Gregory Taylor

, I recommended a few recent recordings that demonstrated Max/MSP in a variety of musical contexts. I’m always glad to foist recordings on my friends (doing a weekly radio program on contemporary music is really nothing more than an efficient means for this kind of geek-out in broadcast form), and interested in their responses, too. In the case of that particular article, my email pals were particularly interested in Mark Fell’s 

 - a recording that took the interest in generative algorithms that we normally associate with his work and then assigned the output to human performers. 

I was surprised at the extent to which that particular work caught my interlocutors’ attention. Was it the novelty of the use of Max as something that generates material for acoustic performers? Is it the sound of "real" percussion that makes it interesting? Does that mapping of generative structure to physical performance somehow change the way that we hear the work? For my purposes, I'm going to assume that there's something going on in terms of the intersection between algorithms and acoustic musical practice. If you’d like an opportunity to think about that intersection between algorithms and acoustic musical practice as a Max/MSP person in more detail (and to hear some examples of those ideas realized), I can point you in no better direction than a trio of articles by Joseph Branciforte that touch upon 

. It's my go-to resource when dealing with questions from excited beginners, and there’s plenty there to stimulate the imagination of the intermediate user as well. It's a motherlode.

It’s not surprising why algorithms and acoustic performances often produce interesting results - as you patch and develop algorithms, you get to leverage the virtuosity of your collaborators’ skills on their acoustic instrument of choice, as well as their responses in improvisational situations. When that’s done well, the results can be breathtaking (I’d direct you to George Lewis’ longstanding body of work with the 

 program, which has made its way from an Apple II to its current laptop MSP instantiation and continues to make astounding music. It remains the most venerable bit of software in this tradition, and it still packs a fearsome wallop).

A composition by Professor George Lewis for Yamaha Disklavier piano. Performed by Professor Paul Grabowsky, Courtney Bryan, and computer-driven virtual improvisor 
 
Machine Music is a daring project, showcasing the fusion of different musical dimensions, such as cutting-edge computer technologies, improvisatory instrumental practice and experimental sound installations. Several years in the making, the project includes world premieres from nine artists over five days, concluding with a real-time interactive concert between the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University in Melbourne, and Qubit, a new contemporary music and performance art initiative founded in New York City founded by Alec Hall and Bryan Jacobs. 
 
The composition, Spooky Interaction, by Professor George Lewis (New York), is a telematic performance by four pianists, all using Yamaha Disklaviers. Two of the pianists are human and two are computer programs. The human pianists are basically engaged in live, completely improvised dialogue with two computer-driven, interactive “virtual improvisor” programs created by George Lewis and implemented in Max/MSP by Damon Holzborn. These programs will be performed on Yamaha Disklaviers in New York and Melbourne using the latest technology in music teleconferencing (Polycom). 
 
The goals of this project include allowing the computers to receive data from each other and from the human pianists, while allowing the human pianists to see and hear each other.

Machine Music: Spooky Interaction

I guess you could say that we’re really talking about questions of interface - is there a person generating the musical output being modified and remapped or a process? Where in the input-to-output chain does the processing occur? Since the data we’re modifying can really be analyzed and mapped to nearly anything, what does the evolutionary tree for this practice look like? I thought I'd follow up on that last post by pointing you to some interesting works and sources of inspiration.

For starters, the most humble and common form from which we begin is probably something you do 

 every time you connect a MIDI keyboard to a softsynth and start playing away. That efficiency sometimes tends to obscure something more subtle - that use of your keyboard as a MIDI input device isn’t just a way to bang notes into your DAW - it’s a way to leverage your sense of timing and touch and facility with the input device.

Prior to the arrival of live real-time audio processing, MIDI was the only way to do this, of course. From the moment of its arrival, MIDI promised more than mere amanuensis - it was ready, too, to provide ways of producing music that stood in the tradition of 

the visionary player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow

 and continues to this day in his wonderfully feral descendants - 

While that last link will take you to all kinds of MIDI-cable choking fun, you might find this piece on 

, one of the contributing composers) an interesting take on a variant of the genre.

 takes Conlon Nancarrow's approach and multiplies it, using three Disklaviers, each of which is tuned to a different set of scales that share pitches to create the equivalent of a player piano with 243 keys.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own this composition. This video was made from an original mp3 file available free of charge for download on the composer's website: http://www.kylegann.com/Hyperchromatica.html

This is Part 4 of Kyle Gann's "Hyperchromatica" - Pavane for a Dead Planet.

4. Pavane for a Dead Planet - Hyperchromatica - Kyle Gann

There are other approaches whose traditions take a different path - once you’ve got the data, it can be mapped to make something new, and that’s where things take myriad forms and - to me - start to become more interesting. The results run the gamut; (Lyle Mays’ 

 is a great example of this simple practice in a musical context that may be less familiar to some Max/MSP users).

Recorded august 1998  at Right Track, NYC, Lyle Mays (expanded piano, synthesizer), This Moment (04:00), Procession (03:56), Origami (01:08), Lightning Field (03:42)

Lyle Mays - Solo: Improvisations for expanded Piano (1998)

From that point, it’s a short step to building something between that MIDI input and the output device to create material which begins to create dialogs between the live performer and the software. And when it comes to ways of converting MIDI information into physical instrumental practice, it's no surprise that the 

 shows up with some regularity. While MIDI pianos and the 

 (back in the day) a great job of capturing input, the Disklavier rules the roost in its ability to make

. You'll find it in wide use in many of the pieces I'll be mentioning here, for good reason.

As someone who enjoys broadcasting work like this, I find it interesting that it tends to be the case that - as we move into this territory - the likelihood of finding full recordings of work tends to diminish in comparison to Youtube fragments of online sections that are intended to communicate something of the live experience. My first encounter with this was local and live toward the end of the last century - it’s probably that experience probably that set me to considering a body of work like this: Composer Joe Koykkar and pianist Todd Wellbourne collaborated on a performance piece that combined a Disklavier and a sampler to facilitate a kind of live dialogue between the piano under human and software control in a piece called 

Starting around the turn of the century, your standard computer music conference (the ICMC or Seamus, for example) seemed to always contain a new piece that situated activity between a live player and a piano. The approaches have been as varied as the persons themselves, but it's often the case that the primary experience of the piece we have is what we 

. While the following examples are certainly not exhaustive by any means, they ought to suggest some futures for you based on someone else's pasts. I'm sure that some of you reading this will have recommendations of your own.

As a Max/MSP person, one's second contemplation (the first being the piece itself) is almost always "How's that done?" Some quality time googling for things like this will bring up an interesting set of responses. If you want to see a patch whose innards you can probably intuit but whose construction will suggest how dialog-based work might be constructed, Bob Gluck's 

 software modules are an interesting place to start - you can marvel at the old school Max patches, and stay for the myriad MP3 file examples.

Sometimes a little encounter with the mysterious is the proper catalyst - in that case, Edwin Kenzo Huet's 

 is a good place to start - you can compare a rehearsal video of the piece with an example of one of the pieces from which the piece is constructed. (What does a Markov model sound like? One of the ways is 

These two movements of “Prism” for pianist, Yamaha Mark IV Disklavier MIDI player piano, and custom reactive software written in Max/MSP were the result of my experiments in combining this versatile instrument's abilities to track key/pedal presses and to play itself. The pianist's part consists of simple repetitive patterns that are augmented and built upon by a set of adjustable algorithmic processes, bringing out new harmonies, rhythms, and colors, hence the title of the piece. The first movement mostly consists of one repeated progression which is augmented and transformed more and more throughout the work, widening the gap between what is seen and heard. This movement was heavily inspired by “Powers of 10”, a video by Charles and Ray Eames in which the viewer’s perspective is magnified or enlarged by ten every ten seconds. Within nine breathtaking minutes the viewer is transported from a picnic scene to the outer reaches of the universe and back, only to zoom in to the subatomic particles in a picnicker’s hand, encompassing the micro and macro boundaries of our existence as we know it without so much as shifting the camera's direction.

Performed by Yesse Kim at the Peabody Institute's Prix D'Ete Thursday Noon recital in Miriam Friedberg Hall Baltimore MD 4/26/14. Received 2nd place in the 2014 Peabody Prix D'Ete chamber music composition competition. Featuring Jackson the baby and his mother.

Prism for Disklavier, pianist, and Max/MSP - Prix D'Ete Thursday Noon Recital Series

is an interesting hybrid approach - the Disklavier transduces a graphic score while the pianist plays from one. In some ways, I think that dealing with the graphic score material in terms of imagining what the software's doing is a more interesting exercise than merely hearing the piece by clicking on the title link . 

 synced to the score as some food for thought:

Chunk (2011) is the score for a composition for Disklavier and piano. The live recording syched with the score is from the premiere, performed by Mark Gasser, to whom the work is dedicated. 
Jarryd Bird did the MaxMSP programming. 
The work is also available as a stand alone installation for Disklavier solo.

Chunk (score synched with live performance)

Imagining the mechanism of a transducing mechanism such as a Disklavier (or a piano under some other sort of external control) brings an entirely different set of ideas into the mix - Hans Tammen's 

 isolates and foregrounds the physical system of the Disklavier to great effect, while the clickbait friendly "talking piano" combines careful signal processing and narrow filters to drive a piano mechanism:

A "speaking piano" reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009. Unfortunately it's all in German, but what the piano says is all English, and it's really neat to watch.

UPDATE: Astera on hackaday wrote a rough translation:

Pretty amazing, how all of a sudden the words of the Declaration become understandable to a European Environmental Criminal Court. Wien Modern was one out of ten cultural institutions asked for an artistic contribution to the event in Palazzo Ducale in Venice.
The ambitious goal was to make this message audible with musical means, without falling back to a simple setting.

Berno Polzer: I think, its partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously arent normal Music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.

Yet another bridge: Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.

The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrom of the childs voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.

Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something  the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.

Speaking Piano - Now with (somewhat decent) captions!

Danny DeGraan has also taken a run at this same approach, with the added benefit that you've got a Max/MSP patch to check out!

For my new composition project I made a max-msp patch which analyses the voice and translates the spectral information of the voice into midi data. This midi data is send to the Yamaha Disklavier. 
 
The idea is to compose a composition for a female singer and Disklavier where the singer will control the Disklaivier via her voice. 
 
This video is just a demonstration of the patch I recently made and is a work in progress. 
 
This project is commissioned by foundation Conlon and will be premiered at the Gaudeamus Music Week 2011. 
 
For more information visit my website: www.dannydegraan.nl

Talking Disklavier

Whew! I feel like I've just tried to describe the constituent parts of a playground. There's a lot more here to investigate (I'm sure you'll have some recommendations of your own - add 'em in the comments), but I hope this gives you some stuff to see, hear and think about. Enjoy your contemplations of the summer!

In a recent newsletter piece, I recommended a few recent recordings that demonstrated Max/MSP in a variety of musical contexts. I’m always glad to foist recordings on my friends (doing a weekly radio program on contemporary music is really nothing more than an efficient means for this kind of geek-out in broadcast form), and interested in their responses, too. In the case of that particular article, my email pals were particularly interested in Mark Fell’s Intra - a recording that took the interest in generative algorithms that we normally associate with his work and then assigned the output to human performers. 

I was surprised at the extent to which that particular work caught my interlocutors’ attention. Was it the novelty of the use of Max as something that generates material for acoustic performers? Is it the sound of "real" percussion that makes it interesting? Does that mapping of generative structure to physical performance somehow change the way that we hear the work? For my purposes, I'm going to assume that there's something going on in terms of the intersection between algorithms and acoustic musical practice. If you’d like an opportunity to think about that intersection between algorithms and acoustic musical practice as a Max/MSP person in more detail (and to hear some examples of those ideas realized), I can point you in no better direction than a trio of articles by Joseph Branciforte that touch upon algorithms and acoustic music, realtime networked notation, and approaches to harmony and orchestration. It's my go-to resource when dealing with questions from excited beginners, and there’s plenty there to stimulate the imagination of the intermediate user as well. It's a motherlode.

It’s not surprising why algorithms and acoustic performances often produce interesting results - as you patch and develop algorithms, you get to leverage the virtuosity of your collaborators’ skills on their acoustic instrument of choice, as well as their responses in improvisational situations. When that’s done well, the results can be breathtaking (I’d direct you to George Lewis’ longstanding body of work with the Voyager program, which has made its way from an Apple II to its current laptop MSP instantiation and continues to make astounding music. It remains the most venerable bit of software in this tradition, and it still packs a fearsome wallop).

For starters, the most humble and common form from which we begin is probably something you do yourself every time you connect a MIDI keyboard to a softsynth and start playing away. That efficiency sometimes tends to obscure something more subtle - that use of your keyboard as a MIDI input device isn’t just a way to bang notes into your DAW - it’s a way to leverage your sense of timing and touch and facility with the input device.

Prior to the arrival of live real-time audio processing, MIDI was the only way to do this, of course. From the moment of its arrival, MIDI promised more than mere amanuensis - it was ready, too, to provide ways of producing music that stood in the tradition of the visionary player piano music of Conlon Nancarrow and continues to this day in his wonderfully feral descendants - the tribes of Black MIDI. 

While that last link will take you to all kinds of MIDI-cable choking fun, you might find this piece on Ranjit Bhatnagar's work A Short Ride on a Fast Chihuahua (along with a set of notes by Ben Hougue, one of the contributing composers) an interesting take on a variant of the genre.

More recently, Kyle Gann's astounding Hyperchromatica takes Conlon Nancarrow's approach and multiplies it, using three Disklaviers, each of which is tuned to a different set of scales that share pitches to create the equivalent of a player piano with 243 keys.

There are other approaches whose traditions take a different path - once you’ve got the data, it can be mapped to make something new, and that’s where things take myriad forms and - to me - start to become more interesting. The results run the gamut;  (Lyle Mays’ piano-as-MIDI-control-source outing Solo is a great example of this simple practice in a musical context that may be less familiar to some Max/MSP users).

From that point, it’s a short step to building something between that MIDI input and the output device to create material which begins to create dialogs between the live performer and the software. And when it comes to ways of converting MIDI information into physical instrumental practice, it's no surprise that the Disklavier shows up with some regularity. While MIDI pianos and the Moog PianoBar (back in the day) a great job of capturing input, the Disklavier rules the roost in its ability to make noise. You'll find it in wide use in many of the pieces I'll be mentioning here, for good reason.

As someone who enjoys broadcasting work like this, I find it interesting that it tends to be the case that - as we move into this territory - the likelihood of finding full recordings of work tends to diminish in comparison to Youtube fragments of online sections that are intended to communicate something of the live experience. My first encounter with this was local and live toward the end of the last century - it’s probably that experience probably that set me to considering a body of work like this: Composer Joe Koykkar and pianist Todd Wellbourne collaborated on a performance piece that combined a Disklavier and a sampler to facilitate a kind of live dialogue between the piano under human and software control in a piece called Interfacing (here are the listening links to movement I, movement II, and movement III).

Starting around the turn of the century, your standard computer music conference (the ICMC or Seamus, for example) seemed to always contain a new piece that situated activity between a live player and a piano. The approaches have been as varied as the persons themselves, but it's often the case that the primary experience of the piece we have is what we hear. While the following examples are certainly not exhaustive by any means, they ought to suggest some futures for you based on someone else's pasts. I'm sure that some of you reading this will have recommendations of your own.

As a Max/MSP person, one's second contemplation (the first being the piece itself) is almost always "How's that done?" Some quality time googling for things like this will bring up an interesting set of responses. If you want to see a patch whose innards you can probably intuit but whose construction will suggest how dialog-based work might be constructed, Bob Gluck's Many Hands software modules are an interesting place to start - you can marvel at the old school Max patches, and stay for the myriad MP3 file examples.

Sometimes a little encounter with the mysterious is the proper catalyst - in that case, Edwin Kenzo Huet's Prism is a good place to start - you can compare a rehearsal video of the piece with an example of one of the pieces from which the piece is constructed. (What does a Markov model sound like? One of the ways is like this.)

Cat Hope's Chunk is an interesting hybrid approach - the Disklavier transduces a graphic score while the pianist plays from one. In some ways, I think that dealing with the graphic score material in terms of imagining what the software's doing is a more interesting exercise than merely hearing the piece by clicking on the title link . 

Here's a performance of Chunk synced to the score as some food for thought:

Imagining the mechanism of a transducing mechanism such as a Disklavier (or a piano under some other sort of external control) brings an entirely different set of ideas into the mix - Hans Tammen's Music for Choking Disklavier isolates and foregrounds the physical system of the Disklavier to great effect, while the clickbait friendly "talking piano" combines careful signal processing and narrow filters to drive a piano mechanism:

Disklavier.jpg

My last post about recent Max-centric recordings got me thinking about a kind of Max-centric work that’s not available in recorded form nearly as often - works in which Max locates itself in between a player and an acoustic instrument in a live dialog. My personal favorite version of this playground involves the piano in its MIDI and Disklavier forms. Here’s a sampling of interesting works - I’m sure you have a few of your own to recommend, too.

between-the-gesture-and-the-thought-music-for-disklaviers-and-their-friends

Very interesting article. Canadian artist Jocelyn Robert's work is also noteworthy : http://jocelynrobert.com/?page_id=43

The links for Joe Branciforte's articles 2 & 3 are broken. They are 

great article! 
The links for Joe Branciforte's articles 2 & 3  are broken. They are here and here.

Between the Gesture and the Thought: Music for Disklaviers and Their Friends