Leonardo Music Journal | Page 5 | Leonardo/ISASTwith Arizona State University

Leonardo Music Journal

LMJ29 - Sound Appropriation and Musical Borrowing as a Compositional Tool in New Electroacoustic Music

This text presents a compact historical survey of musical borrowing and sound appropriation from medieval chant through the latest digital experiments outside popular music involving extensive use of sampling. It then describes two artistic research projects consisting of a series of pieces that digitally reimagine selected works from the classical music repertoire, including thoughts about the contemporary relevance of giving new life to classical music through the perspective of new media.

LMJ29 - Enacting Sonic-Cyborg Performance through the Hybrid Body in Teka-Mori and Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?

In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway explores implications of the increasing hybridization of humans and machines. While society has long been concerned with the encroachment of technology onto human activity, Haraway challenges this concern, suggesting instead a kinship between organism and machine, a hybrid body. A sonic-cyborg performance realizes this understanding of the human-machine hybrid through movement and sound, incorporating a “kinesonic” approach to composition and an exploration of “mechatronic” expression.

LMJ29 - The Rhythmotron

This paper describes the Rhythmotron: a percussion-centered robotic orchestrion, commissioned for the CoLABS festival in Sydney in 2017. The authors describe how they electronically reimagined the mechanical components of a cylinder piano by using a variant of the XronoMorph software, and they consider the synergy between algorithmically generated rhythms in a digital environment alongside its analogous mechanical counterpart.

LMJ29 - Application of Musical Computing to Creating a Dynamic Reconfigurable Multilayered Chamber Orchestra Composition

With increasing virtualization and the recognition that today’s virtual computers are faster than hardware computers of 10 years ago, modes of computation are now limited only by the imagination. Pulsed Melodic Affective Processing (PMAP) is an unconventional computation protocol that makes affective computation more human-friendly by making it audible. Data sounds like the emotion it carries. PMAP has been demonstrated in nonmusical applications, e.g. quantum computer entanglement and stock market trading.

LMJ29 - The Loom Machines of Boott Mill (Lowell): A Composition from the New England Soundscape Project

The author reports on the development of an original piece, Boott Mill (Lowell), in which he takes field recordings of loom machines from the Boott Mill Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts, and uses the recordings as the foundation for a fully realized composition featuring percussion, strings, keyboards and assorted musical textures.

LMJ29 - The Musical Geometry of Genes: Generating Rhythms from DNA

DNA encodes all sorts of information that makes us human, but, aside from encoding genes, could DNA also encode for a mapping of musical rhythms in a very abstract way? This project sought to generate rhythms out of DNA and compose a musical piece out of a gene’s rhythmic sequence. Computational rules inspired by geometric analyses of rhythms guided the mapping of DNA’s molecular structure into rhythmic timelines and melodic scales; these basic structures were then used to compose a song according to the sickle cell gene DNA sequence.

LMJ29 - A Computational System for Violin: Synthesis and Dissolution in Windowless

This article provides an overview of a real-time, hybrid computational system for the violin, Windowless. The system uses a custom sensor glove, the alto.glove, to track the violinist’s movements and drive a panoply of unique digital sound processing effects. The author describes the operations of the system in terms of a broad notion of synthesis, consistency, microintervallic motions and molecular operations.