Reflections from ICMC2013

Last week I had the honour of having some of my work selected for presentation in the International Computer Music Conference, Perth, August 2013.

It was an intense week-long program, with papers and concerts running from early morning to late at night. I’ve only ever skirted the fringes of the world of academic electro-acoustic music, so getting right in the thick of it was a fascinating window into this strange and hidden world, which has essentially been the engine of innovation in electronic music since the early 20th century - innovation which has trickled out to fuel many of the most successful electronic artists in the commercial music sphere. Yet the relationship between these two worlds seems very uneasy, and there is an adversarial tone to the way some academics speak of “pop” music.

This blog post is some of my reflections, bashed out while they’re still fresh in my mind.  

Before I risk saying anything negative at all, I feel I must state that it was an awesome event with a lot of very excellent people, and I’m exceptionally glad that I attended. For such an epic program I think the organisers did an excellent job, and the quality of the work was really high (to the degree that I started to feel very inadequate about my own work I was presenting).

The concert music, to be blunt, was overwhelmingly bizarre, and I’m sure it would have been largely baffling to an uninitiated audience. Much of it was in the genre academics refer to as “electro-acoustic” music, and often featured one or more musicians playing acoustic instruments hooked up to laptops by some configuration of microphones or transducers, processed and pumped out through multi-channel speaker arrays. The instrumental playing was generally ultra-modern, rarely tonal, extended-technique-laden noodlings, while the processing often occurred through custom-made Max/MSP or PureData patches, usually programmed by the composer. Despite being a bit of an outsider, I quickly got the sense that this sort of work has a fairly strong tradition in recent history, and has developed its own norms and idioms.

The theoretical stuff was really diverse, and ranged from dense technical papers on new synthesis techniques to discussions about the aesthetic and philosophical concerns of computer-generated music. The highly technical stuff was often beyond my understanding, but I had a conversation with someone who’d been working in the area for many years, who told me that one can expect software programming ideas presented at these conferences to appear 15 years later in commercially available products like Logic or Ableton. 

There were some mind-boggling ideas and inspiring work presented. The most successful for me were those sound-obsessed tinkerers who manage to keep one foot in the world of heart-felt musical expression - though this was not always the case. At times I got the sense that the experience of the music was of secondary importance, and sophistication of the coding had become the primary concern. Works of this kind were aesthetically unfulfilling for me - I appreciate the elegance of the programming but failed to connect instinctively with the music. But I do also recognise the important role of these programmers/composers - their somewhat cold technical experiments pave the way for more expressive use of the principles they uncover. 

There were a few aspects of this academic electro-acoustic world that seemed surprisingly disconnected from the worlds of music I inhabit. Firstly there was a real emphasis on high-quality multi-channel surround systems. This made for really excellent listening experiences - hearing sound art in a darkened room from a perfectly-tuned 7.1 system is a pretty incredible thing. But I couldn’t help but think about the prohibitiveness - it seems a shame to me that these meticulously composed works cannot be listened to without a rather expensive and exclusive speaker setup, far beyond the capacity of regular people to participate in and enjoy.

There was also the strange disconnect from “commercial” music. This wasn’t just about keeping distance from Pink and Rihanna (which I would totally understand), it was about fencing off academic music from even the most masterful and experimental music which doesn’t happen to be accompanied by academic papers or originate from an institution. The discourse flowed as if people like The Books, James Blake and Hudson Mohawke don’t exist. Electronic music pioneer Alvin Curran delivered a keynote called “A Life in Unpopular Music” which discussed how “popular” electronic music has robbed academic composers of their identity and relevance. Though I have a great deal of respect for Curran, I left really questioning whether this was a necessary or even helpful attitude.

It seems that while many complain of the dwindling audiences of experimental electronic music audiences, they simultaneously lament the commercial success and popularity of people like Flying Lotus, whose work is as ambitious and nuanced as anything coming from within the ivory tower. Is the problem that it is too palatable? Or is it just that Steven Ellison prefers to spend his time making music which connects with audiences, rather than writing papers for academic conferences? The “unpopular” tag seems a badge of honour, indicating that one has put aesthetic and intellectual concerns above the petty needs of a paying audience - but even this picture disintegrates when one considers the many indie experimental artists, unsupported by governments or institutions, making innovative new noise in dank DIY venues, probably at a financial loss.

I’m still not sure what to make of all this - as I mentioned above, I’m quite new to the scene, so there may be many parts of the story that I am missing. I also tend to be more sympathetic toward the DIY indie world generally, since that is where I cut my musical teeth, and it’s a culture I feel more connected to than academic music. Having said all that, I am also writing academic papers about my music and submitting work to conferences, so where does that leave me? I’m honestly not sure at this stage.

Amongst the highlights of the conference:

- This video work by Mark Pilkington from the UK:

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/50337875 w=500&h=375]

Birth (SD version) 2011. from mark pilkington on Vimeo.

- Fellow Aussie David Kim-Boyle’s animated scores:

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/58272658 w=500&h=500]

line studies no. 1 (2013) for piano and computer from dkb on Vimeo.

- And a whole bunch of other stuff which is less easily embedded in a tumblr post.