“We love instability and chaos, because they stand for progress. We do not see chaos as survival of the fittest, but as an oder which is composed of countless fragmentary orders, which differ among themselves and within which the prevailing status quo is only a short orientation point.”
The Manifesto for the Unstable Media (1987)
“To produce the rich repertoire of real earthly weather, the beautiful multiplicity of it, you could hardly wish for anything better than a Butterfly Effect.”
J. Gleick (1987, 23)
“The Ordinary world means, in the strong sense of the word, that everything is in its place. In the first experience of wonder we seem to be in the face of an object that has no place. But in the act of creating a place for it we do not fit it in somewhere, but we find ourselves forced to undermine the nature of place altogether in order to lift many other things out of their places in order to make sense of this new one.”
P. Fisher (1998, 101)
As I am listening to the unpredictable chaotic sounds that my instruments create, a question forms. At what point do these chaotic, sonic behaviors become music to my ears? After all, the electrons flowing through the circuits are only following the nonlinear pathways they encounter. Circling around endlessly, their flow is affected by the components that populate the circuits. None of these components are individually responsible for the rhythms, melodies, timbres, and textures to arise, yet when everything is connected, an astonishing variety of sonic behaviors pop into existence, as an emergent property of the underlying system. The unpredictability of chaos does not equate to a lack of pattern. On the contrary, within chaotic processes there is often an abundance of patterns. In making sense out of this abundance, the listener is tasked to sort through the noise, attempting to locate the signals. It is during this activity, where the very notions of signal and noise are unsettled, that music emerges out of the chaos, a music “composed of countless fragmentary orders.”
“Subversion in musical production opposes a new syntax to the existing syntax, from the point of view of which it is noise.”
J. Attali (1985, 34)
Sifting and filtering through the chaos requires an openness to recognize these sonic formations: emerging and collapsing again; and making room for other patterns to propel the music forward. This emergence moves beyond what is taken for granted, instilling a sense of wonder in the listener. Its a wondering that contemplates where this music comes from, as well as where it might be headed to. Throughout my research, I have cultivated these wonderings that appear at the junctions between chaos and music. Something wonderful happens when these two vulnerable ingredients mingle: when sonic behaviors emerge from processes beyond control, operating in accordance with a chaotic logic that is just beyond my grasp.
“Performers and audience share a space of surprises, discoveries, and unexpected sonic results; they encounter the un-fore-seen.”
P. Craenen (M. Cobussen 2017, 115)
To share a space of surprises renegotiates the assumptions of standard concert practice. The communicative hierarchy between the performer (talker) and audience (listener) is leveled through the addition of an unruly process. As chaos takes center stage, all are invited to listen closely, to get drawn into the minuscule tremblings that might erupt and force fragile sonic balances to collapse and reconfigure themselves. The performer becomes a listener, and the listening audience is invited to compose their own interpretations of the unfolding events. Moments of discovery and surprise emerge from the complexity of chaos, as novel patterns are created and dismantled again.
“The process of creating is a process of listening very carefully. It is about observing how sound actually acts.”
Engaging in playful interactions with my instruments, means becoming deeply immersed in listening to the unfolding of the complex interference patterns that are rippling outwards in novel ways. At times, it seems impossible to discern clear boundaries encircling the playful sonic qualities that are encountered, because these qualities keep on spilling out into the "un-fore-heard." Yet, play requires a playground, and as the game designer Ian Bogost writes in his book, Play Anything:
“Playgrounds aren't things we create so much as structures we discover.”
I. Bogost (2016, 25)
Perhaps the chaotic structures that are discovered, open the doors to a type of playground within which the possibilities for play are in constant flux. A vibrant playground that is entered through designing, building, composing, performing, and perhaps most importantly, listening to sonic evocations. These constantly bubbling environments, along with their wondrous sonic qualities, emerge from the intricate interference patterns of nonlinear feedback.
A Definition of Chaos
In order to contextualize this reflection, it proves useful to investigate an important event that initiated new lines of thought around chaos. In the early Sixties, the meteorologist and mathematician Edward Lorenz, was trying to work out a way to simulate weather patterns on an early digital computer, when he stumbled upon something curious. When he tried to reproduce a part of the data-set, that he had calculated earlier, something strange happened. He inputted a set of initial values that he copied from an original data-set to start the reproduction. However, he was surprised to discover that the new data deviated from the original printout, eventually revealing an entirely different result:
“This new run should have exactly duplicated the old. Lorenz had copied the numbers into the machine himself. The program had not changed. Yet as he stared at the new printout, Lorenz saw his weather diverging so rapidly from the pattern of the last run that, within just a few months, all resemblance had disappeared.”
J. Gleick (1987, 16)
At first, there was the assumption that an error in the computer must have caused the discrepancy between the original data and the second run. But this turned out not to be the case. He eventually realized that the set of initial conditions, taken from plotted data of the original run, was rounded to a 3-bit number while the calculations were executed at a 6-bit resolution. This tiny difference, between the actual values and the rounded values, turned out to cause unimaginably huge differences within the calculations further down the line. Without intending to do so, Lorenz discovered something incredibly significant, something that has turned out to have major implications, not just for the simulation of weather patterns, but for a stunningly wide array of systems that are now considered to behave in a deterministic, yet chaotic fashion. Lorenz became aware of the importance of this discovery as James Gleick describes in his book, Chaos, Making a New Science:
“Lorenz felt a jolt: something was philosophically out of joint. The practical import could be staggering.”
J. Gleick (1987, 17)
Much later in his life, Lorenz eloquently described this discovery, of what is now known as deterministic chaos, as follows:
“Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
E. Lorenz (2005)
The following examination focuses on just this single sentence, unpacking it through various perspectives and utilizing it as a platform to reflect upon my artistic practice. These reflections are relevant to the chaotic processes that are explored within my artistic research, but at the same time, it is impossible to untangle this relevancy from the musical activities. In fact, it is somewhat arbitrary to distinguish between the chaotic and sonic qualities that emerge, as they are wound up within the same processes. The sonic qualities are just the audible manifestations of the chaotic processes, making the chaos accessible to the ears. Any attempt to influence the sound will affect the chaotic process, and vice versa. This also means that the sound inherits all of the strange and intriguing behaviors of deterministic chaos that will be discussed in the text below.
The first step in unpacking Lorenz's description is the acknowledgement that chaos is embedded within an irreversible temporal axis. Then the notion of determinism is discussed, followed by the more ambiguous notion of the approximate. When each of these elements meet, an interference pattern emerges that highlights the rich potentialities that can be utilized when creating artistic works that are informed by these chaotic processes. They require an explorative, curiosity-driven, imaginative, and attentive mindset that could be described as a rigorous and active form of wondering. In the second half of this text, various aspects of this wondering will be further explored.
The Present & The Future
“For time changes the nature of the whole world, and one phase must be succeeded by the next; there is no thing that stays the same. Everything flows. Nature makes everything alter, for as one thing grows feeble with old age and starts to falter, another strengthens, emerging from obscurity.”
T. Lucretius (2015, 282)
“We have first to make up our minds whether time is to be found in nature or nature is to be found in time.”
Two words are featured prominently in Lorenz's description of chaos: the present and the future. Chaos is in motion, ongoing, carrying on, and traveling onwards through time. To take a snapshot of a chaotic process, capturing it like a still frame, does not do justice to what is actually happening. Turbulence, instabilities, and dynamic shifts occur within durations, as events through time. Chaotic processes are always changing, differing, and pushing away from what is known in the present, toward an uncertain future.
“You don’t ever get time [...] physics does not observe time. It only observes stuff happening. There is no time observation, as you can never observe time itself. You can only observe disintegrating atoms, stars rising, the sun setting. You can’t observe time. And that is important because I think there is a kind of naive belief that time is somehow obvious. It’s so common for our experience that we think it’s just something there, and then clocks and all this technology of time reinforces that idea, when in fact it’s a construction. Clocks aren’t time, they are just dependable events.”
Music, as a quintessential temporal art form, can similarly never be separated out from its thrust toward the future. Oscillations, vibrations, and resonances are all pointing to active processes, describing ongoing movements or events. If music can be defined as organized sound, then that organizing can only take place along two temporal vectors: vertically, with sounds happening simultaneously, overlapping, blending, mixing in time; or horizontally, specifying duration, succession, repetition, or difference over time. It takes time to listen to sounds attentively. Exploring the intersections of both chaos and music involves acknowledging the durations of each.
There are distinctions between our sensory, perceptual, and conscious experience of time. The raw, unformatted sensorial input streams would probably bring very little clarity to our conscious selves. In order to be of any use, the senses need to be processed to make any sense. Our perception does much of the heavy lifting, connecting the dots between our future predictions and present sensations through vast networks of memories, associations, and assumptions. The result of this process feeds into a conscious experience of time. However, the borders between these modes of experience are fuzzy, and difficult to separate, especially when confronted with chaotic unpredictabilities.
“Our ‘present’ does not extend throughout the universe. It is like a bubble around us.”
While clocks give off the impression of a steadfast and precise passing of time, our own temporal trajectories appear to speed up or slow down, stretch, or contract. Time can fly by, but it can also grind to a near halt. When it comes to experiencing chaotic music, it is not just about listening tothe sounds as they enter the ears in time. Instead, it involves a listening informed by wonder, concerned with how sounds connect through time. It is about attempting to make sense of the sensorial, by joining: what has-happened to that which is yet-to-happen; and what could-still-happen to that what might-have-happened.
“There is always an extent of time that is part of the musical gesture.”
Sonic experience is not so much about the static encounter of pressure waves, it is about being dragged along by its currents; being pulled underneath a jet stream, lost in ongoing durations. These moments, becoming engulfed in the vastness of sounds, are profoundly moving experiences. If music really is math, it appears that the most appealing results are found in exactly those areas where the numbers do not add up, when the sum is greater than its parts.
“The intellect functions primarily through recognition, through organizing material by what is already known. The intellect thus tends to submit the unknown to the principles of the known, not only to recognize but to precognize, anticipate in advance, what is to come.”
Submitting the unknown, to the principles of the known, is not a flawless methodology. It can quickly become destabilized when chaotic complexities are enfolded within experience. Durations may be riddled with nonlinearities, leading to a range of confusions: getting stuck in moments, glimpses of memories, daydreaming, and becoming overwhelmed when failing to understand contradictory information. The artist Tony Conrad discusses some of these confusions in an essay about duration in art:
“Short events may be perceived, but the registering of these events itself takes time. This means that a sequence of short durations, of very short events, will not be registered as such, but as a single duration that is indeterminately longer than the duration of each individual event. In mathematical terms, then, durations are nonlinear.”
Perhaps the confidence in what is known is only a thin veneer, covering a much more elaborate body of doubt. Acknowledging this leads to an open invitation to vulnerability, risk-taking, and a willingness to accept the limitations of prediction as we encounter novel situations. This is useful because chaos moves beyond concepts of normative and disruption; the possibility of a collapse is always imminent, implemented within the normative. In this light, the perception of the present does not move forward in lock-step, but progresses more like a whirlpool, a vortex, stirring up memories, imaginations, our sensory experiences, and blending them together into a comprehensible chronology. On top of this, this vortex itself is able to expand and contract, adjusting itself to the situation at hand as our levels of alertness ebb and flow.
“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”
Confronted with chaos, we come to our senses: contracting perceptions, and focusing consciously on the current. These precise moments when perception suddenly contracts, leave traces in memory. They reveal an aesthetic landscape of a vast potential, all of which can be explored through the playful encounter with chaotic sonic expressions.
With & Within
There is a specific feature of chaotic musicking that warrants an elaboration, and the following writing is my attempt to capture this feature. This particular feature is highly confusing due to its unstable and nonlinear nature, and language can be a challenging medium to discuss it.
Any influence that affects a chaotic process that goes on within an environment, will also cause that chaotic process to influence and affect that environment in return, resulting in a second-order process of self-balancing. The chaotic process and the environment are rearranged, establishing new relationships toward one another. It is as if one writes a sentence in a language, which then not only conveys a meaning within that language, but simultaneously alters the language as a whole, which in turn alters the meaning of the sentence that was written in the first place. Playing with a chaotic process, within an environment, leads to an upset of this environment. This instantaneously triggers a reconfiguration of the chaotic process within that changed environment. This reconfiguration requires a recounting of the changed state of affairs that the act of playing has affected, as it can then become the ground upon which new acts of play are initiated.
“it is important to recognise that properties that we often associate with a part are actually relational properties and therefore are properties of the system rather than of the part.”
R. Thomasi (2022)
The quote above captures a sense of the complexities involved, but fails to really highlight the importance of the real-time nature. Within the context of chaos, events do not tend to happen one at a time, but they rather happen all at once, forming multiplicities. Descriptions of such events seem to imply a structured causal chain of events, but as they take place it can be impossible to unravel how the links are connected. Going back to the linguistic example of writing a sentence, imagine that each attempt at jotting down a letter or sign, not only destabilizes the alphabet, but also reshapes the pen that is used to write with. It is not so much about getting to the end of the sentence, as something that is thought out and planned in advance, but the act of writing itself is what is put into question while the writing is ongoing. Wondering then, does not follow acts of playing, but is embedded within play as part of the same activity.
Musically speaking then, each and every gesture affecting the sound, enacts a multitude of differences, and not just to the particular character of the sound itself. It also enacts changes within the underlying processes (for example individual modules of a modular synth), and environments (for example the patched modular synth) that are responsible for the creation of that sound. As a knob is moved, the voltage range, that is associated with the circuit that connects to that potentiometer, is altered. This change in voltage then travels through the surrounding circuits, through various patch cables, affecting additional voltage relationships at various points within the instrument. Now these additional points are again connected to a further network of connections within the instrument, eventually closing a feedback loop as the voltages return to the part of the circuit that was altered in the first place. This entire chain of reactions occurs within a fraction of a second. Before we can actually listen to the sonic results of the performative action, the instrument has reconfigured itself: changing the electronic relationships that are responsible for the vibrations in the speakers that are the purpose of the whole endeavor.
This aspect of reconfiguration also influences various choices concerning the visual design of the instruments that are developed as part of the research. Instead of a clear labeling of individual functions, a much more abstract, symbolic, and visual language is used. The focus here is not on what a particular knob or fader does, but rather how it is connected to the larger meshwork of functionalities. Within each reconfiguration, the actual function of a parameter on the overall sound may be changed radically. Either it takes on a significant role, or it barely has any influence. Abstract symbols reflect the open character of the instrument, and can be interpreted in multiple ways depending on the sonic behaviors. How to engage with these complex interconnected processes will be elaborated in the second half of this chapter.
The Approximate Future
“[...] perception itself is a kind of controlled hallucination. Our brains try to guess what is out there, and to the extent that that guessing accommodates the sensory barrage, we perceive the world.”
Andy Clark (2019, 14)
Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark writes in his book Surfing Uncertainty, on the perceptual strategies used by humans and non-humans alike to make some sense about the environments and situations that are encountered. As a proponent of predictive processing, Clark places perception, not solely in the past (as purely an analysis of the barrage of the sensorial inputs), but rather just ahead in the future, reaching forward in the attempt to perceive a world through informed guesses. The predictions or guesses that are made, are subsequently corrected by the senses through a mechanism of prediction error. The error messages function as a bottom up response to the predictions that come in from the top down.
“The purpose of the prediction response is to provide positive and negative inducements that encourage the formation of accurate expectations.”
D. Huron (2006, 30)
The emphasis on a shift of the perceptual activities away from the past and toward the future, connects well with the intuitive, anticipatory, and curiosity-driven forms of wondering that will be elaborated upon in later chapters of this text. However, there is an important difference between wondering and predicting, especially within a chaotic context that, if anything, is best described as unpredictable. Living within anticipation and leaning toward the future is one thing. But, if the approximate present does not approximately determine the future, then how can the guesswork ever become informed well enough? In other words, how to deal with the shadowy, approximate futures that Lorenz puts forward?
The crux of the issue lies in the term un-pre-dict-able, which warrants a further investigation as it is an important aspect of deterministic chaos. Sometimes a single word is really an entire sentence. Unfolding this word in reverse order, we can start with able, or ability. To have an ability is granting an opportunity for action, something to do. Probing the future is an active pursuit, harnessing the forward momentum of the flow of time to reach out beyond the current. Without this ability, or this doing, we would have to passively wait for the future to arrive, for the future to become the now. This waiting would leave us wholly unprepared for whatever the future holds, becoming reactive instead of proactive. Dict, or dictum, points to making statements or assertions. It is easy enough to make assertions about things as they happen or about things from the recent past. But, things get more ambiguous when these assertions are made about events on which our knowledge is in some way obscured. Temporally speaking, this is true for the ancient past, but equally, or perhaps even more so, about what has yet to pass. Pre, or before, addresses this very point. It implies a possibility to assert knowledge about things before they transpire. To predict, is a form of asserting before things can be asserted. These predictions can be seen as informed guesses, based perhaps on prior experiences of events that appear to mirror some of the circumstances that are at play. And then we arrive at the prefix un, or the polar opposite. When something is unpredictable, we lose our ability to make assertions beforehand.
When chaos is in effect, and knowledge on the present is only approximate at best, the future cannot really be determined by approximation, turning prediction into a hopeless pursuit. But what happens to prediction when the hypotheses, and guesses, point to a likelihood of success approaching the toss of a coin? Prediction errors, rather than refining perceptions, overshadows everything, leading to states of confusion. Yet the experience of chaos is much richer than just that of anxiety. The ambiguous nature of chaos may confuse for sure, but at the same time, offers up an open canvas for novel meanings to emerge. When order breaks down into disorder, prediction gives way to wondering.
Predictive processing offers an inspiring shift in the temporal position of perception from past to future. Within the context of my research, however, it seems to struggle to capture the counterintuitive, self-contradictory, and complex situations that are chaotic. Perhaps the view of a brain as a processor is part of the issue, constraining perception to the algorithmic. While it is fully possible to write software on a computer that encodes algorithms for prediction, it proves impossible to provide an algorithm for wonder or for astonishment. The less-than-approximate present conceals the variables needed to predict what will come to pass. This means that attention and concentration are vital tools, not so much to know or claim to know in advance, but to allow wonder to spill out in front.
As I listen, my attention is more and more directed towards a sense of slowness. In fact, there are several different waves present in the sound, all bouncing off each other, pushing, and pulling. Glancing over the controls at my disposal, I gravitate towards enacting an exaggeration of this aspect of slowness. As the frequencies are gently lowered, some peculiar behaviors suddenly emerge. Due to the web-like, networked connectivity of the various modules that make up the synth, a singular action tends to invite a myriad responses. The sounds never quite follow along, and instead, possible trajectories are recalibrated, corresponding to a freshly opened temporal void. An entirely different voice appears out of nowhere, speaking in some unconnected dialect. Uncharted territories. Squinting my eyes, all focus is drawn to the ear, attempting to listen along with the novel sonic expressions…
From Approximation To Proximity
“[...] the pure present being the invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future.”
H. Bergson (2010, 194)
The French philosopher Henri Bergson has devoted an important part of his philosophical writings on durée or duration, which is how the movement of time is experienced. The past gnawing into the future, is describing the present as a length of time, as a duration, and as such, it becomes possible to ask questions regarding the extent of that duration. As it turns out, duration is flexible and able to extend and contract, as Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explains in her book The Nick of Time, discussing Bergsonian duration:
“The present, then, is not an instant, a measurable and regulated moment; it is a dynamic concept that extends itself to include the fringes that touch both past and present. The length of the present varies according to the continuity that it assumes, the duration it occupies.”
E. Grosz (2004, 177)
But how does the future factor into this flexibility, especially within conditions that are unstable and out of control? Distance matters. Our temporal proximity to events corresponds with their sense of realness. As we venture further, either into history or towards unforeseen far futures, everything eventually distorts, and is subjected to the imagination. The distant past and future are always subject to speculation. The immediate past and future, however, remain coherent as part of a shorter but continuous duration. In times of chaos, when conditions are unclear, the present contracts to closely align with the senses. Perhaps, the closer we are to our perceptual now, the stronger our foundations will be to intuit our anticipations. This suggestion can be further investigated through the concept of the adjacent possible.
The Mirage
Wonder alludes to a rigorous engagement with the unknowability of the future trajectories of sonic expressions, yet without making any judgements ahead of time. It is a wondering that extends towards an adjacent possible future in flux, due to chaos. The focus is always set just beyond that which is given, and beyond that which is known in advance; in an attempt to venture closer to that which is shimmering faintly up ahead, as a mirage. This mirage suggests an existing logic, but one that is too ephemeral, and too ambiguous to wrap my head around. On closer inspection, the logic falls apart and reforms in a manner that eludes my understanding, yet triggers my imagination and extends this sense of wonder.
Even when the chaos takes hold, even in the midst of a collapse, there remains a sliver of sense, a sliver of the underlying system. It is precisely there that the aesthetic appeal of chaos emerges. The listener is now confronted with a mirage. There is an unnerving sense of an unfolding logic that is perpetually just out of reach. It shimmers on the horizon, enticing, compelling one to explore just a little further. But as one approaches, the pattern dissolves and morphs into a new sign of potential, be it again, just beyond reach. A semblance of order that collapses under inspection, only to reappear again in the distance. It is exactly this seductive movement that puts the listener to work. Chaos rejects a passive listening to… and favors a form of listening that mines the sonic behaviors for meaning, hidden within the mirage. The puzzlement of randomness is exchanged for curiosity and wonder. This emergent meaning is not set in stone but rather functions as a point of departure for a discourse that extends well beyond the duration of the performance. These active forms of listening are depending on an ability to focus attention towards microscopic details of the morphologic structures, unfolding within the music. It requires learning to appreciate the particularities of the prosody that characterizes the voice of the instrument. Also, to develop a musical taste that interrogates the specific nature of how each sonic event comes into existence: how it shakes, trembles, and changes until it eventually dissolves as it transforms into what comes next. This focus on the microscopic is interestingly, and almost ironically, paired with forms of play and influence that are distinctly macroscopic in nature. Due to the recursive interconnections, it is impossible to isolate particular features that are present in the music. The sounds cannot be reduced to their constitutive parts. Changing a parameter automatically triggers a rippling effect, destabilizing the orbit on which the sound is based. Chain reactions may ensue that end up in friction. Exerting an influence upon these tensions, shakes the grounds upon which music is built. The mirage fades away and gets replaced by new wavering promises, shimmering just ahead in the distance.
Chapter V
Reflection
Wondering Through Turbulences
Wonder-driven exploration in encounters with sonic chaos
When The Present Determines The Future
“Hope and fear, joy and disillusion, obtain their meaning from the potentialities essential in the nature of things. We are following a trail in hope, or are fleeing from the pursuit in fear. The potentialities in immediate fact constitute the driving force of process.”
The first part of Lorenz’s definition places chaos firmly in the realm of determinacy. The present determines the future. This is a highly significant claim that warrants some additional commentary. There are (at least) two important observations that are relevant to my practice and research. First, to continue the thread of the last paragraph, Lorenz sketches the outlines of an arrow of time, as the present is a necessary ingredient in determining what the future will hold. Nothing ever sits quite still, as the world is buzzing with processes of change. Examining these processes of change more closely, a tendency reveals itself. As time progresses, entropy tends to increase, and disorder triumphs over order:
“As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness.”
This universal tendency towards an ever-increasing entropy is the only discovery in physics that points to the arrow of time, the movement away from history and towards the future. Examining entropy from a sonic perspective could lead to the following observation: Once a sonic pressure wave has departed its source, it bounces against everything it encounters, reverberating in all directions, and diffusing as it travels along until silence is all that remains. No echo ever reverts to the clarity of its source without some external force helping it along. Resonance helps us to extend the duration of the sounds we emit, and technologies can be employed to artificially amplify these resonances. This is what is meant by the tendency of entropy to increase. Given enough reinforcement, there can be exemptions from the descent into chaos. The open-ended process of evolution could be seen as such: life can flourish, creating pockets of elaborate forms of order.
“[...] the same nonlinearities may produce an order out of the chaos of elementary processes and still, under different circumstances, be responsible for the destruction of this same order, eventually producing a new coherence beyond another bifurcation.”
I. Prigogine, I. Stengers (1984, 207)
Taken together, entropy and evolution create an intriguing field of tension. One leads toward an increase in disorder and chaos while the other leads to complex forms of order. The exchange between these movements tells a story of a future in flux. While it is determined by the present, the future itself is an unforeseeable development, built upon the friction between entropic decay and evolutionary emergence. It is as such not possible to skip ahead in time and have a peak at how things will play out further along. Of course, it is also not possible to move in the opposite direction, toward the past. The future does not determine the present, and likewise, the present also does not determine the past. But we can state that the present must allow for the future to become. This line of thought begs the question; What happens when we encounter something that breaches our expectations? Something that seems to come out of nowhere? Something that catches us by surprise? An appeal to the supernatural realm is fortunately not in order here, as the turbulent characteristics of chaotic processes are perfectly natural phenomena. The philosopher George Herbert Mead provides the means to deal with these kinds of situations. In his book, Philosophy of the Present, he poses the following remark:
“And the novelty of every future, demands a novel past.”
G. H. Mead (1932, 59)
This seems like a contradiction, as we have just concluded that we can not physically travel back in time, to recreate the past anew, but Mead is pointing to something different here. The novel past implies a mental exercise, not a physical one. Through our memories, we have a possibility to re-examine, to re-evaluate what has come to pass in light of the current passage, and in doing so, the breach of expectation becomes mended through a refactoring of meaning. It is about thinking back, or rather a rethinking of the past, reconsidering the values attributed to the multiplicity of events that have come to pass. Perceiving the present entails a whirling movement, a vortex that bounces back and forth between reminiscence and anticipation, which the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz poetically describes as follows:
“[The present] remains fractured and refracted through reminiscence and anticipation, the murmurs of the past and the potential of future.”
Elizabeth Grosz (2004, 251)
Within a musical performance with an instrument based on chaotic processes, these kinds of fractures and refractions are always ongoing. Continual wonderings follow the current sonic behaviors, while relating to what has come before, and questioning how things are going to evolve onwards. Listening is therefore not just directed at a single, linear, sensorial stream of sound, but is instead a complex and multi-angled endeavor, connecting countless layers of sonic relations. These relations comprise all various patterns that we either uncover, impose, imagine, and are reminded of. To really listen then, is so much more than just following the sonic events as they vibrate the eardrums. It is thinking, and rethinking through sound, and along with sound: an exercise undertaken by each individual that is present during a performance. Performers and audiences alike, use their memories, lived experiences, curiosities, and wonderings, while the performance itself actively enriches these very experiences, conjuring up new curiosities that form a springboard from where the wondering continues.
“Quantum Listening is listening in as many ways as possible simultaneously - changing and being changed by the listening.”
P. Oliveros (2022, 30)
Listening, the central activity within my practice, is not just about encountering sounds. It involves exploring and uncovering sonic patterns, aligning a narrow window into a multiplicity of events, with lived experiences, vivid evocations, and intuitions. Wonderings that spring forth in anticipation of an uncertain future. Listening is situated within a blend of sounds that have passed, sounds that are present, sounds that lie ahead, and sounds that could have been, but may never come to pass.
The definition given by Lorenz, firmly establishes chaos as deterministic. This means that chaos is something radically different from randomness. There is always an underlying system at play. Chaos embeds a form of memory that influences the possibility space that determines what can become. At each given duration of time, chaos behaves as its underlying system demands. This means that however complex, strange, and confusing these behaviors may seem, there is never a supernatural intervention. Hindsight will show that however improbable, or unlikely, each happening has taken place within the possibility space that was available at the time. It shows that assumptions about what might emerge, are most often only a fraction of what is actually possible. As such, the deterministic underpinnings of chaos may serve as a useful upset to these assumptions. It functions as a meaningful reshuffling of the list of things that are taken for granted. Deterministic chaos serves as a reminder that the universe is more elaborate than any given perception or representation of it can ever convey.
The Adjacent Possible
The adjacent possible is a concept introduced by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. The idea is straightforward, but there are some aspects of it that are highly relevant to the chaotic complexities that are at play within my practice. Simply put: Every present state, every moment that we experience, has a range of possible future developments associated with it, which is called the adjacent possible:
“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”
Steven Johnson (2010, 31)
The metaphor of the shadow future is a powerful one, as this map of reinvention is perpetually shrouded in the shadows cast by the sheer amount of possibles. As events occur (as they become actual), there are always more events that were equally possible, perhaps even likely, or nearly inevitable, that for whatever reason may never come to pass (and thus remain virtual in Bergsonian terms). The possible is an excess, an abundance, capable of hiding what actually happens among countless variations and differences. There are always more things that could become, compared to those that do actually become.
“Thus, not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen.”
Stuart Kauffman (2016, 77)
This abundance is impossible to measure in advance, however, it is at the same time not completely boundless. The adjacent possible is a large space, but there are still some limits to its dimensions. These limitations are set by the conditions of the present, combined with the many ways in which these conditions are able to unfold within our universe. Centuries of scientific progress have provided a vast number of models that describe many of the manners in which events are able to unfold. But this does not mean that we are fully in the know of what is to come. Within the universe, there are countless processes all happening at once, affecting one another in countless different ways. This vast complexity, combined with the notion that at least some of these processes behave in chaotic and unpredictable ways, means that it is not possible to accurately measure the dimensions of the entire possibility space. The limits are unknown because the adjacent possible is beyond measure, meaning that there is always a potential for astonishing developments. However, it also implies that distant possibility spaces remain out of reach, and wonder gradually loses its criticality the further it wanders away from the present.
“The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers in new combinations into the adjacent possible.”
S. Johnsen (2010, 31)
It is exactly this adjacent possible that occupies my thinking throughout the process of building instruments, developing compositional strategies, and during performances. This implies that there is genuinely no final form or distant goal in mind as the work progresses. Instead, there are hunches, curiosities, fascinations, adaptations, revisions, experiments, and other kinds of explorations. They are grounded in the current state of things, but spill outwards from there. Taken together it inspires a methodology that could best be described as tinkering. This tinkering focuses on actual things, (like circuits and prototypes), or events (like sonic behaviors or processes involving electronic currents and flows). It produces many questions that do not necessarily require answers, but rather function as the nourishment of a steady stream of further possible elaborations. Tinkering in this sense could be viewed as a practical application of wondering.
Concerts, in this sense, are windows into this process of tinkering, which itself could be seen as a performative form of wondering: a sharing of the present state of the instrument, informed by the present thoughts on form, gesture, timbre, dynamics, while remaining open to the wondrous developments. As an example, in a concert, as part of my trial defense, there occurred a wholly unexpected chance discovery about halfway through the performance. The spring reverb, built into the body of the instrument, was suddenly incredibly sensitive. It affected the sonic behaviors that emanated from the speakers in a manner that had never happened during the many prior months of playful practice. Right at that moment, a new sound emerged, along with new possible gestures, new forms of play, and new spaces of possibility and potential.
The first part of this chapter has focussed primarily on a rather extensive unpacking of one single sentence, opening up a wide array of elaborations regarding each individual element contained within it. What emerges at the other end, is the realization that within the context of deterministic chaos, the future is not merely surprising, but rather shrouded in the shadows of the unforeseen. The present can only ever be known in approximation, and as Lorenz describes, this approximation is never detailed enough to allow for the future to be predicted with certainty. However, while nothing can be stated with certainty before it comes to pass, there is still room for the imagination to gaze ahead. There is still room for an open exploration that embraces uncertainty. There is still room to become curious and attentive toward potential hidden clues that hint at what might come up ahead. There is still room to be astonished. The second part of this chapter will explore this sense of wondering. It will discuss both its limitations and its potential to become a viable approach to an artistic practice that engages with chaotic processes: within the design of instruments, the development of compositional strategies, and performances.
Chaotic sound does not behave any differently. The musical instruments, based on the principles of nonlinear feedback, inherit all the frictions and tensions within their operation. Imagine the circuit board of a feed-back based synthesizer, as an elaborate network of obstructions that cause a turmoil among the electrons trying to make their way toward the ground terminal. It is exactly this turmoil that is tapped into and used to drive the speakers, opening a sonic window into this very process. The instruments are exposing the turbulence through their sonic artifacts. Listening in to these artifacts reveals something that is perhaps jittery, volatile, fragile, and noisy. Yet, at the same time, it is something very different from noise.
s.waitForBoot{
Ndef(\chaos, {
|lfo_1_mul = 1000, lfo_2_mul = 2000|
var pitchRecursion, ampRecursion, lfo_1, lfo_2, tone;
pitchRecursion = ZeroCrossing.ar(Ndef(\chaos).ar);
ampRecursion = Amplitude.ar(Ndef(\chaos).ar);
lfo_1 = (LFPulse.ar(pitchRecursion * 0.01, pi, 0.1)) * lfo_1_mul;
lfo_2 = (SinOsc.ar((pitchRecursion + 0.01).reciprocal, 0, -1, -1)) * lfo_2_mul;
tone = LeakDC.ar(Saw.ar(lfo_1 + lfo_2 + pitchRecursion)).tanh;
}).play;
s.scope;
}
SuperCollider example code implementing a recursive, chaotic process.
Noise is in itself as much a description of a sound (in the sense of disordered complexity), as it is a concept that describes an oppositional relationship to what is considered a signal (in the sense of signal to noise ratios). While there are cases where these two definitions overlap, something different is happening when noise is regarded as a foundational component to music. Instead of noise obstructing some form of signal, it is the obstruction itself that is signaling. The tension and turmoil becomes precisely the aesthetic quality that is sought after, and the processes that disturb are meticulously injected into the sonic environment to cause a racket.
“Noise is the term for a signal that interferes with the reception of a message by a receiver, even if the interfering signal itself has a meaning for that receiver. Long before it was given this theoretical expression, noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code structuring messages.”
J. Attali (1985, 27)
In chaotic processes, when tipping points are surpassed, erratic and volatile behaviors emerge. Each time such a tipping point is crossed, a renegotiation takes hold: a scrambling of what it means for a signal to become significant and for noise to become noisy. There are countless tipping points where the sonic behavior suddenly becomes complex. As chaotic processes are sensitive, even minute changes can lead to radically different behaviors. There are also situations in which the process gets lost in regions that remain unstable and unpredictable.
“Beyond a certain point, the 'point of accumulation,' periodicity gives way to chaos, fluctuations that never settle down at all.”
J. Gleick (1987, 73)
At other instances, the erratic and volatile behaviors do not endure but are rather a temporary transition phase until a new quasi-stability is found. These renegotiations take up time, and represent either brief or extensive durations of volatility in which pockets of sounds emerge which are neither noise nor signal, but perhaps something else that encompasses both. The instrument designer Rob Hordijk describes this process as follows in his paper, "The Blippoo Box: A Chaotic Electronic Music Instrument, Bent by Design":
“While the chaos oscillator is producing such a pattern it is in a stable state. A small variation in a controlling parameter should disturb the stable state, forcing the oscillator into a transition phase. During such a transition it will produce a series of apparently random values, until at a certain moment it becomes attracted and caught into another repeating pattern.”
R. Hordijk (2009, 37)
These pockets of sounds that arise at transition phases as Hordijk refers to them, can be seen as a form of pre-music. If listening to sounds as music involves an uncovering of patterns, then tipping points are both the scrambling and reconstitution of patterning. Within these sonic regions there is a wealth of sound to encounter. Sounds that do not yet make sense, as they are in the process of sense-making; a process of becoming meaningful. It opens up the possibility to encounter glimpses of chaotic instability revealing itself, showing its real nature. Here, signals obscure the noises that obstruct the signals in an ongoing loop, like a vortex swirling around until the flow somehow calms itself down again.
“The unpredictability of the instrument requires an attitude of obedience and resignation to the system and the sounds it produces.”
T. Nakamura (2022)
“I try to find out what’s there—not to make it do what I want, but to release what’s there. The object should teach you what it wants to hear.”
“[...] trying to remind ourselves that the controlling talent that we have must be balanced by the surrendering talent that we also have.”
B. Eno (2011)
Artists and composers working with chaos tend to highlight attitudes of surrender to the processes that define their practices. However, it would be a mistake to identify these attitudes as passivity. Allowing processes to run amok, requires the utmost attention. It asks for careful attention to the details that are hidden among the turbulence. At any moment, these details could become a leading element, pulling the process toward an unforeseen equilibrium that separates signal from noise, allowing noisiness to obtain meaningful relations to the formation of patterns. Without this attention, the sonic behaviors only resemble an arbitrary succession of noises, never quite coalescing, and never quite becoming recognized as music.
When exploring and wondering constitute the core of an artistic practice, chaotic processes become a rewarding ally, providing an endless stream of avenues to uncover. Oddly enough, the most efficient method to create a technology that is: responsive and ephemeral, compelling and ambiguous, enchanting and volatile, is to allow chaos to infiltrate and reshape the processes of creation. Frictions and tensions result in beautiful interference patterns that continuously destabilize, collapse, and re-stabilize again.
The Approximate Present
In the second part of Lorenz's description of deterministic chaos, the word approximate enters twice: once pointing to the present, and once toward the future. But what is meant by this notion of approximation, and why is it so important to define chaos? To get an overview, the focus will first unpack the approximate present where there are three important concepts to be uncovered, each with their own relations to chaos. First the concept of reductionism is examined, then a discussion of sensitivity follows, eventually reaching the conditions that are treated with such sensitive care.
Reductionism is arguably one of the most important strategies employed to further the progress of knowledge. Instead of tackling a large and complex process all at once, reductionism is a move that reduces the complexity by dissecting the original process into ever smaller sub-sets of processes: each conveniently being much simpler to understand. This conversion, from large and complex to small and simple, has enabled science to create models that closely follow the natural processes that are subjected to reduction. To put it in other words, the models approximate the processes at play. But as Lorenz explains, an approximation is never close enough. Reducing the present to a model, removes the basis for its contingency toward the future within chaotic processes. As Lorenz himself can attest, even the smallest rounding errors can set off a chain reaction that eventually causes the behaviors of the processes to rampantly diverge.
This brings forth the second aspect, that of sensitivity. Whenever reductions are being made, slight differences between what actually happens and what the reductive model captures, always creep in. In many cases, these differences are inconsequential as they remain within very close margins. However, something else happens when the processes that are modeled are chaotic in nature. The slight differences cause a rippling effect, magnifying the impact on the overall behaviors of the process. Before long, the entire process has shifted in unforeseen ways. Details matter, as sensitivity points to the significance of including all the interconnected variables that operate within the chaotic processes. This peculiar aspect of sensitivity is famously referred to as the "Butterfly Effect." Stemming from a thought experiment about sensitivity, the idea is that the flap from the wing of a butterfly, displacing only a minute whiff of air, could set in motion a chain of events that could eventually influence the path of a tornado. Taking sensitivity into account means that approximations will always fall short in the long run. The actual present can never be substituted with an approximation.
The variables and conditions that affect chaotic processes are so sensitive that they can not be reduced, rounded up or down, or approximated, without losing track of the contingent relationship between present and future. Within the scientific field of chaos theory, this is generally referred to as a sensitivity to initial conditions, and counts as one of the most important indicators that can tell whether a process or system is indeed chaotic. The inclusion of the term initial makes a lot of sense in mathematical models of chaos, where recursive trajectories are calculated by a computer, plotting out the results for each iteration. The model is fed a range of initial conditions that are then left alone as the calculations are being done. While this approach is highly useful within the scientific and mathematical research on chaos, when chaos is encountered in the wider context of the real world there are two questions that arise.
The first question that could be asked has to do with delimitation. It can be hard, perhaps impossible, to discern what influences a chaotic process, and what can be neglected. To give a practical sonic example, there is the practice of no-input-mixing. As the name suggests, there are no external inputs being mixed. Instead, the outputs of the mixer are fed back into itself, creating a feedback loop. Logically, nothing should happen as the volume is turned up. There is no sound to begin with. Nothing comes out of the output and nothing comes back to the input. Thus, the whole exercise should be useless. A computer model of this concept confirms that everything remains silent.
/*
Example of a model of no-input-mixing without noise, resulting in silence
*/
s.waitForBoot{
~no_input = {Out.ar(30, InFeedback.ar(30))}.play;
~listen = {Out.ar(0, InFeedback.ar(30))}.play;
}
example code written in the audio programming language Supercollider.
However, when cables are plugged into an analog mixer and the volume goes up, a loud, harsh tone blasts out of the speakers. What happened? As it turns out, the mixer in question is not a perfect machine, and within the circuit there are minor inefficiencies that cause a barely noticeable amount of noise. This is exactly the missing ingredient. It is the seed that allows the feedback loop to quickly grow and manifest itself, not as an amplification of the noise that sets things in motion, but rather, a frequency related to the resonant properties of the mixer in question. In most explanations of no-input-mixing, this element of noise is overlooked as it only acts as the first little ignition to set things in motion. Nonetheless, it is a vital ingredient. Without it, we are left with only a lifeless silence to listen to.
/*
Example of a model of no-input-mixing with noise, resulting in oscillation
*/
s.waitForBoot{
~no_input = {Out.ar(30, InFeedback.ar(30) + WhiteNoise.ar(0.0001))}.play;
~listen = {Out.ar(0, InFeedback.ar(30))}.play;
}
Example code written in the audio programming language Supercollider.
Going back to the idea of initial conditions, a further examination of the term initial is warranted. Just as it can be difficult to discern which conditions are essential, there is also no reason to suggest that these conditions might not be subject to change themselves, as the chaotic process is carrying on. In fact, within the context of chaotic live electronics, changing the conditions is exactly what it means to play with the instrument. Influencing the conditions, or parameter space, of the ongoing chaotic processes, introduces additional complex developments within the sonic behaviors that the instrument brings forth. This playful influence allows for an exploration of the astonishingly diverse sonic universes that the chaotic process produces. It also forms an additional feedback loop that runs: from the chaotic circuit, through the amplifier, vibrating the speaker, and the air; to reaching the ear of the performer, being converted into a range of gestures directed toward the various knobs and faders on top of the instrument; and finally, to changing the conditions down in the chaotic circuits underneath again. This feedback loop integrates the performer into a larger sonic ecosystem, consisting of many corresponding elements that together end up making the music.
Wondering
“Art can bring wonder and pleasure in unexpected ways, and whether the artist intended each possible road to wonder is not as important as whether a viewer can find that wonder.”
J. Green (2022)
“[...] wonder is perhaps best described as a mode of consciousness in which we experience that which we perceive or are contemplating as strange, deeply other or mysterious, fundamentally beyond the limits of our understanding, yet worthy of attention for its own sake.”
There are multiple facets to the term wonder. It points to a sense of the mystical (the wondrous), to astonishment (the wonderful), and as an activity (wondering in itself) there is a correspondence to curiosity. Each of these notions has an important role to play in order to make sense of the forms of wondering that are at play throughout my practice.
To encounter the wondrous, is to become enthralled with that which is not yet understood. It is an evocation that arises through the encounter with something that exceeds expectation. The wondrous event has a tendency to place a spell on perceptions, allowing for a window of time in which it is possible to forego quick conclusions, or value judgements, and instead opting to linger within the unknown for just a bit longer. These situations have been called miraculous, but it is rather the inability to comprehend the complexities of what is experienced. The wondrous sound event seduces me to linger within a feeling of enchantment. Extended durations of uncertainty are potentially dangerous out in the open, but they are exactly the kinds of things to explore in the context of a chaos centered art practice.
“The experience of wonder is complex, compromising (usually) some mixture of surprise, bafflement (a felt inability to understand whatever gave rise to one’s wonder), a sense of the importance of what one is contemplating, and a desire or felt need to dwell on the object of wonder, to stay with it, keep attending to it.”
Within my artistic practice there is a performative strategy that is recurring in most of my works. The strategy, which is referred to as States, consists of two parts. First, a chaotic instrument is actively played. Through performative interactions, sparked by curiosity, the instrument is influenced until it reaches a state of sonic behaviors that catch the attention. Then the performer stops influencing the instrument, resisting the urge to continue with performative interferences. Instead, the instrument is given space to sound out unimpeded; to present itself to the audience and the performer alike, who are listening in wonder. After some time has passed, the performer may choose to influence the instrument again, bringing about new states to be attended to through active listening. These moments, when the instrument sounds on its own, often capture a sense of the wondrous. The sonic behaviors that develop by itself, and through itself, have an enchanting quality.
“To be enchanted is never to be awestruck, but it is perpetually to be filled with wonder.”
T. Ingold (2022, 129)
There is a dualism in the admiration of the wonderful. Generally speaking, in situations marked by uncertainty, senses of vulnerability and risk tend to creep up. Rather than marveling in uncertainty, it is probably safer to shy away, to find a safe vantage point from where the situation can be reassessed. Yet, whatever is full of wonder, invokes a strange attraction: an urge to reach out for that which is just out of grasp, capturing undivided attention. It is about giving up control and experiencing moments of astonishment despite the dangers and risks that may be involved. Instead of passively conceptualizing the term, wonderful, as a state suddenly arriving out of thin air (wonderstruck), it is perhaps more of an ongoing development: a duration of becoming filled with wonder.
Wondering takes place in the regions of our experiences and imaginations that are still shrouded in uncertainties and doubt. In fact, there is a seemingly adverse relationship between states of wondering and the accumulation of knowledge. Wondering is an activity that is occupied with uncovering qualities that are hidden or not quite yet in view. As things clear up, and more is known, the increase of knowledge does not push wondering aside, rather, the wondering is reinvigorated, as there are always areas where the dust has not yet settled. To wonder is to engage with the unsettling of the resolved, opening up lines of questioning. When the answers arrive (assuming they ever do), they are enriched by our wondering and infused with further sets of questions, spilling out over areas that remain hidden in virtuality.
“Wonder defamiliarizes the familiar, showing us that their familiarity was in a sense an illusion - or, at any rate, that the concomitant sense of knowing or understanding them was exaggerated at best.”
This relationship between wondering and knowledge should not lead to the conclusion that wonder crumbles under scrutiny. Incoming information and the openness of wondering work side by side to uncover that which is still in flux. Viewed from this perspective, the rigorous form of wondering that is explored here, could be seen as a critical lens through which experience is filtered. Wondering acts as the critical ground for a continuous recommitment of the explorations into the misty trails that lie ahead. To wonder is to point out novel paths of exploration, where potential bubbles up and feeds back into curiosity. Working with chaotic instruments requires a strange form of trust and confidence. Although the situation seems rather hopeless on paper (improvisational performances on unpredictable instruments), within the moment of performance, a musical journey somehow unfolds, shaped through this rigorous form of wondering. It is a trust that although things will not go as planned, they will rather reveal the unheard of. For as long as engagement is present, and attention is given, wonderful music will sound. Wondering actively channels attention, rendering present situations vivid and alive.
Vividness
Every now and then, events occur that startle our perception, exceeding our expectations in a significant way. A jolt of activity sharpens our senses. The now becomes vivid. And, whatever is experienced as vivid, becomes the part of the now that is remarkable enough to remain accessible in memory: informing later actions. The vivid experience leaves a mark within memory, and as such, the experience becomes remarkable. It is now a traceable, marked entity within our past. We can recall what happened, remember the circumstances, revisit the experience, and relive it imaginatively through different lenses.
Vividness transcends temporal boundaries, pulling what we remember from the past, or what we imagine about the future towards the present experience. It can take many forms. One could for example think about, vividly recalling a memory. Or the graphic vividness of horror, shock effects, and jump-scares. Encounters with situations that are marked by chaos may lead to a kind of vividness of vertigo, where certainties quickly evaporate. Vertigo can be caused by a confrontation with the absurd: where things that are usually taken for granted are now put into question, and where experience becomes perplexing. The vivid sensation of vertigo causes the duration of what we consider to be currently happening, also known as the spacious present, to undergo a rapid shift.
“The present must be understood as elastic, capable of expanding itself to include what from the past and immediate future it requires to remain in continuity with itself, to complete its present action.”
E. Grosz (2004, 177)
The present contracts, focusing on the immediate happenings around us, leading to moments of reorientation, and recalibration. It may be confusing, but simultaneously brimming with the potential to encounter terrain that one has not explored before. The vivid experience of vertigo is a first step, leading toward new paths that explore the immediate future, building, and remodeling the narratives that give meaning. Perhaps, it can be seen as the very first acknowledgment that something novel, something unprecedented has occurred. Experiencing something vividly leads to an opening of the senses; to face the chaos, in search for the means to make meaning out of the unforeseen. There is the conscious realization that there are situations that we can not fully comprehend. This is followed by renewed commitments to engage and attend to the elusive processes that mess with anticipation and expectation. Vivid wondering means cementing reference points within the expanses of our memories. Building lighthouses, with beacons bright enough to be recognized from far away; to function as vantage points, following the beams of light into the dimly lit unknown.
Wondering Along
“[...] wonder is both that which comes from the surprise of the unexpected encounter, the productivity of the encounter that defies expectation, as well as that which welcomes the future openly.”
Wondering involves a commitment to face the future with an open frame of mind, withholding judgment, and instilling a hesitation to jump to conclusions. The wonderer takes seriously the complexities involved in the interconnected nature of the environments we find ourselves in. To keep on wondering is to stay clear from the true or false dichotomies of judgments; instead, feeling out the elaborate textures of what is actually happening, before these happenings are compartmentalized into distinct categorizations. It is to fearlessly lean into the unknown, armed with nothing but curiosity. But it is precisely this curiosity that allows the wonderer to inquisitively explore the richness of the adjacent possible, the uncountable ways in which things may play out, and how seemingly insignificant details become the cornerstone of entirely unsuspected future events.
“Everything has greater potential than we initially suspect - or than we can ever fully know.”
I. Bogost (2016, 73)
What emerges is a productive approach, geared toward the exploration of the unknown. Wondering coalesces into a method of practice that proves to be invaluable within my artistic explorations of chaotic processes. Chaos has an innate tendency to escape prediction, to evade stable states, and instead, succumb to the sensitivity of its conditions. Considering this, it becomes clear that wondering about long-term changes may be a lost cause, since those developments are far too ambiguous and could go anywhere. However, a wonder that reaches out from the present, toward that which is just out of reach, places the wondering on the verge of sensibility and perception: riding the tides of the immediate future, and allowing the wonder to spill out in front. The chaotic processes make sure that this wondering can always spread toward new pools of unknown sonic potentials.
“We need to be listening in all possible modes to meet the challenges of the unknown – the unexpected.”
P. Oliveros (2022, 41)
My current activity is always informed by listening, which in itself is always accompanied by this rigorous, inquisitive form of wondering. While tinkering with a modification, for example, my listening hones in on the specific spectromorphological developments that are contained within the sounds, coming from my instrument: providing a springboard for wondering to commence. This wondering follows the instability of the behaviors, and is captivated by interference patterns as they form semi-stable loops. None of these wonderings are predictive, or make any claims or assertions about the sounds. But they do augment and expand my listening, shifting from a passive hearing to an active listening in anticipation of what is to come. Wondering is an investment in ongoing processes: a curiosity to future evolutions; suspicion toward instabilities; astonishment as expectations are breached; and a commitment to linger within those moments.
“Experiencing wonder involves staying with or dwelling with the object of wonder, something that not only takes time, but also takes the wonderer out of (chronological) time.”
There is an important advantage in the withholding of judgements, as the chaotic and turbulent nature of my practice plays out. Any attempts to predict the outcome of the unfolding processes will inevitably lead to the establishment of preferences; to a favoring of one particular imagined set of developments encompassed in an uncountable set of possible developments. The adjacent possible is always richer and more elaborate than our predictions are able to capture. When these predictions are then being used as a steering wheel, the discrepancies between our guesses and the actual outcomes lead toward a performance practice that is full of surprises, but they are the kinds of surprises that only confirm our inability to fully comprehend the emerging complexity. As the anthropologist Tim Ingold exclaims in his response to my trial defense: “Without prediction, one is never surprised, but perpetually astonished!”
Handwritten response by Tim Ingold to my earlier writing as delivered as part of my trial defense on 14-06-2022.
This astonishment is the result of an anticipation that is grounded in wonder. It is to avoid the binary formatting of being either correct or in error, while mining present happenings for their artistic potential. If play is embedded in playgrounds, as the philosopher Ian Bogost suggests, then wonder is perhaps invested in playing with ground itself. Wonder emanates from a playground, rippling outward in all directions. In a tidal move, waves wash back over the playground, disfiguring it through interference patterns that point out the discrepancies between the virtuality of wondering, and the actuality of play.
“To foresee means joining forces with materials in the anticipation of what might emerge [...]”
T. Ingold (2022, 36)
My thoughts on wondering correspond with what Tim Ingold describes as foresight in his recent collection of essays, "Imagining for Real." The description above could be rewritten as concerning the form of wondering that is developed throughout this text, as in my view, joining forces with materials in the anticipation of what might emerge could be applied to both wondering and foresight. However, there are two reasons why my preference goes out to the term wondering as it seems to capture the essence of what is expressed more accurately. Firstly, a reference to my Dutch origins needs to be made. In the Dutch language, there exists a direct translation of the word foresight which reads as, "Voorzichtigheid." Its meaning, however, relates to the notion of caution. Wondering on the other hand relates to curiosity, and thus welcomes the vulnerability of the unknown, and the risks involved in the adventures of exploration. Secondly, the turbulent nature of chaotic processes conjure up violent dynamic shifts known as tipping points leading to situations that could only be described as, and to borrow a phrase from Paul Craenen, "encounters with the unforeseen". When foresight is scattered, blurred, or obscured, all that is left to do is to wonder.
Wonder is always based in the present, but projecting away from it: using the present as a point of departure. It is about asking the question: If this is the information available, what are the adjacent possibles that could become?
Emergent Meanings
The unpredictable nature of chaos becomes accessible through the sonic behaviors of the electronic music instruments that constitute the core of my practice. Instruments with tendencies to unevenly orbit around strange attractors display fragile sensibilities that point toward an understanding: whatever sound is present, it could vanish without a trace. There remains a looming threat of imminent collapse, always followed by a restabilization; a reconfiguration of sonic material in accordance with the chaotic processes that underlie its synthesis. Playing with such an instrument requires an embrace of this temperament, a willingness to confront confusion head-on, to let go of presumptions, and instead, search for the emergence of meaningful differences in the absence of stable recurrences.
“In the dance of animacy, bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing, morphogenetic field of forces.”
The anthropologist Tim Ingold writes in his book, Making, about a dance of animacy. As an example, Ingold describes the activity of flying a kite, which appears to display a liveliness as it pulls on the strings held by the kite flyer. The example points to the fact that the kite does not possess an agency in itself, but is rather animated by the air in which it floats. It is the introduction of a chaotic instability, the flux of materials that enables a dance to commence in the first place. There needs to be something that breaks our ability to foretell the outcome. Gusts of wind bouncing forcibly against the kite, make it seem as if the kite becomes alive. Yet, as these streams of air push against the resistant fabric of the kite, they cannot help but become turbulent. It is not just the presence of air that animates the kite. Rather, the nonlinearities associated with turbulence, emerging as the air collides with the kite, results in the stutters and trembles that pull on the string and seduces us to believe there is a ghost in the machine.
Cause and effect, action and reaction entangle one another and form recursive loops. This makes it impossible to determine whether any given sonic expression originates from the performer, the instrument, or rather their playful mingling and mangling as the performance endures. As abstract narratives unfold, they serve as fluid and pliable suggestions, able to be molded to fit many lines of associations. Both the performer and the audience are placed within an environment that is marked by a radical openness to the unforeseen. What is needed to extract meaning from this experience is both a deep and inquisitive sense of wonder. It is a desire to face the virtuality of an open future head-on. Eventually, one leaves the concert, marked by the sort of vivid lived experiences that can reconfigure meaning, and with it, the scales of aesthetic appreciation. An openness to seek out qualities is a vital competence when encountering art based on emergent meaning. This encounter is as much invested in the continual reinterpretation of sonic perception as it is concerned with the actual adjustments of parameters and the dialog between performer, instrument, and audience as equals, that involves listening as much as it involves playing. A strange form of meaning emerges as one allows oneself to be taken by wonder, taken along on a ride with an unknown destination, veering off from well-traveled paths. The frictions along the way evoke resonant responses that mark an expansion of aesthetic potential: a widening frame of reference regarding what music could become, or what could become music.
“Fun is not only the delight in success, but also the panic of uncertainty, the agony of failure. It arises when figure and ground swap places and surprise us. The familiar turns strange; we no longer grasp it fully. There, facing the world’s stark truth, we either throw up our hands in disgust or dread- or we persist and discover something new.”
Friction & Tension
My artistic research intersects with music, technology, art, and philosophy, and while the research is not scientific, it does take the implications of chaos theory seriously. Unforeseeability raises questions on how to deal with the openness of the future: questions that have an impact on the aesthetics of fragile and emergent sonic expressions. The practice seems like a tumultuous swirl that pulls upon each individual discipline whenever it tends to stray away from the others. Technological concerns will blend into sonic behaviors, inspiring philosophical discourses, and feeding back into aesthetic experiences. Artistic processes are set in motion, but after that, the most important activity is to listen to what happens and to follow wherever the sounds are leading. Chaos takes over the wheel, even though the vessel it is steering, is of my own design.
Chaotic processes have a tendency to pull oppositional qualities together, or rather, to seamlessly transition from one to the other in ways that are never retraceable. Bursting noise dissolves into a single whistling frequency, all without even touching the instrument. The reason why chaotic processes are so volatile and unpredictable is because their behaviors are continually being pulled into different directions by strange attractors. This strangeness is derived from the plural form of the word, attractor. A single attractor leads to a predictable outcome as processes either end up in stable orbits, or are slowly pulled in until the processes merge at the point of attraction. When there are multiple attractors at play, the equilibrium may become disturbed, as the processes swing back and forth, unable to settle down. From an artistic perspective, these hesitating, transforming, wrenching, shifting, stuttering, and grating sonic qualities form an aesthetic of frictions and tensions.
A simple example can capture the essence of these strange attractors. There is a mapping strategy that seems rather convoluted, but often emerges within complex recursive forms of instrument design. It boils down to situations in which a single parameter influences two or more processes, each of which has an opposing influence on yet another process. For example: A tone is heard which sounds at a particular frequency (1200Hz in the example below). This frequency can be influenced by turning a knob (implemented as a slow sine wave oscillation). This knob is affecting two different low frequency oscillators (LFOs) that are influencing the original frequency. One of these LFOs causes the frequency to rise (lfo_1), while the other causes it to fall (lfo_2).
s.waitForBoot{
{
|frequency = 1200, amplitude = 0.2|
var input, lfo_1, lfo_2, tone;
input = SinOsc.ar(0.2);
lfo_1 = (LFPulse.ar(input, pi)) * 500;
lfo_2 = (SinOsc.ar(input, 0, -1, -1)) * 500;
tone = Saw.ar(lfo_1 + lfo_2 + frequency, amplitude);
}.play;
s.scope;
}
SuperCollider example code implementing the situation that is described above.
This situation feels counterintuitive. Perhaps, this is because it breaks with the strongly held belief that technology and algorithms should be as efficient as possible. Technologies are commonly regarded as tools, to help with an incredibly wide array of issues. They make things easy, comfortable, fast, accurate, and reliable. In the example above, something else is happening. Instead of fast-tracking a solution that helps a user set a tone to a specific frequency, a friction is introduced. Two processes are pushing and pulling on the frequency, attracting it upwards and downwards. It makes it hard to foresee how a change in input will translate into either a higher or lower frequency of the tone.
This tension is either an annoyance, or it can spark a curiosity that initiates a sense of wonder. This wondering leads to an exploration of the frictions that are causing the sounds to jitter around. From an artistic point of view, this could expand into an aesthetics of interference within ongoing processes. In his latest collection of essays "Imagining for Real," the anthropologist Tim Ingold develops such an aesthetics of processes. It points to the beauty of ongoing processes marked by interferences, changes, and differences, regardless of the eventual outcomes of these processes. Or, as Ingold himself writes:
“There is beauty in the 'worlding' of this world, by which it becomes vividly present to us [...].”
T. Ingold (2022, 127)
Chaotic processes are characterized by turbulent interferences. Think, for example, of a stream of water making its way down a slope. As long as the stream is unimpeded, the water flows easily in a laminar fashion. But place an obstruction in the stream and something else happens. Some of the water is halted and starts to push against the oncoming stream. The friction between the differences in flow causes the stream to waver and swirl, causing wild patterns of eddies to emerge on the other side. The image below illustrates this process. It clearly shows the difference between the laminar lines above and the roiling curves behind the obstruction. What it fails to capture is the mesmerizing movement itself, its animacy, that which makes it vivid.
Early arrival at the studio. It is still dark outside, the sun has not quite peeked over the mountain tops surrounding the city center. Coffee is in order. Flipping the power switch on the modular synthesizer that I have been designing for the past few months. Murky yellow lights start blinking on and off, signaling silent activities. Dialing in the master volume. Nothing happens, no sounds spark to life. It appears that both of the lowpass filters are completely closed, easily remedied, and soon enough my speakers commence their vibrations. A slow, pulsating melody forms, shifting between a distinct set of pitches without ever quite revealing how they come about. Every now and then, there is an increase in intensity as layers of feedback seem to swell up, but then the momentum reaches its peak and once again succumbs to the sparse pinging frequencies. There is a slow, underlying rhythm to it, not so much related to the precise rhythms found in music, but rather a tidal rhythm, an ebb, and flow, a rising, and falling of sonic mass…
For a flash of a second, there is a sense of bewilderment, as the fragile balance collapses. A sudden freefall as the ground evaporates. Deterritorialized. The gentle waves are washed away, and a complex pattern of dripping noises takes its place. Metallic, disharmonic resonances sparkle and ring, as the drops excite a spring reverb hidden below the faceplates that constitute the visible top layer of the instrument. It can take different lengths of time to get to grips with new sonic environments, endure them, and evaluate their tensions, and potential. Sometimes the promise is near immediately clear, but far more often, a rapid process of disambiguation takes hold. What am I listening to, and how does it relate to what sounded prior? Will it be stable enough to elaborate, or does it appear to exhibit a fleeting nature, collapsing just as quickly as it came into existence?
Much of my reflections or diffractions attempt to capture a sense of the fuel that powers the processes of my artistic practice. They are written with an appropriate backing track. Making new musical instruments involves a lot of listening, long stretches of sonic immersion, living within the particularities of electronics in the process of slowly becoming a voice. Often, these sounds do retreat into the background, like a distant mumbling: whispers filling the void of silence. But from time to time, something captures my interest, and floats to the forefront of my attention. Sometimes the sonic behaviors seem to be attuned to the specific topic that is explored, or even better, they suggest new chapters to be added. One of those moments is used, as an illustration, woven along with the threads that (in)form the main body of the text…
A few seconds elapse, although they feel like an eternity, everlasting. But eventually, I can not suppress a smile as my head bobs along to the rhythms of an alien percussion section. What first seemed like a cacophony of disparate noises, appears to display a wondrous sense of asymmetric balance. Recurrence, absent of repetition. A semi-looping patchwork of patterns is revealed through the sonic frictions between them. This new sonic landscape is transforming the pliability of the instrument that produces it. An instrument capable of reinvention. A machine creating differences, not just affecting itself, but through its intricate vibrations, able to change everything it encounters.
At around two minutes into the example, the waves of low bass that drive the first part of the recording, are temporarily absent, revealing a changed sonic environment.
The sounds of this example originate from the STATES setup. The sonic behaviors are self-balancing, creating all manner of ornimentations around a tonal center.
In this example, a recursive granular patch, written in SuperCollider, listens to the sounds of its own output to govern the parameter space of its own processes. Whenever the settings are influenced, a chain reaction unfolds, altering the soundscape in unforeseen ways, revealing a new sonic playground to explore.
The Physter modular plays a droning soundscape. The timbre and textures are continuously moving, shifting, phasing and beating. The result is a stasis in motion.
As this example develops, there is a very slow movement from a collection of disconnected sounds, towards a more cohesive wave of sound. About five minutes in, all of the sounds work together and my listening is taken along, lost in the sound.
This example features the STATES pedal and a resonant filter. As I play with the setup, a variety of "pulses" are featured. Sometimes these form rhythms, sometimes textures, single hits, etc. Although the sound of each individual pulse is similar, its context is in constant motion.
Playing with the Physeter modular, alongside a generative SuperCollider patch. This recording comes from the early sessions as "Follow the Unfolding" was developed.