Performing electronic music

Damian Stewart aka Frey

http://www.frey.co.nz

Musical background

• electroacoustic music
  • music with tapes, synthesizers, computers, laptops, ...
  • composed in studios
• free jazz
  • music with saxophones, guitars, percussion, ...
  • immediate, improvised

Performance

• free jazz
  • improvised
  • communication between musicians
  • 'duels'
• electroacoustic music: 'diffusion'?
• 'laptop performance'?

Problems with Laptop Performance

• movement
• "A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved ... for the revealing of his humour will stimulate a like humour in the listener ... Those who maintain that all of this can be accomplished without gesture will retract their words when, owing to their own insensibility, they find themselves obliged to sit like a statue before their instrument. Ugly grimaces are, of course, inappropriate and harmful; but fitting expressions help the listener to understand our meaning."
• C.P.E. Bach, Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (1753)

Problems with Laptop Performance

• eye contact - duet/group performance?
• 'putting on a show'
• Robert Henke: "We could come to the conclusion that only simple, rough and direct performances are real performances, forget about complexity and detail and next time we are invited to perfom we grab a drum computer, a cheap keyboard, a microphone, and make sure we are really drunk. It might actually work very well. But what to do, if this it is not what we want musically?" - Live Performance in the Age of Supercomputing - link

Overcoming this: PureData + MIDI controller

• draw on free jazz: software to encourage improvisation
• midi controller: coarse-grained motor action
• no screen: free the eyes

Overcoming this: PureData + Computer Vision

• track movement
• free the body
• turn the stage into a space for exploring sound

Thanks!

http://www.frey.co.nz

damian@frey.co.nz