Category: Spring 24

As I read about the concept of interdisciplinary artists, termed as Artist-Musicians and Musician-Artists by Hoffmann and Naumann, my thoughts gravitate towards Richard Wagner’s notion of “Gesamtkunstwerk” – the total work of art dating back to the mid-19th century. Wagner envisioned a synthesis of music, drama, poetry, visual arts, and stagecraft into one unified piece, believing it would create a more immersive and emotionally powerful experience for the audience— “The true drama is only conceivable as proceeding from a common urgence of every art towards the most direct appeal to a common public” (The Art-Work of the Future, 1849).

It’s fascinating to see how contemporary artists are intriguingly blurring the lines between music and visual arts. With the ongoing digitalization of media, the alignment between visual and musical techniques intensifies. Particularly in live-coding, artists seamlessly integrate diverse elements, embodying Wagner’s vision of synthesizing art forms. Thus, they offer a sensory-rich experience for audiences, maintaining the legacy of Gesamtkunstwerk.

Kandinsky is one of my favorite artists. Kandinsky had the ability to associate (perceptual mixing) and he could hear colors very clearly. This effect had a major impact on his art. He even named his paintings “improvisation” and “structure” as if they were not paintings but musical compositions. This site also features music for Kandinsky’s works. This website made a experiment of Kandinsky’s work called “What if you can hear the sound?”, in which they designed and developed different parts of music clips to divide Kandingsky’s work to many parts and sense.

The article describes the popular genres and development of music or painting in different periods. I like the statement in the article that, due to various factors, sometimes painting develops faster than music, sometimes music develops faster than painting, and sometimes interdisciplinary development occurs, with the two art forms supplementing each other. For the present, developments in AI technology are also impacting the art world, influencing styles of music and painting as well as interdisciplinary trends.

I’ve always been captivated by the beauty of various artistic forms and combining them to get something new, something unique. However, it never occurred to me that something I call an art form may have been seen as something completely different and not as art. That’s why, it truly caught my interest when I read about how music and art were formerly viewed as entirely distinct entities. I always believed that music was a form of art, but it’s fascinating to watch how this belief has changed over time. Another thing that really made me really excited when reading the text was the mention of noise and how it was introduced by Busoni into music.
In my own films, I often experiment with incorporating different sounds and noises to create a more immersive experience for the audience. It’s fascinating to think about how artists like John Cage explored similar ideas, breaking away from traditional musical norms and embracing the raw, unfiltered elements of sound.

There is also the mention of club culture and its influence in modern day artistic expression, something that is often overlooked but apparently incredibly prevalent. I think I’ve been more exposed to how club environments can inspire creativity and foster a sense of community among artists and musicians, through this class and through the concept of ‘Algoraves’. A club nurtures a dynamic space where ideas are exchanged freely, and boundaries are pushed to create innovative works of art. I personally don’t prefer going to clubs, but I feel like I’m missing out when I’m reading such pieces.

The segment at the end regarding the ephemerality and spatiotemporal uniqueness of each live coding performance is something that started occurring to me when I started documenting all the work we have been doing in class. I’d often make a recording before class. Then moments before my performance in my class (or even on the spot at times), I’d think of something new and integrate that in the live performance. I’d then scrap my old recording and try doing a “good” take at home only to be frustrated that it never ended up sounding like how it sounded in class, because I triggered a certain line at the wrong cue. This excerpt brings up folk music in the start, and it brings me a certain solace to see this practice in the same light as folk or jazz – ever-changing, improvisational, yet without ever completely destroying the basis of the original. There is a big tradition of folk artists making covers; Bob Dylan famously having made over 200 covers (https://www.whosampled.com/Bob-Dylan/covers). Over this semester, I have tried replicating and covering songs that have been stuck in my head during that week, and once I shift them into this live-coding improvisational paradigm, I often end up with things that are quite new.

With our recent explorations in quantizations, pattern bundlings, A/V syncing and time-based triggering things do get “better” (not sure what the word to use here is, since again it takes away from some of the spontaneity of the performance”). However, this reading did help me get a bigger picture understanding of the linguistics of this medium. I was aware of some general gists like the paradigms of functional programming, something that took me a bit of time to wrap my head around when I tried sharing a state variable between 3 orbit patterns and manipulating it. But even the choice to name certain functions in a particular way (krush/crush) comes from the understanding that the act of writing this code is a performance in and of itself. The “pre-gramming” of some of these languages is done keeping in mind the needs of the programmer and the enjoyment of the audience.

Art and music. Thinking about art and music as 2 different, unrelated terms is interesting. Not in ways where some say they are the same exact thing, but in a way that the way I define art is a self-expression made tangible. Be it Music, painting, digital art, or even writing, they are all forms of art, each in their own way, and each intertwines together in some way or another.

Close links between music and visual arts are not only to be observed in the works of musicians/artists trained in several disciplines. An interest in the respective other art form undoubtedly went hand in hand with the explicitly interdisciplinary questions that became increasingly frequent, in particular in the context of the emergence of abstraction in painting and later in film.

Justin Hoffmann, Sandra Naumann

The quote above explains a lot about what it means to be an artist, what it means to be led by a creative outburst, and what it means to be yourself in a different light combining, techniques to make a boom.

Personalities

One thing that really stood out to me, however, is personality/self-expression, or publicity and method of publicity. I feel like, personally, when I think about funky, crazy, or cool, I will not think about a writer or a poet, it will usually be an artist, a dancer, or a musician. However, looking into it a little bit deeper, Any artist is someone who spends life looking for an untraditional way of self-expression, a writer, however, would not interact with the crowd, or the people as much, others have a form of self-expression that shares with those around them, that makes them stand out, look different, or mostly be themselves in a world where they don’t care about judgment.

SO WE DID

Art, as I said, I feel is a form of self-expression, the author talked often about weird paths that artists took, about personalities they chose at a time of the day when they get to be a different version of themselves,

For a whole series of artist-musicians/musician-artists, the principle that a good punk song only needed three chords applied just as much as the do-it-yourself attitude.

They started punk, they forgot rules, prevented disciplines from holding them back, and helped the hidden parts in themselves show.

Artists will use whatever they have, from technology to music to text, material, code, and junk, to find expression and creation, that is what I see an artist as, and it will forever remain interesting how different everyone will combine the tools they have. From visuals to music, we all find the room we want to grow in. And it will always remain interesting that one day, music and art weren’t one from the other; that is the only way I can see it today.

As I went into the nuances noted in the excerpt, I was super impressed by the investigation of how human expression is represented in computer code. It’s mind boggling to observe how, when represented on a computer, something as naturally expressive and complex as human expression—whether in music, video animation, or choreography—can be reduced to numerical data. This change from complex, expressive forms of expression to numerical values highlights a basic feature of live coding, or programming using human expression, which just flies over one’s head if they don’t think critically enough. Manipulating just a little bit of this converted numerical data, playing around with it makes a world of difference in the expression the work is trying to convey, which is pretty amazing to think about. A world of possibilities for dynamic, interactive performances arises from the convergence of human creativity and computational precision in the field of live coding, where music, timbre, and even dancing are transformed into data for manipulation. And, different systems prioritize different types of data for live coding, which is another thing I was fascinated by.

The live coding language design conversation piqued my interest in the way that different systems order different components in order to satisfy different creative demands. The diverse range of techniques within the live coding community is reflected in the distinct preferences and priorities of each creator’s live coding system. The focus on components like compositional possibilities, expressive range, and visual/melodic progression demonstrates the sophisticated knowledge of how code may be used as a creative medium. In addition to providing live coders with a variety of tools to work with, this diversity in language design also emphasizes how live coding is a creative discipline that is always changing to meet the requirements and realize the ambitions of its practitioners.

The Notation classity of music practices as stylism, traditionalism and restructuralism. Notation in live coding allows us to play with parameters. It gives more possibilities for people to compose music. Also the author mentions the ephemeral nature of live coding. Some live coders will not save their code after the performance. This led me to ask, since Live Coding is not the same as traditional music production, and since it allows more people to create music through Live Coding, can this form of music production be called “creative”? Recently, Live Ableton released its thirteenth version, with a large amount of AI music generation. One can write a few notes at random and generate a complete piece of music. I think that although more people can compose music in this way, the essence of “creativity” in music has disappeared. Unlike coding itself, art is something that requires a lot of time, and it’s good that people are finding shortcuts to it, but the process of creation should not abandon the “creation” itself. The article makes us consider how live coding challenges traditional understanding of composition and performance. Live Coding questions the nature of creativity.