To start out my program of study, I am going to focus on the composition of music and my own ability to deconstruct, discuss, and recombine the elements of sound/noise which create music. My plan this summer is to do three POS projects, each of which will be turned into the stub of a program or activity to be run at PHS (documented to the point of our first meetings with Healey staff about their programs) and be supported by some hands-on experiences I can mine, reflect, revise, and refine to develop the program’s arc and related resources.

Improvisations

Improvisation is the art of spontaneous music composition. In the right context, it can be a way to mess around and play with the tacit knowledge we all have about what makes something music. However, in the wrong context, it can make spontaneous musical expression feel like a test, like something that can easily fail or flop within a school-like tone. I want to create a **Bible **if improvisational frameworks and test a number of them in different contexts, with different groups of people before writing them out for future use within PHS.

  • Improvisation games @ Camp HONK

  • Quiet Instrument Jam w School of HONK

  • Group soloing w School of HONK

  • BAM (???)

Concepts

Concept art (a la The Darknet Shopper and Boilerstrap JS and the famous signed toilet) is a zone of art that deeply resonates with me on both an emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic level. I love that shit. It tickles me. Concept albums in music can have a similar effect, and I would like to create at least one concept album—potentially a couple, shorter EPs—which will help me to design a program to engage other people in conceptualizing and creating concept albums of their own design. I suspect that the constraints of a concept will help people give themselves permission to create, record, and try things out. But we shall see!

Algorithms

An area of music composition I’ve wanted to explore for a long time, but which I have no experience with, is algorithmic music design. Which, I guess, I would consider under the concept art umbrella. There are some incredibly boring versions of algorithmic music projects (e.g. mapping notes onto nucleotide pairs and then “playing back the human genome, omg so boring). I would like to create a tool or approach to using existing tools which makes it easy to incorporate complex sounds and rules for playing back sounds (e.g. more than when you see a “1” play a “C”) from different kinds of data sets. In particular, and in order to be musical, I believe there needs to be some messiness to avoid the MIDI/electronic exactitude that most exploratory algorithmic music projects share (Kate’s use of sound with the orbitar starts to get at the good version of what I mean, with extended and repeated sounds based on certain variables persisting while some discreet passing sounds are also created based on other variables).

Questions

So, these are the projects I intend to do this summer, and I want to talk a little bit today about which of the last two projects are most appealing to the two of you to be involved in this summer. While I have the least idea about the algorithmic piece, I can imagine it most effectively allowing each of you to engage your own interests and even programs of study in creating pieces. But would like to discuss more this afternoon.