Interplay Between Composition, Instrument Design and Performance
With electronics and code as an essential part of new musical instruments, the boundaries between composition, instrument design and performance are blurring. With code that can be changed and compiled on the fly, the design of an instrument becomes a flu
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Abstract With electronics and code as an essential part of new musical instruments, the boundaries between composition, instrument design and performance are blurring. With code that can be changed and compiled on the fly, the design of an instrument becomes a fluid process, which can even be a performance in itself. Starting with an example from my own artistic practice, I explore the concepts of composition, instrument and performance and what role the design of electronics and software plays in these. What influences design decisions when developing instrument? How does the materiality of electronics and code inform these decisions? How do the knowledge and skills of the makers play their role in this?
1 Introduction With electronic and digital media as key elements in musical instrument design, the boundaries between composition, instrument design and performance are blurring. Practioners do not need to make a clear distinction while developing their projects. However, when they present their work in the context of the established cultural scene, they need to deal with the common division of roles. This paper sheds light on the work process of such artists and how their practice plays in the field between those roles. The questions raised are motivated by my own practice as an artist. In the following section I will describe my piece “Wezen—Gewording” to motivate the questions I raise in Sect. 3. In Sect. 4 I will look at the discourse about composition, instrument and performing in the context of electronic and computer music. In Sect. 5 I will look at live algorithms or interactive music systems, music software and tools and livecoding. I will conclude with a discussion reflecting back on the questions I pose in the beginning.
M.A.J. Baalman (&) Nescivi, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 T. Bovermann et al. (eds.), Musical Instruments in the 21st Century, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2951-6_15
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2 Becoming Since August 2013, I have been developing the piece “Wezen—Gewording”.1 Within this piece, I am looking for a connection between the sonic gesture and the theatrical gesture. I explore this connection by exposing my method of creating the instrument during the performance, while at the same time playing it Fig. 1. Over the course of two-and-a-half years, I performed the piece for 18 times and, both before and during each show, I developed it further. While performing, I go back and forth between body movements and livecoding the mapping between sensor data and its effect on the sound. I wear gestural controllers at my wrists and hands with a number of buttons in each palm. The controls are designed such that they keep my fingers and hands free enough for me to type on my laptop’s keyboard. These controllers started out as an assembly of elastic bands, perfboards, buttons and a Sense/Stage MiniBee (Baalman 2016). Over the course of 1.5 years of performing the piece, the design settled in that I figured out how many buttons I need
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