The Cyborg that landed on the Music thing:

An attempt to find the identity of the Brown University MEME

Department
Jonathan Adam
MUSC1900: Introduction to Ethnomusicology
The Music department at Brown University has one particular
subdepartment that defies easy categorization. The MEME program (an
acronym for Multimedia and Electronic Music Experiments), which
functions both on the undergraduate and graduate level, has its
students produce original works that wildly diverge in genre and range
from real-time electronic improvisation over installation art to video
and performance. Over the past few months, I have tried to pin down
what commonalities the students in this department share: do they
have similar motives for making music? Does the art made in the
MEME department share any central core motifs or areas of
exploration? To what extent do people working within MEME even
consider themselves purely making music, and how do they feel about
their departments relationship to the rest of the Music department?
Through conversations with a couple of MEME graduate students and
one of the founding professors of the department, observations at a
dissertation performance, and examination of artistic products and
process as documented online by one artist, I attempted to establish a
clear idea of what the MEME identity would consist of; however, the
more I tried to solidify this identity, the more it became apparent that a
large part of the communitys self-image is exactly one that is hard to

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define, one that is constantly struggling with is own awkwardness and

in doing so, creates breathing space for great creative potential.
The first graduate student I talked to, Caroline Park, talked at
length about how her work in the MEME program has given her an
alternative pathway to the classical background she came from.
Having completed undergraduate studies at the NEC, she wanted to
move away from particular aspects of the conservatory mindset. As a
composer she felt her role to be [to] create scores which were really
detailed and instructed somebody else to do something, an ideology
which she began to move away from. Her output at conservatory was
also off the mainstream: You bring this piece with like, six weird things
on the piano and thats it I was that person. Moving to MEME she
found she had more leeway in terms of defining and reconfiguring the
parameters of the composer/performer relationship. In fact, she has
found herself performing a lot more than usual, in events ranging from
warehouse basement type shows to predominantly academic
settings of varying degrees of formality. These performances can vary
greatly in nature: they could be improvisatory drone jams; semigenerative pieces that she may spend some time beforehand setting
out a large-scale structure for (so for about two minutes I do this, then
I move on to the next thing); or even ambient pieces that are
welcoming to the audience to take a nap to. With such a wide range of
possible contexts within which her work functions, I was wondering

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whether she could pin down any general theme or point of interest in
her activities. She brought Robert Cogans teachings at NEC, which
focus on sound as the primary motive for music (as opposed to the
usual approach of music education centered on Western Classical
harmony.) The composers work is reinterpreted as someone who
collects, arranges and manipulates sound as a material. Park extends
further into Alvin Luciers ideas about the propagation of sound
through space, asking questions about the nature of the observer and
the listener navigating this space, as well as the composer/performer.
Caroline Parks dissertation performance, CONSTRUCTION,
conveyed many of the ideas we had discussed in our interview.
Audience members coming into the Granoff Center room found a
partially dimmed space with floor cushions scattered around; the
program invites listeners to adjust yourself to feel comfortable. You
do not have to remain fixed. Speakers are spread out throughout the
sides of the room and a row of long tables with assorted electronics
and laptops is pushed to the side of the space. Park enters with a
group of collaborators and they observe a grid of lights until it settles
on a randomized configuration of lights. This configuration informs the
parameters of the next construction: which of 3 possible scores 2 of
the musicians will play, which of 3 light scores will be played, and who,
if anyone, will traverse the space following a movement score. The
piece consists mostly of a few musical elements which are then varied

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over time: long drones which intensify and lull, sine tones which
become intense Morse beeps, all creating an atmosphere in which the
listener is immersed. Audience members end up looking at the 2
performers behind the laptops, or track the dancer as she moves
through the space, or look around, or simply lie down for a while and
experience the sound around them. It is not a typical classical
performance at all: Park has devised a set of circumstances for the
piece to exist within, and the audience simply participates in those
circumstances. As a culmination of several years work, the
performance demonstrates an interest in the notion of space in
performance, and how observers and performers alike negotiate the
spatial aspects of sound and music.
Not all work done by MEME students is inherently musical, and
often falls within the digital art umbrella. The work of Brian House, a
third year graduate student, defies easy categorization but for the
most part is interested in exploring the interaction between code and
data on one hand, and humans on the other. In a talk he gave at the
Eyeo Festival this year (published on Houses website) he talks about
his work as a proposal for new mechanisms, as well as metaphors for
quotidian experiences. One example of this is the Conversnitch, a lamp
that overhears private conversations and tweets them, thus bridging
the gap between (presumed) private physical space and public space
online. Or there is Eternal Portraits, where the raw code of Facebooks

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facial recognition template of three users is framed and displayed in a

gallery. These portraits, at first gibberish code, represent all possible
photos, taken and untaken, by which you might document your life.
Art works like these live in galleries, not performance halls, and lead
significant second lives online, where various press outlets comment
on what they say about our relationships to online networks, to data,
and to technology as a whole. Houses work is not just digital media,
however: in Take my Word for it black box data from a car crash is
translated to a score for two guitars and saxophone; in Quotidian
Record, location data gleaned from Houses phone is represented as a
series of musical intervals and etched onto a vinyl record. House uses
the word data musification (analogous to data visualization) to
describe the process of re-performing data in ways which may
complicate, or play upon, the reconstruction of the narrative that
generated the data in the first place. The more musical pieces may at
times be performed for an audience, but mostly exist, according to
House, as projects that I make videos about, and then put online. And
sometimes people care about them, and sometimes people dont.
When I talk to House about his being a student in the MEME
department, he refers to himself as the most non-musical person in
the department because he, unlike many others (Caroline Park being
one of them), he did not get a degree in music. As an undergraduate
he studied computer science, conning his way into doing work at the

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Computer Music Center in Columbia (which he characterizes as a

subdepartment of the composition program there, and primarily a
resource for the composers) and completed a Masters in Art and
Technology. The MEME graduate program was where he ended up when
trying to find a practice-based doctoral program in Media Art which is
not really a thing that exists in the US. With his work gravitating once
more towards pulses and rhythm, he found the MEME department to
be open and flexible enough to allow for his various interests and
diverse work. The department, he claims, is built around Butch Rovan
and Todd Winkler, but the students within the program are creating
work that is not particularly related to the work of these two people.
Lacking any kind of de facto MEME style, students are more open to
discovering what interests them in their own work. Unlike in Columbia,
the MEME department is not an outgrowth of the composing program
serving the classical canon, and instead it is left to the students to
invent what it is because nobody really knows what it is. The fact
that the same department can house people ranging all the way from
Park looking at sound and avoiding the idea of the score as set of
instructions, to House who focuses greatly on scores or how data can
be mapped to sets of musical instructions, is the great strength of not
having a strong internal style that students work within. The
disadvantage, House believes, is that theres just not much holding the
MEME department together as a department. He views the department

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as a collection of interactions between individuals more of a club

than a department. As an organization he views it almost as a side
component to the other activities hes wrapped up in. Others who are
more invested in the MEME department as a thing they may get
more frustrated when things go wrong. Im more like, eeehhh okay.
Which is kind of a dick move, I guess. It is what it is. Having the MEME
department organized in a low-key fashion, avoiding a common set of
aesthetics or large centralized structure, allows for students to find
their own ways in the art, leading to a great source of diversity in
output; however, it comes at the downside of at times being a
department lacking a strong cohesion in ideology or practice.
I concluded my research with an interview with Todd Winkler, one
of the founders of the program. In our conversation, he talked
extensively about how in his education he did not perceive any true
reasons for why the classical sphere and the new music practice should
be at odds with each other: classical piano and composition always
lived alongside synthesizers and algorithms. On the institutional level,
he found that overall, the classical music world was warming to the
idea of electronic music, and coming to realize it squarely belonged in
contemporary musical thought. Here at Brown, the MEME program
flourished first as an undergraduate concentration, followed eventually
by a PhD program, fueled mostly by the interest that young people
have in emerging technologies. He believes the core tenet of MEME is

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exploring the use of new and emerging technologies in composition

and artistic expression, embodying any number of media: music,
installation, video, dance, or beyond. Winkler explained that a as one
of the people admitting graduate students, one of his main concerns
(second to the quality of the work that these students submit in their
application portfolio) is creating an interesting, diverse community of
people. He believes that the students will primarily learn and be
inspired through their interactions with each other (a fact corroborated
by the interviews with the students), so bringing in people with certain
skills could catalyze a growing interest amongst others: This year, we
brought in someone who is really good at computer graphics, and
these things just spread amongst the community like wildfire. Soon,
everyones trying things out. The construction of the identity of the
MEME department is therefore only indirectly done by its
administration and professors: the practical execution of disseminating
certain styles or techniques is left for the student community to figure
out amongst themselves. Winkler mentioned that he likes that
students latch on to these interests by themselves... theres no point in
forcing any of this. Experimentation is key: with any new technology,
it is just human nature to want to create music from it, and in this
day and age its just too easy to do research. You take a Kinect, you
hook it up, and hey, youre doing something new. Research and
experimentation, trying to figure out what can be done with something

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without yet knowing what that something is completely, is a great

theme in the department and its music.
An often-heard opinion, both in this round of research as well as
in my daily life as a Brown University music student, is the perceived
rift between the music department as a whole and the MEME
department in particular. On top of that, I discovered a general lack of
intradepartmental organization or infrastructure. There seemed to be
few meetings involving all the graduate students; the administration
was just within that of the Music Department, so many expressed a
light resignation on that the computer music kids would probably not
mark the top priority; and one student remarked I dont even think
Ive seen Butch [Rovan] and Todd in the same room they might be
the same person. This general loose casualness facilitates the sense
of experimentation and play that is central to the MEME experience;
however, it is frustrating to many trying to truly grow the department
and establish it solidly. The lack of interdepartmental communication
was also often-mentioned: several students both brought up the same
anecdote about how the MEME students barely interact with the
ethnomusicology graduate students the one time we did, I basically
wanted to take a picture and send it to Ashley [Lundh] and be like,
look at us! When I asked Winkler about his feelings about the music
department as a whole and the MEME department within it, he
responded that he didnt think there was any mutual hostility. He felt

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10

positive about the relationship, saying that many MEME students

participated in performance groups, and that theory is always a good
thing for composers of any kind to study. When I asked whether there
were plans to incorporate more music technology in the music theory
program, he told me he believed anyone would benefit from some
exposure to electronic music as its the language of our time, video,
electronic music But he was reluctant to create a hard requirement
for this, as he lamented the idea of someone being forced to take it if
they didnt want to: If they want to explore it, its there for them. They
can take as little or as much of it as they please, and that goes for any
student at Brown. This approach to education seemed to be a
common theme within the MEME department and what it wants to
transmit to its students. Winkler also floated the idea of capstone
courses where all Music seniors of various tracks would find each other
and be able to collaborate.
With a new hiring round about to take place in the department,
the faculty is looking for people who has a strong composition and
theory background, and, according to Winkler, is sympathetic, or even
actively interested in the MEME department. I was surprised with this
low-key descriptor. Now that a group of the older guard, who may have
been ambivalent or largely wary of the MEME program, had retired, it
seemed like the perfect opportunity to change the climate of the
department as a whole and try to get more new music flowing in the

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theory department as well. But rather, as long as the new faculty

seemed okay with what the MEME department was doing, that would
be all right.
Over the course of this research, I bumped time and time again
into the fact that the MEME department practically requires its sense of
un-definition to function as is. A stronger departmental identity would
go at the cost of a more homogeneous, less crazy and experimental
creative output. A strong house style would forgo the efforts of Winkler
to diversify the student population and foster an atmosphere where
they cross-fertilize each others skills sets and research interests. In
order to foster experimentation and welcome the fact that often people
wont exactly know what theyre doing, the department as a whole
should be constantly experimenting and not exactly knowing what
theyre doing. With the resources and buildings currently at hand,
MEME has no other option but to choose between homogenizing, and
losing a lot of its creative energy; or sticking to its grassroots approach,
which is free for all to experiment within.