A new year promises lots of uncharted territory, but when we cultivate an attitude of curiosity, patience, and creativity, these unknowns and challenges can become exciting rather than daunting. We’ve chosen “Exploring New Territories” as Project Jumpstart’s theme for the month of January, and the work of the Jacobs School of Music Center for Electronic and Computer Music (CECM) provides an inspiring example of these very qualities of curiosity, patience, and creativity, through their experiments with sound and boundary-pushing explorations of the intersections of music and technology—which is why we’ve chosen them for our first Entrepreneur of the Month feature of the year. Read on for some inspiring thoughts from CECM Director John Gibson and Associate Director Chi Wang, as well as a few of the students featured on their upcoming concert on IUMusicLive! this Thursday, January 21, at 8pm!
John Gibson composes electronic music, which he often combines with instrumental soloists or ensembles. His music embraces influences ranging from contemporary classical to jazz, funk, and electronica. Gibson’s portrait CD, Traces, is available on the Innova label, along with other recordings on the Centaur, Everglade, Innova, and SEAMUS labels. Significant awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Paul Jacobs Memorial Fund Commission from the Tanglewood Music Center, and a residency in the south of France from the Camargo Foundation. He was a Master Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in May 2017. Gibson earned a Ph.D. in music from Princeton University and is now associate professor of music (composition: electronic and computer music) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where he is director of the Center for Electronic and Computer Music.
Chi Wang is a composer and performer of electroacoustic music. Her research and compositional interests include sound design, data-driven instrument creation, musical composition, and performance. Chi’s compositions have been performed internationally including presentations at the International Computer Music Conference, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States, Musicacoustica–Beijing, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, New Interfaces for Musical Expression International Conference, Kyma International Sound Symposium, International Confederation of Electro-Acoustic Music, Electronic Music Midwest Festival, Third Practice Festival, and Electroacoustic Barn Dance. Chi’s composition was selected for inclusion on the compact disc, Music from SEAMUS, Volume 28. She is the recipient for the Best Composition from the Americas at the 2018 International Computer Music Conference. Chi received her D.M.A. at the University of Oregon. She is currently an assistant professor of music (composition: electronic and computer music) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.
THE INTERVIEW
Project Jumpstart: How did each of you become interested in electronic and computer music, and what are some of the things that you love about this medium?
John Gibson: I didn’t compose any computer music until well after graduate school. My music had been exclusively for acoustic forces. I was drawn to computer music for its malleability of timbre and algorithmic sound generation capabilities. The extensive timbral resources helped me reconnect with my early experience playing electric guitar and led me to one of my current fascinations, which is exploring the continuum between clear pitch and noise. Some of us call any undesirable sound “noise,” while others limit that term to “white noise” and its cousins. But noisy sounds around us usually have some kind of pitch coloration. Once I noticed this, I began to appreciate the way that computers allow me to understand and work with these sound qualities.
Compared to my colleague, Chi Wang, I am more of a fixed-media (or pre-recorded music) composer. Even when I’m writing for acoustic instruments with live electronics, I like to include substantial portions of audio that I have shaped carefully in advance, with many aspects of micro-level timing prearranged. Chi Wang has a strong presence in the world of electronic music performance using gestural controllers, where much of the sound you hear is directly influenced in the moment by her performative actions. I love that our field encompasses such a wide range of approaches. In the CECM, we’re interested in exposing students to all of it.
Chi Wang: For me, electronic and computer music solves my dilemma of pursuing music composition and merges it with my knowledge and skills in electronic engineering and computer science. While we have spent thousands of years appreciating music made through the acoustic medium, electronic music has a history that only extends about one century. I find living and working in the midst of this new musical frontier, where so much is unexplored and is driven by the “data-saturated world,” exhilarating. Nothing pleases me more than to be able to explore and examine human experience through the complex aesthetic prisms made possible by recent advances in computer technologies.
PJ: What are some common misconceptions about electronic/computer music?
CW: The number of styles in which electronic and computer music can exist is enormous and probably underestimated. Sounds may imitate traditional musical instruments, be comprised of entirely new frequency spectra, be composed of sounds not traditionally thought of as musical, or may bear many diverse cultural imprints. Additionally, the use of computer technology as a tool to forge human expression brings with it associated knowledge that is broad and extensive, including such things as quantum physics, string theory, and data science, to name only a few examples. This last point can be especially important because of the dramatic profile the sciences have in the arena of this new musical expression.
JG: Because the term “electronic music” is now so strongly associated with the work of DJs and EDM producers — who are much more popular than us! — it can be hard for unusual electronic music to break through. Some electronic music that emerged from classical concert music traditions in the ‘50s and ‘60s is criticized for being all “bleeps and bloops” and inhuman, machine-made sound. If you’re watching a ‘60s sci-fi B-movie, this kind of music fits. But the same tradition also includes the pioneering concrète experiments of Halim El-Dabh in Cairo, the expressive subtlety of Messiaen’s ondes Martenot works, the wild vocal experiments of Cathy Berberian and Luciano Berio, the early minimalist tape music of Steve Reich, the meditative synthesizer drones of Éliane Radigue, and many others that sound very different from each other. All of these threads continue to evolve in the broad spectrum of electronic and computer music that is alive today.
PJ: How did you have to adapt your music-making due to the pandemic? And were there any new opportunities that you were able to explore because of these unique circumstances?
JG: I’ve mostly been keeping my head down, focusing on several ongoing projects that require me to sit in my studio and plug away at sound-shaping ideas, with nobody else around. For true pandemic-inspired innovation, I’ll yield the floor to Chi.
CW: I was directly involved in our center’s telemusical performances during the 2020 pandemic. A telemusical performance may occur in many different ways, but for us it meant that performers and audience did not inhabit the same physical spaces, and that rehearsals occurred in real time over the internet rather than in shared physical space. Our students, via a specially constructed remote system, accessed our studio software, hardware, and high-quality sound monitoring mechanism over the internet. During the fall 2020 semester, students configured data-driven instruments with their own digital controllers that included the Nintendo Wii Remote, Wacom Tablet, BeatStep Pro, the Korg nanoKONTROL2, and the GameCube. Using these controllers, the student musicians developed new performance techniques in addition to programming their own sounds. Our performance harnessed the power of the Symbolic Sound Kyma sound design hardware and software environment, housed in the CECM studio. This received performance data in real time from different places around the world. This allowed musicians to observe the interaction of data streams and to simultaneously hear the sound produced from the CECM studio. The ensemble was able to practice and rehearse the composition online, and the documented live interactive performance was a version with six performers in Auer Hall and one performer in Taiwan. This arrangement of technology allowed us to improvise, compose, and rehearse online in real time, which has proved to be a unique experience during this pandemic.
PJ: Staying creative is something that’s important for every musician, but seems especially crucial in the exploratory and experimentative field of electronic music. How do you maintain your creativity and inspiration when juggling busy work and personal schedules?
CW: One of the best ways I discovered is by learning from watching how our CECM director, John Gibson, and my former professor, Jeffrey Stolet, balance their teaching and research. Immediately after they develop a new composition programming language or discover a new compositional or performative technique, they share the newly discovered knowledge with the students, thus elevating newly created knowledge from a thing that is simply possessed to something that is shared. In understanding that knowledge serves society most when shared, I continue to be creatively motivated.
JG: In order to maintain a connection with creativity while teaching, I try to build sound exploration into the plans of my courses. That way, I’m always learning new ways to work with familiar and unfamiliar sounds. Then there are the tools we use to work with sound. Last semester, I found myself studying an unfamiliar computer music language along with my grad. students. They got better at it than me, but I learned so much from the process. This feeds directly into my own practice, so teaching and creative work become intertwined, as they should.
PJ: How has the field of electronic and computer music changed in the last couple of decades or so, and where do you hope to see it go in the future?
JG: The underlying methods of synthesizing and processing sound have not changed dramatically for many decades. Although there have been major breakthroughs, mainly centering around database-driven techniques for synthesizing sound, the most influential advances recently have been in the realm of connecting performative gestures to sound generation. That is why we are so excited that students are eager to work with “data-driven instruments,” in which various devices — phones, MIDI knobs and sliders, repurposed game controllers, and custom-built electronics — combine with specialized software to let composers and performers gain real-time control over sound generation. Chi Wang is a very accomplished practitioner of this kind of composition and performance, and you will see in our upcoming concert stream that many of our students are starting to do it as well, quite convincingly.
I would like for electronic music to maintain its wide variety of approaches, while becoming more open and appealing to people from many different backgrounds. Perhaps the greatest stigma associated with electronic and computer music is that it’s the preserve of geeky white men. While there is still some truth to that — I am exhibit A — the field is changing. I hope to encourage and accelerate this change here at IU and beyond. Making electronic music is fun and rewarding; I want everyone to try it!
CW: Because of the tremendous advancement of computing power over the last two decades, musical work that was only possible outside of real time, became possible within real time. The result of this massive acceleration in computing power is that actual, substantial, and dare I say, beautiful computer music can now be performed on stage, returning overt and observable human musical expression to the spotlight.
The CECM concert premiering this Thursday on IUMusicLive! features works by students Yi-De Chen, Ben Cordell, Kevin Kopsco, Oliver Kwapis, Anne Liao, Shuyu Lin, Joey Miller, and Yuseok Seol. Project Jumpstart reached out to a few of these students to hear more about the inspiration behind their pieces, as well as any important lessons they have learned from their work with the CECM.
YI-DE CHEN – The Changeable Weather, for Max, Kyma and nanoKONTROL2
On the inspiration and process for The Changeable Weather: The weather plays a crucial part in my daily life. It is easy to enjoy the weather with a different sense of feeling. There is a clear difference in sound between the sunny, cloudy, and rainy weather, so I started gathering online samples as sound resources. Technically, I thought it would be fun to transform in real time the pre-recorded samples and blend them with synthesized sounds. Thus, I created this piece.
On important lessons: I was using Kyma synthesis hardware in the CECM studio from my home in Taiwan, over the Internet. Remotely controlling the Korg nanoKONTROL2 with the Kyma software on campus is a ground-breaking capability. Improvising while ignoring the small network delay can be challenging, but with the instruction of Prof. Wang, I gradually got used to the tools and process. Compositionally, I have to be familiar with my instrument ─ the nanoKontrol2 first, and then assign each fader to control the specific parameters in each sound object in Kyma. By figuring out the sound materials that I can utilize, the shape of the piece forms. Compared to composition for acoustic instruments, electro-acoustic composition brings me to a different medium and refreshing ways to develop music. Finally, I sincerely thank all my teachers, Professors Hass, Gibson, and Wang from CECM; they lead me to a new sonic world.
OLIVER KWAPIS – CLBVILYSM, for Max and nanoKONTROL2
On the inspiration and process for CLBVILYSM: For the past ten years, I’ve struggled with Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Clock, Lightning Bolt, Volume, I Love You So Much is inspired by one of my compulsions, a ritual which involves saying the titular words over and over again. My hope is that the piece accurately represents the emotional rollercoaster I ride in the grip of one of these compulsions.
I’ve been eager to musically explore OCD for a number of years, making a first attempt as an undergrad with the art song Here and There. In the piece, I displaced my compulsions onto a fictional character (I never intended to perform the role myself). With Clock, Lightning Bolt, Volume, I Love You So Much, I don’t want to disguise myself. I want to tell my story, and I want to perform it. I began the writing process by recording myself reciting the titular phrase. Then, I processed the recording in different ways, transforming the words into abstract sounds and sonic environments reflecting what I feel during one of these compulsions. I ended up using a lot of glitchy sounds. During an obsessive experience, I often feel like I’m short-circuiting or glitching-out. My goal was to create a personal piece that is precise and unguarded. It was never meant to sum up my whole experience with OCD, but rather to open a window to a specific aspect of my life, and I felt a responsibility to be as candid as possible. Needless to say, writing and performing the piece was both daunting and exhilarating.
On important lessons: Working at CECM has encouraged me to try on a number of different music-making hats. When creating electronic pieces, I have to be more than just a composer. I am an instrument builder, recording engineer, coder, performer and video editor. Trying my hand at these different skills has not only influenced my composing, it has fundamentally changed who I aspire to be as an artist. I want my own creative practice to go beyond writing notes on the page. It’s been an important lesson: don’t box yourself in. Don’t stick to one path or one role. Exploring different creative practices will no doubt inform your own in new and surprising ways.
Another lesson I’ve learned working at CECM is to embrace the adventure of being a beginner. I’ve been writing acoustic music since middle school, but very little electronic music before coming to CECM. Because so many electronic tools and techniques are new to me, the writing process has been exploratory and playful, full of trial-and-error (lots of errors) and discovery. Happily, I arrived with no expectations. I’m still sussing out my electronic “style” and don’t feel pressure to aim towards a particular result. I hope my music reflects this new sense of freedom and will be more vital because of it.
ANNE LIAO – Water, bowls and rocks, for Max, Kyma and Wacom tablet
On the inspiration and process for Water, bowls and rocks: Inspired by Carla Scaletti’s Slipstick, I decided to use the Wacom drawing tablet as a continuous controller to present a real time manipulation of sounds. The creative process began with recording a variety of sound sources from nature and everyday life. Then I processed and sampled these recordings, such as rocks hitting and water dripping, in the software Kyma to explore the potential of the sounds and to sew together a blanket of metamorphosis.
On important lessons: Be patient, and always have a backup copy saved! Throughout the creating process of electronic music in general, I have encountered many problems. From sound not coming out of the speakers, to the software not responding to my codes. Even better, at times the software just kept crashing. I learned to eventually make peace with these frustrating situations and keep trying different solutions to resolve the problems. It is very cool when technology is cooperative, but sometimes it’s not and keeping calm and staying patient in those moments is extremely important. In addition, it is always a good idea to have a backup copy of all important files, just in case something undesirable happens, and I can’t thank Professor Wang enough for always stressing this in class.
SHUYU LIN – Feather Mallet, for Max, Kyma and Wii Remote
On the inspiration and process for Feather Mallet: Everything begins with a wine glass sent from my friend: I was fascinated by the pure sound that the glass made, which becomes the original sound motive. When I recorded the glass sound, I realized that I hit the glass with different kinds of mallets a lot. Then, a question popped into my mind: what would be the relationship between the hitting movement and the sound produced, if the hitting movement could trigger a pre-recorded sound, although I didn’t physically strike the glass with an object?
I haven’t had an answer yet, but I got the idea for this piece: audiences will hear the sounds of the wine glass, although the performer doesn’t actually strike the glass. Instead, a “feather mallet” — a feather mounted on a Wii Remote game controller — transmits the performer’s gestures to the computer. The computer transforms, develops, and distorts the glass sounds, leading audiences into a colorful world.
On important lessons: There are a number of wonderful lessons I have taken, and they are all important to me. It is hard to pick some lessons which are more important than others, but all the lessons are telling me: to imagine the music, do not be limited by the technology, but do not get lost in the forest of technique as well.
Thank you so much to everyone from the CECM who shared their thoughts with us for this feature, and for the inspirational work that they are doing! All of the concert images used here are from the prerecorded CECM concert premiering on Thursday, January 21 at 8pm on IUMusicLive! Please tune in to hear the innovative explorations of all the composers involved.
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