beamfoundation.org Blog

We’ve started a brand new collaboration / friendship with our neighbors, the Stupid Fun Club. The Club builds robots for fun and profit, and when you are at their studio it’s hard to know what kind of metallic friends you might make. (”Knifey”, however, did not want to play.)

Our best friend thus far is MoonBot, whom we are teaching to dance along with our ensemble. A hostage negotiation robot by trade, MoonBot was equally as adept with TCP/IP negotiations. With any amount of luck, she’ll be talking to MACIAS about us soon.

Right now most of our problems are with how we should best link MoonBot’s movements to the music from the Trio. It is exciting to be in a place where the requisite technology becomes transparent and you can resume thinking about artistic issues. The best ideas so far are to teach it “steps”, and then to trigger these, perhaps with scaling and other dynamic factors, with the instruments in the ensemble.

We also plan to teach MoonBot to play along a bit, and we are outfitting her with bells so that she can be a full fledged ensemble member.
Here is the side of my head, Keith, and in the lower right corner, MoonBot.

Visit the Stupid Fun Club at http://www.stupidfunclub.com.

Before technology, music was always interactive. Pitches would wander to make a point and rubato was as natural as pausing before the punch line.  Technology has altered how we play and listen. As a new  technology enters common use two things can happen. One- adopters work around the weaknesses and change what they are doing. This may get us through a transition but leave us in a QWERTY world of compromise. Or users can make demands that are inspired by a strong ideal or commitment and the technology will evolve to a higher standard.

 
In Mark Katz’s “Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music” there is a chapter devoted to a fundamental change in violin technique that occurred in the early 1900s. One recording made in 1903 showed the renowned violinist Joseph Joachim using vibrato as an accent on a selected few notes in a given phrase. This was typical. Around the same time Fritz Kreisler started using vibrato pretty much constantly. Within 20 years almost all violinists were playing like Kreisler. Was it mere imitation? Katz makes a strong case that vibrato made the violin sound better on the early recordings by covering problems of wow and flutter as well as any permanent record of bad intonation. Players altered their style because of technology. Now it takes the psycho threat of a Bernard Herrmann to make string players stop it.

 
Technology in music performance has made us more rigid, more careful. I believe this is merely a lack of refinement and development. During its development, if certain notes on a piano were known to break more often most players would back off. But a few were demanding. I just ask that. We be a lot more demanding of technology and keep banging on the parts that break or hurt or don’t work.