Paper Reading #6: Becoming-Sound: Affect and Assemblage in Improvisational Digital Music Making

Reference Information

Ben Swift. "Becoming Sound: Affect and Assemblage in Improvisational Digital Music Making." Australian National University, 05 May 2012. Web. 10 Sept. 2012.

Authors

Ben Swift- Studies at the Australian National University in the Research School of Computer Science Department.

Article Summary

 

Photo Credit: Becoming Sound Article

In this article, the author talked about the importance of 'affect', the process which something affects one another, has on the assemblage of the people 'coming together' to create music. To demonstrate this, the user talked about an application developed for the iOS called the Discotheque musical collaboration device. The paper then talked about how it was important to both visualize the gestures made on the device as well as being able to collaborate successfully between each other. Although the author talked about the process the users used when 'jamming' with each other, he mainly focused on the elements that 'affected' each user.

In conclusion, the author found  that it is important to understand the history of the devices that are used to innovate music collaboration as well as the importance of music itself. He talked about the ability music had to make the users themselves want to create the gestures needed to make music. He talked about music being a form of assemblage and the ability of that assemblage being able to create and become a part of another assemblage as well. All those parts worked together to form one single form.

Related Work

There were a few related pieces of work on this subject. They are listed below.

• Clay Spinuzzi. Describing Assemblages: Genre Sets, Systems, and Ecologies
• Jim Tuedio, The culture of Chaotic Synergy in Grateful Dead Improvisation and Music
• House of Blues Foundation, Creating an Assemblage
• Jeremy Wade Morris, Understanding the Digital Music Commodity
• Georgina Born, Distributed Creativity: What do we mean by it?
• William Murray Allison, The impact of improvisational musics on the creative processes
• Guderian Lois, Effects of Applied Music Composition and Improvisation Assignments
• Alvin Curran, Musicand Basics. What is improvisation? The Art of Becoming Sound
• Mercedes Pavlicevic, Improvisation in Music Therapy: Human Communication in Sound
• Andrew Stewart, Everybody to the power of one, for soprano T-stick

Most of the above papers talked about the ability assemblage has on the creation of music. It talks about being able to combine different things together (either humans or pieces of technology) to create one single body that can be used for creative entertainment. I enjoyed the topics related more than this piece of work. Assemblage is perceived to me as more important than the effects of affect.

Evaluation

The author in this article talked about the theory assemblage and affect had when creating digital work. The tests done and the data gathered were shown to us in a qualitative state as well as subjective and objective forms. Some areas of his study were fathered in a subjectively biased manner and the end result of the users creation was very objective. That data was qualitative as well. The data was gathered when asking the users to record their video and music and streaming it to the server.

Discussion

The subject talked about was a little difficult to understand, but I eventually understood the main idea in the end. I did not agree with his initial theory that designer's "capacity to build interactive systems continues to outpace our capacity to understand what we have built". I think he is misinterpreting the ability of the devices we create being able to be innovated for other purposes. I think he is taking a look into assemblage too deep and overlooks the aspect of creativity itself. The more time spent in analyzing the affect and assembly correlation, the less room there is for creativity. Creativity to me is the ability to express one self freely without the constraints this experiment put on the users.