| |
QWERTY-SOMETHING
"If
your instrument is a computer, it's very hard to express
yourself in real time. It's wonderful what you can do
with a computer, but it's very anti-social, so it takes
away that essence of spontaneity and of interaction with
other musicians. How many times have you seen a programmer
say, 'Ah, watch this', and for ten minutes he's in his
own space and his own time. Finally he'll sit back and
he'll hit play and there it is - it's incredible what
he's done, but during that time he was off in another
universe. I think one of the reasons for that is the interface
we're using - a computer - was designed for doing spreadsheets
and databases and so on. A querty and mouse is really
a very feeble interface given that what we're dealing
with is orchestras, drums, vocals - it doesn't have the
sort of tactile feedback you'd get from a Stradivarius
or a Steinway - or a Gibson."
Which is where virtual reality
instruments come in?
"I've been working more and
more in VR. My first program was debuted at the Guggenheim
museum in October and November. That was based on a Mozart
string quartet - you put on a helmet and you were able
to wander around a string quartet of four graphically
generated musicians, and as you did so, not only the visual
point of view but also the aural perspective was calculated
in real time. Put your head next to the viola and that's
what you'd hear. It was calculating the direction that
the sound source was coming from, and it was mixing between
them. It was also calculating reflections around the room
and spatialising them in real time.
"The point of it was to show
a couple of things - number one, that VR is not for spotty
teenage arcade game players, but that older people could
enjoy it - my great aunt Rita came down, she's 83 - she
was listening to a piece of Mozart that she knew and she
was tapping her feet and she was really into it. The other
thing was to show that even though the graphics in VR
are still not great, there's absolutely no reason to apologise
for the audio, because we can do CD quality audio in real
time right now and it's relatively cheap and affordable
- I was getting the sound off the hard drives with two
Gravis computer game sound cards which are under $200
each, and doing eight tracks of CD quality audio. But
after I started to get into programming for this environment,
I came back to my Mac and started working on my album,
and I realised that I'm very much at the mercy of Opcode
and Digidesign and a couple of others.
"I lie in bed awake at night
dreaming this music that's in big bold strokes - tempo
changes, instrumental changes and so on. And then in the
morning I get in and go, 'Right, where do I start... well...
um... a kick drum... er... which one?... er, what tempo?
Should it be looping? How many bars? Wait... I'd better
save this quick... now, what folder did I want to save
this in?' And at the end of all that, all you've got is
a kick drum which doesn't like to have its tempo changed.
The computer forces me into
its way of thinking about things, and because using the
machine you can massage things until they sound good,
before very long it starts to sound like a record, and
I go 'Great, that's done then', but it bears no resemblance
whatsoever to the music that I lay in bed thinking about
the night before.
"So I thought, why not design
a virtual reality music instrument which is really matched
to the peculiar skills that I have and that really allows
me to express myself in real time? There are all sorts
of possibilities. At the lowest level you could take the
various axes of the space and map them to MIDI parameters,
say pitch, volume, and timbre. To go beyond that, when
you're dealing with 3D objects you have physical behavior
like gravity, mass, collision detection, friction, rebound
- all of those physical things are additional parameters
that you can add in. For example, I could take a sphere,
I could lift it up above my head, I could spin it at a
certain rate and then over a period of time it would fall
to the ground.
"If you think about all the
different things going on in there and ways of mapping
them to different MIDI parameters, there's a lot of things
that you could do. You might end up, however, with a very
unmusical sound, so you need to start putting constraints
on it. Rather than having the pitch be mapped linearly,
you'd constrain it to a scale. Tempo you could constrain.
As you start to apply some constraints you come up with
macros and templates of areas you want to work in. For
example, by substituting a sphere for a cube I could move
from horns to strings. The more constraints you add, the
bolder strokes you're able to deal with in terms of performance.
Think of a conductor of classical music - all the composition
has been done (so the musicians are familiar with these
pieces) and what he's dealing with, with his arms and
his body language are things like tempo, expression and
volume. But with VR we can go beyond that, because we
can go back into the composition. I can jump around in
pre-prepared MIDI sequences, I can substitute instruments
at will or move between different instrumentations and
introduce all sorts of random elements or artifial intelligence
where things react in a pre-determined way to each other.
There's an awful lot that can be done in that area, and
my job as a composer is to identify the strengths and
weaknesses of this system and to get creative with them
and to learn to use this as a musical instrument and then
go out and perform it to people."
|
