Designing Constraints: Composing and Performing with Digital Musical Systems
Thor Magnusson · Computer Music Journal · 2010
Currently, a musician working with digital technol-ogy is faced with a panoply of musical tools that can be roughly characterized by a split between ready-made music production software on the one hand, and audio-programming environments such as SuperCollider, CSound, Pure Data, Max/MSP, ChucK, or Audiomulch (to name but a few) on the other. Problems with the former lie in the concep-tual and compositional constraints imposed upon users by software tools that clearly define the scope of available musical expressions. It is for this reason that many musicians, determined to fight the fos-silization of music into stylistic boxes, often choose to work with programming environments that allow for more extensive experimentation. However, prob-lems here include the practically infinite expressive scope of the environment, sometimes resulting in a creative paralysis or in the frequent symptom of a musician-turned-engineer. Consequently, a common strategy can be detected, defined here as that of designing constraints, where the instru-ment designer, the composer, or the performer (a distinction often irrelevant in these systems; see Drummond 2009) devises a relatively high-level system of constraints, encapsulating a defined space for potential expression, whether of compositional or gestural nature. This article engages with this situation by ex-ploring the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) concepts of affordances, constraints, and mapping. We examine how computational systems of musical expression always involve the establishment of a particular stratum that provides certain affordances to the musician, while concurrently posing impor-tant constraints. The article studies how constraints can serve as sources for creative explorations. For this purpose, three systems are analyzed: the mLog, Phalanger, and the ixi lang. All these systems are instantiations that proscribe complexity in favor