The aim of 'The Feather' and 'The Feather Quartet' was to investigate how a music score embedded as software can co-operate with human musicians in the flow of focussed and themed semi-improvised composition. Furthermore, how dynamic computerised media and animated visual graphics created in the here-and-now of a performance can feel like a collaborating performer in the music.
'The Feather Quartet' is a digital score for an improvising quartet, and 'The Feather' is for a single improvisor. They consist of a software environment that generates a collage of extracts of found materials onto four quadrants dividing the computer screen. The found materials consist of two pages of music notation extracted from a public domain score, and an extract from Tove Jansson’s book The Summer Book as both the original Swedish text and the English translation. The end result is a collage of colour and image that refers to the original source materials and is generated live with the software. As such, each performance of this piece will bring forth different score images, yet remain connected to the original material.
The computational process changes the images in each quadrant every 10-20 seconds by cross-filtering them with each other and applying random colouration. The musicians can interpret these images freely, but the composer requests that they do so by ‘entering into the spirit of the original texts’. The imperative for the musicians is to play something they value, that contributes to their collective flow, and is from within the meta-narrative of the original extract. The digital score is designed to co-operate with the musicians through time and within the musicking realm of performance. Whilst it is not listening, or analysing the human’s performance it is creating its own response to the meta-narrative evoked within the source materials. The role of the performers is not to respond to the visual information as didactic notation, but to see it as evoking opportunities for response, and as a stimulation for creativity amongst the ensembles on-going interpretation. As such, the musicians must work together through time as a unit creating an aural dimension inspired from the visual dimension evoked by the collage of images.
These digital scores build on existing code implemented in previous compositions, therefore their behaviour has elements in common with these precedents. However, through the course of devised experimentation with the Ligeti Quartet and an iterative design process the final feel of the operational code is unique to this composition.
I consider this score to be existing signs of intelligence, and therefore consider it AI. But this needs to be qualified within the context in which the intelligence is being experienced, which is inside the domain of musicking and outlined by the thematic and conceptual construction of the composition. In the premiere of The Feather Quartet, the Ligeti Quartet felt there were ‘times when the changes in the animation seemed to do exactly as I hoped they would’, and generally throughout the programme the performance felt ‘at its best’ when the musicians were open to the ‘new stimuli’ from the digital score. As such, the digital score collaborated, intelligently within their realisation of this composition, as I had programmed it to do, albeit as a mechanism for surprise.
The software score was originally published by Composers Edition, but is now available open source through this GitHub repository.