Projects

As a part of the Belle Isle and Beyond project, I created my first fixed-media electroacoustic composition in some time.

We tend to think of sound recordings like photographs: as documents that reflect the time and place they were made, as well as the people who created them. Instead, I like to view sound recordings through the lens of the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s theory of making: as materials that I can work with in order to make something unique that would not otherwise exist, like a mason sees stone or a potter sees clay. Far from ‘raw’ or ‘inert,’ these materials—sound recordings, stone, clay—have lives; they bear the imprints of the process by which they came to be, and even with the most advanced technologies, the process of working with them is a push-pull negotiation of forces though which the finely-detailed form of the outcome, in my case a composition, is generated. Belle Isle Reverie (2019) is such a work; a fantasy on a collection of sound recordings made on Belle Isle in the Detroit River in March, 2019 by myself and a group of middle school dance students at the Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences. Of course, the process I described also tells the story of how the place we currently know as Belle Isle came to be: a confluence of natural and human forces and materials, with significant technological mediation. Belle Isle today, like my composition, is a human-made invention of what an urban ‘natural’ place can be. It will change and take on new meanings over time in response to changes to the environment and its surroundings, as well as our cultural and scientific values.

In 2015 and 2016, my Electronic Chamber Music ensemble responded to the theme of “Techno.” In collaboration with the students, we developed a series of instruments for playing Techno. The first iteration was known as the Tridents.

Photocells embedded in the Tridents are activated by the colored light controllers, which emit light pulses according to sequences programmed live by one performer. Performers can use the proximity of the controllers to interpret the sequences

In 2016, the design evolved. We felt that the performers should have more rhythmic autonomy, and wanted to update the design. We added a third sensor to each instrument for a total of 15 possible voices, and migrated from PVC pipe to steel and stained wood. The controllers are slimmer and more compact. Performers can play rhythms in any note value down to 16th-note triplets with coded buttons on each controller, all synced to a master clock.

2 Improvisations With Candelabras

This research is set against a theoretical/philosophical background regarding the nature of human-instrument relationships, from which I defined a conceptual space to explore through design, and then engage in reflective accounting of putting the design into practice. The first prototype, created at SARC, was extremely robust, but heavy, difficult to regulate, and a bit scary!

The final version was created at Michigan, working with MA student Simon Alexander-Adams.

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Reflections

• Facilitated collaborative improvisation
• Performances are episodic: Stable state -> transition -> stable state
• Temporal nature / speed of automated behavior enforced different modes of interaction

I’m thrilled to be an invited speaker at the Colloquium on Interdisciplinary Creation/Research Methodologies: Art, Body and New Technologies, in Santiago, Chile on Aug 8-10, 2016. Thanks to Francisca Morand and Javier Jaimovich from the Faculty of Arts of Universidad de Chile for organizing this impressive gathering!

I helped the students of the University of Michigan Digital Music Ensemble hack a rotary dial phone for their performance of Robert Ashley’s In Memoriam… Kit Carson. During one rehearsal, I heard Steve Rush say that he considered Ashley to be a minimalist like Reich and Riley. There was an extra phone lying around, and this gave me an idea.

I’ve been thinking about designing interfaces that are “bespoke” (to use a term I picked up in Ireland) to compositions. It made me consider whether we can embody a composition into an interface or instrument.

Ten singers begin reading a text at precisely the same moment, although for the majority of the piece the text is read silently in each performer’s head, at his or her own pace. Only occasionally does each switch from the voice in their head to the voice we can hear, according to dynamics and timings indicated on a score. At times, the singers overcome their internal voices by whistling unspecified pitches. Throughout, each performer ceaselessly tunes a radio, never stopping at a particular station or frequency. The content of any particular instantiation is therefore arbitrary, and the entirety of the piece – the text, the radio broadcasts, the internal voices – unknowable.

It took some time for it to become apparent that On Not Knowing is largely about Belfast. ‘About’ is an excessively reductive term here, as Belfast is by no means the subject of the text, nor is it reflected in the process by which the piece unfolds; it would be more accurate to say that the piece is indicative of one’s experience of being an outsider in Belfast. Although the extent to which any place can truly be known is always limited, one can always peel away the unknown, gradually revealing the known. However, no amount of excavation will uncover the unknowable; this is the difference between mysteries and secrets. More than other places, Belfast brings this contrast to the surface. History, geography, climate and trauma conspire to conceal a hidden city in its attics, back rooms and underground rivers. The intense warmth of its inhabitants etches a blind spot into your senses. On Not Knowing reflects the dilemma of Belfast onto the fundamental questions of existence and experience.

with Dónal Donohoe and Stéphanie Bertet

Conceived more as a participatory durational performance than an installation per se, in Whispering Places three rooms in different geographic locations are acoustically superimposed onto one another, creating a shared environment. Using high-order ambisonics and multichannel real-time streaming, a sound in one place appears in the same spatial location in all the other places at the same time. But are we really in the same place at the same time? It may be the middle of the night in Ireland when there is daylight in America; we are thousands of miles apart. Instead of sweeping them under the rug, Whispering Places plays with the contradictions and paradoxes of sharing a virtual space. Pulled by gravity, sounds from one place move in space toward the direction of the others, just as the packets that represent them travel along wires. Visitors have to whisper to make their voices heard – we don’t want to wake anyone who may be sleeping.

Whispering Places sends uncompressed, 3rd-order ambisonic-encoded audio streams between sites via JackTrip. Different sites can decode the streams according to their local speaker setup, allowing for flexible but accurate spatial rendering on any multi-channel speaker system with known geometry.