LONDON — As the audience at Cafe OTO settled
down to hear Neil Luck introduce his ambitious new piece, “Whatever Weighs You
Down,” bemused smiles flickered across many faces.
اضافة اعلان
The evening’s performances had already featured an
intriguing selection of musical
technologies, including sensor gloves,
text-to-speech software, and recordings of bird song processed by artificial
intelligence.
So when Luck launched into a low-tech étude,
raucously inflating a balloon while gasping into a microphone, audience members
could not help but laugh.
A dark humor punctuated “Whatever Weighs You Down,”
a bizarre, violent 40-minute work for piano, video, electronics, and sensor
gloves. It was the centerpiece of an evening that presented works made with
Cyborg Soloists, a multiyear, 1.4 million-pound ($1.6 million) project, led by
the pianist and composer Zubin Kanga, to advance interdisciplinary music-making
through new interactions with technology.
“Whatever Weighs You Down” is one of several
experimental works that recently premiered in Britain and Ireland that show the
rich musical possibilities when disability and neurodiversity are incorporated
into the creative process. These works also point to newly developed
technologies as both malleable tools for expressing diverse perspectives in
experimental music, and as potentially enabling greater accessibility to
composition, which traditionally has been a rarefied and exclusive world.
In recent years, increasing attention has been paid,
particularly in Britain, to making classical music more accessible. This
includes the widespread adoption of what are called relaxed performances in
concert halls — where audiences are allowed to make noise — and the creation of
professional ensembles for disabled musicians, such as BSO Resound, part of the
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, and the Paraorchestra, which is based in
Bristol, England.
For “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Luck worked closely
with the Deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura, who in the piece appeared
on a video screen and used sign language to retell her own dreams about
falling, one of the main themes of Luck’s work.
For me, technology means incorporating a film, visuals, or a general feeling of something else; we’re adding more sensory experiences for an audience.
In “Whatever Weighs You Down,” Minamimura wanted to
express a deaf perspective on sound and music.
“I have hearing loss, but I can feel things — I can
feel sounds,” she said in a recent video interview via an interpreter.
Workshops to develop the piece involved Minamimura
responding to vibrations wherever she could find them: pressing her full body
against the lid of the piano, feeling the underside of the soundboard and even
biting the strings of certain instruments.
As the performance of “Whatever Weighs You Down”
drew to a close, it reached a striking semi-synthesis. On-screen, Minamimura’s
gestures mirrored Kanga’s onstage hand movements. Both performers provided a
kind of accompaniment for each other, experienced in entirely different ways by
audience members, depending on their relationship to sound.
“Traditionally, music is just heard in an auditory
sense,” Minamimura said, “but, of course, we can see someone playing a piano or
playing a flute. For me, technology means incorporating a film, visuals, or a
general feeling of something else; we’re adding more sensory experiences for an
audience.”
Creating music that incorporates multisensory
experience is just one of the areas that Cyborg Soloists explores. The project,
supported by the government-funded
UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders
Fellowship, also involves new types of visual interactions, including virtual
reality, the creation of new digital instruments, and the use of artificial
intelligence and machine learning.
The next frontier for Kanga, he said, is finding a
way to translate brain activity from electroencephalogram caps into sound. And
in Ireland, a recent installation explores a similar process.
Visual artist Owen Boss described the first time he
heard the sonic reproduction of a brain mid-seizure as “an absolutely
extraordinary moment,” describing “a very low-end bass sound, kind of rhythmic,
it just emerges in these sweeping, intense bass noises that whoosh in and
whoosh out.”
The sound files were created by Mark Cunningham, a
professor of neurophysiology of epilepsy at Trinity College Dublin, who
analyzed slivers of removed brain tissue that had been put through a process
that simulated a seizure. He translated the analysis into binary code, and then
into sound. Inspired by those deeply jarring reverberations and his family’s
own experience, Boss then began piecing together an installation, “The
Wernicke’s Area,” which is named after the part of the brain involved in
understanding speech. The installation is showing at the Irish Museum of Modern
Art.
In 2014, Boss’s wife, Debbie Boss, had surgery to
remove a brain tumor. The procedure was successful — the tumor was removed from
her brain’s Wernicke’s area — but there were some side effects: The former
soprano developed epilepsy and also now finds communication challenging.
With his wife’s permission, Boss and composer Emily
Howard created what he calls “a portrait of Debbie,” a multimedia work
including details from the diaries she kept of her seizures, images of her
brain, warped snippets of her favorite Handel aria and a variety of
electroacoustic music drawn from data produced by artificially induced brain
seizures.
For all involved, the first performance of “The
Wernicke’s Area” was an extremely moving experience, particularly for the Boss
family. Debbie Boss became emotional “watching people do what she couldn’t do
anymore,” her husband said. Yet, because she wasn’t directly involved in
shaping the work, there’s a slight distance to “The Wernicke’s Area.”
Lived experience plays a large role in the work of
composer Megan Steinberg, which places neurodiverse and disabled practitioners
in all aspects of the creative process.
Steinberg’s “Outlier II,” created with the
Distractfold ensemble and artists Elle Chante and Luke Moore, explores, in
musical form, how artificial intelligence, or AI, can exclude disabled people
by working off a generalized understanding of human experience. “Outlier II”
involves an AI-generated melody that generalizes over time, gradually losing
nuance before being disrupted by a series of chance-based improvisations.
Projects like these also produce music that is more
representative of the breadth of human experience, according to Cat McGill, the
head of program development at Drake Music, an arts charity focused on music,
disability and technology. These projects “force us to challenge our thinking
around disability and neurodiversity”, she wrote in an email interview.
“If we approach a situation with the assumption that each
individual has a unique contribution to make, rather than feeling like we need
to fix them,” McGill added, “we embrace the differences as a natural part of
humanity.”
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