Larry Polansky

Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion

Music moves us. Its kinetic power is the foundation of human behaviors as diverse as dance, romance, lullabies, and the military march. Despite its significance, the music-movement relationship is poorly understood. We present an empirical method for testing whether music and movement share a common structure that affords equivalent and universal emotional expressions. Our method uses a computer program that can generate matching examples of music and movement from a single set of features: rate, jitter (regularity of rate), direction, step size, and dissonance/visual spikiness. We applied our method in two experiments, one in the United States and another in an isolated tribal village in Cambodia. These experiments revealed three things: (i) each emotion was represented by a unique combination of features, (ii) each combination expressed the same emotion in both music and movement, and (iii) this common structure between music and movement was evident within and across cultures.

The Need of Perception for the Perception of Needs

The author uses physiological, psychological and clinical examples to place the aesthetic problem of architecture within an ethical context. Drawing on a clinical report and an experiment in perception, he argues that perception consists largely of invention on the part of the perceiver. He disputes the possibility of an objective reality, linking the popular belief in objectivity to a desire to avoid responsibility. He outlines the opposition between objectivity and ethics and, likewise, between ‘monologic’ and ‘dialogic’. His discussion of the distinction between denotation and connotation leads to conclusions concerning the role of ethics in architecture.

The music of the voyager interstellar record

Abstract An experiment in applied communication at the margins, approximately 90 minutes of music was selected from cultures around the world by Carl Sagan and his associates and placed aboard the two Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Both spacecraft have now reached the outer edges of our solar system and are heading toward deep space. This gift of music and other information about us has only the slimmest chance of ever being retrieved by extraterrestrialsy—the closest encounter with a star system that could contain life will occur 40,000 years from now. The gesture is principally examined in this paper for what it says about us as homo musicus, beings who sing as well as speak. The Voyager music selection team believed that the inclusion of musical sound texts could capture something quintessential about human selfhood that could not be communicated by other means. Several questions are raised and the Voyager Record critiqued from the issues they present: How does one portray the diversity of human music‐mak...

Spectral Mutation in Soundhack

Soundhack is a widely used program available for the Apple Macintosh computer that performs a variety of sound file manipulations. The functions of the program, authored by one of us (Tom Erbe), include sound-file type conversion, spectral dynamic processing, a varispeed/sample rate converter, sound file convolution, ring modulation, a phase vocoder, a binaural filter, and an amplitude analysisand-gain-change module. In Soundhack versions 0.8 and above, the authors have implemented a system of spectral mutation functions that allow for a number of different trans-

Interview with David Rosenboom

David Rosenboom, currently Coordinator of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, has long been an innovator in American experimental music. He has done significant work in composition, performance (as a pianist, violist, violinist, tablist, and electronic instrumentalist), theory, and instrument design. Among other things, Rosenboom pioneered the use of computers in live performance and the integration of biofeedback techniques in compositional environments. I took this opportunity to interview him not about his past, but about current and future trends in his work. I have supplied a brief discography at the end for those interested in listening to Rosenbooms work.

A few more words about James Tenney: dissonant counterpoint and statistical feedback

This paper discusses a compositional algorithm, important in many of the works of James Tenney, which models a melodic principle known as dissonant counterpoint. The technique synthesizes two apparently disparate musical ideas – dissonant counterpoint and statistical feedback – and has a broad range of applications to music which employs non-deterministic (i.e. randomized) methods. First, we describe the historical context of Tenneys interest in dissonant counterpoint, noting its connection to composer/theorist Charles Ames’ ideas of statistical feedback in computer-aided composition. Next, we describe the algorithm in both intuitive and mathematical terms, and analyse its behaviour and limiting cases via numerical simulations and rigorous proof. Finally, we describe specific examples and generalizations used in Tenneys music, and provide simple computer code for further experimentation.

A Review of Arts/Sciences: Alloys by Iannis Xenakis

The author reviews a transcription of Xenakis’s ‘thesis defense’ for the ‘Doctorat d’Etat’ at the Sorbonne in 1976 and finds it a welcome and essential addition to the literature documenting the composer’s ideas. Each dialogue transcribed introduces a different thinker and colleague of Xenakis, and each focuses on a different realm of Xenakis’s compositional and aesthetic philosophy. The informality and interdisciplinary nature of the discussions contributes new and valuable insights into Xenakis’s work. Xenakis’s dialogue with Messiaen is of particular interest, because of Xenakis’s extraordinary rapport with his former teacher, and because of the unusual candor with which these two composers spoke.

The Composition of Auditory Space: Recent Developments in Headphone Music

Research into the psychoacoustics of spatial hearing and into computer-based technologies has brought about an exciting potential for the development of ‘spatial music’: a compositional approach to the musical organization of sound that considers the position of sound sources and the character of the environmental context to be as musically important as melody, harmony or orchestration. Space as a musical parameter is overviewed, the potential areas and concurrent limitations of spatial music composition are described, and the likely causes of perceptual mismatch between the composer and the listener are reviewed. Headphone music as a solution to the mismatch problem is proposed, and a description of the spatial signal-processing technique developed by the author is given. The compositional considerations used in two computer music headphone compositions, Revelations by the author and Begault Meadow by Gordon Mumma, conclude the discussion.

17 Gloomy Sentences (and commentary) at the turn of the millennium (in the form of an editorial)

4) Astounding:with less than 10 years left in this millennium, ideas about ‘music’, ‘art’, ‘composers’ and ‘technology’ show little evolution (and prospects are dim). 5) Things not to do: justify the backward, proclaim the status quo, rationalize the oppression of the new and different, impede the flow of ideas, discourage the experimental. 6) Ideas to discard: ‘tradition and culture’, ‘like and dislike’, ‘emotion and intellect’ (not to mention ‘man and woman’, ‘religion and belief and ‘race’). 7) Question: How can we be so backward?

The Mills College Center for Contemporary Music's Seminar in Formal Methods Series: A Documentary Survey

This article documents the history of the Seminar in Formal Methods Series at Mills College, Oakland, California. Inaugurated in 1981, the series was conceived as a forum for the presentation and dissemination of recent developments in several disciplines, such as art and technology, experimental aesthetics and applied formal methods in music. The article includes brief descriptions of each seminar, biographical information about the speakers and a selected bibliography of relevant books, articles and recordings.