Decodification for Live Electronics
Hosted by: Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture
Dates: June 1 - December 31, 2022
Decodification: An Artistic Journey to Explore the Boundaries of Sound
This work began with a single question: Is a pure communion of sound possible, one that is un-coded and free from the familiar grammar and order of music? "Artistic Research for Decodification" is the record of a process, a journey to find an answer to this question. This project intentionally exposed the limits of machine music, seeking instead to discover new possibilities for creation.
Expanding a Universe of Thought: Theoretical Exploration
The first step of our inquiry was to understand various musical approaches. We conducted interviews with a composer who actively uses technology to create new auditory experiences like immersive sound, and another composer who deconstructs the very structure of sound, blurring the lines between noise and musical notes. Through them, we were able to expand our own thinking on the intersection of technology and art, and on the fundamental elements that constitute music. At the same time, we sought advice from an aesthetician and professor to establish our methodology for artistic research, learning how to frame the creative process itself as a subject of study. This experience became the backbone for articulating a creator's intuition and insight into a tangible, academic outcome.
A Resonance of Being: The Duet of Human and Machine
Grounded in this theoretical exploration, we began a practical musical experiment with a pianist. Our meeting was less a "rehearsal" and more an "exploration." We attempted an improvisation without any predetermined chord progressions or melodies, guided only by a deep listening to each other's sounds. At the heart of this experiment was the Modular Synth.The most significant characteristic—and limitation—of analog machine music is that "a sound, once passed, cannot be recalled". We embraced this "non-storability" not as a flaw, but as the core principle of our work. A feedback loop was created where the acoustic sounds played by the pianist were transformed by the modular synthesizer, and these transformed sounds, in turn, inspired the pianist's next performance. In this process, the performer gradually shed the habits of conventional playing, focusing instead on the texture of the sound, its resonance, and the ever-changing flow of notes in space. Acts like weaving paper into the piano strings to create friction sounds or pressing the keys with the entire palm were expressions of liberation from a formalized musical framework, a venturing out in search of unpredictable sounds. This was more than a simple collaboration between human and machine. It was a singular sonic landscape, drawn in real-time from the interplay between the performer's inner world (memory and habit) and an external stimulus (the sounds generated by the machine). Through this process, we found clues to what "complete improvisation" might be, and how a moment of true artistic communion is brought into being.
Copyright © Oh Myungseok + Jung Chayoung All rights reserved.