The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music present Mills Music Now 2015-2016
David Rosenboom Lecture –
Deviant Resonances: Nature's Creative Challenge to Absolute Mappings of Biological Phenomena in Music
Thursday, January 28, 2016
7:30 pm
Littlefield Concert Hall
Free and open to the public
Mills College
5000 MacArthur Blvd
Oakland, CA 94613
http://musicnow.mills.edu
Abstract: Exercises in linking complex self-organizing systems to each other via mappings in multi-modal stimulus domains can pose fascinating challenges to our notions about predictive model building. Fortuitously, these challenges can also quickly reveal fertile territories from which to mine potential realizations in the creative arts and to examine for the purposes of advancing research paradigms. This is an endeavor in which art and science can meet in deep theoretical territory, artscience. What might we discover if we ask, “What happens when two forms of intelligence—presumably with brains—attempt to initiate co-communication with each other, while neither possess an a priori model describing the range and scope of manners in which intelligence can be manifested or has palpable experience with the potential scales of energy-matter-time-space (EMTS) over which forms of intelligence might operate?” Will they recognize each other? What predictive models can they use to search for something for which neither has a clear pre-definition? In advanced forms of BCI in the arts we also try to imagine and implement links among complex self-organizing systems—like brains or multi-person hyper-brains—with forms of synthetic intelligence—possibly imbedded in musical instruments—, which we try to endow with some faculty for self-organization and perhaps even what we now call deep learning (DL).To build these realizations, we may posit propositional models. They are propositional, because we, too, often operate with limited pre-definitions, and frequently with declared intentions to do so. Furthermore, nature operates with myriad forms of uncertainty at fundamental levels, and ironically, from that uncertainty emerges order, deviant resonances. Achieving absolutely predictable, quasi-deterministic mappings of biological phenomena, such as brain signals, onto multi-arts synthesis machines is bounded by fundamental limits born of these imbedded uncertainties in natural phenomena. In the arts—for this presentation especially music—, we have license to freely explore the nature of these limits and discover how valuable such uncertainties can often be in unveiling new creative directions and deepening our theoretical understandings. If we seriously examine the deviant resonances that can show up in BCMI when we try to implement absolute mappings, we can often reap rich rewards. What surprising insights might emerge if we try to untangle all the hidden assumptions in a statement like, “What is the size and complexity of the algorithm required for me to always know that my thoughts of raspberry gelato will eternally map to Eb-Major, and why do I care?” In this light, we will tour selected historical and very recent examples of propositional music employing extended musical interface with the human nervous system and speculate about new directions now appearing on the horizon.
Biography
David Rosenboom
Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music and Music and Dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts.
David Rosenboom is a composer, performer, conductor, interdisciplinary artist, author and educator. Since the 1960s he has explored the spontaneous evolution of musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, multi-disciplinary composition and performance, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and literature, interactive multi-media and new instrument technologies, generative algorithmic systems, art-science research and philosophy, and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. His work is widely distributed and presented around the world, and he is known as a pioneer in American experimental music. David Rosenboom holds the Richard Seaver Distinguished Chair in Music in The Herb Alpert School of Music at California Institute of the Arts, where he has been Dean of the School of Music since 1990, a conductor with the New Century Players, Co-Director of the Center for Experiments in Art, Information and Technology, and member of the Center for New Performance. In 2011 he also served as Acting Co-President for CalArts. He taught at Mills College from 1979 to 1990, held the Darius Milhaud Chair, was Professor of Music, Head of the Music Department, and Director of the Center for Contemporary Music. His independent career outside institutions has spanned international performance and composition, consulting, recording, writing, instrument design, interdisciplinary research, and multi-media production
http://www.davidrosenboom.com/
Prof. David Rosenboom lecture at Kunitachi College of Music
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SqFrQDTutY
David Rosenboom on the Mike Douglas Show with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Chuck Berry.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-OaumT8w8o
Cost: Free and open to the public