I particularly liked the feature of presentation mode which recognizes the different processes of building/programming and testing, allowing two different views of the same patch to be open and worked on at once. This division of the programming process and the interface starts to recognize the conceptual mismatch between the process of technical design and the creative goals. Why is it that many Max users play around with their patches without having a predefined idea of the outcome that’s needed? Why does Zicarelli express surprise at this? Musically, how close is this kind of working to improvisation rather than composition? Does Max/Msp facilitate a way of working that allows fluency of conceptual musical ideas and not just technical fluency?

In using Max/MSP I tend to push the material around until I get the sonic results I want. I don’t try to define the outcome before embarking on it, I concentrate on the process. I aim to let the ‘material’ – the data I’m processing for example – find characteristics audible in sound that I wouldn’t be able to predict before I hear it. Sound is not programming! There needs to be a possibility to play with the sound while building, to play with the programming, to change, to tweak, to experiment, to allow mistakes, to allow the possibility of discovering new ideas, and to ultimately shape sound in ways that are not limited to the conceptual thinking of the programming language that it’s built in. 

This is why I like Max and still work with after 10 years as the program of choice for the work that I make. But, as was pointed out by Zicarelli, I am one of a shocking minority of women in the Max/MSP community of users. Why? Why do I like it? Why am I one of only 4 women in the room? It points to a larger problem visible in the minority of women in electronic music.

David’s attention to the male dominance visible in Max, is at least an acknowledgement of the problem. But it cannot be seriously considered by following with jokes on the female nature of the roundness of button/bangs in the graphic interface a joke that made all the men in the room laugh, alienating the women, and continuing to talk on a male level.

I’ve selected these comments on the following topics from the interview:

• technology and feeling – emotions in music
• functionality and musical choice
• distilling ideas, like pure alcohol
• two-dimensional notation, three-dimensional sound in space
• technology as a landscape
• physicality of fly-fishing and sound
• in and out of balance, with and without purpose

I think we should start talking again about emotions in music. 

Now what I do instead is to make pieces about natural acoustical phenomenon. The way sounds act; the way sounds are. People who don’t like what I do say that I’m doing experiments that any physicist can do, all right? Scientific experiments. 

[Talks about the brain wave piece using EEG scans, and taking out of the hospital practical context to make it interesting as a feeling] Technology is one tool after another, and its no better or no worse than any other tool. I took that feeling in the EEG out of the context where they’re not interested in feeling. They’re interested in the physical facts of what brain waves are, and I really didn’t care what the brain waves were.

I’d been thinking recently about making people have déja-vu as a musical experience…You’re always describing it [your work] in very very mundane theatrical terms and I don’t think that what I hear sounds like that.

[on Outlines of Persons and Things, sound waves bouncing off objects in space, works best when tuned at a high frequency, but] I didn’t like it, so I brought them down to the pitches that they are now because it reminded me of those insects in August … So in a sense I made a choice against the best operation of the piece, because it gave me that kind of feeling.

I think of my pieces as the clearest most intense examples of feelings… I try to distill these ideas and present them in their purest form…. It’s like distilling, making pure those things that happen anyway, but that you don’t perceive because they’re too complicated. … its putting people in a beautiful relationship to these phenomena.

.. before language and before writing … I think they were interested in reverberation and the sense of time that sound in space would have.

Well, Webern, Schoenberg, and post-serialism are so connected with print, so connected with writing notes. And if you don’t write in notes you get off the page… and if you’re not thinking on a page, you might not think in two dimensions.

When you write it’s in two dimensions, and sound is not two-dimensional … but most of the music we know is conceived on the page, two dimensionally. Okay? Now if I’m not thinking about that and if I’m not composing on the page and I really love sound, I begin to hear it as it is, which is a three-dimensional action.

See, I don’t think of technology as technology. I think of it as a landscape. … And it’s touching: a composer in the nineteenth or in another century is talking about the landscape that he’s in; the trees and the poetry – and I’m doing just that.

Could we talk a little bit about the idea of making things that make people feel good?

See what I’m doing here is rather like my art, isn’t it?

What you’re doing right at this moment?

Yes, the whole physical quality of this sport [fly-fishing] … The loops, the motion, the physical motion and the laws of wind resistance. … when I do this hour after hour it sharpens my senses. You know, the standing wave piece [Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas, 1973/74] is exactly this piece here [fly-fishing]. It’s exactly what you see when you’re on a stream, or on a pond. You know the first picture about the nature of sound in those acoustical books is a pebble in a pond. They show the photograph of how the surface of the pond radiates outward when you put in a pebble. And if you drop another one in and those waves interfere with each other, you have exactly this kind of thing. … The loops I make are never the same, but the action is. You try to make it the same but each loop is slightly different…. you can see the way the line falls is always slightly different and you can pay attention to that … The change of light, the change of the volume in the stream, the way sound diffracts around the rock.

… when I’ve come to a solution I feel there’s a kind of purification. It’s like alcohol; it’s very pure. It’s like the liquor that you drink – very distilled, transparent you know. It’s like a wonderful kind of gin. That’s funny to say for someone who doesn’t drink any more.

Have you ever noticed, at the moment when you can identify that you’re creating something, that previous to that , you were out of balance or you were sick?

.. It’s [composition] like an activity without a purpose – with and without a purpose.

Notes on “Problems in Cetacean and other Mammalian Communication” (first published 1966, written while working for John Lilly and his dolphin centre in the Virgin Islands. pp 364 – 378)

In the problem of understanding Cetacean communication, mammals such as Dolphins and their sound production, is the difficulty of us as humans approaching communication that may have completely different goals and importance. Bateson describes the predominance of communication of relationship (love, hate, dependency etc) in non-human / non-linguisitc mammals, where there is no need for a language of data (humans have hands and manipulate objects and language is built out of this ability and necessity). The communication of relationship in humans is less explicit in language but can be found in gesture – proto-linguisitc communication – common to all mammals.

Cetaceans, Bateson proposes, are almost solely communicating issues of relationship, but unlike land-based mammals they have very little in the way of visible gestures,  facial expression, body hair, limbs are all smoothed in underwater life. It is not only very difficult if not impossible for us to even guess at these proto-linguistic meanings, but dolphins themselves must have developed other alternative ways of communicating – most probably through their complex sounds. 

Bateson also distinguishes between what he calls analogue and digital in communication. Human language could be considered digital, the example being that 5 has no greater value than 1 in a digital system, it’s pointless to think someone’s telephone number is greater than another, they are merely ways of accessing a matrix. In the same way the word big is no bigger than the word small. But in proto-linguistic gesture or behavior there are matters of degree, a muscle can be more or less tensed, a smile more or less intense, an analogic system.

Perhaps dolphin communication through sound is another digital system, but perhaps it is more concerned with questions of relationship than human language? How can we then study and potentially understand this communication and what does it lead to understanding ourselves in relation to music?

There are four levels of understanding that can be applied to testing intelligence. After the ability to distinguish between x and y, the ability to learn that x or y are a cue to behavior, and the ability to chose always for the good or one that produces the desired result, comes the final fourth layer, whether the dolphin/human can decide or not to collaborate using free choice. Most experiments with humans considered ’sane and reasonable’ don’t need to deal with this fourth layer because it is agreed upon at the outset, only schizophrenics, naughty children and dolphins will challenge this fourth point. But this is also the sign of an intelligence, suppressed in for example the training of circus animals, abrogating the use of certain higher levels of intelligence. How successfully can dolphins be studied in captivity when they are essentially bored in confined space?

David Dunn, Why do Whales and Children Sing? : A Guide to Listening in Nature  (1999, Earth Ear, Santa Fe New Mexico)

Morton Feldman, Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman ed., B H Friedman (2000, Exact Change, Cambridge MA)

Alvin Lucier, Reflections: Interviews, Scores, Writings 1965 – 1994 /  Reflexionen: Interviews, Notationen, Texte 1965 – 1994 (1995, MusikTexte Cologne)

Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, (2005, iUniverse Lincoln)

Dick Raaijmakers Cahier – M : A Brief Morphology of Electric Sound (2000 Orpheus Institute Gent, Leuven University Press)

Louis Andriessen, The Art of Stealing Time ed.,Mirjam Zegers (2002 Arc Publications, Lancashire UK)

Iannis Xenakis, Arts / Sciences: Alloys, The Thesis Defense of Iannis Xenakis (1985, Pendragon Press, New York)

Lucy Lippard Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (1983 Pantheon Books, New York)

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001, Verso, London)

Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972, Ballantine Books, New York)

Roy Ascott Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness ed., with essay by Edward Shanken (2003 University of California Press, Los Angeles)

Brandon LaBelle Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (2007 Continuum, New York)

ed., Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (2004, Continuum, New York)

ed., Ros Bandt, Michelle Duffy and Dolly Mackinnon Hearing Places: Sound, Place, Time, Culture (2007 Cambridge Scholars Publishing)