In a 1963 Science article, pioneering researcher and father of computer music Max Mathews outlined the basic principles through which the computers of the time could potentially be identified as musical instruments: ‘In addition to generating sound, the computer can also function as a machine for composing music. It can either compose pieces based entirely on random numbers generated by itself or it can cooperate with a human composer. It can play its own compositions’ (1963: 553). These principles are presented in the hopeful and somewhat outdated tone characteristic of the early phases of the discovery of the creative potential of computers. Nevertheless, they prefigure the developments that unfolded in the following four decades during which both commercial and art music gradually adopted computers as key – if not central – units in chains of musical designs.
As Bob Ostertag points out in a critique of institutionalised computer music: ‘There is almost no recorded music that does not involve the use of a computer somehow or other’ (n.d.). This is a point that few would argue against given the incidence of techno, hip-hop, trip-hop, trance, to name but a few musical movements. As Ostertag states, ‘we have genre upon sub-genre upon micro-genre of music which is based almost entirely upon, and impossible to conceive of without, the absolute regularity of tempo computers are capable of producing’ (n.d.).
In an almost trivial sense, it is indeed difficult not to conceive of computers as musical instruments in the context of the production of the electronic music genres and subgenres aforementioned. For a vast number of electronic musicians, the computer represents a central go-to toolkit for conceptualising, making, arranging and distributing music. Furthermore, within the realms of commercial popular music, both film music composer Hans Zimmer (Berkman Reference Berkman2013) and pop producer/musician Will.i.am have declared to the mainstream press that the computer is their instrument (Graham 2012).
Outside of popular music, the works of artists Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten; Nikolai and DJ Spooky, which emphasise ‘digital detritus – glitches, clicks and buzzes’ (Licht Reference Licht2009: 6), point to the ever more paramount presence of digital technology in the realm of sound art. In the context of sound installations, the easily programmable computer appears to be especially suited to the creation and performance of pieces that require extended time durations, repeatability and spatialisation. To some extent, it is possible to argue that the kind of ‘alignment between sound art and electronica’ (Licht Reference Licht2009: 6), perceived by Licht as concomitant to the development of late 1970s ambient music, was greatly facilitated by the intrinsic modularity of computers and the expanded qualities of repetition and spatial distribution that it afforded.
However, musicians and sound artists have identified limitations associated with the ‘metaphoric’ organisation that characterises the closed designs of many hard- and software structures found up to this point in musical practices. Some of those critiques have – perhaps surprisingly – surfaced from the mainstream music industry. For instance, Thomas Bangalter, from electronic dance music group Daft Punk, speaks of hardware and software dedicated to music production as turnkey systems: ‘They come with preset banks and sounds. They’re not inviting you to challenge the systems themselves, or giving you the ability to showcase your personality, individuality’ (Mason Reference Mason2013). In this sense, while Mathews claimed that: ‘There are no theoretical limitations to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds, in contrast to the performance of ordinary instruments’ (p. 553), it appears that such limitations have indeed been imposed by some music hardware and software developers.
In a wide range of sonic practices ranging from popular music to sound art, the computer has long been conceived as the beginning and end-point in the creative process. It has most obviously been used for sound processing at various stages of the compositional process, and for converting every analog and digital input resulting from performances into a final musical composition. Furthermore, the computer has increasingly become the medium by which all the processes in the chain of musical creation are brought together from recording, producing and arranging, to the facilitation of collaborative exchanges between musical actors, as well as aiding distribution and promotion to audiences. As a result, much of the conceptualisation dealing with computer music revolves around a fallacy that the role of the computer, in the context of live or studio performances, is essentially that of a ‘black box’.Footnote 1
1. SOFTWARE AS INSTRUMENT – BEYOND MAX/MSP
Recent scholarship considers computers as ‘tools’ for musical compositions (Jones, Brown and d’Inverno Reference Jones, Brown and d’ Inverno2012). Along similar lines, in their article ‘Emerging Materiality: Reflections on Creative Use of Software in Electronic Music Composition’ (2009), Olav W. Bertelsen, Morten Breinbjerg and Søren Pold call for a renewed understanding of the nature and role of the material within creative ecosystems dominated by computer units and digital aesthetics, in addition to presenting an implicit challenge to the above fallacy. Following interviews with artists about their compositional process using computers, the authors point out that the relationship between the composer and the Max MSP software can be compared to an ‘instrument-musician relationship’ in at least four ways: (1) the software can be played in real-time (either through entering code or using a graphical user interface); (2) it has a definite sound signature through the programmability of specific algorithms; (3) it is, in and of itself, the subject of interest prior to and during the compositional process; and (4) it requires the building of disciplined skills in order to benefit from and find ways to go beyond the software’s initial intended potential (Bertelsen et al. Reference Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold2009: 199). Most importantly to the authors, different examples of computer music software share a form of metaphoric design, in which they present the ‘aspect of’ and ‘function like’ pre-existing musical instruments as a means to achieve transparency and increase user-friendliness. By contrast, it is because Max/MSP presents a metonymic quality in its design – that is to say, it ‘opens up new combinations and associative relations between material levels and between chains of mediations’ (Bertelsen et al. Reference Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold2009: 201) – that it reaches the same potential for creativity as other non-digital instruments.
What follows is an extension of this perspective on musical software design through an examination of various types of creative musical applications (apps). Following Miller and Matviyenko’s broader theorisations of mobile applications, we consider apps as a particularly relevant instance of the ways in which software architectures deploy control and power over creative sonic practices, foreground the potential to extend, enhance human capacities (in reality or imagination), and (re)mediate various forms of instrumentality in creative practices (Miller and Matviyenko Reference Miller and Matviyenko2014). Thus, we focus upon the ways in which app-based software, in the form of sound apps, relate to the artist’s creative experiences and consider whether this is particularly revelatory of the status of computers as sound and music instruments.
1.1. Applications as creative musical digital tools
The scope of creative musical apps is currently growing broader by the day. In this article, we focus on creative musical software in the form of applications that are used by artists to manipulate sound in order to create music or sound art.Footnote 2 They range from formulaic software in which creative experiences are pre-crafted and leave little room for the user to experiment via the app’s interface, to programming languages that enable users to create their own musical instruments or controllers through direct line coding. Other kinds of apps also provide highly modular, directly manipulable interfaces that enable connections between different software or plug-ins and an infinite recombination of different sounds.
More specifically, the creative apps concerned with the creation of music and sound range from rudimentary smart phone apps to fully fledged Digital Audio Workstations (DAW). In terms of user experience, these apps vary between specialised pieces of software with well-developed Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and creative programming languages designed for musicians and sound artists.
DAWs are designed specifically to oversee the production of complete pieces of music. Garage Band – well known for bringing an approachable (if formulaic) music production toolkit to a large base of amateur or semi-professional users – has a single-purpose design and runs upon a semi-closed platform (Anderson and Wolff Reference Anderson and Wolff2010). There also exists specialised software devoted to sound processing (Max/MSP, Pure Data), and built-instruments such as Csound. Despite their differing intended uses, this specialised software can also be used to compose full pieces of music. Similarly, programs such as Usine, Plogue Bidule and Audiomulch – all of which were originally designed as modular audio software to chain effects or build layers of sounds – are used by artists to produce entire works.
Some of these software – Ableton Live, Logic, Pro Tools and Reason, to name but a few – feature well-developed GUIs that mimic the layout of an analog recording studio, featuring individual track monitoring and mixing boards. Such software implicitly subscribes to the logic of direct manipulation as they employ symbolic icons reminiscent of analog hardware that is manipulated by the artist. Max/MSP, Pure Data, plogue Bidule and Audiomulch each use a visual programming language and, as such, are linked to a paradigm of signal flow which emerged with the first modular synthesisers. In such a paradigm, the electric signal circulates and is potentialised through integrated circuits, potentiometers, operational amplifiers and a system of high pass and low pass filters. According to practitioners, visual programming languages are adapted for rapid prototyping but do not handle complexity well.Footnote 3
Other software, much like creative line-coding programming languages, revolve around minimal GUIs. SuperCollider, Csound and the real-time programming language Chuck are amongst the most commonly used of these programs. As a reaction to a perceived illusion of control found in the interfaces of standard DAWs, these line-coding languages, which are based on C, C++ and Java, aim to give musicians and sound artists the maximum amount of control over the computer. In contrast to visual programming languages such as Max/MSP, the algorithmic logic, characteristic of line-coded languages, better enables the performance of operations to affect several parts of the algorithm simultaneously.
While Pro Tools has long been considered the standard for professional music and sound productions in the desktop environment, an increasing number of apps for touchscreen and mobile technologies are being aimed at similar high-end and professional contexts. For instance, Auria offers users the possibility to record 24 tracks simultaneously and play 48 tracks at 96 kHz simultaneously with full parameter automation, thus allowing real-time recording of parameter changes. Other apps emulate the sound of analog (i.e. Korg’s and Moog’s) or electronic synthesisers (such as Thor) and include drum machines and sequencers that allow for the composition and the mixing of short sequences of sound, much like their hardware predecessors.
Also worthy of note is the trend to adapt older, ‘micro composing’ software applications often associated with early techno music. While they no longer run on current desktop operating systems, they are still being adapted to run on mobile operating systems. In this vein, Propeller Head’s app Rebirth running on Apple iOS allows for the emulation of iconic Rolland programmable drum machines, such as the TR-808, the TB-303 and the TR-909.Footnote 4
Furthermore, some apps turn tablets into controllers for existing desktop DAW or other software. For instance, the DAW Ableton Live can be controlled through a tablet via the Touchable app. Many DJs state that this offers far greater control than dedicated midi controller hardware, such as Push, because the digital interface enables modularity (switching between a large number of control displays) in ways previously unattainable by physical controllers. Another controller app, Mira, enables the mirroring of the Max/MSP desktop interface, allowing even further interface customisation.
Increasingly, applications are offering more open and modular designs, stepping outside the logic of direct manipulation interfaces. Touch OSC, used by many media or audiovisual artists for interactive installations, helps users to connect external devices (such as screens, lights and loud speakers) to their DAW, and to set up a customised user interface on multiple tablets in order to control interactions between their DAW and chosen external devices.
The currently in-development software, cSpectral, allows users to build their own instruments, and to program them from scratch through the use of line coding tools.Footnote 5 This app is based on Csound, a piece of software with direct lineage to one of the earliest digital audio synthesisers to run on computers. Exemplifying a growing impulse to bridge art practices and software design, some apps developed by artists can be used as tools for creative coding. For example, C4 enables users to create their own musical apps through a dedicated coding language. As Travis Kirton explains:
C4 is a new creative coding framework that focuses on interactivity, visualisation and the relationship between various media. Designed for iOS, C4 makes it extremely easy to create apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod devices. Initially developed as a platform for quickly creating interactive artistic works, C4 is developing into a more broad-based language for other areas such as music and data visualisation. (Kirton Reference Kirton2013: 411)
While hard-line coding has been mostly reserved for desktop interfaces, the example of C4 demonstrates a current trend in the adaptation of complex coding practices to touchscreen terminals.
The diversity of current musical app design, functions and producers, enable greater variety in the degree and kind of control that can be exerted on music and sound-generating processes. But if these apps enable a further democratisation of sound-making processes in terms of cost and accessibility, and, at least partially, through metaphoric design, the examples of the above apps indicate that this democratisation is not always at the cost of creative possibilities, technical fidelity or modularity – all typically being associated with desktop software as opposed to smartphone apps.Footnote 6
Here, it is useful to return to Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold’s distinction between metaphors and metonomies as co-existing conceptual tropes as a basis to understand creative interactions between sound practioners and their instruments in the digital era. For the three authors, ‘metaphor is a trope based on similarity between domain and object’ and ‘metonymy is based on contiguity and association’ (Bertelsen et al. Reference Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold2009: 201). More metaphoric software design – through transparency and similarities (i.e. a digital synthesis program looks and essentially functions like a representation of a keyboard) – tends to constrain potentially innovative reconfigurations between performers and their digital tools. By contrast, more metonymic functions – found, for example, in the Max/MSP software – opens up opportunities to ‘play’ with the digital instruments (in Max/MSP, users can build their own interface) and embracing uses unintended by the digital instrument’s programmers as forms of creative experimentation.
The examples of recent sound app designs discussed above make clear a degree of metaphoric design in the designers’ intentions embedded within the software, but also outline metonymic potentialities afforded by different materialities the software. However, if we hypothesise that a software’s potentialities are limited by the designers’ intentions, we run the risk of running into what Don Ihdes calls ‘the designer’s fallacy’. Ihdes’s critique of this fallacy emphasises a complex material and cultural study of technology design where unintended uses and effectivities are taken into consideration in order to account for the creative potential of technological devices (Ihdes Reference Ihde2008). Following Ihdes’s analysis, we do not see a metonymic function in the design of the apps discussed here. Rather, we contend that metonymy is to be found in those potentialities inherent in the specific conditions and contexts of creation which increase the range of technological devices and spaces open to the artist for experimentation.
Jonny Greenwood, from the British band Radiohead, expresses a particularly common perspective on the relationship between musicians, or sound artists, with digital tools. While speaking about the software/visual coding language Max/MSP, which was used in the making of their album Kid A, Greenwood, implicitly hinting at the kind of metaphoric and metonymic affordances described above, outlines the limitations associated with the range of software and the aforementioned sound apps:
I’ve always felt uncomfortable having to use other people’s software to make music. However limitless sequencers, audio editors, and plug-ins claim to be, you still find yourself being forced, however subtly, to work in certain ways. My copy of Emagic Logic insists on looping the first four bars whenever it can (although it’s good software in lots of ways) … With Max/MSP I finally got to think about sound and MIDI, and their manipulation, in a much purer way … I felt that all direct contact with computers had been taken away from me, until I found Max/MSP. (Quoted in Collins Reference Collins2004)
This quote shows the kind of ‘direct-access to sound’ experience sought by artists in search of the analog rapport with their instruments, which points to the the kind of new material potentiality identified by Ihdes. In the case of creative music apps and software, the user interface tends to limit the potentialities of the algorithm to a digital and imperfect re-enactment of function, which is usually attached to a corresponding analog instrument.Footnote 7 By contrast, the paradigm of signal processing from the synthesiser is redeployed in the diagrammatic logic of Max/MSP. This signal processing logic, re-enacted through the digital, enables specifically the kinds of increased combinations and associations between the different chains of mediations characteristic of Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold’s metonymic software and app design. This points towards the re-evaluation of computers as musical instruments. Whereas metonymy can be considered as both ‘a design strategy and a user interpretation’ (Bertelsen et al. Reference Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold2009: 202), and as such implies some sense-making process, the signal processing logic refers to the very materiality of the mediations conducting the signal. The effectivities resulting from a ‘signal processing’ type of event can be described as instrumental: the signal transducing a given material effectuates a sound according to its peculiar material configuration. Conversely, the effectivities attached to a metonymic process can be described in compositional terms by putting at the forefront the intention of the human using the instrument to effectuate a given sound. In this sense, the signal processing logic embedded metonymically and re-enacted in softwares such as Max/MSP, contradicts the logic of the computer as a black box and opens up the possibility both to innovative connections between digital software of varied scopes and logics and to analogical practice with computer hardware.
2. COMPUTER AS INSTRUMENT: PLAYING WITH HARDWARE IN COMPUTER-BASED MUSIC (THE BREAKING-DOWN OF THE BLACK BOX)
In the previous section we agreed with and expanded upon Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold’s notion that through specific metonymic design, software such as Max/MSP and Native Instruments among others can contribute a sense of analogised instrumentality to the digital palette of the music composer.
A particular logic of instrumentality, which echoes analog conceptions of the place and role of musical instruments in creative processes, is not limited to the specific metonymic functions of software products but is also found in the way the computer – as material hardware – is utilised in music and sound art practices. As specific instances, we point to a variety of musicians and sound artists who have embraced this logic by placing computers alongside other instruments or effect units, and by taking apart, reconfiguring and sometimes destroying its hardware components, further exemplify the analog relationship between making music and computers.
2.1. ‘Part of the band’: computers in analog-digital creative practices
The past fifteen years have seen a greater integration between electronic and acoustic/analog elements in the electronic arts. Across practices ranging from electro-acoustic, sound art and popular music, artists are increasingly using computers as components of their practices in order to make music that defies strictly ‘analog’ or ‘computer-based’ music-making logics. Jonny Greenwood’s description of Radiohead’s Kid A recording sessions provides an example of those processes:
With our last record, there was no time for programming in the studio, so every patch had to be written and working before we started. We had a corner of the studio set up for Max/MSP stuff, and it was all done in real time as we recorded. Part of the band, rather than one person with a computer and four people watching, as tended to happen with previous records. It’s also becoming more and more important at our concerts.
(Quoted in Collins Reference Collins2004)
In his typification of the computer as ‘part of the band’, Greenwood clearly ascribes agency to the computer in the creative process, but only insofar as it is but one of the instruments being used by the band over the course of their studio performances. Parts of Greenwood’s statement pointing to the possibility to program in advance as well as to work in real time, confirm that the metonymic design of Max/MSP facilitates an analogised approach to creativity using computers.
The notion of greater interpenetration between non-digital and digital worlds of instrumentation is also apparent in the sound-art projects of Montreal-based artist Nicolas Bernier, who attempts ‘not to fall into creating either a completely “natural” or completely “digital” works’ (Bernier Reference Bernier2013). In his project frequencies (a), he used acoustic tuning forks as the primary sonic source – ‘because it produces a sound that is close to the pure sinewave, the very primitive sound used in electronic music composition.’ (Bernier Reference Bernier2013). These forks were rigged with contact microphones and automated in order to be subsequently organised and processed through Ableton Live and Max for Live (Bernier Reference Bernier2013). In this instance, the computer is being used alongside an acoustic instrument less to oversee the entire creative process, but rather as a processing tool to open up new possibilities of play with the tuning forks – much like a distortion pedal transforms the approach of the artist to their electric guitar.
Computers and digital processing are further used as supporting equipment amidst analog sound-generating instruments for other Montreal sound artists Hiss Tracts. While the members of this group are involved with the experimental rock and noise scenes of the city, their first album focused on exploring soundscape-based compositions and production. Using instruments such as electric guitars, oscillators and a large number of analog signals, Hiss Tracts foregrounds a process rooted in analog sources, free of programming and sound samples. As explicitly stated on the group’s webpage, digital tools are only brought in as part of their musical performances in order to enhance the analog palette at the disposal of the musicians: ‘Occasional deployments of digital signal processing remain firmly in the service of Hiss Tract’s overriding framework and commitment to analog sources and human’ (Constellation 2014).
In addition, one important dimension that unites the diversity of aesthetics and approaches embodied within such music and sound projects is a clear desire to incorporate analog and digital creative potential in novel ways while circumventing the limitations of computers as turnkey systems. In so doing, they do not negate the integrity of the computer as such – in the above instances, computers are used primarily as software-running machines – but transcend the black box logic through specific practices that cater to particular assemblages of analog and digital instrumentation, playing on their respective differential modulations.
2.2. Tearing down the machine
Another trend that seeks to avoid a totalising sense of digitalism within electronic arts emphasises a move away from the order of the screens, pixels and bits in order to focus on the materiality of hardware that makes up the larger computer structure. One such trend can be identified in John Richards’s ‘dirty electronics’ approach to building portable, DIY analog synthesisers. For Richards, as a concept, ‘Dirty electronics has to be a considered as a reaction to the vestiges of the digital world: the virtual, wireless, pseudo-modernist design, utilitarianism and seemingly endless possibilities’ (Richards Reference Richards2008: 26) and carries with it a greater sense of proximity to the electrical, and analog signals that form the basis of the larger organisms of digital aesthetics.
Now sold through the Mute record label, Richards’s instruments are clearly positioned within the contested notion of a post-digital aesthetic predicated upon a return to a tactile relationship to computing materials. If this relationship is based upon the creation of an analog sound, it is nevertheless influenced and informed by digital practice (Richards Reference Richards2008: 26). More specifically, as argued by Kim Cascone:
The ‘post-digital’ aesthetic was developed in part as a result of the immersive experience of working in environments suffused with digital technology: computer fans whirring, laser printers churning out documents, the sonification of user-interfaces, and the muffled noise of hard drives. But more specifically, it is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantisation noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music.
(Cascone Reference Cascone2000: 12–13)
More broadly, this suggests new arrangements where computers (or its stripped-down, sound-generating circuits) are characterised by a general process of decay, where each action irremediably exhausts a set of possibilities. In this creative process, computers are no longer an immutably ‘digital’ object but instead are an expression of what can be drawn from limited and diminishing resources. In this sense, it is in part the fallibility and the ‘mortality’ of digital hardware that contributes to its repositioning as only one of the links in the long chain of tools used by the artist.
Once ‘opened’ and tampered with, the computer black box is no longer seemingly totalising and immortal: it is broken down as the sum of ‘simpler’ decaying components immediately and physically acted upon by the musician or sound artist over the course of the creative process. This bastardisation of electronic devices, characteristic of circuit-bending and other practices acting directly on the hardware, can give rise to microchip cancers where instruments slowly decay. Reed Ghazala writes: ‘Let me just say that not all circuit-bent instruments are living instruments – that is, instruments that burn themselves out slowly, but faster than usual due to the bending process’ (Richards Reference Richards2008: 28). Ghazala continues: ‘The instrument grows a little older, moves a little closer to early demise, every time it is turned on’ (p. 28).
In relation to ‘dirty electronics’, Richards points out that: ‘process and performance [...] are inseparably bound’ (p. 28). It is specifically this notion of performance and the idea that a computer can be used as a real-time music-generating instrument as opposed to a post-production or recording tool, that carries over from explicitly analog practices such as the ‘dirty electronics’ synths, and brings them into the realm of overtly digital instrumentation.
3. ANALOGISING COMPUTER MUSIC: CREATIVITY, MATERIALITY AND MODULARITY/RESONANCE
In the previous sections, we suggested that there are two ways out of the ‘black box fallacy’. The first implies shifting our view of the machine in order to better integrate it as part of a technological ecology of performance. The second involves tearing apart the material structure of the computer in order to bend, twist or destroy its circuits as exemplified in the long tradition of hacking, modifying and circuit-bending analog computers.
The aim of this article has been neither to emphasise human agency over computer agency, nor to further criticise the misconceived trope of electronic practitioners as ‘motionless performers’. Instead, we have suggested the need to further assess the dynamics of live performance where computers can be seen as being ‘caught in the middle’, embedded in a chain of technologies, attitudes and performing. The increase in ‘360 deals’ between artists and music companies which seek to compensate for the fall in music recordings’ revenues seals the final product of music-making practices as a hybrid object, a product in a permanent ‘beta’ state, an ‘oeuvre à faire’ (Souriau, Reference Souriau1956, Reference Souriau2009) where the specific arrangement of music making and situated practices of performance are reconfigured through diverse contexts of play. This leads to the progressive concretisation of music-making and to the constitution of ‘technical objects’ (Simondon Reference Simondon1969) within which the computer is just one element.
Underlying the majority of analyses of sound practices is the assumption that transduction in music occurs in relation to the non-digital (organic/analog) qualities of the tools used: musicians’ bodies are transduced through curbs of electrical energy transiting through their bodies. Such assumptions derive, for instance, from the influence experimental psychologist and inventor of psychophysics Gustav Flechner has had on the practice of noise musicians who use their own bodies to transduce electrical current from their musical devices. Fechner postulates that bodily and conscious facts occur at the same level, and work on the circulation of currents through the body (Heidelberger Reference Heidelberger2004).Footnote 8 This view pits the analog instrument against digital tools and feeds the contemporary trend towards a return to a pure analog sound.Footnote 9 For the proponents of DIY electronics and physical computing, the only way to be innovative would be to design analog instruments from the ground up and to play them. But the analog use of the computer pertains to an innovative technical ecology of play where the computer is positioned as an instrument. On this view the computer remains a digital tool, but in practice it is used in an analog manner. In this regard, following Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold, we are ‘[c]onceptualizing software as music instruments, or rather software use as an “instrument-musician relationship”’ (Bertelsen et al. Reference Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold2009: 199).
In the first section of this article, we discussed one modality out of the black box fallacy. We have pointed out ways in which a number of mobile applications aimed at various stages of sound design and production emphasise the increasingly mobile and piecemeal position of computers within the constellation of creative agents. This is tantamount to using the computer as an instrument. Dirty electronics and, more broadly speaking, circuit-bending practices have been presented as a second modality to escape blackboxing. In these instances, the reduction of the range of possibility through the act of playing is predicated upon the material exhaustion of the electronics (condenser, etc.). In our view of the analogisation of the computer, the exhaustion of the range of possibilities is predicated upon the set-up itself, where unexpected effects arise from the specific arrangement of the computer as a single instrument in a general set-up implying other instruments and other live performers, an element in the chain of transductions entailed by the process of music performance.
Software and hardware firm Native Instruments curates the band Mostly Robots, which uses the musical interfaces produced by the company in an innovative way. Their performances require continual bodily input from the performer in order to produce sound, with minimal use of sequencers:
The visuals are generated in real time, triggered by note events, controller data and audio material from the players’ instruments and computers. This creates a fascinating display of responsive shapes and colors, allowing the audience to follow the virtuosity of each musician.
(Twinsoul Media 2010)
For Mostly Robots, this technique of live performance is linked to their use of digital tools as instruments:
We gave each member a different form or shape that rebuilds his instruments like his pad or his keyboard and these get triggered by the midi notes [...] We’re jamming, we don’t know what’s going to happen, if it was all click-synced it would be boring for us and the crowd, it needs to have the spirit of the live band. That was the idea, for everyone to jam live and not have a grid where everybody presses play. It’s about getting back to the instruments.
(Gayard Reference Gayard2012)
Among other possible interpretations, this could be seen as a reaction towards live shows where electronic musicians have little to no engagement with the computer, and where suspicions of the excessive use of pre-recorded arrangements and loops are high (Rogerson Reference Rogerson2008).
‘Push’, the new controller developed by Ableton for their flagship software Ableton Live, is marketed as a fully fledged instrument, even though it has to be connected to a computer to act as such. The difference between this particular analog use of the computer, and the kind of practices described by Jonny Greenwood, is that Greenwood designed his own patches and his own interface through Max/MSP. Both can yield innovative transduction in the act of playing while by-passing the kind of fetishisation of ‘computer physicality’ associated with hardware-based practices such as Dirty Electronics.
T. S. Barker argues that seeing mediation as a form of communication between two entities through a neutral channel is unsatisfactory:
As Heidegger points out, ‘Equipment – in accordance with its equipmentality – always is in terms of belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room.’ As such, and with mediation, the character of an entity is gained through its involvement in a system. (2012: 11)
In agreement with Barker, we view mediation as a process, one in which it is ‘not a flow between two pre-existing entities; rather, it is a process that re-presents or reconstitutes entities. In short, it is a generative process, setting the conditions for the becoming of entities’ (Barker Reference Barker2012: 12).
Our suggestion throughout this article has been to reconfigure the views on computers in music-making and sound art practices. In our view, the computer must be considered in a context of distributed agency (Barker Reference Barker2012: 15). This process is akin to Whitelaw’s transmaterial perspective where ‘a computer is a cluster of linked mechanisms and substrates; a machine for shifting patterns through time and space’ (2009). This perspective implies a study of ‘all the propagating matter and energy within something like a computer, as well as those between that system and the rest of the world’ (2009). In relation to the concept of transduction for digital tools, Whitelaw further argues that:
In analog media, transduction is overt (put the needle on the record...). But digital media are riddled with it too. Inputs and output devices all contain transducers: the keyboard transduces motion into voltage; the screen transforms voltage into light; the hard drive mediates between voltage and electromagnetic fields. A printer takes in patterns of voltage and emits patterns of ink on a page. Strictly transduction only refers to transformations between different energy types; here I want to extend it to talk about all the propagating matter and energy within something like a computer, as well as those between that system and the rest of the world. From this transmaterial perspective a computer is a cluster of linked mechanisms and substrates; a machine for shifting patterns through time and space.
(Whitelaw Reference Whitelaw2009)
Whitelaw views the digital computer as a material black box that physical computing takes apart and reconfigures. If the notion of the black box is to remain useful, it is only as reference to a set of attributes given to computers in the course of specific practices, rather than as a quality of the computer itself. Blackboxing can be deconstructed if we consider the computer as an instrument in an analog way.
In Simondon’s philosophy of technologies, the concept of transduction questioned the Kantian tradition putting forward modes of knowing where the separation of the subject and the object is predicated on a set of transcendental ideas foregrounding the conditions of knowledge. For Simondon, the act of knowing is a transductive process which does not occur at a distance but instead leads to the intermingling of the knower and the known (Combes and LaMarre Reference Combes and LaMarre2013: 6–11).
In its everyday, as well as in its sound-related usage, the computer is being increasingly considered as an instrument enabling a transparent cognition of the world. We suggest shifting this view in order to consider how digital technology leads to specific transducing processes in the context of music-making and sound art practices. In the examples presented here, the computer as instrument gains effectivities and is concretised through those transductions. Currently, practices of retro engineering – often paired with technological fetishism – provide musicians and sound artists with further pathways to the creation of their own instruments. In this context, the analogised use of digital technologies allows for different ways of playing on critical nodes through chains of mediations within complex and differentiated ecologies of digital creative tools.
