Real Time is a software for installations that plays selected MIDI scores by capturing ambient sounds in real time from geographically distant devices. It executes the silent notes of the track by replacing them with the closest acoustic frequencies in tone.
The project, conceived by Alessio de Girolamo, has been welcomed by LIM (Laboratory of Musical Informatics at the University of Milan) and developed by the Department in collaboration with Jacopo Silvestri on the occasion of his Bachelor's Thesis. (LINK)
The project is in an experimental phase due to its innovative nature and is continuously being improved.
The Problem of Time as a Number
The experience of sound in real time seems to flow beyond the notion of numeration itself. Sound naturally flows into a hypothetical uniqueness, even though there exists a complex system to guide it. Listening occurs in the moment when it creatively self-generates within us, and each time this happens, it’s as if it is happening for the first time. It’s a moment that never repeats, even if we’re listening on loop to an old recording played on a gramophone or on a computer. The mere fact that the experience unfolds in space and time makes it an original event enmeshed with the humanity of the listener and the environment hosting it. To exaggerate, we could argue that sitting on the couch and pressing the “play” button, instead of attending a live concert, does not compromise the originality of the experience, nor of the performance. It may seem absurd, but since nothing is ever exactly self-identical, neither is the recording medium, the player, nor the natural conditions through which the track spreads. Whether listening is or is not philosophically an original act, there exists a scientific difference between a gramophone and a computer; it’s a categorical difference in which technique and philosophy merge into what we might call the sense of continuum. For Alan Turing, the idea of continuum is lost here, because sampling is entrusted to statistics in combination with binary calculation. It’s an unprecedented structure that makes mathematics a god definitively distant from nature, dehumanizing the information retrieval (previously performed by a needle always in contact with the medium) through the distance of the digital interval. Today, considerations of this kind seem labyrinthine, since reconciling the new logic with the old is untenable. Sometimes, while considering some works of interactive self-generative music, I had the illusory hope of finding an emergency exit. This is because, often, between the detection of the environment by devices and the listening perception, there seems to be no gap, resulting in an audience immersed in a seemingly analogue form of reactivity. Some works of sound art use human material to calculate algorithms and to generate sound patterns as variables; these include position, warmth, noise, among others. As a witness to some of these sonic interventions, I can say that the result placed a new distance between the track and the listener-author. The calculation – aimed at generating a predetermined compositional result, even in terms of performance – calls into question any “fusion” between the listener and the sound, making the individual feel inadequate as a mere “retrieval device.”
What would happen, instead, if alphanumeric programming were simply aimed at creating the conditions for a sonic incident in which space, time, and listener themselves are the sonic matter? How would a calculation manage to nullify the very idea of number in order to achieve a fusion between person, landscape, and time? Before examining the deeper meaning of the Real Time project, I want to emphasize that this discussion shouldn’t seem like an escape from binary calculation, nor should it appear as nostalgia for the analogue. Instead, the foundations of the project should be sought out of the need to restore a hierarchy between natural soundscapes and human artifice, highlighting the intrinsic limit
of technologies, whether they are digital or analogue. Rapidly retracing the history of musical instruments, from primitive ones initially created to defend against hostile nature to classical orchestral ones (children of civil crafts); one then comes from synthesizers created to have timbral limits, and one ends up with digital computers that abstract and continually implement. We can argue that these forms are all pitilessly trapped by an underlying flaw: an impulse to emulation. This way of approaching creative expression is anthropologically ancestral, and, above all, transversal to all technical fields, to the extent that it presents the ultimate limit within which to choose to stay, or the greatest possible challenge to overcome. Real Time finds its genesis here, in the attempt to restore the execution of musical scores to the original soundscape, surpassing the very idea of real-time and raising, in an attempt to resolve, the problem of the more concrete limit of the necessity of pre-sampling in the compositional phase. Here, however, technique does not claim a role of self-exaltation, but rather a purely ontological purpose: to restore a dialogue between humanity and nature without closure or emulation by the former, who can rediscover thus the inherent meaning of history and memory.
The Incident
How does the sonic incident occur in this real time project? And what kind of incident is it? Imagine being in the countryside early in the morning and opening the window of your room. Birds singing, the sound of a stream, your neighbor chopping wood. Many other sounds and noises can suddenly happen, just use a little imagination. Voilà! This landscape replaces an orchestra that should play you a welcome tribute in the morning! Clearly, being a personalised tribute, it’s a unique piece, and, therefore, the notes must be precisely those, arranged in a specific sequence and in a predetermined time that inexorably flows.
But how can the natural soundscape perform tuned frequencies that are perfectly timed as on a musical score? How can a chance occurrence of sounds that express themselves freely in these surroundings coincide with an orderly and codified system of notes that runs parallel in real time? Answering, absurdly, with an analogue example – but one which paved the way for the concrete realization of the Real Time software – the only way would be to have a gigantic roll of music box paper scrolling endlessly and filling its gaps (i.e., its notes) with sounds from the landscape which, by coincidence, are synchronously necessary for the execution! We can argue, therefore, that if the passing of a corresponding hole corresponds to a B-flat (for example), and if fortune hasn’t provided a robin to sing that note at that moment, the system doesn’t work. In conclusion, it is evident that the conditio sine qua non for a recognizable result is that frequent sonic coincidences occur to perform the score, minimizing the sonic vacuum as much as possible. Moving on to an analysis of the Real Time program developed by the LIM (Laboratory of Musical Informatics at the University of Milan), we find no major divergences, compared to this example, in the overall concept. Through a microphone pickup, the software identifies the sound frequencies of the landscape, attempting a continuous match between these and the notes of the score (which run silently in MIDI format).
Moving now from the countryside to a city square, we can deduce that at night, unless there is some specific event, it will be difficult to detect relevant matches (or incidents) between sound events and the notes of the score. On the contrary; from morning until the peak vitality of the day, the sound spectrum will increase significantly, offering a denser and more concrete possibility for the execution of the chosen notes. The absence or presence of humans, animals, machinery, etc., therefore, seem to be essential factors for the final quality of the audio feedback, defining the degree of recognizability of the chosen musical score. The incident is, in light of all this, the annulment of the void through a fortuitous occurrence, a “collision,” in our case, between a codified language and the continuous acoustic flow of the landscape. In this sense, it is implicit that categories such as “beautiful” or “ugly” are not applicable, even less so ideas of “success” or “failure.” “Coincidence” becomes the unique and foundational value to consider, both in its occurrence and in its “not happening.” The manifestation of an overlap that becomes, in this case, a true fusion between the expectation of a written sign and a natural occurrence, placing us, as never before, within the flow of time, and, for the same reason, beyond it. From listening to the results, produced together with the LIM, I want to express a further consideration: returning to nature the musical execution historically assigned by civilizations to the artificial emulation of it yields a surprising result. It necessarily makes us reflect on the human construction of language and its rules.
Alessio de Girolamo
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