Aesthetic Sensibility and Artistic Sonification

Summary

It is not that art is the expression of the unconscious, but rather that it is concerned with the relation between the levels of mental process […] Artistic skill is the combining of many levels of mind – unconscious, conscious, and external – to make a statement of their combination. It is not a matter of expressing a single level. Similarly, Isadora Duncan, when she said, ‘If I could say it, I would not have to dance it,’ was talking nonsense, because her dance was about combinations of saying and moving. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

Artistic Research I – Three Examples

Example 1. During a research seminar in Ghent (Belgium), guitar player Laura Young, investigating the (im)possibilities of transcribing, arranging and playing Max Reger's solo cello and viola suites on guitar, explains her project through the performance of certain parts of the scores she is studying. After her presentation, a philosopher-musicologist asks her whether she can legitimate some of her musical and technical decisions on the basis of a clear (discursive) rationale. After a brief silence Young has to admit that her choices cannot easily be supported by logical and verbal argumentation. A prolonged debate ensues from this: is she just relying on certain aesthetic and performance conventions, or are her choices inspired by some implicit knowledge? Was her performance mainly directed by an embodied routine, which Merleau-Ponty would describe as ‘habitude’, or was a certain ‘reflection-in-action’, as coined by Donald Schon, prevailing?

Example 2. The second chapter of Henrik Frisk's PhD dissertation Improvisation, Computers and Interaction discusses his musical piece etherSound. Put simply, etherSound, an improvisation for sax, drums and electronics, includes an invitation for listeners to send SMS messages to a specific phone number. These messages – the conditions are that they should have a reasonable word length (not too long and not too short) and enough vowels (as a means to increase the chance that it is indeed a meaningful word); preferably, they should make sense – are digitally translated into sonic material, directly audible for both players and audience. This audience-generated electronic input thus immediately affects the course of the improvised music.

Most pages in the dissertation are dedicated to a description of the technical sides of the project, including mathematical formulas, the use of Max/ MSP, and amplitude envelopes.