JOSÉ MANUEL BERENGUER

Artificial Improvisation
Josep Manuel Berenguer
University of Barcelona
jmberenguer@sonoscop.net 
https://sonoscop.net/jmb/

Many of my works arise from questions I ask myself about the nature of intelligence and life. They run through my work, in fact. From my position as an artist, however, I avoid acting like a scientist even though I try to keep abreast of the studies that researchers carry out in this and other fields that, for a variety of reasons, interest or even fascinate me. 

Life and intelligence are related in a domain that also fascinates me a lot: that of the confluence between perception and cognition. In particular, I am thinking now of the structural impossibility for us living beings to get an exact image of the world around us. We cannot get to its essence, first of all, because we are not what surrounds us and it is impossible for us to experience thant. In reality, an image of something, a thing, an animal, is not the source from which it comes. The image of the thing is not the thing. Here we would enter into profound questions of phenomenology in which I do not intend to delve right now, although I must point out that in my basic artistic discipline, sound, the distinction between the thing that produces the sound, the sound and the experience that we, the entities endowed with cognitive capacities, have of it, has historically been aesthetically very relevant. Along with this ontological particularity, it happens that our perceptual and cognitive instruments, perhaps we could call them analytical, have serious limitations. So we elaborate theories that often come close enough to things, but never close enough to feel fully satisfied.

"Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is the well-known phrase that can be read under the pipe in René Magritte's painting La trahison des images, in which he refers to the fact that the image of the thing represented in the painting is not the thing itself. Up to this point, we can all agree. It might seem to be a witticism of the artist, but Michel Foucault talks at length about the profound implications of all this in the text that he precisely titles with the phrase that the painter wrote under his representation of the pipe. The very existence of the philosopher's text makes it clear that, in addition to the image of the painting with its pipe and its accompanying phrase and the pipe itself, there is a third element: the mental image that we make of the pipe itself, the image of the pipe and the text represented in the painting. From this approach emerges a new agent, feedback, which we find in all phenomena that we consider living or intelligent. Feedback can lead us to a saturation characteristic of all recursive phenomena that do not present an exit condition, by the way. It is clear that between these three elements there is a distance. They are not the same. When instead of a pipe, our objective is intelligence or life, things take place in a similar way. The mental representation of life and intelligence do not coincide with themselves or with the images we can construct of them.

We attribute some characteristics to life and intelligence. Astrobiologists agree that in the extraterrestrial explorations that will surely take place later, we may very well encounter a form of life that we do not know how to recognize as such. This idea has always fascinated me because it points to the relationship between our expectations about what we should find and what really exists in a certain context and can be found in it. Something that conditions and limits our abilities to identify. In the same way, with regard to intelligence, it is worth wondering if whenever we find ourselves in front of it, we will be able to identify it. This is how I fable, I dream, I imagine, although it may not be true, that my works are sometimes alive, and other times they are capable of recognizing, even, of interpreting the meaning of parts of the world. What is certain is that many react to some aspects of the world.

Reflecting on this work that I present today, I realize that I start from an idea that I had already used before and I had not become aware of the fact until I had to put my ideas in order to explain them. It is about coupled oscillation. It is well known that the song and light emissions of some animals, and also their neurons, are synchronized and in pathological situations in which there is no output of the feedback processes, they tend to hypersynchronization states, as is the case of epilepsy. Fortunately, the singing of frogs and the flickering of fireflies, which, without the presence of noisy external agents from the environment would tend to stabilization. I already worked the coupled oscillators in Luci / No name and no memory. There, each of the 64 electronic elements is attentive to the flashes made by electronic elements of a similar nature in its vicinity. 

http://www.sonoscop.net/jmb/masluci/luciarco.html

https://www.sonoscop.net/jmb/lucy/index.html

In this way, in the structure of the 64 fireflies there appear zones where the flickers are stabilized for a time and which, due to the topology of the network, end up destabilizing to stabilize in other zones or perhaps in the vicinity. The overall result is emergences of flickers with no clear pattern, but which would never occur randomly according to a uniform distribution or even more skewed. 

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Artificial Improvisation performs the same type of process. The 16 computational agents involved are listening to what the other 16 are doing to try to do things similar to them with a high degree of probability. In this way, I get a sound and visual flow that is always changing and never the same as itself. It can be considered a generative or if you wish algorithmic process.  

What do they hear ?

Well, a series of parameters

Artificial improvisation is an application based on 16 agents that take information from a database feed from a previous musical improvisation made by me in my studio. As it could be running for unlimited time, it could be considered as an Installation. It could be considered as an IPSpace installation when emited to the IP space from a remote computer, a site installation, when hen running in an architectural space, or both. The general idea is to try to emulate the behavior of musicians during an improvisation, where  they use to follow what other are doing or decide completely change the discourse trying to modify the future the whole musical object. Each agent behaves as follows : 

1. If no other agent has made a choice of a zone of the database  to run, then it randomly chooses a launch zone and runs it for a certain amount of time chosen between certain limits.

2. If other agents have already chosen their area of ​​the database to perform, then, with a high probability, it chooses a performance area whose musical descriptors are similar to the already working agents, or makes a choice at complete random according to a probability complementary to the previous one, which, if the first is high, it must be low. In both cases, the chosen zone is executed during a given time between certain limits.

3. Regardless of the sound fragment chosen for the performance, it chooses from a range of computational processing possibilities, such as, for example, transposition of its spectrum to multiple zones different from the original ones, granulation or spatialization by means of convolution reverberation.

4. At the end of the execution of the chosen zone, goes back to point 1.

A visual database was created by associating the images with the improvisation sections, so that each sound section corresponds to one and only one section of the image sequence.

In the same way that sound sections are precessed during the performance, the visual sections are also processed by means of very basic logical operations that are carried out between the currently chosen section and the one that was most recently chosen.

This application was programmed in Max 8.1.11 and it was finished on May 30, 2021.