time slice transmitter

time slice transmitter is a subproject of Spirits in Complexity - Making kin with Experimental Music Systems (funded by the Austrian Sience Fund FWF AR-821).

It is composed as an intra-active adaptive assemblage and investigates creative agency in the context of electroacoustic and algorithmic real-time composition and performance. Marco Döttlinger and Anna Lindenbaum (violin) explore process-based forms or relationships between human and algorithmic actors. This structure consists of three interlocking recurrent levels: a violinist, an autonomously acting computer music system (CMS) and a laptop performer.

The starting point for this project was the net art piece time slice transmitter. This open online musical work consists of 35 composed parts for six-string electric violin. The audio and video tracks of different lengths are arranged on a website according to proportions that transfer the solo lines into a polyphonic sound space. This work does not exist in a determined or fixed form, such as a score. Rather, visitors to the website are invited to invent an individual version, discover it through listening and change it as they wish.

The use of selected machine learning techniques makes it possible to create structures that change and evolve over the course of the project. Each session is recorded and the violin passages invented by the musician are added to the training data sets. The CMS thus gradually becomes richer in possible sonic but also temporal expressions, which in turn are informed by all the violinist's previous intra-actions. This feedback loop is by no means objective or neutral, a notion that is often prevalent in connection with data acquisition. Our approach seeks to understand this very data collection as an inherently aesthetic and material music-making practice.

Our hypotheses are that musical intra-action with algorithms generates a new ontology of musical artworks: away from a text to be interpreted, towards a non-linear and radically open-ended workflow. This also calls into question the traditional concept of authorship, as the temporal interdependence represents new constellations of cooperation. In general, machine learning algorithms are pushing for a critical and creative examination of traditional concepts of music creation.

The exposition time slice transmitter TIMELINE documents the project period and attempts to make accessible the developments of the intra-active assemblage.