Review by Camille Goudeseune
Urbana, Illinois, USA
ICMC returned to the United States this year. Conference Chair Mary Simoni and her team worked hard and it showed: one review can’t begin to describe the profusion of composition and research which was presented in a single week, as seminars, installations, papers and concerts.
Seminars at the conference branched out into other fields of technology: multimedia composition, virtual reality, and mixing for new digital formats like DVD and 5.1 surround sound. This was quite convenient for those of us who can’t make it to the Audio Engineering Society conventions. The week-long exhibition of early electronic instruments organized by John Monforte was a pleasant surprise. Participants could actually play on a Theremin, Mellotron (complete with a hastily sketched introduction to Strawberry Fields Forever), modular Moog (mostly in tune), Synclavier with original twenty-year-old eight-inch floppies, and a LinnDrum. Several people remarked how difficult the Theremin was to play, having no tactile feedback, but one performer familiar with VR interfaces found it enjoyably light: motion capture of her hands’ gestures without having to hold heavy devices. The Moog reminded us how nice it is to have the whole interface visible at a glance, not buried in submenus and preferences panels.
Several installations running for the duration of the conference got good attendance despite being located some miles from the main conference. Insook Choi presented a new composition Unfolding Time in Manifold showcasing 8-speaker localized sounds in the University of Michigan’s new CAVE VR theater, as well as the authoring tools used to compose it. Down the hall, Sever Tipei and Hans Kaper of Argonne National Labs showed a class of compositions A.N.L.-folds and examples of data sonification using an Immersadesk display. Several more interactive installations, some with performers included, some with the audience as performers, were back at the main campus.
The usual large assembly of papers on analysis and synthesis techniques was presented, bracketed with other sessions on accompaniment systems, expressiveness and control signals, and real-time issues.
Eli Brandt presented experimental results measuring the latency of various operating systems. SGI’s Irix remains the best at 7 msec, Windows 95 and NT trail at around 150 msec, but Windows 98 may get 30 msec performance with the new WDM programming technique. The Convolution Brothers (Zack Settel, Cort Lippe) presented a Max-based real-time DSP system in typical over-the-top fashion which had most of us in stitches. This reviewer unveiled a new platform (www.shout.net/~mhamman/areal/) for controlling C++ synthesis algorithms in real time on generic PC’s. The paper by Bernd Schoner et al of the MIT Media Lab was distinguished with an award for introducing a novel synthesis technique midway between sampling and traditional physical modeling. His team trained a neural net with gestural inputs and corresponding spectral envelopes of a violin, using cluster-weighted modeling to implicitly encode the nonlinear correspondences between these inputs and outputs. After this training, they reproduced good acoustic output from new inputs within the trained range.
In the paper session on compositional systems, Michael Hamman distinguished conventional symbolic ways of thinking from semiotic ways of thinking in user interfaces for composition tools, encouraging surprises to occur at the interface instead of polishing the interface to the point that it disappears from the composer’s awareness. Michael Gogins presented Music Graphs, an elegant music formalism implemented in Java, analogous to scene graphs in computer graphics. Stéphane Letz et al presented the current state of their Elody system, showing a nice separation of form (pattern templates) and content (pitches and rhythms) reminiscent of Cage’s early piano works. As a finale they cleverly constructed Brubeck’s Blue Rondo A La Turk as Schenker might have done it. This session finished with the SALIERI music language and composition system (Holger Hoos). Its approach lies midway between that of Elody and that of adding musical/temporal primitives to existing programming languages, as it is itself a general-purpose programming language. As a conventional text-based language it is thorough; its forthcoming GUI and many connections to other systems promise it a long life. Insook Choi rounded off the paper sessions by presenting the VR authoring tool ScoreGraph, used in her compositions at recent ICMC’s. It lets the composer describe various processes, their connections and synchronization, and how their internal state is rendered visually and acoustically.
On the second day of the conference, The Michigan Daily ran ICMC as its cover story with a populist angle, quoting Mary Simoni: "The music presented at ICMC98 represents the most experimental edge of what is known in contemporary parlance as techno." The article quoted papers coordinator Gregory Wakefield: "A lot of the big performers like Kraftwerk owe a lot of aesthetics and technology to our movement." Three aspects of techno were indeed common in the almost one hundred compositions performed: static tonality, pulsed rhythms, and imaginative use of timbre.
William Alves’ video piece Collateral Damage used fragments of Gulf War news broadcast footage as raw material. Looping and superposition of these fragments created basic harmonic fields which shifted suddenly at articulation points. Larry Polanksi’s work for tape and singer choir/empi’s solo took the opposite approach, shifting harmonies very slowly and unpredictably, threatening banality and then avoiding it just when your attention started to wander. But many tape pieces using pitched sounds didn’t consider harmony a problem at all, simply establishing a tonic (or "center", the theorists might say) and never straying from it.
Granular synthesis was commonly featured in the tape pieces presented. (It seems curiously fashionable this year, much like motion capture at SIGGRAPH.) The grain streams were often regularly pulsed (around 10 Hz), which became tiresome in uninterrupted half-hour doses. Presumably some of these composers intended such a steady beat to be maintained for ten minutes at a time, but surely not all of them! Elizabeth Hoffman’s Vim refreshingly demonstrated an awareness of the situation, inflecting the stream with subtle ritenutos and irregularities. Have the rest of us forgotten the Poisson distribution which Xenakis introduced to us many years ago? A perhaps subtler trend also showed up in the many pieces performed: equating exposition with composition. In some commercial techno, exposition of new technology is the necessary aesthetic; development of material only gets in the way. But if this becomes a style in the ICMA community, The Michigan Daily will be disappointed! This expository technique often revealed itself in a gradual introduction of sounds which then just kept on sounding: effective if the beat is strong and the venue allows for dancing, but soporific after four days sitting in a comfortable darkened concert hall. Jerry Tabor’s tape piece engaging Causey stands as one example opposing this simple aesthetic, using chaos theory as a structural principle of orchestration.
All the pieces in the concert given by the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble combined percussion and tape to good effect. Some amplified the performers’ capacity with sounds related to or derived from the performed part (Wayne Siegel’s Match I, Jon Christopher Nelson’s Other Terrains); some accompanied or led the percussionists with not-quite-identifiable timbres (even the instrumental sounds had that same pleasantly mysterious quality in Natasha Barrett’s commission Microclimate I: Snow and Instability). Elizabeth Anderson’s L’eveil for tape also demonstrated imaginative, dare we say beautiful, use of sounds. Sean Varah’s Slipping Image for four instruments and tape powerfully executed what he calls "the sleight of hand game of ‘is it live or is it Memorex’." Voice, always a powerful spice, was processed beyond intelligibility by most composers but Rasmus Lunding’s Det Nøtvendige pulled off clearly enunciated text (in Danish – I wished for a translation!) and even sung melody. These last two works are also on the conference CD, the latter in a slightly shorter version.
Tape music reigned this year: three fifths of the pieces were for tape alone. Another fifth added conventional instruments. One tenth had dancers, video or other nonacoustic elements, and only a tiny fraction used live electronics. (An even smaller fraction used no electronics at all in performance.) Certainly DAT cassettes are more portable and more reliable than computers and controllers (or instrumentalists!), but less than a dozen compositions free from a click track at an ICMC is cause for alarm. One of these temporally free pieces was David Jaffe’s commissioned work Other Worlds for (virtuoso) Zeta violin and symphonic band. Several processing techniques on the violin (pitch clusters, Jean Michel Jarre-like flanging, intricate doubled melodies) were mirrored in composed-out effects in the ensemble. Gregory Laman also presented a processed soloist, but without other instruments, in One Divided. Short movements presented various expansions of a single trumpet via Lexicon 300 effects processor, the result being imaginative and surprisingly interesting. Roger Dannenberg’s In Transit for trumpeter (himself), computer soundtrack, and Scott Draves’ computer animation impressively demonstrated the style recognition and improvisation software he presented last year as a paper, proving that accompaniment systems are maturing.
The dance pieces were particularly impressive. As just one example, Diane Thome’s Unfold/Entwine choreographed by Jessica Fogel intricately recombined nine dancers into various groups and roles, the music corresponding (not too literally!) with a variety of gestures and flow of energy to and fro. Recurrent gestures in both dance and music gently hinted at large-scale structure. And if not literally dance, certainly theater: Barry Truax’s Androgyne, Mon Amour received a stunning performance by bassist Robert Black. In all the evening concerts Mark Allen Berg’s lighting design was consistently imaginative and polished, going perhaps too far only on two tape pieces where four patterned spotlights spun and flew around the stage. Some liked it; those of us who spent four hours at an alternative/industrial dance club the previous evening obviously found it tame. But overall he handled the visual problem of tape music quite gracefully.
The ICMC concert series is always a valuable and unique opportunity to hear such a wide range of computer music, and this year was no exception. The papers set a new standard for polish and professionalism, to say nothing of their deep content. Computer music’s future looks promising from the range of fascinating activity demonstrated this year in Ann Arbor. We hope to have caught up on most of it before next year’s conference at Tsinghua University, Beijing.