Residence Sasha J. Blondeau 2/3 : Jean-Louis Giavitto
Jean-Louis Giavitto, CNRS Research Director in the Musical Representations team since 2011, has accompanied, and continues to accompany, Sasha J. Blondeau. He tells us about the team's contributions to the young composer's work.
Before talking about your involvement in Sasha J. Blondeau's artistic research residency, could you tell us about your research subjects?
My research focuses on programming languages, and more specifically on the representation and use of time in these languages. Before joining IRCAM, I worked with biologists on the modeling and simulation of morphogenesis processes: how a form is constructed in time and unfolds in space. Although developmental biology may seem a world away from music, these themes are similar, and many of the concepts I developed to simplify the simulation of morphogenesis processes resonate with the needs of composers.
How have your research activities developed within the Musical Representations team?
When I arrived at Ircam in 2011, Arshia Cont was developing the Antescofo project.His idea was to couple a listening machine (capable of determining, from the audio stream, where a musician is in a score) with a programming language dedicated to writing electronic sounds.
The aim is to rediscover the musician's interpretative freedom in mixed music, by synchronizing electronic sounds in real time with the fluctuations of human playing.
It was only natural for me to join the project, where I developed the language part in interaction with composers such as Sasha J. Blondeau. Programming languages dedicated to music can be divided into two classes, according to their focus on sound production or score creation. MUSIC-N, Max, or PureData are on the sound side and used in concert, while OpenMusic, a visual programming environment and computer-aided composition (CAC) system, is on the score side - used by the composer during the music writing process. Antescofo goes beyond this dichotomy: the composer uses it to write the electronic parts in relation to the instrumentalist's score, and the system is also present at the concert to listen to the performance and control, in full tune, the production of electronic sounds. This makes it possible to link issues of composition and interpretation, musical material and form.
Do composers who want to make electronic music need to learn how to program?
Marco Stroppa developed the idea that programming languages offer an extremely powerful space for thinking, enabling him to construct and work on the musical ontology he designs for a piece. This ontology refers to the conceptual structure, entities, relationships and rules that define the musical objects in his work. It's not the development of the code needed to realize more or less complex audio processing that he's aiming for, but the modeling effort needed to conceive his musical objects and their relationships in a precise way through the architecture of the programs that accompany his writing.
It's a point of view to which I adhere completely. And, rather than seeing the composer bend to computer constraints, I prefer to see computer science comply with the very nature of musical language. Designing a domain-specific language requires an understanding of the entities of the application domain and the operations that apply to them. We must try to "speak the language of the tribe", as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, while refraining from speaking in the place of others (I'm not a composer) and contributing our own skills (the IT tool).
Jean Louis Giavitto à l'Ircam © Ircam-Centre Pompidou
Sasha J. Blondeau conducted his thesis with the team between 2014 and 2017: how did you, and the rest of the team, support his work?
I had been working on topological representations for knowledge representation.
The intuition that guided me was that topology (with its notions of neighborhood, path, obstruction, contact...), offered relevant material for this purpose as a relationship between two entities could be represented by a neighborhood within an abstract space.
I had used this approach for more than a decade before I met Sasha, for the analysis of fairy tales. I had given my nephew a book by Warja Lavater that tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood, but in a completely abstract visual form. Little Red Riding Hood is represented by a red circle, the wolf by a black circle, the forest by a multitude of green dots... And the story is told through visual arrangements, without a single word, yet in a totally intelligible way, which astonished me. I asked my nephew how he recognized Little Red Riding Hood in the series of abstract illustrations. He replied that there's a legend on the back cover which, like a map, associates "symbols" with characters and objects. Yet, without even consulting the caption, it was clear to me that what I was looking at was the story of Little Red Riding Hood, not Peter and the Wolf.It was in trying to understand why that these topological representations emerged: the analysis of co-occurrences (what appears together or, on the contrary, what never appears together) makes it possible to automatically define topological structures (technically: abstract simplicial complexes [1]) that correspond to a story "signature". And the signature of Peter and the Wolf is not the signature of Little Red Riding Hood. Whereas the signature of Warja's book is very similar to the signature of Charles Perrault's tale.
How did you two come up with this model? Why, for example, the choice of tetrahedrons and their distribution in space?
Sasha arrived with a particular interest in Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas. An art historian, Warburg had collected over 60,000 volumes since 1900. This library, with its unique classification system, was his Denkraum, his thinking space.The books are arranged neither chronologically nor alphabetically, but according to a "neighborly" relationship. This proxemics determines the arrangement of the stock and new acquisitions: each book must answer a question posed by one of its neighbors, and ask a question itself. The result is a labyrinthine space, visible in the spatial layout of the collections, which reflects the variety of categorizations of knowledge, their evolving organization, and a networked epistemology. This arrangement of books in space, dynamic and rearranging itself according to the projects of its owner, allows for unexpected encounters, unexpected connections, disparate links physically realizing, through the shelving, an immense associative memory, "a machine that helps you think, a machine to think with, a machine to think about[2]".
You were just talking about "simplicial complexes": what mathematical objects have you used (or been inspired by) and how, if at all, are these tools used in your formal work?
The meeting of these two intuitions led to the feeling that the musical ideas of a piece could also give rise to a space, a map that could be explored. This feeling became clearer as tools were developed to visually represent these abstract spaces, automatically constructing a visual representation (limited to 3 dimensions) from a symbolic description.
Sasha defended his thesis in 2017. What led you to renew the collaboration, six years later, as part of this artistic research residency?
Sasha's residency gives me the opportunity to listen to composers talk about form, and to imagine new constructions that can explicitly account for this part of the compositional process. We're still a long way from being able to offer new representations to help us work on musical form. But, in the long term, the idea is, for example, to reinforce the bridge between sound and form enabled by Antescofo with new constructions facilitating compositional work and its transmission.
What kind of bridge can Antescofo build between sound and form?
For example, one of Sasha's musical motivations for these " maps " is to reflect on and explicitly represent the relationship between material and form. Do the morphology or characteristics of a sound (assessed on relatively short time scales, of the order of a second) underline, contradict or accompany a form characterized by evolution over longer durations (gesture, phrase, musical development)?
This issue is constantly at work in an Antescofo score, particularly when it comes to controlling sound synthesis in relation to musical development.
More generally, what's the link between Antescofo and the imagined model?
Control structures written in Antescofo, in the sense of a programming language (e.g. repetition, process, sequencing or, conversely, parallel juxtaposition), are the tools provided to the composer to precisely describe a musical sequence. Are there more relevant structures, better suited to compositional writing, that could be offered to the composer?
What does the team expect from this artistic research residency?
Our expectations are twofold. On the musical side, we'd like to detect points of contact between composers' different approaches to issues of form. Our motivation is not to claim to find a model that would encompass all practices and styles, but to identify, behind the idiosyncrasies, common issues or approaches.On the IT side, as we have just mentioned, we hope to be able to tool these issues and, in time, offer control structures that are more natural and better adapted to musical writing.
Finally, how does this residency fit in with the team's activities?
I'm part of a research team called "Musical Representations". The themes raised are therefore central to the team. On a more personal level, this residency has enabled me to become more familiar with the "language of the tribe".
By Jérémie Szpirglas
[1] In mathematics, a simplicial complex is a geometrical object determined by a combinatorial datum that can be used to describe certain topological spaces by generalising the notion of triangulation of a surface.
[2] Carlo Ginzburg. A thinking machine. Common Knowledge, 18(1) :79 - 85, 2012.
