Reframing: liveness, interactivity and sympathetic transformations

Over the last few weeks, I have been getting back into creative work. I’m currently focusing on improving my abilities with Ableton Live, a DAW which is relatively new to me.

Previous attempts to create environments for improvisation with Live had left me feeling frustrated, as I was simply playing into chains of effects which gave predictable responses to my playing. Attempts to then map parameters of these effects to hardware controllers quickly led to confusing and complex setups which were impossible to manipulate in rewarding, clear and musically satisfying ways in performance.

Emmerson highlights that much of the discourse around ‘meaning’ within electroinstrumental performance centres around the audience’s perception of the relationship between the performer and the system (Emmerson, 2013, p. 6). He argues for a reframing, with the focus brought to the performer’s experience with the system: “When the performers feel the meaningful responses…then the whole ensemble becomes a meaningful response network of relationships” (Emmerson, 2013).

This resonates with a wider literature concerning liveness and interactivity in the performance of electroacoustic music (Croft, 2007; Sanden, 2013; Kirby, 2019). In light of this, I want to refocus my own system design to prioritise the feeling of the interactions between myself (as a classical guitarist) and the system. According to Emmerson, this will “better succeed in conveying musical expression or meaning…to the audience” (Emmerson, 2013).

This leads me in a liberating new direction, moving away from my prioritising of only direct manipulations of the classical guitar sound. For traceability, I would like some sympathetic transformations of my playing to remain, but I will also experiment with incorporating generative processes and/or playback into future systems.

I recognise that this new direction will involve relinquishing control in some areas, and instead programming a balance of both static and unpredictable elements into my Ableton Live sets. I plan to use one-to-many mappings to create simpler, yet richer and more sonically-discernible interactions between myself and the software.

If interactive systems are designed around meaningful responses, they will be more immediately and dynamically engaging for the user. This not only encourages further experimentation, but translates more easily to the audience than systems which prioritise visual-audible causes and effects.

References

Croft, J. (2007) ‘Theses on liveness’, 12 (1)(2007–04), pp. 59–66. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771807001604.

Emmerson, S. (2013) ‘Rebalancing the discussion on interactivity’, in Electroacoustic Music Studies Network Conference. Electroacoustic Music in the Context of Interactive Approaches and Networks, Lisbon.

Kirby, J. (2019) ‘Defining and Evaluating the Performance of Electronic Music’, in Innovation In Music: Performance, Production, Technology and Business. New York: Routledge.

Sanden, P. (2013) Liveness in Modern Music: Musicians, Technology and the Perception of Performance. New York: Routledge.