Leonardo Music Journal | Page 4 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo Music Journal

ISSN: 
1071-4391
Title: 

Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 30

December 2020

LMJ29 - Nam June Paik’s Unpublished Korean Article and His Interactive Musique Concrète Projects

Nam June Paik was a pioneering creator of interactive sound art before he became a cult figure in the field of video art. While Paik gradually developed interactive sound art in West Germany, he wrote several articles about contemporary music in Europe. Specifically, a musique concrète article for Korean readers is significant as a seed of his interactive projects.

LMJ29 - Flow Vertical: Composing and Improvising Original Music Inspired by Bodily Sound Vibrations

This text analyzes the process of composing and improvising the musical experiment Flow Vertical. This artistic exploration for chamber orchestra responds to a theory of biosignals, incorporating a putative sonic mapping of “inaudible” sound vibration of the author’s biofield as understood to be measured by an SCIO device. The interpretation and representation of measured frequencies influenced the creation of an “assemblage,” the system of interconnected human and nonhuman agents within the piece.

LMJ29 - Summerland: Exploring the Intersection of Spiritualism and Technology at the Dawn of the Electrical Age

The author describes Summerland, a generative installation for 24 computer-controlled telegraph sounders. This work uses texts from Samuel F.B. Morse and his contemporary, the Spiritualist medium Kate Fox, as source material, driving the sounders through both linguistic and spectral encoding of their words.

LMJ29 - Approaches to Composition in Visual Music: An Artist’s Reflection on Three Original Pieces

This article discusses the author’s visual music compositional practice in the context of similar work in this field. It specifically examines three pieces created between 2015 and 2017 that fused digital animation techniques with electronic sound. This approach contrasted with the author’s earlier compositions, which featured electroacoustic music and video concrète.

LMJ29 - 3D Notations and the Immersive Score

The author discusses his use of generative three-dimensional notations for representing musical forms. Several key works, programmed in the Max/OpenGL platform, are described in detail, and the author discusses current development with Microsoft’s HoloLens. The author argues that such immersive technology promotes a physical engagement with the score in which the work is an emergent property of an open-ended play.

LMJ29 - Hyperreal Instruments: Bridging VR and Digital Fabrication to Facilitate New Forms of Musical Expression

Virtual Reality (VR) and digital fabrication technologies today are ushering in a new wave of opportunities in instrument design; the marriage of these two domains, seemingly at odds with each other, can bring impossible instruments to life. In this article, the authors first sample such instruments throughout history. The authors also look at how technology has facilitated the materialization of impossible instruments from the twentieth century on.