Excellent music and mysterious soundways!

Spindrift is the 3rd track from NetWorks 3: Thresholds, the entire album can be heard on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc. or purchased on Bandcamp: shawnbell.bandcamp.com/album/networks-3-thresholds.

Constraints on the connections and interactions between the entities of systems are central to what defines them. This is true of the interactions between the entities that make up matter, cells, societies, ecosystems, planetary systems and so on. It is also true for games and art. Constraints are what define, and how we recognize, musical genres and are key in the process of creation.

“Spindrift” is an example of the diverse, self-organizing musical forms that information sharing over simple networks can produce. NetWorks represents six years of programming and tuning a network of 64 nodes that share music performance data including pitch, duration, velocity, and entry delay (entry delays result in rhythmic patterns, motives and larger scale structures such as phrases and sections). Articulations such as legato, staccato, etc., as well as pedalling and various synthesis parameters are also often determined by the network.

NetWorks has been “tuned” to generate patterns at "the edge of chaos,” that is, balanced between variety and harmony (through repetition, for example). Although not explicitly programmed, one can often hear motives that repeat, vary, develop into melodies, diverge and return, all through the simple interactions between nodes. If constraints define genre, NetWorks is a search for new genres and cross-genres. To modify a phrase of Christopher Langton’s (a pioneer in the field of Artificial Life), NetWorks is the study of “music-as-it-could-be.”

The approach taken to mapping the patterns to sound is to ensure their clarity, not to obfuscate them by complex synthetic textures or other effects readily available during mixing, for example by applying an echo effect. No notes were harmed in the mixing of these pieces! Since the music of NetWorks is self-organizing, sampled instruments were often chosen to include the “human touch.”

The NetWorks network of 64 nodes is infinitesimally minuscule compared to natural networks, and six years of “tuning” and exploring some of its possible architectures and their musical potential is hardly a beginning. The sounds chosen to manifest the musical patterns discovered by the network attempt to reflect the mystery and wonder that virtually unlimited diversity can come from such small beginnings and such simple models of interaction.

"Thresholds" is good for focused listening, ambience, a background for work, mediating and falling asleep. A decent pair of headphones is recommended for focused listening.

NetWorks 3: Thresholds

Spindrift

Composer, educator and interactive media artist and professional dedicated to creativity and multidisciplinary collaboration. Interested in constructionist approaches to new media education and how interactive technologies and complexity theory enhance and expand the creative process in the traditional arts, new media and game design.

Developed NetWorks, a body of musical work as well as an interactive music-generating algorithm based on scale-free networks. Developer of ~zomes, a sound synthesizer based on a-life models. 

Interest in metacreation dates back to Voices From The Edge of Chaos (1998), a CD of emergent, self–organizing computer music. Received a FACTOR international distribution grant and was subsequently awarded a residency at Lovebytes Labs in Sheffield, England (1999), to produce a piece for Digital Space CD and CD ROM of “innovative new work using digital sound and multimedia”.

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