It seems to me that play has become an ever more significant aspect of networked activities, and while much of this is brought about by the participatory nature of the work, it also exists in work that is “through-composed” or out of the hands of the listener. In the October 2007 Newsletter, I mentioned the performance piece, You Say Potato, I say Potato, a humorous study of the sonic properties of genetically modified potatoes, in which two research groups try to answer the crucial question: GM potatoes, they may be good for our stomachs, but are they good for our ears? That month, we blogged the Tomato Quintet, the sonification of 7 days of tomato ripening into 49 minutes of musical wonder by Chris Chafe (Music), Nikolaos Hanselmann (Visuals) and Greg Niemeyer (Cook). This month, vegetable humor is back again with the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. In existence since 1998, the orchestra, composed of 11 musicians, a sound engineer and a video artist, performs throughout Europe and Asia on instruments made of fresh vegetables. As an encore, the audience is offered fresh vegetable soup.

And then there’s Vaibhav Bhawsar’s Udder Utter, an instrument that utters syllabic sounds derived from the Devanāgarī alphabet. Its playability is inspired by the gestures involved in milking a cow. And Lucier-in-a-Shower MP3s, an aquatic take on Alvin Lucier’s classic I Am Sitting in a Room Listening, that may not be intentionally humorous, but if you know Alvin, the idea of putting him in a shower has its humorous side.

A little more on the macabre side – and without vegetables, udders or showers – is Diamanda Galas’ upcoming performance on February 14th of the Valentine Day Massacre.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all.

Networked_Music Review also launched two newly commissioned works, More of the Same by LoVid, a work that loads copies of a single sound sample and explores fissures in the digital veneer as the spoken communication is played back repeatedly. And You’re Not My Father, by Paul Slocum, composed of a sequence of re-enactments of a 10 second scene from the television show Full House, overlaid with sound loops from the scene’s original music.

Finally, an interesting interview by Peter Traub with Golan Levin that focuses on his 2001 project, Dialtones (A Telesymphony), a concert performed through the choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones, can be found on the site. Peter and I both agree, it’s nice to see older work get a “second life”.

Players can learn to play an instrument starting at low levels and what this does is that when the player chooses to take out their instrument, the keyboard switches to a configuration where specific keys are mapped to specific notes. For instance, 1 is C, 1 + cntrl is C#, 1 + cntrl + alt = C# up one octave, etc. In this way very specific chords can be created. Compositions can also be saved as an “ABC” file and set as a macro so that players can bust out a tune whenever after they’ve done the preliminary work or share it among the community.

Often while waiting for members of a party to arrive, players will play music or listen to the bard in their party perform for them. For me, it raises my involvement with the game another notch as I have also macroed some of my tunes to my Minstrel abilities, really adding that touch of personalization. Other players will remember specific minstrels based on the songs that they play while they’re in the party, because of that custom touch in their experience.

So what gets me now is all the emergent play centering around music that I’m seeing in the game, from random rowdiness and role play in the auction house and taverns in the game to bands and guilds of minstrels that spend most of their time playing music in-game. People I’ve shown this to have commented on the absurd “nerdity” of this system, but I really believe that this open-ended system in a MMO, a very limited environment where players really have little say on player created content, really has created an entirely new brand of emergent play without unbalancing the game world…

Bonds of Sea and Fire Duet (Xenogears)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tjnuvb0Xwk

Megaman 2 Theme / Dr. Wily Stage 1 Theme (P.S. OKKUSENMAN)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrRuNOWfIIM

Overworld Theme (Dragon Warrior)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h69fzUG67iU

Original Harp Composition (This one is amazing.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PfSD7MBdt0

The Entertainer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_C02HAAneA

Hotel California
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmWqlKyVEV8

Stairway to Heaven
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFm9ifgB6OY

[Posted by Al Yang on The Asian Power Hour]

Adam will be answering reader’s questions in the comments section below until January 31, 2008.

Helen Thorington: I understand that you do not think of yourself as a sound artist in Second Life. I wonder if you would explain why?

Adam Nash: I think of a realtime 3D multi-user environment (3D MUVEs), like Second Life, as a post-convergent medium. This means that no single media-element (sound, vision, sociality, network, time, etc) takes precedent, rather they all exist equally in a symbiotic relationship, without which none of them could exist.

[Image: Unsung Song #16: Blue Sound Ground]

Helen: Do you have any musical training? Do you play any musical instruments? Does this help or hinder your explorations?

Adam: I don’t have any formal musical training, but I do play a few instruments badly, chiefly the drums and keyboards. I have many years’ experience playing in bands and making music for soundtracks and performances. I also have quite a lot of experience as a live performer in performance art, dance and movement. Like all experience, it both helps and hinders my explorations in 3D MUVEs. While I am able to build and expand upon musical performance techniques, I assume that the same experience severely hampers my ability to see potential in a new environment. I really love music, but I think new environments like this reveal music as an outdated concept. I still think music is useful – indeed I release a lot of my own music under a Creative Commons license via my net-label at www.concentrated-sound.net – but anachronistic. I was first drawn to realtime 3D back in 1997, when I first encountered VRML, and it struck me as a very similar environment to the inside of my own head when I was creating music for performances. It is a spatial environment in which sounds can be animated in a way that is easy to visualize but impossible to achieve in the physical world. It is a logical next step to see the environment as the performance environment as well as the composition environment, and from there quickly grows the concepts that I explore in 3D MUVEs, basically audiovisual environments that users navigate within to create their own unique experience from the elements provided by me. It’s like the composer’s mind, the instruments and the venue all rolled into one.

Helen: Tell us about composing sound for Second Life. You have called it a “technically very limited and frustrating environment.” What are the limitations and frustrations? Are there redeeming features?

Adam: Composing sound for Second Life, or any 3D MUVE, is fun, because of this ability to provide the basic audiovisual elements and then leave the user to arrange (ie, navigate) the elements as they please. This is an extremely exciting and satisfying way of working, because it removes the need for arrangement – a skill, different from composition, that is absolutely crucial in linear music. There’s nothing wrong with arrangement (often in linear music it is the thing that turns something great), but often there are an unlimited number of potential ways of arranging a piece of music and the musician is forced to choose only one.

From: Infra_Assemblage

Also, with this idea of the melding of the composition environment and performance environment, the act of creating work is often enormously enjoyable because you get to fly around and through your ideas, trying out different ways of navigation that you may never have realized were possible when conceiving of the piece. It’s like a slightly more concrete iteration of the limitless imagination scape in which all these ideas are found.

The technical limitations of Second Life are significant and many. The main limitations, for me, are the lack of a proper modeling hierarchy, and a few things to do with sound, like the 10-second limit per file and lack of control over falloff. There is also an undocumented limit to the number of simultaneous sounds that can be played. On the other hand, there are a lot of positives about working within limitations, as the artist is forced to be creative and come up with novel solutions. It also means many formal decisions are made prior to starting work, which in some ways makes things easier. Like most things, it is both blessing and curse.

[Image: Unsung Song 2: Crescent]

Helen: Avatars play an important role in your work by activating the sound. And yet you have “core problems” with them. “The avatar concept”, you say in July’s empyre discussion “is the one I find the most troubling, and it also grows from the 3d-space-as-physical-simulation misassumption. There is no need to concentrate presence into one cohesive point (an avatar).” I wonder if you would explain what you mean by this, and perhaps suggest alternatives.

Adam: Well, if avatars play an important role in my work, it’s because they play a very important role in Second Life itself. The problems I refer to are both technical and conceptual. First, the analogy of a single point of presence, from which the rest of the world is perceived, and in which the rest of the world perceives you, arises directly from our physical world, where our sensory organs are coalesced in a single unit and cannot be separated. Recently, humans have been able to spread out perception and presence through technological mediation, for example cameras, telephones, radio and the internet, and I think we are certainly slowly moving away from the concept of a single point of perception and presence, but mostly it is still how we negotiate our physical existence.

But, it is a very underexamined concept in realtime 3D, and particularly in Second Life. This is true of the entire physical world analogy that controls the working concept of Second Life. Even though it may seem natural to use 3D space to recreate physical space, that is only one possibility, and certainly not the easiest, because it can never recreate physical space, only represent it. Once we move into the sphere of representation, different modes of perception are required (one never actually walks on a map).

Because the system to which our bodies are subject (ie, physical space) is now being represented, we need also to represent our bodies, not recreate them, otherwise things quickly get confusing and the representation becomes limited in usefulness. This happens as soon as we move our ‘camera’ away from our avatar – we are no longer seeing and hearing via our avatar’s eyes and ears, rather we are perceiving from whatever point in the 3D space that our ‘camera’ is at. Yet, within this synthetic space it is perfectly feasible that we could perceive from both the position of the camera and the position of our avatar. This is not difficult or unusual, in fact we are already doing it twice simply by having a default avatar in Second Life. The first, significantly, is the physical/virtual superposition, where my physical body is seeing and hearing my avatar see and hear – already I have two points of perception (literally and conceptually). Then there is the ‘over the shoulder’ point of view that SL avatars default to, behind and above the head of your own avatar, really a camera that is following your avatar. It is seeing and hearing your avatar see and hear. So now I am seeing and hearing my camera seeing and hearing my avatar seeing and hearing. I am simultaneously perceiving from three different points, literally and conceptually. I think this is one of the reasons so many people feel so disoriented when first encountering realtime 3D space.

Since it is possible, indeed common, to perceive from two or three points, then it’s a small step to expand the number of points of perception arbitrarily, both in space and in time (lag and multiple private chats are both examples of multiple points of perception in the temporal dimension that all SL users are comfortable with).

Practicing the agency of presence via multiple points perhaps seems a more subtle or difficult concept, but again SL users constantly deal with others via multiple points of presence. For example, most users quickly become comfortable with the idea that another user may not be seeing and hearing the scene from their avatar, or that they may be simultaneously dealing with the physical world and the synthetic world and the mediation device itself. Indeed, SL specifically acknowledges this via the device of having the avatar’s eyes and head follow the user’s mouse pointer when dealing with the user interface. This means that others’ avatars are, variously, a presence notifier (the person is logged in), a mouse, a representation, none of these things, all of these things and potentially many more things besides.

[Image: Unsung Song #9:Corona]

Helen: I can fly alone through your installations and activate sounds. I can get friends to move through them with me and produce different sounds. I can play with the work and it changes. Isn’t it in fact important for your work to have the avatars’ presence concentrated in one space?

Adam: In that sense, the avatar is serving the standard function of a mouse pointer for 3D space. Again, this is mainly because of the restrictive working analogy of Second Life itself, which enforces this role for the avatar, and it’s true that some of my works are a specific comment on, and working within, that restriction. But, it is not necessary for the user’s avatar to be concentrated in one space. Ideally, for many of the works, the user would be able to branch off avatars and move spatially through works in different ways simultaneously. Similarly for time. Or, to be able to interact with different works simultaneously in space and time.

Certainly, I consider all the pieces in, say, Seventeen Unsung Songs to be all parts and aspects of the same work, quite literally. Sonically, they are all constructed from the same rational scale that I devised, based on a fundamental tone of 77Hz then proceeding in intervals of ratios over 7. All of the pieces use this scale, and one of the pieces (Blue Sound Ground, which users pass through at the entrance) contains all of the sounds used in all the other pieces, both as a conceptual readying and also a technical device to load as many sounds into the user’s cache as possible. Visually, also, all the pieces are clearly very strongly related, sharing colours methods of distributing colour across hue, saturation and opacity spectra. It would be ideal if they could be experienced in multiple modes over space and time.

[Image: Anahata,The Mute Swan]

Helen: Have you considered what kind of work you might produce if in fact presence were not concentrated in one point? If presence were distributed over time, location, data and media?

Adam: I think it implies a more involved work, a work where the user experience becomes extremely important to the work. The extent of the user interaction over multiple points determines, to large extents, how the work develops and emerges. Works could take dynamic notions much further. For example, currently we can trigger a certain sound or animation based on sensed data about an avatar’s position and other metrics – this could be expanded to include many different aspects of the nature of the user’s engagement with the work. It suggests work that exists across environments, building on gameplay techniques to build a performative and experiential vocabulary cooperatively between artist and user. This is tremendously exciting and suggests a kind of work that could accompany users through time and space, growing and changing together. This kind of thing would start to approach the mechanics of true non-linear interactivity.

Helen: It seems to me that your work adds new parameters to sound/musical composition. In most of the networked musical pieces I’ve heard or seen described, this has not been true. Music remains music, separate or separable from other things, like the space in which it is played and its audience. And while I find this very difficult to talk about, what you introduce has to do with audience immersion and presence in the space; and audience activation of the work as a result. Thinking of the participant, I think of words like “experiential” (experiencing through the movement of my avatar-body as it explores the space you have created), the bringing into existence of music/sound. Thinking from the point of view of the music/sound, it’s not like filling a space with pre-determined sound (as so many of us have done in RL), but rather creating a dimensional space with potential… And that the two constitute a unique approach to creating and experiencing music.

I’m reminded of NOX Son-O-House, a public pavilion that is both an architectural and a sound installation that allows people to not just hear sound in a musical structure, but also to participate in the composition of the sound. It is an instrument, score and studio at the same time. A sound work, made by composer Edwin van der Heide, it is continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up actual movements of visitors.

Is this similar to the work you’re doing?

Adam: Oh, well, I certainly hope so. I’m not familiar with that work, but it sounds very similar conceptually to the process I touched on earlier, where the compositional environment, the performative environment and the experiential environment converge, and the resulting symbiotic relationship reverberates back and forward throughout the previously distinct stages, merging them into a new, post-convergent environment of interactive, emergent, audiovisual experience.

Helen: Given the desire for multiple avatars to simultaneously/collectively activate your installations, how do you reconcile the absence of avatars or the single avatar interacting with the piece with your intentions?

Adam: I’m not sure I fully understand this question, but most of my pieces can be experienced at multiple levels in terms of number of avatars, length of time spent, familiarity with 3D space, etc. Again, this is related to my desire for an approach to the medium that is not tied to a physical world analogy of a single person with a single body. Even though SL is a multi-user space, it doesn’t preclude single users, and this is true of my work too, I hope. Some works are probably more satisfying aurally when used with other people (eg, Rarer Air), but other works are designed for individuals to interact with different elements of the SL experience, besides the social, in which case the number of avatars using it doesn’t really matter too much (eg, The Space Between). Yet others are unaffected by the number of avatars accessing them (eg, Appolinarium). I really try to explore many different aspects of the realtime 3D MUVE environment in all my different works, so its difficult to align all the work with an over-riding desire on my part.

From: Bell Garden

Helen: Have you created sound installations in other virtual worlds? If yes, can you talk about the similarities and differences, pros and cons?

Adam: Again, I really don’t think of them specifically as sound installations, but yes I have worked in many different virtual worlds/environments over the past 10 years or so, including VRML/X3D, ActiveWorlds, Blaxxun/Contact, Unreal, Torque, Quest 3D, Multiverse and even GEM in Pure Data. Differences are mainly technical, with VRML/X3D being by far the freest and most able to accommodate large scale, unrestricted concepts. In practice, it’s always had some problems dealing with lots and lots of simultaneous sounds, but I think that Niall Moody has solved that with his Helian browser, though I haven’t had a chance to use it – I’d like to but SL has got the mindshare at the moment, so that’s where curators want you to work. It’s a shame VRML/X3D never gained wide acceptance in the media arts community. As for the other environments I mentioned, they’re all commercial products to greater or lesser extents, except for Pure Data, so they all have significant technical restrictions that arise as a function of the commercial aims. Multiverse looks interesting in terms of extensibility and freedom, but again I haven’t had a real chance to properly check it out. I’m trying to at the moment with my colleague John McCormick, but again we’ve been commissioned to do a mixed reality piece using Second Life, so that takes up most of our time. Pure Data (known as pd) is the opposite, it’s open source and specifically designed for audio. With the GEM library in pd you can use OpenGL to create responsive 3D environments, and John and I have been working with that a little, with promising results. Most of these environments have things that they do better than others and things they do worse. SL does a lot of things poorly and a few things well, with its popularity being its chief advantage at the moment.

From: A Rose Heard at Dusk

Helen: You refer to your SL pieces as “audiovisual sculpture” and “site-specific installations.” Can you talk about the difference, and what makes Seventeen Unsung Songs site-specific, but not A Rose Heard at Dusk?

[Image: A Rose Heard at Dusk]

Adam: I guess “audiovisual sculpture” refers to all my work in 3D environments, whereas something like Seventeen Unsung Songs is a collection of inter-related audiovisual sculptures that were commissioned by Sugar Seville specifically for an island that already existed, therefore it is “site-specific”. It wouldn’t be possible to recreate Seventeen Unsung Songs in its entirety without having an island that was very similar to East of Odyssey, but it would of course be possible to install individual pieces from within that show in different places.

Helen: What do virtual worlds offer you as an artist that real world spaces don’t?

Adam: To me, this comes back to my concept of the post-convergent medium. The physics of realworld spaces make it impossible to attempt such things as continuous realtime dynamic animation of arbitrary numbers of sound and vision sources based on continuous realtime sensing of presence and other metrics. However, the comparison still considers the primary role of virtual spaces to be a recreation of physical space, which is not what I think. The kind of art that I have ever attempted in real world spaces has always been primarily performative and very different from virtual work. I guess there was a point of crossover when I was still working with The Men Who Knew Too Much and looking to combine real world and virtual art, but since 2002 any work I’ve done that involves so-called mixed reality has chiefly been in the service of others like Igloo, but then I tend to do the music/sound and some performance. I don’t see virtual spaces as a separate reality, I very much see virtual space as wholly contained within the real world.

Helen: We’re seeing more and more artists combining sound/music and moving images/video, referring to themselves as a/v artists and VJs. Why do you think this is?

Adam: I guess it’s a natural progression from a past that had discrete partitions between all sorts of experience, as a result of both technical and conceptual limitations. As media starts to converge, and access to both the means of production and means of distribution becomes easier, it becomes more viable technically to enact the kind of concepts that naturally emerge. In particular, two generations of music video and clubbing combine with more meme-like concepts of emergence and networks to create a desire to operate across a range of media. Most people’s media vocabulary is of a sufficient level of sophistication that practitioners are driven to explore new modes of expression to engage meaningfully with an audience.

Helen: Are there any other artists working in the same vein as you?

Adam: Plenty of really interesting artists operating in Second Life, many of whom share aspects of exploration and practice with each other, myself included. Some who come to mind are Gazira Babelli, Annabeth Robinson/AngryBeth Shortbread, Christopher Dodds/Mashup Islander, Bingo Onomatapoeia and the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, DC Spensley/Dancoyote Antonelli, Brad Kligerman, Juria Yoshikawa, Keystone Bouchard, Daruma Picnic, Christine Webster/Wildo Hofmann and Andrew Burrell/Nonnatus Korhonen. That’s just a short list, there are lots of people doing lots of interesting work all over Second Life.

Helen: Who are some of the artists you most admire?

Adam: John Power, John McCormick, Burno Martelli and Ruth Gibson (Igloo), Bruce Mowson, Melinda Rackham, George Clinton, Prince, Greg Egan, Yoko Ono, Morton Feldman, Brian Eno, Mark Rothko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. There are so many artists whose work I really appreciate, but those are the ones I genuinely admire.

Helen: Do you have predictions for sound art trends, developing technologies, the 3-D web? Have you any thoughts on what the future impact of immersion/presence might be? Do you think it might make “play” and “fun” more important to our lives.

Adam: I think we’re entering the post-convergent era, where distinctions between sound, vision and other media elements will cease to be meaningful. I definitely think play and fun will become more important as 3D environments grow in acceptance, alongside the growth of computer games as a medium. I certainly think that games, in the broadest sense, are the artistic medium of this century. Simulation and modeling will be of enormous importance to society and we will learn a lot from artists and practitioners of games and virtual worlds, and vice versa. The distinction between real world and virtual world will cease to be meaningful. We’ll see a convergence of networked experience via 3D, something like a 3D web but much deeper and more enjoyable than that phrase suggests. I definitely think we’ll see a move beyond the use of 3D space as just for representing physical spaces. The multiple points of perception and presence that we’ve already talked about will grow in acceptance and utility, along with an expectation that art will manipulate this.

Helen: Thank you, Adam, for this great interview.

Visit the following URLs for more information on Adam’s work:

seventeen unsung songs: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/unsung_songs.html
a rose heard at dusk: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/rose_heard_at_dusk.html
anemochord: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/anemochord.html
eudemonia stellata http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/eudemonia_stellata.html
infra assemblage: http://yamanakanash.net/secondlife/infra_assemblage.html

For information on Adam’s other projects, go to: http://yamanakanash.net/projects.html

Videos of some of his works are available for viewing at: http://www.waystowave.com/adam/secondlife/movies/

The Frotzophone hijacks a Z-Machine interpreter (a virtual machine originally designed in the 1980s for running interactive fiction on many platforms, and still used today) and extracts information relating to the map that the game is simulating. This information, along with a record of the player’s movement through the map, is used to generate music. The music follows the underlying structure of the game, revealed gradually as the player progresses through it; the branching, recursive, rhizomatic structure of the game is recapitulated in the generated sound.

Among the goals of the Frotzophone is to explore the dual meanings of the words “play” and “map.” Is “playing” an instrument the same as “playing” a game? What happens when the act of playing the game is the same act as playing the instrument? Is the “mapping” of interface to action the same as the “mapping” of a virtual space? What happens when the map of the space itself serves as the basis of the interface mapping?

Best known for his work on, around and about the violin, Jon Rose is a global performer, presenting his group and solo projects regularly in over 30 countries. He brings over 25 years experience pioneering the use of digital technology in live music performance to the Ball Project and this Festival outcome Sphere of Influence. The ball as symbol is universally recognised. A ball flying through space has an inherent mystery; it replicates our lonely and insecure position in the universe. To sport fans, the ball verges on being a sacred object. Ball games, especially in this sport-obsessed city, are nearly a religious rite. The earth is our favourite ball - our future on it less than certain.

After the sun has set at Federation Square, a huge white ball is pushed, heaved, thrown, and rolled around in a game – or is it a ritual? As this two and a half metre ball moves, it sings, it speaks, it screams. It’s a clever ball: its motion can manipulate both sound and images. The music it makes includes sounds from the environment and vocal samples composed by Rose and sung by The Song Company and Aku Kadogo, while Hollis Taylor plays the live violin obligato. As the ball spins, it juggles with words of wisdom, power and warning. The ball, aided by purpose-built interactive technology, has evolved from an object to a virtuoso multimedia performer.

From Rose’s website:

The use of games of chance to determine musical content has fascinated composers as different as Mozart in his Musikalisches Würfelspiel, Stravinsky in his stage works based on card games (also his neo-classical wind Octet of 1923), Cage throughout his entire career, and John Zorn in his ‘game pieces’ (which are in essence structures for improvisers). Richard Strauss spent much of his time playing skat (not improvised jazz vocals but a version of the card game whist); Schoenberg and Britten were very keen on tennis; Prokofiev was a chess master; Mozart was often to be found at the billiard table; Percy Grainger was outstanding at Badminton and possibly the first recorded jogger - sometimes running from concert to concert (once accompanied by 100 Zulu warriors) and even running from stage to back of concert hall and back again, when he had too many bars tacet in a blockbuster piano concerto.

Outside of western music of course, most societies have had their practice of music integrally linked to every ceremonial necessity of their social activities - from birth to death. Also, in many non-western cultures the idea of music without physical movement (dance) would have seemed strange, if not perverse.

Functional music, cultural replacement

In Australia, we live in a country that has the oldest surviving practice of gebrauchsmusik - it is only 50 years since the chief elder of many Aboriginal groups still knew how to sing into existence every significant animate and inanimate object, the keys to survival. It is unlikely that such sophisticated and rich cultures of aurality will ever exist again. But anybody who has ever witnessed an Aboriginal Australian Rules tournament in the Northern Territory will know that ‘footie’ has gone some way to filling the physical (if not the spiritual) cultural void left by whitefella destruction. This game may have been invented by Victorians, but the Aborigines of the north have seized it with both hands and feet and made it their own. If ballet was this good, I’d go every night. Unfortunately it is for blokes only; it also (sadly) has no music. The women have to make do with basketball or must stick with painting; but there is cause for optimism, painting is still often accompanied by song.

What is it about the ball?

A ball flying through space has an inherent mystery; it replicates our lonely and insecure position in the universe. Any young child seems to recognise the universality and truth of the ball. It’s global. All children, even those who show little interest in games or sport, respond to this user-friendly object. Add the random qualities of the oval ball to our philosophical observation, and we approach notions of twentieth century physics - the Uncertainty Principle and Quantum Mechanics. The oval ball may adhere to Newtonian gravity, but its chance bounce-ability gives lie to Einstein’s own belief that ‘God does not play dice with the Universe’. To football fans the ball verges on being a sacred object; the ball game - a religious rite. Bill Shankly, the legendary manager of the Liverpool soccer club, was once asked if football was a matter of life and death. ‘No’ he said, ‘it’s more important than that’.

New musical forms

A casual listen to the programmes of concert hall music, jazz festivals, rock spectacles, or other mainstream genres in 2005 will inform you that very little has changed in the way that most music is structured. There seem to be very few new forms for music (content is an equally unadventurous story, but let’s not go there). In classical music, they still haven’t got over the sonata form; in jazz they still unthinkingly play the head, the solos, and the head again. In electronic dance music, there is no form; you basically switch it on, mix it with something else, then switch it off again at the end (if you’re lucky). Most team games in sport provide a set of fixed macro and mobile structures that can be utilised as a formal basis for sonic compositions. A composition can utilise the basic parameters and agreed dimensions of place, time and space, to notions of technique, base strategy, flexible game plans, sportsmanship, or fooling your opponents (theatre?). All the codes of team games such as football, volleyball, basketball, and netball have the adaptive potential for setting up musical structures with satisfying yet unknown sonic outcomes - in fact I am suggesting that the practice of sport is akin to many methods of group music making such as Gamelan or the antiphonal singing that grew out of the European Renaissance. In the interactive badminton game PERKS, I thought that it would be enough just to have two adequate badminton players simulating the game. As it turned out, the best musical result was achieved by the best players (both in technique and commitment) - faking it wasn’t possible.

The ball project

The project will consist of a series of compositions utilising the structures of team sports (such as netball and quadrugby - otherwise known as murderball) and incorporating at least four custom made balls (an Australian Rules football; a Volley ball or Net ball; a huge 3 metre plus ball for a gallery space; a small kindergarten friendly ball). The balls will be fitted with pressure sensors and accelerometers providing continuous controller data streams via radiophonic transmission for interactive software driving audio and visual content. Some games will generate visual and text commentary on the nature of competition and tribalism, and be accompanied by string quartet obligato. Other games will function on an abstract level, concentrating very much on the essence of what it is that makes the ball such a powerful object and icon in our culture. The music generated by the ball will include original composition for sampled choir (The Song Company), the sounds of the body, physical exertion, and the sounds of electronic transmission. A composition for violin and juggler, using the same interactive ball technology, is also planned. This, I hasten to add, is not an exercise in touchy-feely therapy but the rigorous development of a hybrid art form.

A short history of ball games

The Meso-American ball game Pok-A-Tok has been around since 3000 BC; players used their elbows, knees and hips to get a small rubber ball through a hoop. Being an ersatz war situation (like most ball games since), the losers were often summarily executed. In North America, the Indians had their own version of soccer called Pasuckuakohowog. When the British turned up in the 1600s, they noticed similarities to their own crazed inter-town ball tournaments (which often lasted several days). The pitch could be over a mile long, the teams consisted of as many players as possible, the ball or bladder was stuffed with anything animal or vegetable - including body parts of a recent enemy (with grass as the ubiquitous filler), and the games were always extremely violent affairs. The Chinese can also lay claim to the origins of soccer. Around the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC, during the Han Dynasty, the army trained by kicking a ball into a smallish net. Almost everyone, including the Greeks and Romans it seems, had their ball games.

Ballspeak

The Age of Enlightenment sowed the seeds of humanity’s salvation in giving us most of the useful ideas that we associate with a modern rounded society - a franchised democracy, rational behaviour, social equality, wonder at (as opposed to ruling over) the natural world. However it couldn’t contain the grab for empire and the pathological exploitation of natural resources - which continues unabated. The Enlightenment has also not prevented the recent backward summersault to about the 12th century as our species’ insecurity and evermore desperate plight on our little planet is highlighted in the current burst of reactionary religiosity.

The moon, the earth would be balls in existence and travelling through space whether we were here to observe them or not. Unlike most of our cultural language-dependent notions like money, democracy, religion, etc - playing with a ball-like object could well have existed before language. It is an ontological artefact like none other whether it be a rolling stone or a pig’s bladder. After all a wild dog will perceive a moving ball as prey and play with it without understanding the rules of either physics or soccer. Once set in motion, a ball object seems to take on a life of its own. For all intensions and purposes, in the eyes of the wild dog, the ball is alive. The domestic dog can be trained to fetch the ball. But no dog, domestic or wild, can understand what a goal or a try is. Nor does an animal understand that our continued existence on this small finite ball is tenuous - we should however.

Blow the whistle.

Metaphors of music

Music as food, or politics as music, abound throughout literature, but a spontaneous look through the sports pages of The Guardian and the culture pages of The New York Times a few years ago revealed the following:

‘For the first 45 minutes, they could find no way through the Hammer’s defence; Dicks, often at walking pace, conducting the orchestra with the Croat, Pilic, as leading violinist. Only Carbone looked to have the wit to break the tempo. West Ham’s game was too fancy for its own good at times; Dicks would play the 1812 Overture, but a minuet through midfield seems to be Harry Redknapp’s preferred melody and, on this evidence, they don’t play it well enough.’

‘The program for Saturday night’s Alice Tully Hall concert described the ‘most distinguishing features’ of The Double Tenth Junior Hight School in Taichung, Taiwan, as ‘the experimental music class and female volleyball team’. The place must therefore be positively jumping with experimental music, and has to be a major force on the Taiwan volleyball circuit, since its orchestra - which were the point of this concert - was most engaging.

The Ball Project is supported in a two year fellowship (2006/7) by The Australia Council, and with generous help from STEIM, Amsterdam.

A/V PLAY! explores sights and sounds with handheld electronic audio-visual objects and digital cinematic installations centering on works that require participation for their activation. A/V PLAY! investigates the frontier of play through process, concept and use. A/V PLAY! delves into the artist’s practice … from hacked and custom electronics, circuit bending, audio-visual noise and rhythms, and VJing to mobile performance using iPod Shuffles, as well as other interactive cinematic work.

Shufflesition: Interactive IPod Shuffle performance (to be played by gallery visitors): A Shufflesition is a mobile system for movement and dance. We use the random playback feature on Apple iPod Shuffles to direct the movement of Shufflers (participants). A Shufflesition can take the form of a game, a dance, a musical performance, or a social experiment. We’re very interested in having a variety of people from different backgrounds write their own Shufflesitions, adding to the possibilities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Dddp3At5Ds

N_DREW (aka Andrew Bucksbarg) is a media artist, experimental interaction designer, audio-visual performer and professor in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University. N_DREW ’s work and interests reverberate in the space of new technology/media practices and theory. As an experimental interaction artist, N_DREW concerns himself with technologies and social systems that support tactics of ambiguous, autonomous social creativity and exchange. N_DREW received an M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in New Media and Integrated Media in 1999. n_drew[at]organicode.net

[…] The layering of the “sound traces” collected at the various locations around the globe, which derive from both geological and human history, is intended to produce a global vibration. (Jerry Zachary) Adamski would like to make this vibration audible … which will be held under the motto The Sound of Globalization … Adamski’s protracted involvement with the medium “stone” has led to his being humorously dubbed the “Andrew Lloyd Webber of Stones,” … more. [via nettime]

Social tech is performative

“…Malleable Mobile Music system is my idea of truly social (i.e. performative) mobile tech.

“‘Historically, music was never meant to exist in isolation,’ Tanaka says. ‘There was always a physical, acoustical, and even social context. These kinds of technologies can add some of those elements back in to the listening experience’…As one participant naturally sways to the groove, the PDA’s motion sensor detects his motion and shifts the tempo of the song. With the song’s intensity building, another listener subconsciously grips her PDA tighter, introducing echo effects into the mix. The closer that listening partners move to each other, the more prominent their part in the song becomes. Meanwhile, the software applies various ‘error correction’ techniques to prevent an onslaught of arrhythmic noise, unless of course that’s the goal. As they listen to it, the mobile music orchestra transforms the tune into a dubby, spacey version of the familiar Bjork song…Someday, malleable music may even become an art form in its own right, leading to a duet between the artist and the audience.”

Check out the Ubicomp 2004 paper for more detail. Originally posted by Anne Galloway on purse lips square jaw.

The three location-specific performances Dialtones: A Telesymphony, Flip Flop, and Texterritory –you had to be there to experience them–introduced in the last posts were produced between 2001 and 2003 They made use of networked technologies–mobile phones, video/audio relayed by wireless broadband–to involve their audiences in the creation of the performances. Each has done this successfully in its own way, while maintaining control, in the case of Dialtones, a tight control, over the performance itself.