How can audio scoring direct performers without verbal instructions?
This project explores how audio scoring can act as a compositional tool without the use of verbal instructions through a series of web-based musical works, grouped together under the name Through the Listening Glass.
Through the Listening Glass is a web-based composition project where musical works are constructed from a series of modular ‘spaces’. These spaces are small, individual, interactive modules with their own sonic character and behaviour. Each space uses live audio analysis to determine and trigger the live processing and/or audio playback, both of which function as a score by implicitly encouraging or discouraging certain musical behaviour. These spaces link together in a navigable structure which is determined in real time based on the musician’s playing. This means that live audio analysis shapes the compositions on both a micro and macro level, controlling the sound of each modular space and the transitions between them.
The title of the project – a play on Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass – captures a core intention of this project: to create interactive, evocative sonic worlds that can be explored by musicians and contain multiple possibilities. My work to develop and theorise this approach draws inspiration from multiple research areas.
Exploring approaches to audio scoring that do not use verbal instructions is at the heart of this work. Because my compositions are interactive, and I want them to feel immersive, it is important to me that the score does not contain explicit instructions. However, I also want each work to maintain an overarching identity and offer material and ideas for the musicians to respond to. These goals have led me to explore the role that semiotics and music cognition play in shaping how we perceive sounds, and how ideas and theories from these disciplines could be used compositionally to encourage or discourage certain musical responses. Alongside this, research into game design, and other multi-variant structures, has been key to developing the overarching structure and informing how musicians come to understand the possibilities available to them within an unfamiliar scoring approach.
Through the Listening Glass and its scoring approach are still in development, and each space and composition made as part of the project reveals new possibilities and research questions. To explore these works yourself, visit new.throughthelisteningglass.co.uk