Rawlinson, Jules, author.

Pulsar Threads.

[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2024.

1 online resource.

Lateral Addition ; 89

"Overactive sound Events weave and unravel Frayed pulsar threads snap Pulsar Threads is the latest of a series of works that aim to inject the sound and morphology of pulsar synthesis into my practice while maintaining active continuity with prior work. This music is about 17 minutes long. This music is also about 17 years long, the length of my practice so far of working with different kinds and orders of improvising with an established but still evolving performance ecosystem (1) in ways that are influenced by both early tape works and modern turntablism. Specifically, Pulsar Threads explores, often simultaneously, buffer scratching, corpus scrubbing, waveform scuffing, live sampling and a range of time-based, spectral and neural transformations of material sourced from the New Pulsar Generator (nuPg) (2). To borrow a phrase from Bolt's work on practice-led research, if there is any magic to be found here, "the magic is in the handling" (3) and concerned with material thinking. This music is characterised by fast moving detail, development and interactions between sound objects and embodied technique to make connections in material through superimposition, stratification, juxtaposition and interpolation. I love the sound of pulsar synthesis, it can be pushed to so many different kinds of sonic places, but I just can't play nuPg fast enough, or really, I can't play it fast enough with the required precision and agility for creating responsive real-time onset, continuation and closure of sound events at multiple time-scales that cluster and collide then fragment and dissipate, with varied and morphing envelopes, arcs and sharp changes in direction. Maybe I just need to practice more! Keep's concept of "instrumentalising" is the discovery of the inherent character and opportunities for manipulation of sound in sounding objects (4), and since 2007 I've been working towards instrumentalising high resolution multidimensional surfaces in combination with MaxMSP software and digital sound files in order to achieve rapid gestural and textural transformations of pre-recorded sound files of varied character and differing durations, from milliseconds to minutes. Beginning with a graphics tablet and what has been described as 'mixed sensing' I've explored a range of typical tablet gestures (5) which, together with scrubbing and scratching, include dipping and bowing across different kinds of sampling and synthesis methods and material. Additional interfaces augmenting the system include a USB turntable, pressure and location sensitive pads, and a compact midi controller. With time the graphics tablet has given way to a multitouch device offering greater opportunity to explore simultaneous contrasts and traversal of timbre and temporalities in material. Different approaches to creating and manipulating sound include sample segment triggering and microlooping, spectral resynthesis, granulation and more. The system uses a range of mapping strategies and design in the interaction of the different DSP layers such as non-linear controller values, and (un)control and unpredictability in the live sampling processes as my attention and intention shifts between simultaneously sounding layers of points, lines and planes in motion. A point might be a moment of pause or a moment of action. A sequence of points forms a line. Massed points create textures of varying density. Lines have a descriptive function as the material trace path of a moving point. Massed lines create shifting planes and curving arcs of lines under tension. As the system has developed for different use cases or works, it's generally followed Cook's principle of "Instant music, subtlety later" (6). There's an immediacy to triggering sounds, but also a complexity to shaping them, even before we begin to process them. The more I practice the more my 'bandwidth' increases, both cognitively and physically. The performance system here meets a number of Croft's conditions for instrumentality (7). The scale of physical gestures on the multitouch surface affects the scale of audio output in a fine-grained way, the responses of the software outputs are tightly synchronous with my gestures and generally my dsp processes follow or match the energy motion trajectories of the input audio. The relationship between my actions and the computer is (mostly) stable, and for people watching a performance, there's a visible relationship between action, effort and sound. I've designed in "explorability and learnability" (8), and occasionally 'bug' becomes 'feature'. One example of this is polyphonic voice stealing. Reflecting on some glitching that was the result of too many simultaneous multitouch points and too few available voices I thought, "Oh, OK, increase the voice count", then, after a reflective pause, "Oh, no, leave it, because it gives me another place (distortion, saturation, and stuttering overload) to go". This is playful, what my Raw Green Rust bandmate Owen Green might describe as a decision to not use tools 'properly' (9), but also results in opportunities to create emotionally and expressively charged "highly aestheticised digital bits" (10). This work also explores processing of sound in ways that my previous work with nuPg material has not. In part, this is a result of working more deeply and regularly with nuPg itself, spending more and better time with it. Having moved from initial exploratory sessions to arrive at informed improvisations with shaped sound output, there's more causal understanding and detailed control of nuPg, leading to a more varied palette of pre-recorded material for further typological and transformational discourse and development of sonic morphology (11). There's also more extensive experience of improvising with the already improvised outputs from nuPg, in mapping them to surfaces and software processes, in understanding the possibilities for threads of connection and combination in and of material. These performed sounds are then sent to multiple auxiliary destinations for further temporal and spectral processes of stuttering, scanning, freezing and looping, of which, these processes can also send to each other in an extended feedback network. These are all things I've been doing for a long time, just not with this material, and it's that material thinking that is at the centre of this, the tacit 'knowing' that comes through handling materials (and tools) in extended and sustained practice. Beyond the auxiliary processing, there's a final couple of developments explored here that aren't present in my earlier solo work in any form. The first is the use of the Fluid Corpus Manipulation (FluCoMa) toolkit (12) for corpus based similarity analysis, dimension reduction and clustering of fragments of sound across a series of newly developed multitouch controlled software instruments, creating an interpolation space for highly expressive sounding action. The same kinds of corpus analysis can be used for live input audio matching, where sound input triggers further sound output that is related to the original material across different descriptors. In addition, this work employs neural style transfer, where sound is resynthesised using the timbral characteristics of a trained model. In this case the model has been trained on an improvisation by saxophonist Franziska Schroeder (13), and I've given myself control of four out of sixteen latent vectors so that I can direct the output character in real-time while keeping sound output roughly proportionate to the energetic characteristics of the input audio. Overall, there's a rich set of possibilities for monophony and polyphony, precision and instability, simplicity and complexity, but all these often conspire to create what Waters would call a "rate of information" (14) problem in my work. I've tried hard here to address this and relax a bit, but one element in particular was gifted to me. Owen has previously suggested that agility might be found in performing with or through uncooperative and failing tools and processes, and in this case nuPg was more or less frozen.
(2007) Performance Ecosystems: Ecological approaches to musical interaction. EMS : Electroacoustic Music Studies Network - De Montfort/Leicester 2007 (available online at http://www.ems-network.org/IMG/pdf_WatersEMS07.pdf) (2) https://www.marcinpietruszewski.com/the-new-pulsar-generator (3) Bolt, B. (2007). The Magic is in Handling. in Barrett, E (Ed.). Bolt, B (Ed.). Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry, (1), pp.27-34 (4) Keep, A. (2008) Responsive performance strategies with electronic feedback: Shaping intrinsic behaviours. PhD Thesis, p.29 (available online at https://researchspace.bathspa.ac.uk/1470/) (5) Zbyszynski, M. et al (2007) Ten Years of Tablet Musical Interfaces at CNMAT. Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME07). (available online at https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2007/nime2007_100.pdf) (6) Cook, P. (2001) Principles for Designing Computer Music Controllers. Proceedings of the CHI'01 Workshop on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME01). (available online at https://www.nime.org/proceedings/2001/nime2001_003.pdf) (7) Croft, J. (2007) Theses on liveness. Organised Sound 12(1): 59-66 2007 (available online at http://john-croft.uk/Theses_on_liveness.pdf) (8) Orio, N., Schnell, N. and Wanderley, M. (2001) Proceedings of the CHI'01 Workshop on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME-01) (available online at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.01571) (9) Green, O (2011) Agility and Playfulness: Technology and skill in the performance ecosystem. Organised Sound 16(2): 134-144 (available online at https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1017/S1355771811000082) (10) Rodgers, T. (2003) On the process and aesthetics of sampling in electronic music production. Organised Sound 8(3): 313-320 (available online at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1017/S1355771803000293) (11) Smalley, S. (1994) Defining timbre - Refining timbre. Contemporary Music Review, 10:2, 35-48. (available online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07494469400640281) (12) https://www.flucoma.org/ (13) https://huggingface.co/Intelligent-Instruments-Lab... (14) Waters, S. (2000). The musical process in the age of digital intervention. ARiADA Texts, 1(1). (available online at https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/17255926/2000musical_process_libre.pdf)"-- provided by distributor.
All I could do was make a spectral intervention by changing the harmonic structure of a high register metallic drone accompanying regular rhythmic pulses, so I did that, for a long time, and for this release, improvised with and around that recorded improvisation for a long time too. - JR (1) Waters, S.

Electronic music.
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Music.

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