Music with eyes closed
Though I have
seldom surrendered to the desire to visualize music, the
emerging possibilities of computational graphics are difficult
to resist. My audio autism has been pretty water tight,
coming from a belief in the uniqueness of musical experience.
Probably this phenomenological monism is just another version
of the idea of "absolute" music, but mine is not so much
a dogma as desire, a desire to create compelling music.
Descartes
Dream
The rationale for this opening, is that
I take geometry to be the formalization of specific kinds
of personal imagination. I spend a lot of time visualizing
when I write musical code. Visualizing models for the flow
of sound and models of processing, visualizing relations
of musical parameters and control structures. Computational
Geometry is creating a competing locus to our internal visual
imagination in mathematical simulation, allowing rich mathematical
ideas to be more easily shared. The fact that this is a
place where musical and visual representations can meet
is truer than it has ever been. Their having common generative
grounds in computation is exciting in that it is so easy
for ideas to migrate between media.
Fear
of Flying
There is also a negative motivation.
That is to untangle the knots we tie ourselves in, in weaving
our intricate digital instruments. I find the explosion
of parameters to be difficult to cope with in performance.
Since I can not separate the composing of music from musical
practice I feel that this has a negative impact on our ability
to make our technology musical. (i.e. if you cant play it,
it"s not music; music without real access to the dynamics
of performance is often just librarianship). If there is
help available from new work in sci. vis. we should take
a serious look. Certainly much practical work these days
in applied and theoretical science is completely dependent
on viz driven tools. We should look at how this works and
try to imagine a way to attain useful tools for composing
and performance.
Navigation Aids
The
high dimensional state space of the music engines we architect
are almost impossible to navigate except by dead reckoning,
swimming from one point to the next, crossing seas of nearly
unchanging predictability and occasionally encountering
the Trinidad's and Tahiti's of fabulousness. Its easy enough
to save their coordinates but not so easy to see the big
picture Ecco, I found it, but in fact where am I? In spaces
of higher dimensions the connectivity is rich and opportunities
for warped trajectories abound. We rapidly lose ourselves
in the process, and this is partly what is musical focus.
But while I can enjoy the slow incremental search, I feel
audiences deserve a more rapid and elegant crossing. Map
makers from Genoa or Antwerp are not much help. The experience
of the overwhelming richness of possibilities for synthesis
and signal processing includes the equally overwhelming
lack of interesting representations. Methods for scaling
and rendering multi dimensional data have expanded greatly
recently to match the increase in computational power. Display
graphics and animation have made the topological insights
of the last 150 years available for the imaginationally
impaired.
I propose we survey geometric and computational ideas being deployed in scientific visualization, that we enjoy the search and hopefully that we find opportunities for collaborative design of the particular tools we desire.
Joel Ryan, 2002
