Sounding the Net: Interview with Chris Brown |
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Peter Traub: In your piece, 'Eternal Network Music', you allow multiple users to control sound objects that manipulate a continuous texture. In designing a work that allows a non-musician to manipulate sound over a network, what were your considerations in terms of interface design and composer control vs. user control? Chris Brown: The idea was to make the simplest possible gestures result in a rich sonic texture. I didn't want the players to have to feel like they needed to learn how to control the music, but that they could explore gesture and response intuitively, perhaps discovering the simple linkages behind the instrument. This is one of those pieces where the instrument IS the composition -- the sound it makes is very specific and could result in many different kinds of performances, but i think that the identity of the piece is always pretty clear. PT: How did your thinking about composition for this piece stem from your earlier work with network music? CB: It's unique in my work since most of my earlier pieces were made in collaboration with other specialist musicians, and were not that accessible to non-cognescenti. but it probably has some relationship to my "talking drum" midi network pieces, which were often installed in such a way that the public could interact with the system without having to know anything about it. the "eternal" idea had to do with making a music that was always accessible and could theoretically at least play forever -- anytime, anyplace, through the web. it was possible for me to think this way thanks to phil burk's jsyn and transjam software
CB: In the same way that any instrument affects what music you make with it -- you accept the advantages and limitations and try to make a work that is congruent with them. I admire Phil's Burk's software very much and only wish there were more composers that made pieces for it. It is especially useful for being accessible to non-expert users, although composing for it was quite a challenge -- one that I likely wouldn't have undertaken without Phil's direct assistance and collaboration. CB: it's pretty different for the reasons i stated above, but also because the Hub music was always based on an interactive system that was realized by each composer for their own instrument in different ways. when making a network piece as a solo composer, i make the entire musical instrument/world, that others can use. in Hub music, we had ideas for data-sharing that each composer fleshed out in his own way. PT: A number of other interviewees have written about the fallibility of the internet and networks being a particular point of interest for them in their work. They are interested in the ways in which the network fails or produces unexpected results (Jason Freeman's N.A.G. being an example), and they work in this arena by using networks (or network software) in ways for which they weren't intended. This seems to tie into the unexpected/surprising results that were desired by members of The League and The Hub, and in fact you discuss it directly toward the end of your article "Indigenous to the Net" (in the discussion of 'Points of Presence'). I am wondering if you think about these types of surprising/unpredictable results as the results of network fallibility, or rather as a carefully controlled process designed to create interesting 'artifacts'? CB: tim perkis' "waxlips" piece is the only one i can think of from the hub repertoire that was specifically designed to sonify the artifact/quirks of the network. but i think that all of us were always interested and accepting of the ways in which they crept into the music. we never expected or wanted the network to be a perfect vehicle for the data-sharing ideas, but were interested in the interactive collision of imperfect instruments with the listening and taste of the performers. PT: When working in musical areas outside of network music, do you still pursue the unexpected results that network music can give, by setting up conditions that would give you similar types of unexpected/surprising behavior? CB: i came into electronic music from the tudor/mumma tradition where the object was always to bring the system/instrument to life, which meant to foreground and celebrate the surprising and unexpected aspects of its behavior. it's always been for me about a balance between in-control and out-of-control, with the performer as instigator and navigator of a electroacoustic space -- most of the time in non-network musics, this is very much about the physical space itself, which electronics allows you to explore in very different ways than acoustic instruments do -- with network music, the system itself takes over that spatial dimension
CB: I don't understand this question. CB: this came up first before we ever did remote concerts. since the first Hub was a mailbox system where each player had to query the computer for new data -- so there was always a sloppy delayed response to changing data in the network that we accepted as part of the instrument -- as well, for practical reasons, there were actually two computers that were continuously updating each other's mailboxes, so that made the whole thing really unpredictable rhythmically, and that was fine for us with the music we were making. as well, when we did the Clocktower remote concert the added latency of 300 BAUD modem connection added yet another weird delay to the mix -- the KPFA concert where poets sending in their lines of poetry triggered events through this two-brain hub lent another strange disconnection to temporality. so, our world really changed dramatically when we switched over to the MIDI based hub, where our messages were addressed directly to each other and entered into our own program via MIDI interrupts. the music changed dramatically, and we were sometimes wistfully nostalgic about the sound of the older "primitive" system! but i got interested in using the complexity of the network to bring about complex, but controlled pulsing rhythmic textures, which you can hear first in the "wheelies" piece, and then in the "talking drum" installations (recently re-release on www.pogus.com) -- i tried to extend that to the internet with the first "eternal network music" pieces, and "Invention#5" in 1999, in which I measured the average net-delays between California and Karlsruhe (about 120 ms), and then buffered all of the data exchanged (at 200 ms) to keep the sync the same on both continents. for a rhythmic music, this is a lot of latency of course, but for computer musicians a slow-response time is tolerable because we're mostly starting and stopping processes rather than trying to inflect momentary gestural activity. my solution to that limitation is just to add those gestures locally, and not worry that the music is different here than it is there (on the Inv#5 recording on the site you can probably hear a berimbau playing along at the beginning and end if you listen carefully). In short, latency is always present as an aspect of this music, and you design different pieces around how you're planning to handle it. Scot Gresham-Lancaster likes to describe it as an extension of the Venetian Rennaissance spatial music tradition! PT: In your quote above, you imply that you're working at a slightly higher level of abstraction than perhaps someone playing the cello or having a more immediate control over the sound. Do you find yourself able to move between different levels of control within the medium, and do networks inhibit or promote that movement? Does working with networks in the way that you do push the composer to work at a certain level of control? CB: I think I've answered this already above -- but, of course computers themselves imply high level abstractions, so the challenge is to bring them into the immediacy of music-making. You have to work with the nature of the beast, not against it! PT: As you are one of the pioneers in the field of network music, I'm wondering if you could discuss your thoughts on the current state of the art. What directions are you currently working in with respect to network music or music on the internet (and do you consider them the same thing?), and what directions do you see other artists working in that you find interesting or compelling? CB: Networking technologies are getting easier to employ, but there still hasn't been much success in getting people to play music with each other in the data networks in which they increasingly spend more and more of their lives. This is sociologically problematic -- if our social lives take place within data networks, we need music to be part of it, and trading sound-files is a very primitive form of interaction! The biggest problem is the distancing that the technology creates. I'm encouraged though mostly by the growing number of people younger than me who seem to be bitten by the network music bug -- they take for granted that network music IS internet music, although I still do not. But in the last year I've found it actually relaxing to set up music sessions with other friends, former students many of them, to make music online together. The fact that it's getting simpler to do means that more people will probably start doing it, and I think that our experience with making it a creative medium for programmer/artists, like the Hub was and is, seems to be an important precedent.
CB: Network music existed for us (the Hub) long before there was internet music. It's actually taken quite a long time for the kind of network interactivity that we used in the Hub to be very feasible for individual composers using the internet. Maybe that's because the internet always presumes a distancing of the players from each other, and also because its primary medium is file-exchange -- only recently has it become that practical for live interactivity. But as of today, it's the easiest way to work!
CB: No! They're still prototyping, and there will hopefully be two full-scale (meter diameter) tables avalable for the September performance. |