I am excited to create music for the Tom Cramer opening downtown at Floyds for First Thursday.  When I first saw the pieces I thought of a lot of the multiscale phenomena that occurs within complex systems.

For example, an individual ant alone will not last very long.  Even 100 ants will not be able to sustain themselves for very long.  However you take 1000 ants, or even 10,000 and a collective intelligence emerges. I had previously discussed many of these ideas in terms of non-hierarchical performance with Gary Wiseman when we collaborated on HEXAGON last spring, and he is curating this opening.

In Cramer’s works there is a homogeneity from a distance, with small variations, but as one gets closer it becomes evident that the immense number of simple patterns are all unique, slightly different.  To respond to this idea I created many simple synthesizers each controlled by a separate random arpeggiator and varied the rates, as well as other qualities of the sound.  Each individual sound is simple, and though their placement in pitch-space and time is random, a smoothness emerges as the complexity of the music increases i.e. as the rate of each arpegiattor increases, or as the notes begin to sonically merge within one other.

I will perform this music live in order to respond to the environment, Cramer’s work, and those wandering into the coffee shop to look at the art.

A sample of what may play at the opening:

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Thanks Erik Carter and Mariah Maines for additional vocals.

The opening is on December 3rd from 6pm-9pm at Floyd’s in Old Town: 118 NW Couch St Portland, OR 97209

Documenation: emergence_voice parts I, II, and III

The following three tracks are from the Tom Cramer opening at Floyd’s. When listening to the pieces it is important to note that the tracks were created for the environment of the opening- so they would be accompanied by conversations, voices, and in a space one could move through. These recordings are the sounds alone, so they do not include the more social-interactive aspect that was present during the show.

Part I was recorded live. Part II was recorded before the show and played during intermission. Part III was recorded live. All together it is about two hours and 45 minutes long.

part I:

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part II:

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part III:

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The music was created using a generative process. The following is a simple schematic of the way the sounds were set up.

Five synthesizers and three voices were mapped to a keyboard notes D, E, F#, G, A, B, C. The voices were recorded live, without any manipulation in the mapping. An arpeggiator selected a note randomly. During the live performance the rate and resolution of the arpeggiator were affected, as well as the reverb, filter, pitch and ASDR of the synth and voice tracks.

Complex systems have multiple levels (scales) of activity. With the ant metaphor mentioned in the earlier post, there is the scale of an individual ant, and then there is the scale of the collective of ants. The individual ant appears to be moving randomly, but the collective of ants seems to move with purpose. From the complex systems perspective, a designer of a complex system must be aware of these levels and choose carefully what will be controlled and what will be left alone. If each of the individual ants were controlled externally and coerced to a certain action, it is unlikely that the same degree of complex collective intelligence would develop.

For this piece I chose to represent these concepts by what would be controlled live, and what was left to chance. I chose to leave the exact note choices in time to chance by defining the pitch-set to be P = {D, E, F#, G, A, B, C}, and leaving to chance the way in which these pitches would be arranged in space. Since the notes were chosen randomly, it is unlikely that any two performances of the piece will be exactly the same.

I chose to directly control the aspects of timbre, amplification, and effects of the sound live. This changed the quality of the sound. I also chose to control the rate at which the random notes were chosen, so the arpeggiator could be sped up to produce notes at a faster rate, or slowed down, to produce notes more slowly.

In retrospect the show as a whole felt very successful. It was exciting to be playing in the dynamic environment of a coffee shop during an opening, and especially to meet Tom Cramer at the end of the show. He enjoyed the music immensely, and so it definitely felt like a successful collaboration between artist, musician and curator.

Photos by Shawn Patrick Higgins