OTOPLASMA: Ephemeral Gumboots

Musical Implications

Rhythm:

From a Western conceptual perception of meter and rhythmic structure, African [2] rhythm seems syncopated and poly-rhythmically complex. Hornbostel ( 1928, 30-62) offers a theory of motor behavior that explains this syncopation: each dance or musical movement (like slapping the boot) is twofold: the hand is lifted and dropped. The first silent phase has the motor accent even though one hears only the second phase acoustically. (The implication of this is that it is interesting to map the sounds to the note-off messages, when the dancer lifts a foot, making these accents audible and shifting them into a western perspective). The African perception of rhythm is conceived from the motion with which it is integrated and differs fundamentally from a conception based on hearing only (which obviously does not include the silent accents). Waterman (quoted in McClure 2003, 5) theorises about a ‘metronome sense', according to which the performers and listeners commonly feel an internalized pulse that does not necessarily need to be realized in audible form but which can be expressed through the silent bodily motions of the dance. Rhythm thus becomes both an aural and visual perception.

The Dancer(s) as Input:

My point of departure in conceptualizing Ephemeral Gumboots was to imagine two dancers at play. I assumed that they would:

a) Move in unison with
b) Use a ‘call and response' interaction between them
c) Settle into interlocking patterns
d) Combine all of the above

The system functions as a shifting ‘sound mask'. The sensor input data either opens or closes different ‘cells' in the mask. My idea was to create complex material that already had its own rhythms and sonic identities, which become audible when the corresponding note numbers are activated and which stay audible for the duration of these messages. This creates a rich sonic texture and makes for a mixological [3] music: it results in a ‘mix' of mini textures and rhythms that are imbedded inside the dancers' rhythmical frameworks. It allows for a complexity of rhythm, sound and speed beyond the capability of any dancer.

When the dancers move in unison, MIDI event messages are transmitted in parallel, simplifying the music at times so as to reveal the more subtle features of the system – the inverted sound mask now allows more glimpses of vertical sonic effect changes.

The more complex the sound material, the harder it becomes for a dancer to control. A solution has been to add a quantise function allowing me to make sure the groove is always rhythmically precise. In other words, if the quantise function is set to eighth- notes and the dancer dances sixteenths, every second sixteenth-note will be heard on top of the next eighth-note. However, while the musical effect is satisfying, the relationship between what one sees and hears becomes distorted. The visual performance becomes

more abstract and, depending on the dancer's sense of presence and performance (and familiarity with the sounds and structures), it may succeed or fail.

Example of typical interlocking rhythms

Try to imagine the two notes (rhythmically) of the top left stave as one dancer's left foot and right foot, and the two notes of the second stave as the second dancer's left foot and right foot stomping out these rhythms. When using simple sounds this interlocking rhythmic pattern is already interesting. Now imagine that these notes act like an inverse sound mask – for the duration of every played note, you ‘glimpse' a music loop that is hidden beneath. The beat structure of the original sample will be audible especially in relation to the longer 8 th notes, resulting in a very complex yet ordered system of interlocking sound patterns. Interesting rhythms will also start to occur if the master tempo setting that controls the tempo at which samples are played differs from the tempo that the dancers are playing. The mask functions like a grid that imposes structure and form upon a very rich, organic ‘chaos' of sounds. The system thus transforms real-time rhythmical input into a structural grid.

For those who experience Ephemeral Gumboots as an installation artwork, I have made the audio samples extremely simple and predictable according to global/world dance music genres, or simply very poetic and entertaining by using funny words, phrases, dramatic ambient landscapes, and simple ‘single' percussive sounds and chords. However, Ephemeral Gumboots also exists as a system that explores my own style of electronic music in which effects such as granular modulation, reverb, delays, buffer override, Doppler effects, compressors, phasors, filters, resonators, distortion, ring modulation and stereo echo 's [4] , (to name a few), create strange and wonderful sonic sculptures. Velocity values from the boots send controller numbers to various parameters of these effects. The sound generally becomes very elastic and abstract.

Besides the music that is generated by the dance, the interface itself can also be seen as content. It defines the experience. ‘If culture, in the context of interactive media, becomes something we “do,” it is the interface that defines how we do it and how the “doing” feels…' (Rokeby 1998, n.p.,). This statement has tremendous social implications: the internet and new media with their magical power of illusion are becoming so integrated into our social fabric that the ways in which we experience the world and each other are being fundamentally changed.

Whether one or many dancers interact with this system, the proscenium, as gumbooters know it, is being augmented and extended into a completely virtual dimension. Computers (which have perhaps already heard of gumboot dance via text files [5] !) are being introduced to a dimension of real-time touch and movement according to the style of gumboot dance. The real is being married to the virtual in more than one way. One tends to focus on the translation from human to computer, but equally important (and surprisingly enlightening) is the translation from computer to human.

The fragmented subjective system of organization in Ephemeral Gumboots:

The choice of tools and sonic material in Ephemeral Gumboots was made purely intuitively and aurally, which makes it really difficult to describe. As a composer, I suppose you could call me (amongst other things) a collector, a map-reader and constructer – a collector of fragments of my own emotional responses to global and local societies. Mental soul maps of perceived reality are mapped, mirrored and hidden in the abstract capacity of sound. The more things I learn to try to do, the more fragmented my compositional process becomes. Splintered sonic planes evocative of Cubist art and Collage unfold; I speak with borrowed words, borrowed tools; I consume and produce, aware of my position in the food chain, to be consumed and disappear – aware of an egotistical resistance of my redundancy through a peculiar process of hiding. (And yet, I am also aware that the word autonomy is a contradiction).

What I can say, in retrospect, is that I focused on intersections of moods and sounds in my composing for Ephemeral Gumboots : Conflict. Confusion. Longing. Violence. Introspective aggression. An overwhelming feeling…when things spin out of control... Soft sounds of modems, drums, voices, murmurings, rumblings, gentle distortions, bright melodic fragments, happy energetic bursts, ecstatic pulses, chaotic overlaps, swelling distortions, incomprehensibly thick noise, soft noise, different frequency bands of noise sweeps, modulations, recognizable electronic musical idioms, dance idioms, sine waves, humorous cuteness, strange juxtapositions ... Sounds deceptive in their femininity that screech with violent intensity... Intensity created not only through the sounds themselves, but also in the way that they are interrupted and interrupt each other... Intensity in the way they feed from the dancer's input and refuse to be predictable in a four-to-the-floor groove kind of way, and yet still very groovy and sensual in the way they keep changing... Change at each intersection... The beautiful (shocking) moments of crossover – of giving up and entering the new... The crashing of the wave... The internal order is based on the rate of change that keeps changing... This change is what really grooves! The changes in the emotional associations that the musical coordinates point to, create a disturbing feeling –- hypnotic, disorientating...The work engages the ears intellectually and emotionally...Fearless and vulnerable, binary pop conversations spark between the body and soul... More pops, crack, static instabilities smudging into a vaporous mass...This is Ephemeral Gumboots!

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Musical Implications
EPHEMERAL GUMBOOTS \| THE INTERACTION \| MOVEMENT & SOUND \| GUMBOOT DANCE \| MUSICAL IMPLICATIONS \| TECHNICAL MATTERS \| VIDEOS

Rhythm: From a Western conceptual perception of meter and rhythmic structure, African [2] rhythm seems syncopated and poly-rhythmically complex. Hornbostel ( 1928, 30-62) offers a theory of motor behavior that explains this syncopation: each dance or musical movement (like slapping the boot) is twofold: the hand is lifted and dropped. The first silent phase has the motor accent even though one hears only the second phase acoustically. (The implication of this is that it is interesting to map the sounds to the note-off messages, when the dancer lifts a foot, making these accents audible and shifting them into a western perspective). The African perception of rhythm is conceived from the motion with which it is integrated and differs fundamentally from a conception based on hearing only (which obviously does not include the silent accents). Waterman (quoted in McClure 2003, 5) theorises about a ‘metronome sense', according to which the performers and listeners commonly feel an internalized pulse that does not necessarily need to be realized in audible form but which can be expressed through the silent bodily motions of the dance. Rhythm thus becomes both an aural and visual perception.
	The Dancer(s) as Input: My point of departure in conceptualizing Ephemeral Gumboots was to imagine two dancers at play. I assumed that they would: a) Move in unison with b) Use a ‘call and response' interaction between them c) Settle into interlocking patterns d) Combine all of the above The system functions as a shifting ‘sound mask'. The sensor input data either opens or closes different ‘cells' in the mask. My idea was to create complex material that already had its own rhythms and sonic identities, which become audible when the corresponding note numbers are activated and which stay audible for the duration of these messages. This creates a rich sonic texture and makes for a mixological [3] music: it results in a ‘mix' of mini textures and rhythms that are imbedded inside the dancers' rhythmical frameworks. It allows for a complexity of rhythm, sound and speed beyond the capability of any dancer.
When the dancers move in unison, MIDI event messages are transmitted in parallel, simplifying the music at times so as to reveal the more subtle features of the system – the inverted sound mask now allows more glimpses of vertical sonic effect changes. The more complex the sound material, the harder it becomes for a dancer to control. A solution has been to add a quantise function allowing me to make sure the groove is always rhythmically precise. In other words, if the quantise function is set to eighth- notes and the dancer dances sixteenths, every second sixteenth-note will be heard on top of the next eighth-note. However, while the musical effect is satisfying, the relationship between what one sees and hears becomes distorted. The visual performance becomes more abstract and, depending on the dancer's sense of presence and performance (and familiarity with the sounds and structures), it may succeed or fail.	Example of typical interlocking rhythms
	Try to imagine the two notes (rhythmically) of the top left stave as one dancer's left foot and right foot, and the two notes of the second stave as the second dancer's left foot and right foot stomping out these rhythms. When using simple sounds this interlocking rhythmic pattern is already interesting. Now imagine that these notes act like an inverse sound mask – for the duration of every played note, you ‘glimpse' a music loop that is hidden beneath. The beat structure of the original sample will be audible especially in relation to the longer 8 th notes, resulting in a very complex yet ordered system of interlocking sound patterns. Interesting rhythms will also start to occur if the master tempo setting that controls the tempo at which samples are played differs from the tempo that the dancers are playing. The mask functions like a grid that imposes structure and form upon a very rich, organic ‘chaos' of sounds. The system thus transforms real-time rhythmical input into a structural grid.
For those who experience Ephemeral Gumboots as an installation artwork, I have made the audio samples extremely simple and predictable according to global/world dance music genres, or simply very poetic and entertaining by using funny words, phrases, dramatic ambient landscapes, and simple ‘single' percussive sounds and chords. However, Ephemeral Gumboots also exists as a system that explores my own style of electronic music in which effects such as granular modulation, reverb, delays, buffer override, Doppler effects, compressors, phasors, filters, resonators, distortion, ring modulation and stereo echo 's [4] , (to name a few), create strange and wonderful sonic sculptures. Velocity values from the boots send controller numbers to various parameters of these effects. The sound generally becomes very elastic and abstract.
Besides the music that is generated by the dance, the interface itself can also be seen as content. It defines the experience. ‘If culture, in the context of interactive media, becomes something we “do,” it is the interface that defines how we do it and how the “doing” feels…' (Rokeby 1998, n.p.,). This statement has tremendous social implications: the internet and new media with their magical power of illusion are becoming so integrated into our social fabric that the ways in which we experience the world and each other are being fundamentally changed. Whether one or many dancers interact with this system, the proscenium, as gumbooters know it, is being augmented and extended into a completely virtual dimension. Computers (which have perhaps already heard of gumboot dance via text files [5] !) are being introduced to a dimension of real-time touch and movement according to the style of gumboot dance. The real is being married to the virtual in more than one way. One tends to focus on the translation from human to computer, but equally important (and surprisingly enlightening) is the translation from computer to human. The fragmented subjective system of organization in Ephemeral Gumboots: The choice of tools and sonic material in Ephemeral Gumboots was made purely intuitively and aurally, which makes it really difficult to describe. As a composer, I suppose you could call me (amongst other things) a collector, a map-reader and constructer – a collector of fragments of my own emotional responses to global and local societies. Mental soul maps of perceived reality are mapped, mirrored and hidden in the abstract capacity of sound. The more things I learn to try to do, the more fragmented my compositional process becomes. Splintered sonic planes evocative of Cubist art and Collage unfold; I speak with borrowed words, borrowed tools; I consume and produce, aware of my position in the food chain, to be consumed and disappear – aware of an egotistical resistance of my redundancy through a peculiar process of hiding. (And yet, I am also aware that the word autonomy is a contradiction). What I can say, in retrospect, is that I focused on intersections of moods and sounds in my composing for Ephemeral Gumboots : Conflict. Confusion. Longing. Violence. Introspective aggression. An overwhelming feeling…when things spin out of control... Soft sounds of modems, drums, voices, murmurings, rumblings, gentle distortions, bright melodic fragments, happy energetic bursts, ecstatic pulses, chaotic overlaps, swelling distortions, incomprehensibly thick noise, soft noise, different frequency bands of noise sweeps, modulations, recognizable electronic musical idioms, dance idioms, sine waves, humorous cuteness, strange juxtapositions ... Sounds deceptive in their femininity that screech with violent intensity... Intensity created not only through the sounds themselves, but also in the way that they are interrupted and interrupt each other... Intensity in the way they feed from the dancer's input and refuse to be predictable in a four-to-the-floor groove kind of way, and yet still very groovy and sensual in the way they keep changing... Change at each intersection... The beautiful (shocking) moments of crossover – of giving up and entering the new... The crashing of the wave... The internal order is based on the rate of change that keeps changing... This change is what really grooves! The changes in the emotional associations that the musical coordinates point to, create a disturbing feeling –- hypnotic, disorientating...The work engages the ears intellectually and emotionally...Fearless and vulnerable, binary pop conversations spark between the body and soul... More pops, crack, static instabilities smudging into a vaporous mass...This is Ephemeral Gumboots!