Access to the French translation “Espaces notationnels et œuvres interactives”
 
Go to the English version of the Encounter with Vincent-Raphaël Carinola and Jean Geoffroy:
 
Go to the French version of the « Rencontre avec Vincent-Raphaël Carinola et Jean Geoffroy »:
 

On Notational Spaces in Interactive Music

Vincent-Raphaël Carinola and Jean Geoffroy

The article “On Notational Spaces in Interactive Music”, by Vincent-Raphaël Carinola and Jean Geoffroy, is available on the International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation & Representation (TENOR) website (see the link bellow). It follows on from the conference organized by PRISM-CNRS in Marseille in May 2022, which published the proceedings, edited by Vincent Tiffon, Jonathan Bell and Charles de Paiva Santana.

Abstract

This article presents a reflection on the nature of notational spaces in interactive musical works using digital devices. It builds on the author’s experiences in Toucher (2009) for theremin and computer and Virtual Rhizome (2018) for Smart Hand Computers. In interactive music, notational spaces are correlated to the spatial structure of the dispositif, a notion that must be understood in the sense of an extension of the traditional instrument. That’s why composing a work is equivalent, at least in part, to composing the instrument. The notational spaces — in other words: the places making possible a writing, and thus a musical interpretation — are distributed among the different components of the dispositif. The way in which its digital devices are interconnected (the mapping), the algorithmic logic of the “if-then-else” and the notion of openness play a fundamental role for the composer and the performer. However, in the case of miniaturized (or embedded, or embodied) dispositifs, this spatial structuring of its components seems to be absent and, consequently, questions the existence of a place for composition and interpretation. One of the solutions explored here is to conceive the work as a virtual architecture that recalls a “world” in the field of video games. This architecture, open to a plurality of courses, then assumes the function of a notational space by calling, paradoxically, on techniques of memory specific to orality.

Link to the original English text of the article
published by the International Conference on Technologies
for Music Notation & Representation (TENOR)