Lippe - Belosmium

Music for Septet and Computer (2013) was Commissioned by the E-Mex Ensemble für neue Musik, and made possible with funds from the Ministerium für Familie, Kinder, Jugend, Kultur und Sport des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen. The piece was premiered by the E-Mex Ensemble, conducted by Cristoph Maria Wagner, at the 2013 Now Festival in Essen, Germany.
The piece, in two sections, has a very strong connection to a composition I wrote twenty years before (in 1993) for sextet and computer, in which one of the fundamental musical ideas of the piece was tutti ensemble playing, based on a set of six harmonies ordered in a quasi-series. Contrastingly, with the 2013 septet, the focus is more on instrumental soli and small formations of duos, trios, etc. One of the influences for this came from my great admiration for Schoenberg’s Op. 21 Pierrot Lunaire, in which he exploits a maximum of sub-ensemble combinatorial possibilities in the composition’s 21 sections. In the septet, rather than using a set of composed harmonies as in the earlier sextet, the formants of the eleven most common vowel sounds found in North American English serve as the raw material for the horizontal and vertical pitch organization of the piece. The eleven vowels are variously ordered based on their first, second (poetic ordering), and third formants. But, I could not entirely escape the influence of the 1993 sextet, and the second section of the septet quotes approximately 30 seconds of the older sextet, where the six harmonies are first presented. This material is spread over the second section of the newer piece as points of departure from which the music transitions from one of the harmonies to vowel formants and back again to another of the harmonies. (While I have quoted my own music in an electronic context, the first time being the 1993 sextet, in which 24 short audio samples taken from my earlier pieces are used, this marks an occurrence where appropriation of my own instrumental music is used in the instrumental part of another piece.)
On the technical side, the computer part was created at the Hiller Computer Music Studios of the University at Buffalo, New York, using the software Max/MSP. Technically, the computer tracks parameters of the musicians’ performance using two of Miller Puckette’s external objects: the bonk~ object, which does an analysis of incoming instrumental signals and gives out information as to when the instruments are attacked, how loud they are, the timbre of each strike, and details about relative loudness across the frequency range in 11 independent frequency bands; and the sigmund~ object, which tracks pitch and loudness of instruments, along with a detailed analysis of their timbral evolution. These tools are used to detect everything from micro-level frequency band information of individual attacks up to large scale rhythmic and phrase activity, and this information continuously influences and manipulates the computer sound output by directly affecting digital synthesis and compositional algorithms in real-time. The digital synthesis algorithms focus on various kinds of filtering, including resonant filter banks, formant filters, and comb filters (which special thanks to Richard Dudas and Jae Hyun Ahn at Hanyang University for their research into inharmonic resonators) along with FFT-based processing, including filtering, delay, feedback, bin ordering, spatialization, spectral snapshots, and cross synthesis.
The computer part, like the seven instrumental parts, functions in various roles: as an integral part of the ensemble, as an extension of the ensemble, and as a soloist with an independent voice. Unlike with most instruments, all three roles can exist simultaneously in the computer part. 
This piece is dedicated to the composer Takayuki Rai. 
Duration: 14 minutes.

Music for Septet and Computer

Performed here by the amazing Yevgeny Dokshansky, Music for Alto Saxophone and Computer (1997) was commissioned by the American saxophonist Stephen Duke, and premiered by him at the 25th Annual Festival Synthese in Bourges, France in June of 1997. The electronic part was created at the Hiller Computer Music Studios of the University at Buffalo, New York, using the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation (a real-time digital signal processor) and the program Max that was developed by Miller Puckette and whose technical support made this piece possible.
The piece makes use of regular/irregular rhythmic and pitch relationships. Metaphorically, I have tried to exploit our rather complicated and intertwined conceptions of humans and machines. We spend a great deal of time trying to discipline ourselves to perform like machines: our ideal of technical perfection is something akin to our idea of a perfectly working machine. Yet, we also have another entirely negative viewpoint towards anything human that is too machine-like. Furthermore, we seem to have a complicated love/hate relationship with machines in general, which is exacerbated by the accelerating replacement of humans by machines in more and more tasks. I am not interested in using the computer to replace musicians, or acoustic instruments. The computer seems best suited to creating new, yet unheard sounds and musical relationships through the exploitation of synthesis and compositional algorithms in real-time. Finally, it seems that in the future, as our machines continue to become more complicated and sophisticated, we will only become more confused about their roles in our lives unless we make an effort to keep our human relationships as non-mechanistic as possible.
Technically the computer tracks parameters of the saxophone, such as pitch, amplitude, spectrum, density, rests, articulation, tempi, etc., and uses this information to trigger specific electronic events, and to continuously control all the computer sound output by directly controlling the digital synthesis algorithms. Thus the performer is expected to interact with the computer, triggering and continuously shaping all of the computer output. Some of the sounds in the electronic part come directly from the composed saxophone part, so that, certain aspects of the musical and sound material of the instrumental and electronic parts are one and the same. Sound material other than the saxophone is also manipulated via time-stretching and granular sampling. FFT-based cross synthesis and analysis/resynthesis using an oscillator bank, as well as other more standard signal processing such as harmonizing, frequency shifting, phasing, spatialization, etc. are all employed. The instrument/machine relationship moves constantly on a continuum between the poles of an extended solo and a duo. Musically, the computer part is, at times, not separate from the saxophone part, but serves rather to amplify the saxophone in many dimensions and directions; while at the other extreme of the continuum, the computer part has its own independent voice.
Duration: 14 minutes.

Music For Alto Saxophone And Computer

Cort Lippe

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