Composing Autonomy in Thresholds and Fragile States
David Dunn, David Kant · Focal Press eBooks · 2024
David Dunn and David Kant are inspired by randomness in nature, but here it is a specific ecosystem which first motivated Dunn to experiment with electroacoustic chaos: the Atchafalaya basin of Louisiana. With its constantly evolving soundscape of environmental utterances, this temporary place of residence inspired a custom electronic system which, when interacted with, offered Dunn a place to contemplate and develop an intuition for the shifting and unpredictable dynamics of wildlife. David Kant then studied the system to develop a more explicit understanding of those electronics’ complex behavior. In their contribution they offer an expansion of the original score and discussion for Thresholds and Fragile States , first detailing a digital model which could both be distributed and modified more easily, via software and dedicated hardware. In addition, they propose modes of analysis of the system in its analog and digital forms to a level of detail rarely seen in electronic instrument analysis.