Students of this course may try their hand at their own sound interventions and musical compositions, or simply focus on learning more about diverse musical traditions, sonic experimentation, and acoustic phenomena in everyday life. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch, and UdK composer Mathias Hinke, this course is also co-taught by scholar and musician Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture) and curator Candice Hopkins (Documenta 14). The lectures link major artistic developments of recent decades to wider ideas about sound in specific social and spatial contexts. Also included are guest presentations from key thinkers and practitioners, like: Christopher DeLaurenti, Jen Delos Reyes, Tina Haver Currin, Quran Karriem, Christina Kubisch, Thomas Kusitzky, Scott Lindroth, Mark Anthony Neal, Bill Seaman, and John Supko. As the ‘ART of the MOOC’ title implies, learners and participants are encouraged to treat the MOOC itself as a public art medium. This happens mostly through the course’s optional practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior sound production or musical experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' in the Coursera catalog.
Collaboration & Generative Aesthetics with Bill Seaman & John Supra
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Art of the MOOC: Experiments with Sound
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LISTENING AS PRACTICE, GLOBAL FORMS & THE SOUND OF THE NET
This lesson provides an overview of the methods and ideas from different schools of listening. It also presents a critical examination of the term ‘world music’ and how it has evolved in relation to economic and cultural globalization. With this global perspective in mind, the concluding portions of our lectures are dedicated to acoustic experience and musical experimentation on the net, the radio, cellular networks, and various social media, including all of the glitches, accidents, and failures we associate with these platforms.
Conheça os instrutores
Pedro LaschVisual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Candice HopkinsDocumenta 14 Curator, Producer, and Author
Jace ClaytonComposer, DJ, Author, and Lecturer
Mathias HinkeComposer, Researcher, and Professor University of the Arts (UdK) - Berlin
It's funny. It goes back to 1979,
and I got very interested in the periodic table of elements.
And I made a kind of poem out of the periodic table.
So, it took the first part of the symbol.
So, H e, halation [inaudible] hesitation.
[inaudible] almost like a mnemonic device.
But the idea was you could take something and perform it.
So, I actually sung this song based on adrenaline.
The chemical formula.
And then later I went to MIT for grad school.
And there was this new technology then called laser disc.
And the idea was you could store half an hour 54,000
frames and you could have video that could combine and recombine in all different ways.
And then also the soundtrack could combine and recombine.
And that was kind of the beginning of this whole thing.
Then I went on to elaborate kind of navigable poems that had image,
music and text that work together.
So, that was with laser disc.
And then finally into virtual reality,
where you literally could position
sound files in the space and literally navigate through the music.
I was doing lots of work in a home studio with cassette tape loops and reel to reel
tape loops and building up structures very noisy and very simple.
And then all of that translated to the computer much later.
So it all started in a simple little home studio.
But in a lot of your work,
you really break with this so-called linear tradition.
And through this recombinant products create very nonlinear structures.
Where are you at now in that regard?
How do you keep these very different strands of work coherent and in one art project?
Yeah.
It's an interesting question.
I've done so many interactive works that I have a way of thinking.
I almost can not be non-linear,
even when I write papers now.
They're very modular with the idea that you could combine and recombine them.
So, I guess I think that way now.
I mean, I think about, okay,
I need to make these modules.
They need to work in any order. How do I do that?
And with music, I'll do for
example make fifty tracks that will all work together in any combination.
And then I know if I bring different of those up at different times,
different music will come out of it.
But it's also thinking instead of beginning middle,
and it's more about a continuum.
A kind of more flat musical structure.
Maybe more like Indian music let's say for people that know what ragas are.
In your kind of training as a musician,
where did you reach the point where you realized,
wait a second I have to go there.
And then, how did you continue that?
That's a good question because my training was
very traditional and it didn't give a hint.
If you to look at it on paper it didn't give a hint that I would
be doing the kind of work I'm doing today.
My first teacher, probably
my most important early influence was a student of Nadia Bouygues in Paris in the 60s.
And another teacher was a student of Bouygues.
So, my training was very traditional.
I wrote [inaudible] and sonatas and all sorts of things on paper from the age of 10.
And at a certain point,
I started getting interested in electronic music.
I wasn't sure I could articulate at that point why I was moving away from paper.
But I was doing things like going around the campus of Indiana University,
Bloomington with little mini disc recorder at that time.
It would have been about the late 1990s early 2000s.
And recording people in the gym,
playing basketball or tennis or that sort of
thing or even taking a ball and kicking it around the back.
The Musical Arts Center and in the reverberant hallways.
And being interested in using sound like photographs,
And I got interested in Musique concrète,
the French early electronic music tradition.
And then, when I went to grad school,
I started to notice that-.
I stopped writing electronic music for a while.
And then I went back to writing on paper.
And I found that,
that experience of writing
electronic music led me to be less satisfied with music on paper.
In other words, a piece of music that would be written
from left to right and perform the same way,
by the same instruments,
in the same order of notes rhythms et cetera,
every time it's performed.
I became less satisfied by that proposition.
So, I started looking to ways of messing with that model.
And one of the earliest things I did in grad school was start
introducing text as an instrumental voice,
as a musical element,
in a texture that included instruments and other sounds.
Because I thought listening to text would change the experience of
listening to a piece of music that there
was maybe a cinematic element that was created by using text.
And then I thought, well,
is there a way to take these various elements and start making
pieces that were not always performed in the same way.
And like Bill, early on,
my first experiments in this direction were quite low tech.
I wrote a piece called, Without Stopping,
that had various tracks on a CD Discman.
And the Discman would be on shuffle function that
would create the sort of oceanic waves of sound,
which I thought was really interesting, although the limited.
Because it only did exactly what was on the CD.
So then later on, I got interested in Maxim SPV,
a Visual programming language,
where I could do
more sophisticated manipulations of sounds that have a computer start to make
choices to approach a kind of intelligence,
an intelligent way of making choices about music that I could program in such a way
that results tended towards things that I would find interesting
that I would like or feel like they represented my aesthetic ideas.
We work with each other in the way that we would individually work with the computer.
That is to say to create a database of possibilities and then use a technological means,
a software usually to look at
this collection that we've created and pick out different combinations,
different possibilities from the database.
Bill wrote a paper on database aesthetics,
which I found very inspiring.
This idea that instead of making a piece solely from
the ideas that one thinks of instinctively and actively,
you amass a massive database of possibilities,
of ideas around the central idea.
And then have the computer show you different ways of putting it together.
I believe Bill and I work because it's
our collaboration is structured
in the same way that we would work individually with the computer.
There's no tension about ownership because we're both working towards the same end,
which involves a technological interrogation of what it means to be creative,
a new model of creativity.
So I think maybe we can go more specifically into some of your collaboration.
So, a few years ago,
like the New York Times actually picked one of your collaborations.
The S_traits as one of the top recordings of the year.
Can you talk a little bit about how you made S_traits,
and what it is and then our learners will also hear at the end of this presentation.
There's a poem by Kenneth Koch called Streets.
I wrote a meta poem about that and knowing it would be modular and,
Responsible.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And John built these engines to enable us to test out things,
and build very complex musical structures.
Why don't I let you explain that?
Perfect. Well there are two sets of tools.
There was an earlier set of tools.
When we were generating musical material,
I created a remix engine that would take several tracks and remix them into
a new track that would hybridize the input in surprising strange ways.
And then another engine that would create interesting rhythmic ideas from many tracks,
but it would also choose the track.
So I would give it a folder of tracks,
and ask the computer to show me a rhythm,
play a rhythm that I might accept or reject depending on the result.
So, Bill and I both use these tools to create a huge library.
Like 720 hours, 120 hours, 110 hours.
Nothing in the New York Times review.
Get the whole thing, right.
Yes.
But so then, we took the 110 hours and we gave it
to this other system that we called Bering Straits.
And the idea was that the computer, yeah,
the computer would make rough drafts from this humongous amount of sound.
It would make rough drafts of 42 seconds to a minute.
And then we would say, "Okay,
we like that as a starting point."
And then Bill would take it or I would take one,
and we would finalize it,
finish it and develop it into a final composition.
So we were collaborating actively with the computers as a third,
almost a third person, a third collaborator.
So our aesthetics, I wrote a paper what I called Re-Embodied Intelligence.
So, if you think of your sensibility,
can you make a machine,
a system that does something based on that,
but also might do new things,
which is exactly what John's engine was doing.
So, there's our re-embodied sensibility,
and then our own sensibilities.
The idea is to have this kind of resonance where everything is working together,
a metaphorical resonance I think.
That's the question of whether the database is part of the work.
I don't think of it that way,
I think of the database as the source,
an enormous source of material,
almost like a picture of the world.
An artist goes out into the world,
and sees a scrap of text on a bus or a truck,
and someone says something to him or her and it sticks in the mind.
Like a magpie, what amasses these things,
and they get digested in the subconscious,
and then they become works of art.
I see that database method of working and using the computer to navigate it as a kind of
substitute or alternative version of the creative process, computational creativity.
So, whereas I think it's a very theoretical thing to say that well,
the work is the product and also the database.
For me, to be honest about it,
I think that the database is a tool as a means to an end.
And the end is really the final product.
We were commissioned by
Mary Duke Biddle foundation to work on an experimental opera called The Oper&,
O-P-E-R with an ampersand.
It's the most complex work that I've ever,
generative work and John's authoring the Max Patch in order to empower it.
And it's vast because there are many sections, and then there are many,
many variables that have to work each time that it comes new.
And in fact, in the performance that will come new at least four times.
It's cyclic so it repeats,
but with different music and text at each,
and video for that matter, at every repetition.
Because the idea for this work was to somehow communicate without actually
explicitly telling the audience that the work is
putting itself together in real time before their eyes and ears.
Because when an audience goes to a theater,
they assume that anything that happens was planned in advance to happen.
So this idea that
the generative engine is itself putting things together before their eyes,
it was a challenge to make that real for the audience,
and make it a part of the work in a way that wouldn't be explicit and heavy handed.
So we thought by having a cyclic structure where the sections repeat.
And the women, the female singers will sing the same things for the most parts.
They'll sing the same music or the text that they speak will change.
There will be an anchor point around which everything else changes.
So we're hoping that cyclic structure will make
the generative aspect of the work more legible.
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