performance hybrid machines: new forms of instrumentness in experimental musical praxes

André L . Martins

The research focus of this work is the agencying that occurs from a metastable environment of musical performance, which includes the use of acoustic and digital instruments, in the formation of what I call here a hybrid machine. It is through this machine that interaction processes can occur between performers X musical instruments (acoustic/digital) X environment. In this work, I intend to investigate some of the new forms of instrumentness provided by the operation of a hybrid machine in an environment of experimental musical practices that include extensive use of musical improvisation. During the text, will be presented the concept of what is this hybrid machine of musical performance, in an improvisation environment, from the investigation of new forms of interaction in real time, taking into account the mobile computer as agent in the process of creation and performance. Through ideas such as imponderability, control and noncontrol, latency, affordance, open-work, free and idiomatic improvisation and new forms of instrumentness offered by the hybrid system, among others, this work also seeks to put into practice much of the theory covered, through recorded performances and the creation and development of a software / digital musical instrument, which can be coupled in a hybrid system, in the form of a patch of performance, processing and sound creation. The whole process of investigation presented here was carried out through autoetnographic bias - it is an investigation always conducted from the place of the performer - which seeks to offer a summary of what was this particular path of research, covering the poetic process of the work, the unique methodology of implementation and execution of the initial premises put on the agenda and, finally, recording this particular epistemology that permeates the entire text, the patch offered and, why not, the performances and reflections made throughout the investigation.

UNIVERSIDADE DE SÃO PAULO ESCOLA DE COMUNICAÇÃO E ARTES {SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATIONS & ARTS} ANDRÉ LOPES MARTINS performance hybrid machines: new forms of instrumentness in experimental musical praxes Sao Paulo 2020 2 ANDRÉ LOPES MARTINS performance hybrid machines: new forms of instrumentness in experimental musical praxes Thesis presented to Programa de PósGraduação em Música da Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo as a partial requirement to obtain the Ph.D. title in Music. Area: Musical Creation Advisor: Prof. Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa Ph.D. Sao Paulo 2020 3 I hereby authorize the reproduction and dissemination of this work, by any conventional means or for study and research purposes, provided that the source is quoted. Cataloging in the Publication Library and Documentation Service Escola de Comunicação e Artes, Universidade de São Paulo Data entered by the author ______________________________________________________________________ Martins, André Lopes "máquinas híbridas de performance: novas formas de instrumenticidade em práticas musicais experimentais" / André Lopes Martins ; orientador, Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa. -- São Paulo, 2019. 395 p.: il. + inclui pen-drive e/ou arquivos online para download. Tese (Doutorado) - Programa de Pós-Graduação em Música Escola de Comunicações e Artes / Universidade de São Paulo. Bibliografia Versão original 1. improvisação musical 2. instrumenticidade 3. máquina híbrida de performance 4. performance musical 5. novas tecnologias digitais I. Costa, Rogério Luiz Moraes II. Título. CDD 21.ed.780 Prepared by Sarah Lorenzon Ferreira - CRB-8/6888 4 Name: MARTINS, André Lopes Title: performance hybrid machines: new forms of instrumentness in experimental musical praxes Thesis presented to Programa de PósGraduação em Música da Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo as a partial requirement to obtain the Ph.D. title in Music. Approved on: __________________ Board of Examiners: Prof. Dr. Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa Institution: USP, Universidade de São Paulo Evaluation ________________________ Signature: ______________ Profa. Dra. Tatiana Olivieri Catanzaro Institution: UnB, Universidade de Brasília Evaluation ________________________ Signature: ______________ Prof. Dr. Manuel Silveira Falleiros Institution: Unicamp, Univ. Est. de Campinas Evaluation ________________________ Signature: ______________ Prof. Dr. Vitor Kisil Miskalo Institution: FAM, São Paulo Evaluation ________________________ Signature: ______________ Profa. Dra. Franziska Schroeder Institution: Queen’s University Belfast /SARC Evaluation ________________________ Signature: ______________ 5 “ ‘ What has changed since you’ve begun to work in social sciences?’ ’ The questions.’ ’Not the answers?’ ‘ The matter is that what we are mainly looking for are not answers.’ Néstor García Canclini “This song is what it is because it does not mean anything besides itself.” Rodolfo Caesar “Drip a drop into an ocean of meanings and note that concentric waves form. Set a word alone means trying to grab these waves; nobody has so agile hands.”. Robert Bringhurst “The ancient ones, who gave name to it all did n ot think delirium was either ugly, or dishonorable [...] I rely on this while you are what you are”. Plato 6 “Nessas e noutras muito extremadas coisas eu tornava a pensar, o espírito em meia-mão, por diante permeio os outros meus entretimentos de-verdade. Agora tudo estava pronto, das obrigações – afora a de esperar, que é a que regasta e recoze. A noite foi se esquentando assaz [...] Ninguém nunca foi jagunço obrigado. Sertanejos, mire veja: o sertão é uma espera enorme”. João Guimarães Rosa 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS To my parents, Edgard and Ivone, always; To my brother, Dalton Martins, who has always instigated and supported me to pursue the path of graduate school; To Ana Paula Vanzella, who read and re-read this work in very first-hand, constantly suggesting positive improvements and original questions; To my music partner, advisor and who also became my friend, Rogério L. M. Costa, who for almost ten years has patiently accompanied my academic and scientific evolution. His always relevant observations, both in this text and in our musical rehearsals and performances, resulting in valuable reflections throughout these years; To all my NuSom fellows, who accompanied me in meetings, presentations, study groups, lectures etc. and especially to Fernando Iazzetta, for the always positive group leadership, with unprecedented initiatives in the study of sound and the use of digital technologies in the sound creation and performance; To my friends from doctorate, master's degree, academic and artistic coexistence: Paulo Assis, Yuri Behr, Luzilei Aliel, Micael Antunes, Mariana Carvalho, Kooi Kawazoe, Vitor Kisil Miskalo, Julian Jaramillo, Missionário José, Rodolfo Valente, Walter Nery, Ciro Visconti, George Alveskog, Fábio Martinelli, Lucia Esteves, Mário Del Nunzio, Valeria Bonafé, among so many others. All our coffees, pieces of cake in the cafeteria, conversations, rehearsals, soundchecks, performances, lunches and meetings are also part of this work, in a special way; To professors, researchers and artists who encouraged me and influenced me through their work, articles, books, classes and performances: Cesar Villavicencio Grossmann, Silvio Ferraz, Franziska Schoereder, José Henrique Padovani, Fernando Iazzetta, Michelle Agnes Magalhães, Manu Falleiros, David Borgo, Jamie Bullock, Federico Visi, Paul Stapleton, Marcelo Wanderley, Cecília Almeida Salles, François Delalande, Rodolfo Caesar, Marcelo Queiróz, Adrien Mamou-Mani, Alê Fenerich, Didier Guigue, Graziela Bortz, Heloísa Duarte Valente, Jaime Reis, Jeff Kaiser, José Augusto Mannis, Tatiana Catanzaro, Lílian Campesato, Alberto Ikeda, among many others I have met all these years; To Ana Trivellato, for the translation of this thesis into the English language, made with so much care. 8 To all my electric guitar, acoustic guitar, musical theory and improvisation students. Thank you all who, in some way, have followed the evolution of this work, from its beginning; And especially to all those who write, compose, create, play, perform, think and make music, science and teach in Brazil. Only those who are here today know what it means to be a musician, to be a researcher, be a teacher and artist currently in Brazil. Thinking, playing, creating and studying are and will always be powerful forms of resistance. [This work is dedicated to my niece Cora Pudo Martins, who was born in the same year I started doctorate and now is 4 years-old]. The present work was supported by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) - Código de Financiamento 001 9 ABSTRACT The research focus of this work is the agencying that occurs from a metastable environment of musical performance, which includes the use of acoustic and digital instruments, in the formation of what I call here a hybrid machine. It is through this machine that interaction processes can occur between performers X musical instruments (acoustic/digital) X environment. In this work, I intend to investigate some of the new forms of instrumentness provided by the operation of a hybrid machine in an environment of experimental musical practices that include extensive use of musical improvisation. During the text, will be presented the concept of what is this hybrid machine of musical performance, in an improvisation environment, from the investigation of new forms of interaction in real time, taking into account the mobile computer as agent in the process of creation and performance. Through ideas such as imponderability, control and noncontrol, latency, affordance, open-work, free and idiomatic improvisation and new forms of instrumentness offered by the hybrid system, among others, this work also seeks to put into practice much of the theory covered, through recorded performances and the creation and development of a software / digital musical instrument, which can be coupled in a hybrid system, in the form of a patch of performance, processing and sound creation. The whole process of investigation presented here was carried out through autoetnographic bias - it is an investigation always conducted from the place of the performer - which seeks to offer a summary of what was this particular path of research, covering the poetic process of the work, the unique methodology of implementation and execution of the initial premises put on the agenda and, finally, recording this particular epistemology that permeates the entire text, the patch offered and, why not, the performances and reflections made throughout the investigation. Keywords: Musical improvisation; Machinic; Instrumentness; Hybrid machine; Performance, New Technologies. 10 performance hybrid machines: new forms of instrumentness in experimental musical praxes Student: André Lopes Martins Advisor: Prof. Dr. Rogério Luiz Moraes Costa Post-graduation in Music, Processes of Musical Creation Escola de Comunicação e Artes Universidade de São Paulo January 2020 11 Summary Introduction 18 1. Hybrid Machines 39 1.1 What is it? 39 1.2 Machines and tools 51 1.2.1 Before that, however 51 1.2.2 Machine is (not) a tool 52 1.3 Half-subject, half-object 60 1.4 Assemblage 66 1.5 Metastable environment 69 1.5 Operation consistency and balance of the machinic system 71 2. iii {improvisation, instrumentness, interaction} 79 2.1 improvisation 80 2.1.1 Chaotic improvisation 86 2.1.2 Music-making – musiking 90 2.1.3 improvisation and hybrid machine 92 2.2 Machine as a creation process agent 93 2.3 Complex environment 95 2.4 The performance place – consistent environment 98 2.5 Open performance 100 2.6 Musical improvisation in the present work 104 a.) Free-free improvisation 104 b.) improvisation out of an idea/word: performance ansiosa – idea of anxiety 106 c.) improvisation out of a painting/picture/photograph 107 d.) improvisation out of a musical score/graph/drawing 109 e.) improvisation out of static reading of poetry, in the originally presented order and coherence 110 12 f.) improvisation out of the static reading of concrete poetry, in which each performer has “their” own time and reading direction 111 g.) improvisation out of an idea on molarity 115 2.7 instrumentness 116 a.) Physicality 123 b.) Affordance 124 c.) Corporeality 126 d.) Resonance 128 e.) Gesturality 130 2.7.1 Hybrid and complex musical instrument 132 2.8 interaction 140 2.9 Interactive system = hybrid machine 145 2.10 Moving-interaction {open interaction} 148 2.11 Gesturality and control 149 3. Sensorium 157 3.1 The ar +2 duo 3.2 The times of a performance 3.3 Different kinds of interaction in the same performance 3.4 Interaction-as-Control 3.5 Interaction-as-Difference 3.6 Latency {or almost real-time} 3.7 Playing in circles 3.8 Unpredictability/imponderability during a performance 3.9 Scary blank-space 159 160 162 165 165 169 173 179 189 4. Autoetnographic Tales – there is a thesis in the middle of the performance; in the middle of the performance, there is a thesis. {autoethnographic tales} 195 4.1 Preliminary comments on the choice for an autoethnographic approach part a.) Individual tales 196 203 13 4.2 Hierarchically related layers of incompleteness {tales on learning and development with MAX software} 203 4.3 Sound flow in my fingers {tales on the learning and development with sotware Flux:FX} 206 part b.) tales on artistic praxes, rehearsals and recordings 209 4.4 Participation with Købenvagn Laptop Orchestra (KLO) 209 4.5 Notes and drafts made on Evernote1 during the research period, “ar +2” duo and creation of patches papagaIO and papaga.iOS 213 a.) [ 1st rehearsal “ar +2” duo, 2/07/2017] 215 b.) [ 2/8/2017 ] 215 c.) [ 2nd rehearsal - 2/14/17 ] take #1 216 take #2 217 d.) [ 3rd rehearsal, 2.21.17] 217 e.) [ 4th rehearsal, 2.28.17] take #1 218 f.) [ 5th rehearsal, 3/8/2017 ] Molarities 219 g.) [ 6th rehearsal, 3/15/2017 ] Aquoso 219 h.) [ 7th rehearsal, 3/29/2017 ] Árido 220 i.) [ 8th rehearsal, 4/11/2017 ] 220 O homem se arrasta 222 j.) [ 9th rehearsal: 5. 9.17 ] Free improvisation based on the individuated reading of Décio Pignatari's poem 224 k.) Performance Tempo Liso 226 l.) [ 10th rehearsal, 5/30/2017 ] Performance Livre #1 227 Performance Livre #2 228 m.) [ 11th rehearsal, 6/6/2017 ] 1 Shared note software between mobile computer, smartphone and tablet, which allows writing, image, drawings and drafts scanning. Available on: https://evernote.com/ -- access on July 31, 2018 14 Deserto n.) [ 12th rehearsal, 6/13/2017 ] Repentes Repentismos o.) [ 13th rehearsal, 6/28/2017 ] Arquipélagos #1 e #2 p.) notes on rehearsals held in 2018 Largo Performance devido tempo Performance ansiosa Performance aBaCa 229 232 233 235 237 Performance based on a photograph, Minas Gerais state 238 Open performance held at SONS DE SILÍCIO exhibition 240 q.) notes on 2019 “Tanto Mar”- performance at NIME 2019, Porto Alegre 241 229 230 231 part c.) observations regarding the design, creation and development of the patch papagaIO (Mac OSX) and patch papaga.iOS (iPad) 243 4.6 Problem found over the patch writing 252 4.7 Patch papaga.iOS (iPad OS) 255 5. Conclusion 261 6. Bibliographic References 271 7. Annexes 296 15 Figures Figure 1: Score of Wood, Stone, Metal, Skin with Voice, by Malcom Goldstein 26 Figure 2: fractal diagram, PEITGEN; JÜRGENS; SAUPE (2004) 86 Figure 3: fractal diagram, PEITGEN; JÜRGENS; SAUPE (2004) 87 Figure 4: fractal diagram, PEITGEN; JÜRGENS; SAUPE (2004) 87 Figure 5: photograph used as a score for musical improvisation performance 107 Figure 6: graphic score used in the performance “Arquipélagos Silenciosos 108 Figure 7: patch created on Max, with delay processing 135 Figure 8: patch created on SuperCollider, with delay processing 136 Figure 9: graphic proposed by Lopèz-Cano based on the idea of using autoethnographic resources in the research of artistic praxes 199 Figure 10: Flux:FX, in iOS environment, with Focusrite iTrack interface 206 Figure 11: initial drafts of configuration and setup of patch papagaIO 244 Figure 12: MIDI FCB1010 controller 247 Figure 13: 1st draft of the controllers FCB1010 configuration referring to MIDI commands of Control Changes (CC´s) 248 Figures 14 and 15: draft details made for understanding the MIDI functioning of foot controller FCB1010 248 Figure 16: configuration screen of FCB1010 in Max 249 Figure 17: detail of scale object, in papagaIO patch 251 Figure18: detail of spectral delay sub-patch, in reconstructed W10 environment 253 Figure 19: detail of original Echoplex ii 255 Figure 20: main screen of patch papaga.iOS, in performance mode 256 Figure 21: individual processing editing screen in papaga.iOS 257 Figure 22: configuration screen for rhythmic and loop repetitions in patch papaga.iOS iOS 258 16 Acronyms ADC – Analog-to-Digital Converter AI: Artificial Intelligence DAC – Digital-to-Analog Converter DAW – Digital Audio Workstation DSP – Digital Signal Processing fMRI – Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging HCI – Human-Computer Interaction IA – Inteligência Artificial AI – Artificial Intelligence IRCAM – Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique MIDI – Musical Instrument Digital Interface MRI: Magnetic Resonance Imaging NUSOM – Núcleo de Pesquisas em Sonologia OSC – Open Sound Control OSX – Operation System X, Macintosh Pd – Pure Data SARC – Sonic Arts Research Centre UCSD – University of California, San Diego VST – Virtual Studio Technology W10: Windows 10 operational system 17 intro du ction 18 Introduction “All I have is doubts, and the more we live life, the more doubts arise. Though I have settled several, in their places others appear. Every solution is a problem. If we spend our lives solving, imagine how many new interrogations are we going to accumulate? [...] Doubt is eternal.” Gilberto Gil, 20182 "This is, therefore, an experimental work that is done while thinking and thinking while doing.” Valéria Bonafé, 20163 How is a thesis written? How can one explain a research problem? How can we write down our ideas about what it is, what it has been and what we wanted our artistic praxis to be? How to relate questions that are so impregnated with time, partnership and instinct that, most of the time, we do not even know how to elaborate them? These, among countless other matters, invaded me during the first two years of doctorate. The hardest thing, at least for me, is to speak about these hermetically unconscious relationships that, in most cases, are not even clearly phrased in my mind. What is the electric guitar for me? And the bandolim?4 What is a mobile computer, what are these pedals, FX processing units, cables, effects, processes, manipulations, software, tablets, apps, audio interfaces, sensors, screens and loudspeakers? There is also the way I want to speak, write, and compose all that. What would be the employed methodology? Which path to choose? Which publications, works, books, 2 In an interview to the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo, p.C1, Ano XXXI, no. 10908, April 29, 2018. 3 In “A casa e a represa, a sorte e o corte – ou: A composição musical enquanto imaginação de formas, sonoridades, tempos (e espaços)”, 2016. 4 The BANDOLIM is a musical instrument of the string family, very traditional in Brazil (sometimes called "Brazilian mandolin" abroad), with double strings; the traditional Brazilian bandolim has 4 double strings and the model that was used in the performances of this work has 5 double strings, and was created by the musician Hamilton de Holanda. Holanda has incorporated a pair of lower strings to the traditional instrument, making it more adaptable for playing chords and harmonic voicings. It was a deliberate choice to keep the name of the instrument in the Portuguese language, so that it is not confused with the American mandolin or the Ecuadorian mandolin (the latter, an instrument with 15 strings, used in the repertoire of Andean folk music). The Brazilian 10-string mandolin is tuned on perfect 5ths: C, G, D, A and E. More about the 10-string Brazilian bandolim and the musician Hamilton de Holanda and its use in improvisation can be found here: http://www.akamu.net/hamilton.htm — https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259427534/pushing-a-tradition-forward-bandolim-in-hand — Accessed on 26/nov/2019. 19 authors, creators, and researchers will I use? What is my poetic project? How do I, as a performer, as a composer and researcher, interact with the sound, the music, the performance environment? How to connect the production of art, the performance, the new technologies and the elaboration of the scientific text? Finally, how can one write a thesis on the field of music, on musical creation processes? Obviously, this is not a simple task. For nearly 30 years, I have played the acoustic guitar and the electric guitar. Around 8 years ago, I also started the 10-string bandolim studies. In music, I started early, at the age of 11, coming from a childhood background in which my father played the guitar and sang a lot. The Beatles, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Elis Regina, Cat Stevens. Brazilian popular music, American folk music, English rock. Those were my first musical references. But in the middle of such pantheons, there were, here and there, albums by Baden Powell, by César Camargo Mariano, Cole Porter, Joni Mitchell with Peter Erskine, Grateful Dead and one, specifically, whose kind of sound I greatly admired, even though, back then, I could hardly understand what really happened in the album: Kind of Blue, by Miles Davis. After the incursion and fascination for the electric guitar and its loud distortions, somehow natural for a kid from Sao Paulo who was a music apprentice, who listened to rock and [Brazilian] popular music, little by little, after teenage years, I got to know through music schools, teachers and literature, musician friends and an increasingly varied repertoire of instrumental music and Brazilian popular music arrangements, jazz with its style based on improvisational idiomatic and technical appreciation. From an early age, however, I have also been equally fascinated by another detail: the sound, not only of the acoustic and the electric guitar, but of the FX pedals, the gear, loudspeakers and amplifiers, sound effects and processing that I, still very young, could not even explain where they came from, how they were "born", executed or their origin. Let us keep in mind that we are talking about a pre-internet, prior to Googling era. At that time, when listening to a certain sound effect or to a specific type of musical instrument timbre processing, there was not much left to do but insistently ask musician friends and the few teachers I had access to. Most of them either did not know or, if they did or had a vague idea of what such processing was, would prefer to "keep" the information, as a kind of treasured asset. So, it was very common to spend many hours of my day with an instrument, an amplifier, and the few pedals I had access to, many of them borrowed from friends who also did not have much idea what it was all about. As a young man, I had plenty of time. And this time, when not invested in rehearsals with friends or listening to music, I was immersed in the instrument, inside my bedroom or at some garage, elaborating, playing and touching the buttons on those devices. With no handbook, instruction or elaboration, I managed to learn what would happen if I increased or decreased the gains of a distortion unit, what a feedback was (even before learning the word), or how the chorus modulation happened through the rate and depth controls, for instance. 20 I write this here because, for me, the music learning process was concomitant with learning the sound; while I learned about musical scales, arpeggios, chords and their operation on the guitar neck, I was, many times even before mastering some technical idiomatic aspect, increasingly interested in the elaboration of an instrument’s sound, in the conception of the timbre and in its real-time processing. In my career path as a musician, this division between composer and performer was never clearly established. If, on the one hand, I have some instrumental works created from the idea of a certain type of music, that is instrumental and that builds a path rooted in the formalistic technique of the instrument(s), in which a score presents a solfege of (some) written musical notes, on the other hand, I have never wished to create a sort of plastered music, coming from the ink printed on the paper, where the musician is expected to play by the rules of what is written. All my pieces until 2013, many of which interpreted live, had nothing more than a simple instruction of suggested form, melody and harmony. Noticeably that, stemming from my involvement with the study of sound and with the learnings through researches on performance, improvisation, praxis, and sonology5 areas, expanded to an understanding of other ways of playing the instrument, other possibilities of sound creation and sound manipulation, especially with regard to realtime sound processing. From an increasing involvement with experimental artistic practices, my poetic project broadened exponentially with the perspective of using new materials in the process of sound/music making, enhancing my understanding of what music can be and of an artistic practice that sees and listens to other qualities of what can also occur in a performance, in the relationships between musical instrument x performer x environment. That did not happen instantly. It was the opposite. I have a background of decades in formalistic instrumental study 6, in which the search for a supposed perfection in execution and logical organization of the composition and arrangement processes were extensively explored. It is often hard to discern how those processes of 5 Sonology is a recent research area that covers studies on interactive processes of musical production and of sound. According to Iazzetta (2014, p.1), "the term has a strong kinship with a new field of studies named sound studies, in an explicit reference to cultural studies that are established especially in the Anglo-Saxon academic environment from the 1970s. Although sound and sound studies have sound as central object, sonology is focused on rather technical aspects of musical production – music development and application of new techniques and technologies to music, computing applied to music, musical acoustics and psychoacoustics - [...] in Brazil, sonology has adopted an intermediary position, encompassing both critical, analytical and reflective study concerning sound practices, and is involved the creative aspects of such practices." 6 I studied music formally in Fundação das Artes de São Caetano do Sul (São Caetano do Sul Arts Foundation, SP-Brazil), in the former ULM (now EMESP, School of Music of the State of São Paulo), at Conservatório Carlos Gomes (Santo André, SP), in the acoustic guitar school Mario Carrer and at LACM Los Angeles College of Music (USA), and I also studied with private guitar teachers such as Mozart Mello and Affonso Jr. Everywhere, without exception, my goal has always been the theoretical understanding of the Western music system and the (rigid) instrumental practice of improving execution of this system in the musical instrument. I only accessed, in an organized way, the studies of experimental praxes and sound when I started as a special student in Music Department at USP in 2010. 21 understanding what is really expected when practicing a musical instrument happen. Today it may make sense that, after many years of practicing and developing technical potencies on the electric guitar, the acoustic guitar and the bandolim, I can, exactly for mastering them technically, exceed certain boundaries of execution and interpretation through experimental poetics. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari jointly coined the idea of deterritorialization7, a widely explored concept in the studies of musical improvisation and artistic praxis, exactly because it effectively represents this sensation: in order to go beyond a certain zone of action and presence configuration, to eventually deterritorialize a constituted territory, the fact of mastering the configurations of what is and what momentarily represents this territory is of great importance. For Deleuze and Guattari (1997, p.139) every system that emerges in a certain context may be regarded as a territory or as part of one. Deterritorialization occurs, for example, when an element originating from that system moves into another context, thus losing its references. The concept of deterritorialization points towards the reterritorialization in a new way, in changing territories, being a passage place itself. However, for some time, I had this inner clash, in which the time invested in learning and developing musical instrumental techniques confronted the ideas of experimental practices that may offer ways of deterritorialization; not in a negative way, of denying possibilities or new types of musical language expansion, but the opposite; from the intrinsic relationships between body, mind and musical instrument. The processes of rupture of a constituted vocabulary familiarized mentally and/or muscularly do not happen instantly. From the experimental practice, what happened was that exactly by deterritorializing a system that had already been absorbed instinctively, it went on being part of an acquired experimental vocabulary, which territorializes itself again, expanding my musical toolbox, so to speak. All this, however, took a certain time to be internalized and instantly configured inwardly. Both in my improvisation praxis and as a composer, my first sensation was that of a narrowing in this formalized division. The possibilities of composition of sound, timbre and the idea of turning into sound what is not sonorous were increasingly approaching the possibilities of what I understood as composition. I even embraced the idea of comprovisation8, an idea that will appear throughout this text, 7 The concept of deterritorialization, among some others proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, will be used during the text and explained in depth in the following chapters. 8 Comprovisation is an emerging term that seeks to connect a systematic proposal of creation out of images, written notes, figures or literature, for example, characteristic of formal composition, with the use of contingency plans, characterizing musical improvisation. As a result, something that was previously planned is subject to unpredictable changes during a performance. Mailman (2013, p.357) used the term interactive composition until 2010, changing this concept to the word comprovisation from then on. It is worth recalling that Kandinsky himself named many of his works as Improvisations, as well Compositions to several others, clearly dividing both. For him, Compositions were a kind of "primordial declaration" of their own artistic ideals, objectively expressing different types of monumentality. The painter writes that "that one word, composition, sounded to me like a prayer". The paintings named Improvisations, on the other hand, were, for the Russian painter, creative processes that occurred spontaneously, mostly, unconsciously, thus representing what would be, for himself, an effect of the intrinsic nature of the human being. And Mallarmé admittedly stated that he intended to achieve the rhythmic effect of his poetic phrases out of themselves, where "the rhythm of a phrase had 22 but I keep on thinking that both improvisation and composition are merged through experimental musical praxis into a unique event. In a certain sense, most of the techniques used by the vast majority of contemporary composers are not so distinct from the techniques used by a great part of the traditional Western music composers. According to Silvio Ferraz (2007, p. 3) "All the techniques are, essentially, common; they are the techniques of a time. " What has been changing, operationally, is the way composers operate the continuities of sound. Whether as a baroque counterpoint or a spectral-morphologic development of sound, both techniques, it could be said, seek to aspire something very similar, with different tools: the stitching of the process of sound/music making in time; the connection of different sounds, parts, structures and shapes (symmetrical or not), thus establishing the musical discourse, the performance itself, in motion, whether being previously composed or conceived "freely"9 at the time. The German saxophonist and researcher Franziska Schroeder coined the term soundweaving which, in my view, could be an example of this fact. The subjective translation of this term into the Portuguese language would be something similar to the idea of sound intertwine. For her (2014, pp. 10-12), the idea of soundweaving is that of a weave of the sound, a sort of stitching of the sound texture and of this tactile making, interlaced, that occurs in improvisation. It is through this kind of tactility, the qualities related to touch, to be palpated, handled, that a musical performance arises. Schroeder goes even further on something that will be an important part of this work, the relationship between the performer and their musical instrument, when she states that "this tactile dimension, enabled here in the form of what I consider a tactile piece of critical fabric [...] reminds of the intimate physical engagement of musicians with their instruments”. This relationship of tactility, between the performer and their instrument, over the performance time, is of great importance to the present work. The human body moves in a different way in contact with a musical instrument, regardless of the nature of this instrument. This intimate relationship has been thoroughly investigated by researchers, including Connor (2004), Magnusson and Mendietta (2007), Wanderley (2001), Chaib (2013), among others. Over this text, as the writing evolves, I will try to build what in such investigations is related with the performances presented and the problems encountered in the relationship performer x instrument x performance environment, especially concerning the new instrumental and interaction possibilities. Many of these relationships disrupt the linear performance time from the point of view of the performers themselves, dealing not only with the employment of a hardened to be the action itself, giving a literal reference to the original sound image", as Schroeder states (2014, p.11). For further information: http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/improvisations.php and http://www.wassilykandinsky.net/compositions.php and http://www.theartstory.org/artist-kandinskyand https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/stephane-mallarme-prophet-ofwassily.htm modernism and https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephane-mallarme -- access on April 23, 2018. 9 Many of these ideas and terms, such as time, musical discourse and the ideas of composition and improvisation will be elaborated in the next chapters. 23 and stable idiomatic system, but mainly from experimental musical practices, with some new forms of instrumentness10, arising from the coupling of the new digital technologies in the process of sound/music making. By breaking the linearity of the performance time, embracing different types of instruments, tools and poetics, giving rise to a performance of time itself during a musical performance, the standardization of the solfege and the linear reading that can be carried out in this same performance are also broken. Hardly anyone would read a text backwards. Or start randomly in the middle of a book, jumping to another random page, and so on. Breaking the linearity of a performance discourse purposelessly is pointless. But when there is a poetic proposal that you can experiment with the new possible readings of the text, alternate routes of reading, discourse perception, absorption and reception come up, no longer in a static and catalogued fashion. Each point of the text can be linked to an opposite end of the same discourse, connecting them in other ends that will, in turn, make several connections. Obviously, this example leads us to the idea of rhizome, a concept created by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1997). The authors state that "the rhizome connects any point with any other point and each of them does not necessarily refer to traces of the same nature." The book in which the authors present this term, itself, was thought as a non-book, built from sequential chapters and stitching the sense of a narrative discourse, but rather, as a cluster of continuous plateaus, with continuous with regions of their own intensity [...] where a plateau is a multiplicity connected to other multiplicities” (p.22), as described by themselves. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I present here, mostly, performances composed based on concrete poetry, words and from abstract painting. In addition to the aesthetic influences that either abstract art or concrete poetry represent in my formation, both represent very clear experimental ways of ruptures with the traditional form and linearity. Works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lígia Clark, Tomi Otake, Stéphane Mallarmé, Décio Pignatari and Haroldo de Campos, among other artists, have been not only inspiration to many of the performances investigated here, but also as a sort of score or guideline. The blanks and the different typographies and mixed metrics, (dis)organized and broken of concrete poetry, as well as the lines, colors, textures and compositions of abstract art, for example, represent important benchmarks in the work of music improvisation and comprovisation presented here. These paintings and poems were often solfeged as if they were, in fact, musical scores written for the proposed performances. Citing Mallarmé (In: Schroeder, 2014, p.11), 10 This term will be widely investigated in the next chapters. 24 This copied distance which mentally separates groups of words or words between themselves, seems to be now to speed along and now again to slow down the motions, scanning it, even imitating it according to some simultaneous version of the Page. From this naked use of thought, retreating, prolonging, fleeing, or from it´s very design, there results for the person reading it aloud, a musical score. The time of performance that also encompasses the performance of time. Not the chronologic time, as if it were a straight line in a single sense of direction, but the time that dialogues directly inside the performance space; the time that pervades the performance and some ways the musician creates to carry out the performance through time. This subject will be extensively investigated in Chapter 2 of this thesis. These performances depart, practically as a whole, from musical improvisation, in its form academically known as free improvisation, encompassing the idea of comprovisation. Coming from a formal improvisation environment, where I first learned instrumental techniques of playing scales, arpeggios, setting chords and opening of harmonics voices, glissandos, ornaments etc., in addition to having developed a broad theoretical foundation in disciplines such as rhythmic, counterpoint, harmony, analysis, perception etc., the concept of improvisation I used, up to 2010, was that of a regularized, catalogued and dissected improvisation, in which different scales, intervals and/or clusters may result in distinct musical intentions, such as major, minor, altered intentions etc. We must also consider the amount of resolutions in harmonic and melodic problems implemented throughout my training so far, from the study and practice of a repertoire which, if broad to some extent, made of Jazz standards, mostly from the USA, through Brazilian music standards, bossa-nova, samba, choro, Latin music, Cuban music and, inevitably, through Blues, Rock and what became known as fusion, a style characterized by mixing jazz, rock and progressive rock, on the other hand, it is also a reductionist repertoire in subjects focused on how to play and "improvise" in certain cadences, harmonic progressions, scale or mode changes, chromatic passages etc. All this from the prerogatives that I have been taught, step by step, in how to proceed in those situations. The conflict that took place, before beginning as a special student in the Department of Music of USP, in 2010, was exactly this: I was already bearing the will, the wish and the intention to overcome those regularities of idiomatic improvisation, however, not necessarily wishing to play free jazz11, for instance. Inevitably, whenever I 11 Free Jazz, as a style and artistic movement, became known from a musical approach developed between the late 1950s and the following decade, when musicians rejected the Bebop musical aesthetics and sought a certain liberation of rhythmic tempo, of the established progress and the use of well known and disseminated of scales or arpeggios consistent with certain harmonic cadences. Often called avant-garde, free jazz was also admittedly an alternative and an attempt by certain musicians and composers of popular music in returning to what would, for them, be the origin of jazz and its roots, 25 proposed improvisation performance sessions, somehow " detached" from such structures, the performers involved and I tended to fall into this jazzy style, known for encompassing traditional jazz improvisation with a certain freedom of musical discourse. Free jazz, however, did not present any particular interest to me, besides creating a certain harmonic, rhythmic or chromatic shock. In this style of improvisation, as a musician, I was still stuck to scales, modes, arpeggios, even putting them in shock with different harmonics or harmonic situations than traditional ones. Nor was I interested in the polirhythmics yielded in several of those performances. Besides being too mathematical and cerebral, these propositions did not thrill me at all. And what I was especially looking for, even before being aware of it, was an approach to the sound as both compositional and improvised musical elements. The sound as an actual performance interface. That, in fact, free jazz has never offered me. Jean Baptiste Barrière (1991, p. 11) wrote that the "timbre is, in one way or another, the mandatory meeting point, but also the inevitable breaking point of every musical discussion, of every compositional confrontation"12. Undeniably, I would add that for me, in that moment, timbre was also the inevitable meeting point both for the rupture with traditional forms of improvisation (including free-jazz), as to (my own) poetic expansion as a performer, as a composer and as a musician. The timbre forced me to elaborate reflections on its constitution, its nature, its acoustic, analogical, electrical, and digital strands. And especially before and during the improvisation performances, to elaborate reflections on their flow. The sound flow has been a recurring theme of many researches in experimental artistic practices. This theme will also be investigated herein, based on the contingencies of the performance time itself. For Sílvio Ferraz (2007, p. 6) "Time has a privileged place in music, since listening to music is only conceived in time ". Even speaking about time from the perspective of listening, the music I speak about here is the one that happens in a performance. And it is during the performance that the sound assemblages, the happenings, propositions, contingencies, deliberations and deterritorializations will take place. It is therefore important not only to understand that a performance has a chronologic time, five, ten or twenty-three minutes, but also, and perhaps more important for this work, there is the performance of time during a presentation, as previously mentioned. Instead of, for example, a score with notes written from an enclosed musical system which implies shades, cadences, harmonic functions, a structured form etc., the performance of a graphical or verbal score allows the performer or the composer to create different ways to solve the sound flow problem. Wood, Stone, Metal, Skin with often mixed with a certain esoterism, spiritualism and a widespread sense of collective improvisation. Important performers historically associated with free jazz, even if covering only part of their recorded discography, among others: Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Charles Mingus, Anthony Braxton and, at the same time, John Zorn, Bill Frisell and Marc Ribot. See: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~blackrse/freejazz.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_jazz and http://www.freejazzblog.org/search/label/Book --- access o April 24, 2018. 12 “Le timbre est, sous une forme ou sous une autre le lieu de rencontre obligé, mais aussi le point de fracture inévitable de toutes les discussions musicales, de toutes les confrontations compositionnelles”. (My translation.) 26 Voice, by Malcom Goldstein13, was a performance of which I participated in 2014, and which presented exactly the issue of the sound creation and the sound flow through the performance time. In the circular form, this piece is an example of the idea of a rhizome, from a single point within the structure that binds to any other point of this same structure, stitching, weaving different parts as particles, distant yet under a very close glance, from an imaginary magnifying glass, but reconnected and aligned with the circle as a whole. The roughness and rugosities of the image worked for both the other interpreters in this performance and to me, valuable elements of graphism, signs, images and materiality, re-signified in sounds. Figure 1: Score of Wood, Stone, Metal, Skin with Voice, by Malcom Goldstein The musical score also carries the verbal instructions, where the typology of writing carries a certain interpretation subjectivity to the performer. The composer’s first indication, for example, is the need to establish a continuous sequence of sound flow, from the idea of a circular figure, presenting different types of materials, established from variations of articulations, dynamics, processing etc. It is worth mentioning that, despite the desire for some kind of restriction when he presents the circular format or when he provides instructions from the viewpoint of creating materials, Goldstein makes it clear on the score that: “Sequence/order can change, improvised as desired [...] dynamics are free, to be shaped as desired”. 13 This performance took place at Ibrasotope, São Paulo, on May 30, 2014, with my participation in electric guitar and digital processing, in addition to the presence of: Vitor Kisil (processing and percussion), Kooityiro Kawazoe (shamisen) and Denise Aoki (voice and koto). See: http://www2.eca.usp.br/nusom/musica9 --- access on April 24 2018. 27 How does the constitution of a sort of sound creation itinerary occur to a performer, based on the instructions mentioned above? The establishment of a sound-flow favorable environment, which has not been hardened in a tonal or modal system, but which, at the same time, establishes a kind of musical plateau through time, is one of the key questions of free musical improvisation, and will be analyzed in another chapter of this text. To me, this imaginary itinerary is the constitution of a type of sound rug. It is in this rug, which may be thin and sparse, or fuzzy and sewn with heterogeneous braids, that the performance assemblage takes place. This supposed place is where a performance in fact happens. There is where the creation of a propitious and potent environment for the development of non-determined updates among performers, their instruments and their machines take place. This rug represents, thus, a fertile ground for the constitution of creation processes in real time, a fundamental aspect for the practice of improvisation. What does this rug bring along? What kinds of freedom does it represent? What is this place? Where on this rug can you step, where should the performer be placed? What are the places this rug traverses? As a musical instrument and theory teacher for many years, I have created an example for my students that goes through the image of a flying carpet, as in "The Thief of Baghdad", a classic cinematographic adaptation from the book 1001 Nights, made in the first half of the twentieth century. In this film, there is a re-creation of a magical, playful and mythical environment, as presented by the book, of an Orient permeated by fantastic and folkloric stories, among them, the flying carpets, which take and bring antiheroes in their services of "stealing" from the rich to give to the poor some encouragement. Carpets were magical, they only flew under the explicit will of each character, and had varied sizes, densities and formats. For my students, when they began to learn the idiomatic improvisation, I used quite successfully the analogy of a carpet that provides, in an ingenious way, both the harmonic part and the rhythmic and dynamic configuration to the improviser, giving them the necessary support and ground for accomplishing such a task with tranquility and foundation. This example, in a certain way, has always worked by providing elements that could make student who was providing the harmonic base deliver the necessary responsibility of getting involved in the perception of the musical material that the improviser creates in their performance, removing only their focus on the score, in the form AABA or ABA or ABCA etc., of the piece in question. This way, if the rhythmicharmonic "rug" does not sustain the improviser, they will collapse, for there is no basis, foundation or support that holds them. By extending this imaginary idea to a free improvisation performance that encompasses the use of digital technologies, I considered it pertinent that even despite the desire of dissolving, deterritorializing and overcoming the boundaries of languages, musical system and its grammars, it is still necessary to establish this kind of complex rug, somewhat, a negentropic14 environment, which can account for the unpredictability of 14 In thermodynamics, the term negentropy is a synonym for "cohesion force". 28 a performance and its complex forms of constitution. These couplings that start building up will form, so to speak, a possible sound flow, generating a chain of continuous transformations. It is this performance of time, based on the idea of the sound flow and the process of sound/music making from the sound as the main element of research, that this work is conceived. Frequently, during a certain performance, systems that can be rooted more prominently to the creation process emerge, bringing about more homogeneous, structured and territorialized contexts. It is at this moment when I, as a performer, can let go or not of this structuring, being more pragmatic, and establish a rupture with those homogeneous systems, working to dissolve them during the performance. The new possibilities of instrumentness provided by digital technology allow the performer not only to obtain very potent resources for the dissolution of hardened systems, but they also offer heterogeneous sound propositions, through an acoustic and digital machinic assemblage. Obviously, the entire background in training theory and practice, besides the musician’s own experience, will not be completely forgotten, it is the opposite. Some of these conflicts of performativity, corporeity, instrumentness, physicality and playability, among others, are also investigated in the present work. Thus, an important part of my poetic project, both as a performer and a researcher in the field of arts, goes through the creation of an environment that, through experimental practices, may become suitable to the development of music improvisation, involving both acoustic and digital instruments, through an assemblage I call here a hybrid machine. This assemblage relates to an environment of sound creation and processing in real time, its potentialities and problems, where the idea of a hybrid machine encompasses the use of mobile computers and their digital tools, along with acoustic musical instruments, broadly expanding the possibilities of interaction, creation and production of sound. Hence, the focus of the investigation presented here is the assemblage of a metastable environment of musical performance itself, through the conception of a hybrid machine, where interactions between performer (s) X instruments (acoustic and digital) X environment occur. It is through the authorial investigation on some of the new forms of instrumentness provided by these assemblages that I intend to present this text as an academic thesis, using a qualitative methodology primarily devoted to investigating certain subjectivities involved in the process of sound performance and creation. For the researcher Marília Velardi (2018)15, what in a research based on the traditional models would be just a certain "bias" (the researcher’s history), in a qualitative research, especially when carried out in the field of the arts, may be 15 In a lecture by Sonora and Nusom - Center for Research in Oncology, entitled "Conversa com Marília Velardi: Thinking Qualitatively", at USP, on April 9, 2018, recorded in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6178&v=VBTHPVnTvts --- access on April 27, 2018. 29 accepted as a criterion of credibility for the research and legitimacy for the academic text. Velardi complements stating that a qualitative research seeks to think of our own role as producers of theories, of epistemologies, considering that we are plunked, rooted people in our fields of research, producing knowledge from this place. The relationship between the researcher and their object of research inverts, when compared with the traditional epistemologies of research; this relationship is made horizontally, and, no longer vertically creating thus a kind of interlocution between "what is done in the world and their own academic research. " In a certain sense, I believe there would be no other way of writing this text but this, that of a presentation and experiences of the investigation process in a personal, subjective way. I remember the first lines of a book by Sílvio Ferraz (2007, p. 1), in which he states that "I write in first-person, so I write because it is a book in which I simply feel in the first person. " In fact, I believe this text speaks, in a very particular way, about my process of musical and sound creation, when inserted into this experimental musical performance environment. In practical terms, it is an epistemological choice, in which I, to some extent, already master the investigated subject, but I also try, through this text, to find the mastering of the investigation method. If the idea was to learn and to master the subject itself, one would unlikely investigate it at the academia. It is in the academia that I seek to find, define, and to formulate methodologically my research process using my own logic of artistic production as a method of investigation. Therefore, I am not very interested in the artistic results of a particular performance, where, frequently, the processes of improvisation, of musical creation and the relationships between the creation agents themselves, that in this case include not only the performer(s), but also the digital machines, the computer, the hybrid instruments and the environment of the performance, are far more interesting to me, from the research perspective. What is interesting to me in this investigation are the new forms of instrumentness provided by the hybrid machine and its conflicts with the affordance16 constituted by the musical instruments; the poietic and autopoietic forms that may come from such performances, relationships between different interpreters and interpreters with the machine, the investigation of these unpredictable environments, and their creative and metastable processes. In summary, what leads me to investigate and write this text is the creation processes stemming from a constitution of a hybrid machine of musical performance. Perhaps I can summarize this whole process as follows: I, as an artist and researcher, put on these pages my own history, creating a somehow personal, subjective methodology; I weave dialogues with some theories pertinent both with my history and with this particular methodology, building a kind of bridge of reflection and cross-examination between these theories and my investigation; I try to describe both processes of creation and investigation of performances, and finally, I present a 16 J. J. Gibson originally created the concept of affordance between the years 1977-79. It concerns the inherent potential for usability of the object of analysis. It is the potential of an object of being utilized as originally designed to be used. The classic example is a door with a doorknob; when we look at this door, the only interaction that seems possible is to move the doorknob; it may not to be the only possibility, but it is the one that presents a more powerful affordance. In the case of an acoustic musical instrument, for example, it is the physical, perceptual and interaction characteristics that primarily make it that particular acoustic instrument. This concept will be widely investigated in the second chapter. 30 conclusion that might in some way bring this work to a closure. It is a summary of what Marília Velardi (ibidem) calls private epistemology, which for me, is a way of promoting a horizontal dialogue between the product of the artistic performance and the product of scientific research in art. This product also allows, in my opinion, a broader perception of what my research problem, my object of study is. I recall Sílvio Ferraz (2007) again, who wrote in his thesis: "... here I flee from the academic way of writing, since I will be writing about a type of music and not about music in its generic sense. " Here, I do not write about the experimental performances using new technologies in their artistic making; I write about one type of experimental performance, which is my own, that also uses part of these new technologies, encompassing both the idiomatic and the free improvisation, which also turns the computer into a real-time creation agent, concomitant to the use of acoustic instruments. A type of performance that benefits from the practice of creating and developing a song that no longer dialogues with its abstract systems alone, but a kind of music that, primarily, uses the practice and creation of sound as a central element. A type of performance in which sound becomes autonomous. Released as of the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, composers such as Claude Debussy, Györg Ligeti and Edgard Varèse, among others, initially brought a certain freedom in the form of composing music and, consequently, of playing, interpreting, performing those same music. The practice of sound as a poietic and creative element is disseminated exponentially from the second half of the twentieth century on, mainly from the initial research by Pierre Schaeffer, who not only elaborates a new type of music, concrete music, creates the idea of the sound object and, perhaps even more important to the experimental practices of music that connect to my work, develops the concept of reduced listening, a kind of attentive, focused, subjective, intensified listening of sound and its molecular qualities17. 17 The idea of sound molecularization is represented by the focus on sound itself, the sound production and its intrinsic energetic qualities. The growing importance that timbre is taking on music production is directly linked to the concept of molecularization of sound. Tristan Murail (1992, p.20 in: COSTA, 2003, p.32) states that "there is a great movement of Western music in which timbre, previously insignificant with respect to scripture, is recovered, recognized first as an autonomous phenomenon and then as a predominant category– almost by submerging or absorbing the other dimensions of musical discourse, so that the sound microfluctuations (glissandos, vibratos, sound spectrum mutations, trembling, etc.) move from the state of ornament to the state of “text”." For Costa (ibidem), "all this is molecularization". The idea of molecularization opposes the idea of molar, both concepts developed by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze throughout his work. For Deleuze (1997, p.71), "all becomings are molecular; the animal, flower or stone from which we become are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not forms, objects or molar subjects that we know outside ourselves, and which we recognize by force of experience, science or habit." The idea of molecular sound, which is composed out of its own intrinsic qualities is the idea of a pure sound, disconnected from any musical system or language, opposes to the idea of molarity, in which sound is covered by systems and languages – by notes – musical, preestablished; regarding free improvisation, Costa (2012, pp.60-66) defines the concepts of molar and molecular, which can also to elucidate both ideas in the way they are used in this work: "In the environment of free improvisation, the molecular level that crosses molar levels predominates. These would be, for Deleuze, manifestations of the stratification and would relate to the outside environment of the strata. The molecular, on the other hand, would relate to the inner environment. In molar, there are particular molecular stratifications and consequently there is a gestalt perception that produces the differentiation of an identifiable whole (styles, languages, systems, gestures). According to Deleuze, it is necessary to aim for the molecular in order to overcome languages and systems. The well-known 31 Along with those facts, an unprecedented technology development in human history takes place during the same period, allowing composers and performers to access new technologies for recording, creating and manipulating the sound material, as well as new types of related instruments, interfaces and technological apparatuses. From the advent of the speaker to the mechanical record of sound, processes that previously took a huge time to run were, little by little, becoming fast and possible to be performed with an increasingly affordable and smaller amount of equipment. It is not today’s news that all technological mediation has changed the artistic practices in a radical way as of the second half of the twentieth century. Researches on composition, sound recording, differed-time sound manipulation, video-art, installations, fine arts, musical performances etc., have investigated the use of digital technology in the field of music for some time, obtaining consistent reflections published in books, articles and theses. What is interesting to me here, therefore, is not the digital technology per se, nor its technological fetish impregnated in the artistic environment, where a certain fascination of the human look is filled with the possibilities of creating and using digital tools and various gadgets available in contemporaneity. On the contrary, many times, what will be of interest in this work are some of the subversive ways18 of using computers and interfaces for sound creation in real-time, from the idea of an improvised and free performance, encompassing the idea of interaction between performer X instrument X technology much less focused on the interaction-as-control and much more rooted and practiced from the idea of a interaction-as-difference19, concepts created by the French-Swiss musician, researcher and performer Henrik Frisk (2008). A type of interaction between the performer, the instrument and the digital machines conceived from the idea of inducing processes that allow for differences in performances, from a static control release of the entire system by the user. That, instead of operating at the click-and-response level, operates in a metastable sphere, which can provide consistent additions to the creative process in an unexpected way. These differences relate to new types of interaction and some new ways of instrumentness provided both by the coupling of the acoustic instrument to digital tools as well as for negotiations and collaborations likely to happen between the agents constituted during a performance, whether being the performers or some technological apparatus, such as a computer, for example. An important detail to me is to clarify in this introductory part of the work: the Deleuzian idea that art it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces, is fundamental to understand this concept of molecularity. The forces are present at the molecular level. It is in this context that the sound thought as a line of strength (with its energetic history) becomes the original and powerful material for a musical practice liberated from any pre-established system". 18 I believe that by subversive ways of using/exploring new technologies, I meant: unusual ways of exploring sound processing and manipulation, different linkages of acoustic and digital instruments and the embracing of occasional contingencies that may occur throughout the process, out of a creative bias. 19 These concepts will be widely explored in the next chapters. 32 academic writing, investigations and the development of a research at the doctoral level assume, obviously, the (vast) encompassing of scientific concepts, and various scientific research and investigations. Within the universe of a research in art, in music, in musical creation processes, the idea of science and research in art is, not of today, rather conflicting20. As mentioned above, in this work, I use the idea of a certain ability to research thinking about my own role as the researcher as a "producer" of epistemology, of knowledge and, consequently, of theory. It is through this selfethnographic recognition that I investigate my research problem, in this kind of dialogue between what I produce in the world, in performances, in creative work, in the day-to-day production and academic research. As a result, there may be a kind of hiatus in the way of addressing and producing "science" between an artistic research and an investigation into the field of the exact sciences, for instance. While in the so called "hard" sciences, or even in purely theoretical investigations in certain areas of the social or human sciences, it is possible to carry out investigation and reconstruction procedures of the researched situations, corroborating in order to get certain procedures to be catalogued and disseminated as scientific research processes, in the artistic research that is, in fact, impossible. Each experiment, within the artistic practice research is unique, singular, thus contributing to an accumulation of epistemological knowledge; as stated by Hanulla (2005, p. 5), "the accumulation of knowledge in the artistic field is a form of investigation". Instead of searching for reproducible procedures or even investigate artistic works previously carried out, from an analytical and aesthetic viewpoint, my own research uses the creating process as the initial research point. The accumulation of knowledge, as Hanulla states, about a particular "way" of creation, becomes a potential element in the creative process, thus becoming, so often, the scientific research itself. The composer from São Paulo, Silvio Ferraz, in a recent comment on a doctorate thesis defense committee21, used the idea of "poetic image" to relate science and artistic production as a scientific investigation. For Ferraz, certain scientific concepts can be considered (and used) in an artistic practice research as poetic images, which, as a concept, contribute to my research, to my investigation, helping in thinking of my artistic practice. Therefore, some scientific concepts, that cannot be proven and reproduced accurately in an artistic search, given its epistemological nature, can nevertheless be used as a sort of reserve of poetic images, differing from the purely 20 Iazzetta (2017, p.18) states that: “Un punto clave para comprender la cuestión de la investigación en arte se refiere a la manera de ser del arte, siempre direccionada para la experimentación. El pensamiento racional nos hace crer fuertemente que el concepto, que sirve tan bien a la ciencia, es la fundación de todas las formas de conocimiento. Pero el arte, hasta el conceptual, es casi un movimiento de revolución delante la inmaterialidad del concepto. John Dewey (2005) ya apuntaba en el año de 1930 que el arte para realizarse plenamente depende de una experiencia singular – en oposición a una experiencia genérica, dispersiva. El arte depende del sentido, de la materialidad de las cosas, de los sonidos, de las luces y tal vez de los olores y gustos. Por más que sea pensamiento, el arte es mucho más imagen y la imagen es falsamente abstracta: ella es nuestro modo de transformar en concreto el mundo que percibimos. El arte es siempre experiencia, pero no se llega a ella por casualidad: el arte demanda esfuerzo, demanda una contrapartida de la experiencia, demanda um experimento”. 21 Defense board of the doctoral thesis of Antônio Layton Souza Maia, “Sonoridades múltiplas: corposinstrumentos musicais à escuta em oficinas de improvisação livre”, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 2018. 33 technical applicability of concepts present in basically all the disciplines (physics, anthropology, philosophy, mathematics etc.). Hence, starting from a performance practice that relies on musical improvisation and the use of acoustic and digital instruments, in an experimental music environment, I (des)scribe, little by little, the investigations I have done in recent years in the forms and ways of sound production and interaction. Through a subjective, particular methodology, I propose to carry out the writing of this work the same way I present my participation many times in the sound constitution of a musical performance: weaving and elaborating, by means of an intensified listening of the moment, a consistent sound flow and that, despite its careful elaboration, can be also permeated with shortcuts, ritornellos, pauses and unpredictability. This is, somehow, the only way I could contribute: from my own experiences, investigating my own performances, stepping in a convergence zone meeting the improvisation, the artistic practice, the study of musical performance and sound creation processes. In this self-ethnographic and subjective process of self-analysis, I board on an investigation in order to try and understand these processes of creation and interaction that take shape during the performances, sharing here some reflections. Far from being a process that seeks a definitive or baseline result, the result is practically the opposite: it is the process itself that becomes interesting, from the notes taken, from the theoretical reflections and the writing of the thesis, which acts as a great notebook, with scribbles and drawings rather than a standardized elaboration. Pervading this work, therefore, some of the instances that currently dialogue both with my scientific and artistic research process are: self-ethnographic reports, reflections on my own performances, investigations on some of my processes of sound creation and a watchful eye to the forms of interaction with my acoustic and digital instruments. For that purpose, I have, in advance, recalled some of the works I consider fundamental in my formulation of what a narrative of the “particular” is, regarding the process of artistic research from the eyes of the performer-creator himself. They are: “Notas do caderno amarelo: a paixão do rascunho”, by Sílvio Ferraz (2007); “A casa e a represa, a sorte e o corte ou: a composição musical enquanto imaginação de formas, sonoridades, tempos [e espaços]”, by Valéria Bonafé (2016); “Explorações de uma relação particular e de expansão com o piano: presença, experimentação e interação”, by Mariana de Carvalho (2017); "Improvisation, Computers and interaction – rethinking humancomputer interaction through Music ", by Henrik Frisk (2008); “O labirinto da solidão”, by Octavio Paz (2014); "Incidents" by Roland Barthes (2004); "Confessions of a Young novelist" by Umberto Eco (2013) and "Notebooks volume I – The thinking eye” by Paul Klee (1973). These works guided me towards the writing of this thesis. They are the texts I have always recalled when searching for both inspiration (to the descriptive, ethnographic making) and for a very particular study of the writing style, of the poietic form of presentation and discourse resources present in the text. Those works have deeply inspired me during this journey in a special way. Some more directly related to the musical making, such as the texts by Ferraz, Bonafé and Carvalho, are fundamental to my individualized writing; they gave me support and, for so many times, support for a riskier and less academicized writing. Other texts, such as 34 those by Klee, Eco and Paz, for example, have reinforced the formulation of a narrative supported by the experiences and the historical course of formation of the artist. Dozens of other books and written works were very important in the fulfillment of this research. They are listed in the bibliography at the end of the thesis. Those are fundamental works for theoretical support and have provided recurrent bases in the preparation of this horizontalized methodology proposed here. Those studied theoretical resources and reflections were put into practice and will be presented in the forthcoming chapters. As a last addendum to the important authors who have guided me, influenced and, in a sense, inspired me to write this thesis and in the research processes and experimental practices themselves, I would like to highlight the importance of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s work. These French philosophers are already recognized in different investigations in the field of arts, being often explicitly quoted in certain investigations or included in specific works. In my work, I consciously sought not to make an explicit use of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concepts. On the contrary, the importance of their work both in this thesis and in my own artistic practice, is much broader than a theoretical element which, perhaps, is popularly accepted by the scientific community in the field of arts. I write this in order to defend the comprehensive use I make of several of their concepts and ideas. The reading of their books and many articles referring to Guattari and Deleuze forged, in a sense, a line of thought that allowed me to structure sound and performance experimentation praxes in objective and influencing ways. The idea of machinic, assemblage, escape lines, stratification, deterritorialization, rhizome, ritornello, connections, becoming, power, molar and molecular, among others, are fundamental in my investigation. At the risk of making some readers - who may not have a great appreciation for the two Frenchmen’s work - precociously impatient for the content of Guattari’s and Deleuze’s concepts embraced in this work, I allow my own defense, arguing that, by using so many of their concepts , I have always tried to make pondered reflections about their use and applicability in my practical work, seeking to understand them over my viewpoint of practice and artistic experimentation; the use of free improvisation, the practice of performance from a machinic assemblage and experimental practices of sound that are configured in a wide field of applicability for these concepts. As Costa affirms (2012, pp. 60-66), "Deleuze’s concepts serve, to some extent, to substantiate the functioning of the free improvisation environment, also to propose that – conversely – improvisation is capable of assisting us in the understanding of his philosophy"22. I can say that there were more than a few times when, through improvisation sessions and live performances, the understanding of Guattari's and Deleuze’s ideas became not only clearer and more objective, but also began to work as "keys" allowing the search to be accessed forward by other paths. Thus, the first chapter of the thesis is named "hybrid machines" and weaves a reflection on a performance environment that is constituted from the assemblage of performer, instrument, environment and digital technology. It is in the first chapter that I clarify what the concept of a hybrid machine adopted here is, trying to dialogue with the idea 22 I include here the same functionality in the concepts of Félix Guattari. 35 of an interactive musical system and its digital tools that favor the sound creation and its subsequent flows in the man-machine relationship. Topics related to the subject, such as HCI, AI and robotics, for example, are explored through the bias of what this hybrid machine of musical performance is, besides the connections to what machinic would be, from the reading of Félix Guattari’s and Gilles Deleuze’s works, among others. Another important concept explored in this chapter is the idea of autopoiesis, originally related to Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s work. Generally speaking, in this chapter, I try and develop an investigation that does not explore the concept of hybrid machine used in my own work alone, but I also seek to broaden the idea of the performer's relationship with a machinic environment and not only by interacting with a mere technical performance machine. For that, I explore slightly deeper concepts such as machine, machinic, assemblage, tool, autopoiesis, organism, deterritorialization, metastable environment, consistency and corporeity, among others. The following chapter is called "iii" and proposes an investigation into the concepts of improvisation, interface and instrumentness with regard to my poetic project. It is the most extensive chapter of the whole thesis, given the importance of these three concepts and many of the reflections carried out throughout the text. Important ideas and notions such as performance metastability, operating consistency, knowledge-base, affordance, the computer as a participating agent in the performance, control and non-control situations etc., are investigated here. The separation of these three items of investigation was deliberate, so that I could approach them consistently throughout the text, going through their theoretical definitions with my own artistic practice. This chapter is based on the figure of the performer-creator, that relates to each of these three concepts in a subjective way, stemming from researches developed mainly by Rogério Costa, David Borgo, Franziska Schroeder, Thor Magnusoon, Bertelsen, Breinbjerg, Pod, Jeff Kaiser and Marcel Cobussen, always under the investigative point of view of artistic practice. There are moments, however, when there is a deliberate dive in some theoretical reflections connected to a real-time performance of sound experimentation, especially regarding the performance environment and ideas of openwork and work-in-motion. In such moments, I lead the investigation from the linkage of texts by Umberto Eco, Henrik Frisk, Guattari and Deleuze, among others, trying to allocate them in the clearest and most accurate possible way in the aspects they connect with my work. This chapter also brings many analyses, reports and comments on performances executed throughout my doctorate period, which refer specifically to the concepts investigated here. These are performances that provided a large part of the subsidies necessary for the theoretical reflections developed here. In Chapter 3, Sensorium, I try to build a space with the intention of exploring, in a practical way, some of the processes presented throughout the thesis. Unlike the analyses and observations in the previous chapter and the self-ethnographic reports in Chapter 4, here I try and investigate from the perspective of creative processes, performance-related characteristics and the different interaction models that may occur during it, coming from acoustic and digital instruments. 36 The ideas of interaction-as-control and interaction-as-difference, created by Henrik Frisk (2008), are explored here, from the perspective of a particular investigation on the different levels and forms of control and non-control and their degrees of imponderability that the performer faces in relation to the computer and hybrid musical instruments. Also investigated here, are important parts of the work that the musician and psychologist Jeff Pressing conducted, from the standpoint of cognitive psychology, presenting two fundamental concepts for the practice and investigation in musical improvisation practice: the referent and the knowledge-base, both co-associated, as if they were "tools" for overcoming possible limitations that a performer may face during the real-time information processing in a performance. Other important concepts explored here are: real time and latency; playing in circles (loops); unpredictability and imponderability during a musical performance; and the conduction of creative actions from a patch for experimental musical performance, with interaction in real time used mainly by the duo air +2, of which I take part with saxophonist and researcher Rogério Costa. Concluding this chapter, I address some features and challenges related to the creation of a patch for real-time musical performance, from the need of not just creating an effect or a sound processing “agglutinator”, but, in certain occasions, another musical instrument that could embrace other digital and acoustic instruments inside the operability of a hybrid machine. Concepts related to Vilém Flusser‘s and the Italian composer Agostino Di Scipio’s works are investigated here, out of the practice of playing a patch together with other musical instruments, in real time. It is therefore an investigation conducted from the performer’s place, this way not an investigation with the post-performance look, from a "product" or a finished "work"; "Sensorium" refers, to the performer's place from "within" the performance, being there, interacting while listening, playing, performing, improvising, creating textures, processes, sounds, ideas. Chapter 4 is written in the form of an open, non-sequential logbook, in which I build the place of my reports, notes, notebooks and self-ethnographic scribbles. This chapter covers several different types of notes on the creation processes, rehearsals, research, artistic practice, diverse experiences with software, machines, acoustic instruments coupled to a computer, readings and interactions. The chapter is divided into three parts: a.) individual reports; b.) reports on artistic practices, rehearsals and recordings during the writing period of this thesis and c.) observations related to the creation and development of the patch called papagaIO, in the software Max and a patch in iOS environment, named Papaga.iOS. In this kind of logbook of the sound experiments and interactions provided by the hybrid machine in my research, writing freedom is at its fullest. In this chapter I tried to record thoughts, notes and reflections in the most varied forms and formats. Here logs from note applications, such as the Evernote23, present on the mobile, computer and cloud were agglutinated and accessible anytime, anywhere and in any available 23 https://evernote.com/ - access on April 24, 2019. 37 device. Along with this format, notes on paper, books, music score etc., made throughout rehearsals, walks, studies and readings are displayed. It is a rhizomatic path of research, always open to the new discoveries that this investigation has made possible to me. Finally, in the last chapter I present my conclusions on the entire theoretical and practical processes held during the research period, also covering the rehearsals and reflections made after performances and presentations that happened during this research period. I begin, thus, this journey, represented here by an extensive investigation work on various themes that are pertinent to the subject, from an intense exploration of the existing literature up until the moment of writing this thesis, about various artistic practices and the ever-present search for an original and consistent theoretical elaboration; anyhow, a journey, situated in a border zone between research, theory and sound creation, bordering on the edges of what could be called here as a bricolage of knowledges, makings and artistic practices. *** 38 hyb rid mac hin es 39 1. Hybrid Machines “But supposing that the machine removes what is human in music is forgetting that there is nothing more representative of what human is than the machines we create.” Fernando Iazzetta, 200624 “There is a lesson here for all contemporary artists who attempt to create art with humble materials, with garbage and scrap: it makes no difference whether the material is noble or humble; the important thing is that it must assert its expressiveness; it must stand out among other forms by dint of a unique forcefulness [...]”. Ferreira Gullar, 200325 1.1 What is it? I call hybrid machine an interactive musical system based on the inclusion of digital tools with the aim of fostering sound creation and its subsequent flows in the man-machine relationship. The connection of all these apparatuses assembled in an interactive way by the performer(s) in a given environment is what I call, therefore, a hybrid machine. This machine encompasses the idea of an acoustic instrument that preserves its original lutherie features, materiality, physicality, corporeity etc., and incorporates the potentialities of a digital instrument, enormously transforming the interaction between musician and musical instrument. As Costa defines (2014, p. 8), "In this context, a musician who uses an acoustic instrument and real-time electronic processing is the assembler of a kind of 'hybrid machine – acoustical and digital – of creative performance, which can be synthesized in the following formula: ... musician + acoustic instrument + digital instrument (microphone + interfaces + computer + patches + speakers) + performance environment =...” 24 In IAZZETTA, Fernando. Música e Mediação tecnológica, p.7, 2009 25 In GULLAR, Ferreira. Lightning, p.87, 2003 40 Through the hybrid machine, the musician does not only use different forms of acoustic and digital instrumental hybridism, but they also access new forms of exploring and creating sound departing from a molecular level – level that understands its composition based on their own qualities, making evident and/or altering, manipulating its intrinsic potentialities. From the moment the access to this envelope of digitalized sound within some kind of computational apparatus becomes effective, in real time, a potential for unique morphological changes arises, something that was not possible before. As Grisey stated (In: BARRIERÈ, 1991, p. 352), "the electronics allows us a microphonic listening of sound [...] and finally, it is possible to explore the interior of sound and reach so far unknown fields of timbres ". The concept of “molecular” relates to the interior of sound, its dismemberment, its intrinsic parts, its possible bricolages. It is as if the sound was momentarily a drawing in which the performer dives in, through the strokes between the pencil and the paper, revealing lines, traces and dots in an increasingly powerful way. These points, lines, and traces will form distinct parts of a drawing, but what matters here is, in a certain way, their momentary, initial and free formations. These scratches of traces and dots can be thought of as sound drafts, small pieces of a certain sound in which I can, both through a reduced and intensified listening, as well as through the potentialities afforded by the hybrid machine, play them, create them, manipulate them. The piece Raspas26 (Scrapes) stems precisely from this idea, where such a singular gesture and at the same time rather typical in contemporary music, happening between the player’s hands and the strings of an acoustic guitar in the form of scraping the fingers and fingernails on the instrument strings, both horizontally, along the scale, the top and the mouth of the instrument, and circularly, covering more than one string simultaneously, became a central element in a musical performance. Raspas also represents the use of new forms of instrumentness27 provided by the hybrid machine: real-time recording of small segments performed on the acoustic or electrical musical instrument in the form of a loop, with instant access, employment of parallel sound processing between the execution on the instrument and the samples recorded during the same performance, use of expression pedals as an instrumental execution and sound manipulation at the same time, through software and a mobile computer. All this simultaneously, in an assembled environment, through speakers that combine amplified sound, processed sound and the acoustic environment itself. The idea of molecular sound here is, therefore, exemplified in a practical way. This performance becomes possible at the moment I identify a kind of doable sonority on the nylon strings of the instrument. From there, a desire to explore this sound, its minimal qualities, and its intrinsic characteristics arises. These aspects of exploration become even more evident (and problematic) when they are executed/experienced 26 Available on: https://soundcloud.com/andremartins/raspas --- access on April 30, 2018. Also, on the media enclosed to this work. 27 The concept of instrumentness will be developed in the next chapter. 41 in real time; the exploration of this sound, although minimal, proves to be extremely rich and heterogeneous, with many nuances of interpretation. Each sample recording performed successfully (many attempts remained, in my view as a performer, at that moment, unsatisfactory from the perspective of the interpretation flow itself), where the performance is in its full course, there is a constant performance effort, not only in recording it, but making it consistent with the material previously exposed, at the same time that, in turn, the need to explore it, break it, make it deterritorialized is present. Therefore, the sound produced out of this assemblage is now constituted not only by the features of its production, by the musical instrument and by the physical interference of the musician, but it also incorporates unique accesses, resulting from the coupling with the digital environment. Its constitution stems from a sum of actions that may include software, applications, foot controllers, digital tools, interfaces etc., in direct contact with the internal dimensions of the sound, from its flows and layers, becoming accessible step-by-step. These are transformations that act on the sound materiality itself, remodeling elements such as consistency, mass, duration, texture and resonance, among others. This has taken place since the advent of electroacoustic music, now, however, provided instantaneously, it is accessible in real-time, during a performance. Solomos (2013, pp. 23-24) states that "henceforth, instead of composing with sounds, sound is composed ". The sonority is obtained as a momentary synthesis of several components, which may act and interact in complementarity, providing a hybrid sound production, incorporating the acoustic, electronic and digital sounds, through the sum of various actions and procedures. Obviously, these assemblage types and possibilities result in a huge variety of problems related to the performer's interpretation and interaction with their acoustic and digital musical instruments. From the new forms of instrumentness provided to the coupled acoustic instruments and also provided by the digital instruments to the new types of interaction, latency and control of the hybrid machine itself in real time, the player is somehow part of both a creative and a chaotic process, made of several stages and with simultaneous processes, most of which are not easily identifiable. It is important to observe that the sound production possibilities based on the idea of a molecular exploration are also related to the idea of acoustic instrumental expansion. The idea of instrumental expansion is not new and has already been extensively documented and explored, being recurrently used in the production of contemporary music. Hence, the present work does not refer to the physical instrumental expansion, through changes in the making and original structure of acoustic instruments and/or couplings of new physical objects (metal bridges, screws, metal sheets etc.28). The idea 28 The idea of adding new tools to acoustic instruments is closer to the preparation and extension of acoustic instruments rather than properly to the expansion of the musical instrument. "Prepared" and/or extended instruments have their original acoustic timbre altered by the inclusion of various objects such as different types of strings, wire, keys, screws, resonant objects such as cones, cans, iron caps, metal or glass, bells etc., since the beginning of the twentieth century, as in Ragamalika (1912), by the French composer Maurice Delage (1879-1961), which already contained instructions on the score for laying pieces of paper and plastic between certain strings of the piano. Some of the composers and performers who have a strong connection with the idea of acoustic instrument extension/preparation are: John Cage (acoustic pianos with inserted nails, screws, metal sheet, different types of strings intertwined with the piano strings etc.), John Zorn (saxophone + American football ball or saxophone + water bottles), Fred Frith (drumsticks between the strings of an acoustic guitar, use of violin bows and 42 of instrumental expansion I use here is that of the original acoustic instrument, in its traditional construction and physicality, coupled, via microphones and mobile pickups, to a digital processing network, which may include computers, software, interfaces, foot controllers etc. The concept of a hybrid machine also relates to concepts derived from other research areas beyond experimental artistic practices such as artificial intelligence (AI), HCI, robotics and cybernetics, among others. The idea that something is machinic29 explains a relationship of technical interaction between human beings and environments consisting of one or more electronic and/or digital tools, providing not only types of body and human thought extension, but also form new areas of coexistence which are, as a rule, constituted out of the interactive possibility with a digital computer (Johnston, 2008, p. X). This digital computer is a computational tool constituted of various materials, being physical (aluminum, plastic, glass, silicon, circuits etc.) and also from the inclusion of one or more types of software, preconfigured programs and algorithms, providing hundreds of different uses. These digital machines are capable of not only simulating or imitating life (interaction of disease simulation, data analysis, cross-referencing of information and metadata, automated robots that perform certain tasks "by themselves" etc.30), as well as building, creating and offering new hybrid constitutions, through the creation of complex environments. Life and machine combined in the same idea can elicit a kind of aporia in this reflection. However, there is a great emphasis on science in general that studies, researches and cello on electric guitars), among others. For more details on the subject, see BUTLER, Gary. Prepared instruments in improvised music, University of Wollongong, Australia, 2000. Available on: http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/1756/ - access on 9.26.2017. 29 This is Deleuze-Guattarian term. In Thousand Plateaus (1997), both philosophers build a type of relationship encompassing heterogeneous elements through what they call assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari built an opposition between the machinic and the mechanic, where the constitution of the first takes place through elements without a predetermined function and, in the latter, from parts establishing a type of intended and desired operation (e.g., the "proper operation of an engine"). The assemblage itself, as Johnston states (1999, p.28) "is not opposed to either mechanical machines or organic bodies but encompasses both"; desires are coupled, out of a power of events (we will see forth, in this work, that events and assemblages can be different concepts), a power that starts to function, despite its heterogeneous genesis. Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, distinguish opposite processes: from points of instability, where functioning and balance make it fickle, there is what they call deterritorialization; however, at the opposite end of this assemblage, in contrast to the lines of strength, processes of stratification, recoding and, finally, reterritorialization may occur. To Costa (2016, p.4), "the machinic thought would be the territory of invention, art and perceptions [...] the music, while power of events, is a machine". 30 Johnson (2008, p.IX) asserts that “more sophisticated forms of machinic life appear in the late 1980s and 1990s, with computer simulations of evolving digital organisms and the construction of mobile, autonomous robots. The emergence of A Life as a scientific discipline—which officially dates from the conference on ‘‘the synthesis and simulation of living systems’’ in 1987, organized by Christopher Langton — and the growing body of theoretical writings and new research initiatives devoted to autonomous agents, computer immune systems, artificial protocells, evolutionary robotics, and swarm systems have given the development of machinic life further momentum, solidity, and variety. These developments make it increasingly clear that while machinic life may have begun in the mimicking of the forms and processes of natural organic life, it has achieved a complexity and autonomy worthy of study in its own right”. 43 stimulates the idea of a machinic life, conceived from the intricated definition of what is, in fact, the meaning of the term life. Johnston (2008, pp. 3-4) states that, “Yet life turns out to be very difficult to define, and rigid oppositions like organic versus nonorganic are noticeably giving way to sliding scales based on complexity of organization and adaptability. While contemporary biologists have reached no consensus on a definition of life, there is wide agreement that two basic processes are involved: some kind of metabolism by which energy is extracted from the environment, and reproduction with hereditary mechanism that will evolve adaptations for survival [...] By abstracting and reinscribing the logic of life in a medium other than organic medium of carbon-chain chemistry, the ‘new sciences of the artificial’ have been able to produce a completely new kind of entity. As a consequence, these new sciences necessarily find themselves positioned between two perspectives, or semantic zones, of overlapping complexity: the metaphysics of life and the history of technical objects. Paradoxically, the new sciences thus open a new physical and conceptual space between realms usually assumed to be separate but now appear to reciprocally determine each other. Just as it doesn’t seem farfetched in an age of cloning and genetic engineering to claim that current definitions of life are determined in large part by the state of contemporary technology, so it would also seem plausible that the very differences that allow and support the opposition between life and technical objects – the organic and inorganic or fluid and flexible versus rigid and mechanical, reproduction and replication, phusis and techné – are being redefined and redistributed in a biotechnical matrix out of which machinic life is visible emerging. This redistribution collapses boundaries and performs a double inversion: nonorganic machines become self-reproducing, and biological organisms are reconceived as autopoietic machines”. Currently, my body has no technological implant, no coupled sensor or anything alike. Recently, I have started wearing reading glasses, which help my ocular globe in the process of focusing on the text and allowing me to read for a few hours without headaches or some sort of migraine. However, my body constitution permeates machines, technological objects and digital apparatus almost ubiquitously. The light sensors and the elevators automatic doors, the alarm and presence sensors in commercial stores and public toilets, my cell phone, my e-book reader, the sound controls on the steering wheel of a car, the different types of GPS embedded in mobile phones, clocks and automobiles that keep track of the my exact cartographic position, my wireless headphones, a watch that counts steps and calories spent over a day, 3D cinema, this very computer, on which this text is written. Many are the examples impacting my sensorium31 in both potent and ambivalent ways. These machines relate to me and I, in turn, with them, from a bond that encompasses my understanding of what systems govern them, and how these systems function or 31 The third chapter of the present work is exactly on this theme and its relations with musical praxes through the machinic assemblage. 44 cease to function, in how these interfaces are composed in my day-to-day life and perhaps in a more prominent and problematic way, in how it gives rise to my life constitution around them and the dependence they cause in my way of living. Clark (2003, p. 3) describes this idea in a very precise and powerful way: My body is electronically virgin. I incorporate no silicon chips, no retinal or cochlear implants, no pacemaker. I do not even wear glasses (though I do wear clothes), but I am slowly becoming more and more a cyborg. So are you. Pretty soon, and still without the need for wires, surgery, or bodily alterations, we shall all be kin to the Terminator, to Eve 8, to Cable . . . just fill in your favorite fictional cyborg. Perhaps we already are. For we shall be cyborgs not in the merely superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but in the more profound sense of being humantechnology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry. A human cyborg. The word cyborg is an abbreviation for cybernetic organism, a kind of organic, mechatronic, digital, biochemically coded, hybrid being. The term differs from concepts such as android, bio-robot or bionic, among others, because the cyborg supposedly retains its organic functionalities and at the same time expands its mechanical constitution through implants and electronic and digital couplings. I cannot think of a more pertinent example to illustrate the constitution of a hybrid machine, in its genesis. In a hybrid constitution between machine and organism, the epistemological control does not remain in its organic origin alone. As part of a hybrid machine, the human mind is, as Clark States (2003, p. 4) “…just less and less in the head”. The decision-making, the occasioned reflections and all logical thought structured in this hybrid constitution escapes from a permanence within the body/inside the head, within the organic stability, and traverse some of the mechanical and digital structures assembled. There is a kind of mutual collaboration between the apparatuses, the couplings, the data processing that occurs externally, and the ability to human reflection and decision-making. The machinic constitutes itself; forms a territory, which is later deterritorialized, and so on. The complexity of the definition of machinic, therefore, passes off the tautological multiplicity of ideas that (inter)connect with the term itself. Something of machinic nature demands possible connections and ramifications that can encompass mechanical and organic concepts, among others, which are important for both Philosophy as to the study of AI, HCI, robotic engineering etc., in addition to being particularly interesting to contemporary musicology. According to the Dictionary of Portuguese Language Houaiss, the word organism can be defined as "set of organs constituting a living being; organized body, which has or may have a separate existence". In the same dictionary, I found definitions of machine, including: "Set of mechanisms combined to receive a definite amount of energy, transform it and restore it over other appropriate form, or to produce a certain effect; apparatus which uses and/or applies mechanical strength and consists of several parts, each of those with a defined function and 45 that, together, perform certain specific tasks”. Both definitions seem to denote similarities with regard to executing functional and interdependent processes, though based on different assumptions. Monaco (2008, p. 5), when comparing the functional similarities between the meanings of organism and machine, states that: “We can say that an organic form operates not only through the interdependence, but the hierarchy of its parts, and is self causing (an agent) by means of these processes. By contrast, the machine is a passive formation with internally distinctive parts, and yet these parts are, like the organism, in an interdependent relation. Although the physical machine is, of course, a secondary function of the human being (organism), by traditional accounts, these two terms set up a (negative) binary between the human (the organic) and the non-human (the machine)”. Looking closely into this quotation, it is noticeable that the similarities of action between the organism and the machine are very meaningful, even with completely different constitutions. This dialectic has been deeply discussed in the past few decades, even by Gilles Deleuze, who gave special attention to this conflictual and, at the same time, symbiotic relationship. According to Monaco (ibidem), Deleuze considers the hierarchy as the main issue in the organism x machine relationship, in which the organism has a hierarchized and interdependent context, made of different parts that manifest through hegemonic processes. The abstract systems (the machines) represent, for Deleuze, concentrated manifestations of the functions of a human organism itself, which can even manage other biological functions, causing a self-determined assembled result in the entire body. Deleuze calls these abstract functions happening in an organism, in general, organs. Among life forms, these abstract organs configure the tension between lower and higher levels of training, dividing assemblages and functions, among the governing forces and those that are governed throughout the organism. Thus, the parts in an entire structure are interdependent. Monaco thus asserts that, for Deleuze, the very concept of human is hegemonic – the more abstract organs (as the idea of human itself) are developed as civilization "progresses", the greater will be the destruction of the vital, natural world, through the embodiment of oppressive forces and instruments. Deleuze therefore points to an experimental problem: a (non)-being (the machine), previously devoid of denial, who becomes ‘a being of problems and questions'; in other words, according to Monaco (ibidem), Deleuze alters the fundamental structure of metaphysical thought, de-structuring what an organic constitution would be, "representing the difference through the identity of concepts", that will constitute an important part of the philosopher’s work, out of the idea of a materialistic ontology, in which the ambivalent status of the ambiguous organic-mechanical relationship is presented, where both can be a source of fertile production and, contradictorily, offer an unambiguous view. Another important philosopher in this context, Deleuze's working partner, is Felix Guattari, from whom many of the concepts that gave rise to the idea of machinic. For Guattari (1992, p. 43) "the machinism is the object of fascination, sometimes, of delirium ". The author shows that the idea of a machinic heterogenesis implies embracing 46 historical accumulations of a whole "bestiary"32 that has always existed in the relationship – always ambiguous – between man x machine, and the latter allocates the image of technology, which is, for Guattari, the order of knowledge and not of doing, interposing a creative mediation whose status of intersection is ambiguity itself. Art, and its experimental practices, obviously, presupposes a deterritorialization of the perception, not only of art as a "seen, perceived, palpable, absorbed, listened, read, felt etc. " object, but the perception of the very act of perceiving; any use that the human attributes to art will be a sort of recoding or reterritorialization, from a particular and subjective context. Deleuze and Guattari call perceptos33 the form-manners that jointly represent the differentiation between pure perception and another possibility of feeling. For them (1992, p. 213), "the perceptos are no longer perceptions, but they are independent from the state of those who experience. " Thus, the machinic is not only using a particular machine or a set of them (although it also covers that); the machinic is an assemblage that necessarily involves a destratification followed by a stratification, deterritorializations followed by reterritorializations, which become processes that exceed their own materials, providing a constant process of invention, where, as stated by Deleuze and Guattari (ibidem) "sensations, perceptos and affectos are beings worth for themselves and exceed anything experienced. " This ambiguous relationship of the human being with the machines goes from mechanistic counterpoints, in which the machines are conceived “parts extra parts”, to vitalist conceptions, in which machines are created and treated as assimilated to living beings, according to related researches by Maturana and Varela (1985), for example, from the idea of autopoiesis34 (self-production). Within this scope of ontological intensities and their thresholds, Guattari is imperative to affirm that it is necessary to build a concept of machine that evolves far beyond the technical machine and that this implies allowing us to apprehend the machinism as a whole in their technical, social, semiotic, axiological avatars etc. The author states that, "for each type of machine, we will present the question, not of its vital autonomy – it is not an animal – but of its singular power of enunciation: what denominates its specific enunciative consistency ". These enunciation modes and models are weaving, little by little, relationships of hybrid linkages, not only between the acoustic and the digital, but between the organic and the mechanic, which are transiting between each other and by themselves, resulting in countless forms of interaction and creation. 32 In a way, every machine is a technological machine that bears a series of accumulations of other distinct technologies in itself. 33 "Perceptos are part of the art world. What are the perceptos? The artist is a person who creates perceptos. Why using this strange word instead of perception? Because perceptos are not perceptions. What does a man of letters, a writer or a novelist seek? I think he wants to be able to build sets of perceptions and sensations that go beyond what he feels. That is perceptos. It is a set of sensations and perceptions that goes beyond those by the one that feels it [...] this seems to me the matter of art. Art gives an answer to this: giving a duration or an eternity to this complex of sensations that is no longer regarded as felt by someone or that will be felt by a character of novel, that is, a fictional character. That is what generates a fiction. And what does a painter do? He does just that, also, giving consistency to perceptos. He takes perceptos out of perceptions." Gilles Deleuze, in an interview with Clara Parnet, 1987. Available on: https://razaoinadequada.com/2015/09/30/deleuze-i-de-ideia/ -- access on May 15, 2018. 34 This concept will be investigated further in this chapter. 47 This idea of developing a concept for the machine that goes far beyond a technical machine permeates my work as a player, as a musician, as an improviser, as a composer, and consequently, this research work, in my constitution as a researcher, in a powerful way. I would like to highlight the citation above by Guattari, which argues that we are not questioning the vital autonomy of a particular machine – after all, a machine is obviously not an animal – however, it opens up to the investigation of its possibilities of enunciation and of organic + digital linkages. On the one hand, the human enunciations themselves, organized based on the performer(s) who works with and around the machines, will be constituted of a kind of discourse that presents its own significations. On the other hand, the machine and its resident and/or coupled systems, out of their autopoietic potential, manipulate figures of expression that will also condition the significations produced in this assemblage, no matter how assignificant that might seem. For example, between commands and pre-established objects within the performance environment (use of an expression pedal by the performer, for example), a certain musical-sound discourse undergoes consistent changes, which can completely subvert the exposed material, in a profound way. This discourse will inevitably and gradually take on a character of process, establishing several technical and artistic parameters, being momentarily the focus of this hybrid, organic and machinic assemblage, simultaneously. As Guattari affirms (1992, p. 47), "these are equations and planes that enunciate the machine and make it act diagrammatically on technical and experimental devices ". A little further, the author complements (ibidem), "this autopoietic nucleus of the machine is what makes it escape the structure by differentiating it and granting it its value”. It is the inputs and outputs of the entire assembled process that will weave the performance itself. Thus, the processes, the materiality, the playing, the performing etc., are coexisting independently of the machinic assemblage itself; its music making is possible outside it, but in other ways, with other systems, based on different processes. The machinic, eventually, postulates, forms, organizes and exposes its own discursiveness and ontology, permanently heterogeneous, from its own constellations of expressive intensities. The idea of autopoiesis in the present work relates to the conception of an environment for the musical improvisation performance assembled by the hybrid machine. The constitution of a performance is built out of not only predetermined intentions35, but often powerfully, from the unwinding of the occurring machinic processes. Costa (2016, p. 35) states that "it matters [...] thinking of the Improvisation so as to consider it comparable to an organism that arises as a result and expression of a process [...] and its relationship with the environment ". An organism constituted from the assemblage of the hybrid machine is formed by desire36 and will as a prerequisite, where the musician is openly available for such performance. Maturana (1998, pp. 1215) defines the concept of autopoiesis: 35 See the next chapter of this thesis the previous intentions of a musical improvisation performance, and much of what relates to it. 36 It is worth recalling that, for Deleuze (2016, p.84), "desire is revolutionary because it always longs for more connections". The author states that the production of unconsciousness = expression of desires = utterance formation = substance or intensities. 48 "And in the silence of my rest, I wondered about the meaning of life and living. My answer was then, and still is, that life has no sense outside itself, that the meaning of a fly's life is to live as a fly, flying, being a fly, that the meaning of a dog’s life is to live like a dog, meaning to be a wandering dog, and that the sense of a human’s being life is to live the human being in getting humanized. And all this in the understanding that the living being is just the result of a non-propositional dynamics. I realized that a living being is not a set of molecules, but a molecular dynamic, a process that occurs as a discrete and singular unit as a result of the operation, and in the operation, of the different classes of molecules that compose it, in a game of interactions and neighboring relations that specify and perform as a closed network of molecular changes and syntheses that produce the same classes of molecules that constitute it, setting up a dynamic that at the same time specifies their boundaries and extension at every instant. It is this network of component productions that closes in itself because the components it produces constitute it, generating the same dynamics of the productions that produced it, and determining its extent as a circumscribed entity through which there is a continuous flow of elements that become and cease to be components participating or not in the same network, which in this book we call autopoiesis ".37 However, both the performance constitution and the assemblage that also encompasses the machines organize themselves into a kind of autopoietic organism, similar to what Maturana describes above, when he says "it is not a set of molecules, but a molecular dynamic, a process that occurs as a discrete and singular unit as a result of the operation "; the relationship between musician-instruments, between musician-musician and musician-instrument-environment-machines constitute and settle in the form of, as Costa States (ibid, p. 35) "a need for existence". Nothing isolated settles in a powerful way, though constituting as a singular option; however, it is a certain joint dynamic, a molecular dynamic, intrinsic to each performance and its complexities, that progressively shapes, organizes and imposes itself. Without a powerful will, without the musician’s(s) desire and availability to establish a relationship with the instrument and with the improvisation itself, with the possibilities that are – 37 “Y en el silencio de mis horas de reposo, me pregunté por el sentido de la vida y el vivir. Mi respuesta fue entonces, y aún lo es, que la vida no tiene sentido fuera de sí misma, que el sentido de la vida de una mosca es el vivir como mosca, mosquear, ser mosca, que el sentido de la vida de un perro es vivir como perro, vale decir, ser perro en el perrear, y que el sentido de la vida de un ser humano es el vivir humano al ser humano en el humanizar. Y todo esto en el entendido de que el ser vivo es sólo el resultado de una dinámica no propositiva. […] Me di cuenta de que el ser vivo no es un conjunto de moléculas, sino que una dinámica molecular, un proceso que ocurre como unidad discreta y singular como resultado del operar, y en el operar, de las distintas clases de moléculas que lo componen, en un entre juego de interacciones y relaciones de vecindad que lo especifican y realizan como una red cerrada de cambios y síntesis moleculares que producen las mismas clases de moléculas que la constituyen, configurando una dinámica que al mismo tiempo especifica en cada instante sus bordes y extensión. Es a esta red de producciones de componentes, que resulta cerrada sobre sí misma porque los componentes que produce la constituyen al generar las mismas dinámicas de producciones que los produjo, y al determinar su extensión como un ente circunscrito a través del cual hay un continuo flujo de elementos que se hacen y dejan de ser componentes según participan o dejan de participar en esa red, a lo que en este libro llamamos autopoiesis”. 49 still – completely intact, without some of these fundamental prerequisites, a performance will hardly be constituted. At every moment of the performance a sort of continuous confrontation takes place, which I refer here to an autopoietic idea, a game between pre-existing forces and those that are established throughout the interpretation. Certain attitudes of each musician, even particular gestures or techniques of each instrument, in addition to certain procedures provided by machinery, acoustic instruments, being digital or hybrid, will be established or abandoned; all these connections boost the performance together in such a way that it will remain as a musical performance, as an improvisation session, as a creation process. There is a passage in the book “Corpo, Fora”, by Jean-Luc Nancy (2015, p. 7) where he says that "to exist means to distinguish both from nothing and from other existences. Existing independently is impossible: it would be their own denial, for they could not expose themselves to the outside nor as an outside. [...] therefore, there is never a body without other bodies". I believe that this thought, of that an existence alone, as an isolated entity, as part-extrapart of the constitution that occurs in a performance environment with the hybrid machine, is very pertinent here where I seek to critically elaborate the qualities, characteristics and powers that may represent such a machine. For Nancy, there is not a body, an organism, a thing while it is alone, while it is closed, isolated, impenetrable, confiscated, distant. The existence, for the author, is given only when there is a distinction between nothingness and other existences, which also depend on this singular and specific existence to constitute themselves. A mobile computer is only a mobile computer; an inert body, capable of tens, hundreds of random, encoded and stored tasks. A static sign. However, when it is embedded in a performance as investigated herein, this computer may not only exist individually, such as an organ that is part of a larger organization, but it will also feed this organism as a whole, forming this kind of performing body that carries the denomination of a hybrid machine. Differences in constitution and even pre-conceived purposes may initially expose these individual bodies to each other. The performer's body, the body of the acoustic instrument, the body in the form of a computer metal casing, the established body of connections, cables, power supplies, outlets, adaptors, the body of the pedals, the body of the speakers, the body of the environment where they are. However, what happens from this setting is, either the complete entropy, which results in nothing, in nonperformance, that may result from a machinic error, a connection error, or from a mutual lack of empathy between the performers or between the musician and the machine or, on the other hand, an organization process is established and the constitution of the performance imposes itself, and little by little it may become more and more complex, which is an important characteristic of this proposed environment. This dynamic environment operates, therefore, with several transitional level connections that may or may not settle among the different agents composing it. And it is also important to remember that many of these agents are (or become) adaptive to the environment, not passively or negligently, without any sort of negotiation, but out of actions that will constitute new stages of interaction between the performance. In a way, the hybrid machine is a kind of complex system, as the concept defined by Ferraz (1998, p. 31) asserts: "complex systems are defined as those in which a large number of independent agents interact in many different modes". An assembled machine 50 made of several agents bearing in their interaction bulges distinct forms, manners and ways that, separately, could be isolated, non-communicating bodies, but during a performance they can relate in powerful ways, transcending their previous isolated features. A hybrid, autopoietic, complex, adaptive, transient, non-permanent machine. It is through this seemingly harsh38 environment that certain types of experimental musical praxis are constituted and, in my artistic experience, have become important not only for their constancy, but also for possibilities of creation and of various questionings, some of which result in the investigations provided by this work. 1.2 Machines and tools 1.2.1 Before that, however I now propose a small parenthesis in the flow of this text, given the importance of certain concepts such as machine, machinic and assemblage, among others used in the present work. These concepts were created primarily by Guattari and Deleuze throughout several works and periods, always covered by a complex and, very often, passionate and poetic philosophy. Both authors, either in works produced jointly or in individual writings, addressed such concepts and developed them in a bricolage of ideas and terms from other stances, building a body to the proposed philosophical thought. Concepts such as becoming, consistency and immanence plane, ritornello, molar, molecular, territory and deterritorialization, for example, are often allocated by these two authors during the development of ideas associated with machines and their machinic thoughts. I chose to develop the concept of a hybrid machine, departing from the definitions of machine and machinic created by Guattari and Deleuze, explaining and substantiating them with the utmost clarity and objectivity I possibly can, avoiding, however, thorough details and long explanations about the applicability of other terms associated with those ideas. If that were the case, I should have written a prior small treatise on the vocabulary created and listed by both French philosophers. There is no need for such an exhausting task, impossible to be completed and totally disproportionate to the scope of this work. Several books, articles and chapters in different works have already been written with this intent and there are constant revisions on the subject. Moreover, Guattari’s and Deleuze’s works suffice to understand and employ these and many other concepts created and adapted by them. On the other hand, presenting a text punctuated with any other important and dear concept to the ideas of machine, machinic and assemblage without presenting any theoretical contrast and even their applicability would be reckless. Thus, throughout 38 However, highly thought provoking as a performance and creative environment. 51 this chapter, precisely because it is about the concept of machine and what is correlated to it – within what matters to me in this research – for several times I consciously opt for the production of a referenced text that brings certain definitions extracted from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s works, thus adding an effort that might sin for the repetition but that may help understand some of the meanings and subjectivities inherent to the text itself. Moreover, I try to weave counterpoints to the ideas provided by them, when I consider necessary to bring about certain specific debates that relate directly to this thesis, out of other philosophers’ and authors’ ideas, mainly from Vilém Flusser, Maurizio Lazzarato and John Johnston. 1.2.2 Machine is (not) a tool "What kind of man will be the one that, instead of dealing with things, deals with information, symbols, codes, systems and models ". Vilém Flusser, 2007 Machines and tools are not the same thing. They depart from very distinct assumptions, even when a machine is used merely as a tool. Guattari and Deleuze, in the book The Anti-Oedipus (2010) use its last chapter to develop the concept of desiring machines, which differ from the technical machines. For them, the desiring machine is always a binary machine, with a binary rule and associative regimes; it is always a machine coupled to another one. This machine is always multiple, where part of this machinery produces a constant flow, while the other part proceeds cutting and extraction operations out of this flow. It is a constant production of objects that, on the other hand, is constantly operating the fragmentation of these same objects. Therefore, the coupling of this collective and multiple machinic synthesis always aims at the idea of a product which is the production itself, what Deleuze calls producing-product: a kind of machinic bricolage that introduces the fragments produced in new fragmentations, thus characterizing a kind of rule of the desiring machines, which is to always produce the producing. Thus, Guattari and Deleuze (2010, pp. 5462) define machine: "On which grounds are the desiring machines truly machines, regardless of all the metaphor? A machine is defined as a cutting system. It is not in any way the cut considered as a separation of reality; the cuts operate in varying dimensions according to the considered characteristic. Every machine is, in the first place, in relationship with a continuous material flow that it cuts [...] opposing to continuity, the cutting conditions, implies or defines what it cuts as an ideal continuity. As we have seen, every machine is a machine of a machine. The machine only produces a flow cut if it is connected to another machine t hat is expected to produce the flow. Certainly, this other machine, 52 in turn, is in fact a cut, but it can only be that in relation to a third machine that produces ideally, i.e., relatively, an endless continuous stream [...] every machine carries a type of code that is machined, stored in it. This code is inseparable not only from its record and its transmission in different regions of the body, as well as the registration of each of the regions in relation with the other ones [...] everything works at the same time in desiring machines, but in the gaps and ruptures, in breakdowns and failures, in the intermittences and short circuits, in distances and fragmentations, in a sum that never gathers its parts into a whole.” The authors then affirm that "only the category of multiplicity, employed as noun [...] can account for the desiring production: the desiring production is pure multiplicity." This multiplicity is far from the applicability provided to the human being by the tools, much less to the techno-fetishes caused by the digital tools, while used as appliances. Guattari and Deleuze state, categorically (ibid., p. 507): "desiring machines have nothing to do with gadgets "39. In an improvisation performance that encompasses the use of both acoustic instruments, coupled with analog-to-digital conversion interfaces, as well as digital instruments, the multiplicity of events, actions and processes is immense. The performer's action choices, out of the interaction with both the instrument and the individual machines and, potently, with the instituted machinic assemblage, with the large performance machine that is constituted, are multiple and the interaction is active and intense. The assembled system as a whole, gets complex at its structural level, though possibly generating a certain appearance of control and a simple modus operandi, and may become considerably intricate throughout a performance. Frequently, it may occur either the abandonment of some kind of accumulated processing, or its use in a creative way as a new material. There is, however, the concern with allocating it (this accumulated and unforeseen material) with a certain care throughout the performance, in order to avert its complete destabilization and destruction. "Free – Free"40, a performance by the duo ar+2, formed by Rogério Costa and me, presents this feature. Throughout the performance, different materials are provided by both musicians, and I proceed certain gestures on the body of the acoustic instrument (which is coupled with a digital instrument system) that processes it in real time and also in deferred time; in about 11'22", up to 11'29", performing rhythmically some beats in the body of 39 At this point in the text, the authors use an analogy of a type of contest reasonably popular in France and active to this day, the Concours Lépine. The contest was created in 1901 by Louis-Jean-Baptiste Lépine (1846-1933) that rewards the best inventions involving diverse mechanisms, trinkets, electricity, etc. The competition is currently involved with the production of original patents and "productive" and "efficient" technological inventions. In 1968, Jean Baudrillard wrote in “Le Système des objets”: “C'est toute la bricole du concours Lépine, qui sans jamais innover et par simple combinatoire de stéréotypes techniques, met au point des objets d'une fonction extraordinairement spécifiée et parfaitement inutile” (‘Lépine’s contest is like bricolage, which without ever innovating and by simple combination of technical stereotypes, develops objects of an extraordinarily specified and perfectly useless function") [free translation]. For further information, see: http://www.concours-lepine.com/association-desinventeurs-fabricants-francais/ -- access on May 4, 2018. 40 Available enclosed to this work and online on: https://vimeo.com/213765835 – access on May 14, 2018. 53 acoustic guitar, gestures processed seconds later by the effects processors and by the connected software. In 11'30" the result of this slight gestural interference counteracts dynamically toward the material presented by the saxophone; I let the process happen for some time, attentive in its fast (and unexpected for me) dynamic accumulation and about nine seconds later, I completely eliminate it, for its accumulation would trigger a sort of feedback that could contaminate any other material presented, overlaying them with high intensity. The cut is abrupt. But the result can be considered, in my opinion, both in terms of sound and rhythm, rich and constituted of a completely random possibility provided by the assembled machine. Some of the features provided by this type of multiplicity will be investigated in depth in the next chapter. In contrast to the concept of machinic presented here, another philosopher worked extensively with similar ideas, such as tool, technique and technology in artistic production: Vilém Flusser (1920-1991). Highly present in Flusser’s work is the basic concept that encompasses the origin of the Greek word techné (τέχνη), which can be translated ambiguously by art and a kind of craftsmanship. Techné is also used in philosophy as a specific term, which resembles epistēmē , referring to the knowledge of principles, although techné implies an intention to do so, opposed to a disinterested understanding. 41 For Flusser, the production of something necessarily goes through the production and subsequent identification of its shape. Flusser (2011, p. 24) states that “when I see something, a table for example, I see wood in the form of a table”. Flusser sees the mantool relationship as a topological, architectural relationship. For him (2007, p. 39), the human learns to create from the tools they invent, out of learning nature itself with their hands, as the author asserts (ibidem), "in order to take ownership of things and 41 Epistēmē is often translated as knowledge, while techné would represent something closer to art and the ability to create something specific, intentionally. Obviously, both concepts cannot be summarily translated in a simplistic way, since we risk taking erroneous and divergent considerations of important ideas covering knowledge and practice inappropriately. On the subject, it is worth including a brief quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) of 2003 and the reference for further readings: “Epistêmê is the Greek word most often translated as knowledge, while technê is translated as either craft or art. These translations, however, may inappropriately harbor some of our contemporary assumptions about the relation between theory (the domain of ‘knowledge’) and practice (the concern of ‘craft’ or ‘art’). Outside of modern science, there is sometimes skepticism about the relevance of theory to practice because it is thought that theory is conducted at so great a remove from the facts, the province of practice, that it can lose touch with them. Indeed, at the level of practice, concrete experience might be all we need. And within science, theory strives for a value-free view of reality. As a consequence, scientific theory cannot tell us how things should be — the realm of ‘art’ or ‘craft’. So, we must turn elsewhere for answers to the profound, but still practical, questions about how we should live our lives. However, some of the features of this contemporary distinction between theory and practice are not found in the relation between epistêmê and technê. […] It is in Aristotle that we find the basis for something like the modern opposition between epistêmê as pure theory and technê as practice. Yet even Aristotle refers to technê or craft as itself also epistêmê or knowledge because it is a practice grounded in ‘an account’ — something involving theoretical understanding. Plato — whose theory of forms seems an arch example of pure theoretical knowledge — nevertheless is fascinated by the idea of a kind of technê that is informed by knowledge of forms. In the Republic, this knowledge is the indispensable basis for the philosophers' craft of ruling in the city. Picking up another theme in Plato's dialogues, the Stoics develop the idea that virtue is a kind of technê or craft of life, one that is based on an understanding of the universe. The relation, then, between epistêmê and technê in ancient philosophy offers an interesting contrast with our own notions about theory (pure knowledge) and (experience-based) practice. There is an intimate positive relationship between epistêmê and technê, as well as a fundamental contrast”. Available on: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/ - Access on January 22, 2018. 54 transform them. " Flusser, however, analyzes the evolution of the tools for a type of construction that needs not only a practical and self-taught learning, but one that calls for a need for theoretical development, resulting in various employments and, as a rule, more extensive than the use of a simple tool. Flusser writes, then (ibid, p. 43) that "the machines require not only an empirical formation, but also, a theoretical one [...] an even more abstract learning process and the development of disciplines that are still not accessible in general. " The author considers, thus, that (ibid, p. 46) "the machines are simulations of the organs in the human body "42. He gives the example of a mechanical lever, which exceeds the idea of a simple tool to perform the role of a powerful, prolonged and tireless human arm, which elevates the power of the physical muscle group and somehow expanding the domain of man over nature. Thus, with the technological development, exponentially from the twenty-first century on, the machines cease to operate things in order to be not only operated but constituted by what the author names as (1999, 2007) non-things, which "are called information". Not just an increasing part of the population begins to produce not exactly things, through the machines and tools, getting involved in the production of information, services, administration of those services, systems etc., as every human being becomes more and more impregnated with it, or as the author himself affirms (2007, pp. 55-56), "our existential interest shifts, clearly, from things to information [...] as we progressively learn to feed information to machines, all the things will lose their value, and all the values will be transferred to the information. " In a somewhat ambiguous way, Flusser brings a thought that leaves aside the isolated use of a tool for an inevitably more abstract human experience with the machines. This concerns me in the sense that, for example, each sound effect, each individual processing, each step of a manipulation and intervention in the sound, each gesture on and to the instrument, may be allocated initially as a tooling procedure, intrinsic to the moment and to that desired attribute. However as mentioned above, machines are not simple gadgets, exclusive tools of a yes or no binary actioning, inside or outside etc. The technique that has become increasingly necessary for the mastery of machines in the artistic production does not imply only in options to turn certain processes on or off. The machine presents and offers inherent and very diverse powers, abandoning the pure state of a tool; even when part of a major assemblage, the machine(s) represent other possibilities than merely changing the shape of, for instance, a wooden table, differently from a chisel or a saw. These desiring machines can infer molecular changes in the wood structure, in ways such as how their legs are attached to the table, or in how its color, roughness, wrinkles are developed. Hence, through the technical mastery of the machine, other assumptions can be inferred beyond the utilitarian, economical, systematic and productive tooling planning. As Flusser himself affirms (2015, p. 173), "I will make an effort to show that between art and technique there is no fundamental difference". In his book The Shape of Things (1999, p. 28), Flusser goes a little further, showing how much the current perspective of form 42 It is interesting to note that, as aforementioned, although machines offer the ability to simulate and/or extend the functionalities of the human body, such as cyborg, based on Nancy's idea, during a performance, they would create new creating agents, new bodies that, isolated, would not exist, but when assembled, could constitute new corporeity, new interactions, new extensions, etc. 55 and material, so dear for centuries in the field of arts and needed technical instrumentation, changed to a machinic use of the artistic technique and practice, when he wrote that, “[…] Since the time of Plato and even earlier, it was a matter of shaping the material by hand to make it appear, but now what we have is a deluge of forms pouring out of our theoretical perspective and our technical equipment, and with this deluge we fill in with material to materialize the forms. In the past, it was a matter of ordaining a world taken for granted, but now it is a matter of realizing the forms designed to produce alternative worlds. That means an immaterial culture, though it should actually, be called a materializing culture. The issue here is the concept of in-formation. In other words, imposing forms on materials”. It might not be a coincidence that in contemporaneity, societies are increasingly and prominently searching for sensations and differentiated experiences, rather than just purchasing things. Maybe the reason is, on the one hand, that the working class, the one that historically has always been responsible for producing things, is reduced, progressively smaller, because industrial works are increasingly allocated to machines, or because there are more and more types of workers specialized in proposing new differentiated experiences and services (a gourmet espresso coffee, aromas, virtual reality, social interaction via digital applications, 3D Cinema, teas from the most remote places, home sound systems in 4, 5, 7 or more channels etc.)43. The fact is that the mastery of electrical, electronic machines and their subsequent evolution to the digital domain, has virtually made all areas and sectors of society change not only the way they interact with these own machines and tools, but also between people and nature. In the arts field, particularly music and sound studies, the machine has brought profound changes not only in the production of sound, facilitated by the creation at a molecular level and through various processes encompassing concrete music, electroacoustics, electronics and live coding, as it deeply transmuted the way the interaction with a musical instrument and an artistic performance occurs. Several authors and researches (BERTELSEN, BREINBJERG, POLD, 2007; BITTENCOURT, 2015; BORGO, 2005; CHION, 1994; COSTA, 2013; DELALANDE, 1999; FRISK, 2008; GRISEY, 2008; IAZZETTA, 1996; JORDÀ, 2002; MAGNUSSON, 2010; WANDERLEY, 2001, among others) have already related and deepened the study and practice of such profound modifications in the way the production of sound and the interaction between the performer and the musical instrument happens. What I try to offer here, 43 On the other hand, the production of non-organic waste increases exponentially, year by year. In 1900, 300 thousand barrels of waste were produced per day and. In 2000, 3 million tons of waste were produced per day and, it is expected that, in 2025, this number will have doubled, which would amount to about 5,000 kilometers of trucks filled with organic waste, in straight line, per day. Source: https://www.nature.com/news/environmentwaste-production-must-peak-this-century-1.14032 and http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTURBANDEVELOPMENT/Resources/3363871334852610766/Chap3.pdf – Access on January 22, 2018. 56 in this particular investigation, is the practice of observations on how this constitution of the hybrid machine occurs, as means of musical performance, through the use of both acoustic and digital instruments, from musical improvisation, and their new forms of instrumentness provided. Rather than just tools and isolated processing, I try to connect the interaction of the performer in this machinic assemblage, in a metastable, real-time environment. As Guattari and Deleuze wrote (2010, p. 508), "It is not through metaphors that we speak of machine: the man 'composes machine ' as long as this aspect is communicated by recurrence to the compound, they take part in well-determined conditions. " As a performer, I compose a performance machine, together with other performers or as a soloist, in recurrence to this assembled compound, in very specific conditions (interfaces, environment, speakers, desire and power of improvisation, musical biography, accumulated practices, experimental practices of creation etc.). I am not departing from the idea of using acoustic and digital instruments as work tools. I do not confront them in relation to my body and the surroundings. They no longer relate to me as aggregate devices, autonomous mechanisms that belong to other places. Within the machinic assemblage, the instruments, the couplings, the devices, the software and whatever type of artifact I choose to aggregate are less at my disposal and more, as Nancy (2015, p. 8) suggests, in an interaction from a dis-position: "The original or elementary dis-position is strictly contemporary and solidary to the bodies. It establishes its relationships. The relation or common ratio of the incorporeal stems from the disposition as its act: separating, approaching, confronting, gathering, rejecting, etc. All the games, beats, drive and repulsions between the bodies ex-im-posing themselves. The placement does not dis-place from the previously given bodies or from any other mode. It is the condition of the body itself, its singular-plural condition. A body is placed, dis-placed among the others. It is ex-posed and im-posed to others, so that only if 'by' pro-posing. A body is a pro-position, an arrival that moves forward and places itself on the outside, as an out. Pro-posed is that the body does not confuse with any other, that does not overlay any other and neither is it overlaid by any other – never, unless a discovery is at stake, placing itself discovered from each body. " A hybrid machine of musical performance can com-pose and dis-pose interactions between performer(s), instrument(s) and couplings, in a single, non-reduced way to cast this or that type of interaction. It is in this kind of profusion of connections and inter-actions, that a desire for sound and musical creation departs, weaved in this place, a place that exceeds the idea of use and appropriation of technology tools (including, of course, acoustic instruments) as things that perform certain tasks. The idea of machinic stems from, as Guattari and Deleuze state (2010, p. 510), a disorderly origin – "it was not from a metaphorical employment of the word machine that we depart from, but a (confusing) hypothesis about the origin: the way any element is determined to compose machines by recurrence and communication". The idea of providing forms of adaptation between machine and performer alone is not of my personal interest. Machines, in this work, are different from tools. The idea of a tool as a prolongation and projection of the body can be replaced here by the concept of machinic phylum, 57 created by Deleuze and Guattari. For them, phylum is an indicator of relentless machinic connections in an evolutionary perspective. Guattari-Deleuzian phylum is the element-indicator capable of pointing out the existing differences between a machinic assemblage and a cluster of mechanical, electrical, electronic and digital tools altogether. Therefore, it is necessary to establish the difference of nature between a tool and a machine, since as both authors affirm (ibidem), "the same thing can be a tool or a machine, as the machinic phylum appropriates it or not, passes through it or not". The machinic phylum is a form of catalyst capable of accelerating and slowing down heterogeneous processes without changing their genesis. A catalyst that can intervene in what exists, which may change previously established constitutions, providing them with effects, amendments, modifications, manipulations, cuts etc., causing therefore, new possibilities that, at first, did not exist before it came into action. Nevertheless, this catalyst will not change the genesis of these tools, these instruments, that will continue to exist and coexist in their originality, ending the machinic assemblage when a performance ends. This catalyst is only originated in a heterogeneous nature, overcoming the idea of a constitution that happens due to the variety and complexity of options provided. It is not the numerical quantity that will guide this catalyst; but the heterogeneity of qualities, "riches" and potentialities between its different elements, which may creatively surpass a simple arithmetic sum and subtraction, providing processes that can act initially as coexistence agents, as heterogeneous elements that can consolidate into new entities. Deleuze and Guattari (1997, p. 330) state: "what we call machinic is precisely this synthesis of heterogeneity". Thus, the difference between machines and tools is clarified more objectively. Again, Guattari and Deleuze write: "We believe that it is necessary to establish, from the outset, the difference between the tool and the machine in their nature: one as a contact agent, the other one as a communication factor; one as projective and the other as a recurring one; one reporting to the possible and the impossible, the other to the probability of a less likely; one, operating by functional synthesis of a whole, the other one by real distinction in a set. Composing a piece with any element is very different from prolonging or projecting, or replacing (in case there is no communication). [...] We also believe that there are always machines that precede the tools, that there are always phylum that determine, at a certain time, that tools for men, work as machine parts in a considered social system. The desiring machines are neither imaginary projections in the form of ghosts, nor actual projections in the form of tools. [...] A reterritorialization process binds to a movement of deterritorialization ensured by the machine ". It is, therefore, through the machines that the machinic phylum may occur, that the types of musical performances investigated here are constituted. Through them some of the powers of rupture and formation of new contents within the artistic production can take place; ruptures that stem from the connecting power provided by the machinic assemblage, by machines that can cross different types of structures, with no arrival order, starting point or regulations; at the same time, in all directions. Flow cut power, flow creation-articulation power, rupture power, connection power. 58 These machinic continuities and discontinuities that may occur during a musical performance exceeds the decision-making that the performer operates while playing; a practical example of this is the disposition and use of my current performance set-up in the improvisation duo ar+2, in conjunction with the saxophonist Rogério Costa. Separately, each instrument, each software, the computer, the ADA interface, the pedals, controllers, mixers, speakers, and microphones, are just work tools, as well as the strings, the picks, the audio and power cables, sockets, adaptors, power supply. Each of these can operate on a mechanical level of use, in which a bandolim, a saxophone or the software are just scattered, separate things, with endless ways of using. Based on my desire, my own will and a determination of the music making, here along with my performance partner’s desire, there might be a machinic assemblage, in which these tools and many of their heterogeneous aspects offer a possibility of extraphysical connection in a very subjective form, also, out of a desire of creating a performance embracing the use of musical improvisation, allowing us to go through varied structures (gestures, figures, sound, music) simultaneously, two important factors may occur, ones that Deleuze and Guattari (2010, p. 514) name: a. ) power of the continuum, which is not but the idea of machinic phylum itself, where such piece connects to a new one and, at the same time, with all the other pieces; b. ) power of rupture, capable of changing, inverting, bend the performance direction, from an absolute or subtle cut, which is molecularly weaved and composed. The authors affirm that “two powers that compose a single one, for the machine itself is flow-cut, the cut being always adjacent to the continuity of a flow it separates from the others, providing it a code, making it drag these or those elements.” A sort of collective, assembled body is formed during our performance. The duration is always distinct: eight, fifteen, twenty-two minutes, and many others. The machinic operation is based on the establishment of connections, flow passages, preparation of intensities, associations that are made and are unmade, territory-deterritorializationreterritorialization. It is, in short, about devising a system whose elements are linked to each other precisely by the absence of padlocks, barrettes, chains or fences, limiting bonds. As Guattari and Deleuze mention (ibid. p. 521), "a set of pure singularities. " Anyway, a set of distinct pieces that work together while really distinct. 59 1.3 Half-subject, half-object The machinic system itself, out of its assemblage, may suffer (de)structuring contingencies which are interchangeable and intrinsic to it. Its complexity does not lie on a determined isolated system, but in the very interaction within the system. Mingers (1991, p. 321) states that "an autopoietic organization is carried out in a particular structure". While a machinic assemblage lasts, this organization will survive because the basic needs of the entire system will be guaranteed. In a concrete situation in my performing praxes, it is about having a power supply system, consistent room temperature to avoid computer overheating, speakers structured in the environment for the performer’s (s) monitoring, cabling and signal path efficiently compound, sufficiently low latency of analog-to-digital conversion, allowing the player to interact with his or her musical instrument coupled to the digital system in real time etc. However, from the very particular contingencies of each performance (some monitoring box in short circuit, operating system crashing, malfunctioning power battery, latency between the trackpad drive and the computer's response, microphones with excessive feedback etc.44), the autopoietic behavior may be interrupted, altering 44 In different operating systems, there are obviously different types of self-diagnostic and analysis of errors and digital bugs that may occur during a "normal" operation. On Mac OSX, for example, several events that can be triggered by the machine itself when a hard boot is performed, or a forced operating system restart action. This can occur when the operating system becomes inoperative or frozen, or a particular application or software does not work. There are numerous causes for such errors, from allocating a quantity of digital data above the established and compatible level of memory and processing offered by the computer, even reading errors and hard drives access, wireless communication, etc. There are even specific cases in which requires turning off the machine power cable and outlet access, replacing it, waiting a few seconds and initiating the computer from a sequence of keys on the machine keyboard, such as the "D" key, for example, that will start the computer's auto diagnostic system, or the "shift" key, before starting the operating system that will load the computer with a "released" version of all extensions installed on the system, so that you can evaluate which one is providing the error and locking of the machine. These different errors can happen to different machines as well, such as digital pedals, FX pedals or even within patches and their abstractions, which often contain accumulated programming accumulated for months or even years. Some software or applications offer automatic diagnostic and updating tools, but not all of them. There are cases – many, in fact – in which the performer himself will be responsible for diagnosing and provide the solution(s) of certain bugs and crashes, having to implement them manually. The following illustrated screen indicates a self-analysis occurrence provided by the Mac OSX system, after an error considered "fatal": 60 the processes made possible by the machine and causing the performance to lose its energy and power, moving toward entropy. Obviously, there are contingencies coming from the system itself, which are not only destabilizing or destructive in character. Certain human "mistakes" or resulting from poor sound processing may lead a performance to unexpected and interesting paths, with different adaptation time, emotional dispositions etc. In this continuous process, a kind of memory develops within the assemblage, structured from what "worked" previously in other performances, and which is being conceived, both autonomously, through successive updates of distinct parts of the digital operating system (from the computer, from a patch, from a new version of processing software used, a foot-controller etc.) and the changes made by the performer(s), in the real-time performance, and also through a constant evolution in learning how the machine "works" and the familiarity when playing it. In short, the system as a whole (acoustic, digital instruments, miscellaneous equipment performers etc.) will undergo successive processes of adaptation and improvement. The operation of the hybrid machine, thus it is governed by the assemblages and their internal configurations and compositions adjust themselves (and, why not, perfect themselves?) from the very epistemological experience of how it acts and reacts throughout the system. They are like inseparable forces, which after a certain level of configuration, may present a spontaneous and productive character (regarding the execution of certain tasks), becoming recyclable and in constant development. In these internal conversations occurring during the operation of a hybrid machine, a sort of particular language is fed and configured, out of a series of necessary actions for the system conception and due functioning. This language, supplied both internally by the assemblers and externally, by the contingencies that may always occur, seeks to get established and is also progressively composed in a hybrid way, not only with regards to acoustic and digital sound, but in face of different situations of cohesion and combustion, encompassing the organic, the mechanical, the electronic and the digital aspects. 61 It is, therefore, a half-subject, half-object language supplying a conversation that can (try, at least) be predictable, but it can also be quite surprising, in terms of results. Surprises can occur from unexpected errors, accidental connections happening at the set-up time and, in some way, resulted in something pertinent or interesting, diverse processing that would allegedly result in certain known materials, but which were presented differently etc. Hence, something absolutely opposite to what was expected may occur, when the machine crashes, or it is not responsive, some cable or connector is malfunctioning, systems overheat etc. If each machine has a certain autonomy (keeping in mind that, auto= I, nomous = law), the system itself can subvert to some sort of pre-established order and provide its own laws. Thus, each machinic assemblage is heterogeneous and originates a particular and autonomous world that decodes materials in its own and unique ways. Each performance, which is also a singular machinic assemblage, may have its memory constantly reallocated or completely reset, continuous "from the point we stopped yesterday "– recalling and reverberating – or resumed from the beginning. Between the performer(s) and the machine a kind of objective relationship is established – starting the operational system, operationalizing which software and applications run simultaneously on that performance, configuring audio and MIDI parameterization, input and output volumes, cables connected correctly etc. – and, at the same time, improvised and autonomous – the same delay processing, for example, reacts in different ways depending on how the performance moves on, providing, from its own delay repetitions, new materials that will accumulate in the game between performers and/or between the performer himself or herself and the machine. It is through the praxis that the machine is created, from the performer’s practice toward the machine and from the praxis of a type of performance that encompasses improvisation and new technologies. A praxis that takes place over a recognition of its structures and the anticipated possible ruptures. This relationship denotes a constant and temporal bond between a particular person (in this case, a performer) and their action environment (which may include not only the machinations, electronic apparatus and acoustic instruments, but also the presence of one or more performers, which also constitute their own action environments). This type of situation that resembles a game is described in the example proposed by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1942, pp. 255-256 in: Bittencourt, 2015), on the relationship between the player and the football field45: 45 “Pour illustrer et éclairer ce rapport entre l’environnement (milieu) et l’action (de l’organisme), nous nous referons à la métaphore du joueur et du terrain de football, brillamment établie par Maurice Merleau-Ponty: « Le terrain de football n’est pas, pour le joueur en action, un « objet », C'est-à-dire le terme idéal qui peut donner lieu à une multiplicité́ indéfinie de vues perspectives et rester équivalent sous ses transformations apparentes. Il est parcouru par des lignes de forces (les lignes de « touche », celles qui limitent la « surface de réparation »), — articulé en secteurs (par exemple, les « trous » entre les adversaires) qui appelle un certain mode d’action, la déclenchent et la portent comme à l’insu du jouer. Le terrain ne lui est pas donné, mais présent comme le terme immanent de ses intentions pratiques ; le joueur fait corps avec lui et sent par exemple la direction du « but » aussi immédiatement que la vertical et l’horizontale de son propre corps. Il ne suffirait pas de dire que la conscience habite ce milieu. Elle n’est rien d’autre à ce moment que la dialectique du milieu et de l’action. Chaque manoeuvre entreprise par le joueur modifie l’aspect du terrain et y tend des nouvelles lignes de force où l’action à son tour s’écoule et se réalise en altérant à nouveau le champ phénoménal »”. 62 "In order to illustrate and clarify this relationship between environment (medium) and action (organism), we refer to the metaphor of the player and the soccer field, brilliantly established by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: «The football field is not, for the player in action, an ' object ', or the ideal term that may give rise to an undefined multiplicity of views in perspective and remain equivalent under their apparent transformations. It is traversed by lines of forces (the side lines, those that limit the "penalty surface"), articulated in sectors (e.g. the "spaces" between opponents) that refer to a certain action mode, by attitudes that trigger the game. The terrain is not given to you, but it is present as the immanent term of their practical intentions; the player is one with himself and feels, for example, the direction to the "goal" as immediately as the vertical and horizontal aspects of their own body. It is not enough to say that the consciousness lives in this environment. It is nothing but the dialectic of environment and action. Each maneuver performed by the player modifies the aspect of the terrain and tensions new force lines, where the action flows and happens again changing the phenomenal field. » " Note that, as Bittencourt comments on Merleau-Ponty’s thought (ibid., p. 83), "the soccer field does not exist beforehand in the situation of the game, and the player becomes one with it46". The hybrid machine still does not exist in itself, before its assemblage, before the performance, but on the other hand, it exists previously by maintaining in its files, in its digital "memory" and its storage units – either physical or virtual – remnants of other performances, saved works, and learnings of the past. As Bittencourt (ibidem) states, "the goal is not the soccer field, but the force lines that invite players into action, always towards the goal "47. Choice options, decision-making, whether to take a certain path are constituted in real time, during assemblage and performance. Even though in a musical game, obviously, the goals are not as determined as in a soccer match, the actions will be constituted dynamically, from certain previously elaborated contexts, but which may or not change radically during a performance through a mutual communication man-machine. At each performance, there is a momentarily elaborated material, that deals with both the performance time (the performance itself, from the beginning and through the materials provided that constitute the idea of a whole), as for the performance of time (when creating, for example, a loop that rhythmically counteracts to a certain material offered by another player or by the processing of the machine itself, which can briefly refer to an idea of groove that will be worked for some time, through distinct elements in the temporal division, from the figural idea, and then it may be abandoned in favor of a new proposal, and so on). In other words, as a musician, I will build the sound flow through a series of procedures and techniques that emerge in real-time, sometimes from something unexpected that will be abandoned afterward, or through small temporal accumulations, which from a shared desire, unfold into grooves or rhythms. With each performance there are new materials that are connected, shaping the time and continuity of the sound flow, in a process of coping with the emptiness that incorporates silence. 46 “Le terrain de football n’existe pas au préalable dans la situation de jeu, et le joueur « fait corps avec lui”. (My translation). 47 “L’objet n’est pas le terrain de football, mais les « lignes de force » qui invitent l’action des joueurs, toujours vers le but”. (My translation). 63 I recall here what Deleuze and Guattari (1997, pg. 167) name as material-forces, when writing on the creation processes of the German visual artist Paul Klee and that can be allocated to the field of sound arts and music. For the authors, "However, it is, it should be, technique, nothing else but technique. The essential relationship is no longer matter-forms (or substance-attributes); though neither is it in the continuous development of the form and the continuous variation of the matter. Here, it presents itself as a direct relationship material-forces. The material is a molecularized matter, which as such must capture forces [...] is now about drawing up material in charge of capturing the strengths of a another nature: the visual material should capture non-visible forces. Make it visible, said Klee, instead of bringing about or reproducing what is visible ". Making it sonorous and not reproducing what is already sonorous. Here is a plausible proposition that these machinic assemblages provide the performers who use and are part of them. As the authors themselves affirm (ibid., pp. 167-168), "the matters of expression give way to a capture material”. From this point on, an assemblage capable of capturing its own materiality during a performance, what becomes essential then is no longer the form, the systems or technical materials that may constitute the creative content of this same performance, but its forces, densities, intensities and molecularities. However, how to deal with these issues within the machinic system itself? How does the constitution of a performance based on such measurements and characteristics occur? Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the fact that these assemblages synthesize so many disparate forces and energies that may constitute considerable misconceptions, ruining the whole system. The authors state that (1997, pp. 169-170), "This synthesis of disparate does not occur without misunderstanding [...] It can be taken too far, exaggerated, operated with entangled lines or of sounds; but then, instead of producing a cosmic machine, capable of making it sonorous, it turns to a reproduction machine, which ends up reproducing mere scrabbles that erases all the lines, a confusion that erases all sounds. It intends to open up the music to all the events, to every irruption, but what is eventually reproduced is the confusion that stops the whole event [...] an excessively rich material remains too territorialized, in sources of noise, in the nature of the objects... [...] we make a set vague, instead of making the set vague by the consistency or consolidation operations that focus on it. Because that is essential: a vague set, a synthesis of disparate can only be defined by a degree of consistency that makes it precisely possible to distinguish the disparate elements that constitute it (discernibility). The material must be sufficiently deterritorialized in order to be molecularized [...] rather than incurring into crammed statics [...] it is the sobriety of the assemblage that makes the richness of the machine effects possible." As creators and researchers, in this kind of machinic ontology it is important for us to develop a reflection capable of analyzing the assemblage as a whole, not clinging to the 64 particular qualities of its components, and that can also elaborate a distinction of the consistency that each constituting element can offer, avoiding, thus, what Deleuze and Guattari call it a statics cram. A sort of critically engaged consciousness, necessary to deal with some of the new forms and singularities provided by digital technologies. A critical consciousness through which the performer can develop subjectively, from a constant transformation, their relationship with these new materials, interfaces, connections and perceptions48; a relationship that deals not only with new types of tools as creative agents, but also with the environment itself where the humanmachine interaction occurs: the performance. These relationships that mat exist and may act in a machinic performance, therefore, stem from, its components, but are not dependent on them, thus feeding a large "block of sensations", the perceptos of the creator in relation to this environment and its inherent possibilities. Such perceptos, in fact, has already been constantly fed by the machines in contemporaneity. For Lazzarato (2014, p. 35) "In our most humane actions (speaking, communicating, writing, thinking etc.) we are 'assisted' by a new generation of machines". All our day-to-day machines fit here. There is no need to list them; they pervade our existence. 48 Varela (1989) conceives a machine as a "set of interrelationships of its components independently of their own components." 65 1.4 Assemblage “Because, about the desiring machine, one must say what Jean Tinguely did: a trulyjoyous machine, by joyous I mean free”. Félix Guattari e Gilles Deleuze, 2010 The real time of decision-making and choices is correlated with the heterochronic durations coexisting in a performance. It is worth mentioning that an assemblage differs from a simple event. While the latter suggests an action or result from a determined occurrence, an assemblage can transform the elaboration and the structures of various processes, forms, systems and structures, based on the idea of a composition of distinct and heterogeneous elements. The event is the result of confluent actions at a given time, therefore resulting from them. For Zourabichvili (2009, p. 6), "the {event updating} generates a mere succession of two states of things, before-after”. The assemblage, in turn, is given during a series of simultaneous compositions, often abstract and immanent, which no matter how hard you try to predict or to control, are not susceptible to a complete domain. For Deleuze and Guattari (2016, pp. 185-186), "in the assemblage, there are states of things, bodies, mixtures of bodies, bindings; there are also enunciations, enunciation modes, sign regimes [...] the assemblages are sets of lines somewhat like painting ". It might be pertinent to conceive the idea of assemblage based on the notion of couplings, in which structures and intentions – diverse and divergent – can be interconnected, building what may resemble an environment of powers. There are social, individual, molar, molecular, purposefully designed, unexpectedly experienced etc. assemblages, causing balances and imbalances simultaneously. Zourabichvili (2004, p. 9) states that, "Each individual must deal with these great social assemblages defined by specific codes, characterized by a relatively stable form and by a reproductive functioning: they tend to reduce the field of experimentation of their desire to a pre-established division. This is the stratum pole of the assemblages (considered "molar"). But on the other hand, the way an individual invests and participates in the reproduction of these social assemblages depend on local, "molecular" assemblages, in which he is inserted either because, by limiting himself to undertake the socially available forms, to model his existence according to the codes in force, he introduces there his small irregularity, either for elaborating unintentional and groping of his own assemblage that "decodes" or "escapes from" the stratified assemblage: this is the abstract machine pole (among which the artistic assemblage needs to be included). Every assemblage, since ultimately referring to the field of desire upon which it constitutes itself is affected by a certain imbalance. " Possibly, every human being combines the two types of assemblages (molar/molecular), in varying degrees and through different situations; the human being maybe only be 66 fully constituted as such, by assembling themselves. These assemblages are weaving abstract compositions over time, which does not necessarily create a contour in previously established situations, often creating a certain strain of subjectivity instantiated by these molar and molecular forces, which are simultaneously found. Deleuze states that (2016,P. 186), "an assemblage is dragged by its abstract lines, when it is able to have them or to trace them". They are creative, challenging, destabilizing, empowering, mutant, vital, destructive lines. As the author states (ibid), "so, there are lines of all sorts." Thus, the assemblages allow heterogeneous elements, either complex or not, to remain together for some time, and it is often through the diversity of multiple assemblages that we can break down trends of homogenizing character. These new consistencies will be re-structured, deterritorialized again, out of new assemblages. These assemblages thus operate as a content fragmenting element, dismembering them, processing them and modifying their structures, transforming them into new modes of aesthetic formulations49. Every assemblage depends, at least, on one type of assembling element. It is this element that will start from a certain kind of desire {human} for the movement of connecting points, lines, structures etc., creating a process. Costa (2016, p. 45) defines that "the assembler is the one that, in a given consistency plan [...] connects the points, determining the directions to a specific process". The assembler crosses and breaks up with the limits imposed by each different element that spreads at the beginning of the assemblage; it is through this that things, in a one way or another, just happen. Every individual, every element, every thing possesses its own lines, action and development features, forming a complex, yet disarranging environment, but which can be connected and potentialized by an assembler, out of his or her particular wills. The experience of using each element, out of particular experiences, is progressively disrupted to an assemblage that exceeds the individual action limit of each element, thus adding to the types of complementary experiences that may result in a new mode of enunciation. Each element is responsible, therefore, for playing a possible transforming role in the chain of events that composes an assemblage. An assemblage can create new correlated structures based on distinct elements that might not communicate or would simply not work with each other. The models of signification and decoding that precede them cannot separately explain the powers of 49 Mikhail Bakhtin (In: GUATTARI, 2012, p.26) describes a transference of subjectivation through assemblages, causing engendering in the modes of aesthetic enunciation, such as, in the case of Music, the isolation and invention cannot be related axiologically to the material: "It is not the sound of acoustics that is isolated, neither is the mathematical number intervening in the musical composition that is invented. It is the event of aspiration and stress valuing, isolated and irreversibly made by invention and, thanks to this, are eliminated by themselves without obstacles and reaching a home at its completion." For Guattari (ibidem), "we find in Bakhtim the idea of irreversibility of the aesthetic object and implicitly of autopoiesis [...] and it's not just in the framework of music and poetry that we see such highlighted fragments of the content work which, in general, include in the category of existing ritornellos. The polyphony of the subjectivation modes corresponds, in fact, to a multiplicity of ways to "mark time”. Other rhythms are thus led to crystallize existential assemblages that they embody and singularize." 67 each individual element, for it is the only contribution, after the possible transformations, which elicit the creative potential of the assemblage. Deleuze and Guattari (1997, p. 193) say that "nothing that precedes us satisfies us". In a machinic assemblage, this idea is very clear. The possible processing provided by a particular application or a specific software may be interesting, but it may not satisfy us in a certain moment, for it is through the assemblage that its possibilities of transformation will be effective. The same happens with the handling power of a specific pedal or digital FX stompboxes, or even the tonal characteristics and amplification of a microphoned and/or prepared for a live performance acoustic instrument. The environment itself will contribute to specific transformations that may occur during a performance. It must be clear that, this characteristic of the assemblage, of connecting the dots and lines from the possible transformations of different elements, is far from a structuralist thought, in which a certain type of listing seeks to account for a correspondence of relationships. While the structuralist thinking seeks to enumerate and explain the correspondence of two or more relationships, either graduating characteristics according to their similarities, or organizing them according to their differences, the assembling thought departs from the idea of a power of action, which makes things distinct in one becoming alone. The idea of becoming is connected to Gilles Deleuze’s thought, defined by Zourabichvili (2004, pp. 23-24): "Becoming is the content of desire itself; desiring is going through becomings. Becoming is never imitating, nor making as, nor conforming to a model [...] there is not a term from which it departs, nor one to which it arrives or to which it should arrive. Nor are there two exchanging terms [...] because as someone transforms themselves, what they transform changes as much as themselves. The becomings are not phenomena of imitation, nor of assimilation, but of double capture, of non-parallel evolution [...]. Above all, becoming is not a generality, there is no becoming in general: one could not reduce this concept, instrument of a fine clinic of concrete and always singular existence, to the ecstatic apprehension of the world in its universal wonder drainage philosophically hollow. Secondly, becoming is a reality: the becomings, far from resembling the dream or the imaginary, are the very consistency of the real. It is appropriate, to understand it well, to consider its logic: every becoming forms a block, in other words, the meeting or the relationship of two or more heterogeneous terms, which are mutually deterritorialized. One will not abandon what one is in order to become something else (imitation, identification), but another way of living and feeling [...] Deleuze and Guattari constantly insist on the reciprocity of the process and in its asymmetry: X does not ' become ' Y without Y, in turn, becoming something else. Two things are mixed here, but should not be confused: a) (general case) the term found is dragged into an expressive-becoming, correlated to the new intensities (content) through which the term is found, in compliance with the two sides of every assemblage; b) (restricted case) possibility that the term found is the one that finds, as in the cases of coevolution, and a way that a twofold becoming takes place in each side. The becoming is, in short, one of the poles of the assemblage, the one in which the content and expression tend to the indiscernible in the composition of an abstract machine ". 68 The assemblage thus relates much more to the expansion modes and their hybrid characteristics, of heterogeneous multiplicity50, than to the isolated characteristics of each element. The occupation, contagion and propagation relations are what matter in a machinic assemblage. 1.5 Metastable environment The ways the human being relates to technology obviously undergo constant renewals and profound effective changes not only due to the features of a market system that economically imposes a type of planned obsolescence51 to the machines, but also by the way in which humans interact among them and with one another. To Lazzarato (2014, p. 17), "the machinisms have invaded our daily lives and now watch our ways of speaking, listening, seeing, writing and feeling constituting what we could name as constant social capital ". The author relates the recent digital evolution with the ways of living of the human being from a concept proposed by Guattari (1984) known as asservissements machiniques, which can be translated into the English as machinic enslavement or subjection. Men, women and machines, human and non-human are thus component parts of a great social assemblage, which goes through not only the way of living and each individual’s options, but also the way in which the State relates to society, in the form of control, interaction, social welfare etc., and, undoubtedly, the way in which society consumes and is induced to consume. Lazzarato (ibid, p. 18) is clear: "machines and machinic assemblages are everywhere". There is also the idea, often instigated by the technological apparatus industry, of the need to fully experience all the possibilities granted by technology. In a sort of reverse dwelling of the post-modern time (STIEGLER, In: RUTSKY, 2004), great part of the current society has ceased to suspect of what is offered and "legitimized" as imperative changes of modernity; the vague notion that if we are not part of something new, we do not acquire this something, we do not experience something, we would 50 Deleuze and Guattari (Thousand Plateaus 4, 1997, p.28) define the concept of multiplicity: "A multiplicity is defined, not by the elements that compose it in extension, or by the characteristics that compose it in terms of understanding, but by the lines and dimensions it holds in intensities. If you change dimensions, if you add or cut any of them, you change multiplicity. From where there is an edge according to each multiplicity, which is not a center, absolutely, but it is the line that involves or it is the extreme dimension from which you can count the other ones." 51 The definition of the term planned obsolescence, according to the British magazine The Economist, is: "Planned obsolescence is a business strategy in which obsolescence (the process of becoming obsolete – that is, unfashionable or no longer usable) of a product is planned and built into its conception. This is done so that in future the consumer feels the need to purchase new products and services that the manufacturer brings out as replacements for the old ones". Note that the idea that something becomes obsolete, according to The Economist definition, would be the user considering something oldfashioned, no longer a novelty or a symbol of modern. The idea of planned obsolescence is implemented by industries and companies in virtually every area of consumption, but it is in the digital technology industry that it proves even more voracious. Companies like Apple and Google have been sued by purposely deploying this practice in their products and services. For further information, see: http://www.economist.com/node/13354332 http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160612-heres-the-truth-abouttheplanned-obsolescence-of-tech – access on January 16, 2018. and 69 miss the experience of a great revolution, of which the kinesthetic possibilities would be immense. It is through this naivety that new relationships of technological and financial dependence – in an automatically interconnected way –will be constituted, organized and imposed, a sense of a spirit of generalized performativity of contemporary temporality (De GENARO, 2012). This somehow crystallized discourse also reaches the field of arts and the music making which often seeks to legitimize certain types of musical and sound production through the use of new digital technologies. At the same time, many of the new digital instruments provided by new technologies are often or allocated to the (re)interpretation of a classical repertoire, stipulated and established or withdrawn from more traditional musical practices. The new forms of instrumentness provided go, very often, far beyond an expansion of the traditional musical instrument, breaking with a tradition and instrumental praxis established and rooted in the didactical methodology of music teaching. Magnusson (2017, p. 287) shows this characteristic by stating that, "We have observed how the evolution of a specific instrument tends to stop at a given point; it becomes a knot in which technology materializes itself (Simondon, 2016), and becomes a stable reference for composers, performers, educational institutions, as well as for the media and the general public. This way, new instruments are either pulled into the tradition, repertoire and schools, or rejected, put on hold, forgotten. The instruments that become part of the musical tradition develop slowly, and the change progresses in a minimal degree, rarely in essence. And the disarticulated contract is forged among composers, interpreters and instrument manufacturers, forming this complex and multidimensional relationship. " This ambiguity between the desire for the new, for what is technologically modern, and the imposition by a large part of performers, composers and educational institutions to encompass new types and forms of instruments provided by new digital technologies is not only in the power relations and maintenance of an established and considered traditional repertoire. Often, the fact that these meta-instruments are still being conceived and developed shows another important characteristic/quality in this process: a lack of stability and a (still eminent) lack of structuring in its conception and usability. On the one hand, digital and hybrid instruments are a latent part of a postmodern aesthetic discourse that seeks to encompass its use and application through machinic assemblages; on the other hand, the widespread amount of bugs, failures, flickering, contingencies and generalized incompatibility often makes the use and application restricted for those who seek to explore a certain degree of effective experimentalism in their artistic productions and musical performances. 70 1.6 Operation consistency and balance of the machinic system In Gilbert Simondon's work (2008, 2014), you can often find ideas related to the individuation processes, entropy and negentropy. Simondon tackles the individuation process out of the idea that something is always liable to continue, thus never stabilizing. In brief, for him, individuation is the name given to the processes by which the undifferentiated become individual or processes in which differentiated components become indivisible as a whole. These differentiated components individualize, hence, from the same identity, the same individual, the same means. The understanding of the individuation concept exceeds pre-existing conceptions, in which the human being is either stable or unstable, or in motion or at rest. The principle of individuation is a process that encompasses metastability and its relations between the inside and the outside, a mediated, multiple principle of several territories, providing a kind of internal resonance. The individuation, thus, can only occur in the now, in the present time; the living being is contemporary of oneself and different from the physical individual existing in the temporal past, which is back in time. Damasceno (2007, p. 178) states that "Simondon's conception does not lie on the identity of unit, but rather on the transductor unit. It means that a being can get lagged, to overflow to one or another side from their center". Therefore, the individual identifies less with the rules of the environment in which he or she lives and more with the guidelines emanated from their essence (totality of individual personality). However, what is interesting to me, in Simondon's concept of individuation, is his relationship with the technical object, with the machine, for Simondon theorized the individuation in the technical processes. For him, the transduction process52 occurs, representing an operation of individuation in progress. Hence, for Simondon, the process becomes ontological, permanent and incomplete, always leaving behind a kind of pre-individual residue, always magnetized and also capable of future individuations, being the transducing operation itself, a correspondence to developing the individuation, in constant variation. The machine thus has its own ontology, acquiring autonomy, its way of "being", forming its own individuality. Costa (2013, pp. 36-37) states that traditionally, one thinks and understands the individuation process based on a finished individual, something as: individuation principle – individuation operation – individual. According to the author (ibidem), however, Simondon proposes an inverse discourse: "knowing the individual from the individuation. In its formulation, the individual/individuation reflects the unfolding of the individuation (it is a provisional state of this process”. It is the place of the negentropy. 52 According to Simondon (1964, p.18 In Damasceno, 2007, p.178), "by transduction we understand a physical, biological, mental, social operation, whereby an activity gradually propagates within a domain, founding this propagation on the structuring of the domain operated region-to-region: each constituted structure serves as a principle of constitution to the next region, so that a modification extends progressively at the same time as this structuring operation." 71 For Simondon, the machine is a way of transiting from chaos to a negentropic environment53: The machine enables the provisional organization, which is a process of individuation. Thus, during a musical improvisation performance based on the assemblage of a hybrid machine, this is exactly what may occur, the performer is in constant process of individuation, from a complex assemblage of forces and matters. The inside and outside (of the performance) present potential differences and asymmetries (tensions) that never allow a definitive stability (which would be, in this case, synonymous with stiffness, entropy). The processes that compose this machinic assemblage gradually delimitate the boundaries and membranes of this complex hybrid machine, putting its different parts at stake: the acoustics, the processing, the latency, the environment itself and its reverberation, the computer's digital system, the coupled digital tools and apparatus etc. In the pre-individual stage lie the desires, the project, the provisions of the performer(s), the techniques, their previously established knowledge, their know-how and problem-solving, repertoire, spatial-temporal features etc. Damasceno (ibidem, p. 179) states that, for Simondon, "it is important to address the topological settings of the live from the very space in which it develops and depending on the relationship between an inner medium and an external medium. " From this point of view, and particularly in the present investigation, the performance environment is defined as a place of connections, where the relationships between the machine and I (performer) are always active and interactive, always aiming for an operation consistency, seeking through distinct processes, a certain constancy in its functioning, in an environment that is simultaneously open to new and constant updates. During a performance out of the machinic assemblage, the interior and exterior are always interacting, oscillating between the pre-individual chaos (entropy) and metastable individuations. This is the place of connections, where the assemblages, the machine, software, performer(s), acoustic instruments, digital instruments and the environment itself are at stake, thus constituting the hybrid machine. In it, I bring my pre-individual, my virtualities, which are the powers of everything that may happen and that, during a performance, individuate. My intervention as a performer occurs at the time and is inserted into a sound stream that is also built by everyone and everything that participates in the performance itself. As I form my hybrid machine, it also forms me, molds me, giving flow to different degrees of interaction between performer X machine, and here, performer x performer. My intervention is continuous. And at the same time, I am always listening, being affected, judging, choosing and deciding. It is interesting to note that I can transit in various forms (gradual or abrupt) during a performance, from more molar environments (that evoke, more or less explicitly, certain languages or styles – grooves, melodies, melodic themes, harmonies, intervallic patterns etc.) to more molecular environments (textural, noisiness, electroacoustics etc.)54. In this sense, the interior and exterior are complementary aspects of a multiplicity that affects me, causing transductions and having the individuation as a metastable equilibrium factor. 53 For Campos and Chagas (2008), "the machine is seen as the one that increases the negentropy factor. In thermodynamics, such a term is a synonym for cohesion force; from this perspective, therefore, the machine is seen as stabilizer of the world, organizer of psychical and, eventually social and human systems." 54 Some of these ideas and concepts will be widely explored in the following chapters. 72 I cite as an example a performance performed by Rogério Costa and me in 2017, in our duo ar +2, called “O homem se arrasta” (close meaning to ‘the man creeps’)55, stemming from a free reading of the homonym poem by Manoel de Barros. Early in the performance, a desire to join our pre-individualities occurs, however, in constant scraping, harsh encounters, as if they were chafing the sound, which literally creep over the beginning of the performance. The reading of the poem happened freely, where both performers could do it in their desired way and time, even devoid the need for respecting the chronological order of the verses. Being the first phrase "O homem se arrasta", one could notice our desire to institute some sounds that metaphorically creep not only among themselves, but with each other, in their own molecular genesis. In a free improvisation performance, musicians do not need predetermined authorizations to carry out specific actions, whether from a conductor, composer, score or from a formalized structure itself. The performers’ autonomy is one of the most powerful assumptions of this musical praxis. Thus, our reading of the poem does not only happen freely from possible rules and analogies, but also based on a type of confrontation in relation to some of the actions that are individualized over the time flow. It may be a reading that involves memories, images56, affections and various other elements and stimuli, nourishing our desire to play, at that time. The first minute of performance happens as if we set an infinitesimal sound pin and, each of us in our own way, in our particular manner, creep it as much as possible, broadening it, extending it, multiplying it. Only in about 1’55 " a new kind of sound material comes up and, just thirty seconds later, starts dragging the sound into different types of action, as if it were a counterpoint in our desire to perpetuate this minimal initial sound pin. It is worth recalling that both of us are, throughout the entire performance, in a constant state of readiness in relation not only to the material exposed by the other as to the constituted environment and all the machinic assemblage established. Falleiros (2012, p. 17) states that: "The improvisation [...] essentially requires a specific state of readiness, formed by listening, as attentively to the improviser as possible and a controlled action, and in order to concretely perform to their instrument, the sound image in such a way that there is nodifference between the thinking and the playing. " 55 See the media enclosed in this work, also on: https://soundcloud.com/ar_mais_2/performance-a-partir-da-leitura-livre-de-um-poema-de-manoel-debarros -- access on May 21, 2018. 56 On sound image, Santaella states that the "... the term associated image [...] draws attention to the trace of a certain unit that sound acquires, a point of stability, even if it is an unstable stability, characteristic of sound". Quoting François Bayle (1995), Santaella continues: "you have a sound and you take an image out of it, not just a sound object, but a figural object, conceived as kinematics of the space of the projected sounds, that is, the plastic qualities of the projected sound entities [...] perceived in terms of contours, densities, impacts and volumes, movements and speeds." SANTAELLA, 2013, p.143. 73 This state of readiness allows the possibility of creating a new discourse out of a certain desire, which, in this example, is the reading of a poem out of our musical instruments and our hybrid machines. It is a desire that involves directly the will of the sound production concomitantly to musical creation. Both (performers) get individualized and (re)acquainted during the processes of individuation, as Simondon described above. The idea of dragging the sound, from different ways of reading the original poem, is addressed in other different moments during the performance. From 8'50 " onwards we start – or better, we discover – new processes that allow us to drag, widen and scrape the sound again, in a kind of ritornello to the beginning of the same performance, but in a completely different way. For about four minutes we drag this sonic, molecular point, extending it momentarily in an almost crystallized way (this can be observed more clearly between 11' and 11'58"). In Manoel de Barros’s poetry, the words destroços, traços e incrusta (wreckage, traces and encrust) are powerful images to the sound creation. Each of us, as performers and individuals, bring at that moment different references that are used in the composition of this new sound, which is also created from the sounds that surround our singularity, our existence. At that moment we bring in our packages of sounds, as Ferraz (2007, p. 17) denominates: "What is this sound? For there are many sounds that surround us and besides the sound images [...] of these sounds, both their spectral characteristics and the references they bring about are important. There is a choice in the package of sounds that surrounds each person, each composer, each work, each moment of life. Packages of sounds that do not necessarily match to the soundscape in which the moment takes place; the packages are independent of the places where the sounds occur. It is important to say that the sounds always bring personal references and that each person bears their references. However, a person is already a package of sounds. And these sounds can be transformed in different ways, depending on the moment and the need to generate compositional materials: spectral analyses, simple imitations, deductions by drawings, images that the sounds may intersect, etc. ". Obviously, Ferraz makes here an allusion to the packages of individual sounds within a musical composition sphere, but that also serves me and my duo partner in the improvisation praxis. Each of us has distinctive sound packages, and we are 'individually' impacted by the same poetry in a completely unique way. In addition, our interaction, both mutual and in relation to our hybrid machines and to the performance environment itself, lead us to compose the sound flow over the time, individuating and thus transducing our individualities at that moment; of our interior-medium to an exterior-medium, an external environment that is progressively created in real-time. The use of a poem in a musical improvisation session, as in this example, also typifies a series of circumstantial interpretations, since the word is a potent form of creation and suggestion of creative actions, mainly because a poem often withdraws the literal sense of certain words and allocate them to other imagistic places. Even so, perhaps an initial desire for an analogy between the literal meaning of a 74 certain phrase with a "type" of sound appears; but then we try and establish a sort of distance from this puerile action, and seek to allocate some poetic resignification between a certain word with a sound processing, or a set of certain processes and manipulations of a sound (i.e., extend the pick on the steel strings of the bandolim, while the sound is processed by a kind of echo and reverberation that can extend this sound, then set it on the performance flow, and compose new materials from a group of proportionate repetitions etc.). Falleiros (2012, pp. 194-195) states that "the word for improvisation intends from the concept, to align the experience to a creative action [...] of sound production, of the confluence of actions and perceived forces in the sound outcome that may constitute a block of perceptos. " In the case of this performance, in particular, there are a number of possibilities for interpreting the poetry as a whole, of certain phrases approaching or being distanced from the poetic metric, possibilities of a cross-reading, some transversal, possibilities of static reading points establishments etc. In addition to the images of words, images of whole sentences and verses, and to the image of poetry as a whole, a single block. Sound wreckage, sonorities that crawl, traces of music, processes that encrust each other, during the entire performance (the last 2 minutes characterize this description in a very powerful way). Thus, a machinic assemblage, prepared and previously constituted of a certain power supply (connections, software, a patch previously created and organized, an interface configured with the operating system, a coupled acoustic instrument, a poetry, an image, a word, an abstract idea etc.) offers an emerging, private and dynamic transduction and individuation place, through the solo or collective creative practice of musical improvisation. Costa (2013, p. 43) states that "this idea of transduction can also be related to the concept of emergence", an idea that relates mainly to the collective improvisation formations, but which is also pertinent to the forms of solo improvisation when constituted out of hybrid machines. The author illustrates this idea in a text published in conjunction with Cesar Villavicencio and Fernando Iazzetta in the Mexican magazine Sonic Ideas (2013), which refer to the idea of emergence that may be constituted during the practice of musical performance: "This term is currently used to define 'complex systems whose property of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' (SAWYER, 2010, p. 12). For him [Sawyer], the groups that develop collective creative works functions as complex systems, sensitive to the initial conditions and, at the same time, prone to quick expansions of their combinatorial possibilities within their development processes. In this case, it is possible to state that "the overall system behavior emerges from the interactions among its individual parts” (idem). According to these considerations on functioning of the collective interaction systems, due to the fact that collective creativity is regarded as emerging, it is hard to predict the direction the group will take during performance, even if the mental states and personalities of the individual performers are reasonably known ". (SAWYER, p. 12 and P. 163). Here I find again the idea of an ontology of the whole, based on the constitution of different parts and their possible sum. The idea of possibilities that can emerge during the performance is not necessarily linked to the mere individual potential of each 75 apparatus, of the machine separately constituted and prepared or of the physicalmuscular technical configurations that the performer can accomplish, but rather, from the possibilities previously imagined and the unforeseen possibilities that this complex machine constitution can cause. As the authors affirm, these systems are prepared to be sensitive to the initial conditions of interpretation and, at the same time, prone to rapid expansions of their possibilities for combining, structuring and processing development processes over the constitution of the performance itself. Often, just as noticing all possible directions in a collective performance, out of its different constituent musicians is unlikely, it is also unimaginable that the performer can predict and establish completely safe and immutable parameters of what will happen, in fact, in their performance using a digital machine and its apparatus and coupled digital instruments. They are metastable systems, prone to divergent results and situations, far beyond simply technical and instrumental capability that a certain set-up of hardware and software can provide. Another important relation on this assumption is the idea that every hybrid compound system, in this case, every machinic organism, bears intrinsic processes of growth and development, such as, for example, the development of more processing layers, the inclusion of distinct digital tools, the accumulation of learning that the performer executes both through instrumental praxis and acquired knowledge, and the updating of different versions of patches, abstractions, systems etc., among other possibilities. No system, no organism, remains steadily for a long time; the continuous import and export processes of materials and knowledge base will cause different chain impact levels, within the hybrid system itself, and in two ways, either from the machine to the performer or vice-versa, thus causing a continuous movement, displacing and growth as a whole, even when only one or few parts of this system are initially reached. Highlighting the premise that digital and/or hybrid instruments provide new forms of instrumentness, and which are, therefore also in constant development, Magnussom (2016, pp. 157-158) reaffirms that the evolution of these instrumental prototypes takes place from the notion of innovation that these instruments can provide to performers: “I do believe it makes sense, in terms of innovation, longevity and usage dissemination, to call them as instruments. I wonder if one day something like the Karlax57 will be taught in music conservatories. How would that even work? What would the training consist of?” Hence, I end this chapter on the hybrid machines, their assemblages, their complex couplings, their hermeneutics and some of the processes that may occur during a performance. Here, certain characteristics were observed qualitatively. A hybrid performance machine is therefore an interactive musical system that favors the improvisation praxis and sound creation in real time. It is through this heterogeneous machine, which encompasses the acoustic and the digital features, that certain experimental musical praxes of contemporaneity take shape, from an interactive creation process that can reveal new materiality of sound and provide, at the same time, new forms of instrumentness to the acoustic coupling instruments and also out of digital and/or hybrid instruments. It is also through this machine that I, as a 57 Karlax is a digital aluminum and resin instrument with eight processors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, etc., in addition to a very powerful control and configuration software, created by the French company De Fact, offering a wide range of connection possibilities, distinct types of interaction and control. The instrument can be configured to capture different types of gesturality, combining a wide range of expressiveness and capture of movements such as hands, fingers, arms, fists, legs, head, etc. The instrument uses different digital communication protocols simultaneously, such as USB, MIDI and OSC. 76 performer, can interact not only with my musical instrument, but with the sound production itself, in a non-conventional way, but from different types of interaction that were not possible before, in which both instrumental praxis and sound creation benefit from a production that is detached from the abstract musical languages systems, through an intensified and focused listening, allowing the elaboration of new territories. These possibilities and new forms of instrumentness do not come without entailing several conflicts between performer x instrument x machines and performance environment, subject that I investigate on the next chapter. *** 77 iii {impro visa tion, instru ment ness, inter action} 78 2. iii { improvisation, instrumentness, interaction } “To the extent that we are unpredictable, we improvise.” Jeff Pressing58 In this chapter I propose an investigation on some of the characteristics arising from a machinic assemblage of musical performance based on the improvisation praxis, using certain new forms of instrumentness provided, allowing different levels of interaction between the performer, their musical instruments and the hybrid machine itself. Given the immensity of possibilities that could be addressed in the investigation on this subject, I propose here a closer look at these three instances – instrumentness, interaction and musical improvisation – making the theoretical elaboration more consistent. I elaborate hereinafter, firstly, out of a discussion encompassing musical improvisation in the context of a performance based on the use of new digital technologies, to then investigate some of the features arising from new types of instrumentness at different levels of interaction. 58 PRESSING, Jeff. In: Cognitive Processes in the Perception of Art. Elsevier Science Publishers, Holland, 1984. 79 2.1 improvisation “Perhaps in a way similar to democracy, which has been another powerful symbol of liberation and resistance to oppression, improvising music teaches us to value not only cooperation, but also compromise and change […] the value of improvising music lies not in the outcome of a single performance, but rather it emerges over time through continued musical and social interactions. Improvising music together does not necessarily produce optimal outcomes, but the decision to improvise music together does”. David Borgo, 200559 In general, musical improvisation is a highly explored subject academically in the last two decades, both in Brazil and abroad. In my master’s dissertation60 I wrote a subchapter that presented definitions of what musical improvisation is and some of its features within the experimental contemporary music61. Thus, I try and elaborate here 59 BORGO, David. Sync or Swarm, p.194, 2005. 60 MARTINS, André L. A guitarra elétrica na música experimental: composição, improvisação e novas tecnologias, USP, 2015. 61 Due to the clarity of the text, it is possible to divide improvisation praxes into two large and adjacent areas: a.) idiomatic and b.) free. Bailey (1993, p.xi) uses both terms to describe the two main forms of improvisation. Idiomatic improvisation happens as a musical praxis within an established language. A musical language brings along its rhythmic, harmonic, melodic and often even timbre relations, among other characteristics and qualities, presenting a structured and very territorialized environment. Languages have specific music systems, such as the tonal system, constructed from a certain organization of pitches. Musical scales, arpeggios, rhythmic patterns that repeat along the composition (grooves), certain types of harmonic voice constructs (triads, tetrades, inversions), rhythmic claves, progressions and typical harmonic cadences are some of the strongly highlighted features by musical languages. Examples of musical languages: jazz, with its rhythmic conduction built out of swing feel and the use of standardized harmonic cadences, such as cadence II – V7 – I. Choro, with its figuration based on based on eight-notes and extensive use of syncopated rhythm, in addition to the outstanding use of of major and minor scales, with the inclusion of notes of chromatic passages. The blues, with its form traditionally built in twelve bars, its harmonic construction from grades I, IV and V, the use of of the rhythmic pattern known as shuffle and the use of pentatonic scales. The loud and distorted sound of the guitar in rock, the sound of “rods drumstick” on the snare drum, the acoustic double bass and the melodies in trumpet and saxophone in jazz, the "scratching" of the nylon guitar in flamenco, the sound produced on electric guitar by metal slide in the country, among many others, etc. Unlike the idiomatic improvisation, which has its edges within a pre-established language by idioms and systems, free improvisation seeks to get out of this territory which, however extensive it may be, always finds borders that delimit it. Costa (2003, p.15) says that "free improvisation is the reverse of a system or an 'antilanguage', an a-grammar. We can compare its operation with that of a machine and differentiate it from a mechanism". Free improvisation thus starts from the opposite principle of idiomatic improvisation, leading the improvising musician to walk outside the structural and stratified systems that permeate an established language and the destitution of the formulations that necessarily accompany these grammars. For Del Nunzio (2011, p.17), free improvisation "is a musical praxis that does not present, beforehand, previously established structural formulations (macro or micro)”. 80 a slightly more reflective text on the subject, given the importance that the study of musical improvisation, in its free and idiomatic forms, possesses both in my current line of research and artistic work. The use of musical improvisation in conjunction with the new digital technologies allows me, as a performer, to elaborate different levels of sound creation and types of sound processing during a performance, in what is considered "real time". Obviously, in any processing that requires an acoustic sound capture, converting it digitally into a system that encompasses computer, interface, speakers, software, etc., there is a kind of temporal latency, a feature we will see further on this chapter. In this context, based on the creation of a performance hybrid machine, the musical improvisation allows me to explore not only the sound, but the very interaction with my acoustic instrument and my digital instruments, in a unique way. It is a process of music/sound creation that gives me access to a different kind of playing, as if I were writing and drawing on a blank, completely clear page, free and without any line imposing any control over my drawing, my direction, my punctuation. It is necessary to define here that the improvisation of which I speak is, in a certain way, free; however, free from what, exactly? Even when I use a fragment from a musical scale or an arpeggio on my instrument, for example, elements that are idiomatically structured (Martins, 2015, p. 84), I still deem this form of process of sound/music production, in this context (hybrid machine), may be free not only from idiomatic abstractions but also from structures, modes, shades etc., territories of welldefined and constituted musical praxes, but also free from the gestures accumulated in my training as a performer. It must be emphasized that this pretense freedom is completely subjective. In fact, improvisation is never free from it all. The improvisation I address here departs from a musical action as an aesthetic proposal, constituted out of the machinic assemblage and thus making new types of instrumentness and sound production possible. Costa (2016, p. 1) states that the "idea of a free improvisation praxis arises as a possibility that is only configured in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries due to the conjunction of a number of factors", it is worth mentioning that, among some of those factors, are the disruption of stratified languages and musical systems, out of an experimental practice of sound creation; the saturation of tonalism, from the end of the nineteenth century onwards; the development of electrical and electronic instruments and subsequently the development of new digital technologies, which have thus provided the emergence of new aesthetic proposals such as concrete, electronic and electroacoustic music, expanding enormously the ways of listening and creating sound; the experimental praxis of collective creation and collaboration dating back to the second half of the last century, developed mainly by Vinko Globokar, John Cage and Terry Riley; the affordable mobile computers with higher data processing power and the popularization of applications, software and various devices, allowing a number of composers and musicians to access to a state-ofthe-art digital technology, among others. It is through musical improvisation that the connections of a performance take place. These connections grant the performance flow through different constituted elements, acoustic, digital, hybrid, which are configured during the process through continuous transformations. These transformations may offer a kind of operation consistency and, 81 in a certain way, balance of the entire system thus allowing the performance to, in fact, exist. In such a praxis, there is a constant variation between stiffened states and somehow "pure" states that are discovered, dissolved, consequently, causing the sound to unfold. It is in this clash that the processes of sound/music production occurs, in an environment that oscillates between chaos and structure; of course, it is not possible for the performer to let go of their praxis on accumulated studies that led them up to this moment, therefore, giving rise another clash, an internal one, which happens between performer and musical instrument. Here is where the hybrid machine can help the performer to break through this structured training background. Pressing (1998, p. 53) calls this reference set as knowledge base, a sort of basic knowledge acquired over many years of theoretical and practical training that the performer possesses, at different levels. This knowledge base encompasses a broad scope of qualities including musical experience, materials previously recognized, studied examples, practiced repertoire, skills and sub-skills, perceptive strategies, problem-solving routines, structure of hierarchic memory of movements, gestural actions, among many others, shaping this state of readiness in which the improvising musicians finds themselves. This knowledge base as a structure acquired by the improvising musician throughout his training, bears not only these qualities absorbed from their experience, but also, as quoted by Costa and Schaub (2013, p. 2), "they include not only what the interpreter can know about a certain style, but also their complete history of compositional choices and preferences that define (their) personal style. " By addressing these skills and sub-skills incorporated out of new and different sound production processes, the performer may go through different (internal) tension levels regarding not only to their instrument of musical creation and execution, but also by being exposed to other types of (external) tension, from new procedures for the sound elaboration and processing. And, concomitantly, the performer also faces the inevitable emergence of new systems which will be constituted throughout the performance, often in an almost continuous confrontation to dissolve them, step by step. It is in this conflictual unfolding that, as a rule, the vast majority of performances presented in this work take place. Hence, what I call the complex performance environment is constituted, out of all these elements, having musical improvisation as its central praxis. This complex assembled environment is both appealing and challenging to the improviser who is also inserted in this place for the exploration of acoustic and digital sound. This environment is always open, in constant creation, in full event. The sustainability of this environment does not depend solely on the performer's desire to establish the sound creation and performance flow; it also depends on a prior elaboration that the machine proposes, based on the homogenization of such diverse components, such as the acoustic instrument itself, digital instruments (such as a patch), interchangeability among different tools etc. The place in which the performer is inserted, inside this place within the performance, as a part of the hybrid machine, becomes a distinct, peculiar place/space itself. As stated by Souza Maia (2018, p. 25), it is the "space of Invention", in which playing, composing sounds, performing with different provided instrumentness, could be related to (ibid) "inventing a new song, or more precisely, inventing another listening. Each 82 musical work composed would produce, thus, a listening ". As a performer, I do not only create this place, this carpet of events, as I described in the previous chapter, but I also invent another sort of listening, based on what I feel, plan, react, manipulate, play. I create by participating in the performance, from a process that eases the types of listening previously established, out of my practical and theoretical training, to another kind of listening, which can always be different; sometimes attentive, intensified, focused, sometimes dispersed, centered in the whole, noisily, comprehensive, encompassing other powers beyond those related to the sound production. My place for the invention of listening is also the place for the invention of sound. It is in this complex performance environment that I choose improvisation, free of these languages, systems, shapes, sets and theoretical props. What I care about, in this place, is the flow, continuity, the processes that can create and transform a sound. Costa (2016, p. 8) states that "the consistency plane of free improvisation is the plane of a functioning machine and not the plane of a form. In it, the process unfolds in an informal continuum". There is no restriction of a pre-established form (there may even be some temporal instructions prior to it, such as a short or long improvisation, but under the effect of the intentionality of creative and performatic exploration), which may impose restrictions to other materials62. In the praxis of free improvisation, exempt from the abstract systems and languages, different levels of improvisation beyond the musical instrument execution in an "improvised" way may also happen. Cobussen (2016, p. 13 In: Schroeder), says that “Acts of musical improvisation cannot be restricted to playing improvised music”. These are degrees of improvisation encompassing the instrument, the relationship of the performer with the environment (in an even, and certainly, ecological way63), the space 62 Simply as a reference, free improvisation treats musical matter differently from an idiomatic process, for example. In the latter, there is a need to establish the form and the structuring of the part to be interpreted (32 bars, AABA, suite, fugue, etc.), in addition to the stipulation of whom the soloist will be, who will improvise first, who performs the return theme, whether or not there is tonal modulation, etc. In free improvisation, the performer puts himself in a prior disposition to create, often from a word, an image, an idea or nothing, where form is actually his own listening and his own musical background, which will attempt, unconsciously and insistently, to impose itself in face of the entropic manner that a performance encompassing free improvisation often begins. Falleiros (2012, p.16) states that "for free improvisation, there is no required ideal technique and necessary understanding to perform an improvisation." It is through these clashes that the freedom of praxis of free improvisation takes place. An autonomous praxis, in which the improviser does not necessarily need to match the playing of a musical instrument with its previously acquired expertise. The jazz improviser, for example, even when play outside, establishes a number of consistent scales and arpeggios that are admittedly effective for such a task, to sound out of a certain tone or cadence. Still, dissonance-consonance processes, etc., are being applied. The free improviser does not require these updates between his musical discourse and the unfolding of the performance. It (the performance) is being created, established, woven, at the present moment. Perhaps free improvisation is, in fact, the only real way to accomplish a musical improvisation, because it only happens in real time, in the now. 63 These different degrees of improvisation that Cobussen cites take place within the performance environment, which is, in itself, a unique, specific environment. It is in this environment that the idea of sound ecology is conceived, in this work, based on the research by Makis Solomos (2012) on the subject. Solomos quotes Roberto Barbanti (2012, p.168): "I would like to propose here a reflection on the sound ecology thought out in their relationships with the 'house' – 'oikos' – that is, the place of sound in relation to our common abode, the world, and with our way to seize it. In other words: the world-sound relationship. In sound ecology, it is not 'simply' a matter of disturbance or pollution, but the place of 83 of their sound production in the performance, their relations with the technology involved in the process, their body relationship with the instrument(s), their permanent state of readiness etc. The act of improvising freely is, in itself, an assemblage. From there, the performer will create and conquer their space within the very space of performance. Guattari (1992, p. 140) writes that "the scope of the constructed spaces reach far beyond its visible and functional structures ". However, the structures of a performance from the praxis of free improvisation are widely constituted in advance. Though, in each space created and conquered by the performer within this amplitude, the reach of their process of sound/music creation can go even far beyond, either to crush some element that momentarily constitutes a standardization agent (from sound, process etc.), as from a subjective singularization, what unites these extremes is the performer’s listening. This is a listening of readiness, an essential element for the occurrence of a free improvisation performance. It is an attentive, focused, molecularized listening, on the sound creation, linked to the different instruments that make up the hybrid machine. For Falleiros (2012, p. 17), this listening allows the improviser to concretely accomplish in their instrument what they hear, devoid of "difference between thinking and playing". It would be, at least in theory, a possibility of an absolute disruption to the languages, gestures, melodic clichés, harmonics, textural etc., towards absolute freedom. The improvising-performer thus takes on the features of a creating-performer, important figure in the praxis of free improvisation and other experimental contemporary music praxes. This creating-performer is a vital central element, capable of denying the directionality of the musical discourse, capable of breaking with the various existing symmetries in the languages, based on the ideas of tension-relaxation, movement functions, dissonance and resolution, quantitative predeterminations (triads, tetrads, extension and tension notes etc.), also breaking with the possible territories that progressively agglutinate throughout a performance. The creating-performer seeks, unambiguously, to be attentive to the sound creation that has been regimented, however, readily seeking to discover the still "unknown", what is yet to come in performance. Quoting the percussionist and visual artist Jamie Muir (In: Bailey, 1992, p. 96), finding out what is the “undiscovered/unidentified/unclaimed/unexplored territory – the future if only you can see it”. The same Muir (In: Costa, 2016, pp. 10-11) describes that "the way of discovering the unknown in the performance is immediately rejecting every situation as you identify them. " sound in relation to us, the others and the global context to which we belong. The world, precisely" (translation by Costa, 2014, pp.189-206). For Ariel (2017, p.28) "we define our perspective considering the "contextualization of creative behavior rather than dissection or compartmentalization of processes (HELSON, 1988, p.58), placing creative products as a result and as raw material in the cycle of use of resources for creativity" (KELLER et al. 2014, p.2). For a sound ecology to enable sound improvisation, the environment requires connection between media and techniques, allowing the exchange of material resources. However, this praxis tends to encompass agents situated in a sound environment that will probably change this environment. That is, in addition to the agents’ intentional actions, there is a process of self-organization that manages the entire system. This form of self-organization presupposes that the subsystems involved are autonomous units generating unique, dynamic and potentially inexhaustible products. In this way, the agents interacting in a common habitat have their own singularities, providing the formation of a sound ecosystem." 84 This avoidance of constituting established, stratified and stiffened situations during a performance is part of the confrontation between what the creating-performer brings along with them, in their knowledge-base, and the flow of the performance itself. In some ways, it is equivalent to avoiding, wherever possible, the formation and establishment of a territory. In the moment it is established (a certain territory), the performance begins to occur at a molar, stratified, and abstract level. The creatingperformer is responsible for the task of implementing some sort of destratification, of deterritorialization. Otherwise, the performance will be hardened, leaving aside its initial power of being created out of the sound and its intrinsic characteristics, and will be conducted on another level – molar – of action. The challenge here is not to impose any explicit limits between the molar and molecular levels, but to instigate the powers of creation and disruption of these situations. Even when there is an intentionality of, concretely, not letting any molar process to be established or more stratified, the challenge is constant. The "Free, Free" performance64, held by the duo ar + 2, is a clear example of this. Initially, both the saxophonist Rogério Costa and I seek to make it clear that no kind of linearity is established. Nevertheless, molar x molecular clash occurs at various performance points, such as between 4' and 5'. Specifically, from 4'25" onwards, there is a very resistant molar resource, from various musical scales, which becomes impregnated in the performance discourse for almost three minutes. As a criticism, it is clear to me that something was missing, in the case of this specific performance, was our unintentionality to reject the accumulated material, leading us to remain for a considerable time at certain points. The material formed from 9'50" onwards would allow us to break the linear discourse that, theoretically, was progressing in opposition to what was proposed, a "free" performance. The use of the silence is very important in these cases, for the silence could acquire an important dimension, to break the established flow and allow new lines of action to be established. Interestingly, from 11'30” on, certain modal molarities take place, from folkloric modes, which get considerably impregnated at the moment. Can we say that this performance did not "work” (considering its original intentionality of being free)? What is “work”, in this case? Obviously, the performance presented very potent molar levels, and, given its proposition of delivering a "free" performance, it was interesting to highlight the following occurrence65. I decided to use this example to illustrate that even when a free improvisation session is carried out by performers with a certain level of experience in this praxis, very powerful stratification processes may occur. In our favor we can say that practically every time the molarities were established, each of us sought to disrupt them with new procedures, out of alternative gestures, hybrid processes (acoustic and digital) etc. For about 15'40” onwards, this aspect becomes clearer. The use of electronics was potentialized, processes were pulled away from the established acoustic instrument, and there is a greater break 64 65 Available enclosed, also on: https://vimeo.com/210931394 -- accesso on May 28, 2018. If the prior intentionality was to perform a "free" performance, it (the performance) should be free to go anywhere. If we limit this freedom by establishing powerful repressive lines (we cannot play this, we cannot play that etc.), how free would this performance be? 85 from the previously presented molar discourse. Our "operation field" enlarges, and our engagement becomes mindful of our original proposition again. Cobussen (2014, p. 15, In: Schroeder) writes about something that sums up what I am trying to establish here at this point: “The question of what improvisation is - is not paramount to the discussion here, but rather how improvisation works”. To me, it is far less important to establish what is or what is not musical improvisation, especially in the case of contemporary music experimental praxes, and rather, to establish a reflection on how improvisation works in these examples. Often, improvisation can be the key element for the operation of a hybrid performance machine; without it, there is no assemblage, there is no desire for readiness, there is no action and its subsequent breaks. Without understanding how improvisation can work, it may be impossible understand, in fact, how the entire hybrid machine works. 2.1.1 Chaotic improvisation Free improvisation, as an experimental musical praxis, is chaotic. The idea of chaos, here, is not associated with a random accident or with disorder and rupture of stratagems. The saxophonist and researcher David Borgo has a definition of the term which I would like to use in this work. For Borgo (2005, p. XVII) “Chaos in its scientific sense describes an extraordinarily intricate ordely-disorder in which complex and unpredictable behaviors can arise from extremely simple dynamical rules”. Chaos is, in a scientific definition66, an orderly-disorder, unpredictable behavior. A free improvisation session, especially when stemming from a hybrid machine, has similar qualities to this definition of chaos. Through chaos, the power lines of the improvisation may, somehow, singularly dance along the woven rug to a certain performance. The images of fractal diagrams obtained from the theory of chaos are well known and, at the same time, absorbed with a degree of considerable appreciation of aesthetic beauty. Its unpredictable designs constitute a nearly perfect analogy to a free improviser in action. 66 BORGO (2005, p.XVII). According to PEITGEN; JÜRGENS; SAUPE (2004, pp.10-11), “We speak of the unpredictable aspects of weather just as if we were talking about rolling dice or letting an air balloon loose to observe its erratic path as the air is ejected […] simple deterministic systems with only a few elements can generate random behavior, and that randomness is fundamental; gathering more information does not make it disappear. This fundamental randomness has come to be called chaos […] an apparent paradox is that chaos is deterministic, generated by fixed rules, which do not themselves involve any elements of change. We even speak of deterministic chaos. In principle, the future is completely determined by the past; but in practice small uncertainties, much like minute errors of measurement which enter into calculations, are amplified, with the effect that even though the behavior is predictable in the short term, it is unpredictable over the long term”. 86 Figure 2: fractal diagram, PEITGEN; JÜRGENS; SAUPE (2004) The drawing starts at any point and connects with any other point. Such as in an improvisation performance, the constitution of the final form will only occur at the end of the session, at the end of the conception of the image itself. The random position of the thousands of dots that form a fractal diagram always seems to be in deformity with the remainder of the image, but when looking closely at the drawing, one can notice numerous similarities and virtually perfect linear conjugations. The two images below prove it. Figure 3 shows a ready, finalized fractal diagram, and the following figure shows six images with more specific final drawing details as if seen through a magnifying glass on the diagram. 87 Figure 3: fractal diagram, PEITGEN; JÜRGENS; SAUPE (2004) Figure 4: fractal diagram, PEITGEN; JÜRGENS; SAUPE (2004) 88 Figure 4 shows six images, and the last one, in the upper left corner, is identical to the one shown in Figure 3. In the other five images, you can see, step by step, how the fractal diagram, apparently conceived out of chance is, in fact, the result of a series of layers and counterpoints organized out of a large linearity. By constructing an analogy, it is possible to say that free improvisation departs from stratified, coherent lines and stable points, to a heterogeneous (dis)organization towards chaos. Here, chaos is not entropic, but the result of a complex and seemingly simplistic emergence, though resulting (in this case) in unique musical and sound forms. How can we tell the form (we could also think of a mold) of an improvised performance beforehand? There is no way of telling it, if we are truly honest with this proposition. Along the performance flow, along the constitution of time itself, heterogeneous, submerged, rooted forms are levered out of their stable territories and opposed in countless ways: in the instrumental gestures, in the expanded physicality of acoustic instruments, in the electronic processing performed, in the often unforeseen sound results accumulated during the session. Simultaneously, during a performance, the improvising musician often finds himself or herself at the "edge of chaos", of this chaos popularly referred to as ruin, as end, as mortal, in a poetic sense referring to being at the edge of the cliff, at the edge of a fall. Borgo (2205, p. xvii) uses a passage from the book Complexity: the Emerging Science at The Edge or Order and chaos, by M. Mitch Waldrop, which follows: “´The edge of chaos’, Waldrop writes, ’is where new ideas... are always nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old belief will be eventually overthrown... The edge of chaos is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the only place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptable and alive.' I can't think of a better definition for what musical improvisation is. " A complex, emerging place, in constant battle, between anarchy, rupture, the new and the stagnation, the entrenched, permanent. Possibly a place that can host a musical improvisation performance. 89 2.1.2 Music-making --- musicking The term musicking, something like musi-creating or musicing in Portuguese language, has been used by some important researchers in the study of musical improvisation, among which, Borgo (2005), Schroeder (2014) and Cobussen (2017). Musicking is an umbrella term that can encompass a vast number of applications in the study of creative processes and of interaction67. It goes through the idea that the human being is capable of musi-creating from their ancestors, through group identity processes and collective coexistence (Borgo, 2010, pp. 131-132), passing through anthropological investigations, where distinct cultures are exchanged, mutually influencing and being influenced through their musical praxes; and reaches the relationships between performer, their body and their musical instrument (Small, 1998, In: Cobussen, 2017, p. 38). For Borgo (ibidem), “ultimately, musicking, across societies and cultures, serves to mediate interactions with other people and to establish a self-identity in relationship to a group”. The musical praxis itself, whatever it is, directly involves the idea of musicking; for Cobussen (In: Schroeder, 2014, p. 17), “there is no musicking without a certain amount of improvisation and a certain way of improvising”. Here is a thought that, to my view, raises another question: But then, what is improvisation? Cobussen himself (ibidem) tries to answer that question a little further, when he states, “How then does musical improvisation take place? How and why is it ubiquitous in music making? Every performer, be it a professional classical musician, a jazz player, a pop musician, someone tried and tested in so-called ethnic music, or an entertainer, does not merely perform, but also improvises upon that which s/he performs, even when the music is strictly noticed”. I believe that here Cobussen relates an idea that, when playing a musical instrument and engaging to it, a performer is always creating one type of music, as a consequence, always dealing with a level of improvisation. Obviously, completely distinct levels of improvisation may arise between a performer who, inserted in a traditional orchestra, performs a certain passage of a well-known symphony and a free improviser in a collective performance. The substrates distinguishing both praxes are so numerous 67 The term musicking was coined by Christopher Small (1998), with the meaning of evoking any type of participation, in multiple ways, in a musical action. Quoting Small (p.2) “there is no such a thing as music. Music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do. The apparent thing ‘music’ is a figment, an abstraction of the action, whose reality vanishes as soon as we examine it at all closely […] it is very easy to come to think of the abstraction as more real than the reality it represents, to think, for example, of those abstractions which we call love, hate, good and evil as having an existence apart from the acts of loving, hating, or performing good and evil deeds and even to think of them as being in some way more real than the acts themselves, a kind of universal or ideal lying behind and suffusing the actions”. 90 that there is no need to present them here; the degrees of undetermined aspects are somehow relative68. However, it is important to note that the fact of dealing with a musical creation, whatever type it is, does not necessarily leave aside a content – higher or lower depending on the situation – of improvisation. Perhaps it is possible to affirm that improvisation, in its essence, can only happen in real time, in the now, but obviously there are very distinct degrees among different praxes. A cellist that executes a certain phrase between the 44 and 48 bars of a specific piece, previously tested and practiced to exhaustion, has yet to deal with certain time tensions, articulation, dynamics etc., which despite having been previously practiced, now present themselves in a real-time musical production. But this performer is positioned within an immense territory circumscribed by very well regimented traditions, whose concern is far more focused on the execution rather than in the creation. Even if you were a performer "creating" an improvised solo in a jazz standard, there is still a very pregnant territory, strengthened by a tradition well rendered over decades, with a comprehensive discography, books, scores, available transcripts etc. Is improvisation created out of emptiness? Absolutely not. This improvisation did not exist before its execution, surely. But it is sustained by harmonics, rhythms, orchestral bases, is based on scales, harmonic cadences, arpeggios and the aforementioned alterations "allowed" by the musical theory. The idea of musicking that I connect to my work is therefore linked to an idea of the sound creation in real time, from a disfiguration of many of the elements that may accompany this process. Instead of, for instance, seeking to create a phrase constructed out of the execution of sixteenth in a swift pace, in which the performer’s intent may be to turn a repetitive and homogeneous pattern rhythmically static, I may wish, using this same sixteenth pattern, create a sort of sound resulting plasticity. In string instruments, for example, this type of execution allows the creation of some rougher, noisier and with a large range of frequencies elements, capable of removing the various molarities involved in a process like this. Everything is relative from the way in which the performer "views" (hears, feels, understands, relates to etc.) their own sound created at that specific moment. If they look at it in a plastic, abstract way and as something inserted in a syntactic myriad (scales, tones, harmonic functions, consonance and dissonance intentions etc.), this material will be interpreted referentially in a particular way; if they "view" this same material under a less abstract and more molecularized way, the sound production may occur out of other assumptions, such as the texture, an energetic gesture that will be explored creatively by digital processing, roughness, intensity etc. Hence, the context in which a determined kind of artistic praxis is inserted - such as improvisation - is fundamental to understand it and investigate it. This discussion is important for this work, since it involves the fact that the sound creation, an 68 For Cobussen (ibidem, p.18), “even if the music is clearly spelled out, for the instance through a meticulously notated score, there is still much left to the performer´s own discretion; tempo, phrasing, articulation, timing, dynamics, etc., are but the smallest details about which musicians often (have to) make decisions during the actual performance. One could say perhaps that a performance tradition is simply the history of improvisations in a more or less stringent musical framework. Every new performance of a piece is (also) a modification of the past, that is, an improvisation on the tradition. The goal never is and can never simply be imitation”. 91 improvised sound, in real time, during a performance that occurs in an assembled and machinic way. Such environment (and its context) is so distant from the environment of a traditional repertoire reproduction in a concert hall, that could in itself, establish the necessary differences. However, in both extremes (if I can put it within these borders) there are substrates of improvisation. For Cobussen (among others), improvisation occurs in any instance of music-making (musicking); for others, such as Bailey and Borgo (among others), improvisation is unequivocally part of musicking, but relates to an individual predisposition in breaking adhesions (textural, rhythmic, gestural, figurative etc.) existing in certain musical discourses. Borgo (2005, p. 9) even affirms that “I have often been struck by the fact that we describe this dynamic form musicking-in-the-moment by linking it to a past tense verb”. Musical improvisation, thus, departs from the premise of being a creative and experimental, multifaceted, fragmented, dispersive, inclusive praxis and beforehand demands a single requirement: the desire to create a singular, subjective sound, from the creation of an exploration environment. This is the basic and essential premise for the investigations conducted here. 2.1.3 Improvisation and hybrid machine Amidst so many possible scenarios, what matters and relates to this work is the musical improvisation praxis (in its free and open form, in most cases) connected to a hybrid machine assemblage, in real-time performance. This relationship is important since the idea of a hybrid machine is only conceived here based on a desire to improvise. The hybrid machine only exists out of a kind of consistency plane, which is also the consistency plane of free improvisation, as an idea of putting a machine into operation. There are no preconceived and established ways. Machinic assemblage encompasses the hybrid machine and includes the performer’s desire of improvising, feeding and constituting itself through a process of continuous transformations. The form, if any, arises only at the end of the performance; the result is the process itself. The use of free improvisation here therefore presupposes the idea of an unfolding of the sound, which is conceived, imagined, executed and appraised in real time. Costa (2016, p. 7) states that "the parts, if any, are configured during the process as a result of the continuous transformations and are only observable retrospectively in a possible recording from an analytical process." Here is an important feature in the free improvisation praxis, when inserted into performances using a hybrid machine: a reflection, conceived afterwards or at the exact post-performance moment, in a type of discussion related to what had just occurred, or from a recording of what was performed, subsequently analyzed. These processes are important for, in a certain way, they conceive different forms of the executed performances. Often, it is from these reflections that certain mechanisms of study on both the praxis of free improvisation and the use and design of a hybrid machine are created. The relationships between performer X instrument X machine X 92 digital instruments x environment can be quite intense during a certain performance, promulgating intense a posteriori reflection. Thus, the idea of machinic, as investigated in the previous chapter, is present in the praxis of free improvisation. Costa (2016, p. 6) states that "free improvisation faces music as a machine that opens up for new and endless upgrades." Each performance is a different type of music. There will never be two identical performances, even if you intend it. "Endless upgrades" allow the same material to be created, designed and reused in endless ways, from an eternal resonance in which, as asserted by Ferraz (1998, p. 77), on the work by the composer Edgard Varèse (1883-1965): "Each moment resounds at the subsequent moment, in a continuous chain of continuous transformations." Again, the idea of continuous transformations of sound, chained together, in a kind of web that, little by little, along the performance time flow, is being stitched, woven (soundweaving), in constant resonance. The link of this cadence, the link of this chain that holds one piece to the next, is the resonance of sound itself, not the resonance as a single acoustic event, as a unit, but the molecular set that this sound resonates. It is the choice of transformation and not just a variation of certain material that gives continuity, elaborating its consistency. A performance thus becomes indivisible; there are no overlapping, staged, arranged parts. On the contrary, the sound material suffers a heterogeneous proliferation from its own, that only after the performance has ended, engenders, takes on its form. 2.2 Machine as a creation process agent When improvising within the machinic assemblage, the performer does not domain the constituted environment entirely. The machine is also another creation agent, and its different constituting "machines" also act as such. Within the hybrid machine, sound monitoring boxes, software, the operating system itself, mobile computer, digital interface, foot controller or external effect, specific patch etc., each of these elements is also responsible for the performance as a whole. In this field of distinct operations that is an improvised performance, the constituted environment is an extremely fertile place for the creation and development praxes of sound experimentation. Costa (2016, p. 12) states that "an improvisation performance necessarily inserts itself as a 'specific time and space' musical fact”. The author shows here that improvisation happens as a complex manifestation that (ibidem) "establishes links and is the result of a series of network connections that occur in this environment". Now I have already quoted a number of factors that are vital for an improvisation performance to occur: the performers’ readiness; an attentive, focused listening; the desire to break the constituted musical territories "little boxes"; a view out of the molecular sound qualities, potentializing its intrinsic qualities; the whole life and instrumental history, through its knowledge base, that each performer embraces in their processes of sound/music creation; the emergence of a latent state that departs from an near-entropy and tries to get established throughout the performance; the performance of time itself, from the sound resonance; the performer's body engagement with their acoustic instrument, digital instruments and new forms of instrumentness that will be granted etc. 93 This place that each performance reaches, after its completion, is always specific, is always unassuming. Through a series of threaded process overlays, it is possible to say that this environment where performance happens, out of the hybrid machine is prepared at length. No one begins a free improvisation performance embracing a hybrid machine based on absolute nothingness, from the void, from emptiness. Some of the components that make up the machine must be prepared beforehand: what software will be used, which processing options are available, what kind of mobile computer will be chosen, what kind of operating system, what kind of construction and creation approach for one or more patches, how they connect with the computer external equipment, what type of interface, cabling, what kind of pickup and microphone will be used in acoustic instruments, the positioning of the speakers, the place chosen to set the performance etc. Each agent in the performance will cause a "greater" change in the set (in the assemblage of the hybrid machine itself) than its individual capacity to affect separately the same performance. Cobussen (2014, In: Schroeder, p. 22) calls these distinguished agents as actors, where “each improvisation consists of a different configuration of actors. Each improvisation will yield a different milieu of actors and interactions, a different assemblage". Each improvisation session will therefore present in its constitution different actors that will provide different types of interaction and internal assemblages, constituting, within the performance itself and singularly, new and unique means (milieu) of sound creation. The interactions occurring in a performance between the different agents also occur in a singular manner. Each of them does not only cause individual occurrences, whether to a performer or to an acoustic or digital instrument, to a certain setup etc., but they will also cause different occurrences to the bulge of the whole assemblage. Cobussen (ibid., p. 23) states that “each improvisation works (or does not work) through particular interactions by particular actors”. On the human side, the relations permeate different strengths, among which, distinct instrumentness, corporality, spontaneity, courage, fear of intervention, freedom, creativity, listening, reflection on the-what-is-being played as while it-is-being played etc. Many of the behaviors observed during a musical performance cannot be observed from the dynamic quantities perspective alone and from action or non-action independently, analyzing each agent separately; these multiple interactions are in fact a kind of interactive composition that act intrinsically among the different agents and the environment itself, in an emergency of intertwined action, that encompasses the whole of the performance. As aforementioned, individual actions ultimately cause transformations to the whole of the performance in a very different way from what they would in an individual, private manner. Here, there is the change of force, where the singular and subjective content affects the whole context. Improvisation, thus, is a network of connections, intertwined wires, embroideries, woven, surpassing the individual behavior of each isolated agent that moves toward a complex environment of relationships. As Borgo affirms (2005, pp. 4-5), "a change from structures to structuring and from content to context ". 94 2.3 Complex environment The performance based on improvisation and new digital technologies, while assembled, is a complex environment of interactive relationships. This space of invention and creation, as aforementioned, does not create only new listening, new sounds, new sound characters and types of music. It also develops and enhances new forms of interaction and relationship between the performer, their instruments and the environment. Stemming from the development of a flexible a-grammar, this environment is permissible with the exploration of experimental situations that may agglutinate different musical praxis out of singular sound approaches. Generally speaking, the environment does not become complicated, but complex. The dynamics of this complex environment is often unpredictable, although not completely random. It is a place where the possibility of unforeseen or not previously intended events is offered. This environment is also adaptive and, to a certain extent, self-organizing69, decentralized, in which the performance continuum often adapts through the resonance of materials achieved during the performance. This type of self-organized, multiple environment that encompasses experimentation through the use of digital technologies reinforces the idea of the machinic metaphor, of the performance as a kind of gadget which, fueled by numerous constituting agents, "comes alive" and moves by itself, from the desire and will of one or more performers in an initial state. From then forth, its behavior is no longer predictable, being, therefore, open to the possibility of surprises, while the musicking lasts. Borgo (2005, p. 4) states that “the behavior of the system is not studied by reducing it to its parts; the result is not presented in the form of deductive proofs; and the systems are not treated as if the instantaneous descriptions were complete”. The musicians’ individual attitudes and the processing carried out by the different machines, in addition to the dimension of the environment where performance occurs, generate new connections that will push the performance forward, making it permanent as long as it lasts. Costa (2016, p. 36) cites researcher Keith Sawyer, who affirms on the collective creative works that "the overall behavior of the system emerges from the interactions between the individual parts of the system ". Thereby, this complex environment of improvisation and experimentation allows you to experience the action of creating purely out of the willingness to create, to develop, the freedom to play something unprecedented, without the burden of cataloging these actions as "works", as a product, as final compositions, which will be reproduced ad aeternum. On the contrary, the goal is the experience of the process alone, through its countless transitory states. Small (1998, p. 4) affirms that “what is valued (in general music) is not the action of art, not the act of creating, and even less that of perceiving responding, but the created art object itself”. The aim is precisely the experience of environment, the experience of these mutant, open, adaptive and permanent creation processes for an unpredictable time. After a certain accommodation, cumulative of processes that were being constituted, dissolutive movements occur, which will be 69 The idea of performance as an organism that organizes itself has already been exposed and investigated in the previous chapter. 95 forwarded (or not, the performance can just end there) in new accommodations, always essentially unstable, free, not governed by any theoretical, technical, formalist order. These spontaneous accommodations are never completely fixed, they are always chaotic, turbulent, disorderly. The development and proliferation of computer technologies further contribute to these processes because they enable them to connect different materials as dots, with each other, through the opening of a network of assembled connections within the performance environment70. It is not uncommon for my bandolim, which has pickups coupled internally under its wooden top, to capture echoes from other instruments that collectively participate in the performance. These automatically captured sounds are inserted into my electronic/digital processing chain, and cumulative to my own sound creation. As a performer, I adapt to these situations, and each of the stages also undergo accommodations with these materials (it is common for me to perform a recording of a certain sound flow over time, and put it on looping, observing later, seconds after this execution, during the performance, that this procedure also puts echoes captured from other instruments on looping). My performance is never pure, even in a solo situation. The ultimate identity of a performance is always multiple in its genesis and unique in its completion; free improvisation possesses this character of autopoiesis and dynamics. This idea of spontaneous accommodation and use of different accumulations in real time was the main influence for a solo performance that I have made, to date, for three times, live. "Allure"71 is a proposition for hybrid improvisation, with a traditional acoustic instrument – the ten-string bandolim – coupled to different types of machines, such as software, patches, a mobile computer, pedals and FX pedal boards. During around 13 minutes of execution, several layers are constituted and undone, out of the acoustic use of the steel and brass strings, the wooden body, the beating of the fingers on the acoustic body of the instrument and real-time processing. In around 5' 16" that becomes clear. Just a few seconds earlier, I was performing a sort of blocked material progression and processed by echoes, reverberations and several filters. From this point on, however, I am surprised by remnants of material that had been recorded on the loop pedal only a few seconds earlier. With this sample being reproduced, I actioned a "freezing" procedure to a certain amount of data digitally converted from 70 These advances are ultra-fast and bring important questions in their bulge. Increasingly fast, portable and powerful computers are able to connect audio and video in real time, with high quality, in addition to an enormity of data, across the planet. The field of arts has sought to learn what possibilities are offered by all this machinery, but it is far from the only one. For Borgo (2005, pp.4- 5), “with the recent development and proliferation of computer technologies, the machine metaphor has continued to hold sway over our collective imaginations. But as these technologies transform from isolated desktop assistants into portals on an increasingly networked world, new metaphors – both justified and overblown – are beginning to creep into common usage. Business, governments, the educational community, and artists are all scrambling to understand – and take advantage of – the power and potential of network culture”. 71 Record of a performance presented during the concert series ¿Música? 13, in São Paulo, SP. Available in the attached media in this thesis and on: https://vimeo.com/273514370 -- access on June 05, 2018. 96 this recording and started the real-time processing from pedal controllers and software.72 The next minute, there is a both settled and accumulated material, which begins to be reproduced unexpectedly, where I, as an agent within this environment, reconduct this material, so far unexpected, unpredictable, into another settlement. In about 7'38", this material is already settled, now working as a new layer for other interferences that I perform both on the bandolim and on the digital instruments. This material that originally appears around five minutes after the performance had begun, turns out to be an agglutinating element of this recorded presentation, a kind of crystalizing force, as in the music by Varèse, who thought of music through the development of what he called sound organizations, through the continuous resonance and the diversified reation of materials. As I wrote in my dissertation (Martins, 2015, p. 128), "Varèse built sound blocks and often called them ‘crystals’, where the movement of timbres was developed by layers, creating a very particular typology". This typology characterizes "Allure", out of the creation of a sound object which can be manipulated and crystallized, with a stable center and multifaceted outer edges. This is one of the main features of Varèse’s work, capable of transforming certain basic sound ideas into a multitude of events and their variations.73 This complex environment allows me not only to create and explore the sound out of ideas of mass, weight, texture, silences, dynamics, heights etc., in a horizon of events and transformations, but also allows me to be one of the agents involved in different types of experimental creation processes. It is the application of one of the central problems of free improvisation, which is , as stated by Costa (2016, p. 39) "promoting this consistency without losing infinity, which corresponds to maintaining the membranes of this consistency permeable ". In other words, free improvisation, when 72 Specifically, in this recorded performance, I play a patch built on Max along with a patch that encompasses other processing, in other software, Ableton Live. Within the latter, there are still various digital instruments inserted via VST, remotely driven by the external foot controller, in addition to a digital mixer, which processes the input and output signals from the bandolim and digital instruments. 73 Here, a note is needed, to help illustrate some of the basic differences when dealing with composition and improvisation. Varèse, in spite of working with experimental processes and from the perspective of dissolution of shades and abstractions, and who thinks primarily about sound and its intrinsic material, is a composer, thus presents throughout his life a series of final "works", which are inserted in some kind of writing. Each of his works has a recording in a score, whether traditional and/or complemented by graphs, various indications and even geometric figures. The idea of continuous transformations in the form of a crystal, recognized in Varèse's work, is still a kind of counterpointistic variation of the theme. Although the material is very distinct from abstract notes dyed on a paper and later interpreted out of an abstraction of scales, shades, arpeggios etc., the compositional idea and variation of the theme is still very present, in addition to the idea of presenting a closed, concluded work, for the assessment of (some kind of) public. "Allure" is, oppositely, a free improvisation performance, which also covers some of the precepts of material variation, but from the perspective, as has been pointed out here, of continuous transformations, accumulations, settlements and deterritorializations. If I wanted to perform this piece again in the same way, it would be impossible. The sequence of transformations does not have a guideline, procedures – even if the same - would never present the same sounds accumulations and manipulations as what was recorded. This piece was presented in the same year in another live situation, during the SBCM 2017, with completely different results from the ones recorded during ¿Música? 13. A documentation of "Allure" in the SBCM 2017 presentation is found in (pp.176-177): http://compmus.ime.usp.br/sbcm/2017/assets/SBCM2017Proceedings-PrePrint.pdf -- access on June 5, 2018. 97 inserted in an artistic proposition and performance praxis, needs to break the membranes of languages and systems at the same time it needs to promote its consistency, its own existence. Departing from the complete entropy to arrive right there, seconds afterwards, in the deep silence, where the desire to play is replaced by the fear of mistakes and successes, or exposing through new materials, requires a very strong desire for action, a very prominent power of active readiness, ready to act. If desire and readiness are not consistent, there will be no performance. Simply throwing some material, process it through some software and perform changes to this material, is not enough to constitute a performance of free machinic hybrid improvisation. Any performer who has already put himself or herself in this situation knows this. Without a real desire for intervention, creation and experimentation, the result will be just a heap of sounds. And nothing else. 2.4 The performance place – consistent environment This complex environment is therefore permeated by the idea of a consistency plane. This concept derives from Guattari’s and Deleuze’s work (1997, pp. 58-59) in which they affirm that a consistency plane "is a plane whose dimensions will not stop growing with whatever goes on, with nothing to lose from its planeability". Planeability here while planing the desire, as a road of conveying, as travelled planes, also the ones to be reached. They are movement and rest relations, which can be immensely complex, but still retaining their original planing, their initial desire for action. Through formed elements and others still not constituted, in addition to discarded elements, but which, to some extent, influence the amount (and are important for those reflections-while-playing), this environment does not only rise, it starts, but, especially, conceives and integrates. They are provisional organizations, but as pointed out in the case of "Allure", they are essential for a performance to be established, settle and, in fact, exist. Thus, the consistency plane of this environment is the performance, it properly represents performance as an operation in development, action in transit, formation of the subject themselves and their perceptos and affectos. It is in the performance that the possibility of, based on a complex assemblage, forming a consistency plane is constituted. Still on this idea, Guattari and Deleuze (1997, p. 58) affirm that, "there are only movement and rest, and speed and slowness relations between the elements [...] at least unformed, molecules and particles of all kinds." Costa (2016, pp. 38-39) states that the consistency plane for the free improvisation praxis, is a "block of space-time, indefinable in its contours, in which the improvisers act, therefore different energies, attitudes, singularities, thoughts, connections, private and collective stories coexist ". The author names this singular and heterogeneous place "horizon of happenings"74, a 74 It is not a horizon operating as a limiting factor, which would still depend on a certain amount of "vision" of those who are observing it to be effective, but perhaps a kind of absolute horizon, such as affirmed by Deleuze and Guattari (1992, p.52): "Concepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of events, the reservoir or the reserve of purely conceptual events: not the relative horizon that operates as a limit, changes with the observer and encompasses states of observable things, but the absolute, independent horizon from every observer, and that makes the event an independent concept of a visible state in which he would effect." 98 place in which a performance occurs, where free improvisation happens, is concretized, emerges as an experimental, interactive process. Thus, the consistency of a performance occurs exactly when the performer(s) identify that heterogeneous elements begin to form a kind of identifiable block, enabling them to configure these relationships between some particles and molecularities still not fully constituted through, as the authors above cite, movements and rests, speeds and slowdowns, where they (performers) can interact with their hybrid instruments in this environment; Guattari and Deleuze (ibidem) state: "this plane, which only knows longitudes and latitudes [...] is necessarily a plane of immanence and of univocity ". Thus, a performance that encompasses the praxis of free improvisation with the use of hybrid instruments and musical technology promotes a complex, an immanentconsistent enchainment75, a subjective, peculiar, unique space, permeated by neighboring areas that approach and depart as certain territorial relations and deterritorialization are progressively constituted. A hybrid machine, therefore, encompasses these structures that couple and decouple affections, perceptos, instrumentness, rests, speeds, latitudes and longitudes or, as stated by Guimarães (2009, p. 273), "find their escape lines in the reversions, injunctions and commutations"76. In a musical performance with such features, the environment is dynamic and its pathways are always open, with no hierarchies, and in motion, always in multiple paths and courses, without ever excluding any direction, even when heterogeneous elements are provisionally concatenated; they can set limits to, in the next moment, go beyond them. The established form will only occur during the performance itself and will be a mere consequence of possible connections and assemblages among its various agents 75 The consistency plane in an improvisation performance also encompasses the idea of immanence, in which a kind of cut that can act delimiting edges, borders, where structural changes in the performance may occur. Guattari and Deleuze (1992, p.51) write that "... a consistency plane or, more exactly, the plane of immanence of the concepts, the planometer. The concepts and the plane are strictly correlated, but they should be confused [...] if they were, nothing would prevent the concepts from unifying, or from becoming universal and lose their uniqueness." Costa (2016, p.39) states that "Thus, the consistency plane of improvisation is also a delimitation or a cut in chaos, and the problem of improvisation practice is to promote this consistency without losing its infinity, which corresponds to maintaining permeable membranes of this consistency, since every free improvisation group risks to gradually strengthen the limits of their consistency, inaugurating what we might call "style." And style can be a problem as it closes to the infinite and performances begin to lose strength." I would say that in addition to the importance of maintaining perspective during performance to aim concomitantly a consistent action plane and to maintain open to the infinity of possibilities, one must also watch out for, during performance – and especially in the case of use of new digital technologies and hybrid instruments –the extremely “mapped” exploration of processes and machinic manipulations that may apparently permeate performance with procedures already and reasonably used in experimental, contemporary and related music, such as the use of granular synthesis, ring modulation, etc., or the use of very rhythmic or idiomatic situations; these are important procedures but which, by itself, only destroy a possible consistency already rooted in the performance, leaving molarised. The vigor of a performance, as Costa mentioned above, is exactly aiming at executing a performance that promotes a consistent, vibrant and instigating development and, at the same time, open to infinity, to new possibilities, often unexpected, always maintaining the performer in a state of promptness and attentive listening. 76 For Guimarães (ibidem), "Deleuze neutralizes the operations that fix the being and the 'I' in categories, which justifies his aphorism 'grab things in the middle'. This 'grab' aims to enhance the movement that updates the feeling of the route, never given by a principle of order or static and pre-fixed succession." 99 and elements. Absolutely everything in free improvisation is provisional, hence, contingent on the personalities of the performers involved and their assembled machines, their acoustic and digital instruments, their own experiences and history. 2.5 Open performance {or as a constant negotiation permeating a free improvisation performance} A machinic performance negotiates with interactions, connections and processes among its different agents (musicians, machines, instruments, environment) the whole time. In a certain way, a musical performance encompassing this experimental creation and interpretation praxis is always in motion, always in an open, fluidic state. Umberto Eco wrote "The open work" in 1962 gathering a collection of essays on the forms of indeterminacy of contemporary poetics in artistic production and, since then, the book has received, ironically, several revisions by the author77 and has served as a base for a recurring theoretical concept in the field of arts in general. Specifically in music, pieces and researches by Frisk (2008), Costa (2016), Borgo (2009)78, Schroeder (2014), Falleiros (2012), Souza Maia (2018) and Cobussen (2017), among others, cover both 77 The author himself jokes that he hoped that his work - Open Work - would remain: always in constant revision, movement. Eco writes specifically for the Brazilian edition, in its introduction: "If once there was a book loyal to its own title, this is the case of Open Work. Since 1958, when I wrote the first essay, I have never stopped rewriting it." For Giovanni Cutolo, who writes the original preface of the book in the language (1968, loc.118-119), for Eco it was important to "formulate a poetics about the opening of the work, in a meaning in which the creator expresses his disinterest in a "perfect, classic, diamond type", artwork, declaring himself, on the other hand, in favor of an open work, such as a modern Baroque, able to interpret the needs of expression and communication of contemporary art." A place that can be characterized as a field of operations, constantly subjected to inquiry and the development of different ideas. Eco (ibidem, loc.128) calls this place a "fruitive relationship structure", where there is no open work model, but rather a group of fruition relationships of the processes that constitute them. The author states, in the preface to the book (ibidem) "in order to understand what actually matters: not the definition-work, but the world of relations from which it originates; not the result-work, but the process presiding over its formation; not the event-work, but the characteristics of the field of probabilities that understand it." It is important to note that Umberto Eco was originally inspired to write Open Work in James Joyce’s poetics which, for the author, presents the "development of an artist in which the project of an open work manifested in transparency." 78 David Borgo also sporadically uses the term "open-system" to designate very similar features he calls work-in-progress. Borgo (2005, pp.124-125), while weaved an investigative look at the processes of creation and self-organization, states that “an improvising ensemble can also be described as an ‘open system’. In a very general sense, the ensemble takes the energy gradually from the enculturation, education, training, and experience of its members, and more immediately in the form of interactions between members and influences from the physical and psychological context of the performance (i.e., the acoustic space, the potential sonic materials, the performer´s state of mind, the audience´s reaction, etc.). More technically, because active listening plays such a central role in shaping the dynamics of improvised performance, the control and feedback parameters are tightly coupled, and the system remains open to continual energy influxes from its environment. Improvised music is also ‘dissipative’ in the literal sense that if no external energy is applied to the system, the complexity of the music will decrease, tending toward zero as listeners get bored”. Much of this thought also applies to a solo performer, within a machinic environment, through this system that remains constantly open, through different flows and synergies. 100 the concept of open work and work-in-progress, which I will present in detail later on, also questioning certain characteristics of the nature of a musical improvisation performance while a field of possibilities, as Cobussen sometimes names it. In this work, the concept of open work is important for putting several issues found throughout the praxis of musical improvisation into practice, especially when associated with digital technologies and hybrid instruments. As previously observed, the performance place is always on the move, always in fruition, constituting contingencies. Obviously, this idea of "openness" is a fundamental ambiguity to art in general, for the very notion of what would be this or that artistic message and its forms liable to interpretation and reception of a particular work is a constant at any time. This is not the way I use the idea of an ever moving and inquiring in my own work. The idea that permeates, to me, the notion of what an open work means, is that which allows thinking of the performance not as a closed, finished, previously planned or planed, but on the contrary, a place that is interested in not exactly where some artistic creation processes are resolved, but rather how they are proposed. It is the improvisation as an open, libertarian creation system. At this point, this concept is closer to the idea of work-in-progress than anything else. It is worth mentioning that for Souza Maia (2018, pp. 62-64) free improvisation is close to the idea of work-in-progress, however, it does not relate directly to the concept of open work originally proposed by Eco. For the author, "the work itself, i.e., the work during the flow that constitutes it does not have dimensions of signification – or it possesses it, though atrophied." I think that for the performer, as a creation and participation agent of the constituted complex environment, there are certain rugosities that allow79, unlike the Souza Maia’s statement, dimensions of consistent signification so that they (the performer) can elaborate their aesthetic precepts of choice, readiness and action from that point. Even so, the fact of thinking the open work as a model is probably an enormous paradox. If the idea of an action model is conceived, in which the opening of possibilities is its main and predominant constitution, the processes expected to be handcrafted and operative during a musical improvisation performance have been previously planned, making no sense to allocate and list them, eventually to systematize them so that they can be repeated in other performances80. It is precisely the opposite. 79 In the author's view, "the meaning of the work – differently from the production of meaning of the work – is generally prior or posterior to the flow that constitutes it; meaning (in its closely linguistic sense) is almost never given during the affection flow exactly for operating the interruption of the flow so that it is spotted in a signifier". In this case, from a strictly linguistic perspective, it can be affirmed that the meaning of something will only take place after its constitution. But in the case of a performance of machinic improvisation, I, while means, while creating-performer, co-participatory agent of the environment, cause affection and am affected by the flow of performance, during its ongoing, being open to multiple options that are not only offered but created in this creative flow. 80 An example here could be the "open" ideas of improvisation that relate to styles such as blues or jazz, for instance, in which interactions between musician and standard form are enhanced in in addition to the interactions between the improvising musicians themselves. However, in both cases, they (the performers) are always relating to a closed, crystallized "work" (after all, this song is, as a rule, a standard and is present in the famous and much publicized Real Books), where the improviser seeks to break some of the rules and paradigms between the form of the song, its harmonic cadences and melodic options, through scales, arpeggios, chromatic passages and outside notes. But in short, everything operates in a large field of pre-demarcated, fully configured and known possibilities, where there is even a certain expectation both among the audience (if any) and the musicians that certain 101 The idea of an open work that I bring here is the one that characterizes this possibility that, in this place constituting what we call musical performance, all the possible directions, regardless of where it is moving to, how to get there and, even so, always seeking, as performers, to constitute fully, consistently, keeping it open and vigorous. Firstly, it must be said that the very notion of work is not associated with the discussed and proposed performances, neither associated with the idea that each improvisation session becomes, instantly after its completeness, a finished, dead, immutable artistic product. It is the opposite; what interests me is not the aestheticization of the performance as a work, but rather as a product of reflection, questioning, truly a performative action. Eco (1968, loc. 261) states that the artwork always presents the problem of the form that might clash with the idea of openness. For him, "by understanding as work an object endowed with defined structural properties allowing, but also coordinating, the alternation of interpretations, the displacement of perspectives". It must be noticed that Eco built a reflection on James Joyce’s work, from the perspective of literary poetics. In a free improvisation performance, I am a long way from just performing permutations of interpretations and the displacement of (some) possible perspectives of action during the performance itself. And, in fact, I am not interested in the finished work, but rather in what happens between its beginning and its final constitution, in how connections and heterogeneities take place. What, therefore, is interesting to me in this matter, and what also seems to interest other authors, performers and researchers, as some of the aforementioned ones, is the poetics of a work in motion, open, in constant movement and how the relations between the performer, not only as a creating-performer, but also as an agent-performer, occur with the different creation agents of this complex environment. Eco (1968, loc. 286-288) elaborates that "What is meant by poetics here? It is understood by poetics a study of the artistic creation, that poïein que s´achevé en quelque ouvre, l´action qui fait [...] the modalities of the production act that seeks to constitute an object..."81. This is the poietic idea that brings me closer to the concept of open work proposed originally by Eco and which is also present in the works by other researchers and performers: a performative investigation of the artistic creation itself, as an ongoing operation, the performance unwinding, which, in the case of the present work, encompasses a series of complexities such as acoustic and digital instruments, machines, software, applications, interfaces etc. Even if I have an initial idea for a certain performance, or start it without any planning whatsoever (I bring about this subject in details below), this performance, as a place of action and field of operations, is always a draft between what it could be intended to it and what it actually is, fact that is only materialized at the end of the performance. "rules" will be broken during the performance, such as some polyrhythmic, very fast and chromatic solos, rhythmic interactions and training of more complex grooves. The idea of this type of improvisation is this, to always revisit the same melodic themes and harmonic cadences, seeking a "new" interpretation from improvisations almost always based on notes, scales etc. 81 The use of some phrases in French occurs in the original edition, in Italian (1962) and was maintained in the Brazilian edition. In my translation: "This doing that ends in some openings, the action it does". It is worth noting that the word poïein, originally kept in Greek, here brings the sense of "doing, creating". See KAGAN, Sarah (2014, p.75), in the book “Art and Sustainability: Connecting patterns for a culture os complexity”, Ed. Verlag, where the author states: “the world poetics comes from the Greek word poïein, which means ‘to-do’”. 102 The idea of open work is also important here since, for being a scientific and qualitative research, my assumption is not to investigate how to solve problems related to musical improvisation performances in real time that involve new technologies, but how they can be proposed. The types of interaction and instrumentness82 made possible during an improvisation performance and the hybrid machine are multiple, characterizing an open work in constant motion that can be investigated based on interpretation and creation propositions, rather than from the exhibited results. This characteristic of an open work, originally proposed by Eco, is of great value to my work, in general. It is noteworthy that, for Umberto Eco himself (1968, loc. 927), the poetics of the open work tends to promote in the performer important features such as "acts of conscious freedom, pole as the active center of a network of inexhaustible relationships, among which its own form is established, without being determined by a necessity prescribing the definitive organization modes of the work in fruition". This does not mean, however, that the improviser is the whole time attentive to all the events during a performance, but the opposite. One of the features of the open work is precisely to offer multiple connections and capture paths among the available materials, and it may make the improviser and (if any) the audience a little "lost", given the loss of consistency that there might be, due to the great amount of material and options. Even experienced improvisers can experience moments in which both their readiness and attentive listening become "confused" or "cloudy", given the wide variety of material and creation lines. Falleiros (2012, p. 57) exposes this issue by stating that, for the improviser, "inserted and accustomed to this type of selective listening, it is very difficult to perceive all the sound relations (occurring either at random or by the deliberate interactions) generated by the group". Therefore, one of the main issues I have found during the vast majority of performances mentioned here, from the practice of free improvisation, is that it makes necessary, in most cases, the sharpest possible state of attention and observation, and a certain kind of sensitive focus in relation to the open state of performance and its operation field in constant motion. This attention allows me to allocate one of the offered paths of readiness and develop it to somewhere else, within this sort of conversation that occurs in an improvised performance; and that also allows me to be free from a certain amount of concern in "having" to follow all the nuances and all the possibilities offered during performance, thereby creating, in a certain way, my own open form83, not as a closed structure, but rather as an open system of relationships and connections. Falleiros (ibid., p. 58) states that "we observe that listening choices are not totally controlled, coordinated activities, simple to be performed in free improvisation". My readiness status occurs affectively with the material and my choices happen through aggregation or not of certain lines of creation that are being constituted during 82 83 I will develop these matters below, in this chapter. Eco (1968, loc.351) states that "we will talk about 'open work' as 'form': that is, as of an organic whole stemming from a merger of various levels of previous experience (ideas, emotions, predispositions to operate, materials, modules of organization, themes, arguments, pre-fixed styles and acts of invention). A form is a work materialized, arrival point of a production and starting point of a consummation that – articulating – returns to give life, always and again, to the initial form, through diverse perspectives." In this way, the form each performance takes when finished, is always constituted by its own fluidity and the history(s) brought by each performer. It is curious that Eco already advocates, decades before, the idea of knowledge base, by Jeff Pressing, which I will address in the next chapter. 103 performance; it is a handcrafted and operative process. It is up to me to choose a certain path and make it progress, contributing to the performance environment, feeding it and letting it feed me, until the delivery of this material, already deferred, based on new choices. This is the kind of fluidity that occurs during the performance. Keeping in mind that all this occurs while the musician, the performer is interacting with their musical instruments, dealing with the instrumentness and processing, physicality and expansions provided by the hybrid machine. 2.6 Musical improvisation in the present work Musical improvisation is an important part of my work. Some of the examples listed in this text cover a multiplicity of variants from this same praxis. I could probably divide the features of some of the works presented as follows: a.) free-free improvisation; b.) improvisation out of an idea/word; c.) improvisation out of a painting/picture/photograph; d.) improvisation out of a music score/graph/drawing; e.) improvisation out of the static reading of a poetry, in the order and coherence originally presented; f.) improvisation out of the reading of a concrete poetry, in which each performer has "their" own reading time and direction; g.) improvisation out of an idea about molarities or molecularities. Obviously, these are just a few of the possibilities that can be used in a free improvisation session. And yet, I could combine them with each other, transferring an important conceptual part of one another etc. But I believe it is pertinent to investigate each of these examples in depth, based on what was established so far in this chapter, regarding musical improvisation.84 a.) Free-free improvisation Performance: https://vimeo.com/272247524 This performance was intended to expose the performers to the maximum degree of freedom. In this way, both the saxophonist Rogério Costa and I seek, beforehand, to free ourselves from any affection or "inspiration" that could be imposed by any sort of preliminary idea. However, it is perceived that there is a kind of slow constitution of a certain consistency plane over the first three minutes of the performance, which contradicts the dynamism of this kind of mutual conversation we had begun. Both of us depart from nothingness, from chaos, from emptiness. However, we carry our background, our history, our learning and, indeed, our personalities, not only our musical ones, besides all our experience up to that moment. It is possible to notice, therefore, that we concentrate on the composition of a presumably heterogeneous, dualistic, lateral sound, which, in about the fourth minute of performance, begins to 84 These same examples of performances will also be investigated regarding the concepts of instrumentness and interaction, presented below in this chapter. 104 unify, to homogenize, opening a path to a rather selfless and synergetic performance at that moment. Hence, if we start the performance somehow groping the space that the gestures and the individual sounds were taking shape, around 6", a complete merger of distinct elements come up, now concentrated in a very attentive and intensified listening, willing to provide a constant fluidity to the performance and still be free from any assumption of form or procedure. The passage between the minutes six and seven illustrates this characteristic, precisely: exactly at 7'28" a single sound, conceived by both performers a few seconds earlier, heterogeneously, fuses very homogeneously and resonantly, preparing the entire environment for a new discursive plateau - around 8'30"- completely unthinkable just one minute or two earlier. How do such subtle, and at the same time, completely unforeseen connections take place? Obviously, there are also asymmetrical moments when forces and lines of creation may hurtle. However, one cannot but find instigating the idea of two or more musicians, around their acoustic and digital instruments, their assembled machines and a complex environment, who can conduct a performance technically out of nothing. The action of the musical thought, at this time, is completely absorbed in relation to such lacerating abstractions comprising the theory and technique of a traditional musical instrument. And the machines, interfaces and software, in this case, do not help or hinder the onset of a performance, because once alone they still do not encompass anything, they are absorbed, quiet, dead. Something must be created, the first word of the conversation must be said, the ball must be kicked for a game to start. This way, after each of the performers’ readiness state is literally personified, as well as their use of a very attentive and intensified listening (towards the other and themselves), the possibility of creating an environment of spontaneity and freedom is established in face of the whole universe of sounds, gestures, textures, figures, abstractions, systematizations etc., possible to be played. At this moment, everything is open and ready to be built, created; we have absolutely everything ready, our machines, our desire to play, our history, our instrumental techniques, and especially our state of readiness, concentration and perception of hearing everything, attentively. So, gradually the establishment of consistency processes, processes that are always interactive, not only among musicians, but between each musician and their acoustics and/or digital musical instruments takes place. In such cases, it is frequent, as is this free improvisation performance, the use of molecularized sound, designed and used from its most intrinsic characteristics. In a certain way, the practice of free improvisation makes use of an emancipation of noise, or of what would be supposedly considered noise in an idiomatic improvisation session. In this example, between the ninth and the eleventh minute, we have the elaboration of strictly noisiness sounds, which are designed from both the extension of the physicality of the acoustic instrument (clicks on saxophone buttons and beats in the bandolim wooden body, among others) and also from the real-time electronic processing of the captured and digitized sound into the computers. This noise accumulation occurs very powerfully, where a certain amount of material is being constantly processed and another part, on the other hand, establishes itself as a 105 rough, dense, adherent and preliminary layer. Though, from 11'20" onwards, the material gradually begins to transform. If we are free, we are free to go anywhere. Even if this place were a little rug of notes or something like that. So, free improvisation occurs: it allows the transit among multiple spheres and territories, leaving them provisionally or definitively, suddenly. Therefore, while there are various manipulations constituted of a material exposed minutes before, the saxophone builds phrases with melodic notes that even convey the impression of a certain stability. However, without any combination or prior arrangement, at 12'30”, both of us hold at length a small amount of processed sound and, promptly, establish a new territory, a new path, new scenarios. This example is important for being one of the most recurring praxes among free improvisers: to start a rehearsal or presentation as a free-free performance. Why is that? Perhaps I can contribute here by saying that, by seeking a complete freedom of action, we have, as performers, all at our disposal: all the tessiture of the acoustic instrument, all the myriad of techniques learned and accumulated, all the effects, processing, machinery etc. However, as we are freed from the need to interpret graphisms of any kind in the form of a score, playing within shades or cadences, and ultimately supplanting any need to stick to any form, we initiate the exploration of the sound from both the readiness in listening to oneself and to each other, as to the reaction of what the other feeds the same environment, which is still embryonic. We deal with the situation of being part of something that is built in real time, out of a completely interactive process. In some ways, every performer participating in a performance like this (in this particular case, the saxophonist Rogério Costa and I), is much more than just an interpreter, as it has become clear both in the text as in the examples presented. This scenario allows (even obliges, I would say) each performer to be also a composer, creator, luthier, listener and inquirer throughout the process. It is in this world of relations and multiplicities that an experimental praxis as free improvisation occurs, as shown in this example. Departing from the exercise of listening to oneself and to the other, we built the performance together, with no sense of ownership. The desire to play, the process of performing and the unfolding of the event, always assembled by surprise, is what matters. b.) improvisation out of an idea/word: Performance “ansiosa” – idea of anxiety: https://vimeo.com/272248790 In this duo performance, our goal was to create an "anxious" environment, where, though there was no stabilized metric form of progress, we could print the feeling of haste, speed of action and restless gestures. Between 2’ and 2’30" this feature becomes very clear. Here, improvisation was pursued as an unbroken sequence of actions, gestures, figures, textures, blocks, and sensations. There is no time between the performance "tempos", where we try to connect one gesture to the other and the 106 next, also seeking to perform actions on acoustic and hybrid musical instruments in a concatenated way. Between 3’40" and 4’20" several gestural actions, with interpolated residual layers are perceived. From there, for almost a whole minute, we only worked with the residues, always guided by the initial idea of "anxiety". I believe to be pertinent reporting here the mental profusion that occurs in a performance with such features. What are we actually playing? By listening around 5'30" on, the idea of an emergency is clearly perceived. We play residues of techniques accumulated through our knowledge-base, but we also play through the mutual interaction that occurs not only between the two musicians, but between each of us and our individual machines. From the idea of emergency and anxiety, we try to withdraw precisely any kind of consonance or establishment of figurative texture, seeking to eliminate any kind of sound and timbre peacefulness. The idea is exactly the opposite to this: the profusion of elements, the non-conciliation of the sound objects, the harmonic and rhythmic a-grammar. However, even imbued with such a task, it can be perceived around the eighth minute, that we created a fairly established texture. In a sort of modal ambience, Rogério and I allowed ourselves to be carried away for almost a whole minute in a less "anxious” sequence, however, if observed as a whole, pertinent to the confused and disturbing thought of a mental crisis moment, of lack of breath, of vertigo. It is as if, at this very moment, the anxious disorder could somehow establish itself, being literally dismantled afterwards as it happens from the tenth minute on in the performance. In general, this was one of the recorded performances that surprised me the most, due to the enchained result obtained. The surprise, here, does not result from any aesthetic or instrumental technique; it was a surprise of alignment between the proposal originally made, performing the idea of anxiety, and the way we did it. In the final two minutes of the performance, this statement seems even clearer. The anxious feeling on the verge of entropy, to complete chaos. c.) improvisation out of a painting/picture/photograph Performance: https://vimeo.com/313831634 Departing from a photograph of a valley, in Minas Gerais state85, and a single tree in the middle of the image, we carry out this proposition. It can be perceived that there are several moments in which we seek to elaborate a kind of "consistency plane", building varied elements mixed in a textural and figurative manner in relation to the proposed image. 85 “Sem nome”, photograph by Amanda Carvalho Martins: https://amcarvalho.wordpress.com/ 107 Figure 5: photograph used for this performance In 3'27", for example, there is a reminder of the sound of an old train, a "MariaFumaça". This sound lasts for some time, echoing our individual memories. From 4'20" on, the memory transforms, now creating the image of the whistle, typical of those trains, transfigured among other types of sound. The sonority here is sought out of different sound types. The memory-sound, the referent-sound, a surprise-sound, another texture-sound. Between minutes six and seven, this becomes clearer, based on the formation of different consistencies and territories, related to the proposed image, imagining natural actions that might occur in that valley, facing that particular tree. The sound of the wind, the sound of the rain, the sound of the air, of the rattling twigs, of the leaves (the distinction between the content of the seventh minute and the next is notorious; if in the first example, the wind blew quickly, in the next, leftovers remain, wet grass, splashes of water). If the performance occurs through an image, each of the performers’ mental images end up being instigated in a very powerful way, where each one’s individual history relates to that place in a special way. For me, the original image might embrace memories of some similar place of my adolescence, while for Rogério, that same image brings about other kinds of memories, perhaps from some recently visited place, for instance. What is interesting to me here is how we conduct both the performance, through the temporal flow, and the processes relationships that elaborate the different sounds, between the acoustic and hybrid instruments. The final two minutes of the performance suggest exactly that. After embracing countless memories (which may 108 never have happened), both of us begin to unveil that image, leaving it quiet now, in the distance, back to being just a decorative photograph. d.) improvisation out of a musical score/graph/drawing Performance: https://vimeo.com/224256485 We called this performance “Arquipélagos Silenciosos”, based on a drawn graphic score: Figure 6: graphic score used in the performance “Arquipélagos Silenciosos” In the nearly three first minutes, the improvisation occurs through the use of silence and spacing. The materials are dispersed, intentionally distant from each other, building an enlarged territory. Between 1'44” and 2', there is only silence, interspersed then by minimal interference. The improvisation in free form here is the idea of broadening the 109 materials through the use of continuous flow and minimum dynamics. Improvising like this, to me, it is extremely difficult, for my knowledge base seeks, during the entire performance time, to create interactions or sound manipulation processes. For many minutes, there is the creation and manipulation of minimum amount of materials. The transitions are very elastic and the order, if there is any, does not obey the traditional sequence of western notation. There are almost no material overlays. Around halfway of the performance, a rhythmic continuum is established, without, however, presenting any sort or kind of groove. Materials are gradually allocated, from one interaction to the next, without excessive individual development. It is as if we, as performers, transited among tiny islands present in this archipelago, embracing small amounts of information (material, processing, manipulation, gestures etc.) in each of them and taking very little quantity of them to other localities. Only around the ninth minute some kind of permanent material is established, which sounds in this context, far more like the very "natural" ambience of poetic imagery of archipelagos rather than the musical process itself. Again, improvising with so little material and so little gestural action is a great challenge for me. Every couple of seconds there is a desire to interfere, often not by the ambience, but rather by the gestural and figurative memories that both the acoustic and digital instrument possess in my training (scraping a string in the acoustic guitar or creating a specific material to be used and processed with granular synthesis, for instance). Between 10' and 11', there are several seconds in silence, making the processes of musical creation, at this moment, quite challenging regarding the dialogue between performers and, at the same time, the internal dialogue between performer and their musical instruments. e.) improvisation out of static reading of poetry, in the originally presented order and coherence; Performance: https://vimeo.com/210935217 This performance was held out of the individuated reading of poetry piece “Nasce e Morre” (Is born and dies)86, by the poet from São Paulo city Haroldo de Campos. Through reading, in real time during performance, it is possible to associate the almost baroque consistency that Campos builds on the text, with very little information, but loaded with interpretations and semantic images. The mixture of singular elements nasce, renasce, morre se, desmorre,nascemorrenasce etc. (born, reborn, dead, un-dead, isborndiesisreborn etc. ) – is pertinent in the growing accumulation of materials that we built at the beginning of the performance, from 1'30" onwards. A kind of counterpointistic musical growth, is perceived, and gradually accumulates up to an almost complete saturation, through notes, gestures, phrases, loops and electronic processes. From the third minute on, there is a territorial transition, allowing the creation, development and improvisation of ideas out of other materials. However, there are still repetitions of the saxophone that seeks to relate to the previous 86 Available on: https://www.escritas.org/pt/t/6300/se --- access on August 07, 2018. 110 moment, being abandoned immediately afterwards. The acoustic guitar, processed with filters, echo and frequency alteration, initiates a new transition, which can be associated with the central part of the Campos’s poetry (renasce e desnasce), creating a musical environment that is distinct from what had been previously built. The saxophone performs rhythmic scores then, and I follow it with more abrupt gestures, staccato notes and use an equalization/filter alteration pedal, avoiding, however, the creation of a more structured rhythmic material. Improvising out of a particular reading of a determined piece of poetry is one of the most intense exercises in the experimental practice of musical improvisation. Obviously, poetry in general is seen as a literary and musical form, through verses, stanzas and rhymes. However, concrete poetry87, in particular, presents challenges that are interconnected not only with the structure or rhythm of the verse, but in different creation agents, such as blank space, lines, syllables, graphic types etc. In a certain sense, concrete poetry distances itself from traditional music and, concomitantly, approaches the free musical improvisation. Just as concretist poets use blank space as a creative and participative agent of the final poem, in free improvisation one can let go of (this is often suggested) the most territorialized structures and rhythms, grooves, cadences, progressions etc., allowing the sound, through the time flow (which at the beginning of a performance can be associated with a blank sheet), to delimit other instances of creation. f.) improvisation out of the static reading of concrete poetry, in which each performer has “their” own time and reading direction; Performance: https://vimeo.com/210938715 This performance presented a different challenge to both improvisers: to develop an individualized and particular reading of the same poetry, here, a piece of work 87 In my article “From Concrete Poetry to Musical Composition: Narrativity, Intertextuality and Musical Meaning in Motet em Ré Menor by Gilberto Mendes”, I write: “Concrete poetry began in Brazil in the 50's of the twentieth century, as an avant-garde movement, in literature, in the plastic arts, fostering also a strong proximity to contemporary music. The idea of concrete poetry comes from the concretist movement of the 1930s, where plastic artists seek to conceptualize the idea of a concrete art - starting from definitive forms and their adherences – as opposed to an abstract art. According to Correa (2011, p. 63), "concrete poetry proposes a change in the international literary scene from the 1950s ... in which the poem should be constructed in a synthetic-ideographic way." The concrete poem makes use of the blank space (or any other color that is present in the free space of the page) of the page's own format, typology, characters (_, -, <, >, ¨, ^≤ ´, `, #, @, a, o, ˙, ˚, ƒ, ∂, ˙, ¶, , etc.), geometric shapes (italic, bold, underline, line spacing, etc.), and everything that may be understood as being or becoming verbivocovisual. The manifesto “Plano-piloto para poesia concreta”, published in Sao Paulo in 1958, cosigned by Haroldo de Campos, his brother Augusto de Campos and Décio Pignatari, preaches the use of the page space as structural agent (i.e., the poem communicates its own structure), paronomasia and the end of verse as the rhythmic/formal unity of the poetry. The concrete movement embraces links with the visual arts, contemporary music, design and electronic media, such as radio, TV, electronic sound recording and cinema, among others”. MARTINS, André L.; COSTA, Rogério. 2017. MUSICA THEORICA. Salvador: TeMA, 201705, pp. 112-130 111 commissioned by the company Philips in 1908 to the poet Décio Pignatari, that was not named, keeping the time flow and the "conversation" of the performance. The piece of poetry in question is: “Nem só a cav idade da boca Nem só a língua Nem só os dentes e os lábios fazem a língua Ouça as mãos tecendo a língua e sua linguagem É a língua têxtil O texto que sai das mãos sem palavras” 88 88 After a great deal of thinking on the need to translate or not the poetry used in some of the performances presented in this thesis, we came to the conclusion that the best way, for now, would be to keep the originals in the Portuguese language. The results achieved in each one of these performances refer exclusively to the interpretation and awareness that the poetic phonemes in Portuguese caused in the performers. Therefore, translating them into another language - in this case would make the poems opaque and without purpose for the initial objective that were used: as sound inspiration of words, graphics, sensations, timbres, memories and rhythmic figuration. According to Clifford E. Landers (2001), "One of the most difficult concepts about literary translation to convey to those who have never seriously attempted it (...) is that how one says something can be as important, sometimes more important, than what one says". For Elsa Simões (p.58, 2004), "Concrete poetry is a literary phenomenon with international expression and is characterized by its experimentalism at a formal level, which corresponds to a desire to express in a new way - not only linguistic - but a new historical and social reality". The author quotes the concrete poet Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003): "The concrete poem […] is a reality in itself, not a poem about... As it is not linked to the communication of content and uses the word (sound, visual form, loads of content) as a material of composition and not as a vehicle for interpretations of the objective world, its structure is the true content". More on this subject and the references used on this footnote can be accessed at: https://bdigital.ufp.pt/bitstream/10284/901/1/56-69.pdf —access on November 26, 2019. 112 Given the chosen score, the improvisation took a lot from, in my case, the last verse of the poem, which emphasizes "the text that comes out of the hands without words", and automatically influenced me to think of sounds that "come out" of my hands without notes, without previously established territories. One of the features of free improvisation is to enable the creation of a freed environment and spontaneity of the sound universe. In this performance this became very clear to me, this creative option through the development of consistent and free sound creation processes, which progressively establishes through mutual conversation between performer and their acoustic and digital instruments, also among the performers in question. One may clearly observe that in the first five minutes of the performance we seek this free and intermittent dialogue, sounds that literally come out of the hands. As each performer is free to perform the reading of poetry in an individuated manner, each poetic record goes through the performance in a very particular way. An interesting simple and occasional synchronic moment happens a little after the sixth minute of the performance. For a few seconds, Rogério and I went into a sort of well-reasoned argumentation, responding each other consciously, releasing shortly afterwards the sound flow to other territories. A moment that clearly influenced me during the reading of this poem, simultaneously to creating the sound performance, is when Pignatari writes "listen to the hands". I believe that this phrase was much more impregnated in my reading and during the whole performance than any other in the poem. I tried to work it by creating not only a sound material with the techniques acquired through many years of gestural praxes, arpeggios, scales etc., but I also tried to work with a gestural thought. My interpretation in this case was not only the "sound that comes out of or is created by the hands", but also "listening to my own hands", by how the movement occurs to both hands in relation to both the acoustic instrument, in this case an electrified acoustic guitar with neck magnetic pickup, as hearing the hands that touch the computer, the software, the Max patch, that touches the trackpad, which plays the FX pedals knobs, that holds a pick, that plays the strings. Listening to my hands in action. That for me is latent from 12' minute onwards, when I incisively seek to let the hands act freely on the instrument, not aiming for anything specific, but conversely, hearing the hands act, play, execute. I cannot remember, before this performance, of having this sensation/observation. I believe that this performance powerfully illustrates the improviser’s search for the creation of a free, molecular sound. This practice includes the idea of "loosening" deeply regimented systems and significations of the instrumental praxes that, as a rule, form a musician. Another feature that permeates not only this performance, but also a large part of the examples illustrated here is the development of an intensified listening during the performances, both to one another and of themselves. This relationship of listening to oneself, listening to one’s "own hands" is connected to the experimental praxis of sound creation, in real time. When experiencing an intensified and reduced listening, focused on a certain process, sound or gesture, for example, it is possible to develop a sort of elaborated capacity that takes into account different creative materials, such as the very texture of a particular sound object or some characteristic of roughness or granularity of a determined sound. 113 Pierre Schaeffer (1966) distinguished four distinct forms of listening in his book Traité des objects musicaux, starting from the characteristic that, in the French language, there are four words to designate the act of "listening": 1.) Écouter, which, according to Donato (2016, pp. 32-51) is "lending one’s ear, be interested in”, a material, physical sound; 2.) Ouïr, which, for Donato (ibidem) is "perceiving by the ear, as opposed to écouter, which corresponds to a rather active situation, what I hear", which relates to listening to the background sound as a whole, inversely to focusing on a specific sound; 3.) Entendre, which relates to the idea that I have an intention of listening, of of something sonorous, I realize that something happens in the form of one or more sounds and I intentionally select my listening to this; and 4.) Comprendre, which for Donato (ibidem) is "take to oneself, brings a dual relationship with écouter and entendre. I perceive [comprendre] the aim of my listening [écouter] thanks to what I chose to listen to [entendre]", being, in a certain way, my listening learning relationship, my reference of what a sound is or may become, to me. In a performance of musical improvisation, in which I seek to relate to the creation of a molecular sound, to manipulate its own intrinsic qualities, this type of cataloging proposed by Schaeffer can be extremely useful to the musician. In free improvisation, I have an intended listening addressed to the pre-musical qualities of a certain sound (no matter whether it is an arpeggio, or a certain interval etc.), where I seek to create it, develop it and process it out of a sound object in itself, approaching the idea of entendre, a listener addressed to the attributes of the sound itself, treating it as a true sound object89. On the act of "listening to the sounds", Costa (2016, pp. 20-21) states that: "[...] the act of listening is the result of a process involving the sound/musical object – acoustic execution of a musical formulation, sound physical phenomenon capable of mobilizing/disturbing our hearing organ – and the subject, in a configuration process. Thus, listening to the sounds implies a human action arising from a necessity, from availability and readiness configured in the relationship with a certain acoustic reality ". Necessity, intent, availability and readiness; vital characteristics, as previously presented here, for the practice of free musical improvisation. So, I, as an improvisingperformer and musician, deal with an environment that is configured along the timeline of the performance itself, built in real time, witnessing the performance flow through an interactive process. Reading poetry, choosing – consciously or unconsciously – a determined piece from it, so that of this, I may turn such affection into creative power as a handling substance in one of my musical instruments, through their different levels of technical intimacy and instrumentness, listening to the other, who is submerged both in their own instrumental and sound connection and in dealing with the 89 Costa (2016, p.23) states that "Considering the fact that every musician is conditioned by his biography (which includes languages and systems), it is necessary to sustain a proposal for free improvisation, a discipline or an intention of listening [...] It is possible to imagine a sequence ranging from sound to musicality, which is based on the listening balances created by Schaeffer and which, in principle, could apply as follows to free improvisation: first, an empirical practice occurs (which is an identification of sound objects in their context) that leads to morphology (which qualifies these objects in their texture). From this dynamic, you can reach, with the aid of recordings and records, an analysis of the objects that emerge from there, and one may (or may not) elaborate a theory of musical structures - abstract synthesis". 114 performance constitution and maintenance, mutual responsibility in the role of creators, building me a state of readiness inside myself that acts and reacts both in my own sensations and to what the other creates and that reaches me, communicates with me, moves me and affects me, finally, all these characteristics, among many others, build our complex, unstable, interactive, free conversation. g.) improvisation out of an idea on molarity: Performance: https://soundcloud.com/ar_mais_2/molaridades In this example, we seek to create a free proposal "on reverse": to create and develop a performance out of molar materials90, as a rule connected in some kind pre-existing system or language. Improvisation here happens at a very territorialized level, but not established for a long time. Probably, Rogério and I present here our influence from free jazz and modal development. Early in the performance, just before the second minute, there is a clear modal intention getting settled, but that I purposely restrict out of an articulation in rhythm. Scalar formations, establishment of groove fragments and counterpoint work are tools explored here. For example, at 2'48" we even built a jazz groove based on swing feel, kept on for a certain period of time or from the eighth minute on, when we built a great modal layer, for a while, exploring the interval nuances and also the timbre quality, in an exploration that is very close to the idiomatic form. As a method of improvisation, it is reasonably difficult to work the creation of an inspired free performance and guided by extremely molar elements, since the tendency to clash very different materials – but that are also very territorialized – is strong. As each material has a certain systematic and idiomatic "legacy”, the improviser needs to redouble their attention and listening to deal with such processes. I certainly felt a need for working the kind of intersect from a certain material to a new sound material at certain moments in the performance. This happens, for example, between 5' and 6', when we are still leaving a swing feel groove and we set out for a kind of sound fragment freezing, trying, from there, to work them with a certain textural care, in a kind of listening that Schaeffer called comprendre, as mentioned above. Costa (2016, p. 94), commenting on textural thought, states that "it refers to something that involves a particular form of listening focused on the general configuration of a sound flow characterized by melodic and rhythmic figuration, harmonic interval organization [...]". This approach also includes the exploration of different registers and pitches of the tessiture of the acoustic and digital instruments, processes involving dynamics, articulation, phrasing, timbre etc. in a complementary way, Costa (ibidem) comments: 90 The definitions of "molar" materials and their distinctions with molecular materials have already been presented in the previous chapter of this thesis. 115 "in other words, the texture types are characterized by modes of interaction of these basic formal characteristics: how the sounds are arranged in time, how they relate in the harmonic space and how they are grouped into subsets – in blocks or in an overlap of partially independent flows ". In fact, of all the examples pointed out here, this performance is the one that we worked more often the comprendre listening type, out of textural processes of sound creation. Between minutes 15' and 16' this is shown very clearly, and in the subsequent minute the dialogue between the guitar and the saxophone is well punctuated by overlapping textures. The end of the performance happens like this, through a wellestablished rhythmic subset by the guitar, which permeates the temporal flow almost independently, up until an abrupt end. Somehow, the thought focused on the texture helped us to overcome the challenge of creating and granting flow to a free performance based on a simple instruction that we would need to stick to molaritybased materials, maintaining a continuum flow that attempted to be established throughout the performance time, but that, in my analysis, fulfilled its initial goal. 2.7 instrumentness The concept of instrumentness was conceived by the researchers Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold (2007) based on the idea that musical instruments are created, constructed and played initially through values such as playability, physicality, corporeality or virtuosity and that, when coupled to the computer and its consequent digital tools, will have their affordance91 expanded potentially and, in contrast, they may cause some forms of restriction on the form and manner in which the performer is accustomed to traditionally interact with their instrument. The term, though broad, is employed in my work mainly regarding the idea of an interface for both control and sound production and manipulation – acoustic and digital – out of the acoustic musical instrument. The development of new electronic and digital musical instruments and the use of computers and their consequent sound manipulation and processing tools extend considerably what we understand as an acoustic musical instrument92 and its 91 It is worth recalling that the origin and meaning of the term affordance was presented in the introduction of this work and will also be detailed below in this same chapter. 92 In summary, an acoustic musical instrument, no matter its type and/or format, is constructed from of a resonant body that can interact with the basic properties of sound – frequency, intensity, duration, wave type (important for the human auditory system to recognize the type of instrument that is in action) and the characteristic form in which the intensity of sound changes over time, known as envelope. This structure will be resonant if it responds to vibrating energy impulses for a certain period of time. The vibration frequency will be determined by the size of the structure and the type of the chosen material for its construction – wood, metal, resin, bone, tissue membranes will commonly be used, etc. – and also because of the way it interacts with this resonating body, because the vibration pattern and its frequency variations will be determined as the energy impulse is generated. In addition, this structure may respond to energy impulses through simple or complex harmonic movements. Instruments require a kind of booster so that it is possible to move energetically through it; this kind of booster can be quite simple, like a wooden drumstick or a metal string (or brass or animal gut, for 116 instrumentness. As Kvifte affirms (2008, p. 45), "the development of new electronic and computerized [musical] instruments constitutes a challenge for the traditional concepts of musical instruments". A little further, the author complements (ibid), writing that "we hear new sounds, we hear familiar sounds coming out of unknown devices, and unknown sounds coming out of familiar interfaces". The employment of the idea of instrumentness here departs precisely from this perception described above by Kvifte: by participating in the assemblage in the formation of a hybrid machine, the acoustic instrument does not only maintain its physicality, corporeality, playability and perceptive relationships, but it also incorporates new expanded forms of these same features, among others that are potentially created from the accumulation of acoustic and digital propositions. They are familiar sounds stemming from software and/or digital interfaces, at the same time that there is the occurrence of not-so-familiar sounds generated by the acoustic instrument, basically derived from it, but reflecting a whole cadence of processing and manipulations. It is important to note that the term is applied here from a creative proposition for the use of this new assembled interface, which encompasses the acoustic instrument and technological tools, and not its quality of efficiency93 concerning its usability, as many of the researches on the man-machine interaction propose. Firstly, I will try and define some of these terms in a technical way, in order to understand the employment of the study on the term instrumentness proposed here. The vast majority of researches related to HCI (human-computer-interaction) covers questions such as usability, visual interface, standard platforms etc., in routine tasks such as, for instance, the use of a word processing software or the way the human being interacts with the machine when navigating the on-line network94. HCI is a research area that has often been fed by ideas from different areas such as design, personal computing, cognitive sciences, robotics, AI (artificial intelligence), digital example), or it may be another structure built especially for this, such as the combination of strings, keys and hammers or a certain type of key. Most acoustic instruments have some kind of frequency control, such as the piano, the guitar or the clarinet, which are generally responsible (partially or totally) for the regulation and tuning of certain fixed pitch patterns. These frequencies can be performed in a multiple way, or a single one at a time, which makes some acoustic instruments monophonic and others polyphonic. Thereby, some acoustic instruments are more efficient and enhance the production of one or more partial frequencies and mitigate others, while other ones from different families, type of construction, type of material, etc., react very differently. Certain instruments have both a quality of resonance at certain frequencies and their partials as antiresonance for other partials, vibrating very little (or absolutely not vibrating) in these specified frequencies/partials, making the composition/construction of its timbre is very particular. Therefore, each acoustic instrument will have particular frequencies, emphasized by its resonant system, a kind of individual signature, which is called formant, that is, its set of partials that potentially resonate in that structure, thus characterizing its timbre and making it recognizable to human ears. 93 Quality of efficiency here means that, for the vast majority of HCI-related researches, a constant concern relates to "how" productive the human being can become in terms of efficiency in the manmachine interaction. Obviously, in the ´resent research, my concern refers to creative and performativity possibilities between human- machines- digital instruments, and not the assessment of any measure of productive efficiency. 94 It might be interesting to observe recent researches on HCI conducted in the following places: a.) https://www.hcii.cmu.edu/research; b.) https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Areas/HCI/; c.) http://www.acm.org/media-center/2017/april/chi-2017; d.) http://hci.mit.edu – accesses on October 9, 2017. 117 interfaces development, communication, computer science, among others, since the 1960s. From the 1980s on, this field experienced a rapid and consistent development, with the advent of personal computer. Much of what relates to HCI research, from a mainstream viewpoint, refers to different paradigms and epistemologies out of the usability and efficiency interaction with the computer. It is important to observe that by the end of the 1970s, only scientists and engineers connected to computer and computing areas and some enthusiasts were familiar to something similar to what we currently understand as a computer. From the emergence of accessible personal computers such as the Apple II and the Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, the IBM PC and the Atari ST95, among others, and consequently, the development of applications (software that created and fed costs, expense and revenue spreadsheets, word processors and other applications that supposedly have developed an increase in productivity for ordinary activities) - whether commercial or not –supposed to make these machines accessible to a great number of people. These first personal computers and their respective software applications, initially and almost entirely created and built in small garage companies in the USA, had in common the idea of increasing the human productivity, starting from the idea that any adult could become a potential user. Implicit values such as productivity, usability, efficiency and time management, common to the U.S. corporate environment in the second half of the twentieth century, can be easily found in many of the ideas of application and dissemination of the personal computer and its digital tools. Control, interaction and usability experiments with the mouse, with the operational systems that sought to virtualize an organized and functional office using folders, a viewing of a desktop, the small wastebasket, available for the user to drag the no longer needed document, throwing it off their desk etc., are still currently present in different types of computers and applications. Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold (2007, p. 233) affirm that, in most of the traditional research on HCI, concepts such as transparency and continuity of work are two of the characteristics that represent the ideal form of what a good interaction between user and machine is. Thus, the development of digital interfaces that minimize the perception that the user is utilizing a particular machine are potentiated, often departing from familiar metaphors to the general public, to the detriment of digital interfaces that, despite providing the enduser a possible greater editing power and manipulation, require broader understanding of the information processing stages and, as a rule, leave some of its machinic layers exposed. However, the three researchers make it clear that (ibidem), alongside these researches that try to quantify and develop the metaphorical approximation of the end user to the machine, there is another research tradition, which is based both on the creative power of the man-machine technological interaction as well as the empowerment of creation and intellectual work that such interaction can result. This tradition, as they claim, seems to be more concerned with the creativity and development rather than the unconscious repetition by the user of common routines that can increase their productivity. The authors state that, 95 See more on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers e http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/ - access on October 03, 2017. 118 “Thus, the success of a computer artifact, e.g. a text processing system, is not only a matter of utility and usability in solving standard editing tasks; it is also important that the system supports the writer’s sense of the text being produced, and that the system serves as an environment for the writer’s development as a writer, and finally it is important that the system supports writing as a creative process, and that inspires and also supports the development of writing in relation to new formats interactive, for instance”. (BERTELSEN, BREINBJERG, POLD, 2007, pp. 233-234) It is clear that the interaction between the user and the machine, in this case through a text processing software, can be both potentially more creative and developed – besides providing new forms of usability, and/or developing original interaction ways – the lower their metaphorical quality, exposing machine and application to the user; the more the user interacts with the computer bearing the notion that this is a machine that can absorb both technical and usage new qualities, providing the interaction, as a whole, to be potentially creative. It seems to me, therefore, that the greater the metaphorical disruption that the man-machine interaction provides, the greater will be the power of appropriation of the digital tools for their creative use. Bertelsen (2007, p. 234) (BERTELSEN, BREINBJERG, POLD, 2007, p.234) states that “furthermore, composers’ systematic violation of the metaphors in the software leads us to propose metonymy as a vehicle for users´ appropriation of the software”. By embracing metonymic use during their interaction with the machine, the user dismantles the familiarity provided by the metaphors implemented throughout the development of digital tools, as a rule, meant to increase human productivity in the digital sphere, thus allowing the development of new creative skills or, as Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold write (2007, p. 239), “in order to be able to unfold the full potential of the new tool." This metonymic relationship (or at least its possibility) implies a rupture of the productivity paradigm in the user X machine relationship, commonly found in researches on HCI and adjacent areas. Jackson (2015) states that, "Concepts are building blocks of software systems. They are not only subjective mental constructs, but they are objective characteristics of the development of a system: functionality incrementations that are consciously introduced by the developer to serve specific interests. " The moment it becomes clear that the development of a software – be it proposed for any type of machine – goes through consciously made choices (by developers, by the industry, by quality certifiers type ISO96 etc.) to increment the functionality of certain actions and parameters to the end user, the interaction quality will be directed to certain types of control, action and standardization. Returning to the example previously used by Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold, of a text editing 96 Acronym for International Organization for Standardization, founded in 1943 in Geneve, Switzerland. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for_Standardization - access on November 3, 2017. 119 software, what makes the interaction experience successful regarding creativity, is not just about the computational artifact that emulates a typewriter, with the front physical keyboard and the virtual sulfite paper; issues such as usability and usefulness of the system itself may have already gone ontologically through the process of opening a word processor and typing words in it, thus resolving issues of standard-productivity and basic editing. It seems to be as important, or even more important, for the system itself to be a kind of user support, a creative layer, to the writer who is facing the machine out of the idea, the sensation that a text is being produced, created, edited and that this same system serves as a digitally designed environment, assembled for the development of the user as a writer, as a producer of words, texts, poetry, novels, articles or letters97. Ideally, the digital tool itself becomes moldable to the user and their creative need/specificity, continuing the production process of the text and, at the same time, developing a contiguous environment that inspires new forms of interaction, always leaving the user aware of it all, if so he or she desires. One important element to the assemblage of a musical performance hybrid machine is the production, manipulation and musical interaction software, often called DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). A music production software, as well as a text editor, that brings in it a reasonably clear tension between the simulation of old sound production and editing tools (faders, knobs, trim buttons, FX pedals with drive switches etc.) and the intentionality of providing new forms of production and processing. And there is still the fact that users tend to choose a certain software – randomly or not – and adapt it to their interaction model one way or another, regardless of whether there are options or alternative creation systems. The creation process, often slowly and unconsciously, adapts to the software (which, of course, encompasses important functionality features from the type of machine in which it is inserted), the user is often taken hostage of their style and interactive form, after all, no software is a neutral tool; it acts on the user's interactive forces, making them, in a sense, to operate it in specific ways. Both on the software side that has been commercially rooted for several years, with a reasonably loyal user platform (exe.: Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic etc.), as for commonly used applications in contemporary music and – sometimes – out of the creation and development of the free use software (e.g.: Max, Ableton Live, Pd, Purr, SuperCollider etc.), going through researches that encompass the design of computing interaction tools, through interfaces using MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), OSC (Open Sound Control), among others, there is a growing attention in identifying new paradigms in the relationship man X machine X musical instrument, through issues such as expressiveness, playability, interactivity, gesture, among others. Castellano, Bresin, Camurri and Volpe (2007, p. 390) state that, 97 Try, for instance, to instantly create concrete poetry in an application software such as Microsoft Word, for example. The application will insist on automated standard formatting/tabulating, instantly correcting word breaking, syllables, lines, and paragraphs that are "out" of the grammar decoded by the software and installed in its memory. Trying to break pre-established standards of a software like this is highly boring and often when reopening the file, the application will try to operate again all the existing presets on its system. 120 “The attention of the music computing community is increasingly focusing on the development of interaction metaphors that take into account full-body movements and gestures at different levels of abstraction, and the interaction with an active environment that offers evolution and dialogue capabilities”. Concepts such as affordance and gesturality are important in the field of musical production based on the use of the new digital tools, especially in the ways where new possibilities of interaction in the process of sound/music production are integrated. The idea of new forms of instrumentness goes through both the way the user interacts with their acoustic musical instrument – when coupled to a digital machine – and to the chosen software and applications, and type of computer. Obviously, the idea of a musical instrument already incorporates concepts of technique and a of kind of tool for something to be accomplished. After all, techniques and instruments have always existed, and the latter tend to absorb the renewals provided by technological development, often slowly. Esquirol (2008, p.24) shows that the primitive man already carved the flint stones and that, exactly for this reason, “there, where we found them, we figured out the traces of the first men". For the author, many were the techniques that, from the earliest days of mankind, through the great ancient civilizations, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, in an unprecedented and potentialized way, through the technological development of the early twenty-first century, followed the history of the mankind98. For him, it would be justified to call the contemporary moment as revolutionary, even under the penalty of weaving a fetishization of the subject: 98 It is worth noting that, for Stiegler (2007, pp.23-24) "the process of externalization of memory is realized as history grammar employment, technical history of memory, in which hypomnesia relaunches the constitution of an anamnesic memory tension." For the author, "we have all had the experience of losing a memory-bearing object -piece of paper, notebook, diary, relic, fetish, etc. We then found that a part of ourselves (such as our memory) is outside ourselves." Hypomesic memory is the decrease in the mnesic function, i.e. a certain loss of the natural human ability to remember, memorize data, facts, situations, faces; a loss of memory capacity. On the other hand, anamnesic capacity relates to what is appropriated to stimulate human memory. Thus, the relationship between a performer and his musical instrument carries an entire relationship of physicality and materiality with regard to the memory of how that particular instrument is played, through the memories of what relates to music theory (where certain notes are in that type of interface, where the figurative blocks of scales, arpeggios, chords, etc. are). Thereby, the relationship that takes place between performer and musical instrument, with regarding the memory of playing this instrument, permeates the development of the musical instrument itself and the relationship that the performer has with it (and this will be enhanced in the instrument with its confusing and often complex interaction interfaces). Stiegler (ibidem) states that "the human memory is originally outwarded, meaning that it is, first of all, technical." With the highest processing capacity and portability that current digital technology currently allows, human memory has now become an element of industrial and technological development, where objects that are part of the everyday life give more and more support to the need for memory and storage of human memory (who can you still remember the phone numbers of relatives or family? And the immense number of photos loaded on to objects such as mobile phones and portable tablets, which recall situations, occasions, etc.?). For Stiegler (ibidem), these everyday objects also support the human knowledge, becoming knowledge technologies, which "objectified in the form of devices, generate, above all, a loss of knowledge". 121 "The power coming from science and technique that we, men and women, have had in our hands since the last century, is of such a caliber that, comparing to other eras, it does not imply a simple quantitative increase, but the quotas it has reached, a truly qualitative change. Indeed, we know situations in which something remains more or less steadily over time, so it happens, for example, with what we perceive as the duration of the days and the nights and seasons; we know others in which we record changes, such as when we study the ways of wine elaboration throughout history; however we know others in which variations were so important that they substantially changed the situation. In political terms, this is the change type – when they are more or less punctual –"revolutions". The change to which I refer could be called "revolution". More substantially in the last decades of the twentieth century, there was talk of cybernetics revolution, computer revolution, digital revolution, and telematics or "multimedia" society. Although there was also a warning about the banality of speaking of revolution, of new era etc., what is certain is that enough deeds happened and are happening and there are good arguments to affirm that – especially with the confluence of the information technologies, of informatics and biotechnology – we are facing a social, political, economic and cultural change of enormous relevance. Speaking or not [the word] "revolution", using or not the "new era" qualifier, is not what matters the most, since, in this case, the name does not do the thing." Thus, at the same time I intend to build here a theoretical thought supported by the artistic praxis encompassing the use of digital technologies – technologies that present a singular moment in relation to its development and implementation in the field of arts, among others – it is also not my intention to promote revolutionary and fetishized ideas regarding the use of digital tools coupled with acoustic instruments that may – or may not – provide new forms of instrumentness. The use of new digital technologies in arts and the risk of their fetishization are very apparent and have been observed in other researches. As Villavicencio, Iazzetta and Costa (2013, p. 51) state: "In view of this situation, we believe that it is necessary to maintain a balance in this equation between the instrumental technique and the technology since the continuous invention of new technological tools for performance may not always have desirable consequences [...] It configures thus, a kind of fetishistic exploration of technology that ultimately precludes a more daring development of artistic praxis and in which the use of technological devices becomes an end in itself, disconnected from the aesthetic results it can produce. " It is important to note that the exploration of digital technologies in artistic praxes recurrently requires the breaking of certain paradigms proposed by the continued use of these tools, often constituting musical instruments whose techniques have not even been explored or discovered yet, or even mapped and systematized. The three authors affirm, in the same article, that, on account of the constant improvements in technology, "such systematization may never occur, which would keep the instruments always open to new and unpredictable possibilities" (ibidem). I propose, therefore, considering how the contemporary technology can change the way in which I can 122 interact and play my musical instruments, trying to neither overvalue it nor to neglect it. As Flusser wrote (2007,P. 39), "what is fundamentally in question here is the man-tool relationship; this is a topological matter". Firstly, however, I develop a brief reflection on some ideas such as physicality, affordance, playability, corporeality, resonance and, finally, gestures. All of them, in my opinion, are critical to understanding more effectively the problem of new forms of instrumentness provided by the acoustic instruments when coupled to digital technology. a. Physicality: Del Nunzio (2011, p. 16) states that "what we call physicality here is what relates to the physical aspects of the process of sound/music production: the interpreter’s relationship with their instrument, the interpreter's corporality when playing an instrument, as well as the material properties of this instrument". Not only the physical relationship between interpreter x musical instrument is interesting to me, but also – and especially – the relationship of the material properties of this musical instrument when interacting with the performer. Mulder (1996, p. 33) reports that "many new instrument designs make use of alternate means of controlling sound production – or alternate controllers – to connect forms of bodily expression, to the creation of sound and music in innovative ways”. The author, however, states that any musical instrument, whether traditional or new, presents imperfections related to inflexibility and standardization. This idea is diluted in some of the contemporary possibilities of musical production out of the use and interaction with digital musical instruments and/or expansion of the acoustic instrument when coupled with such digital tools. The characteristics of flexibility and standardization present in musical instruments can cause two new factors when digitally expanded: 1. Accumulation of the acoustic instrument physicality, such as in the case of MIDI-controller keyboards, with their black and white keys identical to those of the acoustic piano (originally reversed in the pipe organs and the harpsichord, around the eighteenth century), coupled sustain pedals etc., and 2. Breaking of the standards and limitations of the acoustic instrument when played with the digital interaction, such as the MIDI controller keyboard itself being used to play isolated parts of a drum set, in certain keys, with specific sounds of cymbal, bass, snare, rides etc. The expansions provided by the use of digital tools in the acoustic instrument are of great strength and morphism, often withdrawing their natural physicality without offering, on the other hand, a new "coherent" physicality between instrument vs created/played sound. However, the exploration of instrumental resources other than those previously established by traditional instruments, when digitally expanded, has aroused the interest of both composers and contemporary performers, from different styles and creation lines, given their possibilities of creation and experimentalism. Within the practice of musical improvisation, this interest seems to be even greater, for the improvising musician open to the possibility of exploring new physical propositions in their traditional instrument, also opens a large amount of creative and performative tools, changing the way the performer relates with the musical instrument. It is worth pointing out that, often, in contemporary music and, mainly, in the practice of experimental music and free improvisation, dissenting physical actions from those commonly practiced in a given traditional musical instrument are more effective in 123 producing a sound with interesting molecular qualities, sounds that are outside the traditional tessiture of that particular instrument, but which are potentiated through these distinct physical inferences. These sounds can be complex, stable, noisiness sounds, modest or even isolated, but they move the sound production from a certain musical instrument from a static and traditional place99. b. Affordance: What I call affordance here is the instrumental quality that every musical instrument possess to be played, interacted, manipulated, in a sense of creation and playability. Basbaum (2002, p. 133) states that "Americans use the word playability to refer to the ease an instrument offers to be played". The neologism playability here bears this idea, and in the present work it also relates to the idea of affordance, in which the potential of an object to be "used" as it was designed to be, in its broadest exploration potential. Every performer has preferences for a certain type/model of instrument, among many others supposedly alike. This quality is, as a rule, one of the most strongly rooted sensory references in the praxis of an acoustic musical instrument and which, in a certain way, also expands to the digital instrument. A short talk between performers who use the digital technology in their musical praxes reveals what one prefers to play the software "A" rather than "B", while another performer can only play when using this or that operating system, mobile computer brand, digital interface type etc. What I seek here is to relate what the intrinsic characteristics with regard to the playability of these digital instruments are, what is each performer’s typical in previously embedded nature, from their own repertoire of solutions and knowledge and in how the types of possible playability out of the assemblage of the acoustic with the digital instrument occurs. Moore (In: MULDER, 1996) defines the compatibility between performer and musical instrument as control intimacy. For him, “control intimacy determines the between the variety of musically desirable sounds produced and the psychocapabilities of a practiced performer”. This idea that there must necessarily be a marriage between performer and instrument permeates the digital tools and often contributes for the accumulation of the praxes previously acquired by the performers, 99 Cox (2008, pp.65-70, In: Del Nunzio, 2011, pp.25-26) gives this physical production of sounds the name of " sound producing actions", which may include "a broad spectrum ranging from unstable complex sounds and procedurally transformed sounds." Del Nunzio also recalls the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, in his conception of musique concrète instrumentale (instrumental concrete music), where sound production takes place through an intimate and indispensable contact between performer and musical instrument and is enhanced in a relationship with noise, expanded instrumental techniques and, at the same time, the exploration of a reduced, focused, cyclical musical material. For Lachenmann (1999 In: Del Nunzio, 2011, p.46): "musique concrète instrumentale means a wide defamiliarization of the instrumental technique: the musical sound can be curved, pressed, beaten, torn, perhaps asphyxiated, rubbed, drilled and so on [...]". At another point, the German composer states (2004, In: Del Nunzio, p.47): "the note played on a pizzicato is not only an event depending on the consonant event in C major or dissonant in sharp major. It can be a string with a certain tension being tightened and attacked against the instrument's neck. I see that as an energetic process. This mode of perception is normal in everyday life. If I hear the sound of cars crashing - beating against each other – I hear maybe some rhythms or frequencies, but I do not say, "Oh, what interesting sounds!” I say, "What happened?". The aspect of observing an acoustic event with the perspective of "What happened?", is what I call musique concrète instrumentale". This attention to sound, an attention in listening and also in the way of building, of playing and in this sound production, is also a kind of necessary full attention for the sound production of hybrid sound, which embraces both acoustic and digital elements. 124 enhancing the metaphorical idea of use and interaction of the digitally expanded musical instrument. It is worth noting here that, for the performer, the relationship between playability x affordance x musical instrument in an expanded environment can be complicated, as it demands readiness and response that, during a performance, can considerably increase the tension between the musician and the available instruments. This intimacy in the control of the hybrid instrument, which often loses their unique features of affordance and playability previously developed and potentialized, may cause even a mature and experienced performer to have a certain sensation of "strangeness" between the controlling musical interface and the obtained sounds . Obviously, this sensation can be channeled out of a creative bias, but this premise cannot be assured beforehand. The playability that can be parameterized in the relationship performer x their acoustic instrument, for example, will be completely distinguished in a performer-machine context, where the affordance power is a completely different one and, as a rule, of a more complex and confusing kind. For example, a mobile computer keyboard, as the one I am using to type this text, has its affordance already parameterized not only by my experience with related keyboards, but also by coding institutions, analysis and certification100. Each key represents a letter and is arranged in a certain position on the keyboard. There are possible combinations, which are different in certain available operating systems (CTRL + ALT + DEL, popular combination on Windows 10, practically does not exist in the Mac OSX system, where the equivalent combination required will be ⌘ + Option + Esc)101. These key combinations or simply specific keys are allocated by DAWs (in different ways), to trigger and process the timbre of the digitalized acoustic instruments in real time. I do not simply play the strings on an electric guitar or bandolim; I also play the software, the computer, through the keyboard and trackball. My instrumental relationship goes through the playability and affordance of such gear. In general, I would say that a lot of practice with these hybrid instruments is needed in order to characterize a symbiotic relationship, somehow closer to the one I have with the acoustic instrument, even when the relationship between gesture and sound is absolutely diverse. 100 Not only my user relationship with computers typing texts and assignments enables me to use the keyboards, also typing courses in my teenage, learning shortcuts for various programs, etc., make a QWERTY keyboard, like this, a recognizable "instrument" to the point that you do not need to look at it to use it. By transforming this accumulation of dedicated techniques in the use of a QWERTY keyboard to functions other than writing a text, the already internalized affordance clash and the new potentialities of the same keyboard are, in fact, confusing and, several times, frustrating, because during a performance, it is not uncommon for me to activate manipulations and processing different from desired ones, in addition to creating loops and/or losing them permanently, by "errors" of interaction with the machine, through the keyboard. 101 Jane Bennett (2010) and Ellion Bates (2012) write in details the relationship between materiality X potential for creating everyday objects, which Bennett calls thing-power, "the curious ability of inanimate things to become animate, to act, to produce dramatic and subtle effects ". This thing-power that we use so much in our daily lives and in the creative production of music, through performing musical praxis is intrinsically linked, in my view, to the notions of affordance and playability that these objects possess, be it a laptop computer, a software or an acoustic instrument, when coupled, where the performer has the physical and creative notion of what can be listed and provided, in terms of musical production. 125 The well-known quotation by Hornbostel (1933, p. 129), stating that “for purposes of research everything must count as a musical instrument with which sound can be produced intentionally”, turns into a difficulty of affirmation, for where I literally, play when equipped with digital and/or hybrid instruments, almost everything I play fails to embrace the direct intentionality of a specific sound. It might be possible to state that, unlike Hornbostel’s quotation, everything that I construct digitally with the intentionality of producing sound can be considered a musical instrument. A patch, a dedicated FX foot controller, a real-time programming, any kind of processing. The intentionality here is directly linked with my will to construct this instrument, and not only in the material playability of the musical instrument itself. c. Corporeality:102 Quality of interlocution between interpreter and their musical instrument, involving the relationship of physical movements on and to the instrument, keeping in mind that certain sound results will be altered in the face of changes in physical interaction of the interpreter on the instrument itself. Jorge L. Schroeder (2006, p. 28) explains that musical corporeality can be seen as, The image of a triangle of relations in which we have in its vertexes the three forces that I deem to act in every musical achievement, arising from the musician, the music and the instrument [...] on one side this hard and unstable balance triangle is not sustained over its three vertexes only; it should be inserted in a particular situation (the musical performance) so that the instability of the struggle of the three forces may balance, albeit precariously, in the concreteness of a specific and unique musical performance so that it can be observed [...].Although the triangle is an acceptable figure as an imagistic scheme for this situation, the game of forces that is established requires a common generating principle so that the game is given in the same sphere and fits entirely in the triangle figure. And what I consider to be this generating principle is the corporeality, in the sense not only of the presence of the physical body, but the sufficiently enlarged corporeality to include their marks as well. We can then take this expression as the meaning of a set of qualities arising from the condition of the body as far as the decals that the body leaves as traces on the objects and on symbolic productions. Therefore, considering the corporeality as a generating principle, it must be present in the three action agents, in other words, in the three vertexes of the triangle. It is interesting to note that the author emphasizes the need to have, mandatorily, a particular situation – a musical playing (a performance) – so that the idea of corporeality may effectively act. This triangular relationship between interpreter, music103 and musical instrument requires the process of sound/music creation to be 102 103 In a way, many of the ideas presented in this topic could also be called "corporeity." Although the example given builds a relationship between musician x music x instrument, I believe it is pertinent to imagine that this relationship permeates not only the idea of music that a performer may have, but it precedes this, in the idea that any sound available and/or feasible sound production on your 126 effective at its fullest for us to get what Schroeder calls the generating principle, defined as corporeality, it is confronted in an acoustic + digital instrumental assemblage, in addition to causing several observations in the interaction between performer and their digital instrument. The idea of corporeality goes beyond a tactile notion that the performer can have towards their musical instrument, is a joint force that encompasses the practice of playing an instrument, with all the background the performer bears with them, as well as their relationships, know-how, physical limitations, breakthroughs etc., they have with their musical instrument. By digitally expanding it, distinct forces may collide: on the one hand, an arsenal of learning and solutions previously found and gone through by the interpreter with their acoustic instrument and, on other hand, the potentialities that the digital instrument and the hybrid assemblage may yield. Emmerson104 (2001, pp. 206-207) states that “in many ways the instrument is an of the body; the instrumental gestures are extensions of vocal and physical gestures”. sense, the idea of a performance body encompasses the musical instrument as part of a performing "greater-body" that is the addition performer + their instrument. When this relationship with the coupling of the acoustic instrument in a large performance machine is expanded, a constantly updating heterogeneities machine prepared to perform with the inclusion of this corporeity previously acquired and developed by the performer in relation to their musical instrument and their own body, conflicts and tensions will inevitably appear. This relationship between body and environment establishes very distinct relationships for a performer. For Iazzetta (2006, p. 39) "the body grants a biological dimension to the music that is rarely noticed in musicology". The author exemplifies that it is through a direct body action (by voice or direct contact through manipulation of concrete objects) that the first musical manifestations of the human being emerge. This direct action with the musical instrument enables the performer, through natural gestures (walking, hugging, touching etc.) and technically acquired (picking, blowing, typing, clicking etc.), to feel, literally, accommodated with the sound creation interface. This ambience crosses the couplings between both my acoustic and digital musical instruments; the position of the P.A. monitors, my own position towards both the acoustic instrument and the computer, the volume and signal control interface, the control and expression pedals, as a rule placed on the ground etc. Iazzetta (ibidem) states that "it can be assumed that even in an environment that is strongly mediated by electronic and digital technologies, the body acts directly in the musical production and musical instrument (acoustic, hybrid or digital), which can also be transformed, during a performance, into a musical idea. 104 Given that body x instrument relationship is a demanding investment (long studies and practices, a symbiotic relationship between player x instrument, "adequate" repertoire, rehearsals, etc.), becomes troubled due to the constant updates that digital or hybrid instruments suffer, for not requiring a physical structure to be completely restructured. Simon Emmerson writes (ibidem) that “the origins of a major tension within contemporary organology: the instruments we have today are the product of a mechanical technology largely finalized by the mid-nineteenth century. The twentieth-century western musical world has seen an unprecedented expansion in permissible sound typology even before the advent of electronics into the mainstream […] the invention of entirely new instruments has been a further stage in this development but has remained firmly embedded with an experimental tradition, producing no long-lasting new inventions”. 127 fruition". The movements originated from the couplings are also developed, learned, trained; my musical instrument is not just another instrument, but a hybrid machine that encompasses different characteristics of relationship with my body. This machine exists, in fact, out of its relationship with my body, in a performance environment. Playing this machine is performing. d. Resonance: In a summarized way, resonance can be seen as the quality that a musical instrument has to resonate, through mechanical vibration and from characteristics of its own material, particular sound frequencies of its typology, in its own body or parts thereof, and may prolong and retransmit the duration and intensity of these particular frequencies. Loy (2006, p. 245-253) states that resonance can be defined as “the tendency of a system to steal energy from, and vibrate sympathetically at, a particular frequency in response to energy supplied at that frequency [...] resonance lies at the heart of virtually every kind of musical instrument”. Thus, certain acoustic or mechanical instruments (i.e. a speaker) have specific characteristics (determined by the choice of materials and type of construction) that enhance certain frequencies and that, when there is an energetic movement of sound production, these determined frequencies undergo an increase in amplitude. What matters here is how this relationship between the typical resonance of acoustic instruments and sound processing and manipulation powers deriving from digital tools and the use of digital instruments occurs. There is a whole scope of referentiality that is lost/expanded/modified through the use of acoustic instruments coupled to digital tools or the performing use of digital instruments. The timbre105 of any musical 105 The notion of timbre goes through complex internal mechanisms, which account for the reception of the wave type which the human system can perceive. It is important to note that sound waves transmit energy without transmitting any kind of matter. For Loy (ibidem), “A wave is an organized traveling disturbance in a medium, such as air. The medium itself does not flow because of the water; rather, a disturbance in the medium travels through the medium”. Thereby, different types of wave will be perceived as distinct timbres by the human ear through the composition that each sound possess from the sum of its partial frequencies, that is, the lowest frequency (low), called fundamental, and their subsequent frequencies, called partial, and entire multiple of the fundamental (f, 2 f, 3 f, 4 f, 5 f, 6 f, 7 f ...) and that change upwards in relation to their pitches and amplitudes. The human ear uses this complex pattern of fundamental pitches and its partial pitches to identify and recognize what we call timbre. Any sound, therefore, has a frequency f that represents its fundamental pitch, followed by partial frequencies, therefore being so named for collectively building this sound, making it identifiable to the human ear and because they partially carry an important part of them that is characteristic of this same sound. Each partial is created from specific parts of the vibratory system of a particular musical instrument (or of the human voice). The way partials behave in frequency and amplitude terms over time is what our ears use to determine the type of acoustic instrument that plays a sound in a particular way. Loy (2006, p.30) states that "not all vibrating systems contain all possible voices". If the f fundamental frequency shows partial frequencies divided by entire multiples these partials are named harmonics. Instruments with harmonic partials, such as the piano, the violin or the guitar have, as a rule, a character considered melodic and/or harmonic, because, according to Loy (ibidem), "frequencies of the harmonics tend to agree in frequency with the pitches of the diatonic scale". Instruments considered inharmonic, such as percussion dishes, bass drums, tympanums, etc., have the vast majority of their frequencies other than the diatonic scale. Obviously, this is a summarized definition of the events which occur both in instruments considered harmonic and in the inharmonic. The strings of the piano or guitar, for example, when they are excited by the hammer or a celluloid pick, will present different degrees of 128 instrument is conceived out of a number of qualities that will cause a considerable impact on their production form based on the way the performer interacts with their instrument, be it acoustic, digital and/or hybrid. Obviously, the environment is the other primordial element in understanding how the resonance of any musical instrument happens. When playing "Allure"106, for instance, in the main hall at the former MAC building, in University of São Paulo campus, I used the same constitution of acoustic and digital instruments as in other performances in theaters and smaller halls (my acoustic bandolim with microphones attached to its wooden top, a MacBook mobile computer, MAX MSP and Ableton Live software and a pair of P.A. speakers). However, given the characteristics of the environment in question, fully built in concrete, with many clear spans and an over eight-meter-high partial ceiling, the resonance both in my acoustic instrument and digital processing was completely different from all the previous presentations of the same piece. Certain sounds caused feedback into the bandolim wooden box in such a way that a change in physical position of playing it was often necessary; the P.A. monitors also had to be far more distant from each other, and in a very distinct positioning from what I normally use, both in rehearsals and in live performances. These facts, added to the natural reverberation of the place, spatialized to the extreme, with great sound diffusion, even those with a minimally executed dynamic, brought not only considerable extra strain to the performance, but also provided unique challenges for the performance of the piece. Playing solo for over fifteen minutes, in a context encompassing an acoustic instrument and a series of digital instruments, in a reverberating environment as that was, in fact, a great learning. In my inharmony, which depend on several different physical factors, such as the type of material of the pick (or if the string is played by fingers and nails), the tension they have, its length, etc. A string under lower tension (found at the lower pitches) will have a higher degree of inharmony than, for example, a string under a high tension (found in higher pitches). Another factor is the degree of inherent flexibility of the string construction itself: nylon strings, found in classic guitars, for example, tend to have lower degrees of inharmony than stiffer strings, such as those found in folk guitars, with steel or bronze strings. Different degrees of inharmony tend to have a total tuning of the less rigid and preferably "looser" instrument, as is in the case of acoustic pianos. Instruments played with the bow, such as the violin, viola or cello, for example, present a higher degree of inharmony when played in pizzicato; though when played with the bow, they will present a lower degree of inharmony, precisely by the regular action of the arc, in constant friction on the strings. For more elaborate technical detail on this subject beyond the scope of this work, I recommend reading some articles and research on the harmonicity and inharmonicity of acoustic instruments, among them: JÄRVELAINEN, Hanna; VÄLIMAKI, See; KARJALAINEN, Matti Audibility of the timbral effects of inharmonicity in stringed instrument tones, ASA, 2001, available on http://asa.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1121/1.1374756; FLETCHER, N. Digital musical instruments, on the other hand, can always be divided into a gestural controller or input device that information from the performer(s) and a sound generator that plays the role of the excitation source. nonlinear physics of musical instruments, 1998, available on: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.586.7286&rep=rep1&type=pdf ; MOORER, James (2009). The synthesis of complex audio spectra, Stanford, 1975. Available on: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/files/papers/stanm5.pdf; HOPKIN, Bart(2009). Overtones harmonic and inharmonic, available in: http://barthopkin.com/overtones-harmonic-andinharmonic/ - Accesses in October 2017. 106 This performance was part of the series of concerts ¿Música?, in its 13th edition, which took place in the current Espaço das Artes (former headquarters of MAC-USP), on October 6, 2017. The main room of this building is entirely made of concrete, presenting huge free spans and an over 8- meter-high ceiling. The recording of this performance is in the attached media of this work, and can also be found on: http://www2.eca.usp.br/nusom/musica_13 --- access on June 25, 2018. 129 view, feeling the music as a phenomenon to be experienced in a hybrid form is something different from thinking about a kind of music that relates to one acoustic instrument only; the experience that a performance like the one exemplified above can provide, through the couplings and assemblages of a performance machine, in an extremely subtle, delicate and specialized environment, makes the performer relate not only to their instruments in a new manner, but also with music, sound and the environment itself in a very singular, particular, molecular way. e. Gesturality: The typical gestures that characterize playing a determined acoustic instrument may determine how the relationship between the performer and their musical instrument is constituted and relate intimately with issues of corporality and physicality involving the performer and their musical instrument. Wanderley (2001, p.636) defines a musical gesturality (in a performance) as “performer gestures as performance actions produced by the instrumentalist during performance”. The gesture quality present in performing arts may present an extremely individual character; while certain gestures are clearly identified as necessary for the sound production, others may not be so easily related with the sound. Chaib (2013, p.159) states that que “[...] the gesturality phenomenon is seen from several angles, the most varied interpretations about it can be found [...] authors and interpreters generally get appropriated of the gesturality concept in a plural form ”. The plurality of the musical gesture appropriation forms deals with cultural matters, musical styles, didactic forms and distinguished artistic praxes. There is also another issue: the inherent gesturality that each acoustic instrument provides is directly connected to the level of intimacy that the player has with the musical instrument. A true repertoire of gesturality accumulates with the organology evolution of each musical instrument, and each one of them is adapted and incorporated differently by each performer. While certain typical gestures are directly related with the sound production and technical interpretation on the musical instrument itself – the player’s hands position when performing arpeggios on an acoustic guitar; the necessary rigidity and precision for a percussionist to perform a determined dense and diversified rhythmic part; the body posture and the way of blowing a musical instrument such as the trombone when a long duration note is executed etc. – others relate with the several ways the performer deals with and translates certain actions with their musical instrument in gestures. As a rule, no gesture is considered right or wrong, at least for the modern didactic standards; there are several dozens of different ways of picking a bandolim or electric guitar (as there several ways of holding the pick towards the strings of these instruments), for instance, that present different results for the sound production and timbre-wise, that unite distinct techniques, individual knowledge base and musical repertoire, among other qualities. However, Godoy (2010, in: Chaib, 2013, pp. 159-160) shows that "studies specifically relating gesturality with a sound phenomenon are recent", even considering that the performer’s body movement can become one of the main sources of expressiveness during a performance - especially when we consider the idea of a hybrid assemblage of the acoustic instrument and the digital instrument. The inherent and accumulated gestures found in acoustic instruments and their interpretative nuances become relatively problematic when the idea of a digital instrument is introduced. Considering 130 the idea that a gesture carries a speech and does not accompany it only, but is also responsible for introducing new information to discourse structures (Zibikowsky, 2011 in: Chaib, 2013, p. 166), it is possible to understand the inherent potentialities of the process of sound/music creation deriving from the creative use of digital instruments, which (de)compose accumulations arising from the acoustic instruments and enable new forms of instrumentness, allowing, of course, new gesturality forms. Chaib (2013, pp. 166-167) reiterates the need to problematize the gesture in an intellectual perspective, when aggregated to the artistic plane, based on the observation of the origin of the gestural movement and its intentionality, quoting the philosopher and educator Susanne K. Langer: "only when the movement, initially a genuine gesture, is executed from the imagination, can such a gesture become an artistic element ". Digital instruments and the coupling of the acoustic instrument to digital technology proportionally expand the study of gesturality involved in the relationship between the performer and the acoustic instrument. Firstly, focusing on the sound, on sound production and on their creative potential, the performer relates to the digital instrument out of a different kind of listening when compared to their acoustic instrument. By removing certain physical abstractions, such as playing melodic and scale patterns, and broadening the tessiture of their acoustic instrument interface, expanding it digitally, the gesturality is both diffuse and assertive, providing, in fact, new forms of instrumentness to the performer. The increased cognitive knowledge of sound, from the understanding that a performer can develop out of what his envelope is, his dynamic and typological qualities etc., provides that the gesturality involved is directly related to a sound production that is very distinct from what is provided by the acoustic instrument. I can perform gestural operations on the acoustic instrument coupled to digital processing with very distinct dynamics, for example, ranging from the pianissimo to fortissimo, obtaining completely different results from both actioning and processing and digital creation, which are not necessarily related to acoustic sound production. Sounds that no longer depend on the use of mechanical or vibratory instruments, created within digital processing, but which are originally interleaved with a hybrid execution, often initiated in the acoustic instrument itself and converted to the digital computer in real time, provide new forms of gestural interaction. There is, therefore, a cyclical and concomitant confrontation to the sound production: the tense and rigid strings on my bandolim still present these physical qualities, among others, in my interaction with the instrument; however, there is an entire network of connected interleaved signs that enable, at very low latency (very close to what we could call "real time"), hitting me simultaneously, with different qualities of processed sound. As a rule, these are the qualities that feed my playing, returning to me during the performance in order to create a sound flow, a performance time flow, materializing the conversation that has existed for a certain time, which is the performance time itself. 131 2.7.1 Hybrid and complex musical instrument When coupled to a hybrid machine, the acoustic instrument becomes hybrid as well; it is no longer just interacted through the musician in its acoustic constitution, in its physicality, materiality and ergonomics. This instrument also becomes an interface for the production and processing of a digital timbre. As a rule, in the hybrid machine, the acoustic instrument becomes a kind of musical instrument "aggregator" of other digital instruments, such as a patch, software, computer, or a loop pedal, for example. In addition to "playing" the acoustic instrument, the performer still needs to be able to play the instruments aggregated to it, interfaced with it and often originally provided out of the interaction between this specific acoustic instrument and the creation/programming of correlated digital instruments107. In many of the digital instruments I have created in recent years, such as the patch papagaIO, in the form of registering in real time and looping the acoustic guitar in Raspas, or changes in the Model 5108 patch, there is always a direct relationship between the acoustic musical instrument and the development of one or more digital instruments that may provide me with not only an extension or expansion of the acoustic capacity but, mainly, a hybridism allowing the creation of new timbres and new forms of unique instrumentness, enabled by the hybrid machine. After all, how can we define what is, exactly, a digital instrument? The use of the term itself, probably created by Max Matthews in 1963 (p. 553), presented serious problems in its definition: "there are no theoretical limitations to the performance of computer as a source of musical sounds, in contrast to the performance of ordinary instruments "109. According to Lima (2013, p. 67), "the simple adoption of the term digital 107 It is notorious that a performer of a particular instrumental formation will, from his involvement with the digital machine and its possibilities of creating, processing and manipulating sound, develop a relationship of "coexistence" between the original acoustic instrument and the developed new digital instruments. Thus, a pianist will tend to develop a type of relationship with the digital instruments that can, as a rule, relate to the acoustic piano in a more prominent way, just as a guitarist will develop a similar path, more related to his primordial instrument. That obviously does not mean that a performer will not start from scratch in his relationship with digital instruments. 108 The patch papagaIO is in the attached material of this thesis, also available online. 109 "There are no theoretical limitations to the performance of the computer as a source of musical sounds, in contrast to the performance of ordinary instruments" (Available on: http://www.jaimeoliver.pe/courses/ci/pdf/mathews-1963.pdf - access on 10.17.2017. In the article The digital computer as a musical instrument, written by Max Mathews in 1963, while he was the director of the research laboratory of the American company Bell Telephone Laboratories, it is clear the enthusiasm for the use of digital computers as a digital instrument. Consideration should obviously be taken of the timing and context in which the article was written. Mathews (1926-2011) was one of the forerunners of electronic music and in the use of computers in the process of composition and processing of sound. The NY Times newspaper, in its obituary, called him the first computer musician (https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/the-firstcomputer-musician/ - access on 10.17. 2017). His enthusiasm for the possibilities of using what was known as a computer at the time of writing of this article is justifiable, given the potential of applications that such machine could (as it happened) to impact on 20th century music. Miller Puckette, author of two of the most used software in contemporary music for processing and handling sound in real time (one of which baptized under the 132 instrument [...] contains the risk of obscuring a complex issue by proposing a simple association with a paradigm that may not be sufficient". The multiplicity of current forms that are considered a digital instrument proves the difficulty in conceptualizing the term. A piano is, within all its strands, sizes and types, basically a piano. A guitar, whether acoustic, electric, solid, semi-acoustic, baritone, fretless, 6, 7 or 8-string etc., is still seen, played and, to some extent, interacted as a guitar. But what can be said about a mobile computer such as a MacBook? Or a software, like Max? A tablet, such as an iPad? Or an app such as Rotor or Flux: FX? Within this myriad of tools, how could we call a sound processing FX pedal as the Fractal Fx-8? Or even a patch created inside the Purr, for example? Obviously, none of these isolated instruments work alone in the purpose of being used as a digital musical instrument110. To some extent, each of them, among dozens of others, form an important part of a type of hybrid machine assemblage. However, each of these instruments has the potential of exploration and use for the musical artistic praxis in different ways, carrying traditions inside and outside the digital scope and accumulating uses and gesturality from other instruments. Maybe I can start here trying to define what a digital instrument is not: a digital instrument, regardless its format or category, obviously does not work without electricity (even a mobile computer running on battery needs to be recharged periodically on electricity); it does not work independently of some type of analogdigital or analog-to-digital-analog conversion; a digital instrument possibly does not possess any type of internal resonance, or one that depends on the choice of materials (no one expects some sound result by proceeding percussive snapping to a computer casing or an audio interface, unless the intention is to capture the sound through some sort of microphone and process it); a digital instrument will not, in short, depend on the main features that are vital to acoustic instruments: format, choice of materials, resonance, vibration, sound propagation etc. Therefore, a digital instrument is the main interface between the performer and the machine, even if the system encompasses several other distinct steps and/or layers – keeping in mind that, in the hybrid machine, the performer still manages the acoustic instrument often coupled to this digital instrument. In the case of software such as Max, for example, the musical instrument will take over the connection of several different tools, such as creating artistic material, composition of themes, ideas, loops, recordings, processing and numerous manipulations, among others. But what is important to question here is: what (and who) exactly the performer is playing right now? The Max software? But maybe using one or more external effects temporarily synchronized with the application; and when the performer uses the computer's trackpad, the computer's own screen, its internal doors that enable the extension and use of other tools? Even if not playing (literally) in any of this, the software Max itself runs over a certain operating system, and both are being processed simultaneously by name Max, named after Mathews), wrote in 2011: "if the difference between 1911 and 2011 is electricity and computation, Max Mathews is one of the five most important musicians of the 20th Century." 110 Try to pick up Max's installation box (when the software was sold this way, as currently it is only available for online purchase, via download) or a Fractal foot-controller, both isolated, and play them. Little but the sound of some "beating" in metal or paper castings will sound. These instruments, differently from the acoustic ones, obviously need to be interconnected, coupled, connected and initiated through certain procedures before they can be used. 133 the processor/memory of the machine. It is evident that the identification of all this processing makes it difficult to identify who is playing what, in what order, and, mainly, how the interaction and artistic use of these distinct digital instruments occurs, commonly regarded as one only thing. The computer allows, thus, to carry, simulate and emulate virtually everything a performer may wish to create in terms of control, processing and sound manipulation, through different types of programming language. In the case of Max, it is possible to start programming it to play something based on visual objects previously stored in the application data base, thus facilitating the initial access of performers who do not possess programming code skills. This modular feature of connecting objects is, in fact, one of the main attributes of this program, in addition to the ease of a creative environment consisted in the digital sphere. Kaiser (2006, p. 1) describes: “[…] How does a free jazz, improvising quartertone trumpet player with no computer language programming experience, one that has been using low fidelity guitar ‘stomp boxes’ on his horn since the mid-1990s, get into writing his own software? At first, I was led to the manna of software for purely practical reasons: I was tired of carrying gear. However, what was originally a practical decision soon became an aesthetic one when I realized the advantages presented by the open-ended nature of a modular software program, namely, that this software would enable me to go beyond the limitations of the pre-existing singular functionality built into the individual hardware-based audio processing devices (stomp boxes) I had been using for years. Even when those stomp boxes were physically connected together in multiples, the possibilities nowhere approached what could be done with a modular software program.” Note that if in a first moment an experienced performer such as Jeff Kaiser chooses the software (having previously chosen the type of mobile computer, operating system, interface etc.) for a practical reason, of mobility, immediately after this choice also becomes aesthetic in nature. Even when, in this example, Kaiser illustrates the use of individual FX pedals, which fall short of the connection possibilities and Max's processing, I could illustrate here with other contemporary examples of modern FX pedals or even specific FX racks; even when several of these pieces of equipment are plugged serially, the nature of creative possibilities is more static than one can build within a modular programming software such as Max for the simple reason that, virtually, connections can be done and undone heterogeneously and swiftly, besides the possibility of performing updates regularly without changing the consistency of the path that the sound travels within the system. Besides that, the ease of changing and saving different scenes from the same sound processing is a potentially creative element from an aesthetic standpoint. The performer can save different scenes of the same processing, with minor changes in individual effects and/or altered signal paths, even opting to open them simultaneously during a given performance. The matter of individual tools for sound processing in a hardware form and a software such as Max that can encompass hundreds of similar digital processes within a single application corroborates with another issue that involves materiality and other forms 134 of instrumentness of different types of digital musical instruments: it is common to have the presence of digital tools that, isolated, would probably not be defined as a digital instrument, for example, a multi-purpose FX pedal or a loop pedal; in both cases devoid of another type of (acoustic or digital) musical instrument, it is not possible to perform any interaction with these tools. The myriad of processing contained in an FX pedal will only be accessible when there is some kind of acoustic sound source connected to it: a guitar, a microphone etc., or connecting it to a digital processing chain (FX pedal, interface, computer etc.). In the case of the loop pedal, we basically have the same situation: it is necessary to connect to it some kind of sound source to be able to interact with the equipment. We will hardly see a performer playing one of these examples in an isolated form, unless they have already loaded the internal memories of these tools with some kind of sound material. Alone, they are not playable111. For Jordà (2002, p. 24), “digital musical instruments can always be divided into a controller or input device that takes the control information from the performer(s) sound generator that plays the role of the excitation source”. In a way, this division is currently valid, because the performer somehow needs to interfere gesturally in the control of information for the generation, manipulation or alteration of sound expression in a digital environment, even prior to it, through programming languages that enable changes in real time that occur out of certain data. One example is another software, the SuperCollider (SC)112. SC is a digital tool that creates sound material from scratch and also processes and manipulates external sound sources through its input. In order to be accessed, the performer must install it in a computer that is compatible with the operating systems that run the SC, currently Mac OSX, Windows 10 or Linux. After the initial settings, you can initiate the interactivity process between performer x machine x digital instrument. It is important to note that the digital instrument, in this example, it is not just the SC home screen; the software is accessed through the computer keyboard and trackpad (or an installed external mouse). I can play the SC without any other type of sound source together or I can plug acoustic instruments or microphones to an external interface coupled to the computer and process the sound material together with the acoustic instrument. Regardless of the performer's choice, in this brief example it is clear that what it plays, in fact, are distinct layers of a large instrument consisting of very different tools. Unlike our previous example (Max), SuperCollider does not display its programming by visual objects, but through specific command lines of the digital programming language of the software, created by James McCartney. The SC language covers hundreds of abstractions organized in different classes, responsible for both the sound material generation and its processing in real-time. The access to the processing is given through specific commands that determine since the nature of the sound material (wave type, envelope features, frequencies etc.) up until the type of processing and in 111 Obviously, there are cases in which an isolated digital instrument, such as a synthesizer, can be played independently of couplings (if you do have speakers) to another digital instrument or tool. In this paragraph, I referred to isolated digital tools which, unlike a synthesizer, need to be connected to other instruments in order to be used. A synthesizer, by itself, is already a "agglutinating" instrument, with an interface such as keys, different sound emulators (the oscillators), filters, EQ's, knobs and control buttons, as a rule, an LCD for viewing edition parameters, etc. 112 Available on: https://supercollider.github.io/ --- access on July 03, 2018. 135 which order or step they may occur. The performer here is responsible for a deeper layer – concerning the interaction with the machine – than what happens in the previous example. McCartney (2002, p. 61) himself states that “Max is quite a different kind of programming language, which provides an interesting set of abstractions people to use it without realizing they are programming at all”. In both examples, initial access occurs through completely blank screens, granting the performer the responsibility of creating and/or processing the sound material. However, the differences between these two digital instruments are drastic. While Max enables an interaction geared to the organization of objects that represent programming abstractions, SC requires the performer to create the desired processes from the coding of commands. Both examples are considered extremely versatile and with great sound processing power. However, in a performance, each of them do not only deal with the material, but also place the performer differently in relation to machine interaction. Here is a common example in which a saxophone is microphoned, and its signal is sent to a mobile computer through a digital interface connected to it. What the performer intends to do is inserting a lag processing into the original signal, called delay. In general, the first example (Max) allows the performer to connect different points, through the trackpad or mouse, which are represented by objects, through virtual cables, where the path of the digitalized sound of the saxophone will be processed in real-time. Figure 7 illustrates this example performed on Max. Figure 7: patch created on Max, with delay processing. 136 If the performer uses the second example, SC, they must enter certain codes in the computer keyboard, booting the software server, responsible for the communication between the command lines and the different classes of objects that can create and manipulate the digitalized sound113. The following image illustrates the same processing of suggested delay, now processed on SuperCollider. Figure 8: patch created on SuperCollider, with delay processing. This processing is very simple and was used here in order to illustrate the different forms of instrumentness between the two chosen digital tools. In a real-life situation, we may find this kind of processing multiplied several times, since the power of creating and manipulating the sound through both software is immense. The matter here is not to point or to elect the best one, or discuss matters of taste and artistic aesthetics etc., because both represent only a small portion of today’s existing software, but rather to reflect on how the performer's relationship with his digital instrument is given. While some prefer mastering different classes and types of code commands, and run them sequentially, typing and changing parameters in the midst of dozens of written lines, others may feel more at ease, creative, by interacting with visual objects that metaphorically allude to buttons, knobs, faders etc., as well as graphs and displays that easily distribute the parameters. Perhaps the most important thing here is the relationship the performer has in real time, during an improvisation, seeking to parameterize a certain procedure while playing, holding their acoustic instrument, interacting with their digital instrument and dealing with the different 113 I recommend two important readings on the technical use and artistic practice of Supercollider, written by VALENTE and RUVIARO (2016) and WILSON, COTTLE and COLLINS (2011), both referenced in the bibliography. 137 instances of acoustic resonance (feedback), environment, light, audio monitors, audience etc. We are still left with a reasonably controversial issue, but it requires a brief investigation. Each software or application has its own range of algorithms created and developed exclusively for it. We can define an algorithm114 as a standard procedure for calculating and resolving certain equations and mathematical problems that will implement a finite number of steps for a given computational task. This makes not only the digital processing internal routines peculiar or idiosyncratic, as it obviously results both in the creation of diverse timbre qualities and different audio processing and manipulation outcomes as well. The problem here is that, when we deal with sound, the results of the same processing or processes of identical sound creation will create very diverse results when performed in different software, even if using the same computer and the same interface. Hence, for some performers, the Max sound is better than the SuperCollider sound, while for hundreds of other performers, the SC is able to create richer and more diverse timbres than Max, for example. Obviously, this is a particular and aesthetic aspect, that has already occurred since the origins of the performer X acoustic instrument relationship, and that for different reasons, was inherited by the scope of the digital instrument. And that extends to operating systems – endless discussions on what OS is the most stable or capable for real-time audio processing or the one that is less prone to occasional bugs and crashes, for the digital interfaces A-D-A, for the developers of dedicated effects or free access etc. Each inference layer that the digitalized signal undergoes will present typical changes and features of the various algorithms created separately115. This implies that the structure of digital instruments may be modular, sequential or parallel, and that each small grammage of its constitution makes the final sound result distinct and particular. The choices a performer must make seem to be simple, however, they often underlie the interaction interface of computer and/or software. The algorithms and all their mathematical "engineering"- and, not less important, the communication stability that each digital instrument has in its ability to receive, process and pass on different types of sound material – are paramount in the way performers will invest time and dedication in learning these instruments. Thus, we conclude that a digital musical instrument can be classified as a complex instrument possessing certain strata that corroborate with each other in its assemblage. Therefore, the choice an interpreter makes for their digital musical instrument will probably be beaconed based on a long learning period, an experience with the musical instrument itself and their instrumental praxis. Features such as 114 According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary of English language, an algorithm is defined as: “a procedure for solving a mathematical problem (as of finding the greatest common divisor) in a finite number of steps that frequently involves repetition of an operation; a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end especially by a computer”. 115 It is also notorious that certain digital tools do not communicate correctly with certain parts of other tools, even if they theoretically have this compatibility. The Duo-Capture interface EX, by the Japanese brand Roland, for example, is compatible with the Windows 10 operating system, however, on certain brands of mobile computers, this digital board cannot overlap a subscription system of proprietary driver that is Windows itself, even in its latest versions, thus causing the complete shutdown of the interface. And this is just one of the possible measurements that can occur in different interface models with different software models. 138 interface type, access to a library of effects and processing, kind of interaction in real time and quantity of machine processing will possibly be considered. Kaiser (2006, p. 2) states that “[…] in choosing a software-based solution and the development of the software instrument, considerations of the long term artistic/musical vision would also necessarily go hand in hand with directly addressing the practical needs of an improviser: 1.) Variety of sound processing options; 2.) Immediacy of operation; 3.) Dynamic control (i.e. the ability to ‘play’, with ease, the parameters of the given sound processing options)”. We must also consider that many performers create their own final digital musical instrument out of the constitution of a particular patch, which comprehend many of these aforementioned layers and that, from a certain moment in the man X machine relationship, underlie the real-time interaction. It is a common praxis in contemporary music, the creation of specific patches for a particular composition or improvisation session, causing the performer(s) to conduct the entire interaction with the machine through what has been designed and developed in this kind of aggregator of an x number of possibilities and saved in this patch. A digital instrument, therefore, can be used out of combinations with one or more acoustic instruments – as is the case of the hybrid machine – as well as it may be used alone, without necessarily being related to any other acoustic instrument. This gives the performer the ability to act as a hybrid luthier116, when the possibilities of connection, coupling and creation of both acoustic and digital instruments become feasible. This kind of instrumental hybrid lutherie encompasses not only the idea of creating processes and manipulations out of acoustic and/or digital sound combined, but also the form of interaction, playability, instrumentness and performativity inserted in this context. The performance also becomes, under this perspective, a place of creation and structuring, where pieces, processes, instruments, etc., are created and exchanged, often in real time. This is the place of the creating- performer, central element in the hybrid machine, previously mentioned in this chapter. This is the main character, often responsible for the machinic assemblage, where creation stems from the instrumental praxis and its relations with the different musical instruments in question. 116 If abstaining from the physical relationships and gesturality necessary for the mastery of an acoustic musical instrument, many of the users and performers who use digital and hybrid instruments become, sometimes even unconsciously, also in digital developers and luthiers. When you choose to create your own sound, based on the inclusion of digital tools in music making, you begin not only to interact with the technological instrument(s), using perhaps sound samples that are already available, presets already configured or already ready-made effects, among other examples, but to develop not only the typology of the desired sound, but the path of running it, accessing it, the parameters that can process it in real time etc. The user also becomes the creator and main developer of his own digital instrument, creating very specific detailing and particularities for one or more digital tools that are used by thousands of other users. The distinction between performer, composer, designer, luthier and developer, in this case, it becomes virtually irrelevant, because the same person may be involved in one, some or all of the stages that correlate during the creation and performance of a digital instrument. 139 Therefore, the relationship between performer X creation x machines x real-time performance potentializes the use and development of hybrid instruments in the experimental artistic praxis in the twenty-first century. The path of creation is progressively turning into a network of relationships that enable the mutual interaction of different apparatuses, musical instruments and processes in real time. This network of relationships becomes the performance environment, this "rug" that accommodates one or more performers and their hybrid instruments, their machines, their histories and their sounds. For Salles (2017, p. 112) "the interaction is thus one of the properties of the network, indispensable to discuss the ways of development of a creation thought". Thus, I move on to an investigation about these interaction processes within this environment, performance place, when assembled by a hybrid machine. 2.8 interaction Perhaps one of the most important intrinsic qualities that a great part of the contemporary digital musical instruments is their portability. The ubiquitous presence of cellphones, tablets and mobile computers do not only democratize access to the digital instrument, as it provides a virtually constant, moto-perpetual instrumental use. It is clear that mobility, if not essential, is an extremely important factor for the dissemination and experimentation of these new musical instruments. Without the need to carry heavy equipment and accessories and assemble an entire arsenal of appliances, cables, energy sources and the like, the mobile computer, tablet and smartphone have become the leading digital performance instruments in the early twenty-first century. Jones (2013, P. 299) states that “in Design practice, what is to as the carry principle defines the essential principles of the mobile experience: personal, communicative, multipurpose, wireless, battery operated and always on”117. interaction that takes place is also ubiquitous and multitasking; it is not rare to see a performer processing some sound material on their portable computer and, at the same time by tapping something else into another digital tool present in the same machine. The human being has adapted fairly quickly to touching glass screens, interaction gestures with screens, finger clicks in small areas dedicated to the control and movement of the indicative cursor (simple, double or even triple tapping to open, close, include, delete, select, etc., different types of materials such as text, photos, images, files, folders, etc., scrolling with 1 or 2 fingers, to horizontal and vertical axes, the use of simultaneous fingers to enlarge and inversely reduce images and navigation screens, directly on sensitive screens or on specific trackpads, etc.). Schaeffer (1988, pp. 35-36) states that music emerges from the interaction with available resources. The French researcher and composer, in his seminal book, Traité des objets musicaux, originally published in 1966, builds on the first chapter, named El 117 The so-called "carry principle" defines, in the area of Design, some of the fundamental elements of the mobile experience and mobility of a given apparatus: size, form of personal interaction, communicability, energy operation, rechargeable batteries, multitasking, connectivity, etc. See: http://www.amancalledadam.com/?page_id=2071 - access on April 29, 2019. 140 Prolegomeno instrumental118, an allusion of a musical instrument formed by three calabashes interacted by a player who knows them not as a musical instrument, but as utensils. Schaeffer describes layers of interaction between the alleged player and the three calabashes that, through repetition and variation, little by little makes the utensil object disappear and builds the bridge to turn the calabash into an instrument. The philosophical construction that the author weaves (ibidem) is interesting, from a purely phenomenological presupposition: "The three calabashes constitute a given and imposed vocabulary that allows poor, but already numerous and free games. And our improvised musician improvises. [...] What is to come is the elaboration of the experience, according to the various possible behaviors against the device. The dominating behavior will determine a type of music, namely a musical field, more prominent than another, primitive because our (intuition), by the strength of playing the calabashes, reaches a particular form of virtuosity that will condition music [...]. "119. The type of music conceived in the hybrid and digital musical instruments is the one that derives as a result of the interaction with the available resources, in a first phase. Thus, instruments that allow only one note at a time, monophonic, as certain models of synthesizers originally built in the 1960s, conditions determined music class, as Schaeffer writes in the example above; a digital instrument such as SuperCollider may create other types of instrumentness and, supposedly, will condition different stages of virtuosity; and a saxophone coupled in a digital system can simply repeat the stages already assimilated and accumulated for generations that the instrument possesses in its acoustic field and/or may be included to new achievements, based on the exploration of the recent resources available. The idea here is exploring, from an artistic praxis assumption, what new ways instrumental and digital resources can provide to new musical circumstances, thus creating new repertoires of exploration and instrumental interaction. Obviously, from the idea of new forms of instrumentness, the construction of new ways of thinking about this relationship is necessary; traditional musical theory is rooted in the instrumental relationships out of the use and composition of acoustic instruments and their conditions of physicality, materiality, gesturality, etc. Iazzetta (2006, pp. 105-106) illustrates this idea of new possible instrumentness very pertinently when reporting the interaction of the performer (and the composer as well) with the first models of digital instruments available in the second part of the twentieth century: Even with the decrease of the monster's dimensions, even if it was no longer necessary to enter their viscera to make it grunt, the interpreter has experienced a cruel confrontation. Often, their safer weapon is the years of praxis with a traditional instrument, that would be valueless against 118 "Instrumental prolegomena", in the sense of broad introductory text containing the preliminary necessary notions for understanding the book. 119 “Las tres calabazas constituyen un vocabulario dado e impuesto que permite juegos ciertamente pobres, pero ya numerosos y libres. Y nuestro improvisado músico improvisa. [...] Lo que está por venir, es la elaboración de la experiencia, en función de los diversos comportamientos posibles vis a vis con el dispositivo. El comportamiento que domine, determinará una clase de música, es decir, un ámbito musical más que otro, pues nuestro primitivo, a fuerza de tocar las calabazas, llega a una forma de virtuosismo particular que condicionará su música [...]”. 141 panels full of buttons and keys labeled with mysterious codes, and mainly against sonorities generated internally in the devices, entirely unrelated to their gestures. Opposite to what occurs in a conventional musical instrument, a slight and short touch on an electronic instrument can generate a remarkably strong sound and of unpredictable duration. This fact has established a cut in the relationship between instrumental gesture and sound output. The mechanical relationship existing in the interaction of performers with acoustic instruments, and that relates to certain logical movements covered by the traditional music education, typified gestures, previously absorbed cultural physicality, etc., may be questioned very prominently when coupling these acoustic instruments to digital systems and often fully subverted when considering the performer x digital instrument relationship. Not only may the traditional corporeal relationship be partially or completely altered, but it is also suggested that many of the new ways of sound production interaction are imbued within the digital instruments. On these considerations with electronic and digital instruments, Iazzetta (ibidem, p. 106) writes that "these relationships are not physically tied to the instrument but are part of the project of the instrument itself. In other words, it is necessary to build, design the relationships between gesture and sound result [...] synthesizing their operation mode". The performer does not only create a specific patch for a given presentation; they create their own way to interact with the digital musical instrument, through expansions and couplings in acoustic instruments, additions of digital tools and control of various expression, of handling and interaction through unconditioned gestures to the proposed sound results, through atypical movements (from the traditional instruments presuppositions) and often conceiving new materiality that has been completely subverted from their original uses – a QWERTY type keyboard used to trigger sound segments, loop certain blocks of sound objects with the spacebar, the use of magnifying and reducing (zoom in and zoom out) with two fingers, on mobile computers trackpads, use of controls and various joysticks to trigger and modulate synthesized frequencies, effects and control processing of specific parameters, etc. The hybrid and/or digital instrument allows the gesture x sound ratio to be imbued with any type of permissiveness, linked only to the performer’s creative, technical and aesthetics options. It is not possible to have a unique mapping of all the actions and gestures possibilities that a certain hybrid or digital instrument is capable of, even because its genesis, obviously encoded and written in zeros and ones, can receive partial or integral updates over the months, increasing the interaction potential and correcting possible implementation errors. Another factor is that the same digital instrument becomes a kind of timeless Phoenix, because the capacitation of machines and operating systems develop over the time, offering new types of connections, standardization and processing power, making the same digital instrument more heterogeneous in relation to its use over the years. I illustrate this fact with a very brief comparison with the same digital instrument, Max, and its use in 1990 and 2018. One of the main features that Max initially introduced was allowing the composingperformer to operate information and manipulations alongside the scanned signal, which means, it not necessary to wait for processing 1 to be carried out to move on to processing 2, and so on. Originally, the software was not able to process audio 142 digitally converted even at deferred time120; its availability in the 1980s and much of the following decade was exclusively for Macintosh computers, which in many models offered a simple MIDI121 interface, with an input port and other MIDI output, built in and configured on the system. So, Max was able to deal with digital information via MIDI in "real" time (the latency of the MIDI protocol in its initial implementations is notorious), enabling a series of simultaneous procedures. It is worth recalling here that the MIDI protocol does not transmit audio, but rather, binary information that parameterize several stages of sources generating internal sound in the computer itself, or external in sound modules or synthesizers. In addition to the processing innovation of one or more effects in parallel122, Max allowed the performer to see what was happening, through the visual interface provided by the Macintosh system, interacting with the mouse pointer and the QWERTY keyboard of the computer itself. This combination of interaction/visualization and parallel processing caused the application to be embraced with reasonable enthusiasm by different composers, improvisers, sound artists and audio engineers often creating new types of digital instruments specific to different pieces or performances. About the need for developing certain interaction features in the initial versions of Max, Puckette (2002, p. 32) states that, “[...] The separation of the real-time control problem into separate tasks was a key advance necessary for the computer to act as a musical instrument. Previously, computer music programs (and indeed almost all computer programs in general) enforced a sequence of actins on the user. The separation of the program into parallel tasks permitted the user to control the sequence of execution of the program by selecting which task to trigger next. For example, in a multi-tasking environment, we could describe a piano as 91 tasks: one for each key and pedal. The performer – the piano “user” – chooses in which order to trigger the 91 tasks and how many times they will be triggered. The piano enforces no pre-determined sequence. This notion of task can be seen clearly in the boxes of the Max paradigm, which ‘trigger’ each other via their connections. The idea predates the invention of MIDI (and Max was never conceived as a MIDI program), but the availability of MIDI input and output for the Macintosh computers was convenient for early Max users [...] The parallelism so visually apparent in a Max patch is intended to allow the user to make computer programs that follow the user’s choices, not the program’s. Max patches could work as musical instruments”. 120 In fact, neither Max nor any other software of the time, nor Macintosh computer models at the time were able to convert and process audio in real time, a fact that was only achieved throughout the second half of the 1990s and consolidated as of the 2000s. 121 MIDI: Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a technical communication protocol between different types of equipment such as digital interfaces, synthesizers, personal computers, software, digital units etc., which allows the interconnection of communication from one another. See: http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol1/aps2/ - access on November 10, 2017. 122 Strictly speaking, any computer processes the data linearly, though it is not noticeable to the human being, due to extreme processing speed of the machine. Therefore, there is also a kind of "illusion" in the user that the computer is processing different types of data in parallel. 143 If we look at almost three decades forward (2019), finding the same software in its eighth edition, two distinct considerations are observed: a.) many things are different, the potentialities implemented natively to the software itself are considerably diversified, its visual interface has evolved enormously in relation to the early editions and, b.) there are many relationships between software and performer that remain similar, some of them, the problematic ones, have risen exponentially, as the challenge of initiating a new patch from a blank screen and an immense arsenal of possibilities. The performer, for having more development options, increased power of digital information and new technical and aesthetic possibilities (various interaction controls, OSC123, MIDI, light, video, sensitive screens, etc.), also finds more interaction, control and creation challenges. In a sense, a digital instrument such as Max (among others) is a tool that allows the performer to create a new instrument before even creating some kind of music out of this instrument. In a simplistic comparison, it is possible to state that, when opening a word processor, the user as a rule will start to write something with it, which can be a simple memo, some personal letter or an academic, scientific work, such as this thesis. The user can configure basic parameters, such as the type and size of the font that will be printed on paper, where the tabulations, quotations, use of italics, etc., but basically they will focus on the construction of the text itself, on the use of original words and concepts, on creative work. The user does not need to create their own alphabet, and from it, start building their text; they do not need to develop the grammatical rules that will regulate this supposed alphabet, and so forth. When opening a new patch in Max, for example, I come across a blank screen. Before I even play a sound, I have to create the necessary vocabulary to construct a musical text, or other creative tasks that I originally intended to use this digital instrument for. Note that, before mastering the digital instrument itself (MAX), I, as a performer, should constitute a considerable command over my mobile computer (and its installed operating system), in order to start building a new digital instrumentness layer, out of the creation of a new patch. It is the multiple domain of these distinct layers that will bring to existence a musical performance based on the digital instrument, as well as coupling with an acoustic instrument. Zicarelli (2002, p. 44), when comparing the startup of Max's home screen with other applications or software, states that, “The startup state of Max is the same: upon opening the program, a window appears with nothing it. However, this window is designed to facilitate construction not of a text, but of computer music tools […] what could possibly be more intimidating than a blank screen that says implicitly that the user must first create instruments before making music? […] In other words, Max – the program that does nothing – offers the promise that learning it and figuring out how to create its ‘documents’ can lead to results that are satisfying in a way that using prefabricated software would never be”. 123 Acronym for Open Sound Control, computer communication protocol, synthesizers, applications, sound, light and multimedia processors. See: http://opensoundcontrol.org/introduction-osc --- access on December 10, 2018 144 The relationship Zicarelli illustrates here, between user and software, can be relocated to many of the contemporary hybrid and digital instruments for musical creation and performance. The interaction forms and possibilities embedded in a situation like this will probably extend much of the performer’s knowledge base regarding their acoustic musical instrument, since it allows the creation of not only new digital instruments from scratch, as it encompasses the idea of digitally expanding previously acquired resources, through years of praxis of this same acoustic instrument. These resources provide interfaces that, despite being digital and used to control more complex sound processing systems, they can or not display a specific mapping between gesture and sound, allowing a type of static control that does not necessarily relate to the performer’s (s) gestural movement through the idea of control and interaction of computational systems and, consequently, of the digital instrument itself from a fixed, static control. This type of control is much less related to the performer's physical interaction with the machine and the digital system, but with a switching, on-off type interaction, as for example, pushbuttons and footswitches controllers, various MIDI controllers, such as keyboards, faders, knobs, glass touch screens etc. 2.9 Interactive system = hybrid machine The process of creating a hybrid machine presupposes the mating of different tools, machines, musical instruments and various apparatuses, set together, creating a kind of interactive system between the performer, their machines and musical instruments, within their own performance, each of which as a kind of creating agent. This fact encompasses the idea that it is necessary to seek a reduction in the communication time (latency) and also interaction flexibility among all the participating agents in this same subject-machine process. For Giannetti (2002, p112), "this process is both about looking for the reduction of the distance and reaction time and the flexibility in this inter-relationship."124 It is a classic example of interaction between two or more agents in the same environment, feeding back the exchange of data to one another. The classic interactive interface model by William Bricken (1983) is still valid in this case, though exponentially enhanced by new digital technologies: [feedback] agent A (performer) ß information à agent B (machine) [feedback] 124 “Este proceso trata tanto de buscar la reducción de la distancia y del tiempo de reacción y de la flexibilidad en la interrelación”. 145 In this well-known model, Bricken tries to simplify the type of interaction that occurs between two agents in a data exchange process, in this case, between the performer and the machine. However, what makes this example just illustrative is the fact that the performer, in a real-time performance situation, needs to deal not only a single machine, which in this case is not just a single isolated object. The performer has to deal with their own musical instrument, the different machines that make up the hybrid machine, their hybrid and digital instruments, etc. That is why Bricken originally introduced the idea of context when presenting this model of interaction. The context is what will necessarily determine the formation of structures and processes in the interactive system in question. The context, in the case of some examples addressed in this work, depart from the assumption that one or more performers have to deal with different types of interaction, with different tools and instruments, in real time, affecting the performance flow and is equally affected by both the expected and the spontaneously occurring results, at the moment, characterizing a the behavior that Giannetti (ibidem) gives the name of "Acción-Reacción", which for the author is the primordial feature of the man-machine interface relationship. The author also shows the concern that this relationship allocates in the temporal factor, being one of the most important referents in man-machine interaction. For her, "alongside the context, the temporal factor is, therefore, the other referent that plays a relevant role both in the perspective of optimizing the interaction itself and as a recursive process"125. These issues, among others, are amidst the central investigations of the real-time interaction processes, especially in the context of performer X hybrid and digital instrument, which encompass many different inferences and types of feedback. The lapse of time between thinking creatively, reacting muscularly when interacting with the different types of assembled instruments, to provide physical interaction, to be fed with the results provided by such interactions and manage the performance flow, granting feedback and promoting the performance continuity, all at the same time, illustrates how intense the performer’s experience when using new technologies in a musical performance.126 There is still the fact that, in the context of a musical and experimental creation performance, we deal substantially with the sound. For Santaella (2001), 125 “paralelamente al contexto, el factor temporal es por consiguiente el otro referente que desempeña un papel relevante tanto desde la perspectiva de la propia optimización de la interacción como proceso recursivo”. 126 It is worth adding that, in the vast majority of interactive processes between man-machine, real time is, in fact, a simulation, an illusion, because any machine will take, as fast as it can, a few milliseconds to process any type of information. For Giannetti (2002, p.114), “Algunos autores creen, incluso, que la noción de tiempo real, inventada pelos informáticos, resumiría perfectamente la característica principal de la informática: la concentración en el presente, el tiempo puntual o la operación en curso, que se opone a los estilos hermenéuticos, o al tiempo circular del lenguaje o tiempo lineal de las sociedades históricas […] los llamados procesos interactivos en tempo real como simulaciones del llamado tiempo real, dado que cualquier transmisor o receptor necesita un tiempo específico de codificación y decodificación del mensaje (sin mencionar el tiempo necesario de entendimiento y procesamiento de la información recibida, o el tiempo de preparación y reflexión del mensaje a enviar”. 146 "Emanating from a source, the sound propagates through the air by pressures and depressions, traversing trajectories, subject to deformation, whose contours and shapes never get steady. Here is where the primordial quality of the sound, its evanescence, made of streams and refluxes in continuous growth comes from, pure temporal evolution that never sets in a spatial object. The sound is omnidirectional, borderless, transparent and capable of achieving great latitudes. We cannot trip the sound. On the contrary, it crosses us [...] therefore, quali-signs are available and open signs, signs of multiple possibilities. " The horizontal, linear and causal discursiveness of the traditional idea of musical time is confronted, out of the assemblage and practice of the hybrid machine, with the idea of a vertical and intensive performance time, mainly by the fact that the performers deal with the sound production from molecular stages (through their musical instruments and an attentive listening, focused on the concrete capacity of their acoustic instruments) in a free improvisation environment. As Santaella previously described, we cannot not trip the sound, but it crosses us. And by crossing us, it boosts the performance flow, through new acoustic, digital, and/or hybrid acoustic potentialities, favoring the sound creation and its subsequent flows in the man-machine relationship. Thus, these musical and sound creation processes provide a more immersive, static performance time that can create fewer discourses and more environments, referring to the Proustian idea of a piece of time in pure state, devoid of pulse or measurement and that enables an assemblage with the energetic qualities of the sound "in itself". Obviously, it can be difficult to hear sounds "in themselves" without looking for the discursive and syntactic nexus in them, after all, this is how we, westerners, are used to listening to music. However, it is precisely at this point that there may be an interesting creation potential, which originally encouraged me to carry out this research: the possibility of a more liberated experimental creation, free from this such absorptive horizontality and referentiality in western music, out of the acoustic instrument coupling with the digital machine. In a sense, it is the development of a creative practice intensified in sound and a type of listening that challenges the linear, discursive logic and direction of verbal language; a "dive" in the sound, as proposed by the Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), in his piece "Quattro Pezzi "(1959)127, among others. The focus is on the vertical and singular powers of each sound or each combination of sounds, through the organization of a continuity based on less linear, discursive and directional assumptions, hence granting the performer a fragmented, somewhat "holey" continuity, opening room for listening to individual and singular sounds, their contingent relations and is based, finally, on a multiple and complete time of simultaneities. 127 Available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfTjz6emd7c – access on July, 9 2018. 147 2.10 Moving-interaction {open interaction} This multiple and simultaneous time and the unfolding of a powerful and intensified listening also occur through multiple and simultaneous interactions that the performer executes, as described. It is a time delineation through resonance, a step-by-step unfolding through multiple interactive sound creation possibilities: the strings of the bandolim, the keys of the saxophone, the triggering of sound samples recorded in real time and re-inserted into the performance flow, processed or not, in deferred time, from a simultaneous construction with the groping of touch screens of tablets and computers, trackpads, mouse, etc. The "handling" of the performance flow, in the case of a hybrid machine, is always simultaneous, always multiple, always hybrid. Even when silent, the performer can "silence" multiple sources of sound creation, multiple interfaces and processing. It is not uncommon the occurrence of echoes, repetitions and processing continuations performed seconds before and that, contingently, are still resonant, even when the performer is steady, "quiet", in silence. If in traditional music every gesture has a beginning, middle and end, with equivalent well-delineated sound qualities (which, consequently, refer the listener to the idea of a linear and causal time), in a machinic, hybrid thought, the performer (and their supposed listener) are immersed in focused thought on the texture of sound, on the assembled environment and the performance texture itself; Velloso (2013, p. 254) states that the "machine, the technical objects, suddenly present not just a new vocabulary, but the promise of a new syntax." The performer creates, interacts, plays, processes and manipulates, simultaneously as part of a result of relations among several complex components, several lines of force; in this environment, the time often seems to have no direction. In a sense, this creating-performer is not only involved with a creative syntax from the machine and the hybrid instruments; they also relate to the objects involved in the performance, resizing it out of this relationship. Their techniques and their own creative practice, part of these new features provided, sometimes out of other musical instrument praxis previously incorporated into their knowledge base. However, these new resources are inextricably connected to a new way of performing, interpreting, creating, and playing. The performer’s body relationship with their acoustic, digital and hybrid instruments is therefore contingent and singular to each assembled performance. Obviously, the practice of a "same" hybrid machine128, out of the constitution of the same components 128 Conceptual idea; the machine, even if connected and coupled to the same instruments and tools, is never the same. The becomings, desires, moods, affections, the environment etc., are never the same. In a way, something also happens in the practice of an acoustic instrument. A pianist practicing on the same piano, every morning, the same piece, for a certain period of time, has access to the same instrument and the same musical discourse; however, their practice will be different every day. Sometimes they may believe that the practice was more potent and creative; in others, the reverse etc. The issue with experimental praxis with a hybrid machine is that even if I use the same tools and instruments to design this machine (the same acoustic instrument, the same foot controller, the same mobile computer, the same patch, etc.), and even so, my praxis happens in the same physical "environment" (as my rehearsals with duo ar+2, weekly in LAMI studio, in the Music Department of ECA, SP), the environment during each performance is unique, the materials will always be distinct, sometimes starting freely, many others, with some previously allocated ideas. And yet, every day my mood, my relationship with acoustic and digital musical instruments and my own relationship with what 148 and their couplings, can lead the performer to greater mastery and instrumental knowledge and interaction of the involved parts and the machine as a whole. However, at each performance, a new environment is assembled, a new performance time and its subsequent flows are provided. Deleuze (2016, p. 186) states that "an assemblage can be dragged by its abstract lines"; these are creative, challenging, destabilizing, empowering, mutant, vital, destructive lines at the same time. The performer handles (or at least will tries to) the multiple heterogeneous elements involved in that particular performance so that they remain together, for some time, mutually relating, through the very musical creation and interaction executed by the performer. All this, therefore, simultaneously remain together during a performance. The emergencies, the intensified listening, the new forms of instrumentness and interaction with different acoustic, digital and hybrid instruments, the time flow, the horizontal and vertical musical discourses, the different becomings, moods, etc. Interactive action and reaction, in continuous feedback, in constant feedback, providing different perceptos, continuous stimuli, in an also continuous perceptual sensation of immediacy. The interaction, as a consequence, is uninterrupted, complex, emerging, conscious and unconscious, controlled and out-of-control, in contingence. The interaction is never static and closed; it is, finally, open, always on the move. 2.11 Gesturality and control The current technology has not only brought a great development of mobile computers, software and applications. This development accompanies the creation and new propositions of interfaces of capture, decoding and gestural processing, more accurate and with less latency, making them likely to be used not only in the composition process, but also in live performances. Technology of human gestures and movements capture and coupling in acoustic instruments presents an advanced stage of development, enabling and implementing new forms of instrumentness. Developments in correlated areas such as HCI, based on the simultaneous control of various processing parameters, motor coordination and continuous manipulation of sound material, coupled with the use of different digital tools, have allowed the use of mobile digital technology in different musical contexts. Many of the contemporary forms of gestural interaction between performer X digital instrument occur continuously and not only by the interaction-as-choice, in which the user decides by clicking or tapping an "a" or "b" option, for example, potentially bringing new challenges to control the sound material, processes and the performance itself. Wanderley (2001, p. 633) attributes the differentiation between the type of human interaction with computational technology in which a certain type of control occurs during the action (e.g., a MIDI controller keyboard using softsynth, where certain sound is triggered after a certain key is actioned, etc.) and another form of interaction with digital technology, from the "instantaneous" mapping of gestures and movements, each of us, while performer, calls it "music", is different. The example, therefore, is valid from the perspective of a consistent praxis of a hybrid machine, with the assumption of acquiring instrumental knowledge and techniques that can potentiate their use creatively. 149 in which the control is not fixed and the variables immediately affect the result presented. Wanderley quotes researchers Hunt and Kirk (ibidem), illustrating the characteristics of a type of ubiquitous gestural control in man-machine interaction, stating that, “In stark contrast to the commonly accepted choice-based nature of many computer interfaces are the control interfaces for musical instruments and vehicles, where the human operator is totally in charge of the action. Many parameters are controlled simultaneously and the human operator has an overall view of what the system is doing. Feedback is gained not by on-screen prompts, but by experiencing the moment-by-moment effect of each action with the whole body […] consider various attributes as characteristics of a real-time multiparametric control systems: a.) There is no fixed ordering to the human-computer dialogue; b.) There is no single permitted set of options (e.g. choices from a menu) but rather a series of continuous controls; c.) There is an instant response to the user’s movements; d.) The control mechanism is a physical and multi-parametric device which must be learned by the user until the actions become automatic; e.) Further practice develops increased c ontrol intimacy and thus competence of operation; f.) The human operator, once familiar with the system, is free to perform other cognitive activities whilst operating the system (e.g. talking while drive a car)”. By observing some of these characteristics attributed to a gestural and multiparameterized decoding system, which may occur during a real-time performance, it is possible to understand the importance of questioning and investigating the forms of instrumentness provided by new digital technologies. In the face of this presupposition, the human body (and the body relationship with their musical instrument) becomes fully responsible for the action control of the digital instrument, opposite to the fixed order (menus, turn-on/off clicks, etc.), besides allowing an interaction without fixed order of actions (such processing stage is only achieved when a certain previous stage is reached, etc.). The idea of interacting with multiple facets of parameterization enables the performer to execute new interactions, playability, presence and gesturality, (re)building the idea of playing an instrument in a unique way. A determined gesture can be configured to access different procedures in different instruments, simultaneously129, which may, in turn, be pre-programmed or random action mappings, which will be configured in new layers of sound heterogeneity. Many of the metaphors of usability in digital interfaces can be implemented in new ways, such as the clickresponse or the drag and drop, just to mention two examples. If the performer had previously needed to use the pre-determined configuration of a typical action such as clicking on something (via an external mouse, trackpad or even 129 As aforementioned, accesses are never simultaneous, but linear, however, given the power of data processing of current mobile computers and portable digital devices, both for the performer as for the listener, the feeling is instantaneous, of simultaneous processes. 150 by touch screen) in order to have a reactive response to this procedure, some of the gestural control interfaces may provide the same reactions previously established by the click-response (among many others) to another level of interaction. A performer can, for example, set up a simple recognition gesture from the palm of their hand to open a certain procedure of sound manipulation, converting certain information into X, Y, Z axes, etc., and configuring the speed of action of this same hand, when moving in the air, performing multiple operations that would require, if embedded in the traditional system of clicking and wait for a result, dozens of clicks that, important to emphasize here, would never be simultaneous, but in sequence, no matter how fast they have been executed. Not only does the need for repetitive and muscularly fatiguing gestural actions, as countless other performing and creative possibilities are gained. However, in order to achieve a kind of control intimacy (control intimacy, where I also believe there is an idea related to a kind of "intimacy-of-interaction"), a constant praxis is necessary and, of course, the procedural understanding of these interactive forms. The idea of a musical creating-performer expands, overcoming the notion of interaction with a single musical instrument (or more than one instrument at the same time), departing from the notion that their instrument can be multiple and multifaceted, encompassing different, interchangeable, multi-tasking propositions that may occur, as a rule, almost simultaneously to one another and, perhaps the most important here, in real time with the performance. Therefore, this idea encompasses the creation of sound as a central element, no longer exclusively out of actions on a traditional instrument, neither executed out of the conception of a computer where forms of interaction-as-control occur 130. The new forms of interaction and instrumentness will then provide the performer not only with new ways to access different parameters and/or sound manipulation procedures, but also with a complete reconfiguration in the way the creation of sound, the acoustic material, and the constitution of the musical performance occur, through the couplings between the different technical objects and musical instruments, often transforming the way to "operate" each of them131. 130 The concept of interaction-as-control was initially constituted by the French musician and researcher Henrik Frisk, in his thesis Improvisation, computers and interaction: rethinking human-computer interaction through music 2008. This concept was mentioned earlier in this work and will be investigated again in the next chapter, from a practical point of view. 131 In a way, the practice (and necessity) of "inventions of techniques" is not only evident in the praxes encompassing the use of acoustic instruments and digital technologies, such as, most of the time, an effective need. However, it is a fact that many musicians now have a certain fascination with technology, a type of technological fetishism may occur, as mentioned earlier in the text. Another fact is that by embracing techniques from recording studios and different sound practices such as Musique concrète, elektronische musik and electroacoustic music, among others, in a mobile, compact way, many of the explorations of the new gestural and sound possibilities of traditional instruments have been converted into technical explorations of sound. As Velloso (2013, p.297) states, "preserved as images and models, equipment, techniques and the technicality of the studio became, despite its material and effective absence in the creative process and sound creation, sources to engender new processes of creation and musical invention, reflecting on the development of a 'technomorphic' instrumental writing". Quoting Costa (2016, p.16): "Technomorphism, according to Tatiana Catanzaro, relates to the "metaphorical use of a technological process employed in a medium different to what it was designed for, originally." Another important feature to be mentioned is that through these hybrid praxes of sound 151 Obviously, I try to relate here with the idea a digital musician, constituted from the idea of use and interaction with hybrid and digital instruments, through various layers of interaction, organization and usability, as described here so far. As Hugil affirms (2007, p. XV), “The digital musician, therefore, is not one who uses only those technologies but it rather a product of the digital culture”. The digital musician is therefore a result not only of their interaction with available technology, which is and will always be mutant, upgraded, reformulated, but mainly, constituted out of the conception of a complex, machinic environment, consisting of different technologies that can provide new forms of instrumentness. Hugill (ibidem) writes that, “Digital musicians are, therefore, not defined by their use of technology alone. A classical pianist giving a recital on a digital piano is not really a digital musician, nor is a composer using a notation software package to write a string quartet. These are musicians using digital tools to facilitate an outcome that is not conceived in digital terms. However, if that pianist or composer were to become intrigued by some possibility made available by the technology they are using, so much so that it starts to change the way they think about what they are doing, at that point they might start to move towards becoming a digital musician […]”. It might be pertinent to recall here that the idea of musical technology is not new and precedes the development of digital technology initiated at the end of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Magnusson (2016, p. 154) weaves an interesting thought on the subject, by writing, “Today we talk about music technology, a two-word coinage that conjures up the image of plastic- or metal-surfaced equipment offering interaction through rotating knobs, sliders, or buttons, which are mapped to functionality represented on a screen of some sort. However, a quick etymology of the word ‘technology’ clearly demonstrates that we are not discussing plastic gadgets here, but rather an embodied knowledge, skill or craft. The root of the Greek word techné is “wood “, but creation (acoustic + digital, but which were also performed with electronic instruments in past decades, are often still in use today), which seek sound expansion through the expansion of instrumental possibilities, also make constant use of "extended techniques", where the exploration of the gesturality and different possibilities of sound production of individual instruments are strongly practiced. This term, according to Velloso and Ferraz (2011) "became common in the musical environment from the second half the twentieth century on, referring to the ways of playing an instrument or using the voice that escape from the established standards mainly in the classic-romantic period. In a broader context, however, it is perceived that in several periods of time, the experimentation of new instrumental and vocal techniques and the search for new expressive resources resulted in 'extended techniques'. In this sense, it can be said that the term 'extended technique' is equivalent to 'non-usual technique': way playing or singing that explores instrumental, gestural and sound possibilities little used in a given context historical, aesthetic and cultural." The experimental practice of the hybrid machine therefore encompasses the use (often unconsciously) different musical aesthetics, sound practices and experimental techniques, in a context of sound improvisation and use of extended potentialities and resources. 152 at the time of the early philosophers, it had begun to denote the craft of producing something out of something else […] The word is not used much until the 17th century, which is when it enters the English language. At no point did the word signify ‘objects’, but rather the skill of doing things […] we do music technology: we don’t buy it, own it, or use it. Thinking, designing, discussing, performing and composing are all acts of music technological nature. Musical instruments are the tools of music technology and represent the music-theorical framework of the specific culture. However, let’s not forget the Greek origins, where the technology was about shaping something out of something else: in contemporary music technological practice, we are applying hardware, code libraries, communication protocols, and standards that become the material substance of our design explorations. We are working with designed materials, not wood or skin, but entities that already are of an epistemic nature”. The new technologies make the interaction relationships between human being x musical instrument a little more complex, by proposing not one, two or ten, but basically endless possibilities of sound constitution and the offered ways of interpreting– and it is worth observing: the initial condition for any type of interaction is the interfaces themselves; the access to endless possibilities of interaction, makes it easy to imagine the problems related to the creative use deriving from this situation – making it less apparent what each agent is or is not capable of performing in the constitution of a digital instrument. The complex organization of multiple interfaces, mapped and/or gestural controllers, protocols, analog-digital conversion patterns, software codes, patches, specific algorithms, different types of hardware and software, abstractions etc.132, is part of my hybrid and digital instruments, offering very assorted 132 Some patches are being created separately and organized into smaller parts that can say inside other patches (these parts of the whole, configured to exist within other larger parts of the patch, are called abstractions). The idea of abstraction in the English language is based on the concept of encapsulation, in software such as Max or Pd Purr, among others. Briefly, when using an abstraction, the user departs from the idea of encapsulating a certain amount of codes and algorithms programming within some other object that is present in a layer below, and so on. Nothing prevents the use of as many layers as you want in the construction of a patch, abstracting certain parts, inside each other, so to speak, infinitely. Each abstraction represents an independent system file, which may suffer updates separately and regardless of the rest of the patch, to the extent that a kind of malfunction, which may happen when using a particular patch for some years and other systems belonging to the machine ecosystem are being updated (operating systems, specific drivers of digital A-D-A interfaces, video drivers, processors, different versions of the software, etc.). Once saved, abstractions can even be used in different patches, constituting similar tasks to different digital instruments, with small changes in parameters and settings. Abstractions are also significant with regard to the use of a previously developed and absorbed by the performer for some time, and that can be reused in a new situation, with other types of resources. See: https://docs.cycling74.com/max5/tutorials/max-tut/basicchapter15.html and https://docs.cycling74.com/max7/vignettes/abstractions --- accesses on September 7, 2018. I believe it is pertinent to compare the idea of abstraction possible to be executed in some digital instruments with the concept of the 2010 American film Inception, which mixes science fiction with neuroscience and psychology. Situations of life in deferred time occur in layers in the subconscious of the characters, who deal with important abstractions related to certain specific events (relationships, 153 material constitutions of materiality belonging to the acoustic, physical, analogue world; possibly, the constitution of a digital musical instrument confronts certain paradigms such as "where does it come from?", "why it is constituted like that?","how do you play it?", etc., perhaps opening for inquiries related to new musical praxes that may be constituted based on their use. Attali (1985, In: Magnusson, 2016, p. 155) states “in music, the instrument often predates the expression. It authorizes, which explains invention has the nature of noise; a ‘realized theory’, it contributes, through the offers, to the birth of a new music, a renewed syntax”. If the possibilities enable the constitution of new musical and sound syntaxes, providing different or new ways of creating out of their learning, the new forms of interaction and instrumentness from the design and creation of a digital instrument form an unprecedented scope of options133. This is even more intricate when realizing that many of the digital instruments in the musical and sound arts stem from the appropriation of technologies from other areas, such as the computer itself or a smartphone, in which the interaction dynamics are always mutual: from man to machine and vice versa. Velloso (2013, p. 305) states that "it is from the operation of the apparatus that one can extend the human action prosthetically to the level of sound manipulation." Many of the manipulations and processing used in experimental performances are only possible due to this mutual interaction and in ways that are possible to extend, in a prosthetic manner, as Velloso affirms, the human action. Sensors, pickups, glass screens, wireless interfaces, cables of different types, etc., acoustic instruments are not only coupled to machines; they are modified, extended, sometimes physically, many others, digitally, or both ways, using diverse technologies, often originated and developed in other areas. Machado (2010, p. 26) illustrates the problem of the appropriation of technology in the field of arts: careers, friendships etc.). These layers are being created within each other, reaching each deeper level and rooted within the human brain. Despite being a fiction, the film portrays possibilities that the field of neuroscience has been intensively researched in the last decade through analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – which may represent types of photography of different moments of brain in activity and their abstract relationships. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception https://afni.nimh.nih.gov/pub/dist/edu/latest/afni_handouts/FMRI_basics.pdf and https://www.forbes.com/2010/07/29/inception-science-dreams-technology-brain.html#267a6d5a19e6 - accesses on: November 5, 2017. 133 Velloso (2013, p.304), when describing the process of Stockhausen's compositional approach in the play "Solo" (1966), states: "A compositional approach is also perceived in this piece that is inevitably confused with invention. In other words, the composition is, in this case, not only the work of imagining a series of events and musical sounds, but also the imagination of a 'machine' and a choreographic determination of its use/interaction." The creating- performer uses, even unconsciously, this inventive feature with his machine assemblage: there are several times when it is necessary to invent how to play a certain composition of hybrid tools and instruments, which, even if not desiring, can undergo an almost choreographic use of utilization, gesturality and playability. Any performer who has ever experienced playing an acoustic instrument coupled on a mobile computer, FX and expression pedals and interfaces, live, can tell how complex is the use and attempt to control all this apparatus, in operation during the performance flow. 154 "The appropriation art makes of technological apparatus and scientific Knowledge differs significantly from the one made by other sectors of society, such as the mass communication industry. In general, appliances, instruments and semiotic machines are not designed for the production of art, at least not in the secular sense of that term, as constituted in the modern world from XV century onwards. Semiotic machines are, in most cases, designed within an industrial productivity principle, of procedures automation for a large production scale, but never for the production of singular, unassuming and ' sublime’ objects. The artistic perspective is certainly the most deviant of all, since it remains aloof from the intensity of the technological project originally imprinted to the machines and programs, equivalent to a complete reinvention of the medium. " Therefore, one of the central issues between the interactive relationship of the creating-performer with the hybrid or digital musical instrument is (still) the mapping between gesture and sound, which is a natural part of the instrument and its attempt of control. The results between gesture and sound can be simulated, antagonistic, similar, ambiguous, however, never without causing either strangeness or some kind of reflection on a performer that is not at least partially accommodated with the use of such instruments. Iazzetta (2006, p. 109) states that, "whatever the case and regardless of the sophistication of the system, the possibilities of interaction granted by electronic instruments so far, point to problems rather than solutions." This type of relationship between the user and the digital instrument often occurs out of micro-experiments that, given the processing power in most of the computers and current software, is of almost "instantaneous" perceptual effect and can provide easyto-catalogue results. Through the visual interfaces that the great majority of contemporary operating systems possess, the performer is not only capable of listening to the result(s) proposed by the design and processing changes they executed, but they can also see on the glass screens the digitized acoustic waves or created exclusively within the machine, or different types of graphics illustrating changes in dynamics, path, frequencies, etc. levels, which can contribute to the development and enhancement of the instrument as a whole. The constitution of the performance hybrid machine contributes for the possibilities to become feasible, by allowing the performer to interact with different instruments during the performance. Even if experienced and well-prepared, the creatingperformer, however, can still experience interaction and playability problems with their hybrid instruments; regardless of the sophistication of systems, errors, bugs, frozen screens, unresponsive systems and miscellaneous problems, seemingly without momentary solutions, they tend to cause a very large impact on the learning and development of digital tools as musical instruments, often connected with a certain instability in the learning process and performativity. The alleged "simplicities" of the acoustic instruments become, in this case, very attractive, exactly because they frequently offer a certain instantaneous perk between gesture and sound production. There are many difficulties in the creation of a musical performance environment established exclusively out of the use of digital and hybrid instruments, given the – still recurrent – instability of digital systems used in real time, in addition to the complexity in control and interaction of these tools by the performer during more critical live performance situations, due to the inference of lights, cables, sound monitoring 155 systems, latency, etc. Again, Iazzetta (2006, p. 111) writes that, "making electronic technology musical is not a trivial task. It is necessary to deal with the limitations of this technology and the complexity of building coherent interaction relationships." This issue becomes even more evident when the use of technology occurs in the fields of free improvisation and experimental music, which tend to emphasize the use of the digital musical instrument stemming from creative processes of sound, unlike other musical areas, such as popular music or even part of electroacoustic music, based on the use of musical technology from the interface, and not from the sound, very close to what we could call meta-instruments, as defined by Iazzetta (ibidem), "instruments that can generate or simulate other instruments, insofar as they do not impose a determined sound or articulatory personality". This risk, in fact, becomes creatively exposed, being one of the essential parameters for an improvisation performance. The constitution of the performance flow, through interaction with the different constituted musical instruments, and the desire to interact through creation and experimentation processes, during the fruition of the performance is one of the primordial assumptions in this type of artistic praxis. Thus, the performer is not only a performer, but also responsible for the technical quality of their instrument, often for its creation and "construction", for the creative and aesthetics relationships it presents and also for the stability, configuration and usability of the digital instrument itself and all its connections, couplings and articulations. Obviously, both creative and technical responsibility increases exponentially concerning the execution of an acoustic instrument, given the number of factors to be dealt with before and during performance, in addition to the interactivity, performativity and instrumentness relationships listed so far. The musical performance hybrid machine is, therefore, an interactive, complex and heterogeneous system, designed to be used in real time, deriving from the experimental praxis of sound and musical creation. The interaction relationship between the performer and the machine reaches far beyond a dualistic questionanswer relationship, offering feasible possibilities in which both, machine and performer134, relate equally as creation agents. This interactive dynamism thus allows new forms of instrumentness and sound creation, where there is a certain complex balance among electronic and digital artifacts, their technicalities and human interaction, through gesturality, corporeity involved in the way they are operated. These problems and issues are not new, however, they have been potentialized over the last two decades, allowing not only the experimental use of a mobile computer in live performances in a very broad way, but also the gathering of several tools out of the inclusion of the acoustic instrument in this system. In the next chapter, I present therefore, a practical and qualitative study of experimental musical and sound praxis related to the use of the hybrid machine, considering many of the characteristics and qualities of interaction, Instrumentness and technological mediation investigated so far in this work. 134 It is always interesting to note that here; machine is the very assemblage of the different acoustic, digital instruments, interfaces, tools, software, audio monitors and the environment (the "hybrid machine” itself). The performer, therefore, is part of the hybrid machine and also relates to it as equals, like another creative agent. 156 sen so rium 157 3. Sensorium playing, hearing, listening, improvising, performing, composing {and seeing} “After all, I am an improviser and I revel in stitching sounds together to create something that might be... I delight in hearing ideas coming together… I enjoy the process of being in an improvisation, of collectively making sounds, of finding common sonic ideas, of aiming towards something that connects the improvising musicians on a sonic, cultural, social and performative level”. Franziska Schroeder, 2014135 In fact, there are no such times: there are legions of times. A while different for each point in space. There's not a single time. Exists a multitude of them [...] Each watch has its own time. Each phenomenon has its time, its rhythm”. Carlo Rovelli, 2018136 This chapter arose intended to be a place where I can explore, in a practical way, some of the processes I deem utterly important to the present work. It will not be a place for performance analysis, as in the previous chapter, from the improvisation point of view, and also explored in the next chapter, of a self-ethnographic nature, despite the use of certain examples from performances. Here, I seek to conduct the investigation from the perspective of processes and characteristics related to performance and the different interaction models that can occur over its course, both from the new forms of instrumentness provided by the machinic assemblage, through traditional musical instruments coupled to the electronic and digital environment, with regard to the use of digital instruments. This investigation is fully conducted from the performer’s place, therefore, it is not an investigation from a post-performance view, from a "product" or ready "work"; "Sensorium" relates with the performer's place from "within" the performance, from being there, interacting when listening, when playing, when performing, when improvising, when creating textures, processes, sounds, ideas. It is a very particular place, which involves the absorption of dozens of distinct features: my place as an improviser, my training as a musician, my aesthetic relationship with the process of art production, my perception of the current world, my relationship with the acoustic and digital musical instruments, my technical knowledge of musical theory and disciplines related to it (harmony, composition, counterpoint, 135 In SoundWeaving – Writings on Improvisation, 2014, p.172. 136 In A Ordem do Tempo (2018), p.22. 158 analysis, reading, perception, etc.), finally, all my knowledge-basis acquired in my life to the date. Added to this, are the music ideas and the types of music that instigate me, that compose me, that affect me. The particularities of the different kinds of performance that relate to musical improvisation, which in this work is often part of an idea of freedom, interacting with the new forms of digital technology available. Ideas such as interaction-while-control and interaction-while-difference, created by Henrik Frisk (2008) are very pertinent to this particular investigation. In addition to the research on the different levels and forms of control and non-control and their degrees of imponderability that the performer faces in relation to the computer and their hybrid musical instruments, four other important ideas will be looked into here, from the performer’s view inside the performance. They are: . Different types of musical interaction in the same performance; . "Real" time and latency; . Playing, creating and listening in circles (loop); . Unpredictability/imponderability during performance; . The " scary-blank-space ": the construction of a patch for performances, with realtime interaction. The vast majority of improvisations used as basis for this investigation took place at the genesis of ar+2 duo, with my thesis advisor and saxophonist, Professor Rogério Costa. From this point, we established numerous performance sessions conducted for specific purposes, proposed by myself, or jointly, and after the recording of our perceptions over the rehearsals and presentations, we were able to conduct a critical analysis, discussion on our perceptions in the rehearsals, also by electronic messages. In this way, we were able to regiment an arsenal of reflections that have been very dear to this work, resulting in an extremely useful material for the autoethnographic chapter of the thesis. In contrast, the processes listed here resulted from a decoupage process in my mind through the weekly performance praxis, in which we tried to use both new and existing technologies in our improvisations, though reconfigured in our setup. 3.1 The ar+2 duo Aiming to the constitution of a complex and diversified environment for the praxis of free improvisation and providing reflections and artistic praxis from the set up and hybrid machines assemblage, my thesis advisor Rogério Costa and I created a project named "ar+2"137. The duo began in the beginning of the year 2017 and has kept a weekly rehearsal and performance schedule since then, having already participated in concerts, congresses and various other presentations. One of the basic assumptions in this work is to establish a kind of systematic autoethnographic record of the 137 See: https://vimeo.com/armais2 e https://soundcloud.com/ar_mais_2 - accesses on February 20, 2018. 159 performances, their chaining characteristics, design, problems and adopted solutions, etc. Before each performance, we established scripts or suggestions that "concatenate" our individual hybrid machines consisting of our individual knowledge base, our acoustic instruments (which we try to diversify), our digital instruments and apparatus (microphones, interfaces, foot controllers, computer software, etc.), patches, sound monitors, etc. In these performances, issues related to time and continuity of the sound flow are faced. Some of the issues that initiate this text ("How to cope with chaos or emptiness? How to shape time out of silence? What are sound or musical ideas? What are the differences between the note and sound ideas? What are the forms of figure, gestural and textural thought?") are put into practice, both at the theoretical level, encompassing previous and subsequent reflections on each performance, as in the practical sphere, through actual performances. In our improvisation sessions and live performances, we always act and react to the environment. If on the one hand, we bring an acquired knowledge to rehearsals with our hybrid system, our instrumental techniques rooted for years of praxis and study, in addition to our technological knowledge embraced by the use of equipment and various apparatuses, on the other hand, we seek to highlight the desire to break these limits through a constant attitude of invention, adaptation to the environment and the wish to "make non-audible sound ". The beginning of performance is always a moment of considerable tension, point which the necessity and the will to build something out of the silence and emptiness in "real" time is at stake. In this process, certain materials and behaviors, due to their recurrent employment, may be stabilized as useful strategies and resources. However, there is a risk of territorialization creating stratified points in the onset of performance, for example: beginnings in increasing dynamics, little noises, specific ornaments around a group of notes that can create a sort of stabilizing layer, etc. 3.2 The times of a performance What have we got before starting a performance? Individual hybrid machines + of each of the performer’s knowledge base 138+ our acoustic instruments + our digital instruments. It may be possible to describe the potentialities of each 138 The term knowledge base was coined by the American musician and researcher Jeff Pressing (1998, p.88). Martins (2015, p.53) states that "it is clear that musicians carry, each of them in a particular way, an acquired knowledge base, as Pressing states, which encompasses a wide scope of qualities that includes musical experience, previously recognized materials, studied examples, practiced repertoire, skills and sub-abilities, perceptual strategies, problem solution routines, hierarchical memory structure of the movements, action management, among many others, shaping this state of readiness in which the improviser musician finds himself." This knowledge base as a structure acquired by the improvising musician throughout his formation, not only houses these absorbed qualities from his experience, but the accumulation of experience with the musical instrument itself and the development of his technical, perceptual, instrumental and theoretical faculties. 160 element and also of the set. Firstly, it is necessary to emphasize that it is each performer’s knowledge base (memories, techniques, repertoires, skills, "clichés, patterns and idiomatic formulas", listening experiences, analysis, concepts and performance, etc., in summary, "all" each one knows about music) that underlies their ideas towards music. And this is important, since performers will only establish an interactive and temporal game to the extent that they share certain basic ideas about music coming forward to the idea of molecularity and that will feed their individual action. In other words: the performative actions emerge/result from the interaction between the knowledge base (based on memory, other practices, other performances, other times) and interactive sound events in real time. In this pre-established scenario (in the past) the sound flow is outlined (in the present towards the future). Musical ideas can be predominantly rhythmic, melodic, timbrebased, textural, etc. In fact, they are usually a simultaneity of such aspects. That is the reason why it is worth thinking of sound objects (for example, in the low frequencies, noisy, rarefied rhythmic figuration with little intensity). After that, there is the performers’ relationship with their acoustic instruments, the couplings and becomings, which is reasonably mapped and mastered by them, therefore presenting a great potential for expansion through the invention of the extended techniques or unforeseen combinations of traditional techniques. A great part of the extended or even explored instrumentness, through (un)balances between physicality, corporeity, materiality, etc., may happen here. This occurs concomitantly with the system equilibrium and functioning relationships, which will encompass: 1. Acoustic sound; 2. Amplified acoustic sound; 3. The Sound processed by different apparatus and software; 4. The resulting sound from the monitoring speakers. There are several concepts underlying the musical creation acting in a performance: sound object (in the Schaefferian sense), sound character (the sound of a bell, or a wagon), sound image (the sound of the horizon at sea), sound idea (long or short sounds), etc. An image, a gesture, a rhythm, a melodic figure, a sound, a timbre, a sound object, an instrumental act (scraping the fingers on the bandolim string or hitting the saxophone keys), an idea (abstract, e.g., rarefied), a symbol (idiomatic, for instance), an energy, a sensation, etc. It is always connected to "making sonorous what is not audible". There is a temporal oscillation between more homogeneous or more heterogeneous moments in terms of sound materials. There are also moments of greater or lesser permanence, in a constant territorialization, deterritorialization, reterritorialization process stemming from the proposed materials. Departing from these features, the work in the duo had a very interesting and reasonably deep effect on my own way of interacting with acoustic instruments, not only in the improvisation environment, but also in my daily praxis with the musical instruments and in all the allocation that happens between a performer and their musical instrument. Basically, I went on to divide the interaction with my musical instruments in two distinct ways, originally conceptualized by Henrik Frisk. I describe them as follows. 161 3.3 Different kinds of interaction in the same performance “And, to fully inhabit, we need to also invent new modes of interaction”. Henrik Frisk, 2008139 The term interactive computer music was used for some time between the end of the twentieth century and in the first decade of twenty-first century, often seeking to align a thought in which the performer was also using the computer and its software, applications and interfaces in their musical creation process. This term carries numerous problems as it conveys the idea that musical creation processes that do not embrace the computer or electronic and/or digital technologies are not "interactive", which is obviously an absurd. Any kind of musical creation goes through some sort of interaction with the musical instrument, whether acoustic, electronic, digital, analog or virtual, being it the interaction between the performer and their musical instrument or between the interpreter and performance environment. Frisk (2008, p. 67) writes on this matter: “What then is interactive music? That question prompts the theorical: is there a music that is not interactive? That does not interact with its environment and its listener in some way? Depending on the context, commonly when the term interactive is used, it is implied that one of the subjects in the interaction is a computer or some other electronic device. This holds true also for music – interactive music implies computer music, which is paradoxical because, if interactive music equates with interactive computer music, that implies that computer music, without the interactive prefix, somehow is void of interactive elements. At the same time, today, any human endeavor with a computer is referred to as human-computer interaction. That is, composing at the computer today, almost regardless of how the process is carried out, qualifies as human-computer interaction; it is by definition an interaction with the computer. For this reason, strictly speaking, computer music, i.e. non-interactive music, can only be music created and performed by computers only. Which is obviously not the case. Not yet.”140 139 140 In FRISK, Henrik. Improvisation, Computers and Interaction, p.76, 2008. On this matter, it is worth recalling the thesis by Vitor K. Miskalo (2016, p.159), where the author states that: "[...] in many cases, the way the computer is used as a musical instrumental system aimed at creation and/or performance, can reveal the social importance of the human element in musical activities. [...] to do so, the software needs to be programmed by someone and that follows the rules implemented through algorithms. The computer, in its nature, only acts within the possibilities of its programming. According to Wang (2007), ‘for a long time the computer has been considered an extremely attractive tool for sound creation and manipulation. Its accuracy, its possibilities for creating new timbres and its potential for fantastic automations, make it an attractive platform for experimentation and musical creation – but only to the extent that we can tell the computer what to do and how to do." Even in current creative processes involving artificial intelligence, it is still necessary for 162 In part of the previous chapter, I tried to define, as comprehensively and clearly as possible, the ways in which the interaction between performer and their instruments occur in an improvisation; in this work, especially with regard to the idea of an interactive system, namely, the hybrid machine itself. The chapter broadly covered the characteristics and problematizations that happen between me as a performer, and my musical instruments, environment, other performer, equipment, etc. Even so, Frisk's assertion above is interesting for depicting a paradigm that today in 2019 - about a decade later – we are still investigating, debating, problematizing and questioning what exactly, musical interaction between performer and machine(s) is. In fact, the interaction between a performer and "their" music will include any and all sorts of action that may happen during a performance. The term interactive will therefore include any action the performer can execute, either in the environment (changing the position of an amplifier or even his or her positioning), in the instruments (of all types), or other performers (acting, smiling, looking, interlocutions, etc.). Furthermore, this idea closely relates to the notion of "control" that the performer possesses or intends to, not over the musical instruments alone, but over their own performance, in real time, as we will see ahead. Listening to the performance itself (covering all the different types of listening), in progress, is an interactive action. Just as every action on a machine is also an interaction, every action in a musical instrument can also be considered an interactive act. Frisk makes it clear that there is no reason for calling the music performed with or through machines as interactive computer music; it would be the same as naming a composition or improvisation performed by a guitarist as an interactive music for guitar, or something alike. Perhaps the matter that requires an investigation here is: what possible forms of interaction have we encountered when we decided to include an instrument such as a mobile computer in our performances and, from this decision, what forms of interaction and control that different degrees of instrumentness can they provide? I have increasingly noticed that not every interaction with the musical instrument coupled to the computer is identical, neither is my relationship with the digital and hybrid instruments. Even when performed with a single musical instrument, there are very distinct levels and ways of interacting with it, often in multiple ways. First, there has never been an absolute instrumental control in the scope of music. Possibly, the opposite is also true: there is no possibility of a total lack of the ‘performers control over their musical instrument, no matter what it is141. Obviously, what happens here is the existence of different degrees of the performer’s control and “non-control” in relation to their instruments, to the performance environment, to their own body, as someone to program the operating system, software, applications, its algorithms, etc. The human element behind all musical computing is still fully and densely present in several, if not all, process steps. 141 I cannot think of anything more "out-of-a-possible-control" a performer can experience than Jimi Hendrix's performance at the Monterey Festival in California in 1967. The scene is very famous and disclosed: after the execution of "Wild Thing", the guitarist puts a Fender Stratocaster on the stage floor, still plugged to a series of amplifiers and then throws alcohol and sets fire to the instrument, "playing it" yet until its final consummation several minutes later. Available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZot7BBzgog – access on August 21, 2018. 163 to their presence in the performance. Such degrees exist basically as intermediate situations, where there is always, in fact, an amount of control and non-control embedded in any musical situation. I can illustrate this statement with two clear examples: a.) strong feeling of control regarding the performer’s interaction and their musical instrument: a typical situation in which an experienced jazz-style saxophonist is improvising a standard that had previously been studied, practiced and rehearsed hundreds of times; the performer, in this case, masters his acoustic instrument, masters its harmonic cadences and has also full mastery of the scales, arpeggios and modes that are "necessary" to improvise such standard. Even when the performer "abandons" the pre-established tonal or modal situation, playing "outside" notes (notes that provide more tension and dissonance in the proposed harmony), they play something that had been practiced several times and that provides exactly this "altered" sonority in certain segments of the song. Here, in addition to the performer’s sticking solely to interactivity with their acoustic instrument, they also master the harmonic and melodic "rug" of the situation in question. There is a very little probability of a completely disorganizing situation towards the performer to occur; b.) sensation of partial lack of control between performer and their instrument: this saxophonist, when coupling his musical instrument to the computer and a series of electronic and digital FX pedals, as well as extensive use of software and applications. Instead of a traditional jazz standard, the performance encompasses the idea of free improvisation, in which the performance time flow is entirely under the performer’s responsibility. There is no pre-established progress, or previously rehearsed harmonies, previously read and played melodies. Despite the free environment being conceived beforehand, - and desired by the performer - the number of tasks he needs to regiment is immense. At certain times, some electronic process may be interrupted, another digital process can be reset, there might be poor machine operation as a whole or in certain "pieces" of it (a defective cable, loose contact, feedback, an operating system crash, insufficient random memory, etc.). These two examples intend to illustrate objectively the notions of control and noncontrol described here. The idea of a creating-performer presented earlier, intensifies the interlocution between the tasks supposedly reserved to the composer, to the performer, to the sound engineer, to the producer, etc. The creating-performer embraces several different needs and functions, thereby increasing the degree of noncontrol in their interactive actions with their musical instrument(s), exactly for being in action. Performance only happens out of a certain active force, of a series of actions involving creative musical praxis. These control and non-control degrees enable the performer to be placed between different discourses and musical poetics. Interactive types that demand a greater degree of interpretation of a previously composed or established material present a more prominent static control, while experimental praxis, including free improvisation, encompass the idea of providing, at least theoretically, a lower and less present general level of control, which may enable performers different types of exploration and interaction, provided by the different instrumentness. In general, the different degrees of interactivity between performers and the entire 164 contingency of factors involving a particular performance can be classified into two large parts, within a strictly technological sphere142, as Frisk (2008) originally proposed: interaction-as-control and interaction-as-difference. They are described in details below. 3.4 Interaction-as-Control If we think that the idea of interaction has always permeated the musical praxis, it is important to note that the understanding of this term may, in fact, suggest two different instances: a.) a form of interaction between people, meaning between two performers, for example. Here, the exchange between people is unambiguous, where there is an active reciprocity. Both interacting "sides" can affect one another in the same way and with the same intensities; as Frisk (ibidem) affirms here “[...] where the influence is mutual; the participants in this kind of interaction are equally likely to be influenced as they are to influence”. And b.) another bias that goes through the idea of interaction, in which the interaction of one or more humans with the machines occur. In this case, it is clear this is an unequal relationship, for on one side there is a performer and, on the other, an electronic machine, a computer or any digital artifact. Despite the machine, no matter its type, influencing the performer (human) in multiple ways, the interaction relationship does not happen unambiguously; on the contrary, the epistemologies on each side are completely different, and to the machinery remains the development of articulation and preparation of the human side, before initiating, in fact, the interactive-performance process (software installation, several layers of programming language, the adequacy of the operating system, the development of various algorithms, the preparation of energy sources, configuration of external accessories, creation and development of patches, etc.). As a rule, the studies and investigations that consider solely this second model of interaction is often focused on immediate responses, efficiency of the interactive quality and usability-related aspects, as I have described in the introduction of the present work and also in the previous chapter. In this somehow unequal relationship, the actions a performer carries out are almost always oriented to a kind of interactive control of the machine as a whole, be it hardware or part of the software. In general, the idea of an "immediate" and precise response is sought for, though in a free improvisation praxis, when interacted with computers and software, it tries, to a certain extent, to break this hegemony of precision and typical immediacy. But, in general, this type of interaction, which aims to control the process as a whole, is more rigid and homogenous, even if such control is relatively and customarily unstable. 3.5 Interaction-as-Difference The great criticism Frisk builds in his thesis on the relationship between the creative praxis and its interaction with the machine refers to the fact that, for most researchers, the comparison of the types of interaction among humans (person – 142 Frisk (2008, p.71) is emphatic in stating that the idea of interaction, regarding performers and their instruments involved, relates in a technological sphere, always mediated, in a way that exercises different levels of control, whether creative, social, political, etc. 165 person) are very distinct from the types of interaction that a human tends to have with a machine. For him, the differences between these two examples are so great suggesting that his investigation (on these differences) could be superfluous. However, Frisk points out that (p. 75), precisely for this reason, the vast majority of researches related to HCI only cover the interaction as a form of control over the machine, then obviously in the field of arts and in the use of digital machines in creative experimental praxis, this form of interaction extrapolates the need to control the processing and operation aspects of the computer and the software and applications. The moment a computer becomes a creation agent, it also comprehensively contributes with the construction of the musical performance. Within this thought is the fact that the performer no longer interacts with a computer and its digital extensions, simply preparing them to act in a controlled, restrained, expected way; what is expected, from the performer’s viewpoint, are actions that will occur in real time, during performance, between the performer and the machine, which may surprise, deviate paths, suggest possibilities, and finally, contribute positively for a kind of creative musical praxis to happen. Obviously, there is a whole preparation prior to performance: the development of the patch, the system and software settings, connection checking, etc., as aforementioned. However, from a certain moment on, from the beginning of the performance, what I expect, as a performer, is that the configuration of my computer, FX pedals, software, patches, etc., can contribute as a whole to the creation of this environment. When there is a sincere desire to perform out of the instances comprehensively mentioned the previous chapter, there may be a kind of machinic assemblage embracing all the different agents in the musical creation process during a performance. It is at this moment that the interaction between the performer and their digital equipment, here briefly called a computer, extrapolates the idea of control (which, in fact, never fully exists) and encompasses a type of interaction that is, to a certain extent, open and included in this creative sphere. Frisk named this second interactive type "interaction-as-difference". It is in this second type of interaction between the performer and the machine that the computer becomes, within a performance, a creation agent, as the performer himself or herself is. Despite the obvious differences existing between the human X human and human X machine interactions, there is here an approximation of the computer and its whole digital system (software, applications, interfaces, patches, etc.) to a mutual relationship both in the production of creative flow and improvisation, in the "conversation", in the action game that takes place in a free improvisation performance. Instead of simply interacting with the computer in the " execution-order" sphere, the performer develops a relationship with the digital machine and its content, something far closer to what we call a "social" [relationship]. Aspects of mutual approximation are somehow common in such relationship, where the performer gets so close to parts of the machine and the existing digital contents that "they" begin to dialogue reciprocally in the same sphere. At this point, the performer "gives up" the idea of controlling the computer, of its specific obedience; inversely, the performer expects the machine to be able contribute to the creation process, to the construction of performance itself. Frisk (2008, p.76) states that “[…] and to be willing to relinquish control is the beginning of an understanding of HCI that also includes elements 166 pertain to the domain of social interaction”. Thus, the computer now has a power to influence the whole process143. It is important to note that the ways in which a performer interacts "musically" with their digital instruments and interfaces are never of one type only, or even a form of interaction by choice, but rather, by needs rooted in their creative, instrumental and artistic praxis. The interaction forms that relate to the performer’s control and noncontrol are always "multiple", as they refer to specific moments within a performance, which will hardly be repeated, especially when dealing with experimental praxis, as is the case of free improvisation. As I prepare my computer and all its operational system beforehand so that it can perform real-time operations fully, avoiding possible processing errors, thus interacting both with the hardware and the software as an interaction-as-control form, aiming at a certain stability, I also perform operations in an unforeseen way during a performance, changing processes and, instigated or influenced by what the machine executes, interacting-as-differently from what I would do if there were no computer as creating agent. During these processes, I, not rarely, practically "invent" ways to interact with the content delivered by the computer and the apparatus during a performance, either as on-screen operations, or by dragging and dropping objects into new virtual windows, into another software, where new procedures and manipulations will occur, whether activating various FX pedals and several footswitches, changing volumes in different places in the signal chain, changing settings in the various interfaces. As Frisk (ibidem) says “to fully inhabit we need to also invent new modes of interaction”. Thereby, the computer becomes part of the performance, though no longer as a mere accessory, or a tool or even an instrument. Obviously, it is still a musical (also) instrument for the performer; however, during the flow of the performance time, the alterities occurring from the interference with and from the computer takes over a collective nature in decision-making when trying or not to control the stability and instability of the whole process. Such decisions somehow become collectively constructed even in a common performance situation in which there is only one performer and his computer. There, during the performance time, the computer is 143 It is important to note here that I do not speak of Artificial Intelligence, robotics and related technologies, such as the use of “bots”, for example. Here, I relate the creative qualities where, through processes inserted and created during a performance, the computer and its apparatus influence the performance as a whole, often leading to unpredictable directions to performers. The computer here influences as another performer could influence, as a creative agent. It is interesting, however, to see that some areas of research such as AI have sought to investigate and look into the issue of computers as "humanized" agents, through what is now known as a "bot", a diminutive of the word robot. For Hingston (2012, p.4) "future human-bot relations may depend on whether or not we seen them as being like ourselves [...] what does it take for a bot to be believable – by which we mean, to seem like one of us? Can humanness be simulated? Can it be faked". Frank, Roehrig and Pring (2017, pp.1-2) claim: "Artificial intelligence has left the laboratory (and the movie lot) and is in your building. It ́s in your home. It ́s in your office. It ́s pervading all the institutions that drive our global economy. From Alexa to Nest to Siri to Uber to Waze, we are surrounded by smartmachines running on incredibly powerful and selflearning platforms software. And this is just the beginning. To date, we ́ve been enjoying – without even really noticing – various forms of weak artificial intelligence (AI) [...] Now AI is transitioning from being our daily helper to something much more powerful – and disruptive – as the new machines are rapidly outperforming the most talented of us in many endeavors". These issues are on the agenda because a great deal of this technology is now being used to influence government elections and disseminate political propaganda on social networks, through the interaction between AI and human components. 167 fully part of this machinic assemblage, in addition to a short-term memory, a characteristic element of free improvisation in decision-making in the form of a sequence, the computer also possesses long-term memory, which can be highly superior to any performer’s memory, placing processes, materials or sound objects from other spaces, profoundly altering the performance conduction, making it more or less unstable. If a performance combines a creative environment that encompasses the collective and creative actions based on real time, interactions between computer and performer are critically important for this praxis to be constituted, keeping in mind that the computer also contributes to another very important characteristic of this type of praxis, which is that of "openness" of the possibilities that may take place during a performance. Notions of corporeity, instrumentness, physicality and materiality, among others widely investigated during the second chapter of this work, are utterly important. The computer becomes not only a musical instrument for the performer, but also a metainstrument, a co-creation agent, an important element in maintaining short and longterm memories that are recorded and supplied with feedbacks during the performance. From this point of view, an intimate relationship between the performer and their computer and apparatus is established, just as it happens in their relationship with the acoustic instrument. A great part of this relationship is discovered and potentialized only at the moment when a performance takes place, at the moment when the act of playing, of creating in real time is occurring, of interacting, influencing and being influenced by the different agents involved in the hybrid machine. Costa (2018, p. 118) states that, "The performer establishes both corporal and empirical intimate relationship with their instrument. They explore and discover great part of the potential of the instrument in mid-flight. It is a performer-instrument becoming: the set becomes a machine or a creative device, a smooth environment for the unfolding of thought. Therefore, an important characteristic is the experimental attitude: treating the instrument as a field of evidence where unheard of possibilities are discovered." It is therefore a matter of having this attitude of exploration, experimentation and discovery in the way the performer interacts with their computer during a performance; and not only with the computer and its interfaces, obviously, but also with their own acoustic musical instrument, which here is coupled to the digital environment and expanded in such a way that it becomes hybrid, concatenated with various apparatuses and providing new possibilities for execution and interaction. 168 3.6 Latency {or almost real-time} "Of course, I imagine that here the perception of things is slightly discontinuous, that it is made of small reiterated presences [...]". Sílvio Ferraz, 2007144 One of the central issues for any musician who has ever been part of a performance that encompasses both acoustic musical instruments coupled with computer systems and digital instruments is the latency existing between the inputs executed in the computer and software and the outputs that occur after the digital processing of the information. I have discussed this subject in chapters 2 and 3 of this work, for it is present both in the investigation of the hybrid machine assemblage and in the conceptualization of new forms of instrumentness provided by the hybrid machine. Therefore, I intend here to build a much more reflective text on the idea of the "praxis" of sound and musical production from the presence of the so-called latency, under the acting performer’s perspective. In summary, latency is the amount of time required by a given machine to perform the data processing in series, of a specific type of execution. In the contemporary dictionary Aulete Lexikon of the Portuguese language145, "latency" means: 1. Character or state of what is latent; 2. Period of inactivity between a stimulus and the beginning of the reaction caused by it; 3. Period of elaboration, before something assumes definitive existence; 4. Measure of time elapsed between the beginning of an activity and its completion. It is clear that, between the performer’s act of "creation"/modification of any material and its output through the speakers, being previously processed by the machine, a certain period of time, varying from dozens of factors, is required: type of processor in the machine, amount of volatile memory available at that time, type of intended algorithm, amount of data processing that simultaneously occurs at the lower level (operating system), analog-digital-analog conversion interface drivers, etc. In addition to the period required for this exclusive processing, which the performer induced into the machine, there is the very processing of the acoustic instrument coupled to the digital computer/interface/software system in "real time". Even if there is no intended processing of any kind, the mere plugging of the acoustic instrument to this digital system requires a period of analog-digital and vice-versa conversion time, no matter how brief it is. Playing with a musical instrument coupled into a number of digital tools brings an enormity of changes in relation to instrumentness and ways of interaction that the musician has with their instrument, as previously discussed in this work. In addition to issues related to the expansion of the acoustic instrument and its possibilities for creating and for sound production, there is an intermittent issue in this case: the response time between muscle action and the hearing perception of such movement is longer than when the musical instrument simply played acoustically. 144 In FERRAZ, Sílvio. “Notas do caderno amarelo: a paixão do rascunho”, p.93, 2007. 145 Available on: http://lexikon.com.br/novissimo-aulete – access on August 27, 2018. 169 For an instrument such as the electric guitar, this matter has already been a component of its timbre formation since its creation, through the addition of FX pedals and analog sound processing, cables and various connections, regulation of valve amplifiers and electronic powers, among other accessories since the 1950s. Even if electronically processed, the guitar timbre was already composed of a series of processing that, however brief, generated tiny delays, though still not influencing the musician’s perception146 between playing and listening to what is being played. However, from the addition of the digital technology in the arsenal of possibilities for sound production and manipulation, latency has become vital for the design of an interactive music system to be considered for live performances in real time. When an acoustic instrument is coupled to the computer, the response time from the muscle actions is increased due to the larger amount of data processing. The electric signal is digitally converted by the AD interface, usually connected to a computer via USB standard, USB-C, Firewire, or Thunderbolt. Each of these patterns handles speed values differently, while the processor and computer memory are already fully functioning, through the installed drivers, dealing with the digitally converted signal. Then the digital signal can go through a series of processing in different software and applications, considering that each of them will handle data differently. Digital effects plug-ins, audio processing in software with frequency change, reverberation, echoes, reversal, audio sample registration, for real-time manipulation, multitrack recording, simultaneous processing in multiple layers, among dozens of other processing steps may occur here. It must be considered that the musician is operating the computer, their acoustic instrument, their digital instruments and coupled interfaces, generating new data processing layers at each inference. The computer must manage these multiple demands, preferably without overloading its main processor, generally divided into data processing cores, allocating parts of the random memory for each task. Despite today's digital technology being extremely powerful in terms of speed for processing and calculations, the use demands increased exponentially as well. Currently, software can handle large amounts of audio and video information in "real" 146 The human being does not notice a change between input and output under about 25-30 milliseconds. Theoretically, this is the minimum limit for cognitively perceiving the latency effect. Obviously, this number varies from person to person, according to their instrumental motor coordination and their level of auditory perception. For some musicians, perhaps a latency of 50-60 milliseconds is still reasonably low to be considered "imperceptible". As a non-scientific "rule", a latency of 64 milliseconds is considered, by the standards of the digital audio industry, as very low, capacitated to be used in performances in "real time". For Fabio Kon (2004) "somewhat high latencies around 2030ms are probably perfectly acceptable for typical musical application". For further information, seer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6880856/whats-the-minimum-lagdetectable-by-a-human and http://gsd.ime.usp.br/software/DistributedAudio/paper-latencia.pdf --access on August 28, 2018. Henrik Frisk (2008, p.79) cites a survey on audio in digital games, stating that there is a certain difficulty in finding research on latency and jitter exclusively in the area of experimental practices in contemporary music. Frisk quotes researchers Eli Brandt and Roger Dannnberg (1998 In: FRISK, 2008), who claim: "our personal experience and actual measurements of commercial synthesizer indicate that 5 or maybe 10 ms is acceptable. This is comparable to common acoustic-transmission delays; sound travels at about 1 foot/ms". 170 time, processing them simultaneously. However, latency exists, and it may cause considerable impacts on a performance. The accuracy in any analog clock depends on the correct adjustment in the division of hours in minutes, minutes in seconds and the correct marking of each second, from the idea of synchronization. In order to establish a constant marking, this watch must "mark" each second equally, precisely regulated, and so on, as expected of a metronome, for instance. However, even the most accurate existing watch needs, from time to time, to be "regulated" again, because there is a distancing from the showed time, to a "certain" time. Scientifically, absolute accuracy in the temporal marking of an analog clock does not exist, for it will always be, over a certain time, lagging. With the computational processor it is, in a way, the same thing, however, constructed out of numerous sequences of zero and one. The term jitter 147applies in this case, to name the irregularity/variation in the time marking between input and output of the analog signal converted to digital and converted to analog signal again. Jaramillo Arango (2014, p.117) defines jitter as "changes in the value of latency of a connection." For him, if the different factors that determine latency "behaved stably, the jitter value would be negligible." The perception of such irregularities, which happen unpredictably in the digital system, is enhanced due to an increasing number of digital technology components used in the experimental artistic praxis, especially in live performances, which can cause tiny audio interruptions, very small signal jumps or any other type of change in the sound flow. Couchot (In: CRISTOFARO, 2004) states that "the digital communication techniques introduce in our behaviors occasions to experience time far differently from those we have known so far and that intimately affect our culture." In this case, the performer counts on (and has to deal with) these irregularities, even if most of the time they seem almost imperceptible to the human hearing, but bringing a distinct relationship to their muscles, hands and fingers, their body when playing the musical instrument both acoustic and when coupled to the interactive digital system. Dealing with jitter during a performance makes me, as a performer, create helpful alternatives. It is not uncommon for me to try and create a sound layer that is digitally extended, through the processing of reverberation and delay, for example, anticipating an interruption, no matter how short, of the signal coming from the musical instrument coupled to the computer. Even the inferences I execute in the machine are, fairly often, carried out from an assumption that I need to play the strings of the electric guitar or bandolim to then dislodge one of my hands from acoustic instrument to computer, playing some other digital instrument, which adds up to my sound production at that time. Within this scope of action, interruptions and time changes need to be well trained, because the acoustic instrumentness is widely changed as a result of these connections. Sometimes the temporal instability triggered by jitter and latency can be worked creatively, allocating more static sound objects, reproduced milliseconds after the acoustic sound production, and re-worked within the digital system, interactively with other processed sound objects. This is the case of my piece "Raspas", composed in 2015 for FIME, International Festival of Experimental Music in São Paulo. 147 For more on jitter: https://headfonics.com/2017/12/what-is-jitter-in-audio/ e https://www.tntaudio. com/clinica/jitter1_e.html --- access on August 28, 2018. 171 "Raspas"148intended to record a live free improvisation performance, initially played on an acoustic guitar, with the signal captured through specific pickups inside, with a digitally converted signal on an interface attached to the computer. Originally, the piece is an electroacoustic composition, with deferred time processing. Here, it is performed live, out of the hybrid machine assemblage as an interactive digital system. When "scraping" the guitar strings with the tip of my hand nails, I create a very characteristic sound material, which will be my "raw" sound object for working with another instrument, now digital, in Max and Ableton live software. I do not have to deal only with the latency originally present in converting the analog signal to the initially configured in the interface driver for 64 milliseconds. I need to deal with latency and jitter occurring between processing in both software, that accumulates as I insert distinct layers of additional raw sound material to the process. Having previously performed this piece in the studio, where each part can be worked individually, in deferred time, accurately listening to each element added to the process, and performing live, on the flow of performance time, I can affirm that the results are completely different, especially because the processes differ greatly. Live, I deal with layers that, despite being originally proposed by me to the process in a predetermined manner, they accumulate randomly and may cause unpredictable results. Here, obviously, I did not simply have to deal with latency issues, but certainly with the ideas of control and non-control, different forms of provided instrumentness and multiple forms of simultaneous interaction are at stake. By creating different processing layers, my intention is deal more creatively with latency in real time, not leaving me "stagnant" in a process of interrupting the sound flow or some sort of more emphatic discontinuation. On the contrary, I try to create distinct flows that accumulate linearly, adding up to other parts and starting a kind of creative conversation that moves the performance forward. Amidst the actions of creating material in real time, processing it simultaneously in the FX pedals and software, while I am still playing and interacting with the guitar and, consequently, processing this material addressing a conversation flow, of performance flow, in a situation where there is no possibility of "stopping" the performance to solve any kind of issue, there is considerable stress with regard to the creating-performer’s place. Working with overlapping layers is, in this case, in addition to an interesting procedure from the creating-performer's viewpoint, a solution for the ambience of materials and the possibility of continuation of the performance. As in the live "Raspas", at approximately minute six, I deliberately create a sound layer out of a "photograph" of a tiny period of sound material, through a procedure known as "freezing". This layer is also processed in the two software (Live and Max), which over nearly a minute that follows, manipulates from its harmonic partials. This way, I can vent to the performance flow, seeking to interact with the results of such decision, up to the next moment, in which there is a new interference, in other layers, in different tempos and latencies within the performance time. It is a sort of creative game between I, as a performer, my acoustic instrument (in this particular case, the acoustic-electric guitar), 148 The original piece recording in 2015 is available on: https://soundcloud.com/andremartins/raspas – The 2018 live performance recording is available on: https://soundcloud.com/andremartins/raspasperformance-2018 --- accesses on 9/3/2018. 172 digital instruments (patch and software), external FX pedals and the performance environment, which feeds the whole process back. I consider this example a typical case of the hybrid machine in action. 3.7 Playing in circles “Never does one thing have one only sense.” Gilles Deleuze, 2002149 “Seeing music as an open process and not a closed object remains a radical idea”. Andrew Durkin, 2014150 The repetition of an excerpt, melody, phrase, or sound object is one of the most commonly used tools in the history of music, since Antiquity, passing on to Baroque, Romanticism, in popular music and being definitively explored in Contemporary Music, out of the emergence and use of electronic and digital resources in the middle of twentieth century. What might be pertinent to point out here is that from Musique Concrète, developed by Pierre Schaeffer between the late 1940s and 1950s, there has been a growing use of what is known as "loop", initially through electromagnetic resources (roller tape recorders, record players, etc.), through the electronic resources (record consoles dedicated small audio segments in magnetic tapes, analog echoes, Frippertronics, by guitarist Robert Fripp, etc.) and massively explored with the popularization of digital technologies. The loop is important in performances using the hybrid machine and free improvisation for a fairly simple reason: the possibility for the performer to create "something" that enables them to develop a musical/sound dialogue for a certain period of time, during performance, weaving processing and altering sound, sculpting it, proceeding at a next step, and so forth. Perhaps the idea of looping in the contemporary experimental praxes are the ones closer to Guattari’s and Deleuze’s territory and deterritorialization, presented earlier. A loop offers the performer a territorial metaphor; due to that, the performer can go through an entire extension of sounds, while their limits are very clear, after all, a loop, no matter its size, has reasonably delimited beginning and end, thus providing the return to its beginning, 149 In DELEUZE, Gilles. “A Ilha Deserta”, p.156, 2002. 150 In DURKIN, Andrew. “Decomposition, a music manifesto”, p.8, 2014. 173 forming the circle151. The performer’s territory, in this way, has gone through a decoupage, becoming a territory as an exploration space, also as a creative process, and they can investigate its nuances and possibilities, making it more or less stable, building tensions and, if that is their intention, dislodging to the extreme, where this initial loop will probably be discarded, being eliminated giving way to the implementation of other procedures. The loop also allows the performer, from the moment it is created, to engage in a kind of "dive" into sound, since through the repetition of small segments of sound, there is a creative development of their decoupage, processing and manipulation, granting the musician a feeling of immersion in sound, a concomitant with the sound production. I can loop one or two seconds of sound, for instance, and offer the possibility of putting it under a kind of magnifying glass, where its extension, density, character and diverse sound qualities can be manipulated both internally (operations for cutting, reversing, granulation, changing frequencies, etc., in this small segment in repetition), or in contrast, where the original loop is used as a layer that helps create new sound layers thus, literally composing the sound of performance. This focus/immersion in sound is of utterly important for the development of this type of performance, in which the concrete and energetic aspects of sound is a critical step for its creative use, moving it away from the abstract idea of musical note. The loop thus allows the performer to conduct creative operations in the materiality of sound, working its intrinsic qualities, out of the use of different hybrid musical instruments. The loop could be a practical example of the idea that sound "is the creation interface", developed by the Italian composer Agostino Di Scipio (2003, pp.269-277), who states, “This approach, by which one invents and works out inter-dependencies among real-time control variables, already, reflects a paradigm shift from interactive composing to composing interactions. In my view, the shift is especially relevant when composed interactions (timbre compositions), than a music of notes (as is often the case with interactive music systems, especially when instrumentalists are involved)”. Even though Di Scipio originally wrote about composition processes, this idea can also be used here, based on the action of a creating-performer, who acts, interacts, creates, interprets and produces, at the same time, in a performance. The sound "as creation interface" is very pertinent in performances using the loop not only as a creative tool, but as if it were a musical instrument itself. The loop thus presents its particular instrumentness contours, such as its own genesis (I may wish to loop something randomly or to be extremely accurate in my sound clipping, I can loop from different stages of the signal chain where my instruments are coupled, I can loop reversely, in deferred progress times, also changing them later, I can loop by playing together with the original loop, which only becomes a sound fragment after some time, etc.), its extension (fully manipulable after its execution has started, allowing different types of 151 The performer can even perform change and manipulation operations in the loop itself, each time it "returns" to its starting point, reversing its horizontal direction or changing specific parts of the loop, handling progress etc. In this way, the loop is a powerful material of creation and sound processing. 174 sound accumulation, counterpoints between different pieces of the same sound clipping, etc.) and, finally, its looseness (the completion of a given loop is totally linked to the performer’s wish, also able to program its beginning and end in certain periods of time; record of the original loop in the memory buffer of the machine, waste and processing that had been implemented during a passage of the performance, on loop, may be exposed after the loop itself is terminated, becoming creative material for new loops, etc.). The loop, thus, allows the entire music system to become even more interactive, given the action qualities the performer needs to possess in order to operate it somehow creatively, considering what Di Scipio stated earlier, where the performer begins to "compose" the interactions with their instrument, which, in this case, covers both acoustic and digital instruments in a hybrid way. In this respect, Di Scipio states that this change of perspective can be even better defined as “it should be described as a shift from creating wanted sounds via interactive means, towards creating wanted interactions having audible traces”. Somehow, I try to create a loop in a certain performance in a less concerned manner as to its sound result rather than creating a place of creative interactions, which obviously present resultant sound. As aforementioned, when creating a particular loop, I am creating a kind of territory, which will be traversed for a certain time (mostly not determined), according to the intrinsic needs of that particular moment in a performance, and several consistency factors are explored over the existence of this loop, which can be abandoned afterwards or stored in the memory of the machine, to be restored at some other moment in the same performance. The loop is thus a convergent space, a territory where multiple possibilities and desires can be established by the performer. Obviously, like every musical instrument or creative process, the performer needs to practice the loop, especially if they intend to explore it freely in an improvisation. The construction of a loop as an element of improvisation requires the performer to conform to certain instances, among them: from which equipment/instrument will the loop be recorded? How can it be accessed later? At what residual level does the loop happen? (the latter is more connected to the positioning in series or in parallel rather than to the position of digital or analog equipment/instrument responsible for the loop. Depending on this placement, greater or lesser quantities of processing residues, such as echoes, filters, pitch-shifters, etc. may occur.); can it be stored in a sort of buffer or digital memory? These are just a few of the questions that the performer must answer before allocating the use of loops in gear setups. The loop also requires its practice to investigate the types of affordance this procedure can cause to the performer. In addition to the technical characteristics of the gear chosen to perform the loop, the act of looping requires an understanding of the possible affordances. After all, what would be the primary function of looping?152 What 152 Obviously, affordance and its inherent potentialities of a loop like "object" will vary enormously according to the musical style in question, as well as its "function" in different types of music. The act of looping and playing loops changes considerably according to the music styles in which the loop is employed. For a hip-hop singer like Rappin' Hood from São Paulo, the loop might act like a rhythmic instrument and harmonic elaboration, where entire blocks of sound are repeated exhaustively. Now for the composer and guitar player DaveTorn, the loop can function as an instrument of sound expression distinct from the electric guitar or acoustic guitar, where the timbre is processed along the loop itself through several overlapping layers. In the case of Argentine singer and guitarist Marilina Bertoldi, the 175 are the inherent usability potentialities of this very act? As an example, I mention three different features already occurred in certain performances I have experienced during the period of this research: a.) the loop as a comprovisation feature, such as in "Raspas"153, previously presented, in which the record of different parts/sounds is performed and subsequently processed in other digital instruments; b.) the loop as a semi-rhythmic structure, however, without establishing a type of progress, as in "a-B-aC-a"154, performance recorded with ar +2 duo. In this example, we had had a few moments with looped rhythmic structures and deliberately deconstructed, thus allowing the creation of new layers of improvisation. In this case, the looped layers may appear and disappear momentarily, without requiring a dialogue between the fragmentations preceding and continuing the loop itself; c.) the performance of "O homem se arrasta” (close in meaning to ‘the man creeps’)155, also ar +2’s performance based on a poem by Manoel de Barros. In this example, the loop was used primarily as a musical instrument rather than as a processing or manipulation tool. Here, little loop segments were established as central elements of performance without a great number of subsequent sound processing interventions. The loop, in this case, acted as an instrumental element, as a (im)permanent sound source. That way, I built small looped segments several times, always playing "outside" the recorded material and forwarding a new recording afterwards, functioning to continue the flow of performance. Thereby, much of what my own artistic praxis has got in in regard to the use of the loop relates to how the saxophonist and researcher Fransziska Schroeder calls it “soundweaving”, as previously described in the introduction of this work. To Schroeder, the sound of a performance is "woven", is sewn, along it, not in a figural sense, in which there is one sound, followed by another one, then another sound, and so forth, but in a sense of creating the sound itself, which is closely connected, in this case, with the creation of the very environment of this particular performance. This entanglement between sound and its genesis happens when I use the loop, both as a particular musical instrument, and when the loop is a creative process, part of a greater assemblage energy. This tactile quality offered by the loop, of weaving, of composing, of creating by stitching different energy qualities in its design, is of fundamental use in this type of experimental performance. The loop is in essence – in loop "is" the instrument itself, her own band, where she records, manipulates and builds the entire realtime performance arrangement. Or in the case of the duo KaiBorg, of the trumpeter + live-electronics Jeff Kaiser and saxophonist + live electronics David Borgo, where the loop is performed more unexpectedly, randomly, contributing to generate levels of improbability in performance, accumulating over the sound flow and dealing exactly with these characteristics. To see and listen to these examples, visit: Rappin’ Hood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kIfos3tMU4 --Dave Torn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMy1pv3-tw4 --Marilina Bertoldi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzq6fq9sgn8 --Duo KaiBorg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48MBDYNcP6c --All accesses between September 3, 2018 and September 5, 2018. 153 See: https://soundcloud.com/andremartins/raspas-performance-2018 --- access on September 4, 2018. 154 155 See: https://vimeo.com/277184282 --- access on September 4, 2018. See: https://soundcloud.com/ar_mais_2/performance-a-partir-da-leitura-livre-de-um-poema-demanoel-debarros --- access on September 4, 2018. 176 this case – experimental. It encompasses the performer’s physical engagement, a sound engagement by the hybrid instruments and a performance engagement as a whole, through their temporal constitution. In a way, an experimental performance is not but a factory of weaving loops, sewing them and, it is worth reaffirming, playing them. We often play our loops as musical instruments. Schroeder (2014, pp.29-30) introduces the idea of "thread", liable to occur during a performance. This term here I translate as "filament" or simply as "strand" of a textile line, which can go through different positions of in a garment. For her (ibidem), in a performance there is always a sort of dialogue, in which the "improvising musician tells stories using sounds", either between the performers, or between the performer and his or her musical instruments. Schroeder also offers an example that I find very relevant to this moment: that “We follow or lose a thread of the conversation”, in other words, that humans were able to follow or miss the “point” in a conversation, due to different factors, such as attention, interest, provocation, stubbornness, etc. In this case, a performer will, through their ability to "weave" their sounds, their instruments and their poetic discourse as whole, continue or not, to feed or to lose the thread in this conversation that happens exclusively during a musical improvisation performance. This thread interspersed in the conversation is directly related to the performer’s desire to carry on the temporal flow, on the bases of control and non-control ideas, for instance. The performer's mere desire to actively participate in the conversation is not enough. He or she needs to connect with the flow, to sew a relationship with what is happening, that is, if something is really happening (in a solo performance, the performer is the primordial individual in building this dialogue, at least in its initial form). A final feature on the loop is the idea of sound freezing, provided for real-time use through different software or dedicated FX pedals, such as the Electro-Harmonix Freeze156, which I use in my performances with ar+2 duo. This procedure performs a very short sound recording of the sound signal (between 200 and 400 milliseconds), replicating it indefinitely. Metaphorically, it is as if I had access to an extremely portable camera, capable of recording very specific, punctual moments, a Polaroid that is clicked and develops a unique image at the same moment, and that will be forgotten very soon. This processing is a kind of very short loop that can feed the performance in other ways, as if it were a single point, created momentarily, and which goes on being used, processed and removed from the scene afterwards. Rodolfo Caesar (2008, p.34), in his poetics states that "a point would then be the smallest mode of an event production: an isolated particle that, in this condition, constitutes a unit". This created point, this isolated sound particle, can be used to aggregate other materials, providing continuity modes or producing roughness and tension in relation to the rest of the existing materials at that time of performance. In my piece Allure157, presented earlier in this work, this type of manipulation was used throughout the performance. Unlike a constituted loop, the freezing/retaining a fragment of a second weaves other types of threads, of interspersed sounds, in creating sound and creating a particular kind of 156 For further information, see: https://www.ehx.com/products/freeze --- access on September 10, 2018. 157 Available on: https://vimeo.com/273514370 --- access on September 9, 2018. 177 listening, of its own, from a fixed point, which is this micro record of sound itself. Around it, I can create different extensions combining, emancipating or tensioning the originally recorded material, not only from the creative point of view, but as important as that, from the perspective of intense, focused listening, unique to that newly created material. Just as a computer allows you to visualize an image in tiny parts, up until it reaches its smallest constituent element, a pixel, the process of freezing/retention provides something similar for the creating-performer, who thus has the possibility of gathering different sound particles, on a molecular level, often only accessible through electronic and/or digital technology. Hence, the loop and its complementary procedures form one of the most powerful creative tools for the improvising performer, within the scenario of an interactive musical system such as a hybrid machine. The loop allows for something very important in free improvisation, which is a territorial action that enables the performer to plunge into their own act of improvising, a plunge into the sound – in the creation of this sound fragment-point and in creating a differentiated listening of sound – still without having a complete idea of what, exactly, will happen next, but listening to great part of the possibilities. As Schroeder (2012, p.172) states, "[...] at the heart of improvisation is the improviser actively performing improvisation, constantly listening out for what is still yet to come, waiting for the moments that have not yet happened and might still be able to occur”. A process of creative engagement that brings the desire of creating closer to the happening of performance itself, which obviously entails unpredictable openings throughout this process. Somehow, the loop enables the performer to grasp something out of the use of sonorities in particles – larger or smaller, no matter which – that aggregate and disintegrate, narrow down and widen, approach and move away from one another, while offering them a path to openness and unpredictability, even if momentary. Next, I investigate how another characteristic, that of unpredictability, can affect the performer in very different ways in their sound path, on the course of a free improvisation performance using hybrid machine. 178 3.8 Unpredictability/imponderability during a performance “[…] The music is not your hear in analysis, it’s what is there in the real time of performance”. Evan Parker, 1991158 The happening of a musical performance conceived from experimental musicals praxes, such as free improvisation and the use of new digital technologies, can yield numerous features of unpredictability in its course. Reaffirming the initial idea of this chapter, to configure an investigation from the performer's place in action, my focus at this point is a more refined view from my own experience when encountering features beyond my control during a performance. Therefore, I will not worry here about building structuralist references on the notions of unpredictability and imponderability (mainly those by Gilbert Simondon, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Paul Zumthor), already thoroughly investigated in researches published in recent years, although some performer-researchers who have already addressed the subject, from an ethnographic bias, such as David Borgo, Franziska Schroeder, Rogério Costa and Henrik Frisk, among others, were mentioned, precisely because these researchers and performers conducted investigations from the performer’s viewpoint and sense when in action. Having said that, for their relevance to this work, I herein describe some of the important features about this matter. A musical performance entails a series of preliminary wishes: first, what piece will be played, and how it will be executed this time in particular (shapes, grounds, themes, melodies, etc.), or whether it will be an open, freely improvised performance. Obviously, the notion of unpredictability is always present in any musical action. Regardless of the performer’s wish to exercise a level of control both over their instrument, and over the performance itself, there is never an absolute control, independently of the musical instrument, musical style or type of artistic practice. Leaving aside styles and composition schools such as Serialism and Dodecafonism, for example, which have imposed strenuous rigor to the desire of controlling the final result of sound organization and sound pitches, and also putting aside the practices of idiomatic improvisation, such as choro and jazz, for instance, in which different performers organize themselves prior to play previously known and highly practiced standards, my focus here is on an artistic praxis that can be configured from preliminary ideas such as music scores, images, words or even a specific sound, and which are put into practice out of development of performance and its structuring in real time. This idea of structuring something while it is created is exactly where a free improvisation performance occurs, for example. In this place, the notions of control are overshadowed, since no matter how much one wishes to establish certain 158 In BORGO, David. Sync or Swarm, p.54, 2005. 179 preliminary parameters, there is an immensity of possibilities that may or may not occur, besides the creative processes, which as a rule include expansion and/or extension of the instrument and its coupling in electronic and digital systems, in addition to the use of digital instruments. Costa (2018, pp.114-125) states that the very idea of predicting and controlling the results of a performance is ultimately linked to the emergence of a creating individual and the notion of artwork in western Europe. This type of control, as a rule deployed to a composition in deferred time, is not what may occur in free improvisation performances, but it is important to note that the emergence of this idea, that the performer can create and control whatever occurs in a given performance, is tied to this initial thought. After all, if on the one hand a performer is playing a particular piece or standard, even if the desire to build a new and unpublished musical speech is present, it already starts from an extremely territorialized, closed, structured place. In this case, the performer’s function is closer to the one of an interpreter’s, developing a particular view on something previously created, composed, something already studied, analyzed and practiced. Even when this happens in improvisations linked to jazz standards, for example, there is very little occurrence of something, in fact, new. I cite merely as an example one of the most recognized and interpreted jazz standards (I use jazz as an example, though it could be any other musical style; however jazz traditionally has an approximation with the idiomatic improvisation), the song “All the things you are”, originally composed in 1939159, which became a constant theme in the jazz musicians’ study and praxis. This is a simple theme, with 36 bars and an AABA form. There are five tonal modulations along the melody, which originally starts and ends in the A-flat Major. Regardless the form the performer can build when improvising this song, not only their knowledge-based is brought about every time they play it, a dense referent, as studied by psychologist Jeff Pressing, but they also carry with them this kind of music, which, in this case, is instrumental jazz, based on the presentation of the theme out of their traditional formation, involving division of improvisations among the musicians, the swing rhythm, open chord voices, use of interval extensions, etc. There is a whole precast, previously glued and merged territory. Very little can be done here in terms of playing something new, departing from all this structuring. No matter how much performer wishes to be unpredictable, their borders are very well defined. Furthermore, if we think in terms of unpredictability of what might occur outside the musicians’ control, this aspect would be virtually out of the question. The most unpredictable situation that could occur in a performance of “All the things you are”, for instance, would be a musician feeling sick and leaving the scene, or suffering an accident and slipping or collapsing, for example. Nothing that is written is expected to happen differently, regardless the jazz admirers’ sincere wish to listen to something new. The musical phrases, the rhythms performed, the virtuosic technique, the licks outside, the "re-harmonized" harmony, etc., are factors performers have studied to exhaustion. Even when it reaches considerable levels of tension (harmonic, melodic or rhythmic), all this is configured within the jazz language, and that does not present, in fact, anything new. 159 See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Things_You_Are and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPapxr8GvGA --- access on September 10, 2018. 180 It is obvious that traditional musical style, such as jazz or choro, for instance, delimits enormously a performer’s action, somehow granting them reasonable security. Free jazz, derived from traditional jazz, started exactly there, out of the performers’ artistic and creative need, of a certain style evolvement, between the 1950s and 1960s. This example was important here for, in a way, the matter of unpredictability in a performance can occur in two ways: a.) what has not been previously predicted by the performers, but which, in a way, carries a positive character to the performance as a whole, in the sense of a surprise or unheard of material, visibly generated within the machinic assemblage that takes place during the performance; b.) something unpredictable that occurs and that takes the performance to a boundary, an extreme place in which the performance itself can be interrupted. In the latter case, the issues involving technical equipment, unexpected problems with accessories such as string breakage, a type of processing chosen by the performer which generated a material without further development, totally lacking in connection to what that was being created, or a malfunctioning acoustic or digital instrument, for example. In the first example, the performers bear an idea of control in the context of performance itself, in real time. Controlling it is knowing exactly what happens during its constitution, and that there may also be unforeseen occurrences, materials, such as electronic processing (common in performances using live-electronics to occur leftover echoes, reverberations, etc.), which some sometimes can inspire performers to start building a new territory out of this material. As the result of these leftovers of manipulations is, in a way, unpredictable, what and how something will occur cannot be affirmed preliminarily. But it is important to note that even this type of improvisational praxis, encompassing the use of live-electronics, can be assimilated, studied and, somehow, learned, resulting in what musicians in popular music call “licks”, small melodic or rhythmic phrases used several times in the same performance or in different performances, and which are added to the vocabulary of a particular musician, (due to its repetitive use). Processes that use, for instance, ring modulation160 or manipulations based on granular synthesis161 are widespread in experimental musical 160 One of the seminal techniques of electronic music that can be summarized in the idea of a modulation in multiplying synthesis, where the carrier wave is multiplied by the modulating wave. See: http://www2.eca.usp.br/prof/iazzetta/tutor/audio/sintese/4.1-anel.html and https://www.ime.usp.br/~kon/MAC5900/aulas/Aula19.html --- access on September 25, 2018. 161 In relation to granular synthesis, it can be summarized in the idea of recording a small sound sample (which will be used as a kind of "grain" of a certain sound), at its originally created speed, and playing it at different speeds from the same sampling point, in addition to the possibility of changing the pitches and harmonic partials. This type of processing can create extremely rich sound with regard to textures and roughness, encompassing the idea of sound particle, as used by Iannis Xenakis, Curtis Roads and Barry Truax, among other composers/researchers. The Mexican researcher Manuel Rocha Iturbide (2007) shows in the article Buscando una técnica de sínteses global através de una concepción del cuanto sonoro, with the two following images, the difference between a.) traditional additive synthesis and b.) granular additive synthesis, where the researcher states that discontinuities, overlaps and possible spectral uses of granular synthesis make it a powerful tool in creating sound. 181 praxis, sometimes becoming a kind of stylistic repetition in today's experimental musical praxes. In the second example mentioned above, unstable processes may occur so that, in order to keep performance alive, performers are required to establish great structural work. In an open system, as in the case of a free improvisation performance, consistency degenerative processes may occur at any time, literally destabilizing the entire process. Frequently, a performance with such characteristics stabilizes and dissipates over the current minutes, turning it into something that moves, settles, and reorganizes itself, always running in a performative time flow. The main characteristics of musical improvisation are always present in these different moments, seeking to list the possibilities of this kind of mutual conversation between different performers or between a performer and their digital machines and hybrid musical instruments. At every second, important decisions need to be taken by the performer, especially in the presence of digital instruments and electronic machines in action, merging recorded materials during the performance and feeding it back it with different procedures. The performer is, at all times, dealing with different possibilities that constantly involve the maintenance and operation of a certain assembled territory or the departure to a new place, still not created and devoid of any guarantee of stabilization or, as it frequently b) Fréquence Fréquence a) Fréquence Temps Temps The following image (ibidem) illustrates exactly the processing of granular synthesis out of a record of very short-lived sound sample, which is practically "composed" of a textural cloud of different sound grains. Temps See: http://www.artesonoro.net/writings.html and https://www.academia.edu/23345594/Searching_for_a_global_synthesis_technique_through_a_quant um_conception_of_sound --- access on September 24, 2018. 182 happens in a performance, not even its establishment. It is not uncommon that one or more performers seeks to establish a new territory at a certain point of the performance, and it ends up not being embraced by the other players or made impossible by the procedures initiated by digital software or instruments. Therefore, every elapsed second in the performance matters to the performer and their decision-making (both aware and unaware), always in a context of continuity and exploration. Here, the idea of creating-performer experiences its genesis to the fullest, where at every moment the performer needs to deal with their knowledge base while drawing up possibilities that exceed a certain assembled territory at that very moment. Steve Lacy (In: Borgo, 2005, p.124) states that “in 15 seconds, the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have 15 seconds”. What Lacy means is the need to be able to elaborate feasible material at that very moment, which may not only allow what is going on in that performance to continue, but it also offers the possibility of new territories to be explored creatively. The entire hybrid machine in its assemblage, is an open system by nature, absorbing the energy of the performance in order to constitute itself. Obviously, there are moments of entropy and random crossing of different types of creative energy, which make it, almost insistently, unstable. A stable free improvisation performance that presents large amounts of territorialized material could not, in fact, be named free. This opening of possibilities and the very idea of freedom is based intrinsically on the search for the exploration of possibilities and the instant creation of new territories. In this way, every fifteen seconds, all the performer has got are exactly these fifteen seconds to allocate, propose, reiterate or create something that agglomerates to materials that have already taken place in the performance. The opening of the system itself is what makes it alive, through the exchanges of energy among performers, their digital machines, their acoustic, electronic or digital musical instruments, the environment, etc. Borgo (2005, pp.124-125) states that, “An improvising ensemble can also be described as an “open” system. In a very general sense, the ensemble takes energy gradually from the acculturation, education, training, and experience of its members, and more immediately in the form of interaction between members and influences from the physical and psychological context of the performance (i.e., the acoustic space, the potential sonic materials, the performer’s state of mind, the audience’s reaction, etc.). More technically, because active listening plays such a central role in shaping the dynamics of improvised performance, the control and feedback parameters are tightly coupled and the system remains open to continual energy influxes from the environment. Improvised music is also “dissipative” in the literal sense that if no external energy is applied to the system; the complexity of the music will decrease, tending toward zero, as listeners get bored. Improvisation requires a constant influx of energy to offset these dissipative qualities […] the “equilibrium” of an improvised music performance is disturbed, in a general sense, through the expectation by all present that music will be made. Free improvisation, in particular, often carries with the specific mandate to deconstruct or recontextualize 183 know or familiar musical properties. But more technically, the freer forms of improvisation can be said to be “far-from-equilibrium” because (in good performances, at least) the musicians are supplying a great deal of external energy. Similar to the dual nature of entropy in dissipative systems, one person’s “waste” in an improvised performance – perhaps an unintended gesture or “noise” – may also become grist for the improvising mill of others in the ensemble”. As Borgo affirms, if the performance does not achieve this dissipative quality regarding to energies created mutually and with the environment itself, the performance tends to head to its exhaustion as a creation place. What fuels a performance of musical improvisation is exactly the ability to manage its vital moments of imbalance. It is only through these moments that a certain performance may happen. And it is exactly here, during these necessary moments of imbalance, in which several unpredictable processes occur, once the performer always seeks to extrapolate the limits of musical instruments, the limits imposed by the software and even by the computer, the environment itself, the speakers, etc. If these moments of imbalance are not mutually absorbed by the performers and by the creative processes, they can simply make performance so unstable and aimless that it will perish, indeed. It is worth recalling that music, in this case, is not only tied to the idea of final creation, of a product, but rather to transmission, to permeability, to collective action. Making music, in this specific case of an improvisation performance with digital instruments is conveying something to the environment at all times, on a permanent autopoietic and collective level. The uninterrupted transmission of musical possibilities, thus, creates this game, this conversation among the creative agents present in the performance, be they human or machines. A performance will only take place departing from these inter-assembled transmission qualities, negotiated moment by moment, interconnected by possible procedures that will be exclusively elaborated there at that determined moment. This explains why it is so difficult (impossible, in fact) to repeat a free improvisation performance, regardless the wish to repeat that initial idea, the previously proposed structuring, the same instruments used, the same environment, the same people, etc. Each performance will only exist at that moment. And it will never be repeated. Costa (2018, p.116) states that "in this case, music is action, mainly. And this action - which takes place in the ‘here and now’ - is highly sensitive to social, architectural, acoustic, motional, etc. contingencies, etc. Therefore, the degree of predictability decreases dramatically". Consequently, the degree of unpredictability increases exponentially in an environment in which predictability is always confronted and contained. There are several factors that can make a performance unpredictable, among which: each performer’s individual ability of containing the supposed predictable actions (theirs and other musicians’) and redirect them to a path of creative exploration; the amount of simultaneous processing that may occur at a certain moment, saturating the performance sound spectrum to the point of entropically leading it to the end; unexpected actions from both acoustic and digital musical instruments, in which substantial deformations may occur making performance momentarily excessively unstructured; the bad configuration of some gear, which may technically stop working, harming the entire creative environment (a computer that stops operating or restarts automatically, or some speaker that emits a 184 certain sound, characterized by a technical problem, for instance); the lack of personal engagement of a performer, mainly in duo and trio formations, in which each element becomes largely responsible for the creation and elaboration of the whole; etc. Obviously, it is worth mentioning that these characteristics are presented heterogeneously as the performance encompasses the use of idiomatic improvisation, which is firmly stable and territorialized, due to the use of defined materials and widespread musical systems, and the free improvisation, embracing an almost infinite openness in terms of materials and musical procedures, where there is a constant pursuit for deterritorialization. Therefore, the levels of unpredictability will be very different and distinguished as the performance environment changes its focus. In free improvisation, which is the kind of improvisation used primarily in this work, the constant pursuit for new territories is based on a constant feeling of unpredictability, in which the processes of creating the temporal performance flow are often so open and unknown, promoting an intense confrontation between the referent that each musician brings along (their knowledge-base, their entire background in resolution of creative "problems", etc.) and the new levels of creative exploration that are offered by a performance stemming from this environment (that of free improvisation). Here, control is always unstable and relative. Regardless a performer’s wish to control their musical materials and hybrid musical instruments, there is a constant relativity in the control and execution in real time. Decisions are always momentary, usually made during the performance itself, requiring the musicians to listen attentively, focused and directed not only to sound materials, but to the environment itself. Without strict planning, a performance may last five, ten, eighteen or twenty-five minutes, for example, even if the "same" performance is repeated, departing from the same proposal, the same material used such as a score, etc. The performance is built in real time, out of the interaction between performers or between a performer and their digital, electronic machine and their hybrid musical instruments. Even if a musician wishes, during a free improvisation performance, they will find immense difficulty in controlling sound results; every moment overlaps to the next, requiring the performer to have the ability to exercise and develop a kind of "short" memory, a very important feature in this type of experimental praxis. This short memory can offer consistent change elements of sound typology, creation processes, musical and/or sound emphasis, instrument approach, etc., enabling the performer to obtain, in a way, freedom of creative thinking and action. It is worth recalling that not only processes and sound material are usually unpredictable in performances in this type of artistic praxis. As Pressing states (1987, p.345), "to the extent that we are unpredictable, we improvise"; for the author, the whole remainder of what a being accomplishes in life is a repetition of standards and obedience to external orders. However, for all that is unpredictable, we, humans, improvise. This psychological characteristic of our mind is obviously present in situations in which a free improvisation performance takes place. By experiencing a situation of unpredictability within the performance, the musician improvises their act of improvising. To resolve a particular situation or explore this character of unpredictable quality, the musician can dive in this particular situation and experience it at the risk of: a.) managing to "survive" that moment, elaborating momentary creative strategies that permeate this particular situation, leading the performance to somewhere else under different conditions from which they had found it, initially, or 185 b.) even with the attempt to creatively craft a material or a free form process, this particular situation, unpredictable to that performance, they fail to elaborate a kind of exit, of encouragement, of survival. So, it heads to its standstill, entropically. Pressing (ibidem) himself investigated that improvisation, in most styles, encompasses the use of a referent by the improvising musician. This referent observes a formal and preconceived scheme that the musician brings with him or her, learns previously, studies analytically, etc., facilitating the creative negotiation over the proposed material (a jazz theme, baroque fugue, blues, a chorinho, etc.) and employs it to their improvisational praxis, or to what Pressing (ibidem) calls “improvised behavior”. This type of improvisational behavior is present in virtually every improvisation style in the West, except for what we call free improvisation. Pressing states that “if no referent is present, or if it is devised in real-time, we speak of 'free' or 'absolute' improvisation”. For him, the inexistence of a preliminary referent is the only condition for a musical improvisation to be, in fact, free. (ibidem) In any style of popular music, for example, by "seeing" the chord of C7M(9), the improvising musician elaborates, in a virtually unconscious way, an entire arsenal of options to be used. If they wish to establish an extremely stable environment, for instance, they can play a larger scale or a larger pentatonic scale with certain ranges called extensions, such as the ninth major interval, in this example. If the performer wishes to print a quality of tension and a certain degree of dissonance, they may play, over this chord, the minor pentatonic scale a semitone below the tonic note of this chord, the pentatonic scale of B minor or the Lydian mode, the fourth present mode on the major scale of C. In this case, it provides interval qualities as the augmented fourth, which, when added to the intervals of third and seventh major, establishes a less "flat" and predictable sound than the larger scale, mainly by the melodic tension introduced by the augmented fourth. In other words, there is a complete referent established in the performer’s mind when this chord arises. Obviously, they will do a preliminary harmonic analysis, observing which harmonic degrees precede this C7M(9) chord and which harmonic degrees are followed by this same chord; if there is any typical cadence formed; if there is tonal modulation, use of chromatism, borrowed modal chord, etc. Regardless of what has permeated this chord, or the intention that the improvising musician wishes to establish at this time, all available options have already been studied, been already practiced, analyzed, transcribed, investigated. The referent basis here is so pregnant that even if a performer decides to play randomly all the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, at some point this tension will stabilize and will be identified exactly by this chromatic character, as an intention, as an improvisation tool. Above all that, there is the presence of rhythmic groups that the performer can use in this kind of situation. The swing-feel in jazz, the syncopate and the tuplets in Brazilian music, the quarte-note in rock, punctuated notes in the blues, etc. Again, the reference of each style is well known, disseminated and previously established. Even in situations of fusion, in which the improvising musicians "mix" different styles such as rock, jazz and symphonic music, for example, encompassing polyrhythms, broader orchestrations and loaded with voices, musical forms considered more intricate, the referent is established with abundant power. Lovers of artists such as Robert Fripp, PFM (Premiata Forneria Marconi), Frank Zappa, Miles Davis or the Mahavishnu Orchestra, for example, 186 seen as musicians with a wide range of improvisation and composition capacity in several different styles, simultaneously, end up having a peculiar compositional and performing behavior that, however idiosyncratic, are still established in a consistent referent, perhaps a little broader, but still concrete and explicit. Unpredictability also happens in the performer’s relationship with the timbre of their musical instrument, especially in connection with electronic, digital or hybrid instruments. The timbre of an acoustic instrument brings a slightly stabler referent when there is a desire to explore the tessiture ability or its physical expansion. By listening to different performances of saxophonist John Coltrane, for example, we can establish a well-defined timbre referent: a powerful, well defined and robust tenor timbre saxophone. Listening to the musician in 1954, in Johnny Hodges’s band162 or on the album A Love Supreme, eleven years later (1965)163, a regularity in the constitution of his timbre is perceived. Phrasing is reasonably more structured in the second example, based on a technical analysis, but the timbre itself is virtually the same (which, for jazz connoisseurs, is a quality). However, how can the timbre of an electric guitar or a saxophone coupled to a digital system of sound processing be defined? Or how can we tell beforehand, the timbre of the play "escuta/anda/escreve" (listen/walk/write)164, by the sound artist Rui Chaves, that departs from a sound walk in a city like São Paulo? Experimentation from digital technologies exponentially increases the unpredictability of the timbre. For Rodolfo Caesar (2008, p.59), "currently an area that is still wrapped in the mists of chance [...] is the perception of timbres. To this day, there is still not anyone capable of 'pre-listening' what a certain unheard-of mixture of instruments will yield in terms of timbre." The composer still complements, soon after (ibidem): "let alone this difficulty when they have to deal with non-instrumental sounds (such as an electronic one and those of microphonic origins?" In a free improvisation performance with the use of electronic and digital technologies, the creation and development of the timbre as a creative exposition material itself is common procedure used by the performers. The timbre, in this case, serves the performance not only as a territorial layer, a structure launched in the middle of the event; but it also serves as poetic discourse, as an element of creation and elaboration of the conversation that a performer can have with this assembled environment and with other musicians, if this is the case. Thus, timbre in a performance with such characteristics can take on a character of a dynamic, nonlinear and somehow complex place. Due to these precise qualities, the imponderability of all performance can often be intrinsically linked to the timbre that appears at a certain time. Here, as the referent is not a chord or cadence, as there is a pre-established and continuous rhythm, as there is no groove or rhythmic proposition that establishes some kind of sound link with the environment, it is the timbre itself that will often take responsibility for making the performance "move" 162 Available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCTXcUGKcw8 – Coltrane’s solo begins at around 3’03”. Access on October 10, 2018. 163 164 Available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll3CMgiUPuU -- Access on October 2, 2018. Recording of the performance available on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhSdH521PrM -Access on October 10, 2018. 187 forward. As an example, I use here the "free, free"165 performance by the duo ar+2, recorded on video. It is clear that the timbres of the bandolim and saxophone, both coupled with digital interactive sound processing systems, take over the function of "carrying" the performance flow as a whole. The first three minutes are fully wrapped around a loop of sounds recorded from the touches of the saxophonist Rogério Costa’s fingers on the keys of his acoustic instrument, and that is where a more consistent flow is established. Passing through this timbre, there are insertions of an "ethereal", timbre from spaced notes of the bandolim, which was also recorded in a loop equipment. It is interesting to note the transition that happens exactly as of the third minute of this part of the performance. The loop is abandoned, and the creation of a new textural timbre begins, which, even with immense feedback that at 3'45", is created on the move, out of different types of electronic processing. Here, both the 10-string bandolim and the saxophone use very distinct timbres of their acoustic timbres, which are often so unpredictable that they almost put performance itself in question (the feedbacks between the fourth and sixth minutes are an example of this, besides happening again in the eighth minute, also being recorded by the loop; the performer in this case, has to deal with a kind of intervention in the loop itself, creating, as a counterpart, a new material, while "solving" the problem of the material recorded seconds before). I used this example to illustrate how intricate the creation of the timbre of a given instrument is, in real time, during an improvisation performance, and the importance this timbre will possess during the event. In performances using free improvisation praxis and electronic technologies, unpredictability and control and noncontrol forms are therefore present all the time. The assemblage itself can often happen unpredictably and uncontrollably. Being the very environment of performance interactive, due to the machinic assemblage, the performer needs to be attentive and aware of these timbre formation processes as territory and its subsequent deterritorializations, for timbre of a certain musical instrument may be emerging and perhaps simultaneously immanent. It is therefore possible to state that the timbre of a particular performance, formed by the set of dozens of different timbres which, in turn, were created during the event flow, is improvised, is unpredictable and, consequently, irreproducible, just like any performance. Even if the performer wishes to use the same equipment, the same type of pick-up and acoustic-digital conversion interface, the same speakers and the same "place" of a previous performance, they will hardly be able to repeat a certain timbre, in its same constitution, during the performance flow, as previously occurred. When consulting a dictionary of the Portuguese language, the word unpredictable brings the following synonyms, among others: sudden, imponderable; something that happens by chance; random, contingent, uncertain, occasional. I believe that these synonyms are very pertinent to what I tried to write here about the characteristic of creating a timbre during a performance at that very moment. 165 Available enclosed and on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG3_OMsFYbQ -- Access on October 10, 2018. 188 3.9 Scary blank-space {The “scary blank-space”: construction of a patch for musical performances with realtime interaction} “One of the challenges we perceive in the current computer-mediated environment for musical improvisation is to avoid a situation in which our machines are disturbingly lively, and we become frighteningly inert”. David Borgo, 2016166 There are several ways to face a blank screen, a blank sheet, or a blank score, however, in all of those, among other examples, there is the inevitable fact that the creator, artist or performer needs to face: empty space. In a situation in which a performer creates some of their digital instruments and manufactures artifacts intended for a kind of connection and interconnection of different hybrid instruments, through a patch, there is still a very important feature to be considered: the artist is, at this moment, not only creating a new instrument or a space that may allow the connectivity of different instruments and sound processing; they are also building a sort of black box, where after some time connecting, reconnecting, interacting, linking and undoing linkages, this virtual space becomes a maze that even when meticulously annotated can be confusing, shuffled and extremely intricate. The idea of black box here represents an allusion to this object encoding and decoding signals, processes and manipulations, a present concept in Vilém Flusser’s work (In: BERNARDO, 2002, p.67). I do not use this concept as a replicator of Flusser's ideas, I just borrow the term black box to illustrate the complexity of the creation and development of a patch, regardless of the software it is designed in. I recalled Flusser’s concept exactly because, for the author, the black box, according to Silva and Martins (2013, p.173) "in its innocuous and primitive appearance, even in its analogic or pre-digital versions, prefigures all the characteristic devices of today – from the tiny computer chip to the great superstructures of society." The idea of a physical or virtual apparatus, which prefigures cartesian structures, calculating with the jumps of imponderability that are subject to all technical objects is, in my view, very relevant to a patch. Mastering the input and output controls of the patch is not enough. It is also necessary for the performer to master its content, their links, connections, processing, manipulation, permissions, exclusions, etc., in a virtual world that applies, replicates and processes the constituent element of musical performance: the sound. However, even when (in the attempt to) mastering all these instances of sound processing and creation, no performer will be exempt from irregularities enhanced inside this black box which is a patch, whether due to malfunction, or overloaded processing, or connection failures, or saturation, etc. It is exactly in this point that the creating-performer finds the challenge of overcoming such performing and 166 In “The Ghost in the Music: Improvisers, technology, and the extended mind”, 2016. 189 performance stability stress factors and operates changes in the black box. After all, says Flusser (2002, p.11), “it is precisely the blackness of the box that challenges the photographer”. The complexity of a patch itself may end up becoming, in a way, fascinating to the performer. But why have I begun this subchapter titled "scary blank space" speaking exactly about something diametrically opposite, the idea of the Flusserian black box? This opposition was exactly a provocation for the reader to make a reflection: how necessary is it to build a patch from the performer's intentions in virtualizing/automating processes and, at the same time, what is the fascination that these possibilities exert on the same performer? In practice, we are often so involved with creating a particular patch or work that we end up "complexing" certain processes, as it can happen as creators of a particular sound processing or even a new digital instrument, fascinated by the very act of creating, connecting, processing and handling one or more processes. It is not uncommon to observe creating-performers interacting with their "black boxes" frequently in an intense way, where the origin of a particular sound material is voluntary. The manufacture of small programming quantities that can be copied and reintegrated into new patches, out of abstractions and patches "within" other patches, causes the programming-performer, in this case, to get lost in their creation process. Caesar (2008, p.62) calls abstracted-morph the ability that a particular sound material has to be allocated in different layers of composition and/or processing, a type of flexible material, as the author says, from (ibidem) "flexions that seek rhyme, assonance, alliteration, conjugations, etc.". This ability to flex, reiterating and reintegrating pieces of programming – which often result, for the performer, into pieces of a certain type of processing - given that software such as Max, for instance, offers distinct levels of visual programming, by objects - contributes for a patch to have an attribution of a black box, with a usually exacerbated level of technological fetish. A patch is, thus, a place where different creative forces are found, reinforcing Di Scipio’s (2003) concept cited above that sound also becomes, in fact, a kind of creation interface. Di Scipio (2003, p.269) says: “I think it is technically possible and musically desirable to achieve a broader understanding, if not a reformulation, of what is meant by “interaction’”. From this idea, a patch in Max, for example, becomes one of the main and most powerful forms of interaction between a performer and the elaboration of their sound(s). The question, however, is how this performer exercises dominance (or lack of it) when starting a new work with a computer blank screen, having the possibility of copying and pasting programming examples from other patches and/or drawing up a unique programming, perhaps still devoid of full knowledge of where they want to reach. It is worth recalling that a particular patch becomes, after inserted into the chain of gear that makes up a hybrid machine, one of the most important agents, if not the most important one in the whole process. It is through a patch that, most of the time, a performer interacts with the machine, performing cutting operations, establishing sound layers, records, processing, configurations that control other instruments and components present in the system, etc. The performer's use of the 190 patch, thus, becomes a powerful performance agent. A performer can play a patch as much as, or even more than their own primary musical instrument (often the patch itself is the performer’s primary musical instrument), reaffirming what Di Scipio stated (ibidem): “by operating the available control devices, the agent in effect ‘plays’ the if it were a new kind of music instrument”. The initial question comes back to the how do you build a new musical instrument, practically out of the void? Communication and the process of interaction between performer and machine never come from one single direction, although they are often seen in this way (man communicates/interacts with the machine and not the opposite), not only in the processes of musical creation with computers, but in the man-machine relationships167. During a performance, communication is mutual: both the performer interacts with the patch, as it fully does the other way around. In an exchange system that Östersjö (2008, p.i) called "thinking-thru-practice"168, in which perception and performer's interaction with the machine occurs exactly as the machine (and, in this case, a patch allocated within this machinic system) interacts with the whole environment, processed material, coupled digital interface, etc., the importance of the interaction quality is mutual and dependent on the full understanding of the whole environment where this performance takes place. While the performer plays and concomitantly thinks about what they play and see on the screen of their mobile computer, they interact with the patch, practicing previously learned schemes, in the actual performance. This praxis of "thinking-thru-performing", described by Östersjö, feeds the changes of organization and schematics of the patch itself. It is not uncommon for me, over a performance, to change volume levels, to mix quantities of certain processing, specific quantities of certain manipulations in different sound processing (the number of echo repetitions, the depth and rate relationship, sound freezing position in a given sample recorded in real time, cut size in the recorded sound grain sample, etc.). A patch is never the same after a performance. This is an important feature in its creation process, for I, as a performer, create my patches while I play them, experiment them, manipulate and reorganize them, changing vital parts of their constitutions. These changes can only be effective if the performer, in fact, experiences their sound and practical outcomes. Because it is important to understand the operationality of how the patch can be handled during a performance. How do the necessary interactions with the patch in real time happen? Can you operate it from external controllers or is it also necessary to change it within of their visual schemes, through faders, sliders or drive buttons? Is it necessary to enter any sort of information during performance? These, among many other questions, are vital so that a patch may or may not take place in a performance in real time. 167 Frisk (2008, p.71) affirms that “There is a tendency, not only in musician-computer interaction, but in human-computer interaction in general, to look at the communication as a primarily one-way stream, in which noise in the transmission is a great problem. From the bottom up the computer is truly digital and it may be correct to also let the input to such a system be binary. Looking at it, however, as an agent in a communicative system where binary distinctions are difficult to make and where the communication will be defined in the course of action, so to speak, will certainly present problems”. 168 Österjö (ibidem) divides this concept of thinking-thru-practice into two concomitant parts: thinkingthru-hearing and thinking-thru-performing. 191 It is important to remember that for each change occurring in the patch, changes will occur in the sound results, with chain-linked consequences, as a patch covers different types of chain sound processing and manipulation, whether in series or in parallel. There is, therefore, the eternal question that Algie (2012, pp.7-8) makes in his doctoral thesis: "Who is doing what with what?". To every change the performer applies to the patch, there are one or more changes in sound results that, as an immediate consequence, changes in the interaction that the performer performs from this point. Creativity permutations, possibilities of using available hardware, and the software itself integrate a network of connections that, at times, it is not clear whether the performer plays in a certain way because they so desire from the beginning of the programming of the patch or, on the contrary, perform the performance in this particular way because the patch thus enables them to perform it like that169. It is worth recalling that, no matter if acoustic, electroacoustic or electronic sounds, in the case of the hybrid machine, all of them together are mixed and directed to the set of speakers in the system, as a whole. A patch that, for example, offers only and exclusively the repetition of a certain amount of digitally recorded signal, without any other type of processing or manipulation change, may supplement the "acoustic” sound, originally sampled, with the same envelope properties, which will be added to the original sounds170. 169 Borgo (2016, p.2) describes that “Much of the psychological work on improvisation, however, has proceeded according to the (still dominant?) view that our senses provide information to the brain, which then processes and plans utilizing its rich structure, and only then activates our motor systems”. The performer's interaction with a patch – and its almost endless sound possibilities of connection, grouping, processing and manipulation – is what makes the playing in a certain way or is it the other way around? Later, in this same article, Borgo cites the formulation of the idea of an extended cognitive system, which covers natural, technological and socio-cultural perceptual and sensory instances. The environment thus integrates an important part for what a performer creates or is imbued with when creating. By creating a patch “from scratch”, this performer interacts with this machinic environment, and vice versa, and such environment is also of co-creation and co-participation agent. Borgo (ibidem, p.4) states “I would like to suggest that it is becoming increasingly difficult if not impossible to ignore that agency wielded by the environment. In particular, I will argue that free improvisation, especially but not only in the context of its interface with advanced audio and computer technology, affords simultaneously an inroad to participating in complexity and the possibility of creating some provisional closure, some fleeting reduction of complexity [...] on a world, a technosphere, increasingly characterized by relentless machinic heterogenesis”. 170 Coelho de Souza (2010, pp.150-151) states that: "The problem of the interaction between instrumental and electronic sounds has therefore a double articulation: the moment of production postulates, for purely technical reasons, a separation between sounds generated by instruments and synthesized sounds, but at the reception this separation can be found masked by perceptual ambiguities [...] it is then concluded that the dialectic of the interaction between instrumental sounds and electronic sounds depends on the recognition of acoustic similarities at the perception end [...] The sounds generated by instruments may be idiomatic, but they may also be unfamiliar, such as those produced by expanded techniques (multi-phonic flute sounds, for example). Electronically generated sounds may be unfamiliar, such as such as the ones produced by granular synthesis algorithms but can also simulate instrumental sounds with surprising perfection. Among these extremes there is a continuum of intermediate possibilities, such as recorded instrumental sounds and electronically transformed, which could be situated at intermediate points between the extremes of both categories. Therefore, an aesthetic field of work, idiomatic to this mixed genre may derive from the ambiguity of the continuous of possibilities in the fields of generation and reception." Note that Coelho and Souza write this from the point of view of composition, where there is a deferred time between production and reception of these 192 Therefore, when thinking about how to create a patch from scratch, from a blank screen, a performer has dozens of questions to answer, though most of the time, they cannot even formulate them yet. Creating a patch is undoubtedly a way of learning through practice. No matter how many books, manuals, online forums and available examples (in addition to Max, extensive documentation that accompanies the software, even offering thousands of programming examples that can be copied and pasted instantly into the new patch) there are, it is only through the performance with the patch that the effectiveness of using this feature as performance agent occurs, as a creative agent and as a digital musical instrument171, for the sound field of creation and performance possibilities increase exponentially by using such digital resources. Thus, a patch is a place where the performer never creates from scratch. Never. They bring their original intentions of creating that particular patch from or out of a specific need for a performance (sample recording and manipulation with granular synthesis or employment of freezing processing and change of frequencies at the sampled pitches, for example), besides dealing with many examples available and, in a way, seeks to reiterate procedures that have already performed or conducted outside the patch. Through changes linkages and manipulations of the signal digitally sampled, the performer can create new types of instrumental interfaces, especially when it encompasses the use of visual objects to control sound, in addition to the possibility of using wireless sensors and controllers by capturing gestures and body movements. The patch therefore expands what the software itself can offer, through unique connection and virtualization processes. Bertelsen, Breinbjerg and Pold (2007, p.237) claim that patches of software such as Max, for example, “are themselves clear examples of reification. The patch becomes an extension to the already existing functionality of software, and to the existing pool of libraries of patches. Patches are patched create new patches”172. The creation departs from numerous references that the performer has and embraces the discovery of new procedures and ways to process sound ambiguities. From the point of view of the creating-performer, who acts, interacts with the machine, in real time, the possibilities between electronic and acoustic sounds become even more ambivalent and inaccurate. 171 Beaudouin-Lafon (2004, p.16) writes that the paradigms of interaction between man and machine are three: "computer-as-tool, computer-as-partner and computer-as-medium". In the specific case of a performance in real time where the performer creates and interacts with his musical instrument and simultaneously with a patch (in this case, the patch is an electronic acoustic sound processing feature and is, simultaneously, a digital musical instrument), the computer (the software, patch, interfaces, etc.) going through these three paradigms and, in my analysis of use, goes further; the computer becomes an extension of the human body, human mind and the possibilities of sound creation that I, as an acoustic performer, possess. Therefore, there is a need for a certain domain not only of sound material and the envelope qualities of this material, but also of a certain understanding of the programming languages involved in this patch, machine operating system settings etc., as I showed in chapter 2 of this work. 172 “Are themselves clear examples of reification. The patch becomes an extension to the already existing functionality of the software, and to the existing pool of libraries of patches. Patches are patched together to create new patches”. An observation on the term "reification", often also called "coisificação" in Portuguese language, has its origin in the German language: “verdinglinchung” that, according to Crocco (p.50, 2009), keeps in its translation the Latin meaning of RES (thing). 193 and create sound, out of the utilization of previously created examples and available to use. Pieces of programming are added randomly or not, creating new clusters of patches, which result in a "single" patch, for a certain time (often the time of a single performance), up to (the patch) being reconfigured and reorganized, both for issues related to and out of the experience the last performance and by propositions of new programming possibilities. Often, what is sought is the configuration of a consistency to the whole work, where there is a balance between what is provided by the machine and what is provided by the performer, feeding this kind of seesaw that tries to stabilize. Borgo and Kaiser (2010) call this balance "system-environment hybrids", where the way in which the negotiation of the performance in a machinic environment among the different agents is far more interesting than in the mere technical configuration of instruments, computers, software, etc. A patch is therefore a creative and performance agent173, capable of agglutinating processes, interactions and manipulations, thus becoming the most significant place that a performer deals with during their creative work, in the discursive time of a certain performance, as it covers the entire center of connections in the machinic system. Sensorium is, therefore, the performer’s place, seen and experienced from within the performance. The place where I walk, listen, stump, long to play, interact with my musical instruments, with the audience - if there is any - with other musicians, with my machines. It is the place that embraces a series of events that deal and negotiate over time – the performance time, the performance of time – through my presence in this environment. This sort of "strange cave" as Caroline Jones writes when quoting Michel Foucalt (2006, p.1), elaborates different sensations and emotions of what is in the outside and, concomitantly, within myself, of what comes to me, through my various sensory perceptions and in my own epistemological way of receiving them. Jones (ibidem) quotes that “now more than ever we need to think the body, and embody our thoughts – now when that ‘cavern’ and it’s visceral surroundings are [...] emerged from a telling synchronicity”. It is during a performance that I challenge my own subjectivity in the shape of an abyss of cross-crossed and asymmetric feelings. In this timeless place, I somehow experience what Mauro Maldonato (2014, p.156) said: "may this help men bring to life new versions of one's own identity and, when telling it, to build it." *** 173 Borgo (2016, p.6) cites George Lewis (2007): “the improvised musical encounter may be seen as negotiation between musicians, some of whom are people, others not [...] decisions taken by the computer have consequences for the music that must be taken into account by the human improvisers, an aesthetic of variation and difference that is clearly at variance with the information retrieval and control paradigm that late capitalism has found useful in the encounter with interactive multimedia and hypertext discourses”. 194 auto ethno gra phic ta les 195 4. there is a thesis in the middle of the performance; in the middle of the performance, there is a thesis. {autoethnographic tales} “The music I try to think here is the unlikely one, or even an unlikely listening, to which a molded listening would be restricted claiming it unimaginable and impossible. Thus, opposing to the idea of unlikely, is not that of impossible. No current music - music arising at the time of listening - is impossible, but unlikely, not deductible by the space consisting of the past and the present.” Sílvio Ferraz, 2007174 “[...] it is first indispensable to describe how the prosaic phrase - common speech- transforms into poetic phrase.” Octavio Paz, 2012175 4.1 Preliminary comments on the choice for an autoethnographic approach The use of autoethnographic resources in investigations on artistic praxis has become progressively prominent, both in Brazil and abroad. On my own dissertation (2015), I wrote an entire chapter in the form of a logbook, where various experiments with sound from applications and software when used with the electric guitar were written down. From that moment on, the autoethnographic tool began, in fact, to be part of my work, a valuable resource of reflection and decoupage of various processes that, as a rule, tend to become "nebulous" with time, often missing the opportunity for the researching-creating-performer be aware of. Over the process of investigation and writing of this thesis, the amount of reading, referenced, investigated material and I received was immense. The need to take notes of the most varied forms were accumulated over the past few years, both in traditional writing and digital notes on my own computer, in digital texts, or even on my mobile phone. In fact, it was not uncommon for me to send e-mails to myself containing notes 174 In Notas do caderno amarelo: a paixão pelo rascunho, Campinas, SP, 2007. 175 In El arco y la lira, Ciudad de Mexico, p.51, 2012. 196 on certain books, performances or usage procedures of a particular digital instrument or software that showed a certain appropriated feature to my investigation work and my artistic praxis. This chapter, therefore, covers a number of these different types of annotations, which have obviously been screened here in their nature, seeking to offer a reading to other people in a less hermetic way and directed at my own mode of thinking and logging my notes. The notes are about the processes of creation, testing, investigations, artistic praxis, diverse experiences with software, assembled machines, computer-coupled acoustic instruments, readings and interactions. The purpose of this chapter may be particular to my own work of writing rather than necessary for this thesis. However, its presence in this text, which points to a direction in my doctoral research and operates a kind investigative summary, is valid, in my view, since it reaffirms the praxis of a research operated out of an artist’s bias, with an academic sight and, simultaneously practical. This chapter is therefore a kind of network that covers several issues previously referenced throughout the text, exposed here in the most direct and natural possible way: from my own account, from my own experience. As logbook, it exceeds the count of days and weeks that followed one another. For a very long period – around the four years of duration of the doctorate - it would be extremely tiresome for the reader to be continuously referenced by periods so expressly divided and quantized. Thereby, I chose certain larger blocks of notes to migrate to the final version of the thesis, rather than transposing all the annotations, filling pages with notes. Conversely, I opted for bringing certain pieces of this investigative timeline, which may offer the reader both a more comprehensive and more interesting view of this work, which alone is already extensive enough by its nature. Therefore, the reader might find notes taken weeks in a row during this chapter, in which there is a clear presence of an important development (to me and to the research) of something that intrinsically relates with my investigation. In other moments, the reader will come across notes about a large block of time in which there was no need for a daily/weekly division. In fact, this option is more linked to how to present a pertinent content for those who read this work, than simply exposing long annotations that, in a way, were written only to record ideas, sensations or even certain emotions related playing musical instruments or the perception of finding solutions relevant to my own problems and doubts, in some specific software. In the introduction of this thesis I had referenced some of the works that were dear to me during this research period, three of which are very significant during any autoethnographic recording period176 : A casa e a represa, a sorte e o corte ou: a 176 I cover herein the meaning of the term "autoethnography" and its relationship with my work. However, for the purposes of clarity of the text, I briefly add to the definition of the term adopted here. For Lopèz-Cano (2014), “em la atualidad, el término autoetnografia suele referirse a estrategias de investigación que pretenden describir y analizar sistemáticamente la experiencia personal del investigador para comprender algunos aspectos de la cultura, fenómeno o evento a lós que pertenece o en lós que participa”. Para o autor, a prática da autoetnografia “comparte algunos rasgos con la 197 composição musical enquanto imaginação de formas, sonoridades, tempos [e espaços]”, by Valeria Bonafé (2016) “Explorações de uma relação particular e de expansão com o piano: presença, experimentação e interação”, by Mariana de Carvalho (2017) and "Incidents", by Roland Barthes (2004). These three works accompanied me during the moments of writing and recording of my practical experiences and reflections, as handbooks building a self-referenced text out of artistic experimental praxis. Not only in the writing of this autoethnographic chapter, but throughout the writing of the thesis, these books, among others aforementioned, were my companions in planning how I could describe certain experiences or try and demonstrate certain findings that occurred during the entire doctoral research process. Barthes (2004) writes at the beginning of Incidents that his brief and spaced annotations of continuity resemble a kind of haicai, Japanese poetic writing style stemming from the idea of cutting, in which there is always a central idea interspersed by small poetic fragments. For Barthes, his notes are small daily incidents, which fall upon something, some subject, some theme, causing a sort of "crack" on an empty surface. Those notes, for him, are not (ibidem, p.vii) "neither a theoretical research or critical questioning". Such notes cover some methodological possibilities of action or reaction, though devoid of a need for identification with any theoretical material, for instance. They are, in fact, simply daily annotations, or made in a given moment. They can be seen as lexical photographs of experiences lived during a certain process, which, in this case, is that of a theoretical investigation, however without ever failing to be practical and artistic177. Therefore, there is no separation between this chapter, clearly autoethnographic, and the rest of the thesis. Everything written here, throughout the text was made in the first person. It is how Mariana Carvalho (2017, p.17) begins her undergraduate thesis, bluntly: "I, the body, write this work." Later, she adds: "It is a difficult exercise of putting into words everything the body is, writing is not only a mechanical act of transmission of thought, but it is an integrated experience of a body that thinks”. Putting it into words our own experience as a body that thinks, that performs, that plays a musical instrument, that creates, that improvises, that investigates and formulates, is something very difficult and rarefied. Thus, the thesis itself is an extension of this chapter. It is broadening of this space as a place of research that is, at the same time, the place of artistic experimentation. It is a subjective, personal, individual place to my own body, that writes, plays and participates in the construction of this experience and that seeks to share some of these notes made during the process with the reader. The language itself is a factor of (dis)connection between doing, happening and recording. No experience can be (re)transmitted completely through language. Since the moment we describe an event, it is no longer the same thing; what we describe is the memory of the feeling to have experienced it. Barthes (2004, p.9) describes this: "we shall not express ourselves the way we feel, but the way we remember." In the division between theory and praxis, the experience of playing, of creating, of improvisation will always be described as a autobiografia […] en efecto, al igual que la etnografía, la autoetnografía tien como fin último la comprensión de una cultura, sólo que subrayando la experiencia autobiográfica”. 177 Barthes himself (2004, p.viii) writes: "I put myself in the position of who DOES something, and no longer of who talks ABOUT something: I don't study a product, I endorse a production." 198 memory of the body, a memory of a singular act. When describing something, therefore, I describe what I remember having felt. That is the reason it is often not necessary to detail our daily memories of a certain period, since a more comprehensive memory may be more useful as a record than small daily incidents that may only bulk up in quantity, but not in subjectivity. Such subjective and singular descriptions are an important part of the entire writing process of the thesis, once they weave a territory where it is possible to describe very particular investigative processes, as it is the case of an assemblage of a hybrid machine of musical performance. For Lopèz-Cano (2014, p.37) autoethnographic records allow "the construction of their own discourse on their artistic proposal placing in the fore an effective argument about their personal contribution to the music of our days"178. It is important to note that there is, strictly or absolutely, no correct standard procedure within the research of artistic praxis. Lopèz-Cano (2014, pp.27-29) states: "But what exactly is artistic research? In addition to the discourse of celebration, affirmative and claimant of the rights that art should be considered an area of legitimate knowledge within the University, how do you understand this peculiar research model? In fact, even to the date, there are no clear answers to this question [...] On the opposite pole, some consider artistic research precisely as a way to to reverse such trends, as a strategy of cultural resistance in which research of creation is a call to produce new significant and emancipatory, rebellious critical experiences, and disobedient knowledge, with which we can confront the established power."179 Thus, the very description of the rehearsals, praxes or reflections on certain issues relevant to this work also become tools of artistic research. Lopèz-Cano himself (ibidem, p.168) states that the praxis of self-observation generates a self-reflection praxis and so forth, feeding a kind of investigative loop out of the artistic praxis: 178 “la construcción de un discurso propio sobre su propuesta artística que ponga en primer plano una argumentación eficaz sobre sua aporte personal a la música de nuestros días”. 179 “Pero, ¿qué es exactamente la investigación artística? Más allá del discurso celebratorio, afirmador y reivindicador de los derechos que tiene el arte a ser considerado un área de conocimiento legítima dentro de la universidad ¿cómo se entende este modelo peculiar de investigar? En realidad, a la fecha, no hay respuestas claras a esta interrogante [...] En el polo opuesto, algunos consideran precisamente a la investigación artística como un modo de revertir estas tendencias, como uma estrategia de resistencia cultural donde el crear investigando está llamado a producir nuevas experiencias cargadas de sentido y un conocimiento crítico, emancipador, rebelde y desobediente, con el cual podemos hacer frente al poder establecido”. 199 Figure 9: graph proposed by Lopèz-Cano based on the idea of using autoethnographic resources in the research of artistic praxes. Therefore, I divide here the tales into three distinct parts, which served me to different purposes during these last four years of research: a.) individual tales, which include various inquiries regarding the research project itself, the hybrid machine, interventions of thoughts related to the research, on artistic praxis, with certain specific equipment (software or hardware), specific piece or bibliography, etc.; b.) specific tales of artistic praxes, related to rehearsals, performances in concerts, recordings, events, whether in individually or with other musicians and performers and; c.) specific tales on the creation of the "papagaIO" patch, which accompanies this thesis as a support material. The three reporting options include, somehow, the idea of a corporeal involvement, of the involvement of my body in relation to the use and applicability of some correlated idea with my research. The body has been present in art researches and, more specifically, artistic praxes for a long time now. From Jean Luc Nancy to Paul Zumthor, passing through Barthes, Valèry, Mariana Carvalho, Michel Bernard, Steven Connor and even the postmodernist ideas by Andy Clark and John Johnston, who relate to the machinic, the cyber-performer and several correlations that border on pure digital fetishism. However, it was, in fact, through my body that this research took shape. It was and will always be through the body that the interactions with acoustic, digital and hybrid instruments take place; is through the body relationships of intensity, perception and cognition that occurs an assemblage among different machines, coupled tools and myself, as a performer and simultaneously creator. Great part of what was (de)scribed here stems from the interactions between body and machines, in a 200 conducive environment to musical improvisation, artistic experimentation and sound intervention. Since we have become closer to something that resembles contemporary cyborgs, with our bluetooth headphones or our smartphones, in our wireless communication networks, purchasing, scheduling of exams, transport, mobility and consumption of "data", since we have become performative cyborgs in concert halls, parks or garages transformed into home sound studios, we owe it the access that recent generations of human beings have had ingress. The problems are diverse (some of them, more specifically related to performance with musical instruments, related to this work); however, the challenges, the fact of being creative or not, are numerous and thought provoking to anyone who wants to create out of forms of interaction and usability. As Clark (2003, p.4) stated: "the mind is just less and less in the head". If we are born entirely biologically, we have become machinic throughout our existence. And, as Nancy writes (2015, p.8), "a body is this ‘through what, how and where’ everything happens: everything comes about, everything is produced in a gesture, inflection, in an emotion or a skin rash, the sense of another rubbed or offended body". Everything that touches me and, conversely, that I play today, happens through a technological bias180. The body, my body, here, is the one that Zumthor (2007, p.23) describes as being the "weight felt in experience [...] my body is the materialization of what it is proper to me, lived reality and that determines my relationship with the world." 180 Even if what moves me, at this moment is a lone walk on a deserted beach or in a mountain, what I see, which I hear, listen and realize is related to all my knowledge base, be cognitive or not. Whether it is the sound of the sea or the sound of my feet on earth, it will be a sound that I, today, after dedicating so many decades to studying music, sounds and their intrinsic properties, I listen in a different way. Understanding frequencies, I hear syllables, I hear the wind. I immediately find rhythms, roughness or smoothness that are cognitive to me with thousands of other sounds already studied, played, apprehended, learned, processed, manipulated, referenced, decouped, visualized. My body gives me access to the world and, on the other hand, the world, through technology, gives me access to my body, through headphones, software, gadgets, applications, connections. 201 In this way, I begin by the tale selected for this chapter, divided and exposed as an important part in understanding this work as a whole. 202 a.) individual tales {which include several inquiries regarding the research project itself, the hybrid machine, interventions of thoughts related to the research, with artistic praxis, with some specific equipment (software or specific piece or bibliography, etc.}. 4.2 Hierarchically related layers of incompleteness {tales on learning and development with MAX software} I have been using Max for many years, even so, using it for specific tasks is always a challenge. Over the period of my master’s degree (2013-2015) and between the four years of this doctoral research (2016-19), I used this software several times in concerts, presentations and live performances, as well as in many recordings. I even developed some separate effect modules for specific situations, such as guitar teaching and rehearsals with certain instrumental formations. Max has always proved to be very versatile and it is, even today, my main choice for sound processing, both in live performances as in researches related to timbre and sound. I have previously used another software, such as Integra Live, SuperCollider, and Pd, among others. They all have interesting particularities and different ways of allowing real-time interaction between the performer and the machine. In general, Max adds much of what I think is best among these three examples, offering a more stable and visible platform. One issue to the observed is, since Max is a software capable of connecting anything anywhere within a hypothetical virtual instrument or situation of manipulation and sound processing, its learning curve is not simple. If, on the one hand the performer can access thousands of different modules, a reasonably well implemented patch library and excellent official documentation, on the other hand, the types of bugs and crashes that may happen are also numerous. And believe me, any software, no matter its brand or type, will "break" at some point. In the beginning, my learning happened through tips from forums and a resounding guidance that seemed to be trumpeted everywhere something related to Max was seen: "read the damn tutorials!". Exaggerations aside, it was through those tutorials present within the software itself that I learned the basic operation principles and could fly higher in terms of patch construction and feasibility in different ways to couple to acoustic instruments, external sound effects modules, auxiliary digital effects, etc. An interesting detail I have realized is the fact that, in Max, it is possible to perform virtually any kind of sound operation, but many times a certain processing may occur more simply than in another software. The question, however, is that in Max, I can handle and operate audio inputs in a very –in my view – smart and operational way. 203 For my kind of work with sound, and especially for this research, I have not invested a long time in trying to create everything from "scratch". Although there is a certain fetish about this way of dealing with the construction of a patch and/or the creation of a new hybrid instrument. Most of my time invested in creating and learning how to create patches and operate them stemmed are based on how to build an environment that provides me with certain elements I considered important on a certain occasion. Instead of investing my time in creating a type of reverberation or a module of granular synthesis, for instance, I preferred to reprogram existing patches of the exemplified effects or to bring into Max environment some processing via external effect – such as VST, for example – and to invest my learning on operating them within what I originally intended to accomplish in a particular patch. In my view, this is a very important difference, because it is another type of live-coding that arises. As a performer, I do not necessarily need to create everything from scratch to play and engage other instruments in my patch; I can use ready elements or readapt them for my own needs. Hence, each Max patch becomes a kind of action platform in "real" time allowing changes in different parameters, fully configurable according to very different needs. This offered feature, both in the way of building the and in the way of dealing with it in live situations, is a great differential for me. Another important detail is the almost perfect "marriage" between Max and another software, Ableton Live. In fact, Ableton company acquired Cycling'74181, which still exists as a brand. Through the interoperability between Max and Live, the performer can obtain much more objectivity and new ways to connect separate sounds and sound processing. Live is a software that was originally created to be played live, with an embedded “drag-and-drop” concept in its DNA. There was already a hybrid software between the two platforms, Max for Live (still available in the most complete versions of Live), and it is now possible to transit intuitively between the two software, in addition to a natural connection to the hardware developed by Ableton. The extensively functional integration between this different software is definitely something the performer should take into account. As Zicarelli states (2002, p.45), “… one way to think about Max is that it exists as a set of hierarchically related layers of incompleteness. In short, constructing a system is not enough: one must still operate it to achieve results”. The incompleteness levels are always relating to different parameters and needs of a performer like me, for example. Is there an inclusion of certain external effects? Then, how to connect them in a shorter runtime and a possible (desired) greater control power over processing during a live performance? Can I reconnect any procedure with any other type of input? But how can I operate this possibility without overloading the machine that hosts the software and different coupled devices? These are just examples of how everything in Max can be done and, concomitantly, everything that is yet to be done within the software. When you open it for the first time, there is nothing there. A blank screen. The software alone does not do anything. 181 See: https://nesthq.com/what-does-ableton-acquisition-of-cycling-74-mean-for-creators --- see also: http://cdm.link/2017/06/conversation-david-zicarelli-gerhard-behles/ --- access on December 11, 2018. 204 In April 2019, I finally upgraded to Max version 8. This was the first comprehensive upgrade after the company's purchase by Ableton, and represented, in my view, a very consistent breakthrough. The patch I have been working on, papagaIO, had many inconsistencies and, with the proximity of my presentation in the exhibition " Sons de Silício - Lutheria Experimental (Silicon Sounds - Experimental Lutherie)"182, I decided invest and move to the eighth version of the software. Some aspects I can enumerate after a more extensive use of Max 8 in recent weeks: .general stability: the application is, in fact, more consistent and stable; certain bugs that used to occur in addressing externals seem to have finally been resolved, and when opening a patch with some sub-patches involved, as is the case papagaIO, there is a seemingly more effective synchronization; .speed opening the program: worth mentioning here, the speed to start the program now is impressive, especially when opening it through a specific patch. It is far faster, something that in all other Max versions I had before was something reasonably time consuming; .new MC object (multichannel) allows easier layering creation within a specific patch. Although this operation was possible previously, the MC object greatly facilitated this type of connectivity, mainly for patches that use multi-channel loops and sound spatialization. To the time of this writing (April/2019), it is possible to view up to 16 channels simultaneously, but using as many superimposed channels as the computer processor allows;183 .scanning of available plug-ins: considerable improvement in scanning of various types of effect plug-ins and sound processing existing in the hard disk(s) attached to the computer; . perhaps the most important implementation for real-time performances, in addition to the inclusion of the MC object, whether due to being now possible to create controllers that can be addressed to physical controllers (keyboards, FX pedals, footswitches, etc.) similarly to how it is done on Ableton Live, through colorful sliders and objects mapped instantly - without the need to connect the patch cables - through control change addressing (#CC); this is a considerable advance for performers as it enables real-time changes in a far more practical and easy way to operate during a realtime performance. 182 See: https://sonsdesilicio.wordpress.com/ - access on April 15, 2019 183 See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OhOC6rZC9Q – access on April 15, 2019 205 4.3 Sound flow in my fingers {tales on the learning and development with sotware Flux:FX} I have been using Flux:Fx for a few years since its launch in 2015. I have tested practically every application for sound processing released as of 2013/14, mainly because of my master's research. Based on this experience, I can claim that this app proved to be perhaps the most ambitious one in terms of creative possibilities and one of those presenting the greatest innovations in the user interface in an iOS environment. Altogether, the musician can overlap up to five distinct processing in each patch, Besides the possibility of saving it in more than 40 available memories, separated by blocks of 6 patches each. This allows a performer access to a wide range of possibilities during a live performance, manipulating sound in real time, with their own hands, where the change from one patch to another occurs with a minimum sound interruption (which cuts the attack, by the way, but maintains the previously performed effects up until the time of patch change; this allows the performer to allocate delay processing, for example, and use it by overlapping the required changes in patches. This way, there is no noticeable sound interruption, both for the listener and for the performer). The original idea of the app was developed by American guitarist Adrian Belew, who played with bands and artists like King Crimson (along with the legendary guitarist Robert Fripp, creator of the group), Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson and David Bowie, among others. Within the musician’s central style, there has always been enough room for experimentation and improvisation, features that become evident when using this app. Returning specifically to the app, there is an X-Y grid in the center of the user screen, fully configurable for changes in various parameters, which can be exchanged through multiple taps on a tablet's touchscreen like the iPad, and a mini sequencer present on the lower side of the screen, allowing different preconfigurable arrangements on the X-Y screen, besides the possibility of automating them. 206 Figure 10: Flux:FX, in iOS environment, with Focusrite iTrack interface. In short, the application offers the processing: direct loop, reverse loop, point-to-point loop (only activated when "dragging" one or more fingers on the XY screen), loop by segment, compression, distortion, EQ, low pass and high pass filters, modulators (chorus, flanger, phaser, ring modulation), pitch shifter, delay's mono and stereo, reverberation, octave, auto pan and reverse. There are dedicated faders to mix and merge input signals, output and effects, gain controls and individual effect level applied in each patch and three large viewing environments, which change dramatically the way the user screen is displayed: a.) performance view (dedicated for real-time use during performances); b.) edit view (where each present individual processing in the patch configuration is viewed vertically, enabling multiple, simultaneous editions) and c.) sequencer view (which features four horizontal lines composed of X-Y screen presets, that also provides five X-Y positioning mini-screens that can be configured in several ways by the performer. In general, Flux:FX is a digital processing tool that becomes a virtually new instrument, given the offered possibilities of signal chaining and simultaneous processing. Obviously, when compared to software as MAX, for example, this application presents several limitations, such as lack of possibility for the user to create their own processing and a creation limitation for new forms of user interfaces. However, it must be said that because the application is considerably well integrated into the iOS environment, its extreme portability and instant use with through a touch screen, it becomes a possibility for live-electronic performances and experimental music/free form improvisation. This was the reason I also chose to build a patch for this environment, given the possibilities of manipulation and processing, also very interesting (and that can be complementary in a wider sound flow, using of a mobile computer and MAX as well, for example). The learning this application was instinctive through operations with fingers, manipulations in parameters known to me for being present in other 207 software/hardware, such as depth, gain, tap, reverse, etc., mainly by hearing evaluation of the sound result. I started using it exclusively in a performance with the duo ar+2, in 2017, in the version 12 of the series ¿Música?, with the play “Dispersão e Linhas de (Dispersion and Escape Lines)"184 and also in the record of performances with the KLO trio, along with the Macbook/MAX (see below). I deem this app as a very versatile digital instrument exactly for allowing the performer access important features in an experimental music performance, among them: realtime processing change, actioning every parameter via the performer's fingers on the iPad screen, signal order change in real time by simply dragging each block of processing up or down within the signal chain, gaining control and parameters through virtual faders, fairly versatile X-Y touchscreen, instant storage of created/modified patches, interconnection with other applications via AudioBus or Inter-App252, ease of mobility and interface with other digital instruments, good use of the processing performance capacity of the machine, creative thinking similar to Max and Ableton Live by blocks of processing/handling chains, good visual interface for real-time performance, reasonable stability, even under more critical conditions of digital processing use of the machine. In general, the very name of the application gives a good idea about its way of creating and processing the scanned sound: through a multiple sound flow, multifaceted by actions of different parameters. The sound creation capability of this application should be considered by any performer who is interested in experiments with diverse digital processing in real time, and which also offer a good performer x machine integration, with minimal latency. 184 See: http://www2.eca.usp.br/nusom/musica12 --- access on April 12, 2019 208 b.) tales on artistic praxes, rehearsals and recordings: 4.4. participation with Købenvagn Laptop Orchestra In October 2018, in the Music Department of USP, I was introduced to Danes Andreas Wetterberg’s, Tobias Lukassen’s’ and Lasse Munsk work, who form a performance and experimentation group named Købenvagn Laptop Orchestra, or KLO. In their CMU (Music Department of USP) workshop, it was clear to me that they all have a very natural and distinct relationship with its machines, computers and software, when playing live. I had closer contact with Lasse and attended their concert over the weekend, at Sesc Paulista, in São Paulo. There, I confirmed the first impressions I had during the workshop: an almost "grooved" interactive performance, in which they all swung their heads while playing, danced with their bodies, acting and reacting with the sounds created exclusively during the concert. It was as if they were playing a double bass, electric guitar and drums in a rock power trio: a great deal of intensity, exchange of looks and almost a dance on stage, providing a very different interaction with the audience. Due to this strong impression, my communication with the trio was intense. By showing a video in which I played the ten-string bandolim, they immediately wanted to perform some type of musical interaction, and we scheduled a rehearsal day to play in the following week. On October 23, we held at Audioclicks studio, in the district of Barra Funda, in São Paulo city, a very long improvisation session between Lasse, Tobias, 209 Andreas and me, with my ten-string bandolim, my laptop, an iPad, software, apps and interfaces. The recording of this session - and its subsequent mixing - was made by Paulo Assis, yielding a very interesting result, among all those involved185. Over the days preceding the rehearsal, I had the opportunity to talk at length with Lasse, who showed me ways to connect different procedures within the software Max, in addition to clarifying other doubts related to this software and its usability in live performances. Given their experience playing live with machines, I was able to have access to a non-"academic" knowledge on the use of Max, based on a daily use in their praxes. Several joint improvisation sessions were recorded, and we chose five performances to compose a kind of photograph of that moment186. In these performances, I was able to employ a great part of the knowledge I exchanged with them in the preceding days and exchange even more information about the use and performance, mainly of the connections via OSC, via iPad, Max and also with the Flux:FX app and a Macbook mobile computer. Later, when I listened to the result of the entire record, in five different performances I noticed a thematic uniqueness of both timbres and musical language. I decided to invest more time listening to these recordings, which eventually became a kind of disc-photography of this encounter between the three Danish musicians and me. That way, I went back to Audioclicks studio, and after a long conversation with Paulo Assis, who was originally responsible for recording the performances, I decided to perform a separate mix of each performance, working the colors and sounds between the acoustic and electronic elements, turning these records into a single job, baptized with the name "Ensõ", a word of Japanese origin associated with the Zen Buddhist philosophy, which means a complete circle, made in a one or two strokes in sequence, expressing the exact moment the mind is free to let the body create187. This work accompanies this thesis, available in both attached media and in online format188. 185 The recording of the chosen performances are available online: https://vimeo.com/andremarttins --access on February 4, 2019: .performance #1: https://vimeo.com/315224043 .performance #2: https://vimeo.com/315243729 .performance #3: https://vimeo.com/315245368 .performance #4: https://vimeo.com/315246206 .performance #5: https://vimeo.com/315246815 186 One of the performances was named “Mark-Twains-Strase”: https://soundcloud.com/andremartins/mark-twainstrase --- access on December 17, 2018. 187 Ensõ - – (see image below) is one of the most common symbols found in Japanese calligraphy . In short, it symbolizes strength and enlightenment, being several times used as a symbol that can be 210 In each of these separate recordings there is the presence of many contrasts between the acoustic sound of the ten-string bandolim, the electronic processing I performed in real time through my mobile computer and iPad, mainly with Live, Max and Flux:FX software and the electronic processing that Lasse, Tobias and Andreas created in their digital instruments. To me, a very important difference is that here, with KLO, the concern/intention was less to enter a molecular level of each sound, but allocate a performance availability between all the instruments, whether they were acoustic, hybrid or digital. In the performance #1, this is evident from the fourth minute onwards, when the bandolim begins to enter the sound spectrum, through arpeggios based on a very prominent rhythmic density built by Andreas. In the following record (performance number 2), there is the creation by Tobias of an arpegged mini machine, which seeks to introduce a counterpointistic environment with a more Brazilian language of the bandolim (from 0'53"onwards). It is worth recalling that there are no scores, no scripts or even predefined harmonic or melodic ambiences. In this same recording, for example, from 2'20", there is a rhythmic rupture of the electronic trio, in which I explore the metal strings of the bandolim with real-time processing. This construction is regimented for over two minutes, from there, in an exploration of the timbre, even if Andreas creates a rhythmic loop, suggesting a kind of groove at a given moment, done and undone several times. I, in return, create and cut small audio segments -loops- fed with the sound of my own bandolim, putting them in motion over a supposed mental timeline in which each of these little loops are like sound molecules, processed very differently from each other (between 4'and 6", for example). This second performance is lengthy, almost twenty-seven minutes long. There is, therefore, abundant space for the exploration of different ambiences relating to both the creation/processing of sound and to thematic material as a whole. Several times, Lasse or Tobias times suggest rhythmic arpeggios that are placed in a counterpointistic way to my material or Andreas's own grooved material. It is interesting to notice that there was, during every performance in the day, there was no halt to this dialogue, nothing went "wrong", in a conversation that did not move forward. We had never played together, and yet there was an effective symbiosis between the language of the trio (denser, organized, rhythmic and somehow well-rehearsed) and my freer, looser and liberating language as an instrument soloist. For me, it was very important to put into practice the created hybrid machine with the translated as an "expression of the moment". In Buddhist Zen painting, the term ensõ symbolizes the moment when the mind is free to simply let the senses create. For more information on the theme, see: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ens%C5%8D --- https://www.modernzen.org/enso/ --- access on February 4, 2019. 188 The album is available for download on this link: https://www.andremartins.com.br/phd 211 ten-string bandolim + mobile computer + iPad + interfaces, in a situation of musical collaboration with a rehearsed trio and with a well-known background through years of praxis by playing together. The challenge of interacting creatively with the elaborated electronic processing, in which I was the only performer with an acoustic instrument coupled to the digital scope, was huge. Even the physicality of movement was different for me since I was the only musician standing there, and they were playing sitting, around a large table, which supported all computers, interfaces, controllers, etc. Thus, the ideas about music that each of us possessed were embraced more homogeneously, no matter how different our instrumental/musical background was. Obviously, this is my subjective opinion, as an involved part and that, based on the memory of that moment, I try to convey to the reader an idea of what happened. Perhaps at the very moment of the performances I was much more stressed about solving technical problems that happened (lack of synchronization, reconfiguration of the digital interface, checking computer heating after being used for so long in reasonably complex sound manipulation processes, etc.). As Mariana Carvalho pointed out appropriately (2017, p.17), "at all times my words betray the attempt to dismantle certain borders, because language does not escape this exercise"189. Frequently, as the pianist-researcher wrote in her graduation thesis, there is a clash between trying to dissolve consolidated musical territories that tend to stiffen and not to blend in and the search for experiments that may harbor multiple singularities. I felt this way on this day, when there was often a stiffened and idiomatic material, but at the same time, there was a desire to subvert it and to dissolve it, in multiple unique archipelagos. I believe that, in a way, we managed, at least for us, the musicians involved, to enjoy a great satisfaction as we played together. That alone is something of great value. In performance #3, the exploration of time as a central element of the improvisation is very clear. For many minutes, we were diving in the performance time, allowing each sound aspect to be absorbed by the other performers. Between minutes five and eight of this performance, such aspect is evident, of the existence of a sound dismemberment and a quality of very explicit roughness. The penultimate performance, #4, is the one with the highest amount of groove. Maybe because we conducted all the performances on the same day, at the time that we considered carrying this one out, there was a pressure for something more palatable in terms of rhythmic material. Clearly, from the outset, Andreas and Tobias had sent clear signals of their wish to create a more chained, rhythmic, grooved, dense sound. The way I contribute here is by exercising consistent picks in the bandolim and organizing the sound more continuously, stable, allowing, along the performance timeline itself, the materials to compose and modify morphologically. It took us around ten minutes to deconstruct this rhythmically rooted territory, 189 [...] “a todo tempo minhas palavras traem a tentativa de desmantelar algumas fronteiras, porque a linguagem não escapa a esse exercício”. 212 operating some more consistent sound transformations, which eventually destabilize the groove, taking it to other types of stratifications (between minutes 10'and 12'). The last performance held on this day, #5, operates a synthesis of elements we created previously during our time together. There is a groove establishment, rhythmic figuration dismemberment, very intense handling of sound material, exchange of protagonism between acoustic and digital instruments, different environments and spatializations, etc. It works as a good summary of all our musical and sound interaction. 4.5 notes and drafts made on Evernote190 during the research period, “ar +2” duo and creation of patches papagaIO and papaga.iOS: [ 1st rehearsal “ar +2” duo, 2/07/2017] After assembling the equipment, I swiftly started configuring the final steps of my "hybrid machine", which included an acoustic guitar electrified by a ceramic pickup, a MIDI foot controller, a MacBook mobile computer and a speaker. As this was our first rehearsal in this project, both Rogério and I had some technical problems in this take 1, such as the activation of Pd software by me, through the MIDI controllers, resulted in very high volumes in relation to the sound of my amplified instrument. And mostly, in my case, I had prepared some patches on Pd and Guitar Rig the day before, which probably show a higher power in a solo performance, but, playing in duo, they were very confusing. We finished take 1 abruptly and talked a little about what had happened. There was also a volume issue between the two of us, which accumulated with the speakers facing the center of the room, causing a lot of feedback. After a few adjustments in the positions of both speakers, I reconfigured some processing patches on the computer, making them "drier", because Rogério uses a lot the delay effect, both on the dedicated and on the effect pedals present on the sound table. So, when I dried my processing little, and adjusted the master volume output on the Brane patch, in the Pd, there was a significant improvement in our interaction. Take 2 went very well, longer, interesting and rich in exposure/construction of sound materials. We were able to hear much more, and there was a great interaction. This time, there was no hindrance related to technical or volume problems, thus leaving us "freer" and more comfortable to build a dialogue, which, in my view, was very rich. We then decided to record take 3, documented as "Ensaio_7_2_17". It was also a good take, with a quite fluid performance. Rhythmic aspects were well explored by us. 190 Shared note software between mobile computer, smartphone and tablet, which allows writing, image, drawings and drafts scanning. Available on: https://evernote.com/ -- access on July 31, 2018 213 It is noteworthy that the dynamic coherence of both performers resulted in a more challenging conversation in terms of proposals, as it is clear, throughout the recording of this take, where a very interesting interaction of the materials presented can be observed. This is clear around 10’30", when there is a change from longer and melodic materials to a very consistent rhythmic movement. And, over this material, the saxophone presents melodic resources in contraposition. In short, to my view, this first rehearsal was very interesting and quite promising, for there is a vast field to be explored by the two performers both in electronic/digital signal processing terms, in search of a molecular sound, in the rhythmic exploration and the physicality of acoustic instruments and in terms of development of free improvisation. Important observations about our first rehearsal: What do we have before starting? Individual hybrid machines = each one’s knowledge + acoustic instrument + digital instrument (mic, interface, pedals, computer. You can describe the potentialities of each element and the whole. First of all, it is necessary to emphasize the presence of each performer’s knowledge base (memories, techniques, repertoires, skills, "clichés, idiomatic patterns and formulas, listening experiences, analysis, concepts, performance: "all that each knows about music") that underlies ideas on music. And this is important, since performers only establish an interactive game to the extent that they share some basic ideas about music that are close to the idea of molecularity and that will feed their individuals action (what their music ideas are: André and Rogério - repertoire expansion). That is: performance actions emerge/result from the interaction between the basic knowledge (which is lodged in memory) and the interactive sound events in real time. In this pre-established scenario (in the past) the sound flow takes shape (in the present towards the future): musical ideas, sound characters, figures, sound objects, ritornellos. Musical ideas can be predominantly rhythmic, melodic, timbre-based, textural, etc. In fact, they are generally a simultaneity of these aspects. This explains the value for thinking of sound objects or (e.g.: a low pitch, very noisy, very rarefied rhythmic figuration with little intensity). Next comes the relationship of performers with their acoustic instruments (coupling or becoming in Deleuzian terms), which is reasonably mapped and dominated by the performers, therefore presenting a great potential for expansion through the experimental invention of extended techniques or unforeseen combinations of traditional techniques. It is worth recalling Thor Magnussen's work on the acoustic instruments (physicality, etc.). For the sake of functioning and balance of the system, testing the relationship between the following components is necessary: 1. Acoustic sound; 2. Amplified acoustic sound; 3. The sound processed by FX pedals (there are various overlapping effects: presets, looper, reverb); 4. Sound recorded and processed by Brane. Also check the effect of the table (reverb, delay, etc.) All these effects can be combined in various ways. For example: acoustic sound + the same sound recorded on Brane, processed in various ways and reproduced + table delay effect. I believe it would be helpful to read some of Simondon's works on technology. 214 [ 2/8/2017 ] The idea of "sound character" is perfect and I believe we must explore this concept in depth. To me, the idea of impersonating, provide "faciality" to the sound, giving it individualized, personified, typical elements, makes sense. A character does not only tell a story, but is part of the game, creates possibilities, escapes dangers, moves through the plot often without the plot itself being put together, or even done. The relationship of performers with coupled acoustic instruments is also very important. We can move towards "assemblages", the way Deleuze proposes, in relation to this machinic construction. I also believe to be important mentioning the necessary components to test the functioning and balance of the system itself. I understand we can create specific situations for them, among many others, interaction/construction elements. I am truly excited about the duo’s path. I really enjoyed the sound we created, and I believe it will open many interesting doors in the research and may result in a new work to be deeply explored by us. (I wonder if there is any Flusser’s work we could read and explore too.) [ 2nd rehearsal - 2/14/17 ] take #1: The first take began with several rhythmic passages; it is worth noting that both performers talked a lot before this performance, about the issues pointed out during the week, after some e-mail exchanges about the considerations of the first rehearsal and certain ideas of texts and other researches that can dialogue with this work. From my point of view, I tried to allocate a very clear rhythmic character, seeking to "move" more consciously through mutual conversation, electing possibilities for openings and dialogues. A technical event occurred before this take: there was a "shortcoming" with my speaker, which presented a kind of poor contact in the general volume knob. Reporting this is critical once without the speaker, there is no sound flow to be created/interpreted/processed/manipulated by the "machine"; moreover, the performer's focus, just before the beginning of the interaction, rather than being on the sound environment to be created and its possibilities, ends up dispersing a little with a technical problem, which is inevitable in this kind of approach. When creating a kind of "hybrid machine" that couples acoustic and digital elements, technical (not only) unpredictability is a very present factor; the amount of interfaces, cables, converters, power supplies, monitors, speakers, pickups, microphones, etc., is large and profuse. 215 Having said that, it is important to highlight certain aspects that I found very important in this take 1: -the interaction between the two performers was far more intense, providing very distinct moments of dynamics, mutual conversation, questions and answers, surprises, alignments and fugues, creating vast possibilities. -the performers’ mastery of the gear, both hardware and software, seems to align even better at this take, with possibilities of control and non-control created from the exploration, manipulation and processing of the captured signal by the pickups and microphones. This ultimately gives performance a very interesting surprise and vigor from an artistic point of view and from the ability of improvisational paths created during execution. That is very clear between 16"and 19" of the performance. The dynamic and very molecular construction of sounds at this moment displays such characteristics. -it is also clear that both performers’ ideas on music work as a sum of possibilities; both interact more with each other, allocating these music ideas side to side, complementing and re-organizing them, often in unforeseen ways. In general, the performance encompasses the idea of "open work" (ECO, 1962), in its constant evolution and heterogeneity, as well as the idea of "work-in-progress" (FRISK). take #2: I believe take 2 was more homogeneous (which could be expected, since we had already played for almost 40 minutes and adjusted the "machines", besides being literally warmed up - high summer, temperature around 34 degrees Celsius) and we played this take with hardly any interval compared to the first one. This performance seems to present evident rhythmic aspects more consistently, in addition to a greater dynamic variation, reaching pianissimos and fortissimos in a very strong musical form (from 9" onwards, where there is a homogeneous interaction between the two players). From my side, I was more comfortable, commanding the constituted hybrid machine, creating more harmonies with the different available processing during the performance. For me, there is a stronger presence of more established sound layers, even when they cause dissonances (here, I use this term devoid the bias of harmonic analysis, but rather, as a tension agglutinating element). These layers seem to overlap in strengthened ways, gaining individuality of their own with high power. The flow often changes radically in form, direction, color, intention and directionality, but a well-defined continuous plane is established. About these various concepts that underlie musical creation: sound object, sound character, sound image, sound idea etc. It is worth rescuing Silvio’s idea on the difference between sound matter ("the bell sound", recordable, measurable, "objective", collective, intersubjective, etc.) and the compositional material ("what the bell sound is to me": a memory, an emotion, an image –subjective, experienced) that, in our case would be any musical idea that is put into action in a performance: an 216 image, a gesture, a rhythm, a melodic figure, a sound, a timbre, a sound object (in the Schaefferian sense), an sound character, an instrumental act, an abstract idea, a symbol (idiomatic, for example), an energy, a sensation, an idea (abstract, for example, rarefied). It is always about making sonorous what is not sound. It is interesting to note how, in this collective improvisation route, we move between more molar moments (idioms, a Gestalt, through the use of typical figurations, generally based on the ideas of note, melody, harmony, etc.) and rather molecular moments ("free", based on timbre or sound to contextualized priorities). There is also an oscillation between more homogeneous and more heterogeneous moments in terms of sound materials. There are also moments of greater or shorter permanence, in a constant process of territorialization, deterritorialization (escape lines), reterritorialization out of the action of sound characters (compositional materials according to Silvio or ritornellos, according to Deleuze). [ 3rd rehearsal, 2.21.17] On the idea of hybrid machine as an environment for free improvisation, it is interesting mention Simondon for whom the machine is a way of moving from chaos towards a negentropic environment. The machine enables the provisional organization (individuation). In improvisation, we are always in the midst of individuation processes (meta-stable) balancing the opening to chaos (the escape lines). The live (the performance itself, in full becoming) is now the physical individual always in its individuation process. The improvisation is a complex assemblage of forces and materials. This happens since the inside and the outside present potential differences and asymmetries (tensions) that do not allow a definitive stability (which would be synonymous to death). Improvisation is a becoming. The study and rehearsal processes gradually delimit the borders and membranes of this double hybrid machine that puts two machines into play. The pre-individual or virtual are the powers, everything that may happen and, that during a performance will individuate. In pre-individual are the wishes, project, performers’ individual willingness, techniques, knowledge base, space-time characteristics etc. For Simondon it is important that the topological settings of the live are addressed from the very space of development and based on the existing relationship between an interior and an exterior environment. Is the live defined topologically in a "place" of connections? The inside and outside, active and interactive? It is different from the crystal whose inside is stabilized (dead...). In it the inside is a manifestation of the past from exterior. In the live, inside and outside are always interacting. Think of this in improvisation. What is the inside and the outside of an improvisation? [ 4 th rehearsal, 2.28.17] Take #1: At first, we created a kind of ambience filled with sound texture. There is a well-defined crescendo. It is interesting how, without previous agreement on any we gradually built a negentropic environment, which basically arises from chaos. Out of that, all the possibilities and, through machinic actions (performer + computer + pedals 217 + software + microphones + speakers) and the duo’s individuation began to occur. They are, in my view, simultaneous assemblages, like my own, which takes place between my actions in the instrument, the physicality of the guitar and its coupling to the computer and the controllers through an interface. Idem to Rogério, who forms at a time his own hybrid machine, and "our" joint assemblage, instigating conversation, the game, the performance. Even in times we seek a noisier sound or deal with unforeseen results from sound processing, we find a path that, if on the one hand works the lack of control, the unusual, the unforeseen, on the other hand it does not allow the complete entropy, full chaos, stability, death. In this way, the inside and the outside converse uninterruptedly. The ideas that arise to each performer are individual, they are powers that gain strength and externalize, that impact one another, moving from the inside out. At the same time, the reverse path, from the outside inwards also happens, since each of us is influenced (either by accumulation, denial, acceptance or complementation) out of what is heard from the other. Thus, there is a "creative evolution", a concept proposed by Bergson, which influences Simondon. For Bergson, "there is an open creating universe, which does not correspond to the Greek or classical metaphysics described in any way, which acts and departs from time, from transformation." As we form our hybrid machines, they also form us, they shape us. For Simondon, the machine has its own ontology, acquiring autonomy, its way of "being", forming its own individuality. (What would be the individualities of our sounds? Which of our sounds are autonomous, and which ones are not? What comes from the machine itself and what comes from outside? How much of the constituted hybrid machine - assembled – is responsible as a force, as a negentropic power, and how much of this coercion does not depends on it?). Thus, "our sounds", after those couplings, intersections, assemblages and intermediations begin to be "our sound". For Simondon, individuation is the name given to processes by which "undifferentiated" become "individual" or to processes in which "differentiated" components become "indivisible" as a whole. This idea is not new; for Jung, the individuation is "a central process in which the human being evolves from a childish state of identification into a state of greater differentiation and expansion of consciousness”. Thus, the individual would identify less with the rules of the environment in which they live and more with the guidelines emanating from their essence (totality of individual personality ). However, the interesting point in Simondon's concept of individuation is his relationship with the technical object, with the machine, since Simondon theorized the individuation in technical processes. For him, the process of "transduction" occurs, which would represent an individuation in progress. Thus, for Simondon, this process becomes ontological, permanent and incomplete, leaving a kind of "pre-individual residue", always magnetized and capable of future individuations: "the individual is individual and continues to individualize." It is interesting to note that, in general, in the various performances, we move, from various (gradual or abrupt), rather "molar" environments (which evoke, more 218 or less explicit, certain languages or styles - grooves, melodies, "melodic themes ", harmonies, patterns) to more molecular environments (textural, noisy, "electroacoustic"). There is still something about the second performance that, for the first time we established a prior instruction (restriction plan): trying to avoid language, molarities. [ 5th rehearsal, 3/8/2017 ] “Molarities” We decided to engage in a performance out of "molar" ideas, of rather stiffened segments in music systems and languages. Our performance arises from small ideas and externalizations that already bear other "things" that are slightly rooted in grooves, rhythms, swing feel, one or another scale or rhythmic pattern. That does not mean that we performed an improvisation out of fully understood territories already assimilated into our knowledge bases. On the contrary, maybe this performance "molarities" - has so far been one of the most difficult examples to perform, due to the degree of permanence of the material we presented to each other over its duration. There are more clearly densified, stratified moments, such as those presenting a prominent jazzy swing feel, intercut by less harsh explorations and more open to deeper experimentation with molar materials. A very strong bias here is the textural work with certain materials that present a well-established and delineated territory, where we, therefore, find an opportunity to explore texture and its resonances, even if just for a few seconds. Throughout the performance recording, it became clear that we tried to extract some kind of molecularity from within the molar material, thus presenting a sort of seesaw in which we try to balance not only sound, but our ideas on molar music, our comfort zones and confrontation with permanence, transcendences and immanence. From 11" onwards, we presented very particular sound layers, which seem to dialogue in another sphere, is as if the reverberations and resonances changed "colors" from this moment on, moving away from what they had already presented, but at the same time carrying a certain baggage from that place. [ 6th rehearsal, 3/15/2017 ] “Aquoso” Starting from the proposal to work solely on the idea of a liquid, "aqueous" sound, we began the second performance of the rehearsal on March 15; a liquid sound may be delineated by objects that fall into waters, waves of various sizes that underlie from the inside to the outside of a sea, a lake, a dam or even a blue-watered pool, drops, reverberations, bubbles, crystallizations. From these adjectives and images, among others, we built sounds that are almost fully pertinent to hybrid machines. These are sounds that depart from the acoustic, but they run a long way through several components that a performance hybrid machine can encompass, such as repetition pedals, loops, software that use processing such as digital ambience, granular echoes, 219 spectral echoes, wave and ring modulations, and many others. Through these individuation processes, both manual and physical controls are inserted departing from the performer's own body or their interaction with volume pedals, foot controllers, or mousepad clicks that trigger and interact along the path the sound traveled. These "aqueous" timbres are therefore created by increasingly "liquid" layers, increasingly resonant, "wet", reverberant. The sleek time seems to be stretched to the extreme at times, as if involving the frequencies in order to enlarge (and amplify them), creating true powers of exploration for performers during the interaction journey. [ 7th rehearsal, 3/29/2017 ] “Árido” The third performance in the day was an exactly opposed idea. We proposed to work based on the conception of what an "arid" sound is. The sounds are consequently "drier” and opaquer than in the previous performance. Characteristics such as roughness and hardness seem to have been explored here, as well as a notion of saturation, especially on the guitar, due to the use of processing such as "overdrive" and "fuzz", aiming to saturate frequencies to the extreme, turning them into a kind of "square" opacity, in which harmonics and partials are overloaded and turn, we could say, into "dirtier" and metallized "sandy" grains. In general, we try to reduce any type of processing that "loads" the timbre with any kind of continuity or reverberation, seeking to establish a sound flow that corresponds to the proposed theme. The performance is short, and presents very potent granulation and roughness elements, allocating the production time and listening time at one single moment, as a typical improvised performance based on an experimental proposal should be. That is what Costa (2016, p.73) calls it a "contraction of presents", which in a way characterizes the consistency assembled during a musically improvised performance, featured by simultaneity of actions/times. It is through the preparation of this conducive environment for the praxis of improvisation that many of the central issues in the artistic praxis itself and its research happen and unfold. [ 8th rehearsal, 4/11/2017 ] After all, what is the performer's action when he or she improvises? Do they think of a sound, a gesture, a sound object, an image, a texture...? Their intervention takes place in the time and is part of a sound flow built by all those who participate in the performance. Their intervention is continuous. Even if they silence in certain moments, the performance does not stop and they are permanently listening, being affected, judging, choosing, deciding etc. It is possible think of a sound: "I play a sound". 220 This is a sound object, since it is a clipping (it has beginning, middle and end) and has a defined shape, regardless of its dimensions and complexity. For example: a sound/sound object may consist of a strong attack on a low piano note followed by its descent, support and release (as in a dynamic envelope) or it can also be, on the piano, a strong attack on the low followed by a cluster in mf in the region and a glissando towards the high in pianissimo with support pedal. In general, this idea of sound/sound object can be repeated and/or varied in the course of a performance. The sound object is a Gestalt in itself, as it is a set of microscopic attributes that communicates a totality (shape). The sound object is also close to the idea of molarity. There are simple and complex objects (compounds) as the example above. The simpler, the closer it is to the idea of molecularity. The molecular is almost a grain and approaches pure quality. For example, a sustained tonic sound that is being manipulated from the inside (as in Scelsi) and where limits are not clearly perceived (beginning, middle and end). Ligeti's micro-polyphony, desires, at times, this type of sense of listening (Lux Aeterna). The feeling of linear time is somehow suspended. Another example would be "random" pointillism in certain regions of the piano, with or without support pedal. The sensation is of an undifferentiated flow, such as if it were a region (in space) of variable density. The sound character, as proposed by S. Ferraz, is a more abstract idea that comes into sounds, for example, an idea of rhythmic asymmetry that develops, covering various instruments. The idea of glissando, etc. The gesture may be similar to the sound object, but it has its origin in a clear instrumental action (e.g. my characteristic gesture to the glissando saxophone towards the low followed by a short attack). It could be associated with the idea of gesture in its literal sense: fall, beat, shake etc. Or it could be associated with a known idiomatic gesture, for example, a characteristic gesture of rock, bebop, samba, blues, flamenco. Or a romantic Baroque gesture etc. In creating a texture, performers can make use of molecular (e.g., continuous sounds in constant modulation, added up in layers or as a continuous cloud of short sounds – pointillism – with varied dynamics and densities, without an apparent direction, as in Penderetski). Rhythmic-melodic figures can also be integrated in a kind of micropolyphonic plot, as in Ligeti or Bartok. 221 [ 8th rehearsal, 4/11/2017 ] “o homem se arrasta” 191 On the two takes we worked on Manoel de Barros's poem. Further observations on this rehearsal, written down around ten days later: The performance is about eighteen and a half minutes long and took place amid an intense investigation into individuation processes and experimentations that Rogério and I had been talking about in the last few weeks. The choice of the poem, O homem se arrasta ("the man creeps"), by the poet Manoel de Barros, was mine, both for a deep admiration of his work as well as its particular characteristics which, beforehand, signaled to me with a possible sound reading. In the book “Palavras do chão: um olhar sobre a linguagem adâmica em Manoel de Barros”, by Luiz Henrique Barbosa, there is a time when the author states (p.40): "Barros will try to remove from the sign as much meaning as already crystallized by language, to the extent to which new meanings are produced, or even if the only sense is that of sound materiality, of the verbal resonances. His poetry is on the side of the symbolic, but always seeks an approximation with the unsymbolized [...] by mimicking the whispers of a pre-language, of a language that has not is fully imprisoned by the symbolic yet, he will produce a plurality of meanings." This feature in Manoel de Barros's poetry has always intrigued me and was therefore a natural choice for me. The idea of removing from sounds any kind of previously crystallized meaning is very pertinent in the case of a free improvisation performance. As Barbosa says in the excerpt above, just as the poet from Minas Gerais sought meaning in a search for the sound materiality of the language, the word, getting closer to the resonances I believe that we seek, here, in this performance, it is exactly the same: a kind of non-meaning sound (a larger triad, a minute arpeggio, a fourth increased interval, a diatonic glissando, a rhythmically standardized repetition, etc.), finally, a desire to deterritorialize the sound material and its matching processes. The poem in question is: 191 Recording available on: https://soundcloud.com/ar_mais_2/performance-a-partir-da-leitura-livre-deum-poemade-manoel-de-barros --- access on December 15, 2018 222 “O homem se arrasta de árvore escorre de caracol nos vergéis do poema O homem se arrasta de ostra nas paredes do mar O homem é recolhido como destroços de ostras, traços de pássaros surdos, comidos de mar O homem se incrusta de árvore na pedra do mar” Around the fourth minute something like this happens, a kind of resonance of a denser sound material, which, from this point on, opens to new territories. We work at length on the plurality of processing, thus, in my opinion, we seek "new senses" of these sounds to ourselves; this becomes clearer from the ninth minute of the performance on, in which (dis)stabilized some of the sounds out of an idea of resonance of a single object, in this case, a resonant, plural, rough sound object. 223 [ 9th rehearsal: 5. 9.17 ] Free improvisation based on the individuated reading of Décio Pignatari's poem 192 This is one of the most prolific rehearsals we have had; we proceeded three recordings. There were two takes on a poem by Décio Pignatari, from 1980193: “Nem só a cav idade da boca Nem só a língua Nem só os dentes e os lábios fazem a língua Ouça as mãos tecendo a língua e sua linguagem É a língua têxtil O texto que sai das mãos sem palavras” 192 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/210938715 --- access on January 21, 2019 193 Available on: https://bit.ly/2sGhUwB --- access on January 21, 2019 224 We decided to read Pignatari's poem as we did the week before with Manoel de Barros’s. We read separately, individuated, each one of us, during the performance. In this first take, I found it harder to create parities with Pignatari's text, perhaps given the grammatical ruptures and my desire to keep on seeking both rhythmic and melodic metrics to the material as a whole. There were also certain difficulties during this performance, including the one in dealing with the sound "burst", a technically impaired sound, as it happened to me during the performances, we read Pignatari's poem. In these cases, I am extremely influenced by the sound result I hear. What could change that? How Could I get unfocused from the "bad" sound and underpin a more pertinent coherence with the moment of free-improvised performance? (I wrote these questions to myself, and there are not necessarily identified answers to them; the matter of timbre, in particular, impaired electronically by some technical problem and/or malfunction, is still a challenge for me. How much of this can I "fix" during a performance? In certain situations, I can go through these problems, minimizing them during the rehearsal and managing to finish up the performance, perhaps, in a surprising way. However, it is more usual for these problems to affect me intensely by feeding a tension that causes, rather frequently, my wish to stop the performance and try to solve them, than simply to ignore some specific type of technical malfunction. This is a very potentiated feature in the use of the hybrid machine, given the profusion of technical problems and errors that many different equipment, when coupled, can present over a couple of hours of vigorous operation. Performance “Tempo Liso” 194 The first performance of the day was the idea of Tempo Liso , "sleek time"; one of the difficulties for me is the achievement of ideas that underlie the concept of " sleek time " on the guitar, mainly because this instrument depends on constant attacks to generate sounds with a considerable dynamic energy. I used legatos and slides widely, and overloaded the use of reverberations and echoes, aiming to "stretch" time of the notes, the duration of the sound to the limit. Rogério applied long notes on the saxophone, and, as a novelty in our performances, he also used the violin, with a contact microphone on the body of the instrument. At very clear moments of interpolation, between 4'- 5', where we seek to create a kind of stable, "sleek", stretched, statically indeterminate environment. The processing I tried to use in this performance aimed at the continuity of sound, without applying interpolated gestures during the notes. There are also moments in which we try to contextualize a kind of sleek time through echoes, which repeat in both processed instruments, crossing into the created machinic environment. Certain timbres individuate with more pertinence, such as the sounds from 194 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/213765835 - access on January 23, 2019 225 8’ onwards, with very rough, wet, more densified, elongated aspects, we sought to emphasize searching for the temporal sleeking characteristic. This molecularized sound is very evident from the tenth minute on, in which we create an ambience that seeks to escape any abstract gesture or idiomatic material. For some long minutes, all you hear are sounds of different colors and "sizes", which create specific dialogues with the idea of time-prolongation. These sound characters are important, for not only they inspired us during performance but also as a beacon (often relevant) to the path to take during the performance. And that is exactly why they are important, because with this sort of imaginary "carpet" with these beacons, we can often break with edges that may try to surround certain sound proposals, achieving break-ups, deterritorializing them. One of these moments, in this performance, when something occurs, such as this is between 13'and 15', where I try to be based on a sleek time "stapled", through continuous and persistent attacks on the guitar, trying to stick, as if they were sixty-fourth notes so close to each other that they end up becoming a single long note, a single sound, a single gigantic and prolonged figure. The final part of this performance seeks to achieve a unique climax, with the search for higher frequencies and that can be sustained for a longer period. Thus, we create a sort of smoothened consonance at this end, in which we clearly seek to create a coda that ends the performance. [ 10th rehearsal, 5/30/2017 ] -performance LIVRE, #1 195 In this performance, neither of us were apparently happy with the result. As soon as we ended it, both mentioned not being comfortable with the sound obtained during the performance. Specifically, the sound from my speaker seemed to be "bursting" all along, probably due to excessive signal, though I spent a long time during the performance trying to "fix" it, but could not find what was happening exactly, since on my connections (interface, software, cables and controllers) there was no overload sign. This denotes an important feature in this assemblage that is the design of a performance hybrid machine. There are so many elements that can collapse during performance, elements that could be fully functioning moments before, but that may present real-time failures. How to deal with these "mishaps" during an artistic praxis? I think every performer ends up creating a kind of "toolbox" that tries to supply or at least combat this lack of control (the "non-control" defined by FRISK), as the technology is far from being perfect (what is perfection?) and the more elements we cover on our machines, the more non-control situations may (and will inevitably) appear. 195 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/272247524 - access on: January 2, 2019 226 In this kind of "toolbox", I try to find a way to balance the perception/cognition that will be affected by some technical "problem" that may occur during the performance. In the case of this take, there was exactly a demand from my side of trying to stay very attentive to what was happening during the interpretation, the type of sound material Rogério produced and my counterpart in questions and answers, all at the same time I tried to find the reason the speaker was - apparently - overloaded with signal coming from my computer/interface/controllers. In the pursue to combine different procedures such as switching a number of effects, turning them on and off, changing parameters such as volume, gain, FX's wet/dry, changing pitches and modulation processing, among others, while interpreting the material produced by Rogério and also trying to "inspire" myself in creating and contributing to the construction of a dialogue, the attention was obviously not dedicated to any of these tasks in its fullest. Perhaps in these moments we understand how this "toolbox" is in fact an expansion of our "knowledge-base" (PRESSING), and that we may have more "tools" than perhaps we realize, developed and accumulated throughout our musical life and our work as researchers. Listening to the recording, it is clear that the performance does not present problems, on the contrary, despite pointing out technical "errors" such as a wheezing at 9'57". Soon after that, there is a moment of great creative intensity and performance, as around 10'10" and continues to intensify and, around 12", presenting a very effective interaction in both musical material and integration. Further reflection on the non-control moments that happen during the Performances, and on how they affect our poetic consciousness, our state of commitment to create/interact/interpret in real time may be necessary. Despite not presenting, sometimes, a material of great creative potential when there is some kind of "error" or problem, these records are fundamental to evaluate our form of individuation during a performance consisting of a hybrid assemblage that embraces both acoustic and digital elements. This duality coexists with several artifacts embedded in two ways, and that can overload or relieve the performer during a session in many forms. -performance LIVRE, #2 196 After a few brief changes – from my side - in some patches and parameters, seeking to create conditions to solve the "wheezing" from my speaker, we made this second take. In general, this recording presents a far more effective integration both in diving in sound and in an instrumental coherence (which does not mean we need to seek any kind of "coherence", especially in a performance considered "free", but what I may seek to elaborate here is our interaction occurring in a "sleeker" and more effective way, enhanced by the fact that the technical problem in the previous performance was apparently solved). Between 3'and 4' there is an accumulation of very well-prepared sounds, with 196 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/272247524 – access on January 21, 2019 227 different and, at the same time, interspersed materials, which slowly accumulate, restricting themselves and falling apart. For about 3 or more minutes, we worked on a similar type of material, with repetitions, legatos and arpeggios, remaining much more connected to one another. At 7', the guitar features a series of glissandos and chromatic passages, establishing a very distinct connecting bridge with the saxophone, which in turn works with long notes and changing pitches. This take works more on spaces, cavities and silences in comparison with the previous one, this way trying to work some materials in a more exploratory way, literally plunging into certain processes to the exhaustion or to the point of forwarding, connecting to the following ones, with pertinence and a higher degree of integration. In this take, both performers use the process of "looping" some materials that will be then resubmitted with accumulations of other processing. Between minutes 13' and 15' it is possible to perceive small densities caused by the loops and freezing of various materials. The last minutes of the performance recording are very interesting, since they work with an extremely molecularized material, quite powerfully. Between loops waste, processing and manipulation, combined with instrumental interference to the long time spacing, I believe they provided me with rich and diversified material that was very useful later for research as a whole. [ 11th rehearsal, 6/6/2017 ] -Deserto 197 The first few minutes are very slowly constituted. The image/sign of the word "desert" explores here a series of constituents such as: loneliness, bleak place, distant horizon, slow walking, sand, mud, clay, stones, among others. In about 3'30" the sound material presented stands out vigorously, a sort of sandy "wind", and gradually a place of evasion, of impermanence, of escape. There is in 5' a certain "anguish", as if pointing necessarily tortuous paths; it resembles being alone in the middle of a desert, where many miles had already been travelled, leaving steps behind, but it is known that there are still thousands of them ahead. It is like being too far to get back and there is an even longer distance to walk ahead. Somehow, we captured this feeling, presenting from the 7' onwards, a more prominent rhythmic constitution, making it almost vital to move away from that dry medium, of immense loneliness. The dialogue between the guitar and the saxophone that takes place from 8'08" on, is probably the most expressive one since the duo's conception in February of the same year. For a moment, the processing is abandoned and only the notes, rhythms, attacks and physicality between the two performers are left. It is the moment of greatest "dryness", of immense desertification, with wiped timbres to the fullest. It is 197 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/213766842 - access on January 22, 2019 228 noteworthy that the performers did not stipulate anything previously, except for the word "desert". Even the type of reading/meaning of this word was at each one’s discretion. Up until around 12'30", this dryness becomes permanent, with small insertions of glissandos, long notes, and gradually the duo accumulates rhythms, densities and processing planes on and, from 13'40", both performers seem to point to richly constituted echoes and modulations, with plenty of space permeating the chosen heights. It is perhaps one of the recordings that presents immense interactive degree among the assembled hybrid machines. Somehow, it is as if we were learning the solfege of these assemblages and using them in more creatively, potentially available within our knowledge bases. At 17' it is clear the control that we are constituting, moving from a dry sound, to a dive in reverberations, and, meanwhile, consisting of modulations, acoustic sounds, loops and sound changes of various orders, in addition to an improvised dynamic and free rhythmic material. At each recording, each rehearsal, each constituted assemblage, it becomes clear the power that is possible to achieve during a performance, which may lead us to even more distant and deterritorialized places. [ 12th rehearsal, 6/13/2017 ] “repentes” 198 We worked on ideas and procedures that sought to identify what the other performer would do at the next moment, proposing opposite ideas; not allowing any material to materialize; the performance lasted about 13 minutes. At first, the saxophone worked with notes through quick executions, where the guitar intermediates with sixteenth and sestina phrases. All our execution is hasty, sudden, moving from a chaotic state to a state of semi-stabilization, in which the two musical instruments suddenly get in and out of a conversation, a game, through multiple forms. Until around the fourth minute, there is no prominent use of processing. In fact, both Rogério and I sought to explore the contingencies found in our own instrumental interfaces inherent to each of the acoustic instruments. The guitar explores, from the fifth minute onwards, changes in frequencies provided by the alteration of the clutches where the strings are fastened. By contrast, in the saxophone, Rogério explores long notes that have their sound changed to his blows and rhythmic interactions of his fingers in the keys of the instrument. In general, feelings of haste, sudden ideas, mergers of paths and states that range from solid (more territorialized, stratified, hardened) up to completely dismembered, liquid, inaccurate states. It is interesting to observe that around the ninth minute of the performance, there is an immense pause, as if written and noted, a great fermata, which sounds rehearsed, but that was a complete contingency. Then, there is the use of various loops in both instruments (with emphasis on the saxophone at this 198 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/312522289 --- access on January 21, 2019 229 point), with some changes in frequencies and various modulations (this processing is already more explored by acoustic guitar, here), identifying that after the pause of a few seconds, both performers seem to feel the need to explore the sound in a more molecular way. From this moment on, up until the end of the performance, there is a greater presence of noises and roughness, of a state of confrontation, of deliberate conflict, culminating in a final performance in simultaneous unison. It is interesting to note these states of readiness that a performer can remain, longer or for a shorter time, according to the type of material and presented proposal. In this case, it is an idea of exploring a "repente", in a kind of sung and alternated improvisation that even when dismembered in more liquid states of rhythm and harmony, still seeks to present a metric character, of question and answer, of musical accompaniment or soloist execution. In a way, a monotonous, speechless aboio, that here does not guide the cattle in the backcountry, but guides the sounds in a momentarily assembled state, running on its own and presenting several connection possibilities at every moment. “repentismos" 199 This was the second performance recorded on the same day based on this idea. After the first performance, Rogério and I started a conversation, as we usually do after our rehearsals, and we made important observations from each one’s point of view, from what we had just played. The performer's place is always unique and filled with characteristics that encompass each performer’s musical and technical experience with the situations provided by every theme, every aspect or situation in the rehearsals and presentations. Driven by this conversation, we recorded our second performance in a much more structured way, my view, not only because we had previously carried out a kind of "study" on the subject (repentes), but also because we were more inserted in the proposal, something very natural for a second performance in a sequence. Hence, this record brought about interesting impressions to me, who sought at that time to allocate as many interactions between the acoustic and the digital instruments as possible in real time. The introduction of sound textures was very interesting to me, especially in the second part of the performance, in which we tried to establish a more molecularized material than the one created and developed in our previous recording. The idea of conversation, game, question, answer and interaction, present both in the praxis of musical improvisation as in a repentista200 theme, provided a rich material in terms of interactions between the performers as well as the ones provided by the musicians interacting with their and instruments. 199 200 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/312523667 --- access on January 21, 2019 For João Miguel Sautchuk, “Repente” is a modality of improvised sung poetry, practiced in the Northeast region of Brazil. Its practitioners are called repentistas, cantadores or violeiros, and they 230 In general, this rehearsal was very rich in terms of material for my reflections on new forms of instrumentness provided by the coupling of the acoustic musical instrument to mobile computers and the use of computer processing applications in real time. [ 13th rehearsal, 6/28/2017 ] “Arquipélagos”, #1 and #2 201 This was an excellent rehearsal encompassing three performances. The first two ones were related to the idea of working on silence, dismemberment of the structures based on notes and an intention to form a kind of "sound synthesis" out of the two different instruments. This last idea relates to Grisey's concept of sound synthesis, which seeks to form a single sound from different sources. We used the image of islands, of various sizes and formats, grouped forming an archipelago that is united but, at the same time, separated by the sea. At the end of the rehearsal, we named the 2 performances "Arquipélagos", #1 and #2, in which we really tried to transit in silent moments, develop a small amount of material, dive into an even more intensified listening, focused on the developments even if hidden among certain specific sounds (here, one can develop the idea that even a sound with a more powerful dynamics may present interior developments liable of being worked on a performance). The third performance was based on the idea of "Repentes", developed last week, where each of the performers tries to integrate one another presenting various materials, in a kind of sound "challenge", in which the materials agglutinate, densify and disintegrate, moving on to the next stage, and so on. It is curious to notice that, in this case, both performers use less digital processing and attempt to manipulate the sound "inside" the musical instrument. Here, we can relocate the idea of individuation by G. Simondon, previously used in our performances seeking to crystallize certain sound layers that will interact with each other, and that fall apart afterwards. It is worth mentioning that, in both performances, the work of attentive listening was quite evident. Also, we discussed on the possibility of embracing these ideas, among others already explored, as "parts" of previous performances. always sing in duets, alternating in the composition of strophes according to strict parameters of meter, rhyme and thematic coherence. There is a set of rules formulated for this purpose, but the repentistas improvise their verses on a practical basis, such as the poetic rhythm incorporated. The improvisation places the repentista in relation to aesthetic models, such as the rhythm of the poetry, the melodic patterns and the singing rules, at the same time it puts him into a dialogue with the other singer and with the expectations and reactions of the audience. More: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1809-43412011000100010-- Access on November 29, 2019. 201 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/224255789 and respectively. Access on January 15, 2019 https://vimeo.com/224256485 231 What I brought from these trials, recordings and conversations between the two of us were several ideas and notes on the use of silence, on how to institute it "musically", on how to work the sound of silence, regimented by dozens of electronic processing and acoustic inferences. It is notorious that the second performance of the day was much more silent than the first one, where, though imbued with the themes "silence" and "archipelagos", we still carried through an excess of materials (in my opinion) that are good, but that also overloaded the first performance. The recording of our second interaction, on the other hand, provided a more reliable approach to our original intention, to walk through archipelagos of various shapes, sizes, structures and densities, interspersed by aqueous silences, or not. [notes on rehearsals held in 2018] “Largo” 202 In this performance, we work the idea of temporal spacing. Time is an important element of research for several instrumental performers and contemporary experimental composers (Silvio Ferraz, Edgard Varèse, Iannis Xenakis, Frank Zappa, Pierre Boulez, Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, among many others) and it is also for us, the duo, one of the topics we investigate the most. The time of the performance and the performance of time itself. In the previous chapters I addressed this subject a little more theoretically, perhaps through a view concerned with the way the theme was presented and a sort of analysis on how this subject links my own work as a performer and as a composer. Considering the inherent unpredictability of a performance based on the idea of a hybrid machine in the praxis of musical improvisation – unpredictability which is, in a higher or lesser degree, present in any type of musical improvisation praxis, intentionally or unintentionally, in style - the performance of the very time of performance, during a given performance in which a previous idea of space is established and is still intriguing, from the performer's point of view. Thus, in addition to the characteristic rhythmic arsenal we built over almost twentyseven minutes, this arsenal that explored, within the theoretical and playful parts, the idea of spacing/extending the thought of a musical note, through punctuated wholenotes and glissandos, for example, became clear to me, in a further analysis of the recording, that both Rogério and I seek, in molecular sounds, using electronics to access harmonics, partials, to explore and create different layers of sound textures. We start from a stipulated script, though not really delimited, since where a lot of space is present, there are also many empty, quiet places, breaks, nooks, etc. I probably can affirm that "playing" the voids, spaces and silences is definitely something 202 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/312560448 --- access on January 22, 2019 232 more complex than playing notes and musical figures. The silence, through a performance, is built by assorted encompassment, whether the exploration of minimally conditioned dynamics by the performer on the acoustic or hybrid instrument, either by exploring physicality, by playing and interacting with the edges, with extremes, with uncommonly accessed regions, or by diving into the molecular sound, operating processing on the sound envelope from the computer, applications and software. Such aspect becomes very evident to me between minutes 8 and 10 of the performance recording, in which the saxophone and the 10-string bandolim, explore both individually and jointly some sparse, rarefied, looped sounds in a rather delicate way and explored out of the intrinsic, molecular potential. Throughout the sound manipulation process, the textural idea reveals itself very clearly, where we diversify the duration, density or sound dynamics, extending it or restricting it, without abrupt cuts. Gradual, synergistic, interpolated transitions, as a drawing with different types of pencils, overlapping each other. Performance Devido Tempo 203 Time, once again, is the subject of our performance. Here, we try to render exactly a sense of space and positioning for each material, an opposite intention comparing with ansiosa performance, described below. Long notes, whole-note and double whole-note extended, even in an excessively prolonged, stretched way. Repeating what cannot be repeated (time itself, every moment, renews itself, never returning the previous point). In a way, we create a count of this due time, which is due to us, complicated by mixing different productions in the same environment. Each performer’s memory, their knowledge base, seeks to take control of gestures, notes, legatos, phrases at all times. On the other hand, the process of dissolving this territory is ubiquitous, where we try not to stratify it at any cost. We operated these changes out of momentary dissolutions, temporal dissolutions (such as of the seventh minute of performance) and punctual dissolutions, which untangle the knots that connect notes, arpeggios, chords, shades, syntaxes, languages, reference systems, etc. Based on the figure of the creating-performer, who encompasses the performer and the composer in one single person, in the same act, at the same time, where the presence and absence of common characteristics to each of these personalities trades places, unpredictably. The broadening of imaginary time, therefore, allows me, as a performer, to have at least some notion/orientation of these seconds and minutes, throughout improvisation. I may attribute more or less stratified characteristics, but I try here to operate as if I were beside the time, as a spectator (figuratively, of course) of this timeline that continuously takes place. Another important factor, which should be considered in experimental performances 203 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/271380137 --- access on January 28, 2019 233 Such as this one, is the repeated availability for listening that the performer must possess and, to a certain extent, develop. Here is a more concrete example between 13' and 17' of this recording. There is a fairly great silence permeating the whole environment, and there are some minimal sound material operations, carried out both acoustically and digitally. There is a lot of open, freed space. Any performer who has ever been in this situation can understand the intensity that is being in a musical performance and having, at your disposal, such a large space to play. It is at this very point that we work out/potentiate our attentive listening. But for that, both Rogério and I have to be available to listen in a more focused, reduced and attentive manner. If we are too immersed in our own materials, in our own figures and gestures, immersed in our processing and manipulations, we might not even realize this possibility beforehand over the performance timeline. Being available for attentive listening is fundamental to the praxis of free improvisation, out of a state of readiness in relation to the acoustic environment and its surroundings. The listening here is an intention, a focus, a goal. How much do I listen to this space, the how much do I listen to the material Rogério proposes, how much do I listen to my own material and my interventions, how much do I listen to the balance amongst all instruments, machines, creating agents? The last four minutes of this performance illustrate such issues, from a listening focused on the unfolding of the timeline and the (almost) silence. My interaction with instruments somehow becomes an extension of my body, which is never silent, even when it seems, sleeping. Being a near extension, it is important listen to these instruments coupled to each other in an intense and powerful way. The conversation that forms between the notion of my own presence in this assemblage and my instrumental voices is what will eventually create this story. In a way, we are back here to the idea of a game, important concept for musical improvisation. This game/conversation is what feeds the performance, feeds performance time and its typologies and morphologiesthr204 ought its execution, also providing feedback to each of the involved musician. Thus, the performer’s reference and the knowledge base are enhanced in an environment prone to break territories, almost free of (we are never totally free, we are never free from everything, we are always based on/sustained by/supported by something), a transducing environment that can act as an unique, exclusive individuation agent to that performance in question. That explains the reason the recordings, the notes, the written notebooks, the preliminary notes, and further recordings and analyses are so important to the musician who is also a researcher: through this material the performer manages to keep up with what is already part of himself, addressing cognitive alterities and processes that may be investigated in a slightly deeper way. This is the case with this performance, which, at the end of the recording, provoked a thought of excessive hollowness, emptiness, excessive de-structuring. By re-reading the notes and fully listening of the recording, we realized how rich and intense this material was. The construction of this sound in due time was, therefore 204 For Costa (2013, p.131), the practice of free improvisation can start from "a typology, which is the identification of sound objects in their context, which flow into a morphology, qualifying these objects in their texture." 234 performed interactively by each performer and their musical instruments and between both musicians, in a kind of "journey to the center of sound", by Scelsi, torn, stretched, densified. Performance Ansiosa 205 We decided to work on the theme of anxiety in a musical improvisation performance. Through the speed of interpretation, I tried here to relocate the idea of "note" in the instrument, making a far more focused execution on the texture of the pick and contact with the strings rather than a more established set of pitches. Hence, it is evident that we were using one of the most powerful features of free improvisation, the coexistence of horizontal action plans, more linearly, in an even and continuous thought, along with vertical actions, interpolating in small blocks of densities (even when there is no kind of harmony or cadence). From that, the development of the performance takes place more fully and continuously, which, despite the densified materials, presents a linear relationship of material exposure. After listening about 4'20", one may realize that we put aside any kind and established pitch and began manipulating both acoustic and digital noises, making the performance time increasingly tight, exasperated, anxious (these characteristics are much more evident as of the 5th minute of performance). In a way, we deal with these anti-languages in an almost anarchic way, carried away by the environment of performance assemblage itself. The long saxophone note at 5'45" was not planned at all, but it ends an important moment in the way it was created in real time. The idiomatic gestures are gradually consumed by progressively deeper experiments on both the textures of the bodies of the musical instruments, as well as the machinic textures provided by the software, pedals and processing. In this way, there is an increasingly powerful dive into the molecular sound, devoid of signs, devoid of pitches, melodic, harmonic and/or functional relationships. Surprisingly, we plunged into an eastern language almost automatically. At approximately 8'25", a loop stemming from noiseness seems to take us many miles away from where we had been just a few seconds earlier, for an eastern, almost archaic modal setting. Lasting a little over a minute, when the bandolim and saxophone dialogue in this melodic mode and jointly undo the molar aspects, it leaves this territory and moving on to a new place, within the same performance. Overcoming the idiomatic aspect is important for the praxis of free improvisation, also very dear to the idea of assemblage of a hybrid machine for musical performances; due to this overcoming we can find slots in sounds and explore them more powerfully. The static gesture is left aside, or at least intentionally oriented to that, moving from a hard and homogeneous place to somewhere heterogeneous, not as dense, not as palpable. Obviously, my knowledge base is restructured at every moment, adapting itself into new gestures, new sounds, new possibilities that, if repeated a number of times, will be 205 Recording available on: https://vimeo.com/272248790 --- access on January 29, 2018 235 embraced, processed and internalized. Thus, the rupture with my repertoire is continuous, daily, necessary. The idea of texture here, according to Ferneyhough's perspective, needs to be constantly adapted, always interpolated and recovered. I used the word readdressed purposefully, since it reminds me of Franziska Schroeder’s concept of sound weaving, investigated in previous chapters. Addressing something and readdressing it countless times in a row, in a kind of sound weave (which refers us to Schaeffer’s concept elaborated of sound weave, in its definition of the sound object). For Ferneyhough, texture is one of three important elements sound may have in a performance (gesture and figure are the other two). Leaving aside the relative listening of gesture, related to systems and languages, and distancing from the figural timbre, a kind of plastic material, as defined by Rogério during the rehearsal, usually based on rhythmic and melodic materials, a textural approach gives the performer a less dense and an access route rather exempt of basic references; thinking in terms of texture can help me get out of a systematized thought, triggered from muscle memories and technical and repertoire problem resolutions, accumulated throughout my life and my integral relationship with my musical instrument. Texture is sound flow. And sound flow is created at the time of performance, from the idea that performance performs its own time, through different possibilities. This sound design may be more or less similar to gestural or figurative thoughts, thus making the performer, concomitantly, more or less free from the hegemony of languages, systems, references and from, style, language structures forms. In short, thinking about texture is thinking about resonance, in certain resonances, is thinking out of the idea of the sound itself and its transitory states, in a game/conversation which may or may not distance me from short and long memories, from processes already ingrained and paths already run. If there is a repetition, it is always different. If there is a connection, it is always distinct, fragmented, exchanged. 236 Performance aBaCa 206 This idea started from our will to conduct a performance in the musical form of rondo, in one of its variants, ABACA. Hence, we tried to stipulate different processes and sounds for each of the movements in such form. The "rondos" were connected to each other so that we almost evaporated the pre-existing sounds (from the fifth minute onwards, part I). A great deal of the material we created transfigured, almost everything slid into a kind of flight powered by small molecules of sound. The challenge here is to have a performance out of several different motifs, bringing about a common dialogue and still maintaining a certain effectiveness of connection. To me, the boundaries between the different rondo parts are a great challenge, requiring us to repeat something that did not even exist before. That is notorious - and, I believe, it was accomplished effectively – in the melody at the ninth minute, which seeks to recall the melodic and rhythmic figuration of the beginning of the performance. It reminds of and refers to the beginning, however, departing from different movements and sound textures. Part C of the rondo happens exactly at the beginning of part II of the recording. This different microphonics occurred, due to the accumulation of the loop recording and various processing both of us were performing. It is a short, quite intense time, which lasts only around a minute and a half, before we resumed part A. Intersections are, in a way, inevitable, but we are somehow aware of what will occur throughout the performance. Although the performance was not free in its form, we created a series of sound objects along it, acting as a basic structure of exploration of its properties, so that we could perform what Pierre Schaeffer called it an "experimental solfege", out of the idea of attentive, focused, intensified listening. As creating-performers, we obviously create, execute and listen (“écouter, ouïr, entendre, comprendre”) non-simultaneously, but absorbed by us, cognitively, as if it were so, (almost) at the same time. I am affected by a sound or noise that Rogério creates in his saxophone, giving rise to a desire/power to create something in my musical instrument, out of the properties I perceive and identify in the material he had created. Then, very soon, I begin to hear/listen to my own material, while I still hear/listen/identify the material created by Rogério, practically simultaneously to what I am now creating out of several forms of interaction between my body and my hybrid instruments. The assemblage between the different wills/desires/powers occurs, in a kind of game/conversation that we establish second to second, through the construction of a continuous movement. The very existence of sound takes place in a confrontation that requires inexorable finding, such as Menezes (2014, p.19) says: "without movement there can be no sound, and every movement produces sound." Thus, in a way, we put the concept of open work into practice, or the aforementioned work-in-progress. There is a continuous and intense process of negotiation between performers and, for each of them, extensive negotiation between the acoustic and 206 Recordings available on: Part I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfM_pP0mxb8 - Part II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_8IbWXt9f4 --- Access on January 31, 2019 237 digital instruments, processing, the techniques used, the muscle capabilities, etc. Entire blocks of comprovisation flood over every part of the rondo, temporarily specified as constituent elements of territorialization. There is, thus, the performers go through an intense and continuous process of adaptation in every stage. Idiomatic or nonidiomatic, it does not matter to us. The result of sound, at that moment, is what we seek to amalgamate, imbued with this negotiation and maintenance of the performance as a whole. Hence, aBaCa shows that the processes of anchorage/territorialization of a aesthetic moment within the performance is always at stake, always in constant scraping and with a certain amount of difficulty in being established. As creatingperformers, we usually bear a certain aversion about leaving a processing or a sonority establish completely and for a long period of time. This is also due to the fact that technical problems occur during a performance, as it occurred here, in this example. Performance creating and conducting agents are not simply performers, they are not just Rogério and me; we have our computers, our software, our hybrid machines, which actively participate in this co-assemblage of creation. In this recording there are moments when we clearly find ourselves more engaged in solving (or preventing) something technical from going wrong than consciously attentive to the creation processes that takes place during the performance. Performance based on a photograph, Minas Gerais state 207 Starting from the appreciation/reading of a photograph of a valley, in Minas Gerais state, we carried out a performance dedicated to this theme. The photograph in question is very dear to me, since I was given it many years ago and it is part of a playful, imaginary place that permeated my adolescence. With a tree in the background, isolated in the center of the valley, among immense mountains, rocks and dirt, my young imaginary traced escape routes, smells, sounds and various colors. Obviously, I tried not to pass on the totality of my feelings about the image to Rogério, nor what it represented to me. Thereby, we tried to explore the relationship between sound, processing, image, the affections it might cause us at that time, powers that the assemblage itself proposed during performance, etc. This ambivalence of feelings/affections/perceptions is reasonably clear between minutes 4 and 7 of performance, in which we explore different morphologies and sound textures. From there, we set an arrival in the image itself, somehow building a texture in a more consistent way. What does a simple image bring us? What does a photograph tell us, what does it communicate to us, how does it thrill us, and perhaps the most intriguing question, what is the narrative of this emotion, through a musical performance? Barthes (2004, p.203) writes that "humanity has practiced all possible directions of writing: vertical, 207 Original photograph used in this performance was presented in chapter 2, page 107 (see Figure 5). Recordings available on https://vimeo.com/313831634 --- access on 30.1.2019. 238 horizontal, from the left to right, right to left, coming and going, etc."208, showing that the directionality of a narrative does not need to be static, unidirectional or two-way, but the way concrete poetry often proposes. He states, soon afterwards (ibidem, p.204) that "a narrative, in its simplest possible way, is the sequence of a before and one after, an undecidable mixture of temporality and causality"209. For Barthes, photography mechanically repeats what can never be repeated existentially. Now, in a way, isn’t that exactly what happens in an experimental musical performance, in which we create, at the moment of action, the necessary territories to make it move towards disruption and clashes, deterritorializing it, thus, successively, leading to its own constitution? The individuation occurring in each of us during the performance constitutes the necessary substrates so that it, in its entirety, does not perish, but survives, stand up and exists. After all, looking at a photograph and communicating that feeling through sound may seem, to some extent, easy to the moment when you, performer with considerable background of techniques, studies, repertoire, etc., find yourself in this situation. At this moment, it is not enough to think/feel something such as "what this emotion communicates?" Sounds, textures and/or timbres must be placed on the colors, edges, in what is beyond the trees, the valley, the image itself. Paraphrasing Didi-Hubermann, it is necessary to place sounds and silences even on the things we do not spontaneously have sounds for210. In this way, I bring something previously existed inside myself, but that is, to a certain extent, assembled at that time in a very specific and powerful way. The great challenge of improvising out of an image is exactly the way this kind of transduction of the visual, affective memory in relation to colors and/or places to a creative praxis of sound creation. In one way, there is an evidence of the constitution of a sound plane in this performance starting from the tenth minute of recording, in which we apparently find ourselves in a common feeling of interpretation and cognition of what the photograph presented to us. Though this moment, consciously or not (impossible to affirm), is undone from 12'30"on, creating a void that spreads across the sound spectrum. We probably "read" the photograph as we read the notes and chords in a score. However, based on a wide range of freedom offered by the image itself, our interpretation is much more linked to the arising emotion and affection, rather than to the interpretation of symbols. When reading a smaller triad, for example, I immediately identify the relationship that the three intervals written on the score represent. No matter how much I avoid, I can visualize the chords voicings mounts on the acoustic 208 Roland Barthes (1915-1980) wrote specifically about photography, image and its cognition, perception, aesthetics etc. relationships, in his last book published in life, “A câmara clara – nota sobre a fotografia” (7th edition, 2018). 209 210 Highlights are by the author. Didi-Hubermann (2016, p.52) wrote that "this is philosophy: putting words even in things for which we do not spontaneously have words." 239 guitar, electric guitar or bandolim neck, given the years a constant praxis caused on me. In a virtually immediate way, I also identify the melodic possibilities that this triad offers me: the scales, their minor, natural, harmonic or melodic variants, some proportionate modes that fit perfectly to the situation, the chromatic intentions or some other kind, such as a pentatonic scale, for example, and so forth. . open performance held at SONS DE SILÍCIO exhibition: On 4.8.2019, I performed openly at the Sons de Silício – Lutherie Experimental exhibition, approved after a curation process. The performance, called "playing, listening, listening, improvising, performing, composing {and talking}"211, happened in the former MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art) building, in the University of São Paulo campus, in São Paulo, now called Espaço das Artes. This performance was important because my wish was to use the papagaIO patch, through an event in which I played the nylon acoustic guitar, Max 8 and Ableton Live software, besides various FX pedals and controllers, live in real time, in an assemblage of a musical performance hybrid machine. The idea was to allow a fully open the interaction between the audience and me, where it would be possible for anyone to play with me whatever they wanted, at any time of the performance. For that, we configured an active amplification system and an eight-channel mixer, available in a cube in a table shape, with the whole gear set plugged and ready to use. All the performer had to do was sitting, plugging their musical instrument to the amplification (if desired, as there were several acoustic participations and interactions as well) and interact with me. In all, the performance lasted approximately 40 minutes. It featured Mariana Carvalho, playing ventilarpa, an instrument built by it with cello strings in the structure of a fan and with piezzo pickup coupled to the system; Kooi, Kawazoe, with kotô, a traditional Japanese instrument, plugged into several handmade FX pedals built by the luthier from São Paulo Wellington Sato212; Paul Assis, playing an iPad application SAMPL213, where the sound material used was exactly the performance material, being captured and processed in real time, from the performance room, which has a very powerful natural reverberation; Fabio Martinelli, playing the didgeridoo, a traditional wind instrument from Australian Aboriginal culture; Alexandre Porres, with participation in koto and operating FX pedals; and Miguel Antar, on the acoustic double bass. Perhaps the most important thing occurred specifically in this performance, was putting patch papagaIO into practice, used in conjunction with the acoustic guitar 211 Available in full: https://youtu.be/J0hjOIvvUWU --- access on May 6, 2019 212 See: https://www.tomtoneefx.com.br/pedals - access on April 15, 2019 213 See: http://samplr.net/ - access on April 15, 2019 240 and other performers. papagaIO “behaved” well, although halfway through the performance onwards, it refused to loop more than three seconds of the sampled material for granulation processing, which seemed to be working perfectly not only during soundcheck but up to about 20 minutes of performance. Obviously, I was at that time unable to restart the whole the system, then I worked with what I had in hands, up until the end of the performance. Bugs, errors, malfunctions of one or more apparatus, software, hardware, etc., coexist practically in every performance I have been in to this day, and I believe that resourcefulness to deal with these situations of unpredictability and momentary contingency is an important part of each improviser’s repertoire. The interaction with the other performers was, from the performance-wise, aesthetic and sound/musical point of view, excellent, absolutely free and improvised; the configured ensemble at that moment was unique, we had never played as a whole group together, only in pairs, before the performance. 2019 [3.6.2019] . “Tanto Mar” - performance at NIME 2019, Porto Alegre, UFRGS UFRGS (Federal University of Porto Alegre, Brazil) 214 The piece "Tanto Mar", composed by me and Paulo Assis Barbosa, was accepted to the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) congress in the 2019 version, which took place in the city of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul state in Brazil, at the UFRGS campus. This piece was presented on June 3, 2019, at the Teatro de Atos of UFRGS. “Tanto Mar” basically consists of trying to recreate characteristic properties present in the history between Portugal and Brazil, embracing the idea of an aqueous sound that moves both by the cadence of rhythms and roughness and by the bulky waves of reverberation and digital processing. The Atlantic Ocean, which separates and unites the two countries, was as the inspiration for this performance of a ten-string bandolim, a typically Brazilian instrument, developed by the Brazilian musician Hamilton de Holanda, along with mobile computers, processing and sound manipulation software and live-electronics, in a quadraphonic environment, in which the sounds move through four independent, interchangeable outputs during mixing, performed in real time during the piece. Each speaker symbolizes the paths the sea runs uninterruptedly, in a dance of latitudes and longitudes. The intersection of sounds occurs through reverberation processes, spatializations, echoes, modulations and grains that slowly form the sound material, composing, decomposing and manipulating sound waves. Sound characters like wind, waves, stillness, storms, among others, are metaphorically evidenced through a sound material that seeks consistency, creating a kind of rhythmic movement of a caravel thrown into 214 Important excerpts from this performance are available online at this link: https://vimeo.com/342069328 -- - access on July 2, 2019 241 the sea. Sounds move unceasingly between negentropy and chaos, between stillness and tsunami, between starboard and portside, culminating in a textural dance aiming to move performers and listeners away from electronic processing, leading to a dive in an intensified, attentive, deep and engaging listening. New musical possibilities can happen through the experimentation of new routes, unusual routes and horizons yet to be covered. The sea and its inaccurate distances pose permanent challenges. "Tanto Mar" seeks to revive the feeling the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa expressed by writing215: "Braços cruzados, fita para além do Parece em promontório uma alta serra | O limite da terra para dominar | O mar que para além da terra"216. Some of the notes I wrote on my logbook, after this performance, referred to the difficulty between the soundcheck and the performance itself, which occurred a few hours later. We had certain mismatches in the numbers of the four speakers and the original intentions, such as that of a grain processing "moving" through different speakers, along the theater stage and the amplification system for the audience. Another interesting theme was that of a more tense initial contact with the technical team of the event, which did not belong to the NIME, but rather was there for the concert. Clearly, the technicians were used to dealing with popular music bands and singers, and we had some friction during the soundcheck, given the vast amount of specific needs for a performance involving only one acoustic instrument such as bandolim and sound processing in real time, through four speakers positioned differently. Having resolved everything in the best possible way, the piece went through efficiently from a technical perspective. I chose to start it with repeated sounds and plenty of fermatas, so that we could redo the soundcheck in the opening seconds, since we had had some setbacks in soundcheck, mainly to recognize whether the four speakers were adequately responsive to our initial proposal. This is a very important fact in an improvised performance like this, since I, as a performer, intend to focus my attention on the instrumentness and sound processing for as long as possible, in addition to the interaction with the other performer, who is with me on the stage. An additional concern about whether the speakers would be according to our initial intention or not could be an even greater burden to deal with during the performance. Here is the reason for a more careful and flatter beginning for a performance in terms of sound production. As of the second minute, we were more aware of where sounds on the stage came from, of how the spatialization of the sound material being created was taking place. Thereby, we started another moment of sound exploration, more focused on its envelope, on its primordial constitution and on its most intrinsic characteristics and 215 Excerpt from the poem “Uma Asa do Grifo (D. João O Segundo)”, by Fernando Pessoa, inserted in the book MENSAGEM –Obra Poética Volume único, Editora Nova Aguilar, 1999 216 "Arms crossed, glazes beyond the sea | Looks like a high saw in promontory | The boundary of the earth to dominate | The sea beyond the earth". 242 qualities. From there, the exploration took place more fully, immersed in the original intentions for the piece, as verified at 3'55" onwards. I tried to develop interspersed movements between molarities and molecularities, contributing as organically as possible so that the other performer could access different types of materials and sound productions out of the bandolim, its steel/brass strings, its wooden body and the resonances provided by the amplified instrument on the theater stage. c.) observations regarding the design, creation and development of the patch papagaIO (Mac OSX) and patch papaga.iOS (iPad) The idea of developing a specific patch for sound processing and manipulation, in real time is always welcome, I believe, to any performer who deals with distinct forms of new digital technologies in their musical and creative praxis. I have always been close to technology in my musical creation, as described in the introduction of this work, and the accumulation of knowledge and standardization of interface use between performer, machines and software is reasonably large. There is a certain mix of very distinct approaches in my playing and in my production mode which range from my first experiments with FX pedals and analog sound processing in the 1990s, to applications I have been discovering and researching since my graduate school in 2013. Thus, here I try to describe synthetically, at the same time, in details, how the process of developing the patch that I named papagaIO, created and developed in Max software, as well as additional features that have been investigated primarily as a source of research and which, somehow, have become part of my arsenal of digital and/or hybrid instruments. "papagaIO" was came up primarily from a particular need to have a patch that could provide me with a certain level of sound processing control in real time through several types of distinct manipulations and, still, a certain naturalness of chance, of the unforeseen, allowing the concomitant development of a kind of "noncontrol", as I described in previous chapters217. In this way, the patch came up through a number of – private – choices resembling a chain and its links, where each of these choices automatically influences posterior choices, and so forth. 217 The initial idea of creating and using a new patch during this research came from two different specific needs (a.) to implement new features and trials that I had been working on for some years, since 2008, when I first had contact with Max, thus presenting an excellent opportunity to put into practice much of the theoretical part related to the use and interaction with new digital technologies and hybrid machine; and b.) definitely to replace my use of Pd software, which has undergone many changes in the in recent years, by the developing community, and currently still presents dozens of incompatibilities, bugs, distinct versions, etc. 243 As a performer, the first choice I had to make was the software I would use to build and develop the patch. I have been using Max for many years, but I have also used other similar software such as Integra Live, Pd and Super Collider (all of them, except for Max, are open and free platforms). Besides these, I have been using various other tools in my digital sound processing and construction of digital instruments, including: Ableton Live, Logic, Studio One, Pro Tools and Guitar Rig. There are also the (increasingly constant presence in my setup) iOS sound processing and manipulation applications, which I use on an iPad, among which: Flux:FX, CS-Grain, MobMuPlat, Audulus, GliderVerb, Samplr, PdParty, Mira, Bias FX, Crystalline218, and others. These apps are used on the iOS tablet and accessed through an interface specially created for this equipment, Focusrite iTrack Dock, which allows a common iPad to be transformed into the heart of a digital system inputs that offer balanced XLR inputs, phantom power, stereophonic outputs, headphone dedicated output, independent gain and monitoring channel controls. There is still another consideration. Given this multiplicity of sound processing tools, there are also technological resources and apparatus in the form of hardware, which are independent from mobile computers or tablets, some of which I have been using in conjunction to these, thus expanding both the experience of use and performativity, and the size of the assembled hybrid machine. Some of the apparatuses I use in conjunction with software and applications, are: Boss Looper, a dual footswitch pedal that allows you to record audio samples in real time, process them with internal digital effects (such as frequency change, echo, reverberation, octave, etc.); Electro-Harmonix Freezer (a pedal that "freezes" a certain temporal amount of sound sample, leaving it on a photographic pseudo-loop, altering along the timeline some of the partials of the recorded sample; wah-wah Cry Baby, a traditional analog frequency filter changed via expression pedal; Boss EQ-7, an analog graphic equalizer of seven bands and various volume pedals. Therefore, the amount of equipment required to be assembled, regulated, connected, transported, etc., has always been, as a rule, large and tends to increase with the performer’s time of use and learning in terms of use with the acoustic instrument. "papagaIO" was firstly an attempt to rebuild a performance operation model I had already mastered, out of this mixture of different gear, using "only" a mobile computer, a portable AD-DA interface and the acoustic instrument. For this purpose, I began to literally draw some needs and applications based on my experience in using them in various improvisation performances, presentations in concerts, congresses, recordings, etc. One of the first drafts I made was the one below: 218 In my master's thesis, I conducted a thorough survey, mapping and researching almost a hundred digital applications, software and tools for sound processing and manipulation, among which, many of these applications and software described here were presented, although some in the early stages of development. For further information, see: MARTINS, André L. A guitarra elétrica na música experimental: composição, improvisação e novas tecnologias. Universidade de São Paulo, S. Paulo, 2015. 244 Figure 11: initial drafts of configuration and setup of patch papagaIO. In this draft, which was purposely designed sequentially, I was able to understand certain procedures one would need to (re)create in Max for the sake of effectiveness (from the performer's point of view using both acoustic and digital instruments). At first, I relied on a patch created by the Greek composer and guitarist Laonikos219, known as "model5"220, written for Max. This patch, which had its development subsequently abandoned by the creator himself, possess a graphic layout of four distinct types of processing (harmonizer, echo, granulator and spectral echo) each with its individual gain control and mixing between direct sound and processed sound, in addition to the possibility of different settings being saved in the patch itself and accessed later. According to the author, 219 For further details, see: http://www.laonikos.com/ --- access on July 31, 2018 220 See: https://cycling74.com/tools/model5 --- access on July 31, 2018 245 “This is a patcher for live manipulation of sound which features four effects (delay, harmonizer, granulator, spectral delay) and an interface for [pattrstorage] which is ideal for structured improvisations. Using the MacBook trackpad can control volume and panning, and in this way one can control the volume and panning of more than one effect at the same time. It features spectral delay and granulator. The [pattrstorage] interface allows a user to save up to 9 different settings for all the controllable parameters and then recall smoothly between them (with a 0.5 or 25 second interpolation). If the user makes any changes to any of the parameters, this is automatically saved as "state 0", and when the next preset is recalled, [pattrstorage] interpolates between the current state and the recalled state. The user can also drag the line between numbers and interpolate by hand between the whole range of numbers”. I have used Model5 for many years, even in certain important presentations in my career, with the closing concert of the Ircam Forum in Brazil, in December 2015, when I played with a guitar specially built for this occasion, in Ircam, which was named "Smart Instrument"221 by one of his developers, Adrien Manou-Mani. Throughout this time, I have been "perfecting" the patch, adapting it to my specific needs, such as the inclusion of other processing or reorganizing its visual layout on the computer screen. Another patch, fairly different from Model5, but widely used by many performers, including saxophonist Rogério Costa, my partner me in duo ar+2, is Brane~222, conceived by the Brazilian researcher Alexandre Porres. Some of the basic features of this patch are: frequency transpositions, glissandos, speed changes and recorded sample direction, combination of different processing, freezing of a certain point of the sample (freeze), creating loops from any point of the recorded sample, etc. Noticeably, the digital instrument Brane~ is slightly different from Model5. While the latter favors sound processing through four different forms of sound manipulations, working the sound material in real time as to "sculpt it", Brane~ makes greater use of the performer's gesturality, through various forms of recording and changes of meaning, order, speed, height and sound porting. Perhaps one may say that while Model5 uses a design that focuses on creating sound textures, Brane~ addresses the sound material in a very distinct way, from a Schaefferian point of view, treating sound as a manipulable sound object as a whole. Both approaches have always been interesting to me, having used these two patches for years. One advantage of Brane~ is that the developer has already created it thinking about a joint use with external and expression controllers. Through specific footswitches, triggered by the musician's feet, different types of change and 221 See: http://instrum.ircam.fr/smartinstruments/ -- access on July 31, 2018 222 Available on: https://sites.google.com/site/porres/pd -- access on July 31, 2018 246 sound sample manipulations are allowed, leaving the performer’s hands free to continue playing the acoustic musical instrument simultaneously as well as to perform other processing in other digital instruments. Based on the initial idea of creating a new patch, for my own use, I started from the design of these two distinct digital instruments, the Model5 and Brane~. One of the first steps was choosing how to access and control the processes and manipulations provided by the patch, among other software and available apps during a live performance. This complex coupling embraces the idea that the acoustic instrument itself becomes an extension of the body where several other minor and perhaps slight couplings occur, also allowing the extension of the performer’s body, such as controllers, expression pedals, screens, etc. Thus, aiming the access to a great possibility of real-time controls simultaneously at the time of playing both acoustic instrument and interacting with the computer screen and keyboard, I opted for having a MIDI controller pedal that could offer the maximum diversity of controls in the parameterizations and manipulations provided digitally. The model I chose for this need is familiar to me: the Behringer FCB1010, since I have played for some years with my advisor, Prof. Dr. Rogério L. M. Costa, who already uses this controller with Brane~. Although this model is reasonably old, launched over 10 years ago, which for digital technology can be an eternity, FCB1010 maintains important characteristics of control and accessibility, such as ten individual footswitches, access to dedicated bases and two expression pedals. The traditional, five-pin MIDI output is connected to any digital interface that, in turn, is connected to the mobile computer via USB, making the FCB1010 fully compatible with Max, Pd, Supercollider or any other software of one’s choice. The original EPROM223 chip by FCB1010 is admittedly considered problematic by users in several types of need because it presents many binary communication errors and poor performance in managing the entire digital system of the controllers. The first step, therefore, was exchanging the original EPROM and its firmware for a compatible one, EPROM Eureka 2.0224 , which has five different programming settings and complete adjustments of parameterizations for all footswitches and expression pedals. 223 EPROM, acronym for Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memory, is a type of memory chip that retains information even when the power to equipment is turned off. In such a way, it is possible to carry out settings and parameterizations such as saving specific access bases and specific settings for each fcb1010 footswitch and save them to EPROM. Further information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPROM - access on January 29, 2018 224 Available on http://www.eurekasound.com/eurekaprom - access on July 31, 2018 247 Figure 12: MIDI FCB1010 controller After the physical exchange of EPROM, the chosen configuration to communicate with Max was the "EF", which enables each footswitch to be turned on/off, and implements change controls (CC's, control changes) specific to each of them and the two expression pedals. The next step was finding out the control change values for footswitch and configure them with Max software. For that, I made previous connection tests, performing some preliminary annotations, as shown in the following image. 248 Figure 13: 1st draft of the controllers FCB1010 configuration referring to MIDI commands of Control Changes (CC´s) Figures 14 and 15: draft details made for understanding the MIDI functioning of foot controller FCB1010 249 The next step was to implement a simple patch on Max that would enable the on/off switch to each drive pedal and the FCB 1010 expression pedals. Thereby, I created a simple patch on Max that was able to identify each control change of the FCB1010, thus allowing the beginning of the preparation of the patch "papagaIO": Figure 16: configuration screen of FCB1010 in Max In this way, each of the pedals can be recognized both on the specific MIDI channel as in its individual control change. The idea from this point on was to map each physical footswitch and FCB1010 expression pedals with different real-time audio processing. At first, the following processing was considered in this project: . Delay with specific repetition time controls (in milliseconds), number of repetitions performed (feedback), panoramic control, and input and output control of the original digitally sampled sound and the employed effect; . Harmonizer, with specific controls of positive and negative semitones within the tessitura of an octave; volume controls of the applied effect; fine control of pitchshifter effect; . Specific audio buffer, with four independent allocation layers, where it is possible to record real-time audio samples that can be performed via controllers, at a deferred time, mainly for the subsequent granulation processing225. . Spectral delay, a specific type of echo that repeats the original processed sound with 225 Granulation processing consists in a brief way of cutting small audio samples ("grains") sampled and independently changing their qualities of pace, pitch, speed, direction and partial in real time. A kind of unique sound composed of a collection of sound grains (micro samples processed independently of each other. Grains can be replicated, inverted, condensed, scattered, textured in various ways, altered in their pitches, reordered, etc. The control (grain density) usually determines the amount of micro-sound samples that will be clustered together or spread by a predetermined timeline. 250 changes and processing that (dis)organize certain spectral frequencies using mathematical calculations of FFT analysis (Fourier226 Fast Transform). Given the mathematical complexity required for the construction of a spectral delay processing, the papagaIO patch is used in specific John Gibson227 [mode], which is already reasonably disseminated through Max-MSP users’ community. Another reference model for this processing is the work by the French composer, researcher and guitarist Pierre Massat228, who uses this processing in other software, the Pd, but sharing the same principles and digital construction schemes. . Manipulation of specific frequencies, controlled by one of the expression pedals, as parameterizations of equalizations that are purposely uneven, deeply coloring the timbre of the original sample digitally converted. . Digital reverberations; . Inversion of the direction of the sampled wave stored by the buffer; . Freeze of a specific amount of sample time and resampling; . Ring modulation; The original proposal, therefore, was to create papagaIO as an aggregator of various processing, either constructed from scratch, within Max itself, or stemming from VST or serially connected effects. 226 FFT: Fast Fourie Transform: computational algorithm based on the analysis by Fourier, named after the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830), who, briefly converts time (or space) into frequency, and vice versa. Fourier analysis techniques reveal intrinsic characteristics of the internal structure of a sound, leading to pitch detection, transformations of time and pitch, several forms of sound synthesis, among many other features. (ROADS, CURTS, 1996, p.1075). More about FFT at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform -- and on: https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/examples/fft-for-spectral-analysis.html?s_tid=gn_loc_drop -access on May 5, 2018 227 228 See: http://pages.iu.edu/~johgibso/software.htm - access on May 2, 2018 See: https://guitarextended.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/spectral-delay-effect-for-guitar-with-puredata/ - access on May 5, 2018 251 4.6 Problem found over the patch writing: One of the initial problems was the transcoding of the MIDI information from the two expression pedals of the FCB-1010 to different types of numerical sampling, often necessary for more accurate handling of processing as pitch-shifting. After a sequence of errors and after having consulted Max user forums available online, the solution found was to use the object "scale"229, which can stagger the binary limitation between 0-127 of MIDI messages for a virtually infinite range of mathematical options, even the possibility of configuration of exponential variable results. Thus, it was possible to narrow down the fine-tuning control of height and frequency alterations, controlling them in real time, with both expression pedals available at FCB1010. The following image illustrates the screen with the solution: Figure 17: detail of scale object, in papagaIO patch. 229 See: https://docs.cycling74.com/max7/maxobject/scale --- access on February 26, 2019 252 Another issue is that the same patch cannot run on Windows 10 environment with an identical configuration to that of Mac OSX. Apparently, the objects spectdelay and jg.granulate, two important modules used in Model 5, originally created by the composer and researcher John Gibson, were used in previous versions by Laonikos, when he created the Model 5 patch, which at the time, were incompatible with the Windows system. As I primarily use the Mac OSX system, this is not an immediate problem to me; however, I would truly like the "papagaIO" patch to be also available on Windows platform, since it is very popular and has a large user base. This is an issue I decided to resolve later, once I tried to focus, at the beginning, on creating the adaptation of the patch for performances, and now I face the challenge of trying to couple two very important sub-patches within the general patch. Obviously this generates several message conflicts, and now (February 2019) I am running patch conversion tests between Mac OSX and Windows 10 systems. After a series of researches strictly related to the adaptation of these two sub-patches for the Windows 10 system, the issue was partially resolved. The granulator had to be replaced by a similar version, compatible with 32 bits (not 64 bits, as the Mac OSX version). Apparently, after initial testing on Windows, the granulation processing has worked very similarly Macintosh. On John Gibson’s230 personal website, who developed the original programming of this processing, there is an old file that, after slight adaptations, couples effectively within Model 5 in Windows environment. As to spectral delay, the sub-patch could not be converted to 32 bits. After countless attempts, errors always occur, some in a simple way, where even when activated does not cause any manipulation in the sound material, and other deeper errors, which can even freeze the software completely. For the time being, my solution is to rewrite a delay processing, within a sub-patch specifically for the Windows environment, which can be used with the others. As I am still involved with other areas of the patch in development (see below, about the problems I have encountered in adapting a loop module), I have used basic objects such as tapin~231 and tapout~232, besides a monaural reverb processing, very common in Max, the cverb~233. I did a screenshot of this sub-patch on Windows, as illustrated in the following image: 230 See: http://pages.iu.edu/~johgibso/software.htm --- access on February 26, 2019 231 See: https://docs.cycling74.com/max5/refpages/msp-ref/tapin~.html ---access on February 26, 2019 232 See: https://docs.cycling74.com/max5/refpages/msp-ref/tapout~.html and https://docs.cycling74.com/max5/tutorials/msp-tut/mspchapter27.html --- accesses on February 26, 2019 233 See: https://docs.cycling74.com/max7/maxobject/cverb~ --- access on February 27, 2019 253 Figure18: detail of spectral delay sub-patch, in reconstructed W10 environment. The loop also presents many bugs. It works at times, though almost always, it does not. The patch loads the recorded sample and loop object, but it cannot operate it. In brief, I initially built a simple sub-patch to be used as a looper, based on the tutorials by Peter Elsea234, professor of electronic music at UCSC, USA. In the MAC OSX environment, many of the problems mentioned above were resolved with an upgrade to Max 8 version, held in April 2019, as previously mentioned in this text. There is, however, a specific bug with the granulation object, more specifically in the allocation time that the buffer~ is open, capturing the digital signal sampled by the interface, to perform a posterior digital granulation process. There are moments when it works perfectly, then there are times when the granulation sub-patch is triggered by the buffer~ for 1 or 2 seconds only, is cut off without my control. I have not been able to address the nature of this error yet. 234 See: http://peterelsea.com/maxtutorials.html --- access on February 26, 2019 254 4.7 papaga.iOS (iPad OS) patch Just like the papagaIO patch in Max, its iOS system version works within a specific application, such as Flux:FX that I developed previously. The patch was created seeking to replicate some of the processing developed in its original desktop version, but also looking to encompass the interaction possibilities with the touch screens, onscreen finger pressure and sliders present in the user interface of the application. Flux:FX allows the performer to move up to five simultaneous processing in a same patch, and papaga.iOS brings the following manipulations: -binaural echo (binaural delay), which transits the repetitions between the left and right sides allocated in the output of the application; it is possible to control the intersections of echoes in an X/Y performance chart, as well as crossings of different rhythmic figures (in visual format) of the processing. -Loops, divided into slices (small segments of looped signal) and reverse loop, configured to be triggered simultaneously when the performer touches the finger on the edit screen and holds, moving it. In this way, the loop is activated recording a unit of compass tempo/beat, where the pace is adjustable by the user (for example, if the progress is set to 80bpm, when holding the finger on the screen, triggering the loop, the equivalent of a quarter-note duration will be recorded, prior to the activation). It is a process of intense learning since the progress is usually not explicit (there is no type of groove or continuous rhythmic instrument), and the setting of beats per minute is directed to the echoes and repetitions of the loops. Playing extensively with the app, through its use in rehearsals and performances, it is possible to identify the various possibilities of use and sound creation. -Tape Echo, an echo of "analog" topology, a simulation of tape recorders used to create ambiences and echoes, such as EchoPlex235, in the 1960s. This effect was produced on an analog pedal, with a transistorized or valve system, depending on the version and manufacturing year. The signal was recorded by a reel of magnetic tape system that when activated, repeated the recorded loop, according to the adjustment of amount and volume of repetitions. Here, in a digital simulation, the signal is "heated" through parametric equalization, in a simulacrum of the timbre originally found in EchoPlex though the signal saturation on the magnetic tape. The image below illustrates the second version of the equipment, produced in approximately 1963: 235 See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echoplex - https://reverb.com/news/reel-deal-the-echoplextapedelay- now-and-then - access on February 21, 2019 255 Figure 19: detail of original Echoplex ii. -The last dedicated processing is an echo of frequency change, called Pitch Delay. Through it, I can edit specific repetitions that change different frequencies and heights of the sound material recorded both by the loop and everything that enters the system, in real time. You can manipulate the height records in semitones, 1/4 tone in free form, in which digital processing changes hundreds of variations to each semitone, thus creating a much more molecular material and away from the languages of western music. Individual effect mixing controls, feedback, volume amount and general repetitions are also available. In general, the papaga.iOS patch allows for several manipulations that, if reasonably different from those offered by the original version, created in MAX, on Mac OSX, are still interesting and of great use in the elaboration of sound experimentation. This patch, running on iOS, gives me the possibility to have a kind of mini-hybrid machine, where both the iPad and its analog-digital conversion interface are extremely portable236. When setting up a hybrid machine that offers such a mobility, other types of interaction and instrumentness are provided to the performer, such as the interaction with a touch screen, extreme mobility, possibility of setting screens with two or more fingers used simultaneously, etc. 236 See the recording of my performance accepted at NIME 2019, at UFRGS, Porto Alegre, in June 2019: https://vimeo.com/342069328 --- July 18, 2019 256 Its three editing screens, being the main one configured for live performances, are very useful and friendly to action and manipulation. In a practical way, I can state that it is much more intuitive and practical to operate a hybrid machine using this patch in iOS than in its original version in MAX. Obviously, the patch version encompasses many sound processing possibilities that are still not available here, but that make it, on the other hand, more costly both in their configuration as in its operation during a performance. The images below refer to the three editing screens offered by the patch papaga.iOS237: Figure 20: main screen of patch papaga.iOS, in performance mode 237 To date (May/2019), the company that develops the FLUX:FX app has failed to perform an update of the app, making it impossible to be shared via email, Dropbox, Google Drive or any other digital storage platform. I contacted the company a few months ago, they submitted a standard response, probably automated, which is unusual since it is a small business in the U.S., but they did nothing besides that. Therefore, in order for someone else to use the patch, it is necessary to configure it manually. I leave here my email so that, anyone who wishes to use the patch on FLUX:FX may contact me and I can help with the configuration by manually passing on the individual settings for each processing: andremarttins@usp.br 257 Figure 21: individual processing editing screen in papaga.iOS 258 Figure 22: configuration screen for rhythmic and loop repetitions in patch papaga.iOS I believe I will invest more time and resources in this type of portable hybrid machine, since I believe that the processing power of these gear have improved considerably, offering even more possibilities for action/interaction/manipulation during musical performances and in the development of performances out of musical improvisation. *** 259 con clu sion 260 5. Conclusion "Drip a drop into an ocean of meanings and note that concentric waves form. Set a word alone means trying to grab these waves; nobody has so agile hands. Now, throw two or three words of a only time... patterns and interference form, reinforcing a to the other here, and canceling each other there. Achieve the meaning of words is not grabbing the waves for them originated, but rather to perceive the interactions between these ripples." Robert Bringhurst, 2004238 I am taking a different path at the beginning of the conclusion to this work. As a rule, at this point of the text, it is not customary to use any other author or reference as an example, or a support for reflection. After all, in this chapter, the researcher who writes the text is expected to present a reflection of his or her own, summarizing their investigation and concluding it pertinently with what was presented. This is obviously accomplished in this chapter; however, I took the liberty of using an author to introduce my conclusion. I herein explain the reason for this decision. Near the end of my doctoral work, a book published in 2017239 containing a chapter written by the German musicologist Bernd Enders, professor at the University of Osnabrück in Germany came into my hands. In this text, entitled "From idiophone to touchpad: the technological development to the virtual musical instrument", Enders concatenated a very efficient summary, in my opinion, of the different stages of the musical instrument, presenting a growing digitization of both the representation of sound, as well as the musical process of interaction, of notes and of the sound of musical instruments. He identified ten different stages of evolution regarding the construction and the ways of using musical instruments, departing from an increasing digitalization and abstraction of the process of creating and interacting with musical instruments, exemplifying that the vast majority of musical terms (whether in performance, analysis, composition, improvisation or academic investigations on the subject) express the transition from analogue and concrete to digital and abstract. This procedural analysis built by Enders is very pertinent to my work, which led me to this clipping within my own conclusion, beginning it from the final destination of his text. 238 239 In “A forma sólida da linguagem”, Edições Rosari, São Paulo. ENDERS, Bernd. From Idiophone to Touchpad: The technological development to the virtual musical instrument. In: Musical Instruments in the 21st Century: Identities, Configurations, Practices: Springer. New York 2017, pp.45-58. 261 Therefore, instead of including a reflection on Enders' work in the core of my text, that was ready when I first had access to the book published his research, I begin this last chapter from a summary of the ten stages of evolution of the musical instrument proposed by Enders. Next, I carry out the connection of this example with my own work and finally build, from this point, the closure of my research and doctorate, perhaps contributing to add what I believe to be a new category of evolution of the contemporary musical instrument. Bernd Enders wrote in 2016 that musical instruments can be divided into ten distinct stages: the first stage of instrumentation is the mechanization of the musical instruments, providing sound production beyond what was available in the human body. At a second moment, Enders states that automation (or what the author himself calls programmability) has existed since approximately the 900s, through mechanical organs known as realejo in Brazil, going through the music clocks of the eighteenth century and, later, the player pianos. The author then states that a new stage takes place, the electronification, that includes electronic, optical-electric and electromechanical musical instruments, having as one of their main exponents, the Telharmoniun, created by Thaddeus Cahill at the end of the eighteenth century and which became popular at the beginning of the following century. For Enders, it is in this third stage that there is, for the first time in the history of musical instruments, the use of electricity, providing the invention of new methods of sound generation. The author states (2016, p.47) that “innovative instruments with unfamiliar sounds and original playing techniques were invented”, and new categories of families and types of musical instruments were developed. A few decades later, Enders says that a fourth phase begins, that of modularization that the author considers as a separation of the functionality of the instrument itself, divided into three sections: (1) generators (oscillators, noise generators, etc.); (2) modifiers (filters, amplifiers, effect and sound processing units, etc.) and (3) controllers (keyboards, joysticks, sequencers, etc.)240. The classic example of this fourth phase, for the author, is the synthesizer created by Robert Moog, in the middle of 1960s. Then, from the 1970s onwards, there is the beginning of two stages identified concomitantly by the author, the digitization and a kind of miniaturization of electronic instruments, as the first instruments that combine processing data in reasonably mobile interfaces, such as Fairlight CMI and Synclavier, for example. The author states that (p.48), “with the Fairlight CMI’s eye-catcher, the lightpen, the user was able to operate the menu’s elements of the underlying software and practically draw any oscillation, envelope sequencer notes onto the screen, thus foreshadowing the tapping and swiping of tablets and smarthphones”. Here, a different and new step takes place: both the properties of the timbre itself and the signal recorded are now processed digitally during the process of musical creation. 240 Enders (pp.47-48) affirms, “Although the principle of modularization already applies to earlier instruments and experiments, such as the Mixtur-Trautonium by Friedrich Tratwein and Oskar Sala, only transistorization and the develoment of control voltage led by Robert Mood paved the way for a ‘trunkzied’ compact studio”. 262 Enders continues his interesting analysis, stating that virtually all the necessary aspects in a musical and sound production in order to digitalize the process have already been available since the early 1980s: various methods of sound synthesis, artifacts that enable the recording and storage of sounds created and sampled, different sound processing and modification interfaces, digital sequencing of visual format, etc. The author quotes Werner Jauk, who emphasizes that “the digital sound experience is thus becoming ever more immaterial and abstract: in generating and digital sound is completely detached from bodiliness”. During the same decade, it also begins, for Enders, another stage that potentially acts in the way performers and composers interact with musical instruments: in 1981 the MIDI241 protocol is introduced, initially to ensure that different equipment and brands can communicate with each other, initiating what the author calls computerization phase of electronic instruments. Between the late 1980s and early 1990s, Enders states that there is a paradigm shift in the way electronic instruments are developed. Rather than the existing electronic instruments physically built (controllers, synthesizers, samplers, electronic organs, etc.), the presence of an intense variety and development of "virtual" instruments, music software, which need to be actioned and interacted through personal computers is observed. It is the eighth stage for the author, that of virtualization, which promotes unique scenarios in sound production. The software provides a drastic cost reduction in a multichannel studio based on magnetic tape that gradually migrates into the personal computer, scanning different steps of sound recording and manipulation process. Virtualization also allows access to the visualization of sound, through the computer screens. Performers and composers can now see, almost in real time242, the sound waves recorded and manipulated a few moments before. An important data in Enders' research is that, this stage of virtualization encompasses previous developments, such as the modularization of processes and components, for instance, making the organological process more congruent and epistemological. Certain virtualities are developed to simulate sound signal connecting cables, electroanalog buttons and knobs, speakers, etc. As a counterpart, a facilitated access to the processes of creation and unusual manipulation of sound and its interactivity arises through a growing supply of digital recorders, interfaces and controllers, in addition to the fact that personal computers have become increasingly efficient in terms of data processing, besides their affordability. It is at this moment of evolution that Enders asserts a growing difficulty in making use of precise terminology to distinguish between the abstract environment of many functions based on the computer and other types of information and scanned data. For the author (p.50), “in one case, the computer system is an entire music studio; in musical instrument; in yet another it becomes a music engraving system, a device, and interactive musical education program”. The multiple facets of usability definition depend primarily on how the performer configures their digital system, based on their expected use, knowledge-based and individual needs. Clearly, there are not, in fact, any structural, or systematic differences between the computer 241 242 MIDI: Musical Instrument Digital Interface. In chapters 2 and 3 of this work, I developed several reflections regarding "real" and latency. 263 usage/software/interfaces such as multi-track recording studio or digital musical instrument. What differs its definition is the type of interaction that may occur between a performer, the machine, and its coupled artifacts243. From this moment onwards, Enders states that the musical instrument and musical systems become interconnected, both physically and virtually, through online networks and the internet. New forms of music communication arise via network, where music production, for the author, enters the stage of globalization. This step does not change only music production and its forms of creation and processing. For performers and composers, it is now also possible to exchange online information, digital files, performance records, software, plug-ins, annotations, etc., favoring the access to sound creation, manipulation and processing techniques and at an adjacent moment, that of artificial intelligence (AI), contributing to semi-automated software and hardware, virtual concerts, remote access to machines and possibility of playing together at a distance. Thus, the last stage that Enders elaborates for the development of the musical instrument is hybridization. For the author, this step is only beginning powerfully, where technology still moves and transforms itself through its own creative experimentation. The hybridization of the musical instrument allows a fusion of the musical instrument with the human body, giving space to new types of symbiotic performances between man-machine, which, for Enders, “digital electronic means basically enhance the possibilities of the human body’s interaction with a device”, where a performer can interact with the machine by coupling not only acoustic instruments or artifacts of different origins, but also employ sensors, controllers and other forms of objects that can provide different types of sound interaction and processing to their body. It is interesting to note the increasing electrification, electronification and subsequent digitalization of the musical instrument, through the steps identified by the author, and the current step, hybridization, encompasses acoustic, digital, electronic, often the environment itself, sensors and other types of interfaces that can achieve the musician’s entire cognitive/perceptual sensorium, through very personalized and private creative processes perhaps unthinkable just a short time ago. At the present moment, a very intense experimentation process is perceived, stemming from the discovery of boundaries between ways of composing music, creating sounds, improvising in musical instruments, interacting with other performers; this is a time of intense elaboration of the creation process itself, as a creative bias. This man-machine and natural-artificial intelligence symbiosis is still in its incipient stages of applicability, as has often been shown here throughout this work, especially regarding the use of musical instruments in creative processes in real time. Incipience that often relates to ways of playing the musical instrument and the very materiality/instrumentness of the interface. 243 Enders (p.51) affirms, “Today, organology is undergoing a phase of reconfiguration – the organology of the computer society has yet to be developed, as wrote Bense (2013, p.149). Which part of the interactive graphic digital synthesizer reacTable should be views as the actual instrument? Is it the sensational glass top that reacts to manually placeable and movable objects with coded underside by emitting visual signals that optically simulate the typical structure of a modular synthesizer with oscillators, filters, envelope generators and sequencers, or is it the integrated computer along with the software as the sound machine proper, which however remains hidden from the audience?” 264 This matter became clear to me during a recess at the congress SONOLOGIA I/O 2019244, talking to Prof. Dr. Cesar Villavicencio, who had finished his presentation at that time. During this coffee break, I mentioned to Villavicencio certain difficulties in playing a hybrid instrument, due to the types of interaction and the different forms of varied instrumentness that often can confuse even a more experienced performer. He then mentioned that once, performing with his flute coupled with a computer, with several different types of electronic processing and digital sound manipulation, he got absorbed and immersed in sound, far from what he could assume to be originated from a flute. At one point, composer James Fulkerson245 approached Cesar and told him, "never forget that you are a flute player". Villavicencio then told me that the phrase, simple and direct, was a kind of epiphany for him, in understanding that it is possible to manipulate, interface, expand and process your musical instrument and, at the same time, not forgetting where it came from, as musicians and performers. Obviously, our knowledge base is something impregnated and solvent in our own formation. However, Villavicencio’s words made so much sense to me that I decided to bring them here, in the final reflection of my doctoral work. Ever since I started assembling different types of hybrid machines for musical performances, I have used the electric guitar as a primordial interaction interface with both electronic and digital apparatuses. Over this path, the sound creation work often became so abstract that it was difficult to maintain the hybrid relationship between acoustic and digital elements. After all, what is the sound of an electric guitar unplugged from its arsenal of FX pedals, controllers, amplifiers and sound processing software?246 The point is that I got lost along this path, once the electric sound of the guitar is, beforehand, a processed sound. Over time and after dozens of rehearsals and performances using a solid guitar, I gradually started using an acoustic electric guitar, which allowed me a certain rebalancing during the performance between the acoustic and digital sound. After some acoustic electric guitar experiments, I also inserted a tenstring bandolim, and then an acoustic guitar with nylon strings, both instruments containing contact pickups installed on their bodies by a luthier. But Villavicencio's saying did not impact me only to the point of making me use acoustic instruments within the hybrid machine. The impact has also been on the issue of my own musical personality as a performer. "Don't ever forget that I'm also a guitarist" was what resonated in my head at that moment. It is not just the presence and contact 244 Second edition of the event, held between 8 and 12 April 2019, at SESC CPF, São Paulo. See: https://www.facebook.com/sonologia2019/ and http://www2.eca.usp.br/sonologia/2019 - Accesses on April 15, .2019 245 246 See: http://www.composers21.com/compdocs/fulkersj.htm - accesses on April 15, 2019 I bring here the paragraph that opened my master's thesis, defended in 2015: "A guitar without any connected cable, finds itself lonely leaning its solid wooden body against a wall. When a boy enters the place, he takes the instrument with both hands and, holding a small celluloid pick in one of them, he hits its steel strings, what one hears is a volume sound in very low volume, almost inaudible, unsupported; the sound of different types of woods cut into pieces, glued, vibrating, resonating. And nothing more." (MARTINS, André L. A guitarra elétrica na música experimental: composição, improvisação e novas tecnologias, p.17, 2015). 265 with an acoustic instrument coupled to the system such as the ten-string bandolim or the nylon guitar. It is also a familiarity with the interface of the instrument, a reacceptance of the corporality of the electric guitar or the acoustic guitar in relation to my hands and my body, an old-new tuning of instrumental action. If, on the one hand, in recent years I have had access to numerous new parameters, different and unprecedented types of instrumentness and so many other aspects related to interpretation, performance, interaction and gesturality, many of which I presented in this work, on the other hand, the return to an instrumental thought of which I am part too, as a musician/interpreter/performer, still a guitarist, collaborated to bring me a certain encouragement and to allow, in fact, my exploration of many other related aspects on real-time performance itself. Because acoustic/digital hybridization provides a type of interactivity-instrumentness usually innovative to the performer, not rarely it makes us lose the thread exactly of what we are chiseling, weaving, experimenting, manipulating. By re-embracing a purely acoustic musical instrument such as the guitar or bandolim, recoupling it into a digital system and setting up a machine - in my opinion - effective with regard to the offered possibilities of experimentation, it is clear that the hybrid instrument is currently the most efficient proposition and offers manipulation capability for someone who wishes to invest in the research on sound creation based on musical improvisation. In this case, the hybrid machine provides a myriad of access to sound, to the manipulation of different execution settings, in the duration of a musical performance. There is, however, a current research that has made me particularly intrigued recently and that I would like to mention here before finalizing the text. In June 2019, I participated in NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression247), the most important event within the universe of research and studies on new types of musical interfaces and sound control. This year, NIME took place, for the first time, in Latin America, in the city of Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, and brought artists and researchers from many different places, such as Canada, Belgium, Germany, USA, China, India, New Zealand, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, United Kingdom and Brazil, among other locations. Amid several interesting lectures and presentations, one in particular drew my attention, the one by Professor Eduardo Reck Miranda248, who is now at Plymouth University, in the UK. Miranda’s work demonstrated something so special and unique that made me think of my own research and how it might be affected if the hypotheses investigated by him and his team materialize. In short, Professor Miranda presented recordings of two pieces using what he calls PhyBox, a type of black box that brings in its interior four slime mould of the same species, called Physarum polycephalum, centerpiece of his research. According to the Miranda, 247 See: https://www.nime.org/ — access on July 12, 2019 248 https://www.ufrgs.br/nime2019/keynotes.html — access on July 12, 2019 266 “My team and I invented a biological processor made with living tissue from an organism known as Physarum polycephalum. We baptized this processor the 'biomemristor'. Physarum polycephalum is found in cool, moist, and dark environments, e.g. decaying leaves and tree bark. Its intracellular activity produces fluctuating levels of electricity, which can be relayed through its body, and this prompts it to behave like a memristor. The memristor is the relatively unknown fourth fundamental electronic component: it is a resistor with memory. The others are the resistor, the capacitor, and the inductor. The memristor is exciting because its behavior is comparable to the behavior of biological neurons”. This monocellular fungus that inhabits wetlands and is sensitive to light, found in different parts of the world, is the basis for this living processor that Miranda created, based on electrical stimuli that act in the form of resistors possessing a kind of memory, that act similarly to the neurons of living beings. From electrical stimuli, within PhyBox249, occurring between two pairs of these fungi, prepared acoustic instruments and digital instruments receive a type of information that is transcoded and operates changes in unique parameters and manipulations in their sound material, changes created by the fungus reaction to the received electrical impulses. The whole operation is still very subtle, because a large amount of information sent to Phybox can generate an intense electrical current, which will literally fry the four Physarum polysepharum interconnected inside the box, in addition to the communication between acoustic instruments and digital interface that needs various physical couplings to make viable the forms of data coming from slime mould. Miranda states that "the piano notes are transformed into a complex electrical wave that we send to the box, and the resistance changes depending on the previous entries, and the musical notes then turn into a new output which is then sent back to the piano”. Thus, this biocomputer acts as a memory device, of unique composition, which is learning to interact with a particular performer, building a vocabulary that can be rescued briefly afterwards and interacting with the performer as a creative co-agent. The possibilities of interaction with this type of biocomputer, based on various forms of sound processing and real-time creation, become diverse and much more interesting from a creative viewpoint, as there is a new available pattern of reaction, similar to the human reaction, from the behavior of the fungus, acting and reacting the way it is known by a memristor250, an electric resistor with nonlinear memory capacity, 249 Some different recordings of performances using this biocomputer and Professor Miranda himself explaining more about the functioning of PhyBox can be accessed at the following addresses: https://www.egconf.com/videos/eduardo-miranda-composer-professor-comptuer-music-eg10 — https://vimeo.com/user15234038/biocomputer— https://calls.ars.electronica.art/prix2019/prixwinner/31617/ — Access on July 18, 2019. 250 The memristor can be defined as a resistor with memory, being considered a fourth class of electrical circuit (the other three classes are: the resistor, capacitor and inductor), which exhibits characteristics and unique properties, such as the ability to develop a nonlinear memory, from the relationship between two terminal points within an electrical circuit. Researcher Stanley Williams developed at the 267 in which events are understood and stored, thus building a kind of living intelligence that learns, understands, stores data about this learning and reacts based on this understanding. In other words, the memristor acts and reacts in a constant information stream, withholding non-necessarily linear data in different quantities at each interactive step (the fungus may remember some kind of interaction that occurred many hours or days before the current performance, for example), building a nonvolatile and bio-ecological communication vocabulary251. After watching Professor Miranda's presentation, I wondered what it would be like to use PhyBox in my own research work, how the interaction of the hybrid machine with this organic being would be, and how richer and more interesting it would be to play, create and interact with the whole system. The machine and the assemblage, as a whole, would not be only hybrid but also bio-interactive; a hybrid bio-machine: acoustic, digital, human and a fourth element, perhaps non-intelligent (or with a different kind of intelligence), but alive and reagent, which receives, processes, contributes and returns information to the system as a whole. Thus, the idea of the hybrid machine, expressed throughout this work, gains great potential for evolution in its constitution, from the coupling of a type of biocomputer encompassing the concept of unconventional computing252. Instead of simply having an interaction with a more traditional and well-known type of artificial beginning of the decade 1970, in HP laboratories in the USA, this type of resistor, hitherto considered non-existent. Currently, the most researches related to memristors investigate biocomputational behaviors that simulate/emulate/interact with neural data networks. There are several types of memristors, some of them that behave more or less adequately among the action and reaction capabilities that can be provided, among them: memristors based on titanium, based on polymers, magnetic and biomolecular nano-systems, such as physarum polysepharum. For further information, see: https://www.memristor.org/reference access on July 12, 2019. e https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-29394-7 — 251 Miranda affirms: “In July 2018 I completed the final version of the piece “Biocomputer Rhythms”, for piano with electromagnets and percussion. Electromagnets are positioned inside the piano to vibrate its strings. Some electromagnets vibrate percussion instruments. The motivation for preparing the piano with the electromagnets stems from my desire to give the piano a dual identity: one characterized by the standard piano sounds, produced by the hammers striking the strings, and the other characterized by the somewhat otherworldly sounds, which are produced by the biocomputer”. 252 Unconventional computing is a relatively new term that designates unusual forms of computing, which prototypes that use other forms of energy (preferably natural and/or related to renewable energies) and processors related to forms of living organisms and interaction and use of biological and/or ecological parts. Some recurring definitions for the term: “unconventional computing holds out the prospect of new areas of exploration, partnering the digital world of conventional computing with the analogue systems found in nature. While conventional semiconductor computers are extraordinarily efficient at performing repetitive tasks, they are not as efficient when performing of complex processing”; “Developing computing devices built from living organisms such as bacteria or mold looks a promising way to tackle future computing challenges […] Unconventional computing holds out the prospect of new areas of exploration, partnering the digital world of conventional computing with the analogue systems found in nature. While conventional semiconductor computers are extraordinarily efficient at performing repetitive tasks, they are not as efficient when performing of complex processing. As a consequence, one of the approaches currently covered by research on Unconventional Computing is 268 intelligence, created to solve structured problems from a database of typical everyday actions, what can be perceived here is an interactive action with a form of artificial intelligence capable not only of constituting a machine that emulates/simulates/reacts to the human activity, but which integrates a natural constitution into its genesis. This kind of artificial-natural intelligence (or n-AI – natural-artificial intelligence – such as Miranda himself denominated during its presentation in the NIME) re-parameterizes all the components involved in the hybrid machine, performances involving liveelectronics and digital technologies, precisely by acting as a living element of creation, an agent of drawing up materials that not only advocate pre-stored data in the software programming, but contribute in an unprecedented, unexpected and contingency way, in real time. The use of this type of fungus opens a path still virtually unexplored within the contemporary music and in the field of arts using new digital technologies: that of interaction with new forms of intelligence, no longer purely artificial, that react similarly to the functioning of the human brain in its reactions and forms of cognition and creation, rather than as "smart machines", which are created/programmed for the solution of specific problems. Sounds designed from silicon nano-processors, sounds created by acoustic and digital musical instruments, physically created sounds, electronically and digitally, elaborated in a hybrid mode, out of different creative agents that can exist in a large, not merely acoustic and digital, but also bioecological hybrid machine. And why not bio-hybrid, as well? Naturally, the conclusion of a work based on the investigation of the artistic praxis does is not reach a postulated end. What I offer here is nothing more than a momentary outcome, a kind of summary of the last four years of research, which encompasses this text, the patch created and developed, the numerous performances and recordings. During this period, the hybrid machine itself has been changing considerably, either by different acoustic instrument additions, software changes and applications used, improved understanding of how the whole system works, acquired knowledge-base, performance praxes, reading hundreds of texts, articles, books, the network built with friends researchers, teachers, performers, artists, etc. Completing this work is, therefore, pointing out that the research continues in another sphere, both in the praxis investigation as well as a theoretical research. Possibly, in the form of a post-doctoral research, based on the exploration and investigation of these new forms of bio-artificial intelligence and their possible real-time interactions with acoustic and digital instruments, also with these new computational ecosystems. An interactive musical system based on different types of living beings and an increasingly growing digital technology that will soon extrapolate the processing power of the human brain through new forms of bio-interactive connection and the design of combined systems in which a biological process will take over some of the work”. For detailed information, see: http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/free-books/uc-2007-free.pdf — http://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/ — https://ec.europa.eu/digitalsinglemarket/en/news/future-and-emerging-technologies-and-unconventional-computing — Access on July 20, 2019 269 communication (I wonder, how could I name processors created from the combination of different types of technologies, as the inclusion of a fungus such as physarum polysepharum: bioprocessors, computational ecosystems or simply biocomputing?). I do not believe we will replace what traditional computers are capable of doing: enhancing processing capabilities, significant miniaturization of its essential components, data transmission through wireless protocols more consistent and stable, etc.; on the contrary, I believe that we will increasingly incorporate, especially in the field of experimental arts, the use and research on creative processes also provided by these biocomputers and their possible variants, relearning, in a way, to improvise with these new agents and their new possible instruments. It is, therefore, this way and by these paths that I understand how my research continues. I hope, thus, to have contributed positively here with the investigation of important elements that can constitute musical creation performances and interaction with the sound creation and processing – the assemblage of the hybrid music performance machine, different types of new instrumentness provided by this hybridization, issues covering the interaction, corporeity and physicality of hybrid musical instruments, performer cognition through the different forms of sound and musical creation, through the use of improvisation in real time. *** 270 biblio graphic refe rences 271 Bibliography ALGIE, Ian J. Laptop performance in electroacoustic music: the current state of play. Sheffield: Doctoral thesis, The University of Sheffield, 2012. APPADURAI, Arjun. The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. AUTONOMIA CIBERNÉTICA. São Paulo: Itaú Cultural, 2010. ASSIS, Paulo de. Experimental Affinities in Music. 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CosacNaify, 2007. *** 293 anne xes 294 ANNEXES I have made an exclusive Google Drive for the whole thesis material, which will be available for all those who need to access the files; The address to access Google Drive with this material is: https://www.andremartins.com.br/phd The hard copy - printed and deposited in the Secretaria de Pós-graduação da ECA/USPaccompanies physical media containing the same material in the form of a USB flashDrive. It is worth mentioning that all mp3 videos and audio files are also available, always referenced as they appear in the thesis text. Content of the enclosed material: -patch papagaIO Macintosh computers, in MAC OSX environment, that operate software MAX 7 or 8; -patch papagaIO for PC computers, in Windows 10 environment, that operate software Max 7 or 8; -patch papagaIOS for tablets that operate application Flux:FX, in iOS and iPAD OS environment; -audio files containing rehearsals, performance recordings, and other presentations; -a compressed ZIP file containing the entire album recorded with KLO; -video files containing tests and/or presentations. *** 295 André L. Martins andremarttins@usp.br São Paulo, December 2019 296 English translation: Ana Trivellato anatrivellato@gmail.com

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