofthe artis. in the art, should not be viewed too literally [tisnot that itisimpossiblew put asense of one's rade with assistance from machines, Hébert is al bodyand the final sense of the corporeal presence of the artist nating from the work. Its not wevessory that touch” an image or in sul, but it certainly helps ument in order to achiev ANEW KIND OF Music. I got into electronic muse in the mid-1970s, playing synthesizers, which were just becom Tre aster censors he absence ofthe artists booyin ‘etn muse missng ‘een a ends craclto Ae sucess fay wor oft tnreveweg thehstnc! etlget of etrone muse dog andthe tl ett Sie he author fds at he attanment of ereased coal c outside of research nstinations, | Gy nen has concted ith Computer music wasstill confined | theredketen oferta to crude programs run on maine | Bolly vert ty te Defomer He cntasts his frame computers at universities | Pevormet je consis The thinking at the time was that intevertion nd manoution, these electronic instruments were | fs practiced wth pia! so new and different—their en. | estrone wstrens sch 3s ‘theremin, absewerty ‘troduced the eketre utar by mens and is now eran then to vay by turabl art. He cones thatthe tenson beter dy andmacine m mus, a8 ‘osernite tee, ca ory est re methodology and. pedagogy seemed unigue—that they would Teal to the cre ‘of muse. We engerly searched for of this new kind of music that no one had ever heard. the outlin Today we actually do have a new | Tome Ish. on kind of music that hascome diveetly | andere and notas | from electronics, and specifically | _protle to esove from computers: electronic dance music. Throughout the whole his {ory of music prior to computers, no rhythm was absolutely perfectly timed due to the limits of human accuracy: This was. ‘good thing, however, as the nuanced irregularity beat vas actually played was one of the crucial things giving acter to different kinds of music, The precise, sdbeat was sort of ideal grid that everyone kept ved. With the evolution ofjaze, sal grid and what people a= tually played came to be known as swing, but there was no musicin the world that didn'thave somebit of swing, With elec tronicdance music, the precke mental gril that had been lurke ing unheard for thousands of years behind hurnan music was pushed! out front and center and made audible, That's revolutionary. Iisakind of music that could not exist nd cis natural outgrowth ofusing com- dlistinetive ch never actually pl the discrepancy between the but could net yet see, although it did not turn out to be what anyone back then vas expecting. Infact, many of ws absolutely detest this kind of music. But if we step back for a moment, it is not so surprising that electronic dance musics what devel oped. remember when the first MIDI sequencers (easily man- agcable composition software for personal computers) came said, "Well, that’s cool, but it sounds so ma like no one will ever listen tot.” And the software make crs busied themselves trying to figure ou how to make MIDI - But before they could solve the of kids ty of the sound, and nies had then foundl a w human no ove would sequencers sound huma problem, a new ge ‘come up who liked the the software comps to make their sequencers sound ought the software, Apparently machinelike HEONAKBO HUME JOURNAL, Yo 2, pp. eH 22 LLte 10 technology faster than our ability to innovate technologi- cally Or at least the tases of young people ce quickly. Reaction to music with an electronically precise beat s the mos crationally determined thing T have 'een in music, orany ether artform per matter. Teannot think of ow over the age of 30 electronic dance music, most cet 10, mance by ma erent towhatever else ishappening, Peo- ple don't missthe performance aspect of the music, because that is not what they paying attention to, King or chatting at hebat, oF ‘oF somathing, but they are not for cused on the per ple who make electronic da have been going to great lengths to d= vert people’s attention from their actu presence: putting on light shows, show Ing films and videos, and so on. ‘One could argue that making dance music with computers i a backdoor way ‘oF getting dhe human body back into th rmuise—however, the bodies ane the tt cence's not those of the performers, Sothe physieal hond of performance is that ceryone is dancing, while the performers hidebehinda light showor afog machine. Dance music has become so popular clecironie music in our culture. In the 1970s, ic was assumed! that if you payed ‘oF were interested in sy aa synthesia thesizers, then you were oun the fring creative and nuit ‘The eure 1 is exactly the re verse: Ifyoit tell someone that you make electronic music, they assume you are king dance larly, in the 1970s, ofr the beaten path and specialized nents, whieh are neaey all rarrowly tailored to dan foday there tsa large tarket for electronic A BRIEF REVIEW Let’ resiew the early days of electronic music, o see why things turned out the way they did, Most of the earliest el tonic music was musique concree, com positions mace from collages of sounds recorded on magnetic tape. In general, these were studio works frst and last ly assembled by cutting 4p pieces of recording tape with razor blades 12 uring om Batiex Compater Musi Per Of these works consisted of and splicing them back together: formance” playing back the final tape, In the f 1970sT maele some atiemptsto more tape manipulation outof the studio and into performance by building contraptions of multiple tape recorders | could erudely manipulate on stage, but this wasa bite far ferehed. Instead of using recorded 9 nl log sqnthesizers generuted volages that concillated at audio frequencies and th amplified and sent to speakers. One way to “play” these synthesizers was to control the shape, ampiitucle and frequency oftheir audio signals with other voltage sources could be heard assoundl wher the ch ges to be perce ‘events instead of ch bre. This was a very enticing ides: since both the shape of the sound and the 1d be con: trolled in the same world of atom voltages, complexand surprising ystems could be set up within the synthesizer it self, which produced music that was star tlingly new and different. “Composing” inthissituation meant secting up the con ametets of the synthe wgesor pitch or ie nections and p ion dhe processes fone had designed, and “playing” the ‘composiion invobvedlistening to the out put and intervening in the evolution of the process one had set up by fine tuning parameters and connections as things progressed. This is what I generally did in the 1970s. Bat whereas most others working along these lines workerl alone or with 1s, Emoved io Neve ‘ther syathesizer pla York town improvised music scene, trying to develop the skill necessary to. set up “play” procesees in my synthesizer as ‘quichly and accurately as collabor thas John Zorn (on alto sax) [1] or 1d irmmersed myself in the dow A completely dlfferent way o play the lvesizer that aso evolved daring this tine involved rigging a cornention: xtevoltages that could conttal synthesized sound. Keyboards were designed that translated the de pressionof the keys intoa voltage the yn thesizer could accept. Less secessful experiments used guitars, drums and ‘other instruments asinput derices, Many people, including myselt thought the use of keyboards nd the lke great deal a could be ed with 4 piano or a g When confronted with a rove of keys that look hi shove ofapianoand are laid out 1 of 12 unique notes in an oc the key of C, most people would Understandably start 1o think like piano players and to think in conventional cause accustie instruments ne sound ‘exactly the same way. There a8 any variables in how one’s f= breath actually produce the the beat ance that has shaped different styles of musi, small changes in sound from note. note have turned out to be ertcial tothe vitality of the soand (at leastto the ears of those of tus who grew up listening to music pre- computer), IU 8 impossible to get that ined ot ystie variation Fro i in wh ives conven wie played on a synthesizer its istic flat, machinelike fe Thus. while keyboards and guitars ate tached to synthesizers were able to in- corporate synthesizers into conventional ‘use in an often cheesy way, synthesiz- cersalso promised something much more radical. Exploring that direction meant Urowingou the Keyboards and learning to “play"che complex internal processes 1ed to be ge iomatically i nous o these new instruments Digital technology soon developed to the point that all the processes that in thesizers did through voltages, comput- cers could do through numbers, and do. somore accurately, more flexibl and less expensively Digital synthesizersand sam plers replaced tape recordersand analog synthesizers, but the analog synthesizers betwee tional music played mechanically and its odox processoriented Lover tothe laptop fully The problem wasand sillis howto get ‘one's body into the unorthodox kind of performance we are talking about. It had been problematic enough witha snthe- sizer, sitting on stage and earetully mov- ing a kiob a fraciion of an inch disconncetin 4 patel cord here and re- connecting it over there—with none of it correlating with a direct change in the sound that the audience might perceive as related to the physical motion. With iment, the physic mance has been fu sit and mosing a ctor by ‘one's finger across wack pal g on stage This isoften conceived among insteu- iment designers and programmers a6 aproblem of *conirollers"—that new kinds of physical devices are needed, the mae nipalaion of which couldintegrate more appropriately into this kind of perfor- mance than a keyboard, guitar knob oF button can. For years there has been much experimentation with “alernative controllers” at rexearch studios around (3). thave any myself nds, drawing tablets, joysticks rads, video frames—anything the world infrared and game [could get my hands on. research and experi= Despite years me however, there itil i rt sufficiently sophisti allow anyone to develop even mentary virtuosity with i, I believe this failure is rooted in the ps the problem lies in inadequate con- twollers. The bigger problems is this: What exactlyare we going tocontrol with these controllers we would ike to invent? The performance software I have made does hot require much data input to play. On the contiary, it requires very litle. 1 might spenda whole performance mak: ingehanges of very fine gradation to just 1 few variables, aclsonve really wile controller tha cexistnow but that I could desi ‘ap—such as. big ball of a mulike su parameter streams that woul be seam lesdy digitized and fed to the computer— even if Thad such a thing I don’t know how L would use it. Ihave no software ‘could use all that eat and Ton’ think, anyone che does cither. The problem is ine ept of the intervening ant in the very et muse: if we are “playing” in ongoing. automatesl processes th most of what is going on requires 1 input from the performer, al subite more likely nas on the performers part are la compositional coher- ence 10 the result di A DIFFERENT DIRECTION There were, hersever, some early elec tronie instruments that integrated the body differently. The theremin, designed by Leon Theremin in 1919 [4], produced, sound by meansof the beat or difference effect, using two oscillators at inaudible radio frequencies to produce an audible nce tone controlled by changing hhands around at an ‘The theremin was very lin ‘ever it could phy 0 and that 1s pretty much it, Since the performer ‘only had control over volume and pite application was limited to performin fairly conventional music. Over the the theremin also found! a niche in ing spooky effects for science-fiction monies, However, by docs stand as post tronic misical instr yent_on which one could hecome a virtuoso, Clara Rockmore, in particular became 1 bona fie theremin virtuoso by any definition of the word and per formed on the ins tings 5] The keyh ‘aca skin capacitance asthe € cement in controlling the in he ther There were thus fever layersof tech ear other electronic twee! tha ments, The way Jn sound was generated and ay it was controlled are an grated package that one could literally sick one’s fingers right into. Further- the theremin was 2 coneeptually instrument that id not un nt series of revisios designs and “up, One sevote years to learning t ng that all that haxd work would he made useless every 6 months by “upgrade” that changed every ‘The most successul electronic ment to date, however, the electric guitar: T “pure” electronic inst sound snot generated electronically but physically, by a vibrating string that is then ansplifed electronically Within ac- ademia iis not typically even inchuced within the realm af electronic identified as it iewith bhiecand sock and roll. Ietook the genius of Jimi Hendrix to blow the li off the conventional use of this instrument andl point © a whole new way of playing itasa whole new kind of instrument, Hendrix's erstcial tion was playing at high volume and lose 10 the speaker to obtain fecabck th Ihe could control in a ex rely nuanced way with the postion and angle of 1 guitar, the weight and position of his fingers on dl the exact position of his At his most experimental, Hendrix made the most successful electronic music 10 date, [tis music that would be Impossible to make, impossible even 10 imagine, without electronics. I is also ard to imagine a musician on any in- e stings even tire bay srument in any genre imegeating, Iiis/her bodyinto the performance ast tallyas Hendrix did, Esen now, watching filmsof him isa revelation: hisguitarand hisbody appear as one, and it seems that cexerything from his 10¢s to his hair isin volved in shaping the sound [6] ‘The radical elementin Hendrix's work was later developed by Keith Rowe and Fred Frith,among others [7]. These wo have approached the elecuie guitar ex- plicily concious of leaving behind the tontire Uadition of the acoustic guits “ hat 1g rom the i ing not with aguitar per se, but with an plified vibrating strings stretched over a resonant bods. By using amplificatio they found that even tiny disturbances to the string could be made into musieally ‘useful sore, stingly enough, electronic mod- ofthe sound is notcenteal tothe work of any of these three sm Hendrix wsed a wahaval pedal, which & just a very crude filter. When 1 first d playing with Frith, he was using, no electronic sound modification at all, Although later he began using a variew ‘offoot pedals that manipulate the string sound in various electronic ways, the physcal control of the vibration of the strings and electronic amplification of he sine Ii wed atthe center of is work In addition to the elvetic guitar, the turntable has emerged as ing Liybrid instrument, pioneered in the Bronx in the mid-1970sby arvstssuch as Kool Here, Aika Bambuataa and Grand master Flach, And just as Rowe andl Frith took Hendrix's guitar innovations s temically outside the bounds of popular music where they could be explored more rigorously, Christian Marelay did the sume for dhe turntable [8] ‘The turntable is now the focus of in tense experimentation by an entire ge ration of Bs and the term “turntable hhas come into vogue. Here again, we sound that is generated physically: the Vibrations of astylusas itis dragged actos. grooved surfaces. Once again, the crucial clement that the electronics provide is amplification, which makes the very sub- tle contiol of the silts meaning, Any + elcetonie processing of the nd is just icing om the eake. And fi nally, once agsin we have adeve mtirely by music research institutions stead from popular culture. Feople like Marclayand the Invisibl Skratch Fikl [9] have developed substantial skils that re- quire very fine contol and techniques dhing like virtuosity. \¢ approach favored in sic research fi des has leetronically process « 1Btional instruments, For ex ist performs with a second musician ‘who sits at a computer that records the Clarinet sound and manipulates iti ious ways, With few exceptions, this di- rection of work has produced stunningly uninteresting results. Musi that uses clee- Uuonically generated sound from synthe- Siers or computers suffers from the problem that one ually get ‘one’s fingers into the generation of the sound. Hybrid instruments like the elee tuic guitar soke this problem by using. sound sources controlled by the bad amplifying them. Butacousie/electronic collaborations such as havebeen the rage in academic computer music, make the problem even worse by dividing te sks (of the generation and conwol of the sounel andl giv to two difere people. The sound might be generated bby an extremely skilled player wits {erful contol over the sound, but this is often all bt irrelevant dice that person doesnot actually control th pu A FERTILE GROUND The integration of the human body into the performance of music m which the sound is generated by machines thus re- quite problematic, This should ‘come as no surprise. Iie ally new problem, Before the ackent of ma ould antiomsate sophisticated processes, there was no performance uithout the body. Since the body could not be remored, no one had to worry hackin. The problem ‘ean be precisely dated to the moment ‘when early tape music pioneers first put tape deck onstage and announced that theie performance would consist o tingthe “phy” button, and a confused a cir heads and asked, ally psformarce:” nee scratched ‘ways yet never solved. Nor will ithe. For the entire problem is just one window: into the tension resi boa what struce Presion ineverya work, pla; health, reproduction, w love, ex, polities andl art. The fet that Ie finds ex pectof our existence musicians have not resolved this tension probl ‘isappear. It can only be experincali tous ways. This makes itan excellent ter- rain for art aud it particular for artiss who work fron an acai suchas 14 Ovni Homan Bodies, Computer Misc without the catastrophic eo of weaponsderelopment, the astronom: ieal costs of space explora logical casino of gene technology or the We might not be able to perform with mae 1 play with them, which may be the best th women of history. Ne- however requires critically: not celebrating technology but ngitand probing it exami snsions between technology andthe bo anh oering the kinds References and Notes Bchts hax precede nt cresting oer Ia Fare, the STEIM se sing aston of yen Therm: aed athe teri Se alo aC Cee 8 Tee anh ae Prater Eicaenic Arte 6.Thebesof the may Hendiccon amit at sont tae veo “She aoe esi Skratch PH, ee Discography of Works by the Author {sion} aid Pal Mion (ee). Aserbled on mt improve btn Fh lad (200) Reed in Hime edn in 2002. With Geney Hem (Gok). Third an Nope Ase hide (hy). Reany dine” of peat acs by es Cater sa Yagi Mich NNORL tite eden int Ae Rag Hers Nowe 798 inn ul is Oa an! gene. Capuron pce oe ge Re ‘elt MVORL Tne edn n 200, Sour Lar: RecDec 7 (1981), 8 corn Stora boy bai Spon if 1 ad ReeDee 88 (969) With Jota Zor asa) (it) Re Aira Ams, eto 07 (192). Ath rth ‘cen'in Lonlonand NVC Reseuein NVORL i Lie Gating Head, REL (186). Wi Chats ‘rtd intrarenal fom age eed and i all Reed in MOR hae oa sn J Manat seed 1 May 22 Composer; performer insrument build, jeu alist activi, kaykinsructor—Bob Ostetag ‘and his work cannot be easy semmanzed or Pigconbioll. As. componrhe has released 20 CDeand has apparel at music, and mul ‘imeia foils around the ele. His politi cal journalism has been published on every continent and in mary languages. Hedesins sox eecronic instruments for both must ‘a video performance, His cHlaboratos jv ‘ude the Kronos Quarts, annie Joh Zorn eo Fre Brith, hae netal star Mike Pat to, jazz great Anthony Brexten, dyke punk ser Lynn Beedle, dragaiva Jastin Bond ‘ont fimnaker Perr Hier.