Self-Organised Sound with Autonomous Instruments. Aesthetics and experiments
Risto Holopainen
Stipendiat ved Institutt for musikkvitenskap (IMV)
What are autonomous instruments?
- a combination of sound synthesis with algorithmic composition
- but not necessarily interactive in real-time
- they are feedback systems containing feature extractors
Autonomous instruments can be broken down into three units: a signal generator, a signal analysis unit, and a mapping from the analysis unit to the control parameters of the signal generator. There is a constant feedback from the generated sound to the synthesis parameters that influence how the sound is generated.
Thus far, very little music seems to have been made that fits this description. If we broaden the concept a bit, there are several examples of semi-autonomous instruments with real-time interaction.This project studies some existing musical works in this genre, but mainly invents new autonomous instruments.
Dynamic systems and chaos theory is a relevant framwork for a detailed understanding of autonomous instruments. In complexity theory there have been many attempts to come to grips with self-organisation and emergence. What does it mean for a musical system to self-organise, and does this happen in autonomous instruments? If so, then we have a case of self-organised sound, in analogy with Varèse's notion of music as organised sound.
http://folk.uio.no/ristoh/adaptive.html