From Asia

U.S.A./Japan Inter-College Computer Music Festival was held in Tokyo, Dec. 13-16, 1997. The festival was organized by Keio University Research Center for Arts Administration, NTT InterCommunication Center (ICC) and Information Processing Society of Japan SIG Music and Computer (SIGMUS), and supported by the American Embassy in Japan. Prof. Takayuki Rai of Kunitachi College of Music directed this big event. During the festival five paper sessions, eight concerts and two panel discussions were held. Many students participated from different universities including UC at San Diego, SUNY at Buffalo, NYU, Columbia University, Osaka University of Arts, Waseda University, Kunitachi College of Music, IAMUS in Gifu Keio University and Senzoku Gakuen University. Cort Lippe, Robert Rowe, Miller Puckette, Terry Pender and Rick Bassett were the guest professors and composers. Barry Moon, Luke DuBois and Joshua Fried were invited as the guest students of the festival.

After the festival Cort Lippe asked his students to write articles on the festival. The followings are thier reports for each festival day.

- Shuji Hashimoto


Day 1, Saturday 13 December, 1997.
InterCommunication Center, Gallery D.

The conference got under way smoothly with two paper presentations. Miller Puckette, who lectures at UCSD, gave a progress report on his Pure Data software. This report included demonstrations of the current audio and video capabilities of the software. Following this, Kiyoshi Furukawa gave a report detailing his work at ZKM.

The first concert opened with three tape pieces. Keiichi Kitahara's "metamorphosis", was, as the title suggests, a study in spectral mutation. Kenji Yasaka's "Experiment 6" was a comfortable piece with familiar sounds and melodic ideas. Carlos Guedes' "Etudes" made good use of spectral mutation and various synthesis techniques. The final piece on the program was a collaboration between composer Akihisa Ohashi and guitarist Akinori Yamasaki entitled "BLUE". An SGI running MAX was used to transform the sounds of the guitar in real-time. This piece relied heavily on traditional Spanish guitar music for its motivic detail.

The second concert opened with Tonoko Koizumi's "ROU". This lighthearted theatrical piece involved visual images and taped sounds. Takeyoshi Mori's "Reverie" consisted of familiar sounds generated mostly on the SGI. In Sekiya Yamashita's "Bio Confuse" for Biomuse and tape it seemed the composer had pretty much lost control over his Biomuse. Chris Mercer's "Contraptionization I" made use of heavily processed "low-tech" sounds to create a highly complex texture. The final piece on the program was Shu Matsuda's "swing Till Dawn" for soprano saxophone and live computer system. In addition to live processing of the saxophone sounds ISPW, this piece featured a liquid crystal projector run from the SGI as an additional aid to the interaction between performer and computer.

- Barry Moon


Day 2, Sunday 14 December, 1997.
InterCommunication Center, Gallery D.

The second day of the USA/Japan InterCollege Computer Music Festival consisted of threehour-long concerts which presented a wide range of computer music by composers residentin Japan and the United States. The concerts were programmed well, with an excellentblend of compositions for tape alone, instrument(s) and electronics, and interactiveperformance. This review discusses in brief the day's thirteen musical offerings,concentrating on some of the more interesting student pieces, which demonstrated theplethora of possibilities for realizing electronic compositions.

The first piece of the day was an intercontinental "jam" session orchestrated by MasatakaGoto (Waseda University) using his RemoteGIG software which handles MIDI events over tcp/ip-based RMCP (Remote Media Control Protocol). Taking advantage of the long delay inherent in such events, the performance offered an interesting take on the call-and-response idiom, with Rick Bassett playing keyboards in Japan and Brad Garton and Perry Cook at the Columbia Computer Music Center in New York playing keyboards and Perry Cook's homemade MIDI controllers. Both sites were also hearing MIDI backing tracks composed by Mr. Goto. The performance was quite a success as it showed the promising future of Mr. Goto's software, which performed quite well given the inherent difficulties in streamlining and scheduling MIDI events over a network.

Masahumi Inohira's "Walking the Dog" was a suitably noisy tape piece written using MAX as an arbiter of melodic manipulation.

Ippei Ogura's "Assong for Microphone Inside the Body", performed by the composer, was an interesting if somewhat disorienting soundscape. The reviewer was not quite prepared for the subtlety with which the composer treated bodily sounds as sonic objects. The piece, as a result, was quite interesting.

The second concert began with the reviewer's piece "Richetta" for tape. Based on interviews of my grandmother presented in real-time with my voice eliminated and replaced with processed voice and guitar, providing a texture for my grandmother's narrative about her life's transitions from childhood to old age.

Ryutaro Mimura's "Echoes # Labyrintos Case-vita" for tape was an entertaining and repetitive soundscape piece that would have done well as a film soundtrack. The piece, which featured an array of signal-processed piano sounds, was played in conjunction with a simple blue-screen video projection and the composer wandering about the concert hall with helium balloons.

Jeff Ridenour's Improvisation for Contrabass and Electronics was an extremely involved piece, performed with great concentration by Keizo Mizoiri. The electronics, triggered by cues from the performer, responded in a variety of ways to the different techniques with which Mr. Mizoiri explored the timbre of his instrument.

The final concert of the day began with Robert Rowe's "Shells" for soprano saxophone and interactive music system. Dr. Rowe's Cypher software was used to expand thematically on Shintaro Yabe's saxophone performance, comprised of a mixture of notated and free material. The result was a fluid counterpoint of electronics, which expanded on the saxophone part as would a musically sensitive human accompanist.

Australian composer and SUNY Buffalo student Barry Moon's "Study for Voice and ISPW", sung by soprano Izumi Morikawa and based on a text from Shakespeare's Richard II, provided an excellent demonstration of the wide range of possibilities inherent in the signal processing of voice. The vocal performance was transformed by the processing routines into a quite elegant piece of music. The semantic implications resulting from the recycling of text fragments spatially and temporally lent a deeper layer of interest to the attentive listener who followed the text.

On either side of Barry Moon's piece were two short tape pieces: "Silence" by Akira Sakaguchi and "Flowers for the scrambletape" by Masayuki Ienaga, both of which explored the transformative properties of signal processing when applied to simple, repetitive melodic fragments.

Joshua Fried's great performance of his piece "The Music Shoes" for "Shoes, Loops, and FM Radio" was one of the highlights of the conference. Taking looped samples of Japanese talk radio, Mr. Fried then looped and gated the samples by drumming on the heels of specially modified shoes. Mr. Fried delivered the performance with flair and utmost respect for the artistic viability of found sound. The language barrier made the piece all the more entertaining, as Mr. Fried was himself unaware of the words he was sampling in his performance.

The final piece of the day, rescheduled due to unexpected problems with the composer's Macintosh (something which should evoke the immediate sympathy of this newsletter's entire readership), was Rick Bassett's "Axe to Grind" for tenor saxophone, keyboards, and MAX accompaniment. Mr. Bassett's virtuosic keyboard playing, eclectic compositional style, and exceptional ear for orchestration are a joy to hear at any time, and this piece was no exception, accompanied as he was by Toru Morichika's saxophone. Mr. Bassett's keyboard part served the dual role of accompanying the saxophonist and controlling the level of processing and depth of orchestration which the computer added to the sax performance. The piece, which flowed quite well, showed off the computer's ability to aid, rather than restrict, improvisation.

- R. Luke DuBois


Day 3, Monday 15 December, 1997.
Keio University, Mita Campus.

The day began at a frantic pace as the sleepy American contingent played road crew and loaded sound equipment into 518 Hall. Not surprisingly, the Japanese woman who was directing this activity had the strength of three American composers. Upon catching their breath, these weaklings staggered into the Conference Hall to hear three student paper presentations. Harry Castle, a student at UCSD, presented his paper entitled "Scotch, twice: convincing human/machine improvisation". Harry described the details of an interactive system called the "Penginstrument" he had programmed for his piece "Scotch, twice" on the Amiga 3000. We were treated to a realization of this highly interactive improvised piece on the following day. The next paper, entitled "I am trying to make sense of Signal Processing as a paradigm for composing" was presented by Luke DuBois, a student at Columbia. Luke's presentation helped us gain a greater understanding of the motives and techniques behind his electroacoustic compositions, with a focus on his tape piece "richetta for tape" heard the previous day. The next speaker, Yoriko Kojima, a Japanese native who is currently studying at Columbia, presented her paper entitled "Composer as computer musician". Yoriko described her experiences in composing her first electroacoustic piece "REMINISCENCE for tape". We were to hear the piece that evening.

After being treated to a fine lunch, it was time for the esteemed lecturers from the American universities to hit the podium. Terry Pender, who lectures at Columbia, presented his paper entitled "Performing Technology". Terry gave us many insights into his very personal relationship with computers and acoustic instruments. There was an obvious common thread running through the presentations from Columbia. They seem to prefer a highly personal, intuitive approach to the creation of electronic music over the deterministic approach made famous in Columbia by Davidovsky. Next, Cort Lippe, who lectures at SUNY at Buffalo, presented his paper entitled "Music for piano and computer". Lippe played examples from his piece "Music for piano and computer" at different stages of processing to give us an insightful layer cake description of the piece in the tradition of the marvelous chef, Julia Childs. Robert Rowe, who lectures at NYU, was the next faculty speaker. He discussed recent work on his "Flock of Words" and "Interactive Virtual Musicians" projects. Robert's presentation, which included video footage from both projects, detailed his pioneering efforts in designing Integrated Real-Time Music and Graphics Performance Systems.

After a short break, the faculty from the four institutions in the U.S. took part in a panel discussion chaired by Takayuki Rai, Director of the Sonology Department of the Kunitachi College of Music. The intended subject for discussion was "Interactive Computer Music Systems", about which panel members Terry Pender, Miller Puckette, Robert Rowe, and Cort Lippe are all, in their own way, experts. There was much talk about the future of software and hardware. Miller Puckette, who began the panel with a short demonstration of his PD software, was unusually energetic as he described, among other things, a possible new protocol called FUDI which would replace MIDI and utilize ethernet communications instead of the serial port. The crystal ball gazing which characterized this panel session turned sour towards the end when the topic of discussion was steered by a certain member of the audience towards music education. Although three of the four panel members are proud fathers, and obviously care deeply about the future of education, this topic seemed more appropriate to a conference of an entirely different nature.

Thankfully, Takayuki Rai managed to close the session before too much more could be said on the topic and it was time to head over to 518 Hall to hear the 6th concert of the conference. The concert opened with Shintaro Imai's "raremetals" for flute, percussion and ISPW. Shintaro, a student at Kunitachi, displayed an impressive level of virtuosity in ensemble writing and real-time signal processing techniques with this piece. He told me the next evening over a bottle of sake that it took three weeks to complete the piece, which, given it's clarity, is amazing. The next item on the program, "REMINISCENCE" for tape, had been discussed by the composer Yuriko Kojima earlier that day. The piece featured readings of the Greek poet Konstantine Kavafy, processed on the SGI and external signal processors. With this, her first electroacoustic composition, Yuriko shows a great deal of promise as a composer in the genre. The following piece, "Polemics" for piano and tape, composed by NYU student Carlos Delgado, was reminiscent of Davidovsky's Synchronisms in the close relationship between the tape part and the technically challenging piano part. Next up was Chris Penrose's "Dodohead" for DAT tape. Chris is the composer in residence at Keio University's Shonan-Fujisawa Campus. "Dodohead" explored semantic relationships between spurious concrete sounds in a style pioneered in Varese's "Poeme Electronique". Although many aspects of the piece were intended to be humorous, the humor was negated by the long duration of the work. The final item on the program was Erik O $BKB (J's "Marco Polo" for midi piano and ISPW. Erik sent MIDI data to the piano generated by an algorithm running in MAX. The sounds from the piano, which had no human performer, were processed on the ISPW. Some of the more striking details of this piece were the panning effects and the intimate, seemingly unsystematic piano writing.

Day 3 ended in the first of two trips to a nearby Chinese restaurant, where students and faculty from the U.S. and Japan reveled in good food, drinks and conversation.

- Barry Moon


Day 4, Tuesday 16 December, 1997.
Keio University, Mita Campus.

The fourth and final day of the conference consisted of two paper sessions, two concerts, and a panel discussion. The four papers presented were all informative and gave rise to interesting points of discussion. Joshua Fried discussed his current and past works and the compositional motivations that inspired them. Barry Moon followed with a presentation detailing his open-form score following technique as exhibited in his most recent real-time composition "Interact I." The afternoon papers were equally interesting, beginning with a detailed description of the CAMUS (Computer Aided MUsic Synthesis) system developed by Azusa Umemoto/Mikinobu Utiyama/Atuo Kawai/Siino Tutomu. The system adds heuristic approaches to theory-based composition. The heuristic data is incorporated into knowledge bases that are applied towards note duration, chord progression, and pitch composition decisions.

The paper sessions concluded with a presentation by Axel Mulder describing his work with Sidney Fels and Kenji Mase. They have developed an experimental environment in which a virtual object is used as an input device for the editing of sound. The sound artist can literally sculpt sounds by changing attibutes of the virtual object such as its shape, position and orientation. There is no tactile feedback, but the movement of hands is read and interpreted through Cybergloves (for handshape), and Polhemus Fastrak sensors (for hand orientation). They have written custom MAX objects that can be used to introduce movement information into a MAX patch. This presentation attracted a great deal of interest and engendered lively discussion. It was followed, appropriately enough, by a panel discussion on multimedia as it relates to computer music. The panel was chaired by Kazuo Uehara, and the panel included Joshua Fried, Barry Moon, Luke DuBois, Osamu Takashiro, Daisuke Hagimori, and myself (Harry Castle).

There were two concerts given this day as well, one in the early afternoon and another in the evening. The afternoon concert began with three tape pieces. The first, "AC2 (Inspired A-life)" for tape, was by Fumitake Onaka. The piece was generated algorithmically by drawing on artificial-life modelling methods, and was realized through Csound and Cmix. A-life is an ongoing area of study for the composer, and in this case it resulted in a timbrally rich and slowly unfolding work. Ayumu Kitawaki composed "OPUS 30" for hard-disk recorder, a piece which was also concerned largely with timbre. The composer generated all sounds by starting with instrumental sound sources and running them through a battery of effects until the original sound was largely indistinguishable. The work, as the previous piece, unfolded slowly and attempted to direct the listeners attention to the development and transformation of timbres throughout the piece. The third tape piece was "Pinger for tape," by Motohiko Hibino, realized using Csound. "Pinger," as described by the composer, is a "sound to perceive the size or shape of an object that we cannot see directly". This piece was also more timbrally than melodically oriented, and used spatialization to advantage. The music was spectrally lush and the tentative, intermittent panning of sounds created a palpable sense of searching and of physical space.

The next piece was "Cregg's Pipes for mandoin and tape," by Terry Pender. Pender played mandolin along with a tape he created by layering samples of mandolin harmonics, played out of phase with each other. The melodic material was derived from a traditional Irish Reel and played at a much slower tempo. The piece developed beautifully, with the composer playing mandolin along with the tape as layer after layer revealed itself. The result was a wall of interlocking modal melodies reaching a fullness of density and then abating. The final piece on the concert was my own, "Scotch, twice," for Disklavier piano and two performers. The piece is an improvised duet in which one player performs at the keyboard, and the other performs at a computer using custom software to selectively capture and transform fragments of any length played by the pianist. The computer performer then "plays" the transformed material back on the same Disklavier and the two improvisors must negotiate the same physical as well as aural space. The pianist for the performance was Joseph Pinzarrone, with myself at the computer.

The evening concert opened with a piece by Chiaki Mouri for violin (Teduka Satomi), piano (Ayako Sato), ISPW for sound, and SGI for graphics. The composition sought to explore issues of power and contol by allowing the instrumentalists' playing (directed by a score) to influence the development of the piece, while simultaneously projecting a computer generated image of a mannequin whose movements were determined according to their playing. The piece was technologically ambitious and came off without a hitch. The ideas were expressed clearly and it was overall a very enjoyable performance.

Tamami Tono gave a wonderful performance of her piece "dinergy 2," for sho and live computer. Dinergy, meaning "growth over the limits" was an apt title for this piece. The composer played sho using circular breathing throughout, producing long tones straining beautifully against the electronic material. The electronic sounds complemented the sho and the overall effect was, as the composer hoped, to "fill the musical space with the rich ephemeral energy of life."

Cort Lippe's "Music for piano and computer" was given a strong performance by Yoshiko Shibuya. The piece uses an ISPW to analyze the piano performance and in response trigger sound generation and computer processing of the piano. Lippe deploys an extensive range of DSP real-time signal processing techniques throughout the piece. They never stand out as "effects," but instead naturally extend and complement the sounds from the piano. I have seen this work performed several times now and I continue to hear new things in it each time, and each of the performances, like this one, have been energetic and exciting. The final piece of the conference was an improvisation with Rick Bassett at piano, Terry Pender on mandolin, Cort Lippe on an ISPW, and Miller Puckette using his Pure Data software with GEM (by Mark Danks) to add a live graphical component. The energy brought to the stage by this group was infectious and the jam was enthusiastic and compelling. It was a high note on which to end a great four day event.

- Harry Castle