Manipulating Sounds: musical performance as alteration of a pre-configured system’s output

This is a Research Problem relating to the 21^st Century Music Practice Research Centre’s theme on Technology and Musical Creativity and in particular relates to the first bullet point in the Research Problem outlined for that theme: “The ways in which the influences, affordances and restrictions of technology design and configuration affect musical practices”. https://www.c21mp.org/front-page/research-projects/technology-and-musical-creativity/

Up until the development of recording and electronic music, there were very few musical technologies that separated the triggering of a sound from the shaping of its timbre. There were various forms of mechanical muting for strings and brass instruments, there were organ stops and various forms of switching on acoustic keyboard instruments that altered the way the strings were set in motion or allowed to keep vibrating. The development of electric and electronic systems for sound production and reproduction also saw the parallel development of voltage controllable amplitude, filtering, pitch and equalisation and, later, digital systems that also allowed the real-time manipulation of these and other parameters.

This Open Research Project (ORP), as it says in the title, is about exploring the creative, real-time alteration of a pre-configured system’s output as musical performance. It is concerned with musical practices in genres which exploit and explore the separation of sound triggering and sound manipulation. In a way that might be considered parallel or analogous to the separation of composition and performance, these forms involve the pre-production design and/or configuration of a system that will produce one or more streams of audio. This might take the form of a modular patch, a sequencer/arpeggiator configuration, a generative algorithm, a pre-recorded multitrack, a performance by one or more others, or some combination of more than one of them. This is configured in advance to run more or less autonomously. The performance phase then consists of altering, steering and shaping that stream (or streams) of audio in real-time as it runs. This might take the form of fader moves, filtering, modulation, dub-style mixing etc. The performer’s authorship is distributed across both phases: compositional/configurational decisions made before the performance determine what the system can produce, while in-the-moment manipulation determines what is actually heard. There will, of course, be various ‘grey areas’ and points of overlap – such as King Tubby triggering sounds during the mix process by hitting his spring reverb with a stick or an electroacoustic performer with piano and a gesture-controlled granular synthesis algorithm having to occasionally hit or scrape a string – but the project is concerned with genres where this separation accounts for the majority of practice and where the judgment of skilled agency is focused on these two phases of activity.

This ORP is concerned with performative music-making rather than public performance as such: what matters is that the alteration of the system’s output is produced by real-time action, not that it takes place before an audience. This allows the inclusion of albums whose sound was mixed ‘live’ in the studio but distinguishes between performed dub practice and mixes produced with automation (which would not be included). Also, it includes YouTube documentation of solo modular performances made alone in a home studio, which doesn’t involve a public audience. Both of these examples involved real-time manipulation of a running system.

This ORP is open to any musical activity where this definition holds but four common genres (or modes of practice that are important in genre definitions) provide obvious case studies that can be considered as examples of the same underlying phenomenon:

1. Sequenced/generative electronica — modular synthesis, arpeggiators, sample triggers, preset sequences combined in performance.
2. Performance-based mixing in popular music — a key example being dub and its descendants: live desk or control surface mixing of pre-recorded multitrack material as a performative act.
3. DJ/laptop hybrid sets — a subset of Ableton-based sets combining pre-recorded, sequenced and live-triggered material with live manipulation and processing, sitting between DJing and electronic composition.
4. Interactive live electronics — a subset of electroacoustic systems where the ‘acoustic’ is either pre-recorded or a minimal live acoustic input in real time (e.g. the piano example above), distinct from autonomous generative systems.

Another set of marginal cases which should be included is where one performer is instrumentally producing sound and a second performer is altering/manipulating that output in real time. Thus, examples from our second category would include Brian Eno processing early Roxy Music live on stage and dub mixes of live bands such as Adrian Sherwood with African Head Charge. It would also include the Fripp & Eno No Pussyfooting album as it was a live duet performance created in the studio. The fourth category could also therefore include electroacoustic performance combining an acoustic instrumental performer and a live electronics performer (rather than pre-recorded or algorithmic electronics).

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