improvisation – Joe Bennett Music Services

This morning, on the final day of my visit to Berklee Valencia, I attended a gig/masterclass with the remarkable Dutch jazz trio Tin Men And The Telephone. ‘Jazz Trio’ is really an inadequate term for this ensemble. It might better be described as ‘interactive iPhone jazz gaming with live humans’.

The setup is as follows: the trio is piano, upright bass and drums. The drummer has a MIDI drum pad and snare sensor. The bassist has an effects pedal. The piano has a MIDI converter attachment, feeding a MAX patch, with occasional effects processing of the piano signal.

Tin Men and the Telephone: Tony (piano), Pat (bass) and Bobby (drums). All of the musical information on the backdrop – drum loop (left), melodic fragment (top) and chords (bottom) is generated in real time by audience members using an app. Did I mention they’re amazing improvisers?

And…

IRCAM’s Omax

Mark Summers (Sheffield University): Human-Machine Creative Collaboration and Copyright: performing with improvisation-driven music systems
Copyright can be problematic in areas unforeseen by legislators. One such area is that of interactive music systems which combine an improvising instrumentalist with live electronics to create a collaborative performance. The capabilities of such systems are as varied as the number of systems that have been created. These range in a continuum from the instrument paradigm, where an acoustic instrument is extended electronically (for example, MIT’s Hyperinstruments), to the player paradigm, where the system provides an improvising partner that feeds off the instrumental improvisation but is independent of it (Lewis’s Voyager or IRCAM’s OMax).
This paper will discuss these systems and their performance, raising questions about works (in the improvised input, in the output of the system, the mixed output of system and improviser or even in the system itself?) and authorship (is the improviser performing or creating, is the creator of the system the author of its output, are the creator and improviser co-authors of the mixed output?). In the light of these questions and based on legislation and case law, suggestions will be made as to where copyright may subsist and who might own it.

Tag: improvisation

Tin Men and the Telephone #tinmendo #berklee #jazz

Human-Machine Creative Collaboration and Copyright: performing with improvisation-driven music systems #crassh3c (Mark Summers)