The origins of computer music promised unlimited freedom for composers to make music using sounds that no acoustic instrument could make. This freedom comes with a price.
Music unites listeners through shared predictions and reward. At the heart of this process is the musical scale—a designed object that quantizes pitch into structures capable of generating and fulfilling expectation. A survey of the world’s scales reveals five core design features and a single overarching dimension of enculturation, ranging from deeply familiar tonal systems to entirely novel sonic environments.
In this lecture, Falk Hübner will offer various examples of such socially engaged artistic research projects, and discuss the persona of the artist-researcher as a "connector" and the methodological consequences such a positionality implies. From this perspective, he develops a series of questions to the field of computer music, to explore and discuss bridges and potential connections between topics of socially engaged artistic research and the disciplines and discourses of (research in and through) computer music.
