Aesthetics and laptop orchestras

While out for my daily (well, if I’m honest, it’s a bit less frequent than daily) run yesterday, in the afternoon sunshine, I forgot to bring a water bottle.  I began to flag a bit before the end; my legs got heavy and my body started to entertain mutinous thoughts of stopping.   So I took remedial action.  I took my iPod out of its armband and pressed Play on Kele Okerere’s solo album, Boxer, figuring that the nasty synths and the punchy kick drums would get me over the finish line.  As, indeed, they did.

This got me thinking about aesthetics.  I’m currently supervising an undergraduate course on the aesthetics of music, so I’m grappling with a lot of the classic texts in the area, like Eduard Hanslick’s ‘On the Musically Beautiful’.  Hanslick, and a lot of theorists after him, think about musical beauty – what we perceive as appealing or valuable in a piece of music – in cerebral terms.  The real appreciation of music is not a matter of brute sensory appeal, goes the story, but an altogether more contemplative affair. 

That’s all well and good for art music, and maybe for some other world musics, but it struck me that it seems entirely inappropriate for discussions of electronic music.  For me at least, the thing that gets me going about electronic music is the production values.  The way the mix is put together, the ‘shape’ of the synth sounds, the landscape of the stereo field – these are all things I really seem to feel rather than confront analytically.  I’m not sure if the discipline of aesthetics has really thought about this kind of musical experience, possibly because the guys writing the books on aesthetics do so while listening to Mozart, contentedly puffing on their pipes. 

I wonder what kind of an aesthetic treatise might arise from more serious consideration of the diverse relationships that people have with music these days.  If anyone out there wants to commission me to have a go, my email is in the 'About Me' section.

In the meantime, before publishers start beating down my door, Sam Aaron and I are working on our laptop orchestra.  Well, Sam’s doing all the work, to be honest; my contribution so far has mostly involved the provision of chocolate biscuits and the odd ‘musical insight’.  The aim is to create a collaborative environment in which people can get together and make live electronic music, using the Overtone system.  The system will use Supercollider, and all of its resources, but unlike Supercollider it will have a much more user-friendly linguistic interface.  It will also be able to accommodate live input from multiple users on the same network. 

Technology now has a human face, thanks in part to Steve Jobs, a point made in probably thousands of columns all over the world in recent weeks.  The laptop orchestra is another example of this – yet another example of how we can use technology to share new, meaningful experiences, which is what music is all about, surely.  Anybody who thinks that computer-generated music is anonymous or alienating is obviously not a fan of the genre, but the same could be said about art music for those who don’t get it.  Perhaps the Cambridge University Laptop Orchestra (the catchy name is a work in progress) will change a few minds around here at least.

We’re going to keep a log of progress on the project here.  Watch this space for further updates.