The 4th Annual
Symposium on Systems Research in the Arts
Baden-Baden-Germany

Music,
Environmental Design,
and the
Choreography of Space

Baden-Baden, Germany
July 30--July 31,  2002

The Program

Tuesday, July 30, 2002  08:30 – 17:30  Hall A

Chairs: Dr. James Rhodes, School of Sciences and Mathematics, Shorter College, USA and Professor Jane Lily, Interior Design, Lamar Dodd School of Art, The University of Georgia, USA

Session 1

Modulation in Music and Architecture
by Professor Radoslav Zuk, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

A System of Architectural Complexity
by Dr. Roberto Rengel, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

The study of complexity in Architecture has enjoyed considerable attention. Seminal studies by Berlyne (1960, 1963), Wohlwill (1968) and others concluded that, in general, people prefer environments and compositions that are complex over simple ones. While insights from these studies have profound implications for designers, not much follow up research has focused on what these mean in terms of actual architectural composition.

This study analyzes the rich interiors of the Wisconsin Capitol, one of the most magnificent capitol buildings in America. The focus of the inquiry is on the building’s  complexity and the way it is organized as a system. Feibleman and Friend’s Structure and Function of Organization (Feibleman & Friend, 1968) is used for the analysis. This timeless system of organization looks at organizations in terms of wholes, parts and sub-parts and the ways in which they are combined.

The relationships between parts are analyzed in terms of the eleven relational elements suggested by Feibleman and Friend. These include transitivity, seriality, correlation, multiplication, association, distribution and dependence. The parts and their relations are further inspected according to eight rules that determine the parts and elements that are constitutive of the organization. Finally, the organization is classified in terms of its degree of integrality.

Things, Relations, Backdrops of Time, the Choreography of Space
by Professor Jane Lily, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA and Dr. James Rhodes, Shorter College, Rome, Georgia, USA

Session 2

Interactivating Spaces
by Bert Bongers, Metronom Electronic Arts Studio, Barcelona, Spain

Architecture has been developing as a real time medium in the last decades, becoming more fluid and incorporating dynamic materials such as light, sound and kinetic structures. Dynamic systems allow participants in the space to become active and interact with the content of the architecture. The presentation describes several architectural projects the author was involved in as an interface developer and interaction researcher, such as the Water Pavilion in Holland (with Kas Oosterhuis and Lars Spuybroek), the Trans-Ports installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2000 (with Kas Oosterhuis), and the Metapolis Media House in Barcelona in 2001. These spaces sense audience actions, and can therefore be 'interactivated', which refers to the situation where the architecture responds and interacts with its inhabitants. This concept is further developed by the author in the project 'Neutro', an interactive space conceived by the Italian architect Sonia Cillari with further collaboration of the English audio-visual composer Yolande Harris. In this interactivated space sensors track the movements and gestures of the people, and the space responds with changes in projections of light and sound and even moving elements of the structure.

Architecture and Motion
by Yolande Harris, Metronom Electronic Arts Studio, Barcelona, Spain

This paper presents an approach which is a balance between theoretical research as carried out in the Architecture department (Moving Image Studio) at Cambridge University in 2000 and continued and balanced with a thorough practical implementation as a member of the Meta-Orchestra European Project 2000-2001 and co-director of the Metronom Electronic Arts Studio Barcelona 2001-2002, in the development of an instrument for spatial audio-visual performance. The thesis 'Explorations in Movement: Towards the Symbiosis of Architecture, Moving Image and Music' drew up a theoretical outline for the analysis of movement as the central point of conjunction between the three distinct disciplines by discussing their positions in space-time. This research is described into three sections:

1. Architecture gains movement through its representation in the moving image screen, analysed through dynamic cameras, editing and sound.

2. Architecture and Motion: which formulated a series of examples including movement within architectural spaces and kinetic architecture.

3. The dynamic placing of moving image and sound within architectural space, taking examples from the cinema setting, sound diffusion and liquid architecture theory.

The desire to practically realise and develop these ideas, particularly those presented on dynamic placing, formed the base for the development of the "Video-Organ". The Video-Organ consists of a specially developed set of modular instruments for live performances of video and sound. The performances concentrate on augmenting the architectural qualities of specific spaces with moving sounds and images in an attempt to create a unified environment where none of the three disciplines overpowers the others. The presentation will be illustrated by material of performances throughout Europe in relation to the theoretical background, and present new directions for development.  

Webern’s Opus 21 and the Unity of Musical Space
by Dr, John Dack, Middlesex University, Hertfordshire, England

Webern¹s Symphonie Op.21 is a classic work of the Second Viennese School.Composed in 1928 it is an example of the unity of musical space whereby several parameters are organised according to the same principle. Schoenberg compared musical space to the Swedenborgian notion of heaven in Balzac¹s novel "Séraphita". Schoenberg claimed: "In this space (Š) there is no absolute down, no right or left, forward or backward. (Š) To the imaginative and creative faculty, relations in the material sphere are as independent from direction or planes as material objects are, in their sphere, to our perceptive faculties" (Schoenberg, 1984: 223). I believe an analysis of the first movement of Webern¹s Symphonie reveals the underlying truth of Schoenberg¹s assertion. The row¹s formation as a palindrome is revealed at all levels of structure from the local level of pitch events in the double canon¹s voices to the formal structure of the entire movement. Furthermore, the palindrome is manifested in other dimensions. Thus, there are two interlocked chords built on fourths in the "exposition" and similar harmonic structures in following sections. It is, therefore, possible to elaborate the spatial metaphor and imagine the palindrome "behind" all the surface manifestations. Musical space thus becomes truly multi-dimensional, extending horizontally, vertically and in depth. It is perhaps only by applying the notion of "space" with its corresponding dimensions unified according to Schoenberg¹s description that Webern¹s work can be understood. My paper would explore the first movement of Webern¹s Symphonie and suggest why such music remains a compelling model for post-war musical developments.  

Motif as Action: A Systems Approach to Motion in Music and Architecture
by Dr. Ed Pearsall, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Music and architecture operate within different aesthetic fields; architecture partitions space while music partitions time.  Yet we often refer to “flow” when describing architectural designs and just as often to “structure” when describing musical events.  Traditional ways of categorizing these art forms, then, does not necessarily reflect how individuals experience them; both seem to entail motion.  While motion itself is often described in quite specific terms, however, what is being moved or where it is moving is often left to the imagination.  Where, for instance, do flying buttresses fly?  What is moving in a neighbor or passing motion in music?  The implicit thing that is moving is, of course, oneself.   That is, motion is embodied.  Hence, movement in art is not only a metaphorical category, but fully integrated with the natural environment by means of our own biologically defined minds and bodies.  Building on these ideas, I will discuss how the perception of motion in music and architecture derives from the systematic decomposition and reconstitution of motifs based on conceptual repertoires.  As the study will show, the repetition of a motif does not by itself convey a strong sense of motion.  Rather, motion requires action, a change in state.  This approach, because it is based on broadly defined conceptual repertoires, may be used to inform our experience of both temporal and spatial art forms including music and architecture.  To show how analysis might proceed along these lines, I will discuss compositions by such diverse composers as Haydn and Györg Ligeti as well as Hans Scharoun’s architectural design for the Berlin Philharmonic Hall.

Wednesday, July 31, 2002  08:30 – 12:45  Hall A

Chairs: Dr. James Rhodes, School of Sciences and Mathematics, Shorter College, Rome, Georgia, USA and Professor Jane Lily, Interior Design, Lamar Dodd School of Art, The University of Georgia USA

Session 3

Ixi project: Visual Musical Interfaces

by Thorhallur Magnusson and Enrike Hurtado, Ixi Software, Copenhagen, Denmark

This paper is a short introduction to an experimental project that we have been doing the last two years with user interfaces for musicians to control their musical structures. We write our programs as software art, they are free and we develop them with the people that are using it.

Aesthetics Of Musical Performance
by Dr. Mine Dogantan, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey

Musical artworks reach audiences primarily through their performances and our musical experiences as listeners – whether cognitive or affective in nature – derive from the properties of performed music.  However, music analysis, aiming to understand the nature of musical works and their relationships with the perceiving mind, traditionally studies musical scores.   While there is a rapidly growing branch on studies of expressive performance in recent music psychology, research concentrates on discovering causal, law-like relations between musical structures embedded in the score and  their expression in performance, and investigates only the repetitive rather than the original and unique aspects of performances.  So far, the empirical findings in this area have not been related to an aesthetic theory that would explain why audiences prefer a certain performance of a given piece as being expressively superlative. 

Musical performances, however, are works of art fully deserving of careful study in themselves.   In this paper, I first introduce a brief history of the concept of musical performance as developed in different historical periods in the Western tradition, and provide an outline of the recent literature on expressive performance.  Then, I comparatively analyze two recorded performances of Brahms’s Ballade op.10 no.1 for the piano – by A.Brendel and G.Gould – in terms of their treatment of the musical structures and in reference to the aesthetics of organicism.

Analyzing a Composition from a Systemic Point of View
by Daniele Gugelmo, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Brasil, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brasil

This work introduces an analysis of a musical composition based in the General System Theory (GST) developed in the 1950s by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972). The Systemic utilizes various models to analyze systems. In studying the universe of a musical composition, we used graphics and hierarchy diagrams to demonstrate and understand the disposition of elements, their relations, interactions and the final organization of the work.

The contemporary musical composition uses various models to its conception and final realization. Based on this historic and stylistic fact, we focus on a musical piece and we find the same presence of a complex thought. The hypothesis here is that the aural architecture is comprised of basic elements that create relations of the type process of interaction to form three basics musical organizations.

In the piece we study – “The Seven Days of Creation” for Symphonic Orchestra, by Daniele Gugelmo - the basic elements are: intervals of 2^nd, motif fragments and E major chord. The Relations type Process of Interaction are: motif fragmentation in variation, the space of instruments in its range, repetition, superposition of pedals, sonorous mass/silence contrast, construction of mass, expansion and diminution of intervals, rhythmic subdivision, tutti in Orchestra. The Musical organization is as follows: Pitch, Rhythm and Orchestration.

SpeCS, Spectrogram-based Compositional System
by Mika Kuuskankare and Dr. Mikael Laurson, Center for Music and Technology, Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland

There are a number of compositional systems that are specialized in processing, for example, pitch information or sampled sound to produce raw material for compositional use (PatchWork, AudioSculpt, etc.). These compositional systems usually require the composer to do most of the necessary post-processing. This may include, for example, transcribing the material to suit the particular instrumentation. Consequently, it usually also requires to input the material to a notation program and to add dynamics, articulations, and so on. Often the consecutive stages do not, in fact, require an extensive compositional input but are rather routine like instead.

In this paper, we introduce a compositional system that is able to import and process different types of raw material and to produce the musical output. We discuss in detail how to create orchestral excerpts from sampled sound files. The sound file can be either unprocessed or it can be processed by filtering, stretching, etc. The sound can then be viewed and edited in a spectrogram-editor. Here the user can for example draw the desired instrumentation on the spectrogram by using a set of special graphical objects. These objects define arbitrary subsections of the spectrum. The analysis information is then post-processed to incorporate the changes. Finally, an underlying pulse is defined and the output score is calculated. The resulting score contains the pitch information, dynamic markings and articulations derived from the analysis.

The environment used in this study is a novel graphical programming language called PWGL. PWGL takes advantage of a powerful notation program called ENP2.0.

Music Psychology In A Children's Hospital Ward: An Eco-Systemic Perspective
by Dr. Gertina van Schalkwyk, University of Pretoria, South Africa

Admission to hospital is a traumatic experience for most children.  Separation from parents is stressful to any child and may result in feelings of rejection, anxiety and a loss of purpose inhibiting proper rehabilitation.  Medical treatment often involves strenuous procedures that can have a very negative effect on the child’s overall development.   This is specifically the case in the South African situation where children and parents are often separated due to the vast distance between rural settlements and appropriate medical facilities.  This may lead to emotional and cognitive deprivation that is detrimental to the recovery and overall well-being of the child. 

In this research project music was introduced in a programme to improve and enhance the circumstances in a hospital ward, and to promote mechanisms for coping with emotional deprivation.  A system evolves within the hospital ward where relationships were co-constructed through various stimulating activities including music, art and movement.  A specific programme, directed towards facilitating child development, enhancing cognitive and creative abilities, and providing children on the wards with emotional coping strategies, is presented as experiential learning for final year psychology students.  The programme is based on the eco-systemic approach to development and multiple outcomes emerge from this dynamic interactions, processes and transactions between child, music, art and movement.

 This paper will elaborate on the diverse experiences emerging in a children’s hospital ward and an exploration of the patterns that evolve within the child-music system.  Observation of the processes and patterns pertaining to these child-music interactive systems provides a rich and vivid story of probable intra-person, inter-personal and person-context outcomes.