Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lemmon, Eric Charles

Titel

Politics I

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations Publishing

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

• ProQuest

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In western concert art music, the audience’s participation in the presentation of a musical work is traditionally restricted to a staid listening experience within a proscenium setting. Politics I aims to overhaul this rigid notion of music-making by breaking down the barriers between composers, performers, and the audience and rendering audible the politics of aesthetic preference that exists within participatory music settings. In this new computer music system, audience members submit a text, the text is processed by the system, and then depending on the movement, this textual ‘action’ impacts the music generated by the system in specific ways. Drawing on insights from musical semiology and political theory, I argue that this setting allows audience members to recognize the possible sonic effects of their own inputs and make choices that impact the aesthetic experience in real time. In effect, composer and audience determine the shape of Politics I together. Because this participatory setting provides the audience with agency to impact the musical work, the audience’s interactions give rise to an internal discourse contained within the domain of the participating individuals and their submitted texts. This discourse, in turn, generates a concert- going, consensus-based public. Within the internal discourse of this public, audience members articulate a politics of aesthetic preference, wherein the sonic results that are preferred by more audience members can take precedence within the musical texture of the work. The resulting politics of aesthetic preference is most easily recognizable through the interplay between groups vying to determine the shape and experience of the musical work, with the groups being generated through either spontaneous mimesis or pre-planned and coordinated action. To systematically analyze these discursive processes within the audience, and their potential to effect change within the music, the computer music system behind Politics I parses text messages submitted by the audience through an array of natural language processing (NLP) techniques in Python. In SuperCollider, it then sonifies the analyzed content of the input messages while simultaneously displaying them visually. The system is customized to generate music such that distinct code-bases act as individual movements of a complete piece. Politics I has three distinct movements: ‘Digital Discourse’, ‘Cybernetic Republic’, and ‘Technoautocracy’. Each of these movements serves as an analogy to a particular political system, with the purpose of musically representing how systemic structures influence political decision-making but can also be subverted through coordinated action. The work is of variable length; it usually lasts at least 30 minutes, but can be up to 40 minutes long.