> The Harmonic Algorithm 2 -- Backstory/Intro
[I haven't recorded a Harmonic Algorithm video for this post yet, so for now while we're talking about liveness in music, here's a performance from 2016 that I performed fretless bass and motion controlled electronics during]
Hey! Oscar here.
In my brief foreword I shared a few glimpses into my perspective going into this series of ‘content releases’. I’ll elaborate a bit further on everything I said there, as well as giving a bit more backstory about myself. Note that the term ‘content releases’ rather than blog posts or such like is meaningful, and I will elaborate more.
My core profession, in my own mind, is a ‘musical performer’. Operating within the arts practice of music, I focus on the presentation of music to an audience. Alongside this, I have a lifelong personal practice of musical innovation, composition and production, but it’s my work as a performer and the performance of my own works that I’ve always taken most seriously. Notably, I’m not an entertainer -- I have performed hundreds of entertainment gigs in my life, and I’ve decided that’s not the career path I will pursue long term. It is an easy income generator for performers, but I would prefer to focus my musical efforts entirely on creating and presenting art and innovation. Rather than with entertainment, I supplement my income with work as a professional in the tech sphere -- Data Science, Data Engineering etc., which is an engaging and honest gig that doesn’t conflict with my artistic pursuits.
I performed pretty much nonstop, multiple times a week, for over 15 years, being a member of multiple musical groups and projects at any one time. Amazing experiences, and having such a close connection to live music in the space made me think a lot about what the 'energy' of liveness is, and how it works. On a totally different sphere, having a connection to liveness in the digital world as an OG MMO player, all the way back to Ultima Online and various niche MMOs (Neocron anyone? no?) taught me philosophical things about the ways we share spaces. The differences and similarities between those very different experiences reveal a lot about what ‘live’ means, as a description as well as as a feeling.
A while back, I started to feel that as a collective culture, we’d crossed a threshold to where digital spaces were starting to become the dominant mediums for real and authentic connection, and capable when handled correctly of creating the feeling and excitement of ‘liveness’ just as you’d feel it in a physical space.
Recently, I hit a good jumping off point for a few of the group projects I was a part of at the time, and decided that I was going to take the opportunity to cut down my peripheral musical responsibilities and focus on developing my personal arts practice, pulling on the kind of philosophical threads that I’m talking about here. I stopped performing with the majority of live projects, and besides the performances I give with my wife Saydyy as UDAGAN (our family group), I am fully committed to a path of musical exploration and discovery.
The ‘content releases’ referred to in the introductory paragraph are my own personal and playful way of carving out a little digital garden of shared ownership, to see if we can develop it out over time into something meaningful. It goes a little further than just posting a video on YouTube -- I’ve set up an old school forum (an era of digital spaces that I loved) under our ‘UDAGAN universe’ (https://forum.UDAGANuniverse.com) and each content release is fundamentally a forum post, which I’ll then read for a video on YouTube. Pretty simple, but I love the idea of the ‘base’ form of the content being in our own digital garden, with anyone welcome to come join in, interact with us and make the place their own digital home too. The part which I think is coolest is that I’m creating a series of 'spoke' websites around the forum (the first being https://theHarmonicAlgorithm.com/) that explore mine and Saydyy’s interests and projects, and articles tagged with specific tags will auto populate those (including all comments!). The Forum will contain everything, and the various sites will be curated windows into our creative worlds, for people who only have interests in those specific niches.
This all ties into how difficult I think it is to talk about these kinds of lifelong passion projects -- there’s so much incredibly cool stuff to talk about, but when there is literal decades of personal history and creativity in every detail and it’s all so interconnected, then that becomes challenging to communicate. When there are so many individual elements to break down and explain in theory and in practice, to describe one component in particular might be possible, but to demonstrate it requires so many more individual elements to be hand waved over, that it always seems to revert to “there’s a lot more going on here, but check out how cool this is!”. Hopefully by collecting everything together in a shared community space and letting individual threads separate out into their own niche streams of interest, then it can provide some connective tissue that allows me to share more granular topics in a way that contributes towards a larger constellation of understanding.
Even if it doesn’t strip away any of the complexity and chaos, one of my goals is for every content release video to have live music and/or examples, so at least I can point to that and say “there’s a lot more going on here, but check out how cool this is!”. How and why the kind of procedurally generated music I’m discussing can conceptually be live is a topic that we’ll have to discuss more deeply. As we build out and perhaps even accumulate a small community with a shared passion in the various niches of interest that converge to create UDAGAN, then perhaps we can cultivate some of the mythical shared ‘liveness’ of digital spaces, that we’ve theorised about. Maybe it’ll just be a public content management hub for our various websites, but that’d be fine too.
That more or less completes the picture of where we are today. Let's go back to the core goal of this series -- to share (both musically and technically) the project ‘The Harmonic Algorithm’. In the foreword, I described it as “a juxtaposition of composition, musicianship, sound design and programming”. The fusion of performance and technology is one of the core stories here, and the idea of technology as a musical instrument (or the technology of musical instruments) will be something that I continue to discuss.
As a final note, in the balancing of arts and technology I’ve always found the difference in meaning of the word ‘documentation’ to be very interesting. In arts, documentation means to capture a permanent record or reflection on artistic processes that have been engaged with, while in technology, documentation could typically be considered instructions on how to use or understand a tool or codebase. Where they both converge in meaning, is that they are both intended either partially or wholly to guide others down paths that have been trodden by the author. The Harmonic Algorithm, to me, is both a musical instrument and a codebase, so I’m going to combine the intent -- I will write and demonstrate throughout ‘content releases’ the technical documentation for The Harmonic Algorithm, and in doing so tread a path of creative documentation through the meanings, motivations and future creative explorations of the project.
There we go -- that’s the backstory and my statement of intent. In the next post, before getting into the detailed documentation, I’ll give you the broad overview (README.md) of The Harmonic Algorithm project. Please ask me questions on the forum, or just say hi, and subscribe to the YouTube channel if you’re interested in where this goes.
Oscar