Abstract
Sandeep Bhagwati asks whether algorithmic analysis & composition will one day replace human music making. His conclusion is ambivalent: yes, in the future algorithms will compose almost all of our music–but humans will still retain the privilege of aesthetics. We humans will determine what kind of phenomena we choose to call ‘music’ at all–and when, how and why that music can mean something to us. Bhagwati proposes to view music as not so much the art of making sound, but rather as the art of making meaning through listening.
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Notes
- 1.
“Do you realize that almost anything that humanity thinks today, or calls thinking, can already be thought by machines, made by cybernetics, the new science of creation? And these machines instantly trump mankind, their valves are more precise, their fuses more stable than in our disintegrating wrecks.”, from: “The Radar Thinker (1949) [2, p. 71], passage translated by Sandeep Bhagwati.
- 2.
“Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse” [4, pp. 1–7].
- 3.
Summa Technologiae [6, p. 159], passage translated by Sandeep Bhagwati.
- 4.
In fact, it would be more reasonable to assume that intelligence amplifiers would be rather specialised tools—just as we have no general physical robot that can amplify each of our many physical actions: instead we have cars for faster locomotion, power tools for better penetration, forklifts for better lifting, vibrators for better stimulation etc. If we think about it in this way, there is a case to be made that we already now routinely use Lemian intelligence amplifiers—from shopping ‘genies’ to route planners, from commodity usage predictors to high speed securities traders.
- 5.
Such as medicine, baseball team management, predicting the outcome of elections or fashion design—and, obviously, music composition.
- 6.
Of course, as Jaron Lanier [5] has pointed out, we cannot assume that this amplified intelligence will be beneficial to our societies and way of life—will it not almost necessarily re-create hierarchical, feudalist, societies where some lording corporations and their employees control the flow of information (and thus, the amplified intelligence) and the others simply will be their dumb ‘material’—a society that does not need the kind of middle class that currently earns its living solely by its specialised use of intelligence?
- 7.
Wo sind wir wenn wir Musik hören? [10, pp. 294–325], passage translated by Sandeep Bhagwati.
- 8.
Similar in emotional impact to—but not as physically hazardous as—other drugs and alcohol. The ubiquitous “soma” drug of Huxley’s “Brave New World” could, in such a scenario, turn out to be not a pill or a fluid at all—but rather such bespoke live-generated music—exactly what the Sloterdijk quote, too, seems to imply.
- 9.
It is evident from the composers’ statements from this project that some of them quickly subverted this intention—either by limiting their descriptors to the analytic team or by accepting the resultant software compositions as “raw material” for subsequent work. In this, they used some of the strategies for meta-composition and meta-listening that I will describe later.
- 10.
Steve Prefontaine was a runner who once held the American record in seven different running events, from 2,000 to 10,000 m. The quote is attributed to him (without bibliographical data) see [13]
- 11.
Although both obviously would be specific instances of the proposed definition!
- 12.
And this definition by necessity must be open-ended, in order to leave room for new instances.
- 13.
“Aesthetic” in the sense of “pertaining to how we humans evaluate our perceptions”.
- 14.
Such as the popular variations in the styles of composers from Bach to Brahms, written by 19th century composer Siegfried Ochs on the children’s song “Kommt ein Vogel geflogen”, and many similar variation cycles in that vein, even in popular music and comedy.
- 15.
Similarly, almost no stylistic innovation that may come up during an improvisation has a name: only when it is re-visited often enough by the inventor or others (and/or recorded and distributed) will it be understood as a new aesthetic entity—and thus accrue cultural relevance. This poses a fundamental aesthetic problem for algorithmic practices such as live-coding and computer-improvisation: their practice is often understood to be culturally relevant, while their sonic result mostly is not—a paternalistic attitude we normally apply only to amateur work, not to high-level intellectual pursuits. At the time of writing, it is not yet clear whether this situation points to a problem in the resultant music or in our cultural prejudices around music.
- 16.
Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, Dialogues [11, p. 52].
- 17.
I employ this term, coined by Lewis [7] in reference to certain forms of jazz practiced in Europe to designate music practiced around the world that is based on the European heritage of musicking, composition, and discourse. I find it more adequate within a global perspective than the terms more conventionally used, such as “Western Classical Music”, “Western Art Music”, or the falsely universalist term used for this musical tradition by most musicologists in Europe and North America, namely “music”.
- 18.
The French word entendre means both “to hear” and “to understand” [and even: “to signify”]—a homonymy well exploited in French music aesthetics. It indeed seems to embody a useful correlation of concepts for the purpose of my argument.
- 19.
Conversely, one cannot even hear a Beethoven symphony as music—unless one learns how to listen to it. When my father was a teenager in 1950 s newly post-colonial Bombay, he loved music. One day, a schoolmate gave him a LP record of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. My father was eager to listen to this new treat—but when he lowered the needle onto the disc, he did not hear/understand anything musical: just an impenetrable, loud, messy and noisy jungle of nonsensical sounds. The next day, he complained to his friend about this puzzling cacophony. The friend told him about Beethoven and his high status in the West, and asked my father to listen again and again—even in the background while doing homework or while playing. Although his family had been high-level activists in Gandhi’s movement and political prisoners of the British Empire, my father probably did still consider it important to know the music of the not-really-former colonisers. He followed his friend’s advice. And, indeed, after a few days of constant re-listening and exposure, the music finally jumped out from the jungle: he could hear/understand it.
- 20.
The proudly defiant statement, often uttered by avantgarde composers working in the concert/festival circuit, that “they do not write for the audience”, however truthful as a description of their mental state while writing, and however revealing as a socio-political commentary on the relationship between audiences and composers, obviously cannot be literally true: even the most arcane piano/orchestra/ensemble etc. composition is still conceived for a concert audience, it plays a defined role in the cultural politics of institutions promoting this music and most importantly, it usually wants to be listened to in silence—preferably several times. In that expectation, it relies on a context that exists before itself—in a trivial, but not irrelevant sense, all compositions intended for concert performance or audio publication are just fluctuations (content) within a larger context of public presentation of music, fulfilling its situational, social, political—and yes, even aesthetical expectations.
- 21.
It should be pointed out, however, that abstracting musicking from the sonic is not the only possible reaction to the ephemerality of sound. Other music traditions display a large variety of approaches in coping with the fickleness of the sonic. On the one hand, some East Asian (Chinese, Japanese) art music traditions seem to address the matter head-on—they consider the timbre of a note to be even more important than its place in time. They therefore must precisely notate instrumental playing technique rather than, say, duration and precise rhythm. Others deal with the issue by considering the actual sound of musicking as an aesthetically rather marginal element. Hindustani music philosophy, for example, posits a spiritual ideal of sound, dhvani, that must necessarily always remain unmatched by actual sonic events—and, like qin aesthetics, it also knows the concept of anahata: inaudible sound.
- 22.
Only recently can we observe a conceptual turn in composition that mirrors the context-conscious conceptualism of the visual arts. The author of this text feels a certain creative affinity with the dispersed and heterogeneous non-movement of conceptualist composers that might be inferred from individual aesthetics as diverse as those of Peter Ablinger, Mark Applebaum, John Oswald, Clarence Barlow, Johannes Kreidler, Sergej Newski, Chris Newman, Hannes Seidl, Martin Schüttler, Alexander Schubert, John Zorn, etc.
- 23.
In his book Orality and Literacy [9], Ong develops the concept of a “secondary orality” that manifests itself in highly technological (and hence literate) societies—e.g. in TV talkshows or the telephone. Similarly, one could define a “secondary materiality” as one that relies on virtual de- and re-constructions of its “materials”.
- 24.
As, for example, in the live-computer improvisation project Native Alien discussed in Section “Through the veil”.
- 25.
Non-diatonic and non-identical scales, alternate definitions of consonance in chords (e.g. triads based on the fourth), dodecaphony in its various guises, diverse takes on microtonality, synaesthesias of various kinds, etc.
- 26.
James Tenney’s term for perceivable sonic building blocks in complex compositions [12].
- 27.
Albrecht Wellmer in: Identity and Difference [14, p. 71].
- 28.
See [8, pp. 12–13], passage translated by Sandeep Bhagwati.
- 29.
There is no comprehensive article on Native Alien yet, as the project is still in evolution and testing, but some glimpses [video, audio and text] may be found on the project website http://matralab.hexagram.ca/projects/native-alien/ [accessed on July 1, 2014].
- 30.
In this case, the style-models in question are not based on pre-existing musical styles: rather, a major part of the compositional act was to closely define each of the nine style-models invented for this piece—a comprovisation technique I call working with “encapsulated traditions”, see [3].
- 31.
In April 2013, Native Alien was presented at Mumuth Graz in a concert performance with Mike Svoboda (trombone) and Navid Navab (computer). Navab is a co-creator of Native Alien, and his role is similar to that of a conductor: he does not actively “play” or “trigger” any of the sounds that emerge, but watches over the musical evolution of the entire orchestra of algorithmic improvisers. Recently, bass trombonist Felix del Tredici has been the main performer with the system.
- 32.
Welsch calls this act “aesthetic perception”, a term which makes more sense for verbal or even visual situations where you can separate semantic perception and aesthetic (or formal) perception more neatly than in music, a non-semantic formal mode of communication. Hence my term ‘meta-listening’.
- 33.
“Analysis by composition” as an emergent musicological field heavily relies on algorithmic music technologies, both on offline algorithmic composition tools and on a variety of live-improvisation softwares already in regular concert use such as OMAX (IRCAM Paris), Voyager (Columbia University New York), Prosthesis (Goldsmiths College London) and Native Alien (matralab, Concordia University Montreal) and more.
- 34.
As is the case in many of the works of the conceptual composers mentioned in footnote 22.
- 35.
Indeed, should the ‘paradise’ evoked in section “Generative paradises” one day become reality, the case for teaching sonic composition as more than a software skill for corporate use probably may become hard to make.
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Bhagwati, S. (2015). Musicking Beyond Algorithms. In: Nierhaus, G. (eds) Patterns of Intuition. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9561-6_17
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