ecology of questions and ethics
Playing with an improvising machine, moving away from the human domain creates questionmarks. A questionmark towards what is human, humanity, what are beneficial attitudes in human improvisation, what is non-human and why do we want to work with it, what is attractive introducing machine logics, what is non-attractive and why, why, why?
KA is a mirroring machine. It archives human inputs, cuts it up, listens back and reconfigures its archived material as new sound based on some rudimental listening parametres in music; density, loudness and register.
David Toop writes in his essay: “The difficult ethical questions are audible. Are we making something together? Do you trust me? Who does this belong to? Is the power moving around or is it stuck in one place? These can be heard as sound and form. These ethical questions become a little more knotted when a non-human entity is introduced”
This projects method opened up for a musical ecology where the algorithm and the audience through our labs should play a big part of the development on musical and philosophical aspects. The machine we started programming could become an interplay partner with a totally different worldview. I was puzzled by this idea; why not give away the responsibility for the music making to a machine. Could we alter the hierarchy and human value systems of improvisation and leave the music making to the autonomous machine? And what does this sound like? Many musicians, composers and programmers has had these thoughts before us, like George Lewis, Sebastien Lexer, Jerome Nika, Ritwiek Banerij and David Plains Casal. Yet, the ideas that we often talks about in GI, of some entity taking over the musical situation and being rude, an obstacle, very unpredictable and extremely contrasting seemed a bit novel to this project. Anyway, one year after Trump started his presidency, we fiddled around with the idea of a merciless machine without any will except those drawn from its algorithm, when maybe the most important we could do in this situation was to search for humanity… Then the machine said: there are other ways of seeing this, human pain, social interaction or curiosity is not necessary to make music, I can give my opinion on what music is and maybe there is something to learn from it? And maybe most important; through being a machine KA could clarify what human(e) is and sounds like.
Right now, in the middle of a pandemic and standing before a new election in the US, these thoughts have gotten their real-life mirror that screams for humanity and care to enter the stage. In this perspective, I hope that the arts can play a role showing that there is a possibility of keeping meaning, emotions and care intact through interaction with technology, depending on a present, reflective and ethic-minded human in the loop. Maybe the seeing a very emotional piano player engaging with a super-cold machine opens some perspectives on how to employ technology to achieve more humane attitudes amongst people and presidents.
voids and intuition
Seen in retrospect, the belief in the machine as a super-musician or even a super hero that could save me from the hard labor of making, composing, thinking, frustrating, laughing and crying proved to be a bit bigger than it should. Seeing the machine as a super-hero collaborator that could save me from myself and my idioms created many disappointments and empty musical situations. This made me alter my view on KA (the machine). Now I see it more as I see myself, a fallible insecure musician with a limited potential. Someone that I need to cooperate with to make things work. Relating to this, and that KA after the last programming round has gotten more of a voice of its own, makes the playing situation more humane/emotional/interesting.
And what about intuition? I tend to look at musical intuition as the instant musical material one can produce in an instrument domain, where the impulses from me and the co-players set this process into motion. I start lifting up material from this bank in the playing situation depending on the nature of interplay. Through this project I saw that I am not so good at meeting the situation of an improvisation without any defined prefab musical material (as a written song for example). I look to my musical intuition, and face a void. The bank seems empty and it feels more or less random what material I come up with during the playing. Those are the moments where I say Goodbye Intuition, but these moments in the void also contains music. The lack of social interaction and acceptance by the machine have a sound to. Maybe we can talk of a potential of the void, that is triggered by the fact that the machines responses are so unpredictable that to make the music “work” we have to fill in material in ways that we would not do in a human-human interplay. In this void, I must dim down the intensity of my aesthetic compass to find material. This dimming down gives more room for a directionless search for material. In a former world of mine, directionless playing would be a word of swearing. Now it has become a source of material, found through a more stationary, directionless process with KA, a process resembling meditation or a stoic attitude. One has to go with whatever comes up. As George Lewis said in his keynote at the Improtech conference in Athens, 2019: “Improvising with technology as a pointer to another way of life”. And further: “In my music sometimes the humans can move away from the centre. We have to earn our place again”. He also points towards the possibilities of other music(s) by saying: “When you´re letting the network play, you are actually letting the machine decide what music is. Then you have to let go of your concepts on what you think music is and what it is for”.
This walking and listening and being part of the audience and at the same time being a performer, showed me something that has stuck with me since. The possibility of zooming out, of letting go, of just observing musical a situation that I am a part of. The possibility of just letting the music be as it is, that there is actually no need for my interference. The possibility of being small rather than large. The possibility of being vulnerable rather than invincible on a stage. The possibility of setting aside own ideas and just listen to how the music change without me. I started doing less and listening more. I started to embrace weakness, insecurity, directionlessness. These words also have a sound, and I started to search for that sound. I sort of found it together with KA.
Through KAs constant mirroring but also abstracting my output, I have been forced to be quite strict and simple in my playing with KA. If not, KAs output would just be too rich and lose meaning in its richness because of KAs fragmentational playing that lacks all culturally inherited human sense of form. In my playing I noticed that I had started searching for micro-cosmoses rather than big musical canvases. I had not focused so much on details before, it was more about form and direction. The sound of stuff I make now is more like listening through a microscope, you can see the screensaver-grass waving and the virtual insects finding their paths down there.
Through GI, it has also been clarified to me that I am compiled in a way that prefab musical material gives my intuition something to feed on and be triggered by. I find it much more musically meaningful to have this axis from clear composition to open and abstract material present in the music in a more or less clear fashion. This situation and it´s friction is for me a situation of musical flow, where I feel that the intuitional elements gathers momentum from the discourse between the written and the improvised.
So in a way I am stuck in my old self. The trying to find direction, the digging into musical material, the social contact, the pain. All this constitutes an essence of music making to me. Yet I think that the strategy of disinterested searching found through using KA has added a microcosmos which has expanded my attitude in the improvisation and the song-writing. All actions doesn´t need to be permeated with meaning at all times. The non-directional attitude is adding humanity, trust, balance and elbowroom to performance.
To clarify this difference between human and machine interplay, and between different ways of seeing the material production; I think this mail correspondence with Sidsel Endresen 29th Jan 2020 is making sense:
In the interaction, which never becomes what the intention seems, I try to relate more stoically to KA than in an interaction with a human being. Then I think I cannot change this so how should I go about it? In an interaction with people, I base myself more on gut feeling, which can become unbearably strong, on the verge of nausea if it works poorly. The social codes and the emotional involvement here make me start trying to turn the situation around, come up with social and musical hints so that the person / people I play with will understand where I want to go. I never do this with KA, nor do I feel the same emotional need for it. It's actually quite nice, that the music is not always going anywhere.
Equality is a thought experiment, and perhaps one of the most problematic to substantiate / realize in this project. But it also attracts me, an equality without human social connections. I play differently when I give up the opportunity to change / tweak KA at the moment of the game. I have to adopt a stoic attitude where I try to focus on what I can actually do in this interaction.
Within Stoicism, it is often said that "entities" have a dedicated function where a good Stoic will facilitate that the units you interact with can realize their potential. I experience that I can have this function to KA, without experiencing a direct ownership of the machine. More a responsibility to facilitate. A human in the loop.¨
lock down
From the starting point of our project the world has turned upside down a few times more. Trump and Putin are still presidents, and the AI metal bot now spits out perfect death metal, almost impossible to separate from the “real thing”. Now, after the coronavirus more or less took over our normal daily and musical life, it just seems blunt and stupid to even talk about wanting to take away social interaction and a carefully tended human tradition of improvisation for the sake of discovering new music.
On the other hand, KA could be a perfect companion in lock down. An interplay partner totally free from suspicion of biological viruses, a creature that has got no dips in energy. Just turn it on and it never stops. A machine for eternity. But, as we have noticed throughout the whole project, trying to interact with a machine easily puts human in a situation starting to want humanlike features. We have talked a lot about what is lacking in the machine, rather than what machine stuff it could produce. This longing seems like a part of the ecology, at least we have not been able to put it away. Longing for something else is a crucial part of playing with KA, and maybe essential to what output comes from the situation. Now, during Corona-pandemic, the longing for some acceptance, a social sign or a hug after the gig makes this premise almost unbearable. Our human longings are magnified by the lacks of the machine,. Humans are programmed to enjoy togetherness. The sadness on what we lost takes over.
This text is intertwined with studio recordings and some handheld video recordings from a duo-concert I did with our machine KimAuto (KA) 2 years into this project. The concert is filmed by pianist and composer Johan Lindvall. He walked around in the audience, and the audience was also encouraged to walk by written messages at the entrance of the concert hall. This concert was part of a dada-exhibition, so the commission from the museum was to link the concert to Satie. My method when preparing was to let our KA listen to a music streaming service with keyword “Satie” in the search-path for 8 hours. I also let Google Translate chew some texts from Baudelaires “Les Fleurs Du Mal” into Norwegian and put these robot voices of Norwegian fragments into an archive for KA to use. The archives were used by KA throughout this concert, both as KA generated its own audio material from them and as midi generated by the same audio to control mechanical devices around in the system.
This concert tried to investigate the wanting to move away, so I spent around half of the concert walking around with the audience listening to KA. Not a very ethical thing to do in a human- human interplay, to walk away... But with KA it suddenly felt possible not being chained to the bandstand and see what music came out of that. What felt like unethical or careless behavior, could have a potential of being more ethical towards the music itself; if musical material is seen in a Heidegger-ish perspective of a material that want to realize itself. In improvising bands I sometimes think that the musicians are too eager, too strong, too busy to see what the music really wants. This method of fluctuating between being an audience and a performer was mind-opening towards zooming out on a playing situation and let it unfold without me, or at least with less of me.
the tech obstacle
The perspective on the what the dysfunctional or imperfect interplay does to the music is often underestimated in technology-heavy projects (and often in aesthetics too…) We tend to talk about developing software according to some human-ideal standards, yet it seems difficult to talk about and realize the machine as an obstacle, an aesthetic entity on its own, a friction or something that is not ideal for us. For me, this dialogue about perfection and whether to tend to it or not, has made me look for and nourish imperfection in my own playing and recording work. I think this is so much more interesting than the flawlessly working system or the perfectly polished recording, maybe because this resembles a fragility that I can relate to. So is this just another fallacy, that I want the machine to be failing because this reminds me of human failure… Maybe, but anyway it has been quite effective in our discussions to reveal and question our aesthetics and human habits by discussion what the perfect machine should and could be. We have discovered what we have as human improvisers through discussing what is lacking in the machine. As a research method I regards this and the Workshop/Lab discussions as our most effective and interesting in terms of musical and habitudinal development.
18th August 2020, Sten Sandell wrote on his facebook wall about locks and idioms and free-improvisation (my translation):
I affirm something in the playing while avoiding things I do not want to include in the expression. At best, a circular movement arises that takes up experiences of previous processes but which slowly but surely forms new forms in an ascending movement.
and
The locks can at best challenge me to find new directions and ways of playing. At best on the slope of the ruin. All this together form idioms, more or less personal. In free improvisation, there is only one basic rule: to be able to change direction at any time or keep the direction you already have. Idioms arise regardless of what music you want to play, where security factors in your expression vary depending on where you want to be in the process. Safe habits of play are set against your desire to interrupt flows and end up in uncertain situations. Uncertain but hopefully exciting conditions. But at the same time you create different idioms regardless of the type of musical expression you are in. You build up your idioms whether you want to or not. Non-idiomatic music does not exist but feel free to affirm your own idioms!
As Sten Sandell points out, the development in a personal expression as improviser may be seen as a slow movement towards something new, where the core of oneself slowly is accepting novel ideas and merges these with older ideas in a possibly evolving fluxus. This musical core, or experience base that we base our more or less rapid responses on when improvising, can be called a musical intuition, taste or personal aesthetics. In my situation, I guess I wanted something outside the human domain to lock the situation, it felt like the search for a personal aesthetics had stranded in lock down. I wondered If my musical response to these algorithmical locks could be so different to my world that I could twist the whole imagination and intuition rather than going in a slow circular movement around myself.
