DANIEL CIOCCOLONI

Monday, 10 January 2011

RWA performance (part 2)

These are the videos taken at the event. A/V quality isn't very good, but I will be uploading studio recordings of some of this stuff in the future.

Part 1

Part 2

Friday, 31 December 2010

So yesterday (Dec 30th) I performed at the Royal West of England Academy of Arts using a program I created over the past few weeks, I have video footage of the performance and will be posting the videos subsequently on youtube and this blog.

In the meantime I am posting the academic paper I wrote to present the project for the program I used for the performance.

S.A.T. - Research Report

Daniel Cioccoloni

CONCEPTS

The project I will be submitting is informed by a number of concepts and reflections:

1. The musical application of concepts we are used to using when dealing with physical materials, such as density, size, shape and roughness/smoothness of surfaces, and using these concepts to inform aesthetics in composition and live performance.

2. The idea of giving a performer high-level control (over some sort of sound "mass" ) with which to define the overall direction of a piece in terms of contour, contrasts, resolutions, speeds, generalised movements in the frequency range, basically putting the performer in a position that is somewhat similar to that of an orchestra conductor.

3. Generative music that is defined mainly in statistical terms starting from a selection of sound elements tends, in my opinion, to be boring. This isn't necessarily a criticism of the compositions that have been developed generatively, although often compositional devices resulting from the desire to create a generative work in which any one of the possible combinations of sound events will be consonant (e.g. using only the notes of the pentatonic scale as possible sound events) results in a soundscape that is generally very uninspired and closer to muzak than music, rather my criticism is of the process itself.

There seems to me to be a deficiency, aesthetically speaking, in a process that defines music in generally statistical rather than in temporal terms, the result lacks a structure that is "evolving and meaningful" as defined by Andy Hamilton in Aesthetics and Music (2007), there are in fact similarities between statistically generative music and noise, technically defined as "[sound] material whose exact frequencies are not determined, but statistical" (Hamilton, 2007).

My point is that while there is some aesthetic value in using statistical variations within electroacoustic compositions (especially in terms of adding imperfections that are characteristic of human musical production) for the compositions in question to transcend the simple gimmick of "being generative" these statistical elements have to occur within a temporal, evolving and meaningful syntax and there has to be some form of control over the arising "imperfections".

CONTEXT

Some of these points may appear unrelated, however I believe they are inextricably linked. For proof of this assertion one need only look at the history of 20th century music and the natural progression from the ideas of "spatial construction" in music introduced by Varèse in the first half of the 20th century to Xenakis' contour-defined stochastic processes to contemporary applications of statistics in music.

The explorations in musical textures, and the idea itself of looking at music in terms of texture pioneered by Varèse is a necessary and almost sufficient precursor to the idea of looking at musical development in terms of contour. In turn, using contour as the principal way by which to define musical development opens up the possibility for a truly textural evolution of musical syntax (statistical rather than melodic or harmonic).

It was Xenakis who when composing using statistical material realised that for the results to be aesthetically valid and meaningful it is necessary for the composer to make arbitrary choices both of a statistical and temporal nature. In other words the composer should not be a slave to the process, but rather should use the results of the process as a raw material from which to shape musical compositions in an arbitrary fashion.

Personally I feel my critique of statistically generative music has certain similarities with Xenakis' critique of serialist music, because although the objects of the two criticisms are very different the critique itself is extremely similar, i. e. that starting from a process that describes a non-arbitrary choice of frequency content and rhythmic structures a composer must make an arbitrary set of choices that discriminate in favour of certain frequencies, harmonies, speeds or gestures within the frequency domain to achieve full aesthetic effect.

IMPLEMENTATION

Starting from these premises I am proposing to construct a program that will synthesise an ensemble of independently moving voices (50 at least). The movements of the voices will be defined across the entire audible spectrum at random by the program.

This is the generative element of the process, it is very basic, the voices simply have the capacity to move to frequencies chosen at random, at random speeds that vary between half a second and a minute.

The program is set up so that a portion of the voices move linearly from one frequency to the other, by means of portamenti and the remaining voices move discretely from one frequency to the other.

If left to it's own devices the program would simply continue to act in the way I have described above, the result would be chaotic and could be likened to white noise (although less dense) with all frequencies being equally probable during an execution of the program's raw process. Thus the program requires human intervention to produce any meaningful results, as I have already stated the generative element of the program is very basic as my interest is not in generating music through a particular mathematical process (which may or may not be discernible to the listener), rather I am interested in allowing performers to impose their will on a mass of generative material that in itself has no particular aesthetic value, much in the same way as a sculptor imposes his will on a formless piece of stone.

The interface of the program will allow a performer to shape the mass of sound generated by the program both in the frequency and time domain through the use of a series of double sliders.

The sliders that control values in the frequency domain have two markers each, one to define the lowest frequency to which the various voices can move and one to define the highest. The performer uses these sliders to limit the movements of the voices and create areas of higher or lower density in the frequency domain.

The various sliders can be used to break the mass of sound up in to various sub-groups defined in terms of tone quality (percussive sounds that move discretely from frequency to frequency vs. "pad" sounds that move by portamenti) or amplitude weighting assigning them to different portions of the frequency range. There is also a master slider that can be used to control the values of all the sliders at the same time. The result of these controls is that in terms of frequency the performer can create musical textures that run the entire gamut from structured tonal material to complete chaos. The harmonic structures that can be created vary from a unison (with all voices regardless of tone quality or amplitude sounding the same frequency) to chords created from different sub-groups sounding different frequencies in unison to combinations of unisons and harmonic clusters to each sub-group creating distinct harmonic clusters all the way to completely indeterminate movements across the entire audible spectrum.

In terms of the time domain the user is able to define the range of speeds at which the movements of the voices take place, once again the range can be defined to incorporate a large number of values (anything from half a second up to a minute) or be restricted all the way to allowing only a single possible value. When the speed of movements is defined as only having one possible value, let's say half a second, then all of the voices will gradually start to conform to this rigid structure creating a pulsating, highly rhythmical effect. So once again we have the possibility to move between completely chaotic structures and rigidly defined arbitrary states.

Personally I believe the most interesting textures will result from the transitions from chaotic to ordered states and vice versa and from the combination of varying degrees of order or chaos in terms of frequency and time domain structures.

Other controls that will allow a user to more fully define a musical idea within such a system are independent volume controls for different groups of voices and controls that define tone variations (such as attack/decay time in the case of the percussive section). There will also be a master volume control for global amplitude changes.

SYNTHESIS

The voices that move by means of portamenti will have a harmonic, organ-like sound that will make it easier to discern individual voices within a particular cluster, the best synthesis technique for this will clearly be some form of additive synthesis.

The percussive voices will have to be of definite pitch so best candidate would most likely be FM synthesis of bell-like sounds.

I am also considering including a second section of voices that move by discrete intervals. These synths will sound like wind instruments and the best technique would be FM synthesis, possibly used in combination with some noise synthesis to simulate blowing sounds.

LINEAR/NON-LINEAR ARTEFACTS

For the linear submission I'm still debating whether to use a carefully selected composition written specifically for the program that showcases its potential and get a high-quality recording of a performance of the composition or whether to construct a collage of recordings of various states of the process. This decision will be made once I have had the time to experiment methodologically with the program.

For the non-linear presentation I will most probably be performing a composition written for the program (hopefully accompanied by a video projection of my computer screen to display the ongoing processes visually).

AUDIO CD

The accompanying audio cd contains the following tracks with sound textures generated by a prototype of the program I have described above.

Tracks:

1. Portamenti moving by random values at random speeds across the entire audible range.

2. Percussive voices moving as in the above track.

3. Voices grouped in separate clusters

4. 2 unisons + 2 clusters

5. Chord (4 distinct unisons)

6. Unison - first half with a rigidly defined time structure, second half in free time

7. Percussive voices with precisely defined time but random pitch

8. Percussive voices transition from structured rhythm to chaotic rhythm

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hamilton, A., 2007. Aesthetics and Music. London: Continuum

Xenakis, I.,1992. Formalized Music. Revised Edition. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press

Fauvel, John et.al., 2003. Music and Mathematics. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press

Creasey, D., 2010. Audio Processing Book 3. Bristol: UWE

Bernardini, N. and Vidolin, A., 2005. Sustainable Live Electro-acoustic Music. In: XV CIM, Sound and Music. Salerno, Italy, 24-26 November 2005

Isacoff, Stuart. Temperament. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001

Wednesday, 22 September 2010

Current projects

Finally I've got round to talking about my current activity :)

Over the summer I've been keeping really, really busy lately with a number of diverse (yet all music-related) projects. Firstly, one major composition that has been developing in the back of my mind for about year now and I have finally managed to transfer a series of images into a concrete set of musical themes and forms and to realise the software required for the realisation of some of the sections.

Secondly, I've been working on my thesis for my final uni project that is a piece of software with a graphic scoring interface and generative capabilities that will essentially be a hybrid between a scoring system and live performance instrument.

Thirdly, and possibly most interestingly for my youtube viewers I have began working on the production of a documentary series that will be looking at the history of 20th century classical music whose first instalment will probably be published some time in late autumn 2010, so keep an eye out for that.

Another thing I wish to quickly talk about is an unplanned piece I composed a few days ago and only just published. This composition was something of a happy accident as I just woke up one morning with an idea for a set of themes developing in symmetrical scales and through a variety of transpositions and just ended up writing the whole day, pushing aside other things that had to be done. I continued writing into the night almost without taking a break and by one o' clock in the morning I found myself with a complete score.

Friday, 10 September 2010

Quick recap

Ok, this is going to be quite a long entry as I haven't posted anything in a while, I will be briefly going through my recent activity since the Meditations performance last December to get the blog up to date as I have a couple of announcements to make in my next post regarding my future projects.

A few months back I published an audio study named Four Lines, this was something of a freak event for me since it's the only study of the 100+ I have written over the past 2-3 years I've ever published.

My studies are generally written as a means of sonic exploration and range from exercises in traditional scoring and notation, to the generation of audio by means of logic circuits, to pure maths applied to composition and tone generation.

I write these studies to gain familiarity with techniques I am interested in incorporating in my compositions so process always takes precedence over aesthetics (this being mainly the reason why the studies are not intended for publication).

In the case of Four Lines I was looking at ways of constructing an entire composition using a single chord change, however when I decided to to use digitally controlled portamenti for the chord change I decided to also work on setting up the harmonies in such a way as to end up with incidental harmonies during the portamenti sections that would give the piece an overall sense of brightness.

I eventually decided to publish the study as I felt it was interesting enough to stand on its own, so here it is ( the video contains a few notes regarding the harmonic construction of the piece).

During this period I was also working on a short tonal composition for which I got the idea while walking at Severn Beach with my girlfriend Sveva in which a three-note theme is developed using different styles throughout the duration of the piece.

The composition was written over a very short period of time and was also a chance for me to show a different aspect of my music than I had previously.

Over the past few months I also published the two remaining tracks from the Meditations series which was completed in early spring 2010. The second half of the series has a much looser feel and structure than the first half and ends with a free piano improvisation I recorded almost by accident while at uni.

I was initially intending to end the series with Meditation No.4, but somehow the piano recording found its way onto the album and I quite like the contrast it creates with the preceding tracks so it's now "officially" become part of the series.

To listen to the complete series first check out the two videos from the "Meditations -Live performance" post, these contain footage from a live performance of the first half of Meditations and then watch the two following videos (there's a few accompanying notes in the Improvisation 1 video) which make up the second half.

Well, that's pretty much it, there's a few other things I've published on my youtube page and around the interweb but these are the most interesting bits. I've got a number of of projects that are well developed right now so now that i've got up to date on the blog I'm going to be posting info on upcoming projects, publications, etc more regularly.

Wednesday, 23 June 2010

Meditations - Live performance

12/12/2009 - Last December I had the chance to perform an (at the time) unfinished set of new compositions at Arnofini art gallery. The suite was a chance for me to freely explore aspects of recording and composition I was interested in at the time.

I performed the first half of the suite (three compositions in total) as I was still working on the second half at the time. I have included performance notes below the videos.

PART 1

PART 2

Performance Notes:

The suite opens with a prelude for piano and prepared sounds, the structure is atonal but the repetition of certain rhythmic patterns and the use of certain notes only in particular contexts gives the piece a sense of unity and direction. The prelude references many compositions and many musical styles of the first half of the twentieth century within a disjointed and entropic musical landscape.

The prelude segues straight into the second Meditations composition, Meditation No.3 (the numbering system indicates the order in which the parts were composed, not the order in which they are to be performed), a composition that expands on the main theme from the third movement of War Distilled (also by Daniel Cioccoloni). The style of this arrangement of the theme is a homage to the krautrock movement of the late 60s and early 70s, the piano cadences are created through generative systems starting from basic structures from the prelude.

As the last chord of Meditation No.3 fades out the choral section of Meditation No.2 slowly creeps in. This section uses a limited number of samples, found sounds, found samples and instrumental parts with a very limited frequency range to create an expansive, non-thematic composition. Despite the absence of a theme there is a strong sense of unity and momentum as the structure of transpositions and phase shifts often adheres to strict mathematical rules. The frequent use of the tremolo in the timpani explores the outer reaches of what perceptively one can define as rhythm as in the particular case of the tremolo rhythm can be considered to exist if defined as a succession of structured accents over time, yet it can be considered absent if one defines rhythm as a succession of pauses between notes as the individual hits are too close for there to be any any silence between one hit and the other.

After the choral/timpani structure reaches maximum intensity everything dies away leaving the composition almost devoid of sound, all that remains is a single synth. the synth plays within a structure that increasingly limits its frequency range until over the last two minutes it can only play frequencies contained within the C4-G4 range. Three tones explore this confined space until they come to rest on the frequencies of the C minor triad resolving with the tonic on bass.