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Improvisations from 2005
Alex and Arthur Culang

Part I: 01 02 03 04 05 06 07

Part II: 08 09 10

download all MP3s in a .ZIP
runtime 24:39

Improvisations from 2005 is a musical work coauthored by my brother Alex and myself.

In March of 2005 we wrote software in Max/MSP that allowed us to generate MIDI data using video game controllers. We routed this data to Reason, a commercial sampler and synthesizer.

Before long, we began improvising pulse-based musical compositions. Game controllers in hand, we recorded many of these jams in stereo by routing Alex’s computer output to one stereo channel and mine to the other.

Human/Computer Interface
Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft presumably shell out serious R&D dollars in developing game controllers. Though seemingly crude, these devices manage to provide an intimate link between human and computer sufficient to keep gamers engaged with software for hours on end. Given the inexpensiveness of game controllers and our degree of familiarity manipulating them (Alex and I bought our first Nintendo in the late 1980's), we found them to be a natural choice for our digital instrument interface.

Part I vs. Part II
The average track length of Part I (the first 7 tracks of Improvisations) is 1 minute and 27 seconds—brief and enticing. These tracks get to the point and get out. They are meant to lure or lull. They are commercials for Part II.

Part II (the remaining 3 tracks) is intended to jar and challenge the ever-shrinking attention spans of contemporary music listeners, myself included. For me, Part II requires more deliberate concentration to enjoy, and does not function as “background music” as well as Part I or pop radio.

Environmental Sounds
I love the way the Beatles incorporated environmental recordings into tracks like "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "Yellow Submarine", so Alex and I, interested in exploring possibilities of representing physical spaces or situations in music, experimented with mixing field recordings we made in Berkeley and Davis into Improvisations (for example, the chimes of Berkeley's Campanile appearing 15 seconds into track 2).

Phasing
Only after at least a rough cut had been made of our game controller improvisations did we add in the dance-type percussion. This percussion was semi-arbitrarily added, and minimal effort was made to do any kind of tempo-matching between it and the melodic improvisation. Steve Reich-style phasing inevitably occurred (albeit with—dare i say—groovier beats in our case). The rhythm of the percussion parts and the melodic improvisation parts constantly shift in and out of sync in an unplanned way.

Editing
We took a cinematic approach to editing the improvisations.

While both music and film are time-based mediums, traditional editing techniques for each address unique concerns. The existence of specialized software for music editing vs. film editing drives home this point: How many recording engineers use Final Cut Pro to assemble a pop song? How many filmmakers edit with ProTools?

Most editing activity in music is done in strict adherence to a defined tempo and meter. Film editors on the other hand are usually guided by other criteria—say, the back and forth pacing of a conversation. While a well-edited film certainly has a “rhythm” to it, we rarely say that a particular edit is “out of time,” or “missed the downbeat,” etc.

Without a linear mathematical grid of downbeats and quarter notes and four-bar phrases, the film editor chooses the precise moment for a cut purely through intuition, rather than quantization.

Alex and I attempted to adopt the filmmaker's approach when editing Improvisations. We deliberately tried to divest ourselves from traditional notions of musical phraseology, which was easy because the bulk of our recorded material had no clearly delineated phrases or downbeats in the first place. Our improvisations felt to us like perpetual flows and currents—pulsing and swirling, but never landing on a downbeat.

We also tried to adopt a cinematic approach to editing our jams in the sense that we didn't want to arduously show the whole story. In other words, just as a film doesn't show you every step, every car door closing, every bathroom break and every meal of its characters, we attempted to edit our jams down to “just the good parts.”

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