9th
studio minds
The studio process uses the ‘best fit’ method in the bottom up tradition. The theory being that the non-grid sound art (Wishart) is too complex to use pitch based rules to help organize formal rules around. It has been said that the only system appropriate for the construction of concrete sound art is the auditory system which comes with it’s own rules. Laws of auditory perception are theorized and tested according to various disciplines’ experimental methods. Any experiments’ power to predict is a reflection of how well the rules in question conform to experimental needs.
This musical form is an experiment on the idea of form, The rules are derived from perceptual theories with phenominological biases. The most obvious so far is ecological psychology’s description of the organism as imbedded and embedded in it’s environment. As t how this works out as a way to plan the construction of the piece, details for each work are described in the PhD.
More Songs About Asphalt and Speed addressed this in a straightforward and sometimes programatic style. The agent/organism/composer/skater/climber/guitarist/runner et.al. moves from direct to abstracted representations of its auditory connection with the world. (Nance, 2007)
The ‘new art’ works, Parables, Analogies of Control, and K, are also constructed with that overview in mind but the focus of the experiment is more concerned with drawing together the auditory poiesis of the composer with that of the performer. Whereas written music has a long and involved evolution with the performer/reader, EA’s history is less evolved on a lexical basis, but the evolution of the hearable world and music’s are about equal. The method applied was the elimination of the visual mode (graphical and textual) from the process and build aural models from which the performer will derive his part. the rules are fairly simple if the act is not. The player is to mimic what he hears in the headphones unbiased by what his eyes might tell his ears (for an example of visual auditory influence see the McGurk Effect for one of the more obvious)
This method sidesteps the visual and cultural training concentrating on the musician’s aural acuity and technical expertise.
