Sonic Arts Research Centre:
Valhalla for the Human Ear
PowerBooks in Performance
“There’s definitely a culture of laptop performers that centers around their preference for the PowerBook,” says Rebelo. “It’s a bit of that connoisseur’s passion for the instrument, the same way electric guitarists will bond over a particular type of vintage Stratocaster. They’re constantly swapping PowerBook tips and tricks. And developing gestures in performance — the way you press a particular key, use the cursor, slam the lid down at the end of a piece — it’s subtle, yet comparable to gestural language developed around the violin or any other instrument.”
And will the PowerBook ultimately usurp the violin — and virtually every other traditional instrument — in the brave new musical world?
“In theory, at least, these computers are now capable of producing every possible type of sound,” says Rebelo. “But for musical purposes, that’s not always what you want. If you play a violin in an orchestra, then you have a limited range and a limited role in that orchestra, and that’s fine. But imagine an orchestra of a hundred laptops that can all make any possible sound. It’s likely going to be a complete mess.
“So one of the musical — and philosophical — challenges we face with these new tools is: What exactly do we do with all this freedom?” The answer, he thinks, may be to redefine our notions of music from the ground up.
Put these tools in the hands of SARC students and faculty and the results can be unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Today, in ensembles that often combine traditional instruments with PowerBook laptops, in contexts that range from the intricately composed to the completely improvised — and often on the stage of the awesome listening environment of the Sonic Laboratory — a new breed of musicians and composers are experimenting with new ways to make music and setting new rules for interaction among band members and between performers and audience.
Pedro Rebelo uses a banjo as an input device for his PowerBook.
Pure Invention
“This new generation of students is reaching an enviable position where a musician can use Macs and PowerBooks to make music not just extrapolated from existing forms, using existing instrumental sounds, but to develop it purely from their imaginations, to invent it anew every time,” Rebelo muses.
“There’s definitely a culture of laptop performers that centers around their preference for the PowerBook,” says Pedre Rebelo.
“Today, it’s not just about getting a piece of off-the-shelf software, loading it up, and concentrating on creating the content with existing paradigms, but actually questioning why that piece of software works like it does, and having the expert skills to build your own alternatives.”
Take Note of the New
This effort to reinvent music is “such a vibrant field right now,” Rebelo says. “And tools available for the task — tools like Macs and PowerBooks — are efficient, affordable, and in our hands; whereas five years ago, that was impossible to imagine unless you were in a very large research institution.”
Combine that with the revolutionary changes created by the Internet and you get a massive diversification in the types of music that will soon be available to anyone, anywhere. “From creation to distribution, people are taking music more into their own hands,” Rebelo declares. “The results of that will be very intriguing.”
Partch Meets Punk
As a student of musical history, Rebelo sees many parallels for the ethic of “taking it into one’s own hands” between Harry Partch, the iconoclastic American composer who ultimately built his own unconventional instruments, and the punk bands of the late 1970s. “In both cases, the key factor is your intention to make music, rather than the type of music you make.”
Rebelo explains: “One of the great things about punk was, obviously, that those bands weren’t expert in guitar playing or drumming, but they emphatically had something urgent to say. So they picked up the tools that were available and appropriate at the time, and they used them. These days, more and more people have access to ways of making music, but the differentiator — whether it’s worth hearing or not — is whether people have something to say. Hopefully, it’s the people who really have something to say who’ll find their audience.”
