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Subject: Music is Dead! The Future of Music is Space...
From: Sputnik <agarton@toysatellite.com.ay>
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 02:35:38 METDST

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The Future of Music is Space
Note for a new composition from Andrew Garton, Sensorium Connect
Produced in collaboration with ABC/The Listening Room

Music is dead! We listen, love, work and die silent in numbing arpeggios of
repetition. With its skilled interpreters, its concert halls and cathedrals, its
theorists and record companies, its evolution from ritual to repetition
confirms the end of music and its role as creator of social space. The
maintenance of social order and cohesion is built upon the absolute denial,
prohibition and commodification of free expression. Music is no exception. In
fact it performs as an indicator of its success, the success of power, of
commerce to define and control its compositional procedures and its production,
distribution and consumption.

Music is dead! In the Middle Ages the European jongleur, both a musician and
entertainer, would travel from village to village performing privately and
publicly. The jongleurs income was derived from these performances and their
material was gathered, assimilated and modified from what they heard and what
they saw along the way. They ensured that access to music remained the privilege
of every social class. They were essential to the social circulation of
information. The jongleur "...was music and the spectacle of the body. [They]
alone created it, carried it with [them], and completely organised its
circulation within society."

Music is dead! True folk music, is no longer possible. The original folk process
of incorporating previous melodies and lyrics into constantly evolving songs is
impossible when melodies and lyrics are privately owned. The jongleur became a
businessman, a skilled interpreter of music inhibited by cultural property and
copyright protections.

Music is dead! "The mind believes what it sees and does what it believes..." The
messengers of capital are thorough. Creating an audience for its own message.
You cannot rebel against something you have been taught so thoroughly to believe
you want, need, can't do without. All the glitters is not gold.

Music is dead! But doesn't abstract and experimental music push back the
economic boundaries, freeing creativity, exploring new sonic landscapes? It
could be said that the modern musician gives the appearance of being more
independent of power and money than their predecessors, they may actually be,
more tightly tied into the institutions of power than ever before. Jacques
Attali, a French political economist, suggests that the contemporary composer
and musician, "separated from the struggles of our age, confined within the
great production centres, fascinated by the search for an artistic usage of the
management tools of the great organizations (computer, electronic, cybernetic),
…has become the learned minstrel of the multinational apparatus. Hardly
profitable economically, [they have become, perhaps] the producer of a symbolism
of power".

If music is dead, how do we resurrect it? The author, John Berger suggests,
"There is always a danger that the relative freedom of art can render it
meaningless. Yet it is this same freedom which allows art, and art alone, to
express and preserve the profoundest expectations of a period [in history]."
Does the resurrection of music call for a collapse of the manifestation of
capital? Does it demand that we turn the tools available to us now into
instruments for the socialisation of free expression? As a composer immersed in
technology, bound to all that should harness my skills into the service of
capital, I have opted for the realisation of a music that strives towards the
liberation of the imagination, towards the discovery of our inert spiritual and
creative capabilities. The future of music and sound is space!

Sensorium Connect is one such space, an ever-changing generative sound space
that combines the medium of radio and that of the Internet into an exploration
of non-repetitive creative possibilities. For artists like me, the Internet has
become a vital platform with which to further our ruminations on the world. It's
a collaborative medium that returns us to a kind of social circulation of
information, just as in the time of the jongleurs.

Sensorium Connect is both composition and process. The composition is comprised
of sounds created by the artist, Stelarc, during his performances. The sounds
include brain waves, heartbeat and blood flow. The sounds of his third
mechanical hand are also amplified.

We have also sampled an angle transducer that measures the bending angle of the
legs and a sensor that monitors CO2 in the breathing. These variations make it a
much less predictable signal and a much more beautiful resulting sound. The
sounds that are indicative of the physiological function of the body, and the
mechanical operation of the third hand are rendered neutral in their
associations so that they don't sound like a musical instrument or natural sound
or some kind of other technological object that we know and identify with. This
is further mutated through the generative compositional process that sees to it
that the piece, as well as much of the sounds, are never heard the same twice.

Acoustically what's happening in Stelarc's performances is a kind of aura is
generated around the body. When internal body signals are amplified they are, in
a sense, emptied from the body into the room within which the body is
performing. The humanoid shape of the body that originally contains the sound
now becomes the cuboid space of the room. With Sensorium Scan, these sounds are
further emptied into what one might call, the suspended ever-evolving space of
the Internet. An acoustical landscape translating from humanoid form to cuboid
space to a space as instrument.

Generative music is algorithmically driven to produce variation, ongoing
evolution and development of sounds. The process of creation, performance and
distribution of music changing. The Internet is an amourphous infrastructure for
the liberation of creative ideas and is no doubt influencing the work of
artists the world over. It is a time of enriching exploration and discovery that
is akin to the period during which Francesco Pierro was to discover perspective
and the body's relationship to space.

Can music change before it dies outright? It is changing. It is a participatory
change. Listening to this program contributes to the process, engaging the
space, whether you listen in via the Internet, or never have anything to do with
computers. The suspended space is expanding and the physical world as we
believe we know will change. The distance between audience and performer is fast
becoming reclaimed physical space. We are all engaged in the space of change,
giving birth perhaps to a spectacle to both fascinate and liberate the mind."