Schematic as Score: Uses and Abuses of the

(In)Deterministic
Possibilities
of
Sound
Technology

[Moritz Ellerich / Fabelphonetikum (rhizome schematic)]

'The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the
great loneliness, and it can be reached only through

suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind

of a man to all that is hidden to others.' Inuit shaman
Najagneq, recorded by Knud Rasmussen1

'If you want to build a modular, my advice is not to do it if

you want to have any friends, it takes too much time.'
Jessica Rylan2
Over the past few years, a strong reaction against the sterile world of
laptop sound and video has inspired a new interest in analog processes,
or "hands dirty" art in the words of practitioner John Richards 3. With
this renewed analog interest comes a fresh exploration of the pioneers
of the electronic arts during the pre-digital era of the 1960s and 1970s.
Artists and inventors such as Nam June Paik, Steina & Woody Vasulka,
Don Buchla, Serge Tcherepnin, Dan Sandin and David Tudor all
constructed their own unique instruments long before similar tools
became commercially available or freely downloadable 4 often through
a long, rigorous process of self-education in electronics.
John Cage once quipped that Serge Tcherepnin's synthesizer system
was "the best musical composition that Serge had ever made" 5, and it is
precisely Cage's reformulation of the concert score from a list of
deterministic note values to a set of indeterministic possibilities that
allowed the blurring of lines between instrument-builder and music
composer that followed.

[John Cage's Fontana Mix (1958) uses a series of transparencies to

generate a unique score each time it is performed]
David Tudor in particular has recently become the focus of intense
interest, largely through the work of "hardware hacker" Nicolas
Collins6. Tudor's transformation from John Cage's concert pianist to an
electronic performer and autodidact engineer in his own right is
archetypal for the contemporary media artist, who also must oscillate
between the creative and the learning processes. His work "Rainforest"
also stands out as an exemplary model of the collaborative process
within a technically defined, yet socially open system. I will elaborate
on this in my section of the current issue.
I consider it axiomatic that, for any art work to be considered
experimental, the possibility of failure must be built into its process. I
am not referring to the aestheticized, satisfying glitches and crackles
valorized by Kim Cascone7, but to the lack of satisfaction produced by a
misguided or misstepped procedure in the experiment, whether
colossal or banal. These are not errors to be sought out, sampled and
celebrated, but the flat-on-your-ass gaffs and embarrassments that
would trouble the sleep of all but the most Zen of musicians or
composers.
The presence of failure in a musical system represents feedback in the
negative, a tipping point into anti-climax, irrelevance, the
commonplace, the cliche or even unintended silence. Many artists try to
factor out true, catastrophic failure by scripting, scoring, sequencing or
programming their work into as many predictable, risk-free quanta as
possible ahead of time. (Spacebar, please.) But this unwelcome

presence also guarantees the vitality of that hotly-contested territory

the live electronic music performance.
Another central argument of my research is that, in creating electronic
music instruments, the builder is in fact simultaneously acting as postCagean composer by simultaneously constructing a highly restrictive
collection of limitations and an indeterministic set of performance
possibilities, each full of as much potential and risk as the
builder/composer wishes to allow the performer.
This idea can easily be demonstrated in electronic dance music, where
the internal workings of the Roland 808 drum machine and 909 bass
generator have cast in stone the aesthetic conventions of that genre.
Similarly, the Ableton Live software allows first-time users to easily
create risk-free music from any audio sample they like, so long as that
music conforms to the rasterized structure of German Minimal Techno.
And the largest knob on the popular microKORG synthesizer presents
the user with a choice of 8 programs, spanning the range from Trance
to HipHop as if all other kinds of music could easily be distilled from
them.
The resulting compositions from the most "easy" and "simple" software
tools are often nothing more than "digital folk" 8 art the endless and
endlessly similar permutations which are possible merely from the
tweaking of a few basic presets. Perhaps the artistic tragedy of the
digital age lies in the social and economic pressure to immediately
release "results" which barely get beyond this initiatory phase.

[David Tudor's 'self-playing' performance patch 9 for Untitled(Homage

to Toshi Ichiyanagi) (1972)]

The artists selected for this issue of Vague Terrain approach this
situation from the opposite angle. Often operating at the extreme edges
of the DIY electronics scene (where most, after all, still want to build a
"normal" drum machine or keyboard synth), their work represents
some of the most radical and idiosyncratic artistic approaches to
electronic circuitry of the moment. Their compositions take the form of
systems which provide a map of what is possible, but lack a prescribed
route on how to get there. The discoveryand the riskis left to the
moment of the performance.
Some of these artists, such as Peter Blasser or Jessica Rylan, are skilled
electronics engineers, well-versed in the mathematical mysteries of the
transistor and the integrated circuit. Where Blasser strives for a
personal mythology and original iconography to represent his systems,
Rylan evokes a logical and intellectual relationship with the
instruments she creates in constant tension with an emotional and
intuitive one.
The circuits employed by Lesley Flanigan, on the other hand, are
deceptively simple. Lifted almost directly from the datasheet of the
LM386 1/2 Watt audio amplifier, her schematic/score only hints at the
range of possibilities within the beautiful speaker-feedback systems she
constructs with it.
Even more deceptive are the systems soldered together live by the Loud
Objects; Tristan Perich, Kunal Gupta and Katie Shima. Initially
confronted with the overhead-projection of several anonymous black
chips, the audience must wait for the process of connections which
activates the circuit and awakens the sound within it to reach
completion before their eyes.
The meticulously detailed "self-playing" chaotic synthesis patches of
Jason R. Butcher likewise concern themselves with an interconnection
of discrete operators in a complex network. In this case, the ready-made
system of the Buchla 200 analog modular synthesizer provides Butcher
an almost boundless territory to explore.
A young, autodidact instrument builder, Moritz Ellerich has chosen the
phonemes of the spoken German language as core elements for his
system. His Fabelphonetikum prototypes a rigorous approach towards
manual and performative speech synthesis using a bare minimum of
signal sources.
While speech between one person and another has concrete features
which can be analyzed and modeled, speech between the living and the
dead remains far more nebulous. Artistically building on the Electronic
Voice Phenomenon research of Dr. Konstantns Raudive 10, Martin

Howse sets up delicate electronic systems in "charged" locations. These

systems can involve radio transmitters and receivers, noise generators,
various recording devices, geiger counters, lasers and photo-receivers,
all sensitive to the slightest disturbance in the hopes of receiving some
signal from "the other side".
The Syncronator project, by video artist Bas van Koolwijk and sound
artist Geert Jan Prins, also investigates a breakthough communication
between the realms of the analog audio and video signals. For them, the
ability to seamlessly transmit a signal between the two domains opens
up a vast range of live performance possibilities.
And finally, I concern myself with communication through the use of
David Tudor's classic schematic-score, "Rainforest". Here, the greatest
possibility of failure ended up not in the technical realization of Tudor's
drawings, but in the communication between the performers playing
that system and from them to the audience assembled in the space to
listen.
In every case, each artist or group was invited to submit a schematic or
other graphical representation of their chosen composition system
alongside audiovisual documentation of that system at work. Each
instance of these compositions is not definitive, but only represents the
relationship of that system to the performer under a certain set of
circumstances. Future performances could and should evolve in an
altogether different manner.
I would like to thank Greg J. Smith, Neil Wiernik and Corina
MacDonald of Vague Terrain for this opportunity to guest-curate an
issue and put my entirely-too-complex thoughts on this subject into
some coherent form. I would also like to thank the invited artists for
opening up their practice to scrutiny, particularly those who created
original works for this survey. I welcome comments and
correspondence, and look forward to future discussions expanding the
topic.
Derek Holzer, BerlinApril 2011
Notes:
(1) Rasmussen, Knud (1927). Across Arctic America: Narrative of the
Fifth Thule Expedition. (2) Rylan, Jessica (2004). "IRFP Presents:
Modular Synthesizer".(3) Collins, Nicolas (2009). Handmade Electronic
Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780-415-99873-4.(4) Vasulka, Woody ed. (1992). Eigenwelt der ApparateWelt: Pioneers of Electronic Art. Linz: Ars Electronica.(5) Prema, Krsna
(2008). "How I Became a Monk".(6) Collins, Nicolas ed. (2004).
Leonardo Music Journal 14.(7) Cascone, Kim (2002). "The Aesthetics of
Failure: "Post-Digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music". (8)

Schultz, Pit (2003). "Computer Age is Coming into Age". Read_me 2.3,
ed. Goriunova, Olga and Shulgin, Alexei. Helsinki: NIFCA, Lume, m-cult.
ISBN 9518955743.(9) Image source: Kuivila, Ron (2004). "Open
Sources: Words, Circuits and the Notation-Realization Relation in the
Music of David Tudor", Leonardo Music Journal 14 pp 17-23.(10)
Raudive, Konstantns (1971). Breakthrough, an Amazing Experiment in
Electronic Communication with the Dead. London: Colin Smythe, Ltd.
ISBN 0900675543