Music scores by PerMagnus Lindborg
PROGRAM NOTE
Per Magnus Lindborg: Man bör kalla saker och ting vid deras rätta namn.
For flute,... more PROGRAM NOTE
Per Magnus Lindborg: Man bör kalla saker och ting vid deras rätta namn.
For flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello and double bass. Duration 10 minutes. Written for Ensemble Bit20 for the occasion of their Ho Chi Minh City concert, 9 December 2007.
After having worked with transcriptions and musicalisations of the voice of Mao Zedong over two years and eight pieces, the opportunity of working with a recording of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was welcome. Ever since he entered politics in the late 1950s, Palme was on the frontline, supporting the oppressed against the profiteers. Throughout the US war in Vietnam and Laos, Palme insisted on piece initiatives and troops withdrawal and was one of very few leaders in the West who actively supported the North Vietnamese government. When the Paris Peace Conference broke down in 1972 and President Nixon followingly ordered massive punitive strikes against Hanoi and Haiphong, Palme did not shred his words. A short but carefully worded statement in Swedish Radio, barely two minutes, caused an international upheaval and the retraction of the US ambassador from Stockholm.
”Man bör kalla saker och ting vid deras rätta namn: det som pågår idag, i Vietnam, det är en form av tortyr. Det kan inte finnas militära motiv för bombningar i denna skala. Militära talesmän i Saigon har sagt att det inte förekommer någon uppladdning ifrån Nordvietnamesernas sida. Det kan inte heller rimligen bero på någon halsstarrighet från Vietnamesernas sida vid förhandlingsbordet. Alla kommentatorer är överens om att det främsta motståndet mot Oktoberöverenskommelsen i Paris har givits utav presidenten Thieu. Det man nu gör, det är att plåga människor - plåga en nation, för att förödmjuka den; tvinga den till underkastelse, under maktspråk. Och därför är bombningarna ett illdåd, och av det har vi många i den moderna historien, och de är i allmänhet förbundna med ett namn: Guernica; Oradour; Babin Jar; Katyn; Lidice; Sharpeville; Treblinka. Där har våldet triumferat. Men eftervärldens dom har fallit hård over dem som burit ansvaret. Nu fogas ett nytt namn till raden: Hanoi, julen 1972.” (Olof Palme)
One should call things by their rightful names: what currently goes on in Vietnam is a form of torture. There cannot be military reasons for bombings of such scale. Military spokesmen in Saigon have said that there is no gathering of forces by the North Vietnamese side. Neither can there reasonably be a case of stiff-headedness by the Vietnamese at the negociation table. All commentators agree that the greatest obstacles, at the October Conference in Paris, have been created by Thieu, the president. What they are now doing, is torturing people - torturing a nation, to humiliate it; force it to kneel, by gun talk. And therefore the bombings are despicable, and of such we have plenty in modern history; and they are normally connected with a name: Guernica; Oradour; Babin Jar; Katyn; Lidice; Sharpeville; Treblinka. Here, violence triumfed. But the ones who live on carry a hard judgement over those responsable. Now a new name joins the list: Hanoi, Christmas 1972. (translation by PM Lindborg)
TreeTorika
TreeTorika for chamber orchestra [1111-sax-1111-acc-2prc-pf-2111] (22’, 2006) has bee... more TreeTorika
TreeTorika for chamber orchestra [1111-sax-1111-acc-2prc-pf-2111] (22’, 2006) has been commissioned by Ensemble Ernst with support from Komponistrådet, Norway, and is dedicated to Thomas Rimul and Ensemble Ernst. The saxophone part is performed by Lars Lien.
In TreeTorika, I deal with rhetorics through recordings of Mao Zedung speeches, pursuing work from recent pieces, in particular Khreia, ReTreTorika, ConstipOrat and Mao-variations. In these pieces, transcriptions of the voice are taken as “found” musical material. In ReTreTorika, bits of un-edited recording fuse with the saxophone and the ensemble, making Mao’s voice very much part of the sonic image, but in the more recent pieces, the original material is segmented and re-composed in various ways, thus distancing it from the source. Why work with rhetorics? I am interested in prosody: the way speakers form their speech and phrase their vocal delivery. Rhetorics is not about what is being said; it is about understanding how something is said. Oratory is not about clarity in public address; it is about manipulating an audience. Rhetorics is the study of oratory and oratory is the subject of rhetorics. There is no such thing as written oratory. There can be preparatory notes for a speech, and an article can be read aloud in plenum – but even good writing may make bad oratory. I am interested in the way speakers use the rhetorical situation – kairos – the particular moment and necessity calling for someone to speak in public. Kairos demands that the orator (lawyer, teacher, politician…) gauge the situation and respond to it by adapting to an adequate mode of delivery. The art of speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker+topic+listener system and using this knowledge to affect the mindset of the listeners. Great orators craft the situation to their advantage: it is all about convincing the listeners. So, is “TreeTorika” is in itself some kind of oratory? No, because it does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical drama involving aspects of rhetorics.
These pieces are based on analyses of recordings of speeches made by Mao Zedong. In “ReTreTorika” as well as in “ConstipOrat” the electronics include recognizable bits of his voice as well as bits which are more or less treated, i.e. transformed and therefore much less strongly pointing to the source. But even when Mao’s voice is clearly heard, one need not know what he says. He spoke Hunanese, a Chinese dialect so strong that most non-Hunanese find it nay impossible to understand it. This was also the case in Mao’s lifetime, but he never gave it up, as he was obviously concerned with showing ”peasant pathos” in public appearances. One could argue that Mao, a singularly powerful individual but with relatively few public appearances, did not see oratory as a central means to his exercise of power. In this he differs from politicians such as Martin Luther King and Olof Palme, people for whom the scene, the microphone and the camera consisted the platform of a public mandate. Mao preferred other channels for his exercise of power. Although it intensively disputed, I think Mao was a skilled orator. From a musical point of view, his delivery is not flamboyant. It is based on rhythmic stability and melodious prosody. The alterations between speaking and pausing are carefully worked out to maximise efficiency. The large-scale form, judging from the recordings, is given by the interaction with the audience, i.e. the rhythm between Mao speaking and the audience applauding. However, listening carefully to the recordings, I am positive that some equally dedicated and unscrupulous Party sound engineer has tampered with the applauses; identical bits appear in different places and can be identified because of Mao’s persistent groaning and coughing. For the composition project, however, this fact is irrelevant, as I decided early on to accept the recordings as “found material”.
Now, some technical notes which may be of interest to those working with computer-assisted composition. The analysis of the recordings – which are rather noisy and narrow-band – was made using different computer software. For the voice line, I needed an accurate transcript. Initially, I tried fundamental tracking in Diphone and automatic transcription in OpenMusic/Kant, but found the results unsatisfactory. Instead, I programmed tools in MaxMSP to assist a more straightforward method, using my ears. Further programming was used to optimise rhythmic notation, in particular in regards to phrase segmenting, the choice of pulse speed and measure markings. These are non-trivial tasks in the analysis phase of producing a performable sonofication of a recording. The harmony was deduced by note-chunking of the melody and from partial tracking in AudioSculpt. The rhythmic layers in movements 3 and 6 are composed using the “rhythm constraint” library in OpenMusic. Notwithstanding the flexibility of these techniques, the computer could only assist me in forming the raw material for composition. Orchestration and detail work rely on standard composition techniques and, not to be forgotten, old-fashioned intuition.
TreeTorika consists of six parts. Following analysis of the segments, I reinforced small differences in order to create quite different musical situations. The saxophone leads the first segment, with a sparse accompaniment. The situation is inversed in the second segment, when the full ensemble takes over, playing a monolithic chorale. Setting out on a lighter note, the third segment gradually picks up mass and movement, before ending in aggressive saxophone solo phrases. The low-key fourth and fifth segments are grumpy and dark before releasing tension in an ascending line. The final segment fuses aspects of the music in the preceding segments, leading to a cataclysmic coda where the ensemble-backed saxophone engages in a heated exchange with the bass drums.
Finally, a remark as to the title. TreeTorika has nothing to do with dendrochronology (although a working-title was the old carpenter’s adage “measure twice, cut once”) but is a contraction of the initials of those to whom it is dedicated, Thomas-Rimul-Ensemble-Ernst, and the word rhetorics.
PerMagnus Lindborg
Lindborg studied piano, trombone, mathematics, languages, classical music and jazz improvisation in his native Sweden before concentrating on composition. He obtained degrees from Oslo (State Academy) and Paris (Ircam and Sorbonne), receiving numerous awards and grants, such as the Norwegian Young Artist Grant twice. He also studied composition privately with Klas Torstensson in the Netherlands. A member of the Norwegian Society of Composers since 1996, he currently teaches electroacoustic composition at École Nationale de Musique in Montbéliard, France (www.enmenm.tk).
Lindborg’s main research interests lie in music interactivity and rhetorics as a metaphor for composition. Selected works are “Mao–variations” for trio, "Khreia" for orchestra, "ReTreTorika" for quartet and electronics. Springer Verlag has published an article on “leçons” for saxophone and computer. His pieces are featured on record labels such as ECM, Daphne and Ash International.
PerMagnus Lindborg is currently working on “SynTorika45”, a project with French ensemble Utopik, and an interactive computer work based on “RGBmix2-Pugnus” recorded by the Norwegian Poing trio. As member of the freq–out team (www.freq-out.org), he will participate in sound installations in Chiang Mai, Budapest and Vienna in 2007.
While Scriptor is lyrical and intimate, Rhetor is fiery and speech-like. Both pieces draw from Ch... more While Scriptor is lyrical and intimate, Rhetor is fiery and speech-like. Both pieces draw from Chinese sources. The trombone line in Scriptor meditates on a few words from a letter written by the wanderer-poet Li Pai (T'ang dynasty, 7th century A.D.) to a friend, reminiscing about happy days together, drinking, singing, feasting – and having to part. In Rhetor, the trombone retraces the voice of Mao Zedung, whose voice is captured in an elegiac speech from 1949 where he honors military heroes fallen in battle thirty years earlier.
PROGRAM NOTE
The Mao-variations deal with rhetorics and use recordings of Mao Zedung speeches. I ... more PROGRAM NOTE
The Mao-variations deal with rhetorics and use recordings of Mao Zedung speeches. I pursue work from my three most recent pieces, namely ReTreTorika, Rhetor fragment and ConstipOrat. In the Mao-variations, the music is developed on the level of rhythm, prosody and harmony in a fairly abstract way. Transcriptions of the original recordings are here taken as “found” musical material, which is segmented and re-composed in various ways, thus distancing it from the source. The attitude is different from ReTreTorika, where bits of un-edited recording fuse with the saxophone and the ensemble, making Mao’s voice very much part of the sonic image. Although the Mao-variations are scored for violin, cello and kantele, three acoustic instruments, the compositional process is more akin to the one employed in ConstipOrat, a piece for loudspeakers. The two pieces use the same Mao citations as a basis for the compositions. While ConstipOrat develops them in the electroacoustic domain, the Mao-variations do so in the symbolic–compositional domain.
The Mao-variations consist of three parts. Each deals with one citation taken from a different speech. The excerpts were chosen for their particular rhetoric qualities with regards to situation, variation and style. Some of the acoustic qualities of the recordings have influenced the writing, in particular the violin echoing the cello in the second part.
The piece starts with a citation played in unison by the strings. Over three variations, the rhythmic and melodic complexity is gradually reduced to reveal the harmonic structure. The Mao excerpt was taken from the end of a 15-minute speech to a People’s Party conference in 1949, focussing on Party ideology. The speaker uses the even or dry rhetoric style, iskhnos.
The cello leads the second part. The material is developed in a double-ended process, transforming call-like notes into meandering lines of intricate prosody. The citation appears as one stage in the middle of the process. It is taken from a 1949 speech to a huge crowd, in which Mao announces the names of party workers appointed to higher office. In this speech, he could be said to employ the deinos style of grandiose and rhythmic delivery.
The third part is similar to the first, but the process is reversed. From a static harmony, more and more detail and rhythmic complexity is revealed, leading into the citation at the very end. The excerpt comes from the closing speech given to the Chinese Communist Party’s 1st national committee meeting in 1951, where Mao employs the middle rhetoric style, glafyros.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
Mao-variations for violin, cello and kantele are commissioned by the Shingle Church Music Festival.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
The Mao-variations were first performed by Maria Puusari, Markus Hohti and Eija Kankaanranta at the Shingle Church Music Festival Festival, Finland, in July 2006.
PROGRAM NOTE
Even though ReTreTorika is based on analyses and recordings of speeches made by Mao ... more PROGRAM NOTE
Even though ReTreTorika is based on analyses and recordings of speeches made by Mao Zedong, the piece is not about him; it is about rhetorics. I am interested in the way that speakers use the rhetorical situation, which, in traditional terminology, is called kairos. The word refers to the particular moment and necessity calling for someone to express herself or himself in speech. Kairos demands that the speaker (orator, rhetorician, politician...) gauge the situation and respond to it by adopting to a particular way of delivery. The art of public speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker–topic–listener system and use this knowledge and affect the mindset of the listeners. Great orators craft the situation to their advantage: it is all about convincing the listeners.
So is ReTreTorika itself some kind of oratory? No, because it does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical drama about some aspects of rhetorics. I will nevertheless give some suggestions to how one could – but not “should” – listen to the piece. One could hear in the saxophone an orator and in the other three instruments a listening crowd; afer all, they do sometimes “applaude”. One could take the recorded voice as being Mao the rhetor and sympathise with the saxophonist’s struggle in imitating him; for the musician offers an interpretation of what he or she has listened to. One could imagine the computer’s voice as a metaphor for the attempt to reconcile the demagogue with the blind follower; for it depends entirely on the saxophone and the recordings. Or you could – and perhaps should – take ReTreTorika in some completely different way.
ReTreTorika er bestilt av Affinis Kvartett med støtte fra Norsk Komponistråd. ReTreTorika is commissioned by Affinis Quartet with support from the Norwegian Composers' Fund.
DEDICATION
ReTreTorika is dedicated to the Affinis Quartet. The composer is indebted to Dr Chan Hingyan and Dr Joyce Beetuan Koh for their assistance with the Mao Zedong recordings.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
ReTreTorika was first performed by Affinis Quartet (Lars Lien - saxophone, Teodor Berg - percussion, Thomas Kjekstad - guitar, Jon Helge Sætre - piano) at NyMusikk Toneheim, Hamar, Norway and at Ilios Festival, Harstad, Norway on 2nd and 3rd of February 2006.
PROGRAM NOTE
SynTorika45 is a musical fantasy, based on analysis and free recomposition of earlie... more PROGRAM NOTE
SynTorika45 is a musical fantasy, based on analysis and free recomposition of earlier compositional work. It is the last piece in a series of six – TreTriTroi, ReTreTorika, Rhetor-Scriptor, Mao-variations, TreeTorika and SynTorika45 – and functions as a coda within this larger form. The subject of all the pieces is primarily rhetorics (on an abstract level) and, secondarily, one particular orator, Mao Zedung (on a material level). Recordings of speeches between 1949 and 1956 are taken as “found material”. I have transcribed the recordings, then segmented, analysed and re-composed the symbols in various ways. The electronics likewise employ different techniques in transforming the sonic material. One of the main formal principles in the compositional work is the resulting perceptual distance between the original and the actual composition. As much as I hope that what I say here is not essential for the concert experience, it might be of some interest to the analytically inclined.
So what do I mean by “rhetorics” in the context of music composition? The term used to refer both to a topic of intellectual study and to a set of practical tools, used by politicians and lawyers, but also in the training of musicians. After the classicist epoch, it seems to have had less and less impact on compositional thinking. Also, within the sphere of politics, the abuse of mass-communication – I am referring here to the fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century – has made “rhetorics” a negatively loaded word. However, the techniques of Gorgias, Quintilian, Perelman and others as such are not to be blamed. I think that composers today have the necessary distance to enable us to reinvestigate some aspects of rhetorical techniques. For my part, I am interested in the way that speakers use the rhetorical situation, or kairos. The word refers to the moment of necessity calling for someone to express herself or himself in speech. Kairos demands that the speaker gauge the situation and respond to it by adopting to a particular delivery. The way that prosody, speed of delivery and articulation change during a discourse is potentially musical. At least, an analysis of these parameters can allow the composer to extend his expressive palette. The art of public speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker–topic–listener system and using this knowledge to affect the mindset of the listeners. Orators craft the situation to their advantage: as we know, rhetorics is about convincing the listeners. There are parallels with the role of the composer in the process of music creation, but I do not think the two situations are congruent. So is SynTorika45 itself some kind of oratory? No, it isn’t. It does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical fantasy, relating to some aspects of rhetorics.
TRANSPOSITION Score is transposed.
DURATION
6-8 minutes. The actual duration of a performance is ... more TRANSPOSITION Score is transposed.
DURATION
6-8 minutes. The actual duration of a performance is variable and could change between different performances.
ACCIDENTALS
Accidentals, including quarter-tones, are valid for the whole measure, in the same octave and for the same instrument, including trilled notes in parenthesis.
For further info, see rgbmix1-SAXCON
"rgbmix1-SAXCON" consists of 12 segments, organised in four groups of three segments each. For co... more "rgbmix1-SAXCON" consists of 12 segments, organised in four groups of three segments each. For convenience, they are labeled "red", "green", "yellow" and "blue" rather than anything that would suggest a sequential order. Each scorepage corresponds to a colour and features one of the instruments in the quartet, thus:
yellow <--> barytone saxophone blue <--> alto saxophone
green <--> tenor saxophone
red <--> soprano saxophone
On a scorepage, the three segments correspond to the three systems, and are referenced as "top", "mid" and "down", respectively.
All segments should be played attacca, i.e. without pause inbetween.
The duration of each segment is approximately 40 seconds.
The total duration of a performance is flexible (between 10 and 14 minutes).
Editorials by PerMagnus Lindborg
eContact! 16.2, Oct 1, 2014
The SI13 NTU/ADM Symposium on Sound and Interactivity in Singapore provided a meeting point for l... more The SI13 NTU/ADM Symposium on Sound and Interactivity in Singapore provided a meeting point for local researchers, artists, scholars and students working creatively with sound and interactivity, as well as the foundation for an issue exploring sound and interactivity in the Southeast Asian country.
The School of Art Design Media of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University hosted the Symposium on Sound and Interactivity from 14–16 November 2013. A total of 15 artworks and 14 papers were selected by a review committee for presentation by 24 active participants during the three-day symposium. While all but four of the participants are residents of the island, they represent seventeen different countries, thus reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Singapore in general and of sound artists and researchers in particular. (1)
Thanks to funding from Nanyang’s CLASS conference scheme, Roger T. Dean (MARCS Institute, University of New South Wales, Australia) and Diemo Schwarz (IRCAM, France) could be invited as Keynote Speakers; they also performed in the concert that opened the symposium, and contributed to the exhibition.
It is a pleasure to collaborate with eContact! in presenting a broad collection of articles emanating from this event, and to use these as a basis for an overview of sound art and related activities in Singapore. Eleven texts from the SI13 Proceedings have been edited for this issue. Joining them are two texts originally written for the catalogue of the “Sound: Latitudes and Attitudes” exhibition held at Singapore’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (7 February – 16 March 2014). Finally, in the guise of a “community report” on sound art activities in Singapore, I have contributed a “constructed multilogue” created from interviews with three sound art colleagues.
Welcome to this Special Issue of Array: Proceedings of Si15, the 2nd International Symposium on S... more Welcome to this Special Issue of Array: Proceedings of Si15, the 2nd International Symposium on Sound and Interactivity.
The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23 August 2015. The festival events included five invited artist performances, two scientific keynotes and two days of proceedings, a commissioned sound installation, an afternoon of public talks, an internet panel, two pedagogic workshops, a concert with young performers, and more than fifty artworks and scientific papers in numerous forms and formats selected from an open call (http://soundislands.com/si15).
We are thrilled to present 20 articles, by 31 authors, emanating from Si15. The articles have been extended and thoroughly revised for this special issue of Array. They cover a range of topics related to aesthetics, percep-tion, technology, and sound art. We hope that you will enjoy the fruits of the authors' labour and therein discover many a stimulating thought.
Book chapters by PerMagnus Lindborg
ISSUE05, Jul 2016
Jago stirs: something is strange. Ice-cold wind streams from the aircon and relentless chatter fr... more Jago stirs: something is strange. Ice-cold wind streams from the aircon and relentless chatter from the radio: "…it would not be without reason to deem it a ghost or a phantom formed by the brain…"1 Reality blur: yes, he must have drifted off. Yes, the taxi, but no, why have we stopped? What time is it? He breathes in heavily through the nose. Fog lifting: yes. The guest lecture at the Uni, voices of those students still lashing the insides his skull. Jago searches a foothold for memory. Faint whiff of tiare, plumeria: airport posters with not-so-secret voluptuous bodies. Why is he alone? Or, not exactly alone.
This chapter examines computer assisted analysis and composition (CAAC) techniques
in relation ... more This chapter examines computer assisted analysis and composition (CAAC) techniques
in relation to the composition of my piece TreeTorika for chamber orchestra. I describe
methods for analysing the musical features of a recording of a speech by Mao Zedong,
in order to extract compositional material such as global form, melody, harmony and
rhythm, and for developing rhythmic material. The first part focuses on large-scale
segmentation, melody transcription, quantification and quantization. Automatic tran-
scription of the voice was discarded in favour of an aural method using tools in Amadeus
and Max/MSP. The data were processed in OpenMusic to optimise the accuracy and
readability of the notation. The harmonic context was derived from the transcribed
melody and from AudioSculpt partial tracking and chord sequence analyses. The second
part of this chapter describes one aspect of computer assisted composition, that is the use
of the rhythm constraint library in OpenMusic to develop polyrhythmic textures. The
flexibility of these techniques allowed the computer to assist me in all but the final phases
of the work. In addition, attention is given to the artistic and political implications of
using recordings of such a disputed public figure as Mao.
While at conservatory, I played several smaller piano pieces by Olivier Messiaen, parts of the Qu... more While at conservatory, I played several smaller piano pieces by Olivier Messiaen, parts of the Quartet for the end of time, even a handful of the easier Vingt Regards. Our theory class analysed the Études, in particular the iconic Mode de valeurs, with its mysterious amalgam of total material serialism and intuitive composition. I heard the world 2nd performance of Éclairs de l'au-délà in Oslo in 1991, Messiaen's last great work, and it was truly splendid. However, I was not taken in by his sound – saturated and thoroughly sotte, to quote Pierre Boulez – and certainly not his rhythm – instructive, as in Mon language, but so much less compelling and human than in Bartok, Berio or Holdsworth. When analysing scores, I was stunned by the straightforward, almost mechanical ordering of local harmony and rhythm, but even more surprised by the absence of understandable rules as to why this material had been composed in a particular way. The structure was simpler than in Bach or Berg, but more temperamental than in Carter. Exactly how this simplicity gave rise to splendour evaded me. What was I missing?
Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, Jan 1, 2004
This paper aims at describing an approach to the music performance
situation as a laboratory for... more This paper aims at describing an approach to the music performance
situation as a laboratory for investigating interactivity. I would like to pre-
sent “Leçons pour un apprenti sourd-muet”1, where the basic idea is
that of two improvisers, a saxophonist and a computer, engaged in a se-
ries of musical questions and responses. The situation is inspired from
the Japanese shakuhachi tradition, where imitating the master performer
is a prime element in the apprentice’s learning process. Through listening
and imitation, the computer’s responses get closer to that of its master for
each turn. In this sense, the computer’s playing emanates from the saxo-
phonist’s phrases and the interactivity in “Leçons” happens on the level
of the composition.
Journal articles by PerMagnus Lindborg
Special Issue on Soundscapes. Appl. Sci. 2016, 6(12), 405, Dec 3, 2016
There have been few empirical investigations of how individual differences influence the percepti... more There have been few empirical investigations of how individual differences influence the perception of the sonic environment. The present study included the Big Five traits and noise sensitivity as personality factors in two listening experiments (n = 43, n = 45). Recordings of urban and restaurant soundscapes that had been selected based on their type were rated for Pleasantness and Eventfulness using the Swedish Soundscape Quality Protocol. Multivariate multiple regression analysis showed that ratings depended on the type and loudness of both kinds of sonic environments and that the personality factors made a small yet significant contribution. Univariate models explained 48% (cross-validated adjusted R2) of the variation in Pleasantness ratings of urban soundscapes, and 35% of Eventfulness. For restaurant soundscapes the percentages explained were 22% and 21%, respectively. Emotional stability and noise sensitivity were notable predictors whose contribution to explaining the variation in quality ratings was between one-tenth and nearly half of the soundscape indicators, as measured by squared semipartial correlation. Further analysis revealed that 36% of noise sensitivity could be predicted by broad personality dimensions, replicating previous research. Our study lends empirical support to the hypothesis that personality traits have a significant though comparatively small influence on the perceived quality of sonic environments.
Restaurants are complex environments engaging all our senses. More or less designable sound sourc... more Restaurants are complex environments engaging all our senses. More or less designable sound sources, such as background music, voices, and kitchen noises, influence the overall perception of the soundscape. Previous research suggested typologies of sounds in some environmental contexts, such as urban parks and offices, but there is no detailed account that is relevant to restaurants. We collected on-site data in 40 restaurants (n = 393), including perceptual ratings, free-form annotations of characteristic sounds and whether they were liked or not, and free-form descriptive words for the environment as a whole. The annotations were subjected to cladistic analysis, yielding a multi-level taxonomy of perceived sound sources in restaurants (SSR) with good construct validity and external robustness. Further analysis revealed that voice-related characteristic sounds including a 'people' specifier were more liked than those without it (d = 0.14 SD), possibly due to an emotional crossmodal association mechanism. Liking of characteristic sounds differed between the first and last annotations that respondents made (d = 0.21 SD), which might be due to an initially positive bias being countered by exposure to a task inducing a mode of critical listening. Comparing the SSR taxonomy with previous classifications, we believe it will prove useful for field research, simulation design, and sound perception theory.
To work flexibly with the sound design for The Locust Wrath, a multimedia dance performance on th... more To work flexibly with the sound design for The Locust Wrath, a multimedia dance performance on the topic of climate change, we developed a software for interactive sonification of climate data. An open- ended approach to parameter mapping allowed tweaking and improvisation during rehearsals, resulting in a large range of musical expression. The sonifications represented weather systems pushing through South-East Asia in complex patterns. The climate was rendered as a piece of electroacoustic music, whose compositional form - gesture, timbre, intensity, harmony, spatiality - was determined by the data. The article discusses aspects of aesthetic sonification, reports the process of developing the present work, and contextualises the design decisions within theories of crossmodal perception and listening modes.
PLoS ONE 10(12): e0144013, Dec 7, 2015
Crossmodal associations may arise at neurological, perceptual, cognitive, or emotional levels of ... more Crossmodal associations may arise at neurological, perceptual, cognitive, or emotional levels of brain processing. Higher-level modal correspondences between musical timbre and visual colour have been previously investigated, though with limited sets of colour. We developed a novel response method that employs a tablet interface to navigate the CIE Lab colour space. The method was used in an experiment where 27 film music excerpts were presented to participants (n = 22) who continuously manipulated the colour and size of an on-screen patch to match the music. Analysis of the data replicated and extended earlier research, for example, that happy music was associated with yellow, music expressing anger with large red colour patches, and sad music with smaller patches towards dark blue. Correlation analysis suggested patterns of relationships between audio features and colour patch parameters. Using partial least squares regression, we tested models for predicting colour patch responses from audio features and ratings of perceived emotion in the music. Parsimonious models that included emotion robustly explained between 60% and 75% of the variation in each of the colour patch parameters, as measured by cross-validated R2. To illuminate the quantitative findings, we performed a content analysis of structured spoken interviews with the participants. This provided further evidence of a significant emotion mediation mechanism, whereby people tended to match colour association with the perceived emotion in the music. The mixed method approach of our study gives strong evidence that emotion can mediate crossmodal association between music and visual colour. The CIE Lab interface promises to be a useful tool in perceptual ratings of music and other sounds.
Applied Acoustics, 92, 47-60, May 2015
Sound is a multi-faceted phenomenon and a critical modality in all kinds of sevicescapes. At rest... more Sound is a multi-faceted phenomenon and a critical modality in all kinds of sevicescapes. At restaurants, our senses are intensively stimulated. They are social places which depend on acoustic design for their success. Considering the large economic interests, surprisingly little empirical research on the psychoacoustics of restaurants is available. Contributing to theory building, this article proposes a typology of designed and non-designed sonic elements in restaurants. Results from a survey of 112 restaurants in Singapore are presented, with a focus on one element of the typology, namely interior design materials. The collected data included on-site sound level, audio recordings from which psychoacoustic descriptors such as Loudness and Sharpness were calculated, perceptual ratings using the Swedish Soundscape Quality protocol, and annotations of physical features such as Occupancy. We have introduced a measure, Priciness, to compare menu cost levels between the surveyed restaurants. Correlation analysis revealed several patterns: for example, that Priciness was negatively correlated with Loudness. Analysis of annotations of interior design materials supported a classification of the restaurants in categories of Design Style and Food Style. These were investigated with MANOVA, revealing significant differences in psychoacoustic, physical, and perceptual features between categories among the surveyed restaurants: for example, that restaurants serving Chinese food had the highest prevalence of stone materials, and that Western-menu places were the least loud. Some implications for managers, acoustic designers, and researchers are discussed.
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Music scores by PerMagnus Lindborg
Per Magnus Lindborg: Man bör kalla saker och ting vid deras rätta namn.
For flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello and double bass. Duration 10 minutes. Written for Ensemble Bit20 for the occasion of their Ho Chi Minh City concert, 9 December 2007.
After having worked with transcriptions and musicalisations of the voice of Mao Zedong over two years and eight pieces, the opportunity of working with a recording of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was welcome. Ever since he entered politics in the late 1950s, Palme was on the frontline, supporting the oppressed against the profiteers. Throughout the US war in Vietnam and Laos, Palme insisted on piece initiatives and troops withdrawal and was one of very few leaders in the West who actively supported the North Vietnamese government. When the Paris Peace Conference broke down in 1972 and President Nixon followingly ordered massive punitive strikes against Hanoi and Haiphong, Palme did not shred his words. A short but carefully worded statement in Swedish Radio, barely two minutes, caused an international upheaval and the retraction of the US ambassador from Stockholm.
”Man bör kalla saker och ting vid deras rätta namn: det som pågår idag, i Vietnam, det är en form av tortyr. Det kan inte finnas militära motiv för bombningar i denna skala. Militära talesmän i Saigon har sagt att det inte förekommer någon uppladdning ifrån Nordvietnamesernas sida. Det kan inte heller rimligen bero på någon halsstarrighet från Vietnamesernas sida vid förhandlingsbordet. Alla kommentatorer är överens om att det främsta motståndet mot Oktoberöverenskommelsen i Paris har givits utav presidenten Thieu. Det man nu gör, det är att plåga människor - plåga en nation, för att förödmjuka den; tvinga den till underkastelse, under maktspråk. Och därför är bombningarna ett illdåd, och av det har vi många i den moderna historien, och de är i allmänhet förbundna med ett namn: Guernica; Oradour; Babin Jar; Katyn; Lidice; Sharpeville; Treblinka. Där har våldet triumferat. Men eftervärldens dom har fallit hård over dem som burit ansvaret. Nu fogas ett nytt namn till raden: Hanoi, julen 1972.” (Olof Palme)
One should call things by their rightful names: what currently goes on in Vietnam is a form of torture. There cannot be military reasons for bombings of such scale. Military spokesmen in Saigon have said that there is no gathering of forces by the North Vietnamese side. Neither can there reasonably be a case of stiff-headedness by the Vietnamese at the negociation table. All commentators agree that the greatest obstacles, at the October Conference in Paris, have been created by Thieu, the president. What they are now doing, is torturing people - torturing a nation, to humiliate it; force it to kneel, by gun talk. And therefore the bombings are despicable, and of such we have plenty in modern history; and they are normally connected with a name: Guernica; Oradour; Babin Jar; Katyn; Lidice; Sharpeville; Treblinka. Here, violence triumfed. But the ones who live on carry a hard judgement over those responsable. Now a new name joins the list: Hanoi, Christmas 1972. (translation by PM Lindborg)
TreeTorika for chamber orchestra [1111-sax-1111-acc-2prc-pf-2111] (22’, 2006) has been commissioned by Ensemble Ernst with support from Komponistrådet, Norway, and is dedicated to Thomas Rimul and Ensemble Ernst. The saxophone part is performed by Lars Lien.
In TreeTorika, I deal with rhetorics through recordings of Mao Zedung speeches, pursuing work from recent pieces, in particular Khreia, ReTreTorika, ConstipOrat and Mao-variations. In these pieces, transcriptions of the voice are taken as “found” musical material. In ReTreTorika, bits of un-edited recording fuse with the saxophone and the ensemble, making Mao’s voice very much part of the sonic image, but in the more recent pieces, the original material is segmented and re-composed in various ways, thus distancing it from the source. Why work with rhetorics? I am interested in prosody: the way speakers form their speech and phrase their vocal delivery. Rhetorics is not about what is being said; it is about understanding how something is said. Oratory is not about clarity in public address; it is about manipulating an audience. Rhetorics is the study of oratory and oratory is the subject of rhetorics. There is no such thing as written oratory. There can be preparatory notes for a speech, and an article can be read aloud in plenum – but even good writing may make bad oratory. I am interested in the way speakers use the rhetorical situation – kairos – the particular moment and necessity calling for someone to speak in public. Kairos demands that the orator (lawyer, teacher, politician…) gauge the situation and respond to it by adapting to an adequate mode of delivery. The art of speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker+topic+listener system and using this knowledge to affect the mindset of the listeners. Great orators craft the situation to their advantage: it is all about convincing the listeners. So, is “TreeTorika” is in itself some kind of oratory? No, because it does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical drama involving aspects of rhetorics.
These pieces are based on analyses of recordings of speeches made by Mao Zedong. In “ReTreTorika” as well as in “ConstipOrat” the electronics include recognizable bits of his voice as well as bits which are more or less treated, i.e. transformed and therefore much less strongly pointing to the source. But even when Mao’s voice is clearly heard, one need not know what he says. He spoke Hunanese, a Chinese dialect so strong that most non-Hunanese find it nay impossible to understand it. This was also the case in Mao’s lifetime, but he never gave it up, as he was obviously concerned with showing ”peasant pathos” in public appearances. One could argue that Mao, a singularly powerful individual but with relatively few public appearances, did not see oratory as a central means to his exercise of power. In this he differs from politicians such as Martin Luther King and Olof Palme, people for whom the scene, the microphone and the camera consisted the platform of a public mandate. Mao preferred other channels for his exercise of power. Although it intensively disputed, I think Mao was a skilled orator. From a musical point of view, his delivery is not flamboyant. It is based on rhythmic stability and melodious prosody. The alterations between speaking and pausing are carefully worked out to maximise efficiency. The large-scale form, judging from the recordings, is given by the interaction with the audience, i.e. the rhythm between Mao speaking and the audience applauding. However, listening carefully to the recordings, I am positive that some equally dedicated and unscrupulous Party sound engineer has tampered with the applauses; identical bits appear in different places and can be identified because of Mao’s persistent groaning and coughing. For the composition project, however, this fact is irrelevant, as I decided early on to accept the recordings as “found material”.
Now, some technical notes which may be of interest to those working with computer-assisted composition. The analysis of the recordings – which are rather noisy and narrow-band – was made using different computer software. For the voice line, I needed an accurate transcript. Initially, I tried fundamental tracking in Diphone and automatic transcription in OpenMusic/Kant, but found the results unsatisfactory. Instead, I programmed tools in MaxMSP to assist a more straightforward method, using my ears. Further programming was used to optimise rhythmic notation, in particular in regards to phrase segmenting, the choice of pulse speed and measure markings. These are non-trivial tasks in the analysis phase of producing a performable sonofication of a recording. The harmony was deduced by note-chunking of the melody and from partial tracking in AudioSculpt. The rhythmic layers in movements 3 and 6 are composed using the “rhythm constraint” library in OpenMusic. Notwithstanding the flexibility of these techniques, the computer could only assist me in forming the raw material for composition. Orchestration and detail work rely on standard composition techniques and, not to be forgotten, old-fashioned intuition.
TreeTorika consists of six parts. Following analysis of the segments, I reinforced small differences in order to create quite different musical situations. The saxophone leads the first segment, with a sparse accompaniment. The situation is inversed in the second segment, when the full ensemble takes over, playing a monolithic chorale. Setting out on a lighter note, the third segment gradually picks up mass and movement, before ending in aggressive saxophone solo phrases. The low-key fourth and fifth segments are grumpy and dark before releasing tension in an ascending line. The final segment fuses aspects of the music in the preceding segments, leading to a cataclysmic coda where the ensemble-backed saxophone engages in a heated exchange with the bass drums.
Finally, a remark as to the title. TreeTorika has nothing to do with dendrochronology (although a working-title was the old carpenter’s adage “measure twice, cut once”) but is a contraction of the initials of those to whom it is dedicated, Thomas-Rimul-Ensemble-Ernst, and the word rhetorics.
PerMagnus Lindborg
Lindborg studied piano, trombone, mathematics, languages, classical music and jazz improvisation in his native Sweden before concentrating on composition. He obtained degrees from Oslo (State Academy) and Paris (Ircam and Sorbonne), receiving numerous awards and grants, such as the Norwegian Young Artist Grant twice. He also studied composition privately with Klas Torstensson in the Netherlands. A member of the Norwegian Society of Composers since 1996, he currently teaches electroacoustic composition at École Nationale de Musique in Montbéliard, France (www.enmenm.tk).
Lindborg’s main research interests lie in music interactivity and rhetorics as a metaphor for composition. Selected works are “Mao–variations” for trio, "Khreia" for orchestra, "ReTreTorika" for quartet and electronics. Springer Verlag has published an article on “leçons” for saxophone and computer. His pieces are featured on record labels such as ECM, Daphne and Ash International.
PerMagnus Lindborg is currently working on “SynTorika45”, a project with French ensemble Utopik, and an interactive computer work based on “RGBmix2-Pugnus” recorded by the Norwegian Poing trio. As member of the freq–out team (www.freq-out.org), he will participate in sound installations in Chiang Mai, Budapest and Vienna in 2007.
The Mao-variations deal with rhetorics and use recordings of Mao Zedung speeches. I pursue work from my three most recent pieces, namely ReTreTorika, Rhetor fragment and ConstipOrat. In the Mao-variations, the music is developed on the level of rhythm, prosody and harmony in a fairly abstract way. Transcriptions of the original recordings are here taken as “found” musical material, which is segmented and re-composed in various ways, thus distancing it from the source. The attitude is different from ReTreTorika, where bits of un-edited recording fuse with the saxophone and the ensemble, making Mao’s voice very much part of the sonic image. Although the Mao-variations are scored for violin, cello and kantele, three acoustic instruments, the compositional process is more akin to the one employed in ConstipOrat, a piece for loudspeakers. The two pieces use the same Mao citations as a basis for the compositions. While ConstipOrat develops them in the electroacoustic domain, the Mao-variations do so in the symbolic–compositional domain.
The Mao-variations consist of three parts. Each deals with one citation taken from a different speech. The excerpts were chosen for their particular rhetoric qualities with regards to situation, variation and style. Some of the acoustic qualities of the recordings have influenced the writing, in particular the violin echoing the cello in the second part.
The piece starts with a citation played in unison by the strings. Over three variations, the rhythmic and melodic complexity is gradually reduced to reveal the harmonic structure. The Mao excerpt was taken from the end of a 15-minute speech to a People’s Party conference in 1949, focussing on Party ideology. The speaker uses the even or dry rhetoric style, iskhnos.
The cello leads the second part. The material is developed in a double-ended process, transforming call-like notes into meandering lines of intricate prosody. The citation appears as one stage in the middle of the process. It is taken from a 1949 speech to a huge crowd, in which Mao announces the names of party workers appointed to higher office. In this speech, he could be said to employ the deinos style of grandiose and rhythmic delivery.
The third part is similar to the first, but the process is reversed. From a static harmony, more and more detail and rhythmic complexity is revealed, leading into the citation at the very end. The excerpt comes from the closing speech given to the Chinese Communist Party’s 1st national committee meeting in 1951, where Mao employs the middle rhetoric style, glafyros.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
Mao-variations for violin, cello and kantele are commissioned by the Shingle Church Music Festival.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
The Mao-variations were first performed by Maria Puusari, Markus Hohti and Eija Kankaanranta at the Shingle Church Music Festival Festival, Finland, in July 2006.
Even though ReTreTorika is based on analyses and recordings of speeches made by Mao Zedong, the piece is not about him; it is about rhetorics. I am interested in the way that speakers use the rhetorical situation, which, in traditional terminology, is called kairos. The word refers to the particular moment and necessity calling for someone to express herself or himself in speech. Kairos demands that the speaker (orator, rhetorician, politician...) gauge the situation and respond to it by adopting to a particular way of delivery. The art of public speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker–topic–listener system and use this knowledge and affect the mindset of the listeners. Great orators craft the situation to their advantage: it is all about convincing the listeners.
So is ReTreTorika itself some kind of oratory? No, because it does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical drama about some aspects of rhetorics. I will nevertheless give some suggestions to how one could – but not “should” – listen to the piece. One could hear in the saxophone an orator and in the other three instruments a listening crowd; afer all, they do sometimes “applaude”. One could take the recorded voice as being Mao the rhetor and sympathise with the saxophonist’s struggle in imitating him; for the musician offers an interpretation of what he or she has listened to. One could imagine the computer’s voice as a metaphor for the attempt to reconcile the demagogue with the blind follower; for it depends entirely on the saxophone and the recordings. Or you could – and perhaps should – take ReTreTorika in some completely different way.
ReTreTorika er bestilt av Affinis Kvartett med støtte fra Norsk Komponistråd. ReTreTorika is commissioned by Affinis Quartet with support from the Norwegian Composers' Fund.
DEDICATION
ReTreTorika is dedicated to the Affinis Quartet. The composer is indebted to Dr Chan Hingyan and Dr Joyce Beetuan Koh for their assistance with the Mao Zedong recordings.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
ReTreTorika was first performed by Affinis Quartet (Lars Lien - saxophone, Teodor Berg - percussion, Thomas Kjekstad - guitar, Jon Helge Sætre - piano) at NyMusikk Toneheim, Hamar, Norway and at Ilios Festival, Harstad, Norway on 2nd and 3rd of February 2006.
SynTorika45 is a musical fantasy, based on analysis and free recomposition of earlier compositional work. It is the last piece in a series of six – TreTriTroi, ReTreTorika, Rhetor-Scriptor, Mao-variations, TreeTorika and SynTorika45 – and functions as a coda within this larger form. The subject of all the pieces is primarily rhetorics (on an abstract level) and, secondarily, one particular orator, Mao Zedung (on a material level). Recordings of speeches between 1949 and 1956 are taken as “found material”. I have transcribed the recordings, then segmented, analysed and re-composed the symbols in various ways. The electronics likewise employ different techniques in transforming the sonic material. One of the main formal principles in the compositional work is the resulting perceptual distance between the original and the actual composition. As much as I hope that what I say here is not essential for the concert experience, it might be of some interest to the analytically inclined.
So what do I mean by “rhetorics” in the context of music composition? The term used to refer both to a topic of intellectual study and to a set of practical tools, used by politicians and lawyers, but also in the training of musicians. After the classicist epoch, it seems to have had less and less impact on compositional thinking. Also, within the sphere of politics, the abuse of mass-communication – I am referring here to the fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century – has made “rhetorics” a negatively loaded word. However, the techniques of Gorgias, Quintilian, Perelman and others as such are not to be blamed. I think that composers today have the necessary distance to enable us to reinvestigate some aspects of rhetorical techniques. For my part, I am interested in the way that speakers use the rhetorical situation, or kairos. The word refers to the moment of necessity calling for someone to express herself or himself in speech. Kairos demands that the speaker gauge the situation and respond to it by adopting to a particular delivery. The way that prosody, speed of delivery and articulation change during a discourse is potentially musical. At least, an analysis of these parameters can allow the composer to extend his expressive palette. The art of public speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker–topic–listener system and using this knowledge to affect the mindset of the listeners. Orators craft the situation to their advantage: as we know, rhetorics is about convincing the listeners. There are parallels with the role of the composer in the process of music creation, but I do not think the two situations are congruent. So is SynTorika45 itself some kind of oratory? No, it isn’t. It does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical fantasy, relating to some aspects of rhetorics.
DURATION
6-8 minutes. The actual duration of a performance is variable and could change between different performances.
ACCIDENTALS
Accidentals, including quarter-tones, are valid for the whole measure, in the same octave and for the same instrument, including trilled notes in parenthesis.
For further info, see rgbmix1-SAXCON
yellow <--> barytone saxophone blue <--> alto saxophone
green <--> tenor saxophone
red <--> soprano saxophone
On a scorepage, the three segments correspond to the three systems, and are referenced as "top", "mid" and "down", respectively.
All segments should be played attacca, i.e. without pause inbetween.
The duration of each segment is approximately 40 seconds.
The total duration of a performance is flexible (between 10 and 14 minutes).
Editorials by PerMagnus Lindborg
The School of Art Design Media of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University hosted the Symposium on Sound and Interactivity from 14–16 November 2013. A total of 15 artworks and 14 papers were selected by a review committee for presentation by 24 active participants during the three-day symposium. While all but four of the participants are residents of the island, they represent seventeen different countries, thus reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Singapore in general and of sound artists and researchers in particular. (1)
Thanks to funding from Nanyang’s CLASS conference scheme, Roger T. Dean (MARCS Institute, University of New South Wales, Australia) and Diemo Schwarz (IRCAM, France) could be invited as Keynote Speakers; they also performed in the concert that opened the symposium, and contributed to the exhibition.
It is a pleasure to collaborate with eContact! in presenting a broad collection of articles emanating from this event, and to use these as a basis for an overview of sound art and related activities in Singapore. Eleven texts from the SI13 Proceedings have been edited for this issue. Joining them are two texts originally written for the catalogue of the “Sound: Latitudes and Attitudes” exhibition held at Singapore’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (7 February – 16 March 2014). Finally, in the guise of a “community report” on sound art activities in Singapore, I have contributed a “constructed multilogue” created from interviews with three sound art colleagues.
The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23 August 2015. The festival events included five invited artist performances, two scientific keynotes and two days of proceedings, a commissioned sound installation, an afternoon of public talks, an internet panel, two pedagogic workshops, a concert with young performers, and more than fifty artworks and scientific papers in numerous forms and formats selected from an open call (http://soundislands.com/si15).
We are thrilled to present 20 articles, by 31 authors, emanating from Si15. The articles have been extended and thoroughly revised for this special issue of Array. They cover a range of topics related to aesthetics, percep-tion, technology, and sound art. We hope that you will enjoy the fruits of the authors' labour and therein discover many a stimulating thought.
Book chapters by PerMagnus Lindborg
in relation to the composition of my piece TreeTorika for chamber orchestra. I describe
methods for analysing the musical features of a recording of a speech by Mao Zedong,
in order to extract compositional material such as global form, melody, harmony and
rhythm, and for developing rhythmic material. The first part focuses on large-scale
segmentation, melody transcription, quantification and quantization. Automatic tran-
scription of the voice was discarded in favour of an aural method using tools in Amadeus
and Max/MSP. The data were processed in OpenMusic to optimise the accuracy and
readability of the notation. The harmonic context was derived from the transcribed
melody and from AudioSculpt partial tracking and chord sequence analyses. The second
part of this chapter describes one aspect of computer assisted composition, that is the use
of the rhythm constraint library in OpenMusic to develop polyrhythmic textures. The
flexibility of these techniques allowed the computer to assist me in all but the final phases
of the work. In addition, attention is given to the artistic and political implications of
using recordings of such a disputed public figure as Mao.
situation as a laboratory for investigating interactivity. I would like to pre-
sent “Leçons pour un apprenti sourd-muet”1, where the basic idea is
that of two improvisers, a saxophonist and a computer, engaged in a se-
ries of musical questions and responses. The situation is inspired from
the Japanese shakuhachi tradition, where imitating the master performer
is a prime element in the apprentice’s learning process. Through listening
and imitation, the computer’s responses get closer to that of its master for
each turn. In this sense, the computer’s playing emanates from the saxo-
phonist’s phrases and the interactivity in “Leçons” happens on the level
of the composition.
Journal articles by PerMagnus Lindborg
Per Magnus Lindborg: Man bör kalla saker och ting vid deras rätta namn.
For flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, piano, 2 violins, viola, cello and double bass. Duration 10 minutes. Written for Ensemble Bit20 for the occasion of their Ho Chi Minh City concert, 9 December 2007.
After having worked with transcriptions and musicalisations of the voice of Mao Zedong over two years and eight pieces, the opportunity of working with a recording of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was welcome. Ever since he entered politics in the late 1950s, Palme was on the frontline, supporting the oppressed against the profiteers. Throughout the US war in Vietnam and Laos, Palme insisted on piece initiatives and troops withdrawal and was one of very few leaders in the West who actively supported the North Vietnamese government. When the Paris Peace Conference broke down in 1972 and President Nixon followingly ordered massive punitive strikes against Hanoi and Haiphong, Palme did not shred his words. A short but carefully worded statement in Swedish Radio, barely two minutes, caused an international upheaval and the retraction of the US ambassador from Stockholm.
”Man bör kalla saker och ting vid deras rätta namn: det som pågår idag, i Vietnam, det är en form av tortyr. Det kan inte finnas militära motiv för bombningar i denna skala. Militära talesmän i Saigon har sagt att det inte förekommer någon uppladdning ifrån Nordvietnamesernas sida. Det kan inte heller rimligen bero på någon halsstarrighet från Vietnamesernas sida vid förhandlingsbordet. Alla kommentatorer är överens om att det främsta motståndet mot Oktoberöverenskommelsen i Paris har givits utav presidenten Thieu. Det man nu gör, det är att plåga människor - plåga en nation, för att förödmjuka den; tvinga den till underkastelse, under maktspråk. Och därför är bombningarna ett illdåd, och av det har vi många i den moderna historien, och de är i allmänhet förbundna med ett namn: Guernica; Oradour; Babin Jar; Katyn; Lidice; Sharpeville; Treblinka. Där har våldet triumferat. Men eftervärldens dom har fallit hård over dem som burit ansvaret. Nu fogas ett nytt namn till raden: Hanoi, julen 1972.” (Olof Palme)
One should call things by their rightful names: what currently goes on in Vietnam is a form of torture. There cannot be military reasons for bombings of such scale. Military spokesmen in Saigon have said that there is no gathering of forces by the North Vietnamese side. Neither can there reasonably be a case of stiff-headedness by the Vietnamese at the negociation table. All commentators agree that the greatest obstacles, at the October Conference in Paris, have been created by Thieu, the president. What they are now doing, is torturing people - torturing a nation, to humiliate it; force it to kneel, by gun talk. And therefore the bombings are despicable, and of such we have plenty in modern history; and they are normally connected with a name: Guernica; Oradour; Babin Jar; Katyn; Lidice; Sharpeville; Treblinka. Here, violence triumfed. But the ones who live on carry a hard judgement over those responsable. Now a new name joins the list: Hanoi, Christmas 1972. (translation by PM Lindborg)
TreeTorika for chamber orchestra [1111-sax-1111-acc-2prc-pf-2111] (22’, 2006) has been commissioned by Ensemble Ernst with support from Komponistrådet, Norway, and is dedicated to Thomas Rimul and Ensemble Ernst. The saxophone part is performed by Lars Lien.
In TreeTorika, I deal with rhetorics through recordings of Mao Zedung speeches, pursuing work from recent pieces, in particular Khreia, ReTreTorika, ConstipOrat and Mao-variations. In these pieces, transcriptions of the voice are taken as “found” musical material. In ReTreTorika, bits of un-edited recording fuse with the saxophone and the ensemble, making Mao’s voice very much part of the sonic image, but in the more recent pieces, the original material is segmented and re-composed in various ways, thus distancing it from the source. Why work with rhetorics? I am interested in prosody: the way speakers form their speech and phrase their vocal delivery. Rhetorics is not about what is being said; it is about understanding how something is said. Oratory is not about clarity in public address; it is about manipulating an audience. Rhetorics is the study of oratory and oratory is the subject of rhetorics. There is no such thing as written oratory. There can be preparatory notes for a speech, and an article can be read aloud in plenum – but even good writing may make bad oratory. I am interested in the way speakers use the rhetorical situation – kairos – the particular moment and necessity calling for someone to speak in public. Kairos demands that the orator (lawyer, teacher, politician…) gauge the situation and respond to it by adapting to an adequate mode of delivery. The art of speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker+topic+listener system and using this knowledge to affect the mindset of the listeners. Great orators craft the situation to their advantage: it is all about convincing the listeners. So, is “TreeTorika” is in itself some kind of oratory? No, because it does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical drama involving aspects of rhetorics.
These pieces are based on analyses of recordings of speeches made by Mao Zedong. In “ReTreTorika” as well as in “ConstipOrat” the electronics include recognizable bits of his voice as well as bits which are more or less treated, i.e. transformed and therefore much less strongly pointing to the source. But even when Mao’s voice is clearly heard, one need not know what he says. He spoke Hunanese, a Chinese dialect so strong that most non-Hunanese find it nay impossible to understand it. This was also the case in Mao’s lifetime, but he never gave it up, as he was obviously concerned with showing ”peasant pathos” in public appearances. One could argue that Mao, a singularly powerful individual but with relatively few public appearances, did not see oratory as a central means to his exercise of power. In this he differs from politicians such as Martin Luther King and Olof Palme, people for whom the scene, the microphone and the camera consisted the platform of a public mandate. Mao preferred other channels for his exercise of power. Although it intensively disputed, I think Mao was a skilled orator. From a musical point of view, his delivery is not flamboyant. It is based on rhythmic stability and melodious prosody. The alterations between speaking and pausing are carefully worked out to maximise efficiency. The large-scale form, judging from the recordings, is given by the interaction with the audience, i.e. the rhythm between Mao speaking and the audience applauding. However, listening carefully to the recordings, I am positive that some equally dedicated and unscrupulous Party sound engineer has tampered with the applauses; identical bits appear in different places and can be identified because of Mao’s persistent groaning and coughing. For the composition project, however, this fact is irrelevant, as I decided early on to accept the recordings as “found material”.
Now, some technical notes which may be of interest to those working with computer-assisted composition. The analysis of the recordings – which are rather noisy and narrow-band – was made using different computer software. For the voice line, I needed an accurate transcript. Initially, I tried fundamental tracking in Diphone and automatic transcription in OpenMusic/Kant, but found the results unsatisfactory. Instead, I programmed tools in MaxMSP to assist a more straightforward method, using my ears. Further programming was used to optimise rhythmic notation, in particular in regards to phrase segmenting, the choice of pulse speed and measure markings. These are non-trivial tasks in the analysis phase of producing a performable sonofication of a recording. The harmony was deduced by note-chunking of the melody and from partial tracking in AudioSculpt. The rhythmic layers in movements 3 and 6 are composed using the “rhythm constraint” library in OpenMusic. Notwithstanding the flexibility of these techniques, the computer could only assist me in forming the raw material for composition. Orchestration and detail work rely on standard composition techniques and, not to be forgotten, old-fashioned intuition.
TreeTorika consists of six parts. Following analysis of the segments, I reinforced small differences in order to create quite different musical situations. The saxophone leads the first segment, with a sparse accompaniment. The situation is inversed in the second segment, when the full ensemble takes over, playing a monolithic chorale. Setting out on a lighter note, the third segment gradually picks up mass and movement, before ending in aggressive saxophone solo phrases. The low-key fourth and fifth segments are grumpy and dark before releasing tension in an ascending line. The final segment fuses aspects of the music in the preceding segments, leading to a cataclysmic coda where the ensemble-backed saxophone engages in a heated exchange with the bass drums.
Finally, a remark as to the title. TreeTorika has nothing to do with dendrochronology (although a working-title was the old carpenter’s adage “measure twice, cut once”) but is a contraction of the initials of those to whom it is dedicated, Thomas-Rimul-Ensemble-Ernst, and the word rhetorics.
PerMagnus Lindborg
Lindborg studied piano, trombone, mathematics, languages, classical music and jazz improvisation in his native Sweden before concentrating on composition. He obtained degrees from Oslo (State Academy) and Paris (Ircam and Sorbonne), receiving numerous awards and grants, such as the Norwegian Young Artist Grant twice. He also studied composition privately with Klas Torstensson in the Netherlands. A member of the Norwegian Society of Composers since 1996, he currently teaches electroacoustic composition at École Nationale de Musique in Montbéliard, France (www.enmenm.tk).
Lindborg’s main research interests lie in music interactivity and rhetorics as a metaphor for composition. Selected works are “Mao–variations” for trio, "Khreia" for orchestra, "ReTreTorika" for quartet and electronics. Springer Verlag has published an article on “leçons” for saxophone and computer. His pieces are featured on record labels such as ECM, Daphne and Ash International.
PerMagnus Lindborg is currently working on “SynTorika45”, a project with French ensemble Utopik, and an interactive computer work based on “RGBmix2-Pugnus” recorded by the Norwegian Poing trio. As member of the freq–out team (www.freq-out.org), he will participate in sound installations in Chiang Mai, Budapest and Vienna in 2007.
The Mao-variations deal with rhetorics and use recordings of Mao Zedung speeches. I pursue work from my three most recent pieces, namely ReTreTorika, Rhetor fragment and ConstipOrat. In the Mao-variations, the music is developed on the level of rhythm, prosody and harmony in a fairly abstract way. Transcriptions of the original recordings are here taken as “found” musical material, which is segmented and re-composed in various ways, thus distancing it from the source. The attitude is different from ReTreTorika, where bits of un-edited recording fuse with the saxophone and the ensemble, making Mao’s voice very much part of the sonic image. Although the Mao-variations are scored for violin, cello and kantele, three acoustic instruments, the compositional process is more akin to the one employed in ConstipOrat, a piece for loudspeakers. The two pieces use the same Mao citations as a basis for the compositions. While ConstipOrat develops them in the electroacoustic domain, the Mao-variations do so in the symbolic–compositional domain.
The Mao-variations consist of three parts. Each deals with one citation taken from a different speech. The excerpts were chosen for their particular rhetoric qualities with regards to situation, variation and style. Some of the acoustic qualities of the recordings have influenced the writing, in particular the violin echoing the cello in the second part.
The piece starts with a citation played in unison by the strings. Over three variations, the rhythmic and melodic complexity is gradually reduced to reveal the harmonic structure. The Mao excerpt was taken from the end of a 15-minute speech to a People’s Party conference in 1949, focussing on Party ideology. The speaker uses the even or dry rhetoric style, iskhnos.
The cello leads the second part. The material is developed in a double-ended process, transforming call-like notes into meandering lines of intricate prosody. The citation appears as one stage in the middle of the process. It is taken from a 1949 speech to a huge crowd, in which Mao announces the names of party workers appointed to higher office. In this speech, he could be said to employ the deinos style of grandiose and rhythmic delivery.
The third part is similar to the first, but the process is reversed. From a static harmony, more and more detail and rhythmic complexity is revealed, leading into the citation at the very end. The excerpt comes from the closing speech given to the Chinese Communist Party’s 1st national committee meeting in 1951, where Mao employs the middle rhetoric style, glafyros.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
Mao-variations for violin, cello and kantele are commissioned by the Shingle Church Music Festival.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
The Mao-variations were first performed by Maria Puusari, Markus Hohti and Eija Kankaanranta at the Shingle Church Music Festival Festival, Finland, in July 2006.
Even though ReTreTorika is based on analyses and recordings of speeches made by Mao Zedong, the piece is not about him; it is about rhetorics. I am interested in the way that speakers use the rhetorical situation, which, in traditional terminology, is called kairos. The word refers to the particular moment and necessity calling for someone to express herself or himself in speech. Kairos demands that the speaker (orator, rhetorician, politician...) gauge the situation and respond to it by adopting to a particular way of delivery. The art of public speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker–topic–listener system and use this knowledge and affect the mindset of the listeners. Great orators craft the situation to their advantage: it is all about convincing the listeners.
So is ReTreTorika itself some kind of oratory? No, because it does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical drama about some aspects of rhetorics. I will nevertheless give some suggestions to how one could – but not “should” – listen to the piece. One could hear in the saxophone an orator and in the other three instruments a listening crowd; afer all, they do sometimes “applaude”. One could take the recorded voice as being Mao the rhetor and sympathise with the saxophonist’s struggle in imitating him; for the musician offers an interpretation of what he or she has listened to. One could imagine the computer’s voice as a metaphor for the attempt to reconcile the demagogue with the blind follower; for it depends entirely on the saxophone and the recordings. Or you could – and perhaps should – take ReTreTorika in some completely different way.
ReTreTorika er bestilt av Affinis Kvartett med støtte fra Norsk Komponistråd. ReTreTorika is commissioned by Affinis Quartet with support from the Norwegian Composers' Fund.
DEDICATION
ReTreTorika is dedicated to the Affinis Quartet. The composer is indebted to Dr Chan Hingyan and Dr Joyce Beetuan Koh for their assistance with the Mao Zedong recordings.
FIRST PERFORMANCE
ReTreTorika was first performed by Affinis Quartet (Lars Lien - saxophone, Teodor Berg - percussion, Thomas Kjekstad - guitar, Jon Helge Sætre - piano) at NyMusikk Toneheim, Hamar, Norway and at Ilios Festival, Harstad, Norway on 2nd and 3rd of February 2006.
SynTorika45 is a musical fantasy, based on analysis and free recomposition of earlier compositional work. It is the last piece in a series of six – TreTriTroi, ReTreTorika, Rhetor-Scriptor, Mao-variations, TreeTorika and SynTorika45 – and functions as a coda within this larger form. The subject of all the pieces is primarily rhetorics (on an abstract level) and, secondarily, one particular orator, Mao Zedung (on a material level). Recordings of speeches between 1949 and 1956 are taken as “found material”. I have transcribed the recordings, then segmented, analysed and re-composed the symbols in various ways. The electronics likewise employ different techniques in transforming the sonic material. One of the main formal principles in the compositional work is the resulting perceptual distance between the original and the actual composition. As much as I hope that what I say here is not essential for the concert experience, it might be of some interest to the analytically inclined.
So what do I mean by “rhetorics” in the context of music composition? The term used to refer both to a topic of intellectual study and to a set of practical tools, used by politicians and lawyers, but also in the training of musicians. After the classicist epoch, it seems to have had less and less impact on compositional thinking. Also, within the sphere of politics, the abuse of mass-communication – I am referring here to the fascist movements in the first half of the 20th century – has made “rhetorics” a negatively loaded word. However, the techniques of Gorgias, Quintilian, Perelman and others as such are not to be blamed. I think that composers today have the necessary distance to enable us to reinvestigate some aspects of rhetorical techniques. For my part, I am interested in the way that speakers use the rhetorical situation, or kairos. The word refers to the moment of necessity calling for someone to express herself or himself in speech. Kairos demands that the speaker gauge the situation and respond to it by adopting to a particular delivery. The way that prosody, speed of delivery and articulation change during a discourse is potentially musical. At least, an analysis of these parameters can allow the composer to extend his expressive palette. The art of public speech-making lies in understanding the dynamical relations in the speaker–topic–listener system and using this knowledge to affect the mindset of the listeners. Orators craft the situation to their advantage: as we know, rhetorics is about convincing the listeners. There are parallels with the role of the composer in the process of music creation, but I do not think the two situations are congruent. So is SynTorika45 itself some kind of oratory? No, it isn’t. It does not attempt at convincing the listener to adopt any particular point of view. It is an abstraction: a musical fantasy, relating to some aspects of rhetorics.
DURATION
6-8 minutes. The actual duration of a performance is variable and could change between different performances.
ACCIDENTALS
Accidentals, including quarter-tones, are valid for the whole measure, in the same octave and for the same instrument, including trilled notes in parenthesis.
For further info, see rgbmix1-SAXCON
yellow <--> barytone saxophone blue <--> alto saxophone
green <--> tenor saxophone
red <--> soprano saxophone
On a scorepage, the three segments correspond to the three systems, and are referenced as "top", "mid" and "down", respectively.
All segments should be played attacca, i.e. without pause inbetween.
The duration of each segment is approximately 40 seconds.
The total duration of a performance is flexible (between 10 and 14 minutes).
The School of Art Design Media of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University hosted the Symposium on Sound and Interactivity from 14–16 November 2013. A total of 15 artworks and 14 papers were selected by a review committee for presentation by 24 active participants during the three-day symposium. While all but four of the participants are residents of the island, they represent seventeen different countries, thus reflecting the cosmopolitan nature of Singapore in general and of sound artists and researchers in particular. (1)
Thanks to funding from Nanyang’s CLASS conference scheme, Roger T. Dean (MARCS Institute, University of New South Wales, Australia) and Diemo Schwarz (IRCAM, France) could be invited as Keynote Speakers; they also performed in the concert that opened the symposium, and contributed to the exhibition.
It is a pleasure to collaborate with eContact! in presenting a broad collection of articles emanating from this event, and to use these as a basis for an overview of sound art and related activities in Singapore. Eleven texts from the SI13 Proceedings have been edited for this issue. Joining them are two texts originally written for the catalogue of the “Sound: Latitudes and Attitudes” exhibition held at Singapore’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (7 February – 16 March 2014). Finally, in the guise of a “community report” on sound art activities in Singapore, I have contributed a “constructed multilogue” created from interviews with three sound art colleagues.
The articles in the present issue originated in the Si15 Soundislands Festival, which was held in Singapore 18–23 August 2015. The festival events included five invited artist performances, two scientific keynotes and two days of proceedings, a commissioned sound installation, an afternoon of public talks, an internet panel, two pedagogic workshops, a concert with young performers, and more than fifty artworks and scientific papers in numerous forms and formats selected from an open call (http://soundislands.com/si15).
We are thrilled to present 20 articles, by 31 authors, emanating from Si15. The articles have been extended and thoroughly revised for this special issue of Array. They cover a range of topics related to aesthetics, percep-tion, technology, and sound art. We hope that you will enjoy the fruits of the authors' labour and therein discover many a stimulating thought.
in relation to the composition of my piece TreeTorika for chamber orchestra. I describe
methods for analysing the musical features of a recording of a speech by Mao Zedong,
in order to extract compositional material such as global form, melody, harmony and
rhythm, and for developing rhythmic material. The first part focuses on large-scale
segmentation, melody transcription, quantification and quantization. Automatic tran-
scription of the voice was discarded in favour of an aural method using tools in Amadeus
and Max/MSP. The data were processed in OpenMusic to optimise the accuracy and
readability of the notation. The harmonic context was derived from the transcribed
melody and from AudioSculpt partial tracking and chord sequence analyses. The second
part of this chapter describes one aspect of computer assisted composition, that is the use
of the rhythm constraint library in OpenMusic to develop polyrhythmic textures. The
flexibility of these techniques allowed the computer to assist me in all but the final phases
of the work. In addition, attention is given to the artistic and political implications of
using recordings of such a disputed public figure as Mao.
situation as a laboratory for investigating interactivity. I would like to pre-
sent “Leçons pour un apprenti sourd-muet”1, where the basic idea is
that of two improvisers, a saxophonist and a computer, engaged in a se-
ries of musical questions and responses. The situation is inspired from
the Japanese shakuhachi tradition, where imitating the master performer
is a prime element in the apprentice’s learning process. Through listening
and imitation, the computer’s responses get closer to that of its master for
each turn. In this sense, the computer’s playing emanates from the saxo-
phonist’s phrases and the interactivity in “Leçons” happens on the level
of the composition.
I sent the three of them a letter containing a range of observations I had made (which may or may not be entirely accurate) and questions (admittedly thorny and intended to provoke), including the following:
The geographical location and Singapore’s historic reason-to-be as a trading post has instilled a sense of ephemerality — people come and go, ideas and traditions too — as well as a need to develop contacts with the exterior. The arts scene in general seems to be largely a reflection of whatever the current trading priorities demand. In what way does the current local sound art reflect the larger forces within Singaporean society? Since art is mostly orally traded, how are its traditions nurtured and developed?
Around 2010, the Government seems to have indicated a new task for cultural workers, including sound artists and musicians: to define — create or discover, stitch-up or steal — a “Singapore identity”. The Singapore Art Festival shut down two years while the think tanks were brewing. Will this funnel taxpayer money and (more importantly) peoples’ attention towards folkloristic or museal music, rather than to radical and/or intellectual sound art? At the same time, there is considerable commercial pressure to subsume music / sound listening into an experiential, multimodal, game-like and socially mediated lifestyle product. Are commercialization and identity-seeking two sides of the same coin — one side inflation-prone, and the other a possible counterfeit? Is there room for a “pure listening experience”, for example to electroacoustic music? Or is the future of sound art ineluctably intertwined with sculptural and visual elements?
Different kinds of creative people involved in sound art are entrepreneurs, programmers, academics, educators, curators and journalists. Which institutions nurture talent and bring audiences to meet new experiences? Where are the hothouses for developing ideas, craft, artistry, innovation and business?
The interviews, loosely structured around these themes, were made in January and February 2014. Our conversations often took unexpected turns (mostly for the better). I diligently transcribed the recordings, and each interviewee made corrections and additions, before we gently nudged spoken language a little closer to prose. I then brought out a pair of big scissors and a large pot of coffee, and made a cut-out collage, weaving the texts into the multilogue that follows. The idea has been to create an illusion of four people conversing with each other under the same roof. Deceit or not, at the very least, we all live and work on the same small island, somewhere in the deep southeast.
series of touch-sensitive displays. Each display shows the portrait of an elderly person,
standing with the hand turned outwards, as if saying: “I built this nation”. Two displays
can be seen in Figure 1 below. When the visitor touches the hand or shoulder, they hear
a recording of the speaker’s voice. Chances are that the visitor will not be able to
understand the language spoken, but she or he will indeed grasp much of all that is, in a
manner of speaking, “outside” of the words - elements of prosody such as phrasing and
speech rhythm, but also voice colour that may hint at the emotional state of the person.
Then there is coughing, laughing, a hand clap and so forth. Such paralingual elements of
vocal communication are extremely important and furthermore, their meaning is quite
universal.
The present article presents the language situation in Singapore, the design and
underlying aesthetics of the installation’s sonic interactivity, and finally, recapitulates
some of the media discussions that the first public showing, in March 2009, engaged.
Part of an art and speech research project, the installation aims at bringing attention to
the multitude of languages that Singaporeans use on a daily basis, but also the fragility
of this linguistic soundscape. It is well-known that language is key to understanding an
intangible cultural heritage linked to an immigrant minority: not only that of its
geographical origins, but also its communal experience of migration, of diaspora, of
integration. Much of this heritage is in great danger of being lost in Singapore. The
installation presents eight voices: speakers of Hokkien, Teochew, Hainanese, Hakka,
Telegu, Tamil, Malayalam and Baba Malay. They are telling their own stories about
childhood, life during the war, cooking methods and recipes, and so forth. The custodians
of these languages are now in their 70s and 80s, and Singapore Voices places them in
focus as individuals. Through the interactive experience of the installation, visitors are
able to rediscover the intergenerational distance through listening to and physically
feeling their voices. In a condensed setting, they can experience and appreciate a part of
Singapore’s rich cultural heritage.
The interaction design is built from a principle where different combinations of
touching trigger selected excerpts from interviews. As the voices speak, the whole
display vibrates with the sound, and in this way, touching becomes a metaphor for the
necessary effort, on our part, to re-establish contact between generations: necessary, if
we want to understand the richness of the culture we are living in. Singapore Voices
lets the visitor sense the individuality, and musicality, of the voices.
portrayal in cartoons by different groups of subjects. A set of
audiovisual stimuli was selected through a procedure in two steps.
First, 6 ‘judges’ evaluated a large number of random snippets from
all Mickey Mouse cartoons released between 1928 and -35.
Analysis singled out the five films ranking highest in portraying
respectively anger, sadness, fear, joy and love/tenderness.
Subsequently, 4 judges made a continuous evaluation of emotion
portrayal in these films, and six maximally unambiguous
sequences were identified in each. The stimuli were presented to
two groups (N=33), one in which the subjects were expected to be
visually oriented, and one where they would tend to be more
aurally oriented, in three different ways: bimodally (original) and
unimodally, i.e as an isolated sound or video track. We
investigated how group and modus conditions influenced the
subjects’ perception of the relative intensity of the five emotions,
as well as the sense of realism portrayed in the cartoon clips, and
how amusing they were found to be. Finally, we developed an
estimate for visual-aural orientation as a linear combination of
select self-reported variables, and tested it as a predictor for the
perception of medium dominance.
rights to their work are dependent on the nature of a work
as well as its origin and underlying philosophy. Some
differences and overlaps between French Droit d’auteur,
Anglo-Saxon Copyright and the Copyleft movement will be
explored. I will briefly touch on examples from my own
compositional practice.
Four papers focus on perception. In paper A, urban soundscapes were reproduced in a 3D installation. Analysis of results from an experiment revealed correlations between acoustic features and physiological indicators of stress and relaxation. Paper B evaluated soundscapes of different type. Perceived quality was predicted not only by psychoacoustic descriptors but also personality traits. Sound reproduction quality was manipulated in paper D, causing two effects on source localisation which were explained by spatial and semantic crossmodal correspondences. Crossmodal correspondence was central in paper C, a study of colour association with music. A response interface employing CIE Lab colour space, a novelty in music emotion research, was developed. A mixed method approach supported an emotion mediation hypothesis, evidenced in regression models and participant interviews.
Three papers focus on design. Field surveys and acoustic measurements were carried out in restaurants. Paper E charted relations between acoustic, physical, and perceptual features, focussing on designable elements and materials. This investigation was pursued in Paper F where a taxonomy of sound sources was developed. Analysis of questionnaire data revealed perceptual and crossmodal effects. Lastly, paper G discussed how crossmodal correspondences facilitated creation of meaning in music by infusing ecologically founded sonification parameters with visual and spatial metaphors.
The seven papers constitute an investigation into how sound affects us, and what sound means to us.
Since sensory processing is inherently multimodal, research in sound is necessarily multidisciplinary.
The present work has been guided by principles of systematicity, ecological validity, complementarity of methods, and integration of science and art.
The main tools to investigate the mediating relationship of people and environment through sound have been empiricism and psychophysics.
Four papers focus on perception, and three on design. They constitute an investigation into how sound affects us, and what sound means to us.
Ce texte a comme sujet la confluence entre la création musicale et les sciences cognitives. Le but principal du travail a été de faire de la reconnaissance sur le terrain. Le présent texte est donc forcément incomplet, et ne servira que de point de départ pour une recherche substantielle.
J’ai choisi comme thématique l’interactivité musicale, qui sera définie comme le dialogue musicien–machine. Je vais tenter d’approcher ce phénomène par multiples chemins, qui se superposent. Le thème restera au centre, et autour de lui, j’esquisserai sa relation avec plusieurs faits et phénomènes liés, en particulier : les langages naturels et formels, la question de l’interface à la création, l’intelligence artificielle, et les notions de mémoire et de sens. Ces approches mises ensemble constitueront l’étude des aspects des systèmes d’interactivité.
Le vaste sujet de l’interactivité musicale est incrusté dans l’histoire de la musique d’ordinateur, une histoire qui date déjà d’un demi-siècle au moins. Par conséquent il sera nécessaire de cerner le cœur du sujet et de parcourir des cercles concentriques ou en spirale, pour gagner des connaissances qui nous permettent de comprendre mieux le phénomène. La procédure est un peu comme quand on observe une étoile avec l’œil nu : si on la regarde tout droit elle disparaît… La rétine est plus sensible à la lumière dans les côtés. Le texte est donc fatalement un collage consistant de plusieurs études d’envergure limitée. Malgré cela, il faut respecter les aspects importants propres au sujet, essayer d’esquiver le superflu et faire le plus possible de liens. La recherche est guidée par trois thématiques. Quelle est la matière, en d’autres termes, les composants et les processus qui constituent le système de proprement dit, utilisé dans la situation de performance musicale ? Deuxièmement, quelle est la relation entre recherche cognitive et outils technologiques à disposition ? Troisièmement, quelles implications est-ce que les technologies ont eues et auront d’autant plus à l’avenir sur la créativité musicale ?
Depuis plusieurs années, les concepts qui sous-tiennent ce texte ont influencé mon travail de compositeur et performeur. J’ai fait des expériences en la matière au travers d’œuvres employant des dispositifs électroacoustiques de configuration variable : “Beda+” (1995), “Tusalava” (1999), “Leçons pour un apprenti sourd-muet” (1998-9), “gin/gub” (2000), “Manifest”[1] (2000), “Project Time”[2] (2001), “sxfxs” (2001), “Extra Quality” (2001-2), ”D!sturbances 350–500”[3]… Ces morceaux de musique sont nés d'une curiosité pour le fondement théorique de la cognition et le fonctionnement du cerveau humain. En particulier, je me suis consacré à analyser la situation de jeu dans laquelle a lieu un échange d’informations et d’initiatives musicales entre musicien et machine, qui agissent sur un degré équivalent de participation dans un système complexe. J’éprouve que cette situation ludique peut également servir d’outil de recherche ; elle est un peu comme un laboratoire, ou un banc d’essai, pour tester des hypothèses, qu’elles soient des propos limités à la musique, ou bien plus étendues, élargissant vers des terrains inhabituels.
Étant compositeur, j’ai essayé de rendre l’étude ni trop limitée, ni strictement descriptive. J’ai ressenti le besoin d’analyser des travaux contemporains, ayant des composants scientifiques : les trois projets étudiés sont effectivement en cours de développement. Il s’agissait dans cette étude de capter plutôt leur raison d’être que de montrer leurs formes respectives dans un état finalisé, qui de toute façon n’est pas leur destin. Si la musicologie se contentait de démontrer des structures dans des œuvres de répertoire connues depuis longtemps, ou si elle s’enfermait dans un académisme technocrate développant des modèles n’expliquant que des choses qui sont évidentes pour les musiciens, alors elle souffrirait d’anémie. En proposant une hypothèse, elle doit comporter des aspects prédictifs. Ce serait encore mieux si des modèles développés en support à l’hypothèse étaient facilement accessibles et pouvaient servir au développement de nouveaux outils innovants. Cela est souhaitable, non seulement pour stimuler la production créative, mais également pour aider à mieux comprendre le fonctionnement de la créativité lui-même.
L’activité musicale, au sens général, pour ceux qui la produisent autant que pour ceux qui l’apprécient, est un exercice essentiellement non-verbal dont le but est l’émergence d'une compréhension de la créativité humaine d’un ordre autre que verbal ou écrit. En étudiant la créativité, et surtout sa formalisation, ne risquerait-on pas de la dénaturer ? Peut-être la créativité ne risque-t-elle pas de s’effondrer dans la recherche ? Que restera-t-il de la création musicale le jour où une machine aura composé une œuvre capable d’émouvoir les auditeurs ignorant tout de son mode de fabrication ? Néanmoins, en suivant l’appel de William Faulkner, “kill your darlings”, espérons transcender la créativité telle qu’on la connaît et aller vers des pays musicaux inouïs.
PerMagnus Lindborg
Paris, septembre 2003
“Neuromuse” qui présenté d’après plusieurs points de vue
[les techniques utilisées, des exemples sonores.]
Ensuite, une réflexion essayera de trouver la signifiance de cette approche à la
création musicale contemporaine, et des directions pour futur travail.
Finalement, la rédaction d’un entretien avec Voisin.
It is part of a 3-year research where we aim to design and research online expressivity; that is, participatory telematic audio and video frameworks with both physical and virtual components, involving technologies for real-time analysis and synthesis (MaxMSPJitter), streaming (UltraVideo, JackTrip) and diffusion (Spat~) in order to create multisensorial interactive media art experiences.
TimeTravel is a collaboration between Tromsø Music Conservatory, Arctic Sinfonietta and Nanyang Technological University. It is supported in Norway by the Cultural Council, Sparebank Gift Fund (Gavefund), University of Tromsø, Verdione, and in Singapore by NTU’s Innovation Centre and School of Art, Design, Media, and a National Research Foundation grant.
A principal component analysis determined a set of acoustic features that span a 2-dimensional plane related to latent higher-level features that are relevant to soundscape perception. We tentatively named these dimensions Mass and Variability Focus; the first depends on loudness and spectral shape, the second on amplitude variability across temporal domains. A series of repeated-measures analyses of variance showed that there is are patterns of significant correlations between perception ratings and the derived acoustic features in interaction with personality measures. Several of the interactions were linked to the personality trait Openness, and to Aural-Visual Orientation.
This phenomenological discovery, followed by extensive typologies of sonic morphology, timbre, texture, and signification, laid the theoretical basis of experimental music composition, in particular acousmatic music. This, in its turn, enabled the digital audio revolution, sampling, the pop production pipeline, and the design of earcons.
While research in multimodal perception has a long history, especially the perception of audio-visual composites, the field has more recently gained considerable traction. Two examples are cross-modal effects of sound on food taste (Spence 2011), and sound design of auditory icons in screen-based interfaces (Gaver 1986). This is partly driven by advanced marketing methods predicting the 'just right' music detail attracting attention and positive valence to sales products, and partly by increased availability of psychophysiological and neurological research equipment.
The authors conduct research in sonocentric cross-modal perception and design. We are charting associations between visual colour and auditory timbre (Lindborg & Friberg 2015), between visual spikyness and sonic roughness (Liew, Lindborg et al. 2018), and the identification of sound sources in complex soundscapes (Lindborg 2016). Adhering to a research-led creative practice, we apply findings in creative artwork through data sonification (Liew & Lindborg in review).
Recording available at https://www.youtube.com/user/sonosofisms
High intensity sound (even within legal levels) might induce physiological stress on hearing and voice organs when competing with ambient noise, psychophysiological stress on heart rate and metabolism, or psychological reactions such as annoyance.
A recent German study showed that the acoustical conditions in elementary classrooms often do not fit the specific needs of children, who are more sensitive to acoustic problems due to reverberation and noise than adults.
If the soundscape matters to school children, how can we create optimal acoustics in classrooms for communication, learning, and development? This is a great multidisciplinary challenge, calling for us to bridge environmental psychology, acoustic design, and education.
In this presentation, I will explain concepts such as SPL, reverberation radius, and Lombard effect, and share preliminary results from a pilot study in Singapore kindergartens.