Renotations workspace (PILL)

[Zvibes]

Hi! This thread will be the workspace, log, repository, etc. for the “Renotations” PILL Project.

“This project entails the creation of a ‘kit’ which provides sets of instructions, suggestions, and tools for reassigning the various information in a musical score, one which should ideally be agreed upon if realized by a group.”

The full original proposal can be found here: PILL: Renotations (or, a musical alternative interpretations kit)

Several guiding research questions are entangled in the background of this proposal and its possible kit byproduct:

1. How can musical notation be understood as a protocol?

1-1. (or works of music, music writ large, or art writ large?)

1-2. What novel observations may arise from relating it to protocols studies as opposed to pre-existing studies in musicology, theory, artistic research, etc?

1-3. Does reframing artistic experimentation in terms of protocols have benefits for moving it beyond specialist environments?

2. If we understand works of art as protocols, what do they offer the development of protocols that interventions in technology or policy cannot?

2-1. What is the relationship between aesthetics and protocols?

Work on this project will involve reviewing literature, analyses of select musical works, ‘sketches’ for kit design, and general journaling.

I come to this project as a composer, improviser, curator, and scholar (more on what I do can be found on my website). I’m especially interested in this project for a) the chance to explore these ideas outside of the usual context of academic arts research; b) greater flexibility of process and result (and commitment to open-source sharing through this thread as a resource and idea dump).

Would love to hear reactions or suggestions in replies!

Working index of posts:

[Zvibes]

To start, and to keep things clearly related to the proposal at first: some reference material:
One brief example of an intervention on notation: “Immortal Bach”

Immortal Bach - Komm süsser Tod - Knut Nystedt

This piece by Knut Nystedt involves a set of instructions for extending a line from the J.S. Bach chorale Kom, Susser Tod – timing instructions are assigned to subgroups of singers that override the given note durations. The resulting harmonies are a ‘blurring’ of the chords, suspended in a manner that retains familiarity but also is closer to ambient music and modern choral repertoire alike.

What’s interesting about the piece is that it does this with relatively limited material:
-The notation and explanation take up a single page.
-The explanation is written, instead of realized in notation.
-Only the element of time/duration is intervened upon (dynamics are proscribed, but not altered because none are present in the original Bach material).

This piece could be seen as an exercise or ‘first step’ in understanding how pre-existing material can be reworked, in this case through the written ‘sub-protocol’ of Nystedt’s instructions intervening or overlapping with broader interpretive protocols (the regulative assumptions of Western classical music and notation practices). The ‘sub-process’ is fairly simple, since singers just have to count a fixed number of seconds per note, and a fair degree of constraint is still at play.

Just how more ‘difficult’ is it, though? And is it possible to compare the effect of the straightforward chorale with that of the extension (whether as a performer or audience member)?

There are many more examples, but this is a rarer case because of its concision and application to notation. A more complex “re-interpretive protocol” example would be Christopher Hobbs’ “Voicepiece” which makes a distinct performance system for interpreting a phonebook.

In considering the possibilities of a kit, the factors I’m considering include things like:

-What is the level of cognitive load any intervening protocol can bring to bear on its user? What forms of directive increase or decrease it?
-How many parameters are there, or how many can be addressed?
-What might the perceivable relationship to the source material be?
-What is the affect of the change, and how does it impact the feeling of ‘flourishing’?
(this last one is in reference to “A Phenomenology Of Protocols” which I want to write on more shortly)

[Zvibes]

NB: I was in a big car accident last week which has really impacted my schedule and capacity (physically alright though!) – combined with travel and teaching, my hope is to really ramp up posting and thinking and tinkering next month.

As another interim bit of sample material, this video is on my mind a lot when it comes to the broader nature of notation and protocol adoption:

Notation Must Die: The Battle For How We Read Music

Which goes into all kinds of histories and criticisms and criticisms of criticisms.
Among many interesting points:

-c. 51’10": “Pictograms are generally more immediately intuitive than symbols because symbols are abstract…But it’s precisely this abstraction that give musical symbols so much power.”

As other cases go on to point out, a certain amount of ambiguity, latitude, or symbolic abstraction (or even abstraction leaks?), is what facilitates acceptable variation of interpretation which we consider expression. Perversely, some of the examples in the video that go on to more precisely define musical information make them harder to actually use and adopt.

Less than a ‘sweet spot’ of ideal efficiency between leakiness and stability, what seems to be at play in musical-notational systems is a constant give-and-take, or thinkable space defined by the movement of overlapping protocols. Drives for clarity are undermined by drives for expression, or put into a highly productive friction.

Art systems, presumably much like most other systems, are set into motion by overlapping protocol friction, but perhaps unlike others, the priority of these get to rest much more on an aesthetic or affective level. That affect might be conventional musical ‘beauty’ or the appreciative reaction of such, or frustration, or interest (as an affect of difference).

So in the act of PILLing, and swapping up our abstraction systems, which might we (I) want to prioritize, or where on the spectrum do we balance them? And how do we want that to FEEL?

There’s a reel that went around that I can’t find, but it basically plays Happy Birthday but uses a new clef and tempo value for every note–the minimal-effect-maximum-effort humor of the gimmick.

I guess if there was a 2x2 of this, it’d something like a range of each of these:

But even the felt impact of each of these can be very different. I’ll leave it here with the open question of how we want a protocol to be affectively experienced, or maybe more precisely, how we want their change to be felt. Can there be ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ protocol frustration?

(or more broadly, are aesthetic procotols useful/interesting in that there is a greater tolerance or adaptability for ‘inefficiency’ in their processes?)

[JohnGrant]

I feel reluctant posting a comment in your workspace thread that I would have tagged as an “idle protocol musing”. I’d be happy to delete and raise elsewhere if you prefer. Anyway, I’ve been reflecting on our brief and interrupted chat on Zoom the other day. On a protocol flexibility spectrum, I see western musical notation nearer to the strong protocol end, whereas guitar tabs are towards the weak protocol end. If I understood you correctly, I think you said you disagree and you would consider Western musical notation to also be a weak protocol. Reading through your notes, I can start to see the connection. However, there’s an aspect that relates to the encoding and decoding process I’d like to explore.

Given a piece of music, I lack the knowledge to encode it using western musical notation. So from an encoding perspective, musical notation is a strong protocol. However, I would likely be more successful translating it into guitar tab format and improvise if I encounter something I’d not encoded before. I can appreciate your perspective, I think, in the decoding process. As a guitar player without formal musical training, guitar tabs provide a useful form of information compression that helps me quickly get started learning to play a piece of music. But even with limited knowledge, a musical score would also give me clues on many aspects of the music such as its complexity, tempo, etc. Although I can’t converse in this stronger protocol, I can, by applying knowledge gained through experience, pick up aspects and then layer my own interpretation on top of that, in the same way I would do with guitar tabs. So, from a decoding perspective I can appreciate both musical notation and guitar tabs can be viewed as weak protocols. A rough analogy is how different digital audio workstations render MIDI information, some include musical notation options, but there are also other (default) layouts.

An open question for me is if we imagine all musicians were somehow compelled to compose music using only western musical notation, would it lead to broader cultural expression?

It’s going to be interesting for me to see how your PILL project unfolds.

[Zvibes]

Thanks John! I think it’s great to have discussions happen in here as well (I wish there was a subthread option ala Slack), and good to continue what we hardly started.

Maybe there’s a split here re: protocol strength regarding what the strength actually is – encodability on the one hand, capacity for abstraction and guided use on the other. Both hinge on certain vectors of protocol literacy – the more ‘analog’ (direct correspondence) quality of MIDI and tablature make them highly decodable systems and viable for faster literacy acquisition. The ‘strength’ of Western notation, per the above video and my comments, is its capability for abstraction, and fundamental indeterminacy on some level/some aspects while being highly (sufficiently) syntactical for others.

Definitely would not encourage a regulative use of one kind of notation system. I hardly use it myself (at least in a ‘standard’ way, i.e. in the context of its historical ‘lore’ area which the 20th century blew wide open with its own kind of lore/adaptation).

But maybe it’s interesting to crack open the similarities across all of these–certain kinds of directionality (especially, say, horizontal time-linearity) that persists across the decoding practices. Another post/device I’m working on looks at some very basic reversals of such orderings (reading left-right music right to left, ala Victor Borge) – even though it’s very easy to reverse audio and MIDI in most DAWs, the overall linearity remains left-right (technologies working against this include software like Max/MSP or Ableton Live’s Session View).

So ideally, Western notation is just the testing ground for scope-limitation purposes. It’s this very encoding/decoding a good PILL can hopefully hack, with ‘aesthetic’ consequenes in this case…

[Zvibes]

Hoping to do some actual prototyping soon, especially as part of a residency this week, but for now, still running over ideas and getting some processing down…

Countermapping—Countercoupling

In my group in the first PILL meeting, ‘countermapping’ arose as the pertinent subject for John’s project in its cartographic sense (or cartography as the most readily apparent impact of the project’s maneuvers). Forgive me for any incorrect connections, John!
In its abstracted sense, mapping is used throughout musical contexts as a way to describe pre-existing structures or reveal new perspectives on them:

(I. Backgrounds)

Two prominent examples would be Mary Helen Richards’ “Thresholds To Music” in educational settings (“they unwittingly inverted the process of sound to symbol to feature a program of symbol to sound.” - Education Through Music : Mary Helen Richards), and Dmitri Tymocsko’s representations of triadic space (Mapping Music | Harvard Magazine).

I think of it most readily when working in Ableton Live, where ‘mapping’ in the software allows me to give any two parameters an instant/real-time connection: volume to amount of reverb, pitch of an incoming instrument to filter on another, really almost anything. Having reduced all parameters to numerical spectra, no correlation is out of the question within the interface in a use context (data type is another issue).

Exposure to mapping in one domain might help bring the concept to other realms (the ‘reverse skeuomorphism’ of ChenoeHart’s project?) — I’ve experimented with this in previous works, where repeated phrases are re-interpreted on the basis of notes’ physical appearances:

Video of the premiere of this piece back in 2022

By preserving the symbolic structures but constantly remapping them, the amount of potential musical information on a single page becomes exponential in nature (or like quantum vs binary data values in computing?) — the catch, however, is that they’re intensive with regards to the mental energy and time for re-interpretation.

This is a result of not only the particularity of each new note meaning, but the application of it to several parameters at once: attributes ranging from duration to timbre to pitch and more.

*While productive for the interpreters, this system risks rendering notational symbols disjoint to an audience—the degree to which an audience should understand music as the product of its notation is another topic entirely dependent on social and aesthetic regulations, or, well…protocols of art, quality, intention, and attention.

So to scale it back for better PILLability, what happens when we focus on redoing one parameter at time, or emphasizing 1-to-1 reconnections?

For instance, remapping pitch as duration:

It’s by no means the most effective system. Especially because the ranges here aren’t necessarily scalable beyond what’s given here (using the cyclical/modulo nature of pitch), though conceivably one could use additional accidentals for microtones (Accidental (music) - Wikipedia) to similarly increase the internal division of time values. And what to do about simultaneous notes/harmony?

What’s interesting about it, though, is that it leads to kinds of “rhythmic key signatures”, where pitch patterns in a tonality would have an associated rhythmic profile. Applying a scaling system in reverse, for duration to pitch, would seem to imply a severely delimited set of harmonic/melodic choices, though, given the predominance of certain metrical patterns in preexisting notated music:

And this only deals with the most precisely parametrized elements. Dynamics/volume indicators (piano, forte, etc.) are just that—dynamic, relative, and far less precise (depending on repertoire, which may see gradations of p/f amounts up to quintuple amounts). There’s no precise relationship to decibels. And the amount of discrete values don’t exactly line up to the range demarcated by notation for pitch and duration. So would this mean a remapping entails turning certain qualities into approximate areas? Strictly speaking, sure, why not? But within the social context of harmonic conventions which written notes preserve, regulate, and reproduce, irregular pitch and rhythmic areas may take on a degree of uncanniness, at least relative to the conventions enabled within the system (harmony is protocol lore?)

Examples of the above remapping forthcoming, but I’m also apprehensive about pursuing this method further. For all its precision, such remapping is legible, just about intuitive, but not necessarily effective, and its delimitations don’t seem particularly inspiring or liberating. It’s also not even touching a number of parameters, sonic and symbolic.

Remapping still feels like a highly graspable method of system intervention, and perhaps more viable for other systems and protocols. Here, the question may be: between the above dumb charts and Are We Hardly, is remapping a matter of scale, or another set of (re)connections entirely?

As dumb as this all may be, it’s felt necessary to approach it from this perspective to explore what makes a protocol intervention effective in terms of its desired affect on several levels, including but not limited to:

-Legibility of the user experience - graspability - not simplicity but more like approachability
-What are the roles of fun and frustration in this system or beyond?
-Can a protocol look or feel worse than it actually is to operate?
-Legibility of the source material
-Can this kit not override the identity of what it’s operating on, i.e. not grey-gooing/Ice-Nine-ing any music it comes into contact with?
-Generativity
-related to the above, and ala Unreasonable Sufficiency, producing novelty
-“””Beauty””””
-does the resulting music still have some sort of aesthetic appeal, or is it solely “interesting” for its maneuvers?

[Zvibes]

A quick co-working meeting followup, around the ‘punk in appearance vs punk in operations’ split:

One of the things that has been a bit of a sticking point in my conception of this project is how “punk” the result can, or should, or might, sound. This ties into the general goals of a stable ontological relationship between the original piece and the process, but has a further social/aesthetic dimension. If the idea of this as a PILL project is to draw in the unfamiliar & unsuspecting, then there’s possibly a dimension that the resulting music has to sound ‘good’ — which is a highly contextual set of values. There’s a difference between that and the possible kit as a means for experimentation, which means a greater leeway for things to ‘sound off’, or ‘go wrong’. Even if they do, laying the process bare might be better for the potential ideological goals of PILLing, even if the aesthetics flag a little bit in relation to the source material. I guess ideally, there shouldn’t be a contradiction, but priming for certain goals or groups definitely is making me think about what kinds of maneuvers or forms of latitude within the instructions should be brought in.

Finally getting thinking more about the actual materials too, more on that below:

[Zvibes]

Kit Materials (how much more can we add?)

As I keep going down assorted conceptual and functional rabbit holes (and a variety of life circumstances that have made this period of the summer hard for thinking in-depth, hope to continue this beyond June!), it’s been too easy to forget the kit part of the proposal, and remember that materials afford their own paths.

When I think of a ‘kit’, my mind goes to the Fluxkits, collections of scores, poetry, objects, etc. made by lots of folks in the circle of George Maciunas, who packed them and sent them off. They were as large as a suitcase, or about cassette-sized, like this one I found in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago archives:

I bring up size because when I imagine how such a collection of objects would be put to use, I have to keep thinking back to the conditions of a ‘performance’, and the physical reality of the notation these things would operate on. While there’s a rich culture of ‘live’ and computer-assisted notation going on in various circles, my conception of this has oriented around interventions done on pre-existing sheet music. This is because 1) there is still FAR more physical notation in existence than digitized material, thus keeping the ‘training set’ large and accountable, and 2) keeping a ‘punk’ sort of subversion-mutation ideology in the forefront. There’s also the tactility that I think has an important purchase on this punkishness (even when annotating to hell and back, it’s generally kept to the descriptive rather than anything elaborative).

So–kit materials that could fit on a music stand, and be readily applied or changed around?

My two main thoughts right now revolve around:

1: transparencies–plastic overlays that are either color-coded for particular transformations, or able to be drawn/erased on to specify sections of transformation. I’ve got some colored translucent tape and sticky notes on the way to play with for this purpose, and hopefully with enough, varieties can be made that would be customizable or editable to fit whatever format is being used as base material.

2: a ‘clip-on facilitator’: a few years ago, I worked with arts administrator Adelheid Mers on her “Micro-practices for a New Gentleness” – figurines associated with styles of dialogue and facilitation, which could be placed in a space or whose poses could be replicated by participants. Such a figure could be a useful guide for indicating overall ensemble processes (in lieu of or perhaps augmenting a conductor in some situations). Ideally, it would be small, pliable, and able to attach to a music stand or be in a prominently visible position for a performer. Basically, a Gumby stand partner?

Physical gesture and cuing is an enormously important part of interpretive practice, whether subtly in chamber music, or utilized as a creative crux in numerous conducted improvisations such as Soundpainting or Conduction. This element could be really brought to the fore, but in emphasizing the symbolic aspects of notational protocols here, it’s perhaps experimentally efficacious to keep them (counter)coupled to precise operations.

So perhaps the ‘kit’ would look like some kind of file-folder, or a book-sized sort of D&D module thing, with editable materials, figurines, and a sample bit of canonical repertoire to start folks off. A prototype would be very prototypical, though, as I still need to work through the procedures, principles, and aims of the work as a whole. Definitely will be continuing this past June…

[Zvibes]

Shifting gears to a prototyping stage:

Going tactile-first has helped push through some of the conceptual snags and blocks. It’s also felt important to keep this low-tech and physical to maintain a certain kind of punk-ish, ‘interventional’ relationship to pre-existing materials.

What that looks like thus far is colored tape and sticky notes! Also, here is a very rough working model for the aforementioned conductor figurine:

But for now, focusing on the tape and a color-coding means of applying ‘strategies’ to sections of music. My working ‘menu’ is as follows:

-Purple: Inversion: reverse interval direction and/or volume
-Blue: Retrograde: material read backwards, in time
-Yellow: Suspension: out of time
-Green: Blackout: replacing notes with silences or extending previous sound (like blackout poetry)
-Orange: Scaling: pitch, rhythm, dynamics, etc. are ‘scaled’ to either a highly condensed range (microtuning, sped up playing) or highly expanded range (leaps)
-Red: Noise: pitch becomes mapped to selection of noises

So for example, I’m applying this to a page of Bach:

And unaltered, it sounds something like this.

Here are the fourth and fifth measures (second purple and first green applications) with alterations.

Definitely took some practice for the original music AND the alterations, but that’s to be expected. Part of the PILLing, I think, is opening up (or ‘slowing down’) the understanding of notation as a protocolized process and introducing the incremental possible changes.