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)

I / O + IOU: The original text by Ben Boretz, « I / O » was published in Open Space Magazine, Issue 3, Spring 2001, Red Hook, New York. The text IOU by Jean-Charles François was written for Ben Boretz’s 80th birthday and will be published (alongside with Ben Boretz’s text) in the next issue of Open Space Magazine, under the title « I.O.U.A.lot, ComplE/Imentary to I / O by Benjamin Boretz ».

You can access these two texts in two different ways :

1) A video composed by a slide show of the texts accompanied by the recorded voices (in French) of:

• In the role of Ben Boretz: Jean-Charles François
• In the role of Jean-Charles François: Monica Jordan
• Titles of works in Boretz: Nancy François
• Non-titles in François: Dan Haffner

2) A pdf version of the two parallel texts (in French).

The two texts in French (12p, landscape format, 175Ko)

Musique, Recherche et Politique: One of the principal preoccupations of the collective Paalabres is the concern with the role of the artist in today’s global (or eminently localized) society, which is perforce political in nature. With the emphasis on practices rather than on the result (the works of art), the political characteristics of the interactions between participants cannot be avoided: especially the issues of access to artistic practices, to hierarchies, to participation in a democratic process, to the degree of self-determination of groups, etc. What is at stake is not to develop the communication of political postures, or to consider to overturning existing structures, but rather to be aware of the political and social nature of artistic acts. In this text Karine Hahn and Nicolas Sidoroff basically describe Karine’s research on musical practices in French rural contexts, and Nicolas’ work on popular education and its possible applications to musical practices. Some illustrative vignettes, more or less lengthy, more or less anecdotal, accompany the main text, bringing some elements of reason/resonance.

Return to the French text

The Artistic Turn: Summary of the book The Artistic Turn, A Manifesto, by Kathleen Coessens, Darla Crispin and Anne Douglas, published by the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium (Leuwen: Leuwen University Press, 2009).
Here is the text of the book’s cover:

The emergent field of artistic research remains controversial, and is accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm in academic institutions. The challenges and opportunities presented by this discipline may be better understood by re-emphasizing the centrality of the artist through a fresh paradigm — an ‘artistic turn’. The aim is to create a field of meaning that may illuminate the most promising, though correspondingly problematic, aspects of artistic research: the essential ineffability of artistic creativity, and the consequent insufficiency of verbal and written accounts. The discourse articulated charts a constellation of ideas that outlines the new discipline and points to its manifold and open ended possibilities.

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George Lewis, « Afterwords to "Improvised Music after 1950": The Changing Same », was published in The Other Side of Nowhere, Jazz Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, eds. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, Middeltown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, p. 163-172.

The original essay, “Improvised Music after 1950”, was published in Black Music Research Journal in 1996 by the Center for Black Music Research – Columbia College, Chicago.

Return to the French text.