The GRM's Acousmonium at the Maison de la Radio in Paris
The problem of live music has become complicated relatively recently: certainly after the birth of the phonautograph, the phonograph, the wire recorder, the wax cylinder, Berliner's disc, the microgroove record, loudspeakers, and perhaps even after the spread of magnetic tape.
When we found ourselves with objects (microphones - preamplifiers - magnetic tape - amplifiers - loudspeakers) that could capture and project into space a musical performance with enough verisimilitude to fool an audience with its eyes closed, a bit like with the Lumière brothers' train, a questioning of the reality of perception was born that equally influences Michael Jackson, Pan Sonic or Maine Mendoza.
This sound so true (that is, so false), which might have risked wiping out the experience of the concert, of live music, instead immediately became an industry alongside it, radically changing, however, the expectations and perceptual horizons of its audiences. The tools that made it possible to create the illusion of a musical performance came, within four decades, to be recognized as creative instruments in every respect, leading to the birth of electroacoustic music and to a new way of composing traditional music for instruments and voices, creating with the recording studio: for the first time, sound works are not conceived for live performance or for the realization of a faithful image of it.
This brings out a second and different complication, linked to the impossibility of performing live rather than to the possibility of doing without it: lip sync is born at the moment when it becomes credible, whereas the acousmonium answers a new necessity, but the origin of both is tied to the recording and reproduction of sound and to a form of simulation, of deception. While the Beatles soon devote themselves completely to this new activity and in 1966 abandon the stage, at the GRM in Paris there is instead a great desire to bring this music for loudspeakers to the public.
Without needing to invoke all those art forms that are born explicitly multimedia, such as opera or the A/V live, it can be said that almost all live music up until the Second World War does not face the problem of questioning its own modes, since it is taken for granted that one or more musicians pick up their instruments and perform written or memorized compositions or else improvise with idiomatic elements.
From the birth of the elements discussed above emerge the problems of bringing into the context of live music:
– Music born for speakers. This category includes music simply conceived for this destination but also acousmatic production, music that does not want to show the sources of its sounds, for example that of Pierre Schaeffer and his school. – Music that is impossible to play live. This category includes, among others, all the early electronic music, collagism, some extreme cases of instrumental music but also all music with a discrepancy between the resources available and those necessary for its live realization: despite their popularity, Tina Turner and Ike could hardly have taken on tour the 21 musicians who recorded _River Deep – Mountain High._ – Music that, if played live, is identical to its recorded version. A friend recently recalled a 2016 concert where Verdena performed the record from beginning to end with the click in their headphones. There remains in any case a difference in the acoustic experience and other aspects that we will see later.
These classes of problems are not mutually exclusive: if, for example, we take the music of the record Third Law by the English producer Roly Porter, we have an acousmatic work born for speakers, which because of the number of simultaneous sound objects would require a large ensemble of synthesizers and samplers to be performed live and would result in something identical to what can be heard on the record, given the lack of room for variation caused by the tight concatenation of events.
To all this is added a more peculiar problem: by Porter's own account, the quality and precision of a sound with several hours of sound design, mixing and mastering behind it remain for him priorities not to be subordinated to the aspects of live music.
Given these problems it is necessary to ask why certain music is not simply played back through loudspeakers in a listening session; I think the answer lies in the set of values that the concert carries with it, congruent with the reasons that lead people to go out and travel kilometers to hear an artist:
\- Live musical creation (improvisation), unrepeatable and different from any recorded performance. \- Quality execution of existing music (written in notation systems or memorized), that is, finding pleasure in hearing a faithful performance of a piece of music one knows or whose premises one knows well enough to recognize a mistake (for example an out-of-tune note in a piece of music in equal temperament), or a version with slight differences that maintain recognizability \- Extraordinary acoustic experience, divisible into: difference between the diffusion of sound in an instrument and the diffusion of the same sound through loudspeakers; volume and frequency response more extended than home listening; quality of the room acoustics; listening through multichannel and immersive systems \- Extra-sonic aspects, including the mere physical presence of the musicians \- Sociality
Francesco Cavaliere live in Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni. Photo: M3Studios
These values are articulated and combined very differently depending on musical and social contexts: the same value may be at the top of the hierarchy in one genre and be irrelevant in another.
In Western classical music there is great attention to the quality of the performance of the composition, in a perpetual tension between what is and what should be, to which is added an extraordinary acoustic experience often tied to places (theaters, auditoriums) and sometimes that strange form of theater made with the exaggeration of the performers' gestures as a visual component.
As for rock and pop music, the industry has concentrated first of all on sociality and multimediality (in all its forms, from the simple exaggeration of the musician's gesture, to choreography, lighting design, up to the diffusion of smells), supported by the extraordinariness of the acoustic experience; the aspect concerning performance is analogous to classical music.
As for electroacoustic music in the broad sense of the term, the solutions have been many over time but often analogous, first of all the realization of compositions with synthesizers and processors and the multichannel acousmatic diffusion of pieces on fixed media; let us list some of these modes by looking at a few contemporary cases (mainly ones I have attended in person, some discussed directly with the artists), without attempting to be systematic or to exhaust the subject or the practices of the artists mentioned, but concentrating on stimulating reflections on the conceptual and practical problems cited earlier. Consequently we will not speak, for example, of artists who perform or improvise using only the synthesizer or other electroacoustic instruments without overdubs, whether live or in the studio, since this is a case structurally identical to music based on traditional instruments.
Some parametric axes to keep in mind are: interpretation of a composition vs. improvisation; congruence or not between compositional and performative practice; choice of instruments and control devices; active or supervisory role of the performer.
First of all there are those who have accepted the superfluity of live action and limit themselves to being paid to press play on the laptop: a famous example is Pan Sonic.
A step further is taken by those who practice live mixing: the pieces are divided into overlapping tracks and then mixed live: if one does so by operating a classic analog mixer, for example, one can control volume, position in the stereo field and equalization. In this case the performer's role is tendentially that of an acoustic referee immersed in the problem of the impossibility of standardizing the conditions of reproduction - the music is adapted to the specific space and context – but nothing prevents a creative and improvisational use of this minimal approach. Some examples can be Jacob Kirkegaard, Rudolf Eb.er, Dialect.
Not to be confused with the term mixing in the context of DJing, which is in fact closer to live editing, that is, the live assembly of pre-recorded material through juxtaposition or overlapping; Prison Religion come to mind, but also Ottaven, who with two decks adds, removes and overlaps cassettes.
A practice that is on one hand more active, on the other of lesser overall impact, is that of occupying oneself live with generating or modifying only a portion of the material and playing back the rest from fixed media without variation; the proportion between the two components can vary greatly and lead to different outcomes: structurally it is nothing different from a rock band with an electronic backing track, but looking for example at the already mentioned Roly Porter or at Aho Ssan, the ratio of the material employed is inverted, whereas the rock band takes care of the riffs and leaves the ambient and less weighty components to the backing track, the two electronic artists manipulate live the more liquid and malleable material, leaving to the fixed medium everything that determines timing and structure.
This approach shares many aspects with those who decide to use live instruments that replace some electroacoustic compositional elements or are added to them - Myxomy, Sofie Birch, Marina Herlopp come to mind, but this is not the place to dissect the implications of the interaction between musical instrument and electroacoustic practice.
Some artists then focus on an idea that arises thanks to electronic means and later spreads also to the purely instrumental realm, namely live processing: whether it be chains of analog effects, pedals or DSP, it is something that differs from the practices already mentioned because it gives the possibility of intervening also on the totality of the sound without giving up the security and precision of playing back files or other fixed media. Today the possibilities of live processing go well beyond simple actions in the domains of time, frequency and dynamics (filters, compressors, delays, reverbs, distortions, etc.) and reach, for example, operations of style transfer through the use of neural networks.
Then there is the GRM's solution, where with the invention of “loudspeaker ensembles” the performer's agency is shifted to the last level of the electroacoustic chain: the sound is projected and moved among several loudspeakers, where in François Bayle's Acousmonium the idea is to emulate the orchestra by placing a large number of them on a stage, while in immersive multichannel systems the very perception of space is shaped. Many contemporary systems combine the two approaches.
In most cases, today all these practices come together and overlap in various forms, responding to the needs and desires of artists and listeners in relation to the problems and values discussed in the first part and also influencing musical choices and the selection of instruments: even if potentially identical in function, we cannot deny that it is different to watch an artist touching a laptop trackpad and one with a table full of controllers.
Two examples of syncretic forms can be Valerio Tricoli, who improvises with his ecosystem of CDJs, sampler, reel-to-reel recorder and mixer, or Francesco Cavaliere, who, lying on the floor with a laptop, a keyboard and a microphone, diffuses the sound through speakers placed in three glass horns.
I would close the circle by speaking of artists who accept the impossibility or the superfluity of a live musical intervention but, instead of settling for their own physical presence on stage, devote themselves completely to transmediality, entering strongly the field of the performing arts and often limiting the sound to the playback of tracks (perhaps those of the record): this is the case, for example, of S280F or The Caretaker.
Staying within the transmedial realm one could shed light on all those artists of sonic background who involve recorded sound in what we might call total performances where it is only one of the interacting elements, not necessarily the protagonist (I am thinking of the performances of Luciano Maggiore and Louie Rice), but this would mean entering two areas that I would like to exclude from these notes: the strong separation of studio practice from live practice and sound performance not attributable to the musical field.
Nonetheless, experiences of this kind help us reflect on the great relativity of contents depending on context, presentation and narratives, that is, on the expectations that audiences project onto the show and how these influence the perception of potentially identical forms (the same show is different if presented in a musical or a performing-arts context), or on the way solutions connect to the specific aesthetics of the artists and of the context in which they operate, well beyond sonic problems; one could talk about how there are festival lives, venue lives, gallery lives or site-specific lives, but we prefer to conclude by appreciating how the birth of the means of recording and reproduction has led to a strong expansion of the perceptual horizons of the category of concert and to a fruitful dissolution of the boundaries between artistic practices.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →