Champ Magnétique
2015 | saxophone quartet and tactile notifiers (14')
Commissioned by Quasar quatuor de saxophones (CA).
Sponsored by CIRMMT (CA), Lars Hierta Memorial Foundation (SE) and Royal Swedish Academy of Music (SE). Honored with the CIRMMT Research Award.
The work is developed according to different operations based on immersive listening and attention to background noises. In a hypnagogic state (state of transition from wakefulness to sleep), different isolated sounds that are combined can shift the hierarchy of foreground and background, semantic meaning and field of Warning. In number theory, with Euclid’s algorithm, we can determine the greatest common divisor of two elements. In this piece, the use of the algorithm is to determine the meeting points of the different repeating structures, so that the planes, synchronized or not, gradually transform with each other.
“Fredrik Gran offers us a world at the border of the state of sleep and waking state. A textured work in which there is an unreal taste. Technology is omnipresent, but lies in a background, veiled. ”
-Marie-Chantal Leclair, Art Director, Quasar Saxophone Quartet
“In our previous work on vibrotactile notifications for interactive music performance (Schumacher and Giordano 2013) we developed a prototype tactile feedback system for communicating information about a computer music system to music performers using the haptic modality. The system was integrated into a software framework for live electronics (“CLEF”, http://sf.net/p/clef/), allowing users to design tactile notifications about any parameter state or change in the system. We informally evaluated the effectiveness of the prototype in collaboration with a percussion performer who helped us designing different tactile cues. In continuation of this work we investigated physical and perceptual characteristics of our tactile display. Nevertheless, this research has so far been carried out in a single-user context and for specific musical situations only.
With our current CIRMMT award project, we intend to leverage our previous results and apply them in a real-world context for music creation and ensemble performance. We will collaborate with composer Fredrik Gran and the performers of the Quasar saxophone quartet, for the creation of a piece to be performed in a public concert. Composition, performance and research aspects will be considered in a holistic approach from the very beginning in order to take full advantage of the possibilities given by our haptic notification system. The compositional interest is to explore structural and rhythmic relationships of a complexity difficult or impossible to achieve without a multi-user synchronization system (Chafe, Caceres, and Gurevich, 2010). Using our haptic notification system in CLEF it is possible to transmit tactile notifications – such as temporal cues – from system to performers and in response to performer actions — without the need of obtrusive auditory or visual displays. We will work on the design of a tactile displays embedded with vibrating actuators, whose vibrating behavior we previously investigated (Frid, Giordano, Schumacher et al., 2013), to assure coherent experience for each performer. Subsequently, we will proposes a vocabulary of “haptic notification cues” (Giordano and Wanderley, 2013), enabling users to design custom notifications. Ultimately, we will evaluate the effectiveness of our haptic cues in an iterative performer-informed evaluation process. Users will test the system in terms of robustness and flexibility, and will be actively engaged in providing us with feedback to improve the current version of the system.”
– Marlon Schumacher
Premiered: 20150312 at Le Gesù, Centre de créativité, Montréal, CA
Specifications: Saxophone quartet (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone), 4 tactile notifiers, CIRMMT Live Electronic Framework (CLEF) Runtime, project files, computer, score.
Links:
Vibrotactile feedback for live electronic performance
CIRMMT Award Recipients
CIRMMT Research Spotlight, Dec 2014: Using haptic notifications for polyrhytmic/ metric synchronization in ensemble performance
Live recording excerpt from Le Gesù, Montreal 20150312.