Encounters

Composer John Supko, Associate Professor at Duke University, explores intersections, chance and intention; traditional music notation and real-time score generation; sound and spoken text; installation and performance; and human and computer creativity. In recent years, he has been developing generative software to navigate his vast archives of field recordings, sampled acoustic and digital instruments, noise and voice recordings. He writes: The following text is intended primarily to be evocative of my compositional practice. As such, it is structured as a sequence of thoughts—digressive, uncertain, recursive, redundant—about thinking, language, literature, visual and conceptual art, information, technology and music. Despite coming last in the preceding list, every line of this text relates to ideas I have about music. In fact, every line represents a musical utterance. In some sense, this text is music. JS

 

We often forget it, but we are always talking to ourselves.

We are constantly, silently, talking to ourselves.

We are talking about what we see and what we think.

We are talking about our problems.

We are talking about our feelings.

We are ceaselessly narrating our lives as we live them. 

Even unconscious, the mind may be talking to itself, noticing things, gathering information.

There is seemingly no qualitative distinction, no hierarchical value, to the things we tell ourselves.

The mind considers the most important things, the most mundane things, one after the other.

In writing we prize order, rigour, control, the pursuit of an argument, an elegant turn of phrase.

But the mind wanders, we cannot control it. 

Plato understood thought as conversation with oneself.

In conversation, we don’t expect speech delivered in full paragraphs.

I am tempted to say the mind improvises, but that’s not quite right.

Thinking is not improvising.

Thought precedes improvisation. 

Do I know what my next thought will be? 

Can I guarantee that it will follow logically from the last?

These thoughts sound like speech, but then again, they sound like nothing save themselves.

We might as well call it music.

 

The human body possesses a vast network of sensors.

The feedback from these sensors can redirect our thoughts.

I have a book in my hands; I start to read it.

I notice the room is cold and I think about a sweater.

My next thought might consider the art of weaving, or my mind might turn to a person who once wore a sweater I admired.

I’ve looked away from the book, my eyes drawn from the text to something I see only with my mind’s eye: a face, an object, an abstract idea like motion.

I notice I’ve strayed from the task I gave myself—reading and understanding this book—and I wonder how it happened. 

 

We’re distractible; I understand this.

‘Distracted from distraction by distraction... / Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind’, wrote T. S. Eliot.

Returning to my book, something by Kierkegaard, I read on.

Mid-sentence, mid-paragraph, the thought of eating an apple occurs to me.   

Nothing about the act of reading made me hungry, nor anything in Kierkegaard's text.

We get hungry; I understand this.

The thought of eating a piece of fruit simply appeared in my mind, occupying the same space occupied by Kierkegaard’s ideas.

When I notice that I am hungry, I immediately tell myself what I noticed.

But I already knew it.

 

We are ceaselessly, silently, narrating our lives even as we live them.

There is a redundancy to this narration.

But you have already told yourself that.

 

I am sitting at my desk at home, writing these words.

I am telling myself, 'I am writing a text'.

I am both writing this text and reading it aloud. 

And as I read it, I hope it is singing also.

I hope it finds the cadence of thought, and its melody also.

 

Can I measure the distance between thought and speech, between speech and song?  No figures seem accurate, only an idea: infrathin.

 

I am writing this in order to explore a problem.

The problem is that we are always talking to ourselves.

Our lived experience is inescapably mediated by speech.

Some of this speech is vocalized.

Some of it we only imagine. Some of it, I imagine, is closer to singing.

We speak singingly to ourselves, sing speakingly, in the privacy of the mind.

We are always listening to this secret music; we have no choice.

 

I’ve said this is a problem. 

Is it?

I’m not sure.

Is there a solution?

I'm not sure.

‘It is two thousand and hundreds of years since, that the theory was proposed that thought is conversation with oneself’, wrote Eliot, speaking of Plato.

Nothing is new about this observation, but so little in art has acknowledged it.

Thought doesn’t have good timing.

‘Ideas do not necessarily proceed in logical order. They may set one off in unexpected directions...’ observed Sol LeWitt in Sentences on Conceptual Art.

Thought doesn’t wait for the right moment, or for any moment.

Is this a musical problem?

 

We could consider the history of our intellectual and artistic endeavors as a response to this ‘problem’ of focus. 

‘There is no solution because there is no problem’, said Marcel Duchamp.

In writing we prize rigour, control, the pursuit of an argument, an elegant turn of phrase.

Those who ignore this expectation pay a price.

In his book on plot, Viktor Shklovsky engaged in various self-conscious digressions.

He wrote of his age, of not being offered a seat on a bus, of the current progress of his writing.

He examined the potential of these personal observations to enrich his intellectual project.

Or, rather, Shklovsky did not draw a distinction between his process and its product.

Writing the book was part of the book; he included the process in the product.

 

Today we are inundated with information. 

It comes from our computers, our phones, our televisions, tablets and other devices.

We perceive life moving faster than it did a decade ago because now we must contend with more information in less time.

As a result, concentration breaks down.

It becomes a luxury to sit and contemplate one thing for one uninterrupted hour.

A luxury, a rarity or a vanishing skill?

 

We worry about our shrinking attention spans.

‘Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind...’

But perhaps a new kind of thinking is emerging.

Reading used to be an act of deciphering that lent itself to deep contemplation.

Scriptura continua—continuous writing—consisted of text with no spaces between letters or words.

The reader had to find the separate words, and only then work out the writer’s meaning.

 

Today we live in a similar situation.

We are surrounded by enormous quantities of information with no boundaries between any of it.

Our experience of the world now extends beyond the natural and the real. Everywhere technology superimposes the synthetic and the virtual, which we carry around in our pockets.

With so much available information, linear thinking is less attractive, perhaps even less possible.

Stephen Jay Gould said, ‘My talent is making connections’.

Making or finding connections between seemingly disparate things is a definition of creativity.

More information should make more connections possible.

Does it?

I don't know.

More information should mean more creativity.

Does it?

I don’t know.

 

The term ‘soundscape’ is familiar to us. 

The composer R. Murray Schafer devised it.

According to Schafer, a soundscape is a combination of sounds that ‘arises from an immersive environment’.

The mind has its own imaginary or memory-driven soundscape but there is more than just sound in this spiritual expanse.

While I can’t explain it, I have the sensation of exploring my mind as if navigating a terrain.

I think of it as a landscape.

I negotiate my mind with as much curiosity and uncertainty as I would any actual unknown land.

‘I write in order to peruse myself’, wrote Henri Michaux.

Anything we submit to the attention of the mind gets absorbed into its landscape.

When we listen to music, the sound is set in that landscape, whether we like it or not.

We can train ourselves to concentrate on the performance and only the performance, but other things — other thoughts — seep in.

 

The problem of Kierkegaard and the apple.

 

We could make a dire judgement: the human attention span is shrinking.

Or we could consider the possibility that we are getting better at interweaving more and more strands of information into our cognitive experience. 

Will my life be so diminished if my mind wanders during this recital of chamber music?

If the music becomes the soundtrack to, rather than the focus of, my thoughts, what then?

 

‘Paying attention’ sounds like it costs something.

A dangerous question ensues: was the experience worth the price? 

Expenditure. 

Profit and loss. 

‘

Ideas can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical’, LeWitt wrote.

 

When a work of art inhabits the artist’s mind, it shares a landscape with all the things it isn’t but might become.

That’s why Shklovsky’s conflation of process and product is so compelling.

 

‘A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.’ LeWitt, again.

The efforts of artists to make this landscape accessible to others has an established history in painting.

Think of the landscapes of De Chirico, Ernst, Matta, Sage, Tanguy.

Matta called his painting Listen to Living an ‘inscape’, a poetic borrowing from G. M. Hopkins.

The word ‘inscape’ is a portmanteau of ‘interior’ and ‘landscape’.

The equation of the mind with physical space is an ancient one, and it seems self-evident.

The ‘memory palace’ technique of the ancient rhetoricians envisioned connections between abstract concepts and physical objects in imagined space.

We see many things with the mind’s eye, a mysterious kind of sight superimposed upon retinal sight.

In much the same way, the voice of the mind overlays our conscious experience. 

We experience our thoughts as silent language.

 

My interest in integrating speech into my music produces an auditory inscape. 

I am trying to turn my thinking into music.

I am trying to turn my music into thinking.

I did not begin with this intention. 

I began by reconsidering what I was doing as a composer.

I grew up learning to write music for a space, any space that would have it.

A piano piece played in a concert-hall, a string quartet performed in an atrium.

Music about music.

Music unconcerned with where it was.

I wrote a lot of music like this.

 

At some point, I began to lose interest in this manner of working.

I began looking for ways to design the space in which my music was experienced.

I started referring to my works as ‘sonic environments’, where organized and unorganized sound could coexist on an equal footing.

I feel a kinship with Adolf Loos, who wrote: ‘My architecture is not conceived in plans, but in spaces.’

My music projects conceptual space that absorbs or replaces the physical space in which it is heard.

 

Some years ago, I wrote a piece that included the sound of people playing ping-pong.

I knew that I would be performing in a space that adjoined a room with a ping-pong table, and that people would likely be playing the game while I performed. 

I decided to make a sonic environment where the sound of ping-pong was as natural as any other sound. 

It included the sounds of several locations, superimposed and gradually shifting in and out of audibility. 

 

In 2004, Robert Fitterman wrote a poem by entering the phrase ‘This window makes me feel’ into a search engine and compiling the results.

Each sentence of the poem begins with the words ‘This window makes me feel’ and is completed with a different search result.

This poem is a text of rich contradictions: both opaque and rawly emotional; mechanical in conception and yet profoundly human; its form is as regular as a litany and yet surprising and subversive in its content; there is a streak of absurdity running through it, but deep veins of sadness and compassion as well. 

When I set it to music, I imagined walking through a large city.  I heard in my mind’s ear a single, arbitrary thought from each person I passed.

 

But that was a long time ago. 

The use of speech in my music now principally suggests the voice of one mind, possibly a computer’s, probably my own.

I am introducing what Roger Shattuck calls ‘raw lumps of thought’ into the texture of my music. 

 

The voice of the mind is never silent.

I can’t pretend it stills when the music starts.

I prefer to absorb it, to recontextualize it.

I want to explore the landscape of my mind; my inscape.

I have been using software processes to simulate the emergence of musical and linguistic ideas.

An artificial intelligence brings the music into being at each performance.

It also speaks — in some sense, thinks — new thoughts.

The association of generative music and generative speech will give rise to new meaning.

 

In my work divine the rest, there are parts of speech that the computer forms into complete statements.

I recorded these parts of speech myself, then programmed the computer to use my voice to say the things it wanted to say.

The result is a generative landscape, an open system of emergent meaning expressed through musical and linguistic sound.

The words are the computer’s ‘raw lumps of thought’ spoken with my voice.

In each performance, I do not know what the computer will have me say, or what music it will construct to accompany my voice.

When I listen to it, I have the sensation of listening to my own mind re-embodied in the system.

 

I am trying to use music to convey and explore spiritual experience.

What is the nature of human creativity? 

What is the nature of computational creativity?

What is it like to think constantly?

Why do we seem to forget that we are always thinking?

When we observe our thoughts, why do we experience them as language, as speech?

This voice that is always with me: am I he? 

Or is this voice just an idea I have of myself?

 

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