Music Ex Machina: Methods and Methodologies for Technology-Centred Practice-Based Research in Contemporary Music
Biographies & Abstracts, in order of presentation
John Aulich
John Aulich is a composer whose works are performed internationally, including in the UK, US, Israel, Thailand, Australia, and Italy, by world-renowned performers such as ELISION Ensemble and International Contemporary Ensemble. His work has been performed at MATA Festival and CEME. John’s work is characterised by evocative, highly charged and volatile soundworlds stemming from the physicality of performance. His oeuvre as a whole takes as its first principle the idea that composing, performing, and listening is a lived, embodied, and physical experience. A focus of his latest work is abject, disgusting, and surreal soundworlds.
Reverberating the Relational Body: Artificial Space and Affect in in hollows spilled thin
My most recent piece, in hollows spilled thin was inspired by the underground rivers beneath central Manchester. Written as part of the LSO Soundhub initiative, the piece makes heavy use artificial reverb and spatialisation to simulate extreme spaces in order to bring about intense bodily experiences evocative of these subterranean environments, such as abjection and contamination, claustrophobia, and kenophobia. Using in hollows spilled thin as a refrain, I explore the ways in which these immersive space-generating technologies can implicate listeners and their bodies in the creative process through Prowse’s concept of the intervention: space as an instigator of affect. While technologies ranging from drawing to urban planning have been examined in terms of the impact of their expressions of space on the body, the possibilities of space-invoking sounds as potential sites of intervention inviting viscerally felt affective experiences as in need of further exploration. This research will offer new approaches to sound, space and affect in art, and could provide a basis for the critical analysis of immersive sound in new media, particularly AR and VR.
Robert Reid Allan
Robert Reid Allan is a Scottish composer, pianist and activist based in London. Their work sits at the intersection of documentary and music composition, drawing on approaches from documentary theatre and film and investigative journalism to examine real events, lives and stories. Their work has been performed by the likes of Ensemble Modern, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.
Robert’s practice-based doctoral research at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama explores compositional practice within the context of investigative documentary theatre, and in 2021 they joined the Sundance Institute’s Art of Practice Fellowship.
The ethics of mediatng reality in multimedia composition
The ‘social turn’ (Bishop, 2006) in contemporary artmaking has opened the door wide to the participation and representation of non-professionals in professionally-produced artworks since the 1990s. While the ethics of such participation has raised debate within the spheres of performance art and documentary film and theatre since the turn of the century, these questions are further complicated by the increased centring of technology in performance, the growing presence of media in everyday life, and renewed mainstream efforts to better the representation of marginalised identities on stage and screen.
Criticism of this trend applies also to many multimedia music works which involve non-professional participants in a representational capacity. Following scholarship on this topic in theatre and performance studies, and reflecting on my own documentary-music piece Do you share coming out stories still? (2022), this paper explores the ethics of composing music with non-professionals, the considerations composers should take while mediating others’ testimonies through aesthetic and technological processes, and the implications of technological innovation and shifting priorities for progressive cultural politics on this ethical context.
Zara Ali
Zara Ali (b. 1995) is a composer and multimedia artist. Her work is characterized by carefully woven microtonal harmonies, a delicate attention to timbre, and a translation of structural concepts (geometry, kinetics, temporality) into physical sounds. In 2023, Zara was nominated for the Gaudeamus Prize for the Gaudeamus Festival in Utrecht, Netherlands. In 2022 she received first prize in the renowned Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Competition for composition. Zara is also the recipient of a 2021 JACK Studio Commission from the JACK Quartet and is a 2017 winner of the Robert H. Burns Prize for Contemporary Chamber Music, a prestigious national prize for composers in the United States. Her music has been performed at the Berlin Konzerthaus, the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the Royaumont Foundation, the Archipel Music Festival in Geneva, among others. Zara received her B.A. at Columbia University in New York and her M.M. in music composition at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold in Germany. She studied composition with Georg F. Haas and musicology with Julia Doe and Giuseppe Gerbino. She is currently the composer-in-residence of the International Ensemble Modern Academy and lives in Frankfurt, Germany.
The Rise of Staged Virtual Worlds within the Contemporary Music Scene in Germany: 3 Case Studies
This paper is a case study that examines works and multimedia installations composed and performed in the last three years by contemporary music composers primarily in Germany that use recently developed technologies (e.g., VR, AR, AI) as a key feature and/or thematic focus in the creation, presentation, and dissemination of their music. These hybrid-reality pieces begin to dissolve the normative notions of “Zeitgenossische Musik” and tread into a new compositional form that seeks to bring the audience in as real or imagined “users.” The chief works to be analyzed are Melencolia (Brigitta Muntendorf, 2022), AnimaTM (Alexander Schubert, 2022), and Scatter (David Bird, 2022). Each of these works co-opts the original function and discourse of particular technologies in order to generate a critical art piece that is recognizably situated in the aesthetics of 21st century Ernste Musik in Central Europe yet treads further into an aesthetically unrecognizable frontier of creative practice and critical inquiry through its incorporation of recent technological advancements that both 1) affect new music aesthetics and 2) question the integrations of new technologies that pose as simultaneously wondrous and terrifying for present societies. Muntendorf’s work explores transtechnological transhuman musicians in her multimedia work for Ensemble Modern that depends on augmented reality, artificial intelligence language synthesis and video art to create a hyper-theater work for the stage. While Muntendorf focuses on the transitional, Schubert builds anew using VR, AI, and electronics to construct what he terms “virtual identity models.” Lastly, Bird’s piece departs from both in its interactivity manifested in a web-based application that connects the normally hidden orbits of the Halley Comet with the orbits of urban transportation in New York city, allowing users to transcend common perceptual limitations to experience a harmonious embroidery between hyper-industrialized society and nature.
Bofan Ma
Bofan Ma is a Manchester-based composer-performer and multidisciplinary artist. Originally from China, he makes music that embodies a normalised, transnational creative identity, addressing issues around cultural bias, inclusion, and accessibility in the age of AI and machine learning. He has worked with ensembles/initiatives including Shanghai Conservatory Chinese Symphony Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Distractfold, Psappha, ANU Productions Ireland, Ensemble X.y, Vonnegut Collective, Music Theatre Wales. His music has been heard across the globe, namely in the Shanghai Spring International Festival (China); Mise-en International Festival (USA); Hearing Art Seeing Sound International Festival (Armenia); and Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Germany). Having completed a PhD at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2021, Bofan is currently the Post-doctoral Research Associate at the RNCM Centre for Practice & Research in Science & Music (PRiSM). He is one of the co-founders of the composer collective The Incógnito Project, as well as Chair for the Manchester branch of the international Contemporary Music for All (CoMA) network.
Machine Learning, lived experience, and a novel intermedia artistic practice
Incorporating machine learning technology in artistic and creative practice often calls forth new and critical ways of looking at data and data-informed automation processes. Many generative artificial intelligence tools (especially those concerning neural synthesis) that have become easily accessible in recent years, tend to afford a peculiar yet increasingly relevant practice of data curation. This curatorial practice seemingly re-embodies a subjective position-taking and lived experience, whilst making visible many idiosyncratic attributes of being human that are often overlooked through holistic statistical analyses.
This paper will thus revolve around this emergent process of re-embodiment through the lens of two recent AI-assisted inter-media projects – that’s what they said (2022) and The Wernicke’s Area (2022). The former uses deepfake technology, real-time audio neural synthesis, and machine generated news articles to articulate certain socio-political undertones of being a Chinese creative practitioner living in the West. The latter, informed by medical and biographical data obtained through an international multi-disciplinary collaboration, evokes new understanding of the real complexities of living with epilepsy.
Maria Sappho
Maria Sappho is a Puerto Rican American artist currently working in the UK. Maria specialises in multi-species collaboration primarily working with her AI ‘Chimere’. As part of her partnership with the Swiss based AiiA festival, Maria wrote the first opera made entirely in collaboration with AI (including the design of score, libretto, props, costumes, lighting etc.). And she developed a transspecies orchestra, building new instruments, developed tuning systems, and composing through human, machine, and fungal logics.
Maria is a long-time member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and has worked with the International Contemporary Ensemble (US), BBC Scottish symphony orchestra, Australian Art Orchestra, and the Instant Composers Pool (ND). She is a winner of the BBC radiophonic Daphne Oram award (2021), Dewar awards (2018) and New Piano Stars Competition (2015). She gained her PhD as part of the European Research Council project IRiMaS where she helped develop new software through her research into global experimental improvisation communities. Maria also holds a MMus and BMus from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where she is also a current lecturer. She runs the Feminist Free Improvisation Archive (for gender minority artists), curates for Mopomoso (at the Vortex jazz club London) and co-edits the political arts magazine the Mass.
x-artist: transhuman relationships in the development of extended creative bodies
Beth Coleman proposes that we now live in the ‘x-reality’, a place which has demolished the divide between the virtual and the physical binary - the new contemporary landscape in which we build our communities, document our lives, and develop our identities. This paper will present my work with the Swiss based AiiA festival in the development of the creative artificial intelligence ‘Chimere’. Chimere is a multi-modal AI that is built through a dataset of interaction with a pool of artists towards experimentation with techno-moral issues regarding the ethics of artistic intellectual property and the possibilities for transhuman creative communities. Examples will be presented from my recent work ‘The Mushroom Grove’ a set of new musical instruments – a transhuman orchestra - built in collaboration between human (me), machine (Chimere) and organic (mushrooms) communication. Elements emergent from this practice will explore a new practice that is ripe with possibilities for the development of new logics for social relationships when the human is extended in communication with a web of posthuman companions.
Robert Laidlow
Robert Laidlow is a composer and researcher. He is currently a Career Development Fellow in Composition at Jesus College, Oxford. His work is concerned with discovering and developing new forms of musical expression rooted in the relationship between live performance and advanced technology, including virtual reality, video games, and artificial intelligence.
From 2018-22 he was the PRiSM PhD Researcher in Artificial Intelligence with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Northern College of Music, resulting in a number of pieces including the large-scale work Silicon (2022), the concerto Warp (2021), and the ensemble piece Three Entistatios (2019).
Silicon Soul: Neural Synthesis as Archive-Specific Compositional Tool in Orchestral Music
This paper discusses the recent large-scale orchestral work Silicon, composed for the BBC Philharmonic. One key way in which Silicon utilises artificial intelligence as a compositional tool is in its third movement, '“Soul”, which uses neural synthesis to create an electronic counterpart to the physical orchestra. This counterpart was trained on decades of archive radio broadcast material from the BBC Philharmonic and resulted in a sophisticated algorithm capable of creating its own “orchestral broadcasts”.
The paper outlines the methodology behind collating this archive, training a neural synthesis model on it, and generating new sonic material from this model. It then shows how this sonic material was incorporated into orchestral music, resulting in novel compositional ideas. It addresses the broader questions of how a performing institution might incorporate advanced technologies into its fabric, and some strategies of working with/against/through the implicit biases of AI technology when applied to a curated archive of music.
The paper situates AI as a useful and creative tool for composing new music for orchestra, and the orchestra as a useful and creative tool for critically examining AI.
Benjamin Tassie
Benjamin Tassie (b.1987) is a composer, artist, and researcher. His music has been commissioned and performed by organisations, ensembles, and soloists including The National Gallery, Tate Britain, Historic Royal Palaces, Nordic Affect, Liam Byrne, and the Ligeti Quartet. Awards include the prestigious PRS Foundation and Jerwood Arts Composers’ Fund award. He presents the weekly show Future Classical on Resonance FM and is PhD candidate at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire where his project is funded by the UKRI Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
Augmenting Historical Organs: The Use of Creative Technologies in Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees
Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees is a large-scale concert work commissioned by the pianist Dr Zubin Kanga as part of Royal Holloway’s UKRI-funded research project, Cyborg Soloists. Research and practice toward the creation of the work has used the latest studio and performance technologies to augment the musical and performance possibilities of notable historical organs. Technologies used include the new microtonal functionality in Ableton Live 11, the innovative ROLI Seaboard Rise 2 MPE keyboard, and a 360-degree, multi-speaker surround-sound array. Historical organs sampled for the work include the 1479 Van Straten Organ at the Orgelpark in Amsterdam and the cabinet organ in the private chapel at Knole House in Kent (thought to be the oldest playable organ in England). This paper will share insights into the role creative technologies have played in affording and affecting new musical vocabularies, in extending the performative and expressive possibilities of electronic and historically-informed performance, and in mediating social, cultural, and political meanings through the musical work. In particular, the quasi-religious component of the piece will be explored, with Max Weber’s concept of ‘brotherliness’ deployed to suggest the way in which the technologically-implemented historically-informed artwork might help ‘re-enchant’ postmodernity toward the reconstitution of communality.
Dave Riedstra
Dave Riedstra (b. 1989, Brampton, Canada) works with quiet sound in composition, sound art and installation, double bass performance, and code. Focusing variously on material, process, experience, and transduction, Riedstra hopes to offer an immediate sensation of entangled environments. His work might have been heard across Canada, the UK, in the Czech Republic, and online, and he has also been active as event producer and arts collective organizer. Riedstra currently researches quiet entanglement with Martin Iddon and Oliver Thurley at the University of Leeds and is grateful to past mentors including Martin Arnold, Christopher Butterfield, James Harley, and Joe Sorbara.
Haptic Box and the Tangle of Its Own Making
Haptic Box (2022) is a web-based event score in the form of instructions for the construction of a sound sculpture which performs an algorithmic feedback composition in tangible lower audio frequencies on the surface of a wooden box using transducers and piezoelectric pickups. Constructing the box puts the builder into intimate relation with its materials and affects their experience of the haptic feedback piece, saturating it with embodied familiarity and breaking down the distance that Yuriko Saito argues characterizes art-centred aesthetic experience. Having assembled the box and taken in its performance, the builder then takes on responsibility for it: to bin it, give it away, or hold onto it and feel the way that ‘bodies as well as objects take shape through ... cohabitation or sharing of space’ (Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology). The project’s embedded activity forms a feedback system in which histories and situations agglomerate into objects, habits, and skills which then become histories and situations of future events. Through its entangled becoming, Haptic Box generates ‘novel network aesthesias’, experiences as, not only with, the tangle, to ward off ‘network anesthesia’ (Anna Munster, An Aesthesia of Networks).
Solomiya Moroz and Craig Vear
Solomiya Moroz is a Canadian-Ukrainian musician, composer and researcher, based in the UK. She has a PhD in music composition from the University of Huddersfield and a Master’s in Live Electronics from the Conservatory of Amsterdam. Her work tends to progress towards the expansion of music-specific media and the role of the musicians within them. Currently, she is working as a research fellow in embodied music cognition on the Digital Score project at the University of Nottingham. Recent premiers of her compositions have been performed by Ensemble Apparat, accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti, Quasar saxophone quartet, Bozzini string quartet and accordion duo XAMP. She has also performed as a flautist with various ensembles and presented her music in Canada, the UK, the US, and Europe. Her projects and research have been supported by Canada Council for the Arts and Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et Culture.
Craig Vear is Professor of Music and Computer Science at the University of Nottingham split between music and the mixed reality lab. His research is naturally hybrid as he draws together the fields of music, digital performance, creative technologies, Artificial Intelligence, creativity, gaming, mixed reality and robotics. He has been engaged in practice-based research with emerging technologies for nearly three decades, and was editor for The Routledge International Handbook of Practice-Based Research, published in 2022. His recent monograph The Digital Score: creativity, musicianship and innovation, was published by Routledge in 2019, and he is Series Editor of Springer’s Cultural Computing Series. In 2021 he was awarded a €2Million ERC Consolidator Grant to continue to develop his Digital Score research.
Keeping My Options Open: Digital Musical Instruments as Digital Score
The article presents findings from three different projects which look at the corporeal and mental involvement of the musicians interacting with digital instruments such as a gestural piano-like instrument, a brainwave reader and a haptic metronome device. All three projects use digital musical instruments which are an integral part of the digital score. Through the examples discussed, we will outline how the materials of the digital score instruments extend, embody, enact and embed (the 4 E) the musicians within them, in turn facilitating accessibility, collaborative and transdisciplinary potential. Additionally, we expand the 4 E theory by adding another two Es, evolution and emergence which help us consider the element of time organization in a digital score. As the digital score instruments discussed present many choices in interaction and music making and can be considered open, we will also discuss the benefits and dangers of this.
Keynote: Scott McLaughlin
Scott McLaughlin (b.1975) is an Irish composer and improviser based in Huddersfield (UK). He started out as a shoegaze/experimental guitarist before studying music in his 20s at University of Ulster then MA/PhD University of Huddersfield (with PA Tremblay, Bryn Harrison). Currently, Scott lectures in composition and music technology at the University of Leeds, and co-directs CePRA (Centre for Practice Research in the Arts), as well as convening the RMA Practice Research Study Group. His research focuses on composing for contingency and indeterminacy in the physical materiality of sound. Scott is currently Co-I on the AHRC SPARKLE (Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement), and recently completed an AHRC Leadership Fellowship, the ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ project, on composing for contingency in clarinets.
Individuation and Technology
The Cyborg Soloists project is an ideal context to talk about the generative complexity of the relationship between machines and their humans. In this talk I will use Gilbert Simondon’s concepts of ‘individuation’ and ‘technicity’ to discuss the entangling of the solo performer with the technology of performance, with examples from the digital and the non-digital.
Thomas LaMarre explains Simondon’s philosophy as looking ‘at the operations of machines by analogy to the structures and functions of organisms’ […] neither in opposition to biology, nor over and above the human body, but a continuation of it’. (Combes, 2013) Aud Sissel Hoel nuances this further, acknowledging the ‘need to consider technical being not only in analogy with living being but also in its coupling with it’. (2018) The nature of exploratory practice in contemporary music necessitates just this kind of ‘coupling’, where each piece (or even each performance) is an individuation of the ‘technics’ involved. The Cyborg Soloists project facilitates the close engagement between composer, performer, and technology, which affords invention in a manner similar to Simondon’s interest in ‘the material and energetic agency that manifests itself inside and outside of technological objects’, (Schmidgen 2005)
This talk will discuss some examples of my own work that might be productively described in Simondon’s terms (including we are environments for each other for violin, piano, and resonator system), and other examples from the Cyborg Soloists project and beyond.
Questions?
Please direct any questions to mark.dyer@rhul.ac.uk and caitlin.rowley@rhul.ac.uk
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