Info@
Engineering
andMusic

Version: 1.3
31. August 2001

Position Statement: Discusion Session "Human Supervision and Control in Music" 

 
Control of which Reality?

Besides this multiple reality, the ontology of music also includes the axis of communication from poiesis (the making) to the neutral work (score, audio recording), and the aesthesis (the perception and understanding). The control of performance is illusory if the stream of communication, the path of the message is not the primary concern.

Musical communication is also more than its media: it conveys a meaningful message, a content in the sense of semiotics. This content may be abstract structure or program-oriented, but it is the core of what the making of music is about. Music performance is expression of content, and as a such it needs rhetoric categories of shaping the abstract facts in the sensory space of audio-visual-gestural reality.  
 

And if the Music Controlled You?

There is the famous saying by Leibnitz that making music is like telling a story whose development you do not know. This is the point of being played by music; you just participate in a deep reality of a spiritual extent which you are not controlling. After all, the space of a common piano score (not to mention the space of the events which are enriched by spectral or gestural attributes) is four-dimensional (pitch, onset, loudness, duration), and we cannot pretend to control the configuration of thousands of points in such a space. This activity is akin to what French symbolists called "écriture automatique", this state of writing poesy in an ecstatic state of streaming creation. In music, this is the common situation, however! 
 

Lost in the Timbre Manifold

Of course, one may compose (with) sound colors, envelopes, whatever. But then, the composition is already defined in these parameters, and it is erroneous to pretend that the missing sound colors have just been forgotten by a composer. 

The manifold of timbres is undoubtedly a fascinating one. It is a huge and mathematically very complex manifold, with singularities, infinite-dimensional parts, and all what you like. Moving around in a controlled way (!) on such a variety is extremely complicated. Some years ago, when I asked Jean-Claude Risset whether they had found reasonable geodesics on the manifold of timbres (such as, for example, the shortes path from a violin to a tuba sound), he denied. I do not know of any concept for controlled and intuitive navigation on the manifold of timbres.

The point of sound control is that sound technology has been strongly developed in the last years, including the software control of physical sounding bodies in physical modeling. But the musical function of moving on a sound manifold is not just self-satisfaction of naked auditive experience. Sound must be loaded with structural contents, it must be a parameter space for something. Imaging a children's song like "Hänschen klein ging allein in den weiten Wald hinein" being played by a Wagner orchestra: this is utterly overdressed, it makes no sense to navigate on a rich sound manifold when the message is so trivial. On the other side, playing the Cavatina in Beethoven's string quartet op. 130 on simple flutes reduces the expressivity to a level where you cannot tell the very structure of its mysterious ("beklemmt") modulation from E-flat to B. So the control must also include the adequacy of instrumental expressivity to the intended and given message.  

This is a very difficult field: to investigate the balance between message and media. Contemporary music theory, above all in its computer-music-oriented variants, has not dealt with the problem of the function of the manifold of sounds to produce and control contents.