2. LIVE ELECTRONICS: SOME HISTORY

It was not until the 1960s that live electronic manipulation of sound became a conscious, creative musical practice, separated from both the instrument and the agency of the player. Works such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I and II and Mixtur, composed in 1964 and 1965, had a significant impact (Emmerson Reference Emmerson1991). Mikrophonie I is written for a single instrument, a tam-tam, but a number of players comprising two percussionists, two ‘mikrophonists’ each holding and moving a microphone, and one or two musicians controlling the amplification and filtering of the sounds captured by the microphones. Thus, the transformation of the tam-tam involves an explicitly performative set of actions, separate from the actions of the percussionists. In Mikrophonie II composed in 1965 for choir, Hammond organ and ring modulators, and Mixtur for orchestra, sine tone generators and ring modulators, the modulation is again not in the control of the players/singers themselves.

Drawing on ideas and aesthetics from Cage and other experimental composers as well as a growing avant-garde improvisation movement, live electronics began to find its way into music in ways that reflected a more improvisatory approach. John Cage’s Solos for Voice 2 (1961) appears on the LP Extended Voices, released in 1967. ‘The electronic version of this work was developed by Gordon Mumma and David Tudor. The singers’ sounds are picked up by several types of throat, lip and cup microphones, are fed into a complex configuration of electronic equipment and are then processed in real time during the performance’ (Lucier Reference Lucier1967).

Simon Emmerson discusses three early British groups – Gentle Fire, Intermodulation and West Square Electronic Music Ensemble:

Souster acknowledged the influence of ‘AMM (founded in 1965 by Keith Rowe, Lou Gare and Eddie Prévost) which rejected all written materials, integrating electronic distortion and amplification as “instrumental extensions” within an often predominantly acoustic framework’ (ibid.). In AMM the musicians used technology to make new sounds available as mutable, sonic material. ‘In addition to amplifying their instruments, Cardew and Gare would apply contact microphones to various common objects to amplify the sounds made by, for example, rubbing a glass jar or striking a coffee tin’ (Wikipedia 2019). Emmerson himself was also involved in an influential duo partnership with Lol Coxhill. ‘The Digswell House concert by Lol Coxhill and Simon Emmerson is one of the earliest examples of a saxophonist being processed by electronics controlled by another musician’ (Davidson Reference Davidson2001).

Other notable groups include Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), formed in Rome in 1966 by a group of American musicians including composers Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace and Frederic Rzewski, soprano Carol Plantamura and others. From the beginning their improvised work included acoustic and synthetic sounds but also live electronic transformation and spatialisation, with Rzewski designing a ‘photo-resistor mixer’ to spatialise sounds in 1967 (Bernstein Reference Bernstein2010). In the same year they also performed a version of Cage’s Solos for Voice 2 using a Moog synthesiser to transform Carol Plantamura’s voice (Holmes Reference Holmes2016). Rzewski writes that for the group

Evan Parker’s ElectroAcoustic Ensemble with Lawrence Casserley ‘formed in 1990 as a sextet to explore the possibilities of real time signal processing in an improvising context’ (Parker n.d.). I first heard the group in the mid-1990s and this was a particularly important source of inspiration for me. In the ensemble musicians often work in pairs of instrumentalist and electronic performer. Parker is quite candid: ‘It’s funny that I have this electro-acoustical ensemble and I don’t really have a clue what those guys are doing technically, I just know that we can get to a certain music that you can’t get to any other way’ (Parker Reference Parker2006: 413). Later in the article he is asked by F.-M. Uitti ‘How do you feel about others “taking” and processing your sound?’ He replies ‘Well, it’s the only way that live electronics work’ (ibid.: 414).

Another duo whose work explores live electronics in improvisation is that of Phil Durrant and John Butcher whose ‘electromanipulation’ performances spanned 1997 to 2004. ‘Over 7 years the electronic hardware changed from filter boxes to computers, but feedback – both electrical and in how the musicians reacted – governed the duo, with each player partially controlling the other’s output’ (Butcher n.d.).

Baalman, Emmerson and Brandtsegg in their paper on ‘crossadaptive processing’ describe a more technically complex approach in their research ‘where one performer’s output effects the audio processing of another … by analysis of the acoustic signal, extracting expressive features and creating modulation vectors that can be mapped to audio processing parameters’ (Baalman, Emmerson and Brandtsegg Reference Baalman, Emmerson and Brandtsegg2018: 86). In their research they apply this model to ‘performance practices of the audio processing musician, augmented (acoustic) instruments, live algorithms, group improvisation and interconnected musical networks’ (ibid.).

What we can see in both composing and improvising is that technology involving electricity offered new musical tools, free from the history and baggage of traditional musical expression. Note AMM’s use of amplification to augment their sonic palette, and Rzewski’s use of spatialisation; and in the case both of Parker’s ensemble and of Durrant and Butcher, the separation of each player from the control of their electronic transformation. Of particular significance here is Rzewski’s description of the alteration to the performer’s body and identity through the electronic transformation, something I will return to later.

3. WHY AND WHERE DO LIVE ELECTRONICS AND IMPROVISATION MEET?

Alain Savouret (Canonne Reference Canonne2010) associates the emergence of free improvisation to the listening engendered by, or perhaps that engendered, electroacoustic music (chicken or egg?), as a result of the magnification of detail that recording and amplification affords. He talks about ‘An ear training covering the field of the audible in its totality’ that flows from the heritage of electroacoustic music; ‘a listening revitalised by the intrusion of the “magnifying mirror” of the loudspeaker’ (ibid., my translation). He continues ‘Free improvisation leads to or “authorises” extended playing techniques; but these techniques are found downstream, not upstream from a personalised expressive will’ (ibid., my translation).

While Savouret proposes this new listening as the catalyst for ‘free improvisation’, I would argue that live electronics can result in improvisation even further from an instrumental music paradigm, opening up a new realm and potentially distinct possibilities for musical expression, interaction and identity. With live electronics the musical focus can shift to aspects and details of sound and music that are only exposed through the electronics, or new sounds that are only brought about through digital processing. In my experience with a number of musicians, and especially when working with less experienced improvisers, players are prompted to explore an even more expanded palette of material from this novel musical context.

From the other direction, so to speak, Richard Barrett argues that:

It would seem to me, then, that improvisation and live electronics are natural partners. Free improvisation begets new sounds to express new ideas, free from the constraints and tropes of other musical traditions and languages. At the same time new musical possibilities emerge via technology, which itself draws on improvisation as a method for innovation.

4. WHY MIGHT THE IDEA OF ‘ESTRANGEMENT’ BE USEFUL?

The prompt to consider my practice in terms of estrangement came in a call for papers (VIS 2018), which quoted Svetlana Boym: ‘By making things strange, the artist does not simply displace them from an everyday context into an artistic framework; he also helps to “return sensation” to life itself, to reinvent the world, to experience it anew. Estrangement is what makes art artistic; but, by the same token, it makes life lively, or worth living’ (Boym Reference Boym2008). Here Boym is paraphrasing Russian Formalist literary theorist Victor Shklovsky who first used the term ‘estrangement’, or ostranenie, in his 1917 essay ‘Art as Technique’. He writes:

But Boym goes further. As Julia Alekseyeva says ‘By emphasizing estrangement as that which “makes art artistic,” Boym also subtly refers to the etymology of the word “aesthetic.” The term “aesthetic” derives from the Greek aisthetikos, meaning perceptive; in contemporary English, “aesthesis” suggests pathos, feeling, and sensitivity’ (Alekseyeva Reference Alekseyeva2017). This proved a useful catalyst for reflection on my own practice of improvisation, working with live electronics to process the sounds of an acoustic musician in real time.

In addition to the Russian formalists’ ostranenie, we find the concept of estrangement emerging in a number of disciplines in the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud begins his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (Freud Reference Freud1919) by defining unheimlich (the uncanny) as an aesthetic experience. He goes on to emphasise ‘that this feeling [of estrangement], an experience close to a sensation, is at its peak when it is triggered by the reappearance of a familiar object that has been forgotten or repressed for a long time. The feeling of estrangement can be compared to the phenomena of déjà vu or déjà vécu (previously lived)’ (de Mijolla-Mellor Reference de Mijolla-Mellor2005: 524). For Freud, and as implied by Boym previously, ‘aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feeling’ and ‘The subject of the ‘”uncanny” … is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror … [and] tends to coincide with what excites fear in general’ (Freud Reference Freud1919). Through modernism we have seen a shift in aesthetics towards the inclusion of a fascination with the grotesque, the distorted, the unreal.

In visual art there are many examples from the early twentieth century. From expressionism to cubism, Dadaism and more, visual artists often aimed to shock by making the world strange. In theatre, Bertold Brecht used what he described as Verfremdungseffekt, which can be translated as ‘distancing effect’, ‘alienation effect’ or ‘making strange effect’, a technique that ‘estranges’ the audience. ‘The V-effect is to make the spectator adopt an attitude of inquiry and criticism in his approach to the incident’ (Brecht Reference Brecht and Willett1964: 136). Composers too were reimagining the world of music. Igor Stravinsky’s atavistic Rite of Spring and Edgard Varèse’s work for percussion instruments, Ionisation, had immediate lasting impacts, and Arnold Schoenberg conjured up the ‘air from another planet’ in his Second String Quartet.

More germane to our discussion, Simon Emmerson (Reference Emmerson1994) describes three ‘acousmatic dislocations’ that resulted from the phenomenon of sound recording: those of time, space and mechanical causality. These led to the possibility of a new art of sound, and Pierre Schaeffer, an important figure in its development, described what he called reduced listening (écoute réduite) as a technique of distancing or estrangement that encourages or at least describes a more objective approach to sound materials or sound objects (Schaeffer, North and Dack Reference Schaeffer, North and Dack2017). The ‘hidden’ source can be listened to without recognition hindering an appreciation of purely sonic qualities.

But why in this context might we use the term ‘estrangement’ instead of ‘transformation’? Because, rather than simply describing the technical ‘facts’ of transformation (real to abstract), I am interested in the perception the performer has of the experience; how it feels (subjectively) rather than how one might understand (objectively, technically) what it is to have one’s sonic identity as a musician changed in the moment by another person. There is a sense of estrangement when we look in a mirror.

Jacques Lacan (Reference Lacan1977) first developed the idea of what he was to call the ‘mirror stage’, the moment when a child first recognises themself in a mirror, in the 1930s:

Simultaneously, in recognising itself as other, the child is alienated from itself, and encounters what Lacan calls the Imaginary. Who, when faced with a distorting mirror, does not play for a while, pull faces, move around to test the distortion on their own body? The sensation of playing with the unreal, the illusion, exaggeration is a powerful one. We seem to feel our bodies changing shape as our perceptions are altered and we are disoriented; we start to ‘dance’. In other words, we constantly test our environment and play and in doing so we learn about ourselves (our identity) in relation to a new environment.

Artist Erika Janunger plays with this phenomenon in her Balansakter (Balancing Acts Reference Balancing2017). Janunger’s work, which I saw in Dansmuseet, Stockholm in 2018, consists of a large, open-sided box, decorated and furnished as a room, the whole box rotated at an angle so that a ‘floor’ may appear as a wall or ceiling. A video camera, tilted at the same angle, captures the room and relays the image to a video screen so that to the viewer of the screen, the room looks level. Participants in the tilted room create the impression (to the viewer of the relayed image) that they are weightless, standing on a wall, for example, with feet off the ‘ground’. It invites play – I couldn’t resist, and I was not alone. Who, in a tunnel or cathedral, is not tempted to clap, or make a noise to test the reverberation? Again, I can rarely resist. In making sounds in an unfamiliar acoustic we are testing, rediscovering ourselves through play.

Play is intrinsic to us as humans. It is recognised as ‘fundamental to survival, health, well-being and development’ (Lester and Russell Reference Lester and Russell2010) to the extent that it is enshrined in Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN General Assembly 1989):

This need to play continues beyond childhood. Paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott links creativity to play in his book Playing and Reality (1971). In it he identifies ‘creative apperception’ as what ‘makes the individual feel that life is worth living’ (echoed by Boym previously). He writes:

Simon Waters suggests that ‘improvising—playing with possibilities—appears to be a significant “group empathy” skill’ (Waters Reference Waters2017). He references sociologist Roger Caillois who also suggests that play ‘encourages experimenting with individuality and identity’. Waters goes on to state that ‘Empathy is thus a process through which encounters with others and otherness may be productive of supplementary potential for the self—of a larger, less “boundaried” sense of what a self might be’ (Waters Reference Waters2017).

It seems to me that this feeling of estrangement expresses perfectly what my duo partners have described, and what I myself have also felt. It is this ‘less “boundaried” sense of … self’ that seems to describe quite well the symbiotic or co-dependent experience I am interested in exploring in my practice.

5. MY PRACTICE

From my first experiences composing in the electroacoustic studio, what struck me was the power of the tools of the studio to transform recorded acoustic sounds into something extraordinary; to problematise them or ‘estrange’ them. I had little interest in technology for its own sake, nor did I see the studio as a way to control sound more precisely than I could with notes, and I had little interest in synthesis. Rather I became fascinated by the world of illusion that the loudspeaker creates, and of playing (playfully) along what John Young describes as the ‘reality–abstraction continuum’ (Young Reference Young1994).

Estrangement became part of my composing methodology. De-familiarisation became a way for me to discover new things about sounds, new possibilities for their use, and it was this playful, improvisatory process of working that drew me to the medium and a practice that engages consciously with space and illusion. My compositional techniques developed ‘downstream’ of a playful musical intention, and later led to the practice under discussion that gradually emerged from studio-based composition into a live improvising practice on stage.

A pivotal piece for me was Sensuous Geographies, created in collaboration with Sarah Rubidge in 2002–3 (Rubidge and MacDonald Reference Rubidge and MacDonald2004). This drew together my compositional practice along with my experience of improvisation and previous collaborations with dance. The piece is a performative installation where participants’ speed of movement, location and proximity to each other are tracked, and this in turn influences layers of sound, each of which is associated with a participant. In addition, there are projected video images of participants, similarly controlled or influenced by their activity in the installation space. Participants are estranged from their identities through totally immersive costumes, and disoriented by blindfolds, having to navigate via sound alone. One enters a central area defined by a textured floor cloth bounded by loudspeakers and semi-transparent screens, dressed in a richly coloured robe and head covering, unsighted and barefoot. A new layer of sound starts as you enter, and as you move, it follows you. You are also aware of other participants in the space through the movement in space of other layers of sound.

An important aspect of the installation is that it was designed to be ‘played’ with increasing levels of complexity. As its simplest level, participants could quite easily understand how their movement affected their own layer of sound, and perhaps how they might affect another participant’s sound (affecting volume or playback speed, for example). However, as they explored more complex levels, more layers of sound transformation were added and this became too difficult to decipher; it was at this point, if not before, that participants played more freely. Their loss of control was another estrangement. They were not oblivious to the relationship their movement and/or location might have on sound, but became less concerned with controlling it and more interested in feeling the result.

The effect on me of experiencing Sensuous Geographies as a participant had an enormous impact on my thinking and practice as a musician. The estrangement I felt became something I wanted to seek out and develop further. Having developed the tracking and sound control environment for Sensuous Geographies using MaxMSP, I immediately saw possibilities for adapting this to other areas of my work. I had for a number of years been improvising using simple live electronics and sound playback with players/singers, and my approach had evolved from my studio composition methods along with extensive experience of performing live electronic works by other composers with BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre) over a period of more than ten years. Now I was motivated to develop and enhance my technical resources and design tools for collaborative improvisation. At that time I had just started working with harpist Catriona McKay for whom I was writing, and with whom I established an improvising duo of harp and live electronics, Strange Rainbow, to explore these ideas, tools and methods (MacDonald Reference MacDonald2014).

While my own musical practices include composition for concert performance, collaborations with other media (dance, visual art, poetry) and improvisation, all of which use audio technology to a large extent, in my practice of improvising with live electronics with other musicians (usually in a duo), I use the same technology, but my musical actions are quite different in both intent and result.

I can re-contextualise the (acoustic) musician’s sound world with other sounds, pre-recorded and often pre-transformed, and play short event and gesture type sounds, acting as an independent musician. However, more conspicuously, I use live electronic processing to transform my partner’s acoustic sound in the moment and it is this aspect I intend to focus on here.

In his definition of free improvisation, Derek Bailey points to identity: ‘The characteristics of freely improvised music are established only by the sonic-musical identity of the person or persons playing it’ (Bailey Reference Bailey1993: 83) rather than any particular musical style or language, or set of techniques. Alain Savouret also describes improvisation in terms of identity, self-discovery and self-revelation: ‘In the shared musical action, the individual reveals himself to himself, becomes acquainted with the music that can only be his’ (Canonne Reference Canonne2010, my translation). Through live transformation we have a symbiotic relationship resulting in a singular, shared output and identity rather than two separate/separable parts, a quite different experience for us as performers, compared to a duo improvisation between two discrete instruments.

I do sometimes work with more than one improvising partner, but as Joel Ryan says ‘The duos are for me the real thing. Both in the way they so clearly represent what is going on and in the perfect moment for what I want to do musically … With one player the possibilities can be explored in time and this can accumulate dramatic energy’ (Ryan Reference Ryan2006). With more players it can become much more difficult to separate out the relationships between the acoustic and its electronic other when there are multiple layers of transformation.

6. LISTENER PERCEPTION

As noted earlier, I am concerned here with the perception the performer has of the experience of having their sounds transformed in an improvised performance, that is, of unexpected estrangement, as this is little discussed. In fixed, usually notated compositions for instrument and live electronics, the composer will usually have a clearly defined idea of the sounding result of the combination, and the player will become familiar with this in the rehearsal process. Analysis and discussion of such music tends to focus then on these fixed relationships and known outcomes. While the audience may perceive the instrument to be estranged by the live electronics, Emmerson

In other words, the audience simply accepts the new, expanded instrument. This is similar to Jonathan Harvey’s assertion that ‘With live electronics, when electronics are performed in realtime like instruments and combined with instruments (or, of course voices), two worlds are brought together in a theatre of transformations. No-one listening knows exactly what is instrumental and what is electronic any more’ (Harvey Reference Harvey1999: 80).

7. PLAYER PERCEPTION AND ESTRANGEMENT

For the player, this new resulting sound world in fixed compositions is not so strange but becomes part of their identity in the piece they are performing. In improvisation with live electronics the performer may feel more estranged, since where the electronics are improvised by another musician the effect or consequence of the electronics on the sounds the player makes will likely be unknown or unexpected, and thus they will more likely feel some degree of estrangement from both their instrument and the shared musical result. The degree of distancing becomes a continuum to explore. As I learned from Sensuous Geographies, this estrangement becomes crucial to the relationship onstage and the resulting improvisation. There is risk, however: ‘When you alter the sound of a performing partner you are engaging them in a rather special negotiation towards emergence. Some will feel they have lost control and resist the idea completely and others will find the resulting experience interesting and engaging’ (Wessel Reference Wessel2006: 427). The player, then, needs to develop skills to deal with the ‘not knowing’, to comfortably inhabit that uncertainty, to confront and engage with their doppelgänger.

I seek out estrangement; it is an intentional part of my improvising methodology. I seek out players who find the experience engaging. By making strange I consciously invite play, and in turn am invited to play.

And in this situation, I too am surprised, challenged, provoked, resisted, alive!

I estrange my duo partner, so that they are confronted not simply with the sound they make, but my live electronics functions as a kind of audio distorting mirror, reflecting their sound back to them, transformed. The effect is an offer, an opening, a provocation, a confirmation, a reaction.

As already noted, acousmatic, electroacoustic dislocation is an estrangement in time, place and source/cause (Emmerson Reference Emmerson1994). Sound is de-contextualised, removed from its source; it is re-contextualised, projected through loudspeakers into a new space; it is made present again in a new time. And its source or cause may be less apparent. Sound processing may result in weaker ‘source bonding’ (‘the natural tendency to relate sounds to supposed sources and causes, and to relate sounds to each other because they appear to have shared or associated origins’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1997: 110)). Like Young’s ’reality–abstraction continuum’ (Young Reference Young1994), we might suggest a scale or continuum of estrangement, from the ‘near normal’ through the ‘just connected’ to the dis-connected/un-connected/unfamiliar. We can play with separation, ambiguity, confusion. What’s what? Who’s who?

So what are these processes that weaken the ‘source bonding’ or identity of the sound? The basic technical configuration I use is based on my practice in and experience of composed, mixed electroacoustic works. The instrument is captured with condenser microphones, sent to my computer via an audio interface and the resulting, transformed sound is played back over loudspeakers, plural. While I may amplify my partner for reasons of balance, as noted previously, the co-created sound world is projected as a field or environment which immerses the performer rather than emanating from them, as would be the case with an electronic instrument tethered to a local amplifier. The speakers create a stereo or multichannel ‘stage’ or field, or environment, surrounding but separate from the location of the player. The sound that they are responsible for is already beyond their instrument.

Savouret describes the loudspeaker as a magnifying mirror (Canonne Reference Canonne2010). This magnification, while ubiquitous in much music where the degree of amplification is fixed, becomes an active musical parameter when used dynamically. The instrument may become ‘bigger’ or ‘smaller’, related to perceived loudness or apparent presence or proximity. Further, when the spatialisation of the amplified sound is actively manipulated this too renders a scale of dislocation. The player is faced with their ‘double’, which has a degree of its own spatial autonomy, and this spatial separation may suggest opposition, complementarity, or more. The use of simple reverberation, the creation of an illusory space, can further enhance this sensation. The player must respond to this projection of themselves into the bigger space of Waters’s ‘larger, less “boundaried” sense of what a self might be’ (Waters Reference Waters2017). Their experience of self may move between observation and engagement, inside and outside, along an emotional, and therefore potentially musical continuum.

Dynamic filtering leads the performer to hear their sound rebalanced, focusing, perhaps, on a particular spectral area or behaviour that then becomes available to the player as musical material to explore in new ways. A kind of ‘microphonic listening’ (Savouret in Canonne Reference Canonne2010).

By playing with time-based transformation, the electronics allow the singer/player to step a little outside of time. The ‘déjà entendu’ of synchronised looping is widely used by musicians, often solo, to build their own accompaniment using simple loop pedals. Delayed repetitions (including looped samples) affect our perception of time. They may be further transformed to suggest an arresting of time; or may accelerate, decelerate, crescendo or decrescendo, offering opportunities to play with changing pace and dynamic shaping. Then transformed further again to explore space and loudness as mentioned previously, direction (reversed sounds), speed of playback and change of pitch. Repetition creates opportunities for counterpoint or heterophony, lines or textures. Other processes may freeze a moment in time, turning a moment into a sustained sound, a dramatic gesture into a flat line.

When we hear music we ‘resonate’ (Gibson Reference Gibson1979) to the information; we ‘parse’ it, dividing what we hear into what is meaningful; we notice (consciously and subconsciously) gesture in sound, we recognise shapes in sound in relation to perceived or imagined physical gesture/action. By editing in unexpected places, isolating fragments from a stream of sound regardless of the ‘sensible option’, we discover new actions that ‘didn’t happen’ in the way we now experience them. We disrupt our understanding; we are forced to reconsider what we hear. This can happen in real-time with, for example, granular processes where a sound is cut up, with the added possibilities of silence between fragments, reordering, reversal, and transposition. More radically, granulation can create textures quite distant from the source, with fragments too small and processed to be recognisable, much more dense or sparse than the original. Fragmentation can thus suggest to a player a more hesitant ‘double’, stuttering, disturbed; or offer the opportunity to effect clouds of textures from simple materials.

Other processes, including moving filters, ring modulation or transposition, give the player opportunities to engage with the vertical domain of pitch and harmony (in its widest definition). And electronics can distort, contort, mask, overwhelm. In combination, the resulting complexity better resists control by either player. All of these technical processes that result in transformation of the acoustic player’s sounds effect a degree of estrangement. This can feel like an estrangement from the body, especially as an instrument is felt by musicians as an extension of their body; for singers the voice is even more so. It is also an estrangement from their identity as they both ecognise and feel alienated from their sonic/musical self and agency. Multiple, simultaneous estrangements/illusions can result, with each player feeling at once powerful and vulnerable, grounded and untethered, calm and excited. A real ‘balancing act’. This doubling – things matching with their opposite merged into one – brings us right back to the core of Freud’s unheimlich.

8. ELECTRONIC ‘INSTRUMENT’ DESIGN

The design of my electronic ‘instrument’ has been central to the development of my practice. Again, this has come ‘downstream’ of musical necessity, and has developed, and continues to develop, in ways in which I did not always expect.

Simon Waters reminds us that:

As we have already discussed, this is not an instrument in the traditional sense, but a distorting mirror in which my performing partner is reflected; an expansion and transformation of their sound and their musical identity; an evolving ‘limb’ of their instrument over which they have less control. It is also designed to limit my control.

Hunt, Wanderley and Paradis in a paper at the Reference Hunt, Wanderley and Paradis2002 NIME conference (Hunt, Wanderley and Paradis Reference Hunt, Wanderley and Paradis2002) describe research on interfaces for making sound (i.e., new instruments) where more ‘difficult’ interfaces are found to be much more engaging and satisfying for users than those using simple mapping. An instrument you can learn to play in 2 minutes is not likely to be engaging or fulfilling for long. And as Raph Koster, in Theory of Fun for Game Design, tells us, ‘Complexity is engaging – games, music, whatever’ (Koster Reference Koster2014).

In order to seek estrangement for myself – the unexpected – I learned from Sensuous Geographies that control is less interesting than ‘materials in play’. How I control, in real time, the complexities of material, meaning and context is therefore important. I don’t aim to control the player or even control every aspect of my own sounds; I am more interested in a shared shaping of musical result. I seek for a quality of shared engagement and letting go of conscious control, which allows me a greater sense of flow in performance.

For this reason I have built a touch-screen interface in Lemur (Liine 2018) that controls some parameters with accuracy, others with less precision, and some with variable amounts of randomisation (see earlier). At the same time, in my improvising patch or ‘environment’ built in Max (Cycling ’74, 2020) my approaches to and strategies for improvising are purposely designed to create an engaging complexity, and offer some degree of quasi-physical resistance for me in the ‘playing’ and for me as listener.

I have created a self-consciously playful interface in order to play that invites experimentation and error. I can set control parameters off on their own jittery, drunk walk, adding subtle texture, or surprising changes; banks of samples can be loaded but then the sample triggered may be chosen at random, at a pitch that may be fixed or, within limits, randomised; some single screen controls are mapped to multiple parameters; other parameters are completely hidden.

Deniz Peters says that ‘Resistance is resistance to movement. In hearing resistance, then, one hears resistance to motion. Motion in music is the basis of musical agency’ (Peters Reference Peters2013). It is this resistance, and the resistance of the sound itself, that I seek to sense and engage with in my role, along with an engagement with the resistance the player offers me. In the development of my ‘instrument’ I aimed to build in resistance to my control, to create an interface that required effort and motion, and constant attention.

Resistance is expressed/experienced in a number of ways through both my instrument/interface and the transformations it can effect:

• resistance to synchronisation – for example, relative lengths of looped buffer selections are not based on even divisions of time and cannot easily be matched; my virtual faders are simply not precise enough.

• resistance to equal temperament – semitone-based transposition is available but rarely used; transposition in granular processes is on a continuous scale, and ring modulation produces unpredictable results both because the control of modulation frequency is not tied to an equal tempered scale and because neither player, each of whom is responsible for one of the inputs, know what pitch or frequency the other will choose.

• resistance to pulse – delays may be evenly spaced, but that evenness is one point on a touch-screen fader scale from extreme acceleration to extreme deceleration; loops can be switched to move randomly through the possible buffer space, or their lengths can be set to constantly vary.

• resistance to spatial stasis – most transformations have some spatial behaviour programmed in. For example, looped buffers can be set to float around the stereo or multichannel field; the spatialisation of successive delays can be randomised or follow one of a number of trajectories.

• resistance to spectral stasis – the outputs of many processes can be re-processed through moving, semi-random filters, resulting in constantly shifting colours.

• resistance to ‘technological listening’ (Smalley Reference Smalley1997) – in creating complex layers of sound (through multiple layers of process) the intention is to create a listening experience that resists technical explanation, but guides a listener to musical listening, to the musical functions of the interaction.Footnote ¹