A collaboration between me and my machine — translating a field recording made on a journey through the Paris Metro (Line 7 Place D’Italie to Pont Marie, March 8) into midi-generated harmonies. I made the field recording, and chose the instrument, set the frame. The machine chose the notes. I am uneasy with the ease, but I also like the sound of the results. What is it to share creative credit with the machine?
I am always using the machine, I am not an acoustic artist but where is the line that marks our different contributions? Does there need to be one? Am I being ruled by the paradigm that the notes hold more weight than the other elements and choices in this composition?
The first paper I read in the Schaeffer archives* was his « Le pouvoir créateur de la machine » (The Creative Power of the Machine), a lecture (or conference as the French call it) for the Centre d’études radiophoniques, 3 Décembre 1949.
In it he questions the role of the machine in his work — what it is beginning to enable him achieve do that he could not before. Ever modest, he attributes much credit to the machines in his creative experiments. He talks of (and this is mine and Reverso’s rough translation) how the title has troubled him, and that he would rather have called it
“‘Power of Machines’, because the term ‘creative’ bothers me a little…it is obvious that, if machines do not create, they bring us, in these places of Radio and Cinema, to the phenomena of creation, to which we have, so to speak, little share; we are, so to speak, passive assistants to these phenomena of creation. It is necessary to attribute them to some being, and this being is perhaps the Machine.” (p. 4)
Then he takes a curious speculative realist, or object oriented ontological approach saying: “We are uncertain ourselves, and we do not know very well whether we have the right or the duty to talk about our machines or what they allow us to see.” (p. 9) But he gives offers a way forward by saying tha,t rather than talking of what the machine makes we should talk of the territories that the machines allow us to explore.
So in this, I am thinking of how the machine has allowed me find an interesting intertwining of field recording and instrumental, not quite accompaniment, but expression, translation, transduction even – where the two channels sit with a kind of equal weight of figure and abstraction. The translation of field recording, by machine has allowed me to access scales and modalities that are not within my musical reach but which I identify as appropriate expressive responses.
Perhaps in this I am, to some extent, accepting the aleatoric flux of the material sonic world (as Christoph Cox and John Cage would have it**) by simply framing it and then allowing the machine its own digital flow.
* I have had the opportunity to access Pierre Schaeffer’s correspondence and texts in the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (L’IMEC) in Caen
** Cox, C. (2018). Sonic flux: Sound, art and metaphysics. University of Chicago Press.
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