|
Symposium
Brett
Terry
Chaotic Aesthetics:
Electro-Acoustic Music and the Appropriation of Aesthetic
Mathematic Objects
Presented Friday May 10th at 5
pm
Electro-acoustic
music, born in the aftermath of the second world war, never
had any instrinsic developmental relationship to musical form,
though its sonological style has been closely bound to the
timbral and gestural idioms endemic to its underlying technological
basis. The emergence of mathtemical objects with highly aesthetic
properties of self-affinity, fractal dimensionality, and simple
iterative encodings of structural unpredictability has led
to a desire to explore such objects within the realm of electro-acoustic
music. This paper explores the uses and ramifications of these
appropriations.
In
order to understand the attractiveness of utilizing Chaos
in Electro-Acoustic Music, it is helpful to understand a basic
taxonomy of the objects of Chaos theory. I put forth a categorization
based on four major families : (I) Strange Attractors, (II)
Julia Sets, (III) Cellular Automata, and (IV) Classical Fractals.
In
characterizing the common features of these Chaotic objects
in so far as they are desirable for musical applicability,
I suggest the following basic list of attributes: Self-Similarity/Self-Affinity,
Iterated construction, Nonintegral fractal dimension, Structural
Randomness, Underlying "attractor", "Simple"
encoding of complexity.
A
brief (and necessarily incomplete) survey of some of the musical
uses of Chaos will shed more light on the attractiveness of
certain applications of Chaotic systems and illustrate some
of the musical parameters that lend themselves efficiently
to parameterization by these systems. These applications can
be subdivided into three broad categories: (I) Structural
Organization, (II) Timbral Construction, and (III) Sound Processing.
Studying
these applications of Chaos as a group, rather than individually,
highlights their approach to some of the common qualities
of Chaos elucidated previously. There seem to be strong practical,
conceptual, and metaphorical reasons to explain the attractiveness
of these objects. Algorithmic composition clearly always seeks
systems which produce interesting yet unpredictable output
and there would appear to be many more uses of chaos in this
area that remain to be explored. Many algorithmic or computer-assisted
approaches have focused on mapping the output of chaotic systems
to parameters. Granular synthesis seems to be the most popular
use for chaotic systems with regard to timbral synthesis,
apply many possibilities with physical modeling and timbral
transmogrification have yet to be explored.
Brett
Terry - Biography
Brett Terry is a composer and computer scientist living in
Mystic, Connecticut. In addition to many choral compositions,
his electro- acoustic compositions are often performed at
conferences. Object-oriented audio synthesis, information
retrieval, and interface/information design are among his
research interests. He is the Technology Evangelist at the
Burnett Group in New York City, and is an editor of Computer
Music Journal.
|
