Prosthetic Light

The unusual title of this piece has to do with the heightened degree of computer involvement in its compositional process. We usually regard artistic inspiration as a ray of light coming from beyond, emanating from a higher level of existence. In that light, to use a machine in support of inspiration may mean, for the sake of an unusual verbal pairing, to give light a support, a prosthesis.

To create this piece, I wrote a software application capable of combining predefined musical elements and representing them in a MIDI musical structure for further use.

This was my first such experience. In order not to waste creative time and to validate the principle before implementation, I chose an elementary algorithm, namely weighted random selection. I gave the machine a subset of musical durations to use, a subset of musical intervals, and a set of musical events, essentially notes and rests. Every element within a subset had a weight, or probability of being chosen, established by the human operator when starting the program. I implemented the concepts of stepwise motion and movement by leap, and instructed the machine to use them as wisely as possible: to favor stepwise motion if too many leaps had been used, and vice versa. The rest was chaos.

As the only human element involved in the project, I contributed by producing a piece of unfinished music, somewhat minimalist and/or repetitive, yet still pleasant to listen to. For the same reasons, the machine is cold matter, without reason or feeling, it fell to me to combine the two fragments of score, mine and the machine’s, in such a way that they would form a unified musical composition with its own structure, sense and becoming, one that listeners of cultivated music might recognize as such and accept. Listeners who, however willing they may be to entertain sonic abstractions, remain human nevertheless.

The musical material can therefore be structured into mechanisms, the product of the machine, and improvisations, the product of the human being.

The mechanisms owe the authenticity they breathe to the fact that they were in fact produced mechanically. They evolve on predominantly hexatonic scales, tend toward isorhythm, and favor stepwise motion and ostinato. They take over almost entirely the percussion ensemble used in the piece, glockenspiel, xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, treating it as a monolithic, multi-timbral apparatus. By exception, the crotales escape this intrusion: they remain handled by the human being and explicitly, demonstratively mark or reinforce the boundaries between the sections of the work.

The improvisations are authentic as well, and for that very reason may provoke contradictory and intense reactions in the listener. In the desire to preserve its human character unaltered, the improvised music was left in its raw form and retains intact the hesitations of the musician creating on the spot. It bears witness to doubtful decisions taken in haste, in pursuit of the next implacable click of the metronome. In full disagreement with the machine, the human being gave rise to a tonal music, in F minor, which predictably follows its own course, with rare and brief modulations toward close and related tonalities. It is a music that easily passes for facile; it refuses evolution, development and variation, flows between the apparently impenetrable walls of a narrow ambitus, and repeats with melancholy and resignation the same undefined regret. The piano, the four horns and the English horn are enlisted to perform this music, instruments that do not take part at all in the musics of the machine.

The piece is organized as a suite, in five sections plus a coda, all performed without pause. The sections, 1 Machine, 2 Machine & Human, 3 Human & Machine, 4 Human, 5 Human & Machine, 6 Coda (Machine), trace the course of two divergent musical realities attempting a compromise. Surprisingly, it is the human who proves inflexible throughout the process, refusing to adopt thematic elements from the machine. The short-lived union becomes possible precisely because the machine concedes to apply the human being’s tonal harmony to its own rhythmic-melodic formulas, fashioning from them an unexpected yet favorable accompaniment. The denouement is the expected one: the two musics close themselves off once more, each within its own sonic universe, incommunicable and incomprehensible.