18 november 2001

The project Brian and I are working on, an interactive music/dance collaboration, demonstrates and externalizes the internal dialogue of a dancer via a single dancer, microphone, the computer, and speakers. Brian has created various modules that toy with the qualities of my incoming voice and creates effects - converging on music - out of them. The internal monologue narrates the steps I've chosen (they are formulaic and familiar to begin with); as the piece continues, the captured 'soundtrack' dictates, to an extent, the vocabulary I'm using for the dancing. Over time, this interaction intensifies and complicates the simultaneous dancing and commentary, forcing me to respond and thereby making the movement increasingly conflicted and uncomfortable. At the height of this dissonance, the tension in the sound and the steps resolves: the sound into music, the steps into dancing, and the commanding monologue disappears; such a resolution is suggestive of the problems with confining, limiting, and demanding dancing - any other artistic product, for that matter.

The problems we have encountered with the idea so far have been largely logistical: space considerations, malfunctioning equipment, etc. The space demands of an interactive dance/music piece -- i.e. that there be both adequate dancing space and adequate computer equipment -- have limited our "interactivity" so far. As we work to overcome these limitations, new possibilities that present themselves that may guide us in a slightly different direction.

As a dancer, the piece poses interesting issues, primarily because of our choice of sound source, my voice. In training as a dancer, I'm largely required to be quiet: having the opportunity to use my voice is a daunting challenge, particularly because we want my voice to approximate as closely as possible the connection between the steps and my thoughts. The combination of a substantial dance piece and vocalization is also a challenge to my hard-earned endurance. Compositionally, the choreography is a challenge to me because the process has been opposite to mine in the past: in this case, the music comes out of the dancing, not the other way around. Given our aspirations for the piece to begin with, this is exactly the point - but it calls for a new route for thinking about choreography.

I have only a few additional comments to what Megan has said. There are several compositional challenges present in the structure that we are exploring that we have discussed at length; foremost, as the sound is to be wholly constructed from Megan's voice, what the "voice" of the piece represents to the audience becomes extremely important. Obviously, the sound remains external to Megan's person; there is therefore a certain danger in its being perceived as an entity in and of itself, making the piece dancer vs computer. Another possibility, if my own realtime control of the system becomes too prominent, is for Megan vs Brian. However, I would prefer to keep the technology as transparent as possible and centered in Megan's experience, making the sound feel as organic as possible. This is important given the theme of the piece: that the internal, and verbal, monologue of a dancer developing a piece has a musical progression in itself. We are only simulating the process so it can be observed, and emphasizing elements of the process so it can be more readily ... enjoyed. I will endeavor to make the piece as listenable as possible, especially since I feel that Megan's style of dance is inherently very approachable while retaining a sense of self-awareness.

Modules I have created include threshold recording, rhythm generators, and feedback effects. It is highly probable that a large portion of the sound will rely on comb filters, as they are a straightforward way of generating harmonic material from an ambiguously harmonic source. While creating these MAX/MSP elements is easy enough, integrating them into a structured system is my current challenge, and one more closely tied to the form of Megan's choreography. Our current struggle is therefore centered on my lack of a laptop and the sketchy cordless mic in Prentis (perhaps I was trying all dead batteries?).