Imperfect Tense

The imperfect tense describes an action in the past that was ongoing — something that kept happening, that hadn't quite finished. That seems right for this.

I've spent a large part of my working life thinking about space. Not just as a vital acoustic parameter — though it is that, sitting alongside frequency, amplitude, timbre, and duration in the family of things that make music music — but as something more elusive: the space between gesture and sound. The space between a finger and a key. A bow and a string. A stick and a drum. Those physical spaces are already full of meaning, already loaded with centuries of accumulated virtuosity. And yet, somewhere along the way, space became the forgotten parameter. The one we stopped asking questions about. I got caught up in asking them early on, and have never quite stopped — especially when the instrument in question is a computer, and the space between intention and sound becomes suddenly abstract, slippery, and worth fighting for.

It started, as many things did for me, at IRCAM in Paris in the late nineties. Working with James Wood on Mountain Language, we built an interactive cowbell system — sensors, samplers, the cowbell itself as a MIDI instrument. It sounds absurd described that way, but turning a collection of almglocken into a massive electronic cowbellophone is only absurd if you forget that there's a first-rate percussionist playing it. Any object can become an instrument if you're willing to ask what it wants to do.

Then: BigEye with James Dillon — a camera tracking a performer, translating movement into music. Steven Schick was one of the performers for that one. Wii remotes attached to skateboards in Stuttgart. A Kinect following a black-belt percussionist and translating kata into sound in a festival in Mons. And somewhere in between, in the early 2000s, there was Schlag! — a circus spectacular in a big top tent in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, with Roland Auzet and six other percussionists. The first night was cancelled because we were on strike (the intermittents du spectacle, for those who know French cultural politics). When we finally performed, the plan was for a camera to track Roland's hand gestures in real time and trigger files accordingly. Great idea. Except this was the early 2000s, and it mostly didn't work. So I became the gestural interpreter — watching Roland's hands from the side of the stage and triggering the files myself, in real time, trying to pass as a machine. Steven Schick was in that one too, as it happens. Percussionists: either the bravest guinea pigs in the business, or simply gluttons for punishment. Either way, I owe them.

Each time the question was the same: the body already knows how. What's needed is to capture that virtuosity and translate it into music. How do we let it sing?

A very long thread in all of this is the Olitherpe — an instrument I've been building with and for the musician Patricia Dallio since 2007. That one deserves its own space below.

Right now I'm working on a series of MIDI controllers — classic in concept, expanded in connectivity, with at least one gestural sensor each (touch, IR, ToF, radar). Prosaic maybe, but with that little something that might tap into the space and catch a drifty virtuosity. Nothing to show yet. Everything I need is sitting on the bench. It's a time problem, not a materials problem.

And further out: animate.forms, a research project that grows from all of this. Still on paper. But the paper is filling up.