and I – goodbye?
Some reflections in the end of the project “Goodbye Intuition”
Intuition – this highly complex and problematic concept – is of course not the most interesting aspect of this project. I understand well the ironic undertone in saying goodbye. Nevertheless, it makes me think about the notion of intuition and what the word really implies. It is not unusual that words and concepts, that are often used, lack a clear and common definition. We often use intuition quite sloppy and fuzzy: “gut feeling”, “fingertip feeling” and even “instinct”, are some of the definitions and explanations in every-day conversations.
The Latin root is intueri which means something like “look at or upon, observe, regard, contemplate, consider”. Not really an obvious definition of the concept in our daily understanding of the word, where it often means the ability to make quick decisions or judgments of situations or phenomena that we don’t have time or capability to analyse and react to rationally and logically.
I will be so reckless as to try out my own definition of intuition here, suiting the purpose of my point of view:
Experience-based knowledge stored in the subconscious, which is processed in a non-reflected way. Often, but not always, based on phenomenological experiences.
This is of course a definition that suites me as a musician who in playing music, alone or in interaction with others, constantly is in a flow of “non-analysing”, using my senses and musical experiences in the million different choices and decisions every second while playing a piece of music.
I know my intuitional, subconscious musical “library” is built on probably every sound, tune, note, harmony, phrase, technique and so on that I have played in my whole life. And naturally also of the sounds, tunes, notes, harmonies, phrases, techniques and so on of others, that I have listened to and played with. It is there, sometimes wide open and accessible and sometimes hidden and unreachable - and everything in between.
So - what is the difference between playing with human musicians and playing with a sound-producing algorithm?
The algorithm KA doesn’t have a subconscious and its reactions and material-use is not based on phenomenological experiences, or any experiences at all. It is random and operates within a spectre of (by programmers and musicians) guided random. You never know or really know what to expect, what it will present, in what way. How does KA answer to your input – and how does this affect me as a musician – how do I respond? Can I get away from anthropomorphism in the way I analyse and interact with the machine and thereby free myself of intuitional reactions and reheated habits? I find it hard to answer the question after working with this project and the most important reason are the technical flaws that I, as a human musician, have and have been struggling with throughout the project.
As a musician having my background in the “classical” tradition I have worked with electronics, both live and recorded, in many different settings. But the conditions have been very different as I have always had a technician or in the best scenarios a composer running the sound and the technique.
One of the favourite works that I have performed during the years is the piece La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura - per violin solo e 8 nastri magnetici from 1988 by Luigi Nono. A piece based on an 8-channel recording with Nono’s music and sounds (and noises from around the recording and conversations between him and the violinist Gidon Kremer). The piece is performed by a live violinist moving between different stations in the space and playing with the recorded material. The recorded material is “played” by the sound technician who can select freely from the multi-channel material - which channels to emphasise, mute, move in between and so on. As a performer you don’t have any idea what material will appear at any time and you move around in a musical landscape to which you add the written material (that is very fragmentary) by Nono.
I can’t help thinking of this piece and remembering the wonder of moving in this hyper-poetic landscape and answering with my interpretation to the unpredictable sounds that are overwhelming me. The multitude of possibilities in performing Nono’s piece are under these circumstances inexhaustible. Of course, the musical material is the work of a coherent and “recognisable” musical persona, but the randomness of the mode of performing could perhaps very well be comparable to playing with an algorithm, based on a personal sound archive. Interesting is also that playing the piece by Nono today involves a specific historical dimension as the tapes (even if they today are digitalised) are deeply rooted in the moment of their creation and connected to Nono’s and Kremer’s collaboration.
Jaques Derrida has created the term “hauntology” – a combination of the words haunted and ontology (Derrida, 1994). It refers to the return or persistence of elements from the past, like ghosts. Derrida uses the term to describe how Marxism haunts the western society from beyond the grave. But hauntology was also used (adapted by Mark Fisher, British philosopher and critic) as a concept within different art fields, philosophy, politics, fiction, literary criticism to describe how contemporary culture is haunted by the loss of “the futures” once defined by modernity, wiped out by postmodernity and neoliberalism. It also became a description of a music genre/trend in Britain where electronic musicians use old devices and material (soundtracks, radio programs, production music…) to create a music characterised by “cultural memory” and aesthetics from the past. For me personally, coming from a heavy classical musical tradition, there is something very appealing with these “historical” perspectives linked to the idea that we are being haunted by a constantly present history of music and sound. (It might not be relevant for everyone within this project but I have not been able to avoid these issues as they are an important perspective in my music making.)
“…when cultural innovation has stalled and even gone backwards, [...] one function of hauntology is to keep insisting that there are futures beyond postmodernity’s terminal time. When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past” (Mark Fisher 2013: 53)
Playing with an algorithm generated in a machine can very well evoke a similar sensation of haunting – even if the materiel is created by yourself and your colleagues today. I never get away from the feeling of, in relation to KA, that “something is there” – a voice, an intention, an expression of something. This is spooky because you know rationally that it isn’t so.
And this is probably also an important and interesting attribute that we humans and machines actually share: irrationality. A rational behaviour is certainly part of creating music, knowledge and skills are produced in well-structured learning processes and you develop a conscious set of aesthetics and musical “tastes” that are mostly very logically explainable. But playing with other skilled improvisers and meeting their respective aesthetics and tastes is complex and adventurous and human musicians as creative agents have perhaps a lot more irrationality in the ways of reacting to each other, and overall musical actions, than the random algorithm…
Personally I often make up internal strategies for how to interact (and avoid habits) in certain musical “situations” – like “only play every 7th second, wait for the next silence, answer to specific sounds, don’t go with your first intention, go the other way, follow like a distant shadow” and so on – all to try to fool my intuitive and organic way of reacting. But most of these times I still end up doing something completely different as the music in its own logic seems to spoil my strategies. And even more important – I seem to get bored with the logical and premeditated ideas and land in something that I can’t control, an absolutely irrational and intuitive non-thinking.
I have really been struggling with KA –the base for the project “Goodbye Intuition”. Initially a technical idiot I have now developed into a frustrated technical half-idiot. Sometimes when you learn things you only get to the point where you realise how little you know – that describes well my technical development within the project. The biggest problems were to get the different sound files into the proper folders, and thereby getting a creative exchange with the sound archives and pre-sets. (I have during this period constantly discovered files from my recordings in very surprising locations in my computer when working with completely different things...) I have been working with the manual in one hand and the violin and the computer and loudspeaker in the other.
Morten Qvenlid has been most helpful and patient in a number of Zoom- and Skype-sessions but I very often seemed to miss some important step(s) when going on doing the experiments by myself throughout the spring and summer 2020. I think I would have needed to be together with the other researchers with technical support at an initial phase of the project – perhaps both I and the fellow project members overestimated my skills in meeting the technical demands. A part of my problem was also wanting to try it out myself, trial and error is an exciting process, but the ability of really comprehend what was the trial and what was the error didn’t seem to develop far enough in my work… It was exciting though and I have quite enjoyed the lonely experiments!
The most satisfactory part of the project was the workshop that was held in Stockholm in February 2020 where we musicians played together with KA and with each other. With Morten Qvenlid as the master “programmer” of KA and sound I got a good glimpse of the possibilities and flaws of the algorithmic challenges. I must stretch that playing Bach’s Sarabande I B-minor with KA at that event was inspiring and surprising. The kind of far out comments that KA would present along with just mimicking some of the Bach material was something that I wanted to go on with and I tried also to do that by myself going back to my studio. But my inability to get the technique to work for me made my experiments much more banal and the results were more like a fiddler’s meeting in Dalarna with Bach material being over-layered again and again. I did many recordings during this time and add one example here where I play on prepared violin, with Sound Archive-material of the same kind, which has it’s poetic qualities but KA never seems to surprise me – more shadowing and “accompanying” my live playing.
For the future I hope to get back to KA and the colleagues in the project to play concerts – as it was anticipated before the Corona pandemic isolated us in our different corners of the world. I am sure that I would have many exciting, “haunting” and surprising experiences playing with KA, with a proper technical support and a vivid dialogue, with live colleagues, on what is really going on during the performances.
References:
Luigi Nono, La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura, madrigal per più “caminantes” con Gidon Kremer, per violin e otto nastri magnetici(1988-1989) Recording 1992, Deutsche Grammophon.
Jaques Derrida, (1994) “Spectres of Marx” (English, Routledge)
Mark Fisher, (2013) “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology” (Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5 (2): 42-55)
