Relating Superhuman Virtuosity to Human Performance
Nick Collins · 2005
An exciting field of compositional endeavour is outlined in this paper. We focus upon transitions from human to beyond human performance ability founded in psychoacoustic measurement data. The challenge is to make such changes perceptually smooth and acoustically plausible. The point of greatest ambiguity and hence compositional tension is around the limits of what is humanly possible. Virtuosity contextualised accurately against human ability is much harder to design than bare feats of bravura. For convincing illusion an extrapolation of human performance characteristics to impossible tempi is necessary. This is by no means trivial given the context sensitivity of expressive deviations reported in performance research literature. This compositional agenda is intimately linked to advances in computer music, through research into sound synthesis and the synthesis of human performance. Historical precedents in work of Nancarrow, Jaffe and others is highlighted. Key-Words :human performance, transhuman skill, limits of performance, computer music composition