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Breaking the Loop PDF

Andrew Garton

Master of Arts Research
Centre for Animation and Interactive Media
Faculty of Art, Design and Communication
RMIT University

6 December 1997

The record industry maintains its status in the global economy and its income streams by way of repetition. Repetition is the key to generating an audience of consumers for its product: music. Audiences dutifully purchase a representation of the music, which they then listen to repetatively in their homes, their cars, walkmans, bathrooms... anywhere one could conceivably place a speaker.

The record industry maintains its status in the global economy and its income streams by way of repetition. Music that is played over and over again so much that it creates its own audience that in turn purchases its representation to listen to it over and over again in their homes, their car-s, walkmans, bathrooms... anywhere one can think of to place a speaker.That's a loop: music that repeats itself in the lives of people, who in turn purchase what they hear, little knowing how much control the industries that stimulate and maintain this cycle exert, on listening.

Breaking the Loop awakens us to the relationship between the consumer (listener) and consumed (composer/musician), and to a strategy exploring the emergent public space of the Internet for the delivery of artist-owned and artist-deployed works of sound.Imagine for a moment music that doesn't repeat, that is never heard the same way twice, that is somehow fresh every time it is performed. A new music genre, self-evolving and at present, difficult to commodify, is emerging.

Generative music is often driven by mathematical formulae to produce variation, ongoing evolution and development of sounds. Techniques for creating generative music are not new to composers, but ready access to the technology to produce and publish it widely is not.

Late 1995, a small UK-based software development company, SSEYO, released a suite of generative music software. The authoring tool, KoanPro, is essentially an interface to SSEYO's algorithms, offering over 250 parameters for altering the way sounds and musical arrangements can mutate over time.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's, The Listening Room, commissioned one such composition. Between August and September 1997, over a period of 60,480 minutes, Sensorium Connect had recomposed itself in real-time via the Internet. Created in collaboration with performance artist, Stelarc, Sensorium Connect provided visitors to its Web site with an ever-changing sound space, an on-going exploration of non-repetitive creative possibilities.

This performance/paper has been informed by and references the seminal texts, Noise (Attali, J 1997) and Art and Revolution (Berger, J 1969). It explores the process towards the generative streaming composition, Sensorium Connect,. commissioned by The Listening Room (ABC, August 1997).

It was presented at Recycling the Future, 10 Years of ORF/KunstRadio, Vienna, December 1997.KunstRadio, ORF Centre, Vienna, December 1997.


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