Timbral Hauntings is an interactive installation work that borrows ideas from soundscape analysis and the convergence of how “echos and ethos” reshape the present and future. Timbral Hauntings ‘listens’ to the soundscape of the space, analyzing the timbre of each acoustic event; cataloguing the eight most commonly occurring timbral phrases throughout the life of the system. As a critical number of events are collected, the system selects the most commonly occurring timbral phrase. This phrase is used to shape the timbre of the ‘present’ in the hauntings of the past. At the same time the selected phrase from the past is analyzed for near timbral matches from the present. When a match occurs, those near moments from the past are played back in an attempt to influence the future in repeating the past. As the composition progresses, new phrases from the past are selected, allowing for the constant progression in the emergent composition.
Participants to the space are welcome to wander the space, simply sit and listen, or contribute to the composition, in any way they feel comfortable, including playing the instruments laid out.
Timbral Hauntings is part of Michael Musick’s Sonic Spaces Project.

Timbral Hauntings -  Iteration No. 2; April 2014 Mix

Timbral Hauntings -  Iteration No. 3; NYU Open House, May 17th 2014

SUMMARY
The Harmonically Ecosystemic Machine – Sonic Space No. 7; is an interactive music performance system building on the combined work of the three contributing artists/researchers. This piece invites participants to contribute musically by playing the instruments placed throughout the active space. In doing so, they join the system as collaborators and interrelated musical agents. In essence this creates a chamber work, in both senses of the word: the piece becomes an improvisational chamber work between the system and participants, and a work that activates the entire physical chamber it is installed within.

FULL NARRATIVE
The Sonic Spaces Project is an ongoing series of interactive sonic ecosystems that build a complex dynamical system between a physical space, a computer music environment, and external participants. These pieces have been presented as both concert and installation pieces.1 These pieces create an ecosystemic relationship amongst all of the contributing human-agents and digital agents. This is accomplished through a major change in typical interactive music performance system’s interface. In a typical interactive music system, the interface is usually a physical device that a performer directly manipulates or a microphone that picks up only the sound of a performer’s close-mic’d instrument. In this way, the performer is free to manipulate the system however s/he sees fit, and has the option of completely ignoring the the system. Sonic Ecosystems shift the computers perception of the external world from a performer only view to a room- wide view. This is accomplished by placing microphones throughout the entire space, thereby allowing the system to use sonic energy from all participants in the space at the same time, including the system’s own sonic output. This creates a complex relationship between all of the elements of the system, and by changing any one element, the musical output of the entire system changes.
The FST Project is an actively developing improvisational accompaniment machine, which has been ongoing for the last three years. This piece uses a Python interface to the OpenFST Finite State Transducer (FST) toolkit to produce harmonic accompaniment based on tracked melodies occurring in the room. An FST is a finite state machine that maps sequences of input symbols to sequences of output symbols. Here, the input sequences consist of melody notes, and the output sequences consist of chord sequences. The training data used to construct the FST is a database of transcriptions of the melodies and chord sequences of pop/rock songs. In addition, another FST is used to produce the dynamics and rhythms used in the piece. In this case, the machine is trained with the dynamic and rhythmic patterns used in a collection of Mozart compositions. Both FSTs can be constructed using different sets of training data (e.g., jazz lead sheets), and the output of the machines will reflect the harmonies and rhythms of the training data. Thus, the system can produce any number of different musical aesthetics.
This piece builds on the work of both of these artistic research projects. The installation is structured after the ecosystemic principles developed for the Sonic Spaces Project. The analysis, decision-making, and output of the system have been composed around the improvisational machines from the FST Project. This work listens to the entirety of the space for melodically significant lines, rhythmic and tempo qualities, dynamics, and harmonic motion. These qualities are captured by the system and stored for future musical material. These features are also fed to the FST and the output of this machine is used to produce a 5-agent accompaniment that uses the stored sonic history of the room as the musical material. The emergent music is a result of the interrelationships between the digital-agents, room, and human-agents.

The Harmonically Ecosystemic System; Sonic Space No. 7

Aggressive City Rhythms (2015) is a generative composition whose source materials, as well as algorithmic control processes are derived from the synchronized urban sound data that was collected in Prague and New York City. For the presentational format that will be heard, the ten locations are randomly selected every ten to thirty seconds. The sonic qualities that define these locations are streamed from a database and mapped to the rhythmic generation, dynamics, complexity, length, and so on of the composition. The rhythmic bursts that become the primary musical material for the composition are also derived from the soundscape recordings. As each location is played in the background, it is passed through an acoustic event detector that extracts short samples and passes these to the player module. Finally, each location was also compressed from a thirty-minute recording to five, ten, and thirty second representations. These demonstrate the spectral similarities and differences between these locations and cities. These recordings are sprinkled in to the composition as a way of directly getting a sense for the unique sonic qualities of a location. 
This piece is intended to invoke the excitement and controlled aggression that the soundscapes of these big cities offer its citizens.  


Aggressive City Rhythms

Sonic Space No. 5 is part of Michael Musick's ongoing Sonic Spaces Project. These interactive performance systems are more specifically defined as Sonic Ecosystems. Ecosystemic performance systems are coupled to the physical space in which they are installed by having microphones throughout the space capture all sounds, and by having speakers return sound to the entirety of the space. In this way the acoustical properties of the space, the human agents within the space, any other sound making agents in the space (background machinery, outside sounds such as trucks or trains, etc.), and the digital agents programmed into the Sonic Space system become reliant upon each other and affect the final experienced performance. The digital agents are composed to only come to life if particular types of energy are present in the space. When this occurs, they consume the energy and in so doing transform the sonic energy before returning it back to the physical space. This is similar to the way species of our own ecosystem survive off certain types of energy, and then become or create energy for other species to consume. One could consider these systems as complex feedback systems. All of the musical elements that create the final presented performance have originated from the physical space and are processed within the system; no sounds are synthesized or pre-recorded prior to this performance.
Originally intended as an installation work in which participants are free to explore the space and contribute sounds themselves, Iteration No. 2 of Sonic Space No. 5 is adapted and intended as a fixed duration concert presentation. In this presentation, the audience is asked not to purposefully contribute sonic energy to the system. However, their presence greatly affects the final composition. This is because the mere addition of bodies to the room changes the acoustic characteristics of the space thereby resulting in significant changes to the ecosystemic properties. Additionally, many of them will inadvertently create sounds that the system will use.
During a performance of this piece the performer introduce sonic energy into the space from a central position in the hall near the mixing console. Using a pair of Tingsha bells to the wake agents in the system up. This will in turn cause further responses from additional agents. The presentation of the piece is timed to last 10-minutes, and will complete a full cycle of energy usage within the ecosystem.