An Astrophysicist's Tale - Electroacoustic / Live Coded Composition

2008

2017

2021

For a complete performance video see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK-EWKytoZw With the theme of “teaching and learning” during 2021’s Fresh Inc Festival, I have designed this work to display some underexplored and newly developed rhythmic possibilities in music: namely, indivisible poly-mensuralism and “pan-rational” time signatures. This work also uses techniques in algorithmic and fractal-based music composition, which I have developed over the past five years to aid in my creative process. Thus, this work is both a learning experience for me as the composer, exploring some of the possibilities of poly-mensuralism and pantationalism, and a learning experience for the performer in parsing these rhythmic stratified and indivisible structures along with this modified system of time signature. In addition to the learning process of the composer and performer, the fractal-based processes used to generate much of the rhythmic and pitch material in the first and second parts of the piece are created using a simple machine learning neural network. When I first begin developing some basic algorithmic and iterative processes to generate motivically related but rapidly developing and diverging musical material from rudimentary pitch and rhythmic cells, I found the process very long. These algorithms could generate vast arrays of potential musical variations and derivations, but most of these possibilities generated by the computer I would find uncompelling. I had to sort through a lot of data and modify many satisfactory results into something I found more compelling. Upon the suggestion of my husband, I began to use a simple machine learning neural network to teach the machine the results I liked best and, consequently, teach the computer to find solutions that I would like based on the “training set” of successful matches. Rather than try and prescribe limitless parameters of what pleases me in music, I let me computer attempt to learn through sorting many results into best, good, satisfactory, bad, and poor categories, even using extant pieces of music I had previously written. Consequently, the computer would produce only results that would theoretically compel me and sound like me. Of course, there are always potential false positives, but I hope with further use, this network might continue to prove extremely useful as I continue to compose using various generative processes. As such, I am teaching my computer to not write music blindingly based only an iterative process, but to sort through those iterations and produce those which I will potentially think are the best. Thus, not only is this work a learning experience for me and the performer, but also the machine which aided in the process.

2010

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2003

Journal of Literature and Art Studies, 2016

In accordance to Langerian aesthetic theory, Mark Campbell (1992) concludes that Cage's 4'33" (1952) is by no means aesthetic music. I argue the antithesis: Cage's 4'33" satisfies Langerian aesthetic theory, and is indeed "aesthetic" music. Cage does something more: he satisfies Langerian aesthetic theory, yet he is not limited by it. He does not simply create music, nor does he offer listeners a musical space. He creates what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987) call a line of becoming that passes between music making and a musical space. In 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence, Cage presents a sense of emptiness and numbness felt simultaneously with fullness and explosion. In what appears to be stillness, the listener experiences the flux of movement; what appears to be devoid of depth, is filled with complexities. 4'33" embraces chance, uncertainty, and the unknown; it is an experimental process; it is becoming-music in 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

1997

Journal of Schenkerian Studies 6: 93-113, 2012

2009