How can I set up a grand piano with selected live electronics creating an instrument with sonic possibilities that correspond to my aesthetics and performing practice? 1 (Initial key question, revised February 2014).
The initial key question said that I was trying to make an instrument that would cater to my aesthetics (poetics), as if the poetics were already there. But, as the instrument evolved the poetics changed. I changed. A new notion emerged in me: a notion that the use and development of technology and complex instrument systems is not a one-way street from idea towards musical and sonic realization. Now, I see this process as a partnership between instrumental, performative, musical and personal elements. I regard this change of situation a main turning point in my project. For me, the present musical situation is one where the agencies, despite their difference in signs, language and logic, drive the artistic process together. This interagency, comprising exchanges between the agencies of instrument, music, performances/rehearsals and my poetics, constitutes the base for the HyPer(sonal) Piano Project.
I found resonance for this change of angle in theories on post-humanism and distributed cognition,
a field in which philosophers, psychologist and educationalists (among others) try to depict and explain how humans interact with technology, and how this interagency will evolve in the future. Writings on distributed cognition and post-humanism by Katherine Hayles emphasize that human capability depends on this interaction. She argues that ideas of a human autonomous will are a huge simplification made as an attempt to understand and explain the chaotic and emergent structures that we coexist with. 2 Philosopher Andy Clark refers to these structures as a cognitive technological environment. 3 Through the making of this project, by interacting with technological complexity,
I came to a point where I saw this perspective as consistent with my reflections and practice because I experience these complex development loops in-between when I play and develop my instrument. Reflections on this topic led to a revision of my key question in March 2016:
How can I develop a grand piano with live electronics through development loops in the cognitive technological environment of instrument, music, performance and my poetics?
What music arrives from this interagency?
What reflections arrive from this interagency? 4
In fact, the true power and beauty of the brain’s role is that it acts as a mediating factor in a variety of complex and iterated processes which continually loop between brain, body and technological environment. And it is this larger system which solves the problem. 5
My reflections on the interplay-situation between the agencies of music (improvisation/composition), instrument, performance, myself (and the world) are shaping my actions. These attitudes are keys to how I filter information, how I process and deploy ideas. Accepting this diversity of voices is opening towards other sound-materials, ideas and technical configurations. How? By distributing music, videos, personal reflections, performance analysis and technical solutions in this document, I hope that glimpses of connections showing this intricate topography might appear. Even though this view of the process has made me less consistent, and more variable in my views (and in my playing).
Anyway, my projects outputs need listeners/readers and their individual experiences and reflections. My material becomes active when it meets your system of cognition. There are no rights or wrongs to how this material is understood or used.
Viewing myself as a part of this interagency rather than being the autocratic master-and-judge of the process became a game-changer for me. Maybe I am wrong, but I believe that many performers in my field are using and developing technology to realize concepts and ideas in a unidirectional chain of command. By leaving the paradigm of mastery, the line from idea/poetics to sound-realization through technical means is broken. By taking part in a system of distributed cognition, I see that I can get other artistic results. My sensitivity towards the exchange between ideas and attitudes, technical means and music becomes a catalyst. The output is not an extension of who I am or what´s technically possible, yet it is made up by the dialogue in-between technologies, poetics and performances (and of course the world outside, which I will limit myself from discussing in this disposition).
Aims:
- Doing research into techniques of multi-layering and accumulating sound using an electronically extended instrument.
- Strengthening, clarifying and reflecting upon the interagency between me, my music, my performances and my instrument.
- Developing my role, enabling me to use sound-processing as an integral part of music making to a degree where other technicians or technical conditions aren´t too decisive for the final sonic result.
instrument setup (as of April 2016):
- A grand piano.
- The sound is picked up by a Yamahiko Pickup and two acoustic guitar piezo pickups, taking in different parts of the piano sound. One AKG 411 condenser microphone is mounted on a brass bottleneck slide to pick up sound when I play with it directly on the strings.
- A HelpInstill Piano Pickup system is used for high-volume projects.
- Two high quality condenser microphones are mounted very close to the resonant bottom, approx. 1–3 mm. away. For use with PA-system.
- A midi-bar (Moog PianoBar) is mounted on the grand piano keys picking up and distributing midi info. A novation 25 SL with TouchKeys interface and a Kenton Killamix Mini work towards the mixing interface in Ableton Live.
The sound and control signals are distributed to the following modules:
- A selection of effect pedals (also called stomp-boxes), most of them designed for use with electric guitar.
- A computer section with different audio and midi-tools, compiled using Ableton Live as the main CPU-interface.
- A second computer section with my own programming in MaxMsp, utilizing a random live recorder device and a random midi recorder device.
There is also:
- A selection of peripheral electronic sound sources interacting with the rest of the system.
- The outputs from the electronics are routed to:
- Two moveable exciter loudspeakers.
- Two guitar amplifiers and two high-resolution PA loudspeakers for sound distribution. Sometimes a sub-woofer.
me (and you)
‘we are effectively black boxes engaged with black boxes in an exceedingly complex dynamic of perturbation/compensation.’ 6
This is not a closed project. The music, my augmented instrument and reflections are outcomes of a 4 years intensive (re)search, a period in my life which I am very grateful for. This opportunity of going in-depth, the constructing, rehearsing and finally being elastic enough to play my music with new means has been one of pure gold. This process will colour the rest of my artistic life.
I want to invite you into my playing attitudes, reflections around my music, and technical insights obtained in this artistic research project. I will try to disclose what´s inside the black box concealing it.
I like simple cornerstones in music. Melodies, chords without numbers, rhythms, lyrics. By augmenting the piano using different technological strategies, I try to engage in a more flexible relation to these cornerstones. I feel ambiguous towards them. I like them but I want to dissolve, mask, reshape, blur or destroy them. I need an instrument to help me realize this ambiguity in music.
The dialogue between instrument-building and music makes up the core of my project. I have taken on many roles. Technician, composer, performer, programmer, electrician, recording- engineer. Roles with their specific reflections, shortcomings and doubts. Engaging in a project like this is and should be a plunge into unknown territory.
what could artistic research be (to me)?
‘Frankly, it is not the poet that creates a good poem, it is the good reader.’
(Hans Børli, Tankestreif, my translation)
‘It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.’
(Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
Artistic research to me is to put artistic practice on display through artistic results and the reflections, insights, ambivalences and doubts that break the surface through the artistic process. The artistic output and reflection material constitute a body of work that may answer questions risen within the project and questions from the ‘outside’.
The HyPer(sonal) Piano project is an attempt to make an instrument that communicates with and evolves alongside my poetics and performative needs. With this personal world-building and disclosure of the process, I am putting myself, my beliefs, my ambivalences and flaws up for display. The music is a manifestation of this world-building and the doubts following. The artistic outputs become verisimilitudes, a transmission of something that might not be true in a normal sense of the word, yet seemingly true in the power of belonging to a created world, 7 my world…
The HyPer(sonal) Piano project may generate a polyphony of questions.
The polyphony of ‘answers’ lies in the interplay between the technical tools, attitudes, performances, reflections and musical outputs presented here.
I believe that the artist´s personal gaze, the doing through art and the reflections that follow may generate viable and effective insights without an exhaustive contextualization towards the field of art-science and art-philosophy.
Scientific discourse seeks to eliminate ambiguity in its terminology and definitions. An artistic discourse would on the contrary often seek to be as polyvalent as possible, suggesting a network of meanings or implications. 8
methods
Video analysis
In October 2014 I gave a solo concert at the Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH). Two years into this project, this was the first time I really felt that I could make proper music with the whole instrument, be flexible to make choices initiated by the music and not being held back by technical limitations or computer breakdowns.
At this point I was reflecting on how the music and the instrument´s mutual dependence could and should be a direct catalyst for the reflections in my project. I wanted this performance´s taste of turning point to be the starting point for my reflection work.
My next move was to do a video analysis of the concert. I used the software HyperResearch, an analysis tool that let me extract parts of the video and write about them. This turned out to be a good writing exercise. The writing led me into my work from an unfamiliar angle, and the meeting between performance and reflection produced a substantial material. The writings from these sessions became material for further work. They contained pure sound descriptions, elaborations on musical, technical and compositional choices, and philosophical aspects that arose from the performance.
I exported the report from HyperResearch, looking for keywords and concepts that I saw as central elements in the performance. After a month of analysis and reduction, I had about 100 keywords. These keywords made the basis for this reflection, generating the topics and directions of the material. The reflections aim to preserve the intimacy with and interplay between the music and the instrument setup. Here is an example from the exported report. The different video snippets were categorized with codes, and each snippet has its dedicated annotations. I used two levels for the annotations: 1: A description of what happens and 2: A reflection on what happens.
Notes
I have used Evernote software for notes during the project period, and I find it a good tool for structuring and finding back to older notes, pictures, videos and sound recordings with its tags and search functions.
Text editing
When writing this text, I have used the software Scrivener, designed for novelists, screen-writers and such, people working with many fragments of text that they need to organize with ease along the way. Coming from my ‘writing exercise’ I needed this functionality. I wrote short texts based on my keywords, and I have moved them around in different folders, copy-pasted, cut-out, merged and reshuffled, very similarly to how I work with music in the recording studio. All of these functions are accessible in the Scrivener interface. For me, this helped me to maintain an open mind towards the text´s form right until the end of the writing process. When I work in ‘normal’ text-editing software
I tend to get stuck in a form very quickly.
Interventions 9
Intervention research happen when the researchers arrange a change in conditions, and compare the results to an original state. In artistic research we may use the method by putting up other conditions for the artistic practice, seeing in what way the interventions may change the practice. The intervention might perhaps interrupt or change materials, attitudes or situations of art making, and in doing so change the art.
Interventions in my project:
Lab concerts presenting work in progress and discussing it: the jöK & seasicK sessions that research fellow Ivar Grydeland and I arranged regularly during our projects, represent a clear intervention in our artistic processes. It was no longer a closed and private process, but a more open and open-minded situation that took new turns by the inputs from and discussions with people inside and outside our field.
Supervision extraordinaire! My first supervisor Henrik Hellstenius, and second supervisors Øyvind Brandtsegg and Eivind Buene, have gone all in with their immense proficiency and ability. For a musician, who don´t have the writer’s privilege of having a dedicated publishing editor, it has been a life-changing experience to have access to this to-the-point dialogue with people I have really got to know on a weekly basis.
The deliberate complexity of the instrument. This imposes a lasting intervention to the musical output. The complexity generates a situation I can no longer fully control. This is a catalyst to changing my output.
Other musicians have intervened in musical and technical aspects of my project. When I thought the instrument was ‘there’, that I had sturdy technical solutions, new sonic situations with other performers demanded change. This has led me to making several setup versions of the instrument, adapted to different interplay situations.
The writing. I started writing these reflections in November 2014, when I had almost two years left of the project period. I have been working with them on and off since then. By doing this, instead of reflecting retrospectively, the writing has become a voice participating in the aesthetical, musical and technical exchange in the project. Especially, the writing has been a major tool trying to comprehend the more or less abstract connections between the different agencies of the project. I take part in a dialogue with the grand piano, poetics, music, technological tools and performances. The writing makes me clarify my inputs to and understanding of this dialogue.
Constructing the instrument, recording, performing and writing. All in parallel. This has been the guerilla-method of this project.
Interventions in artistic research carry the potential of finding new insights in artistic practice based on outspoken encroachments into the art-making process. This openness may reduce the risk that artistic research becomes an act of narcissism, a situation in which we seek to research and understand ourselves, resulting in introvert excavations locked off from the field that we are a part of. Interventions show us other angles and views of our artistic works and practice. By opening up the practice for the outside, I believe that we also open up insights hidden in practice, our so-called tacit knowledge. Knowing a little bit more about what that tacit knowledge is may result in greater elasticity in developing and sharing this knowledge. The artistic research is not a lonely act of digging into ourselves, yet it is an act of digging into the interagency that we take part in.
jöK & seasicK
From 2013 to 2015, research fellow Ivar Grydeland and myself initiated and held 12 lab-concerts under the name jöK & seasicK at NMH. The idea was to lift the artistic laboratory out in public, open up for a live critical reflection on the artistic presentations and stimulate our artistic and reflexive works.
The audience consisted of students, research fellows, teachers, supervisors and other employees at the academy, and artists and musicians from elsewhere. The sessions started with 2x20 minutes performances by Ivar and me, and continued with 60–90 minutes discussions based on the performances. The audience was encouraged to contribute with their views and comments.
Seen in retrospect, the concerts and following discussions have been effective catalysts in moving my project. The pressure of trying to come up with new approaches every time, having direct feedback from an informed audience and the mirroring of my project in Ivar’s project has contributed to this movement. Despite this, I see that these sessions could have been designed more carefully to be more effective. Audience-composition and clarifying the thematic of each session might have strengthened the reflexive and artistic outcome of this methodical move.
This essential arena has been an amalgam of the ease of the rehearsing space and the tension of the podium. I believe that this climate has given me and my project different questions and answers than what would have been the case if I only were to present my artistic outcome in more formal situations. 10
This forum gave me the chance to do isolated tests of different modules in my system, playing with ideas in an instrument that was far from finished. This created unstable performances having interesting musical occurrences, flukes and failures. The pressure of the podium acted as fining and filter towards reflexive processes on which modules, ideas and strategies I desired to keep, and which I decided to discard during the project span.
hyper(sonal) piano 11
Hyperinstrument 12
An instrument augmented with an array of electronics and playing styles, expanding the sonic palette of the instrument.
Sonal
Pertaining to sound; sonic. 13
Personal
Of, relating to, or coming as from a particular person; individual; private. 14
Personalness
The quality of being personal or of belonging to a person. 15
Personality
Refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. 16
HyPer(sonal) Piano
A piano with sonic extensions, made to establish a relation between instrument, personal sound imaginations, poetics, expressional needs and sound.
I want instability, melancholia, joy, doubt, memories, balance, nerve, light, tranquility, tears, darkness, laughter, pondering, flow and friction. That ambivalence I felt with my grandmother´s piano is driving me.
terrain
several viewpoints
not a single faced certainty
different views on the topography
ambiguity
a place for content to wander, vegetate or develop
different view, different meaning
NOTES:
1 I should have used the term ‘poetics’ instead of ‘aesthetics’ to begin with. I regard poetics as constituting personal reflections on my practice and the results of that practice, as opposed to aesthetics, which I interpret as relating to a particular genre, field or more general theories on art perception and movements in the arts. I will use the word ‘poetics’ from now on. [back]
2 Katherine Hayles. How we became posthuman. The University of Chicago Press, 1999. [back]
3 The concept of a cognitive technological environment is discussed by philosopher Andy Clark in the article ‘Natural born cyborgs’. http://www.edge.org/conversation/natural-born-cyborgs [back]
4 Interagency: constituted from more than one agency: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/inter-agency?q=interagency [back]
5 Clark, op.cit. [back]
6 David Borgo. ‘Openness from closure’ in Negotiated Moments. ed. Gillian Siddall and Ellen Waterman. Duke University Press, 2016. Borgo talks about black boxes as human or nonhuman systems that we engage with and whose workings we understand, or sometimes do not. [back]
7 ‘Internal verisimilitude is the …phenomenon of “seeming true”…not that it communicates “the truth”, but that it compels us by its created world’. From a presentation by the director of the NordART center, Darla Crispin, opening the conference ‘Unfolding the Process’ at NMH, Oslo, 17–19 November 2015. [back]
8 Lasse Thoresen and Andreas Hedman. ‘Spectromorphological Analysis of Sound Objects’. Norwegian Academy of Music, 2001/2004. http://www.ems-network.org/IMG/EMS06-LThoresen.pdf [back]
9 Either, ‘the act or fact of intervening’ or ‘interposition or interference of one state in the affairs of another’. [back]
(http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intervention?s=t)
10 http://www.ivargrydeland.com/artisticresearch/node/50 [back]
11 Working with Helge Sten for many years has been a foundation for this project. He introduced me to much of the technology I use today, including the Moog PianoBar, maybe the most important tool in my setup. Learning from his thoroughness in preparing instrument and recording setups, his honesty and conversations with him on musical poetics have had an invaluable impact on my work. [back]
12 Other related Hyperinstrument projects that have informed mine are Hilde Marie Holsen´s electronic trumpet extensions, the Metasax project by Matthew Burtner, Maja Ratkje´s work with voice and electronics, Andrew McPherson´s magnetic resonator piano, Tod Machover´s self playing piano, Palle Dahlstedt´s augmented piano, Victoria Johnson’s work with electric violin and the Yo-Yo Ma Hypercello of 1991. [back]
13 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sonal [back]
14 http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/personal [back]
15 http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/personalness [back]
memory #1
My grandmother came down from her bedroom. This is the only time I remember seeing her in person. I don´t remember her talking, eating, or taking part in family activities. I remember her calling us made my mother upset. I remember the instant when she came down from her bedroom, her long white hair spread unevenly over her ruby red bath robe. My mother had told me that she was taking medicine to calm her neurosis. To me, a three-year-old boy, she looked crazy. I was scared. I tried to hide in the sofa. She sat down at the her brown Steinway grand piano and played through a Chopin mazurka. I can still feel it, the blend of goose bumps and fear. The music took me completely. I was surrounded by the piano, swallowed by it. She finished playing and walked out of the room. I don´t remember meeting her ever again.
(I do not think it is useful to present the whole analysis I carried out in HyperResearch here, since that work was a catalyst for reflection more than an analysis for the analysis´ sake. The material created by the ‘free writing without pressure’ was the main achievement using this method.)
Yet, to keep the method open and transparent, the whole report can be viewed here:
From day one I initiated a project log on researchcatalogue.net. I have presented concerts, reflections and technical findings there along the way. I know that a group of interested people has been following my work there, a fact that makes me very happy. The log has had a similar function to the jöK & seasicK concert series, as a place to present unfinished thoughts, bold statements and more or less successful artistic results along the way. It provided the pressure of the podium in the form of a public notebook…
In upcoming research projects I want more regular log posting and more functionality. At times the posting has been too sparse and not of adequate quality to stand as artistic research statements. In some phases I just didn´t need the log to move on in my project, and it suffered from this. If I make a similar open log in the future, I should consider if the motivation is there to use it as a main tool of the process. I would also like to have the functionality needed for people to comment and initiate a public reflection of the works online.
For sure, this log is documenting that I have been researching and reflecting, but I felt that the easy access vibe of the log needed a little refinement to appear as focused reflections on the project. So I have decided to keep the log as source material, an archive that I have used when writing, alongside my keywords from the concert-video analysis. The direct perspective from the concert analysis and the more processual view of the log has fed this text from different beneficial angles.
Ambivalence
The disclosure of ambivalence, not only for myself, but to go public with it was a clear turning point for me. It changed the psychological aspect of performing and making music a lot. Previously I needed to deal with doubts and limitations before I went on stage, a self-therapy to build the right level of tension and self-security before a concert.
Now I take the insecurities with me. I trust them. I enclose them as a part of performing. Doubts are not dangerous. They are vital. They invite me to explore, to do mistakes, to fall apart and to reassemble.
SoloKonsertNMH13OKT2014 Code: Loop material
00:05:30.845,00:05:40.845
Annotation: 1: Looping the voices in a four track software looper. (Mobius 2.5) Implemented in Ableton Live.
2: Makes the function and the meaning of the voices more hidden and abstract. Dampens the effect of using voice which is a drastic effect to begin with.
SoloKonsertNMH13OKT2014 Code: Musical stillstand due to tweaking the instrument
00:05:50.845,00:06:16.845
Annotation: 1: Setting up the next move by adjusting levels etc creates a musical stillstand.
2: Moving from one part to another in the music and in the instrument creates a lower energy and a feeling of process rather than musical making in action.
SoloKonsertNMH13OKT2014 Code: Leap: Improvisation mode to Song mode
00:06:10.845,00:06:30.845
Annotation: 1: The music moves from the improvisation over to the composed song.
2: The composed parts and the improvised parts share many elements. But they stand on different ground and have different motor and mentality. In the improvisation I am open to whatever idea is coming, and at the same time I know where I am going(to the composed part or a new improvisation). This is a contradiction that creates a musical tension. In the composed part I am also open to ideas coming, but the motor that is moving the music forward is more or less predetermined.
SoloKonsertNMH13OKT2014 Code: Adding elements to create crescendo and intensity
00:06:20.845,00:09:08.845
Annotation: 1: Working with the predetermined chord sequence, but adding elements to it and working with levels to create a crescendo and growing intensity towards a climax. Elements as distortion, pitched delay, granular delay, samples and reverb are added.
2: Working with the axis between tonal and dystonal to create a tension to the tonal material in the chord sequence. I like to cover clear structures with the use of processing, and I also think that this strategy gives an edge and energy to the music, making the written structure more “dangerous”.