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Ê .emusic
10.01.03 Carbonated Jazz, music as an object to be described.
Online music, in its networked dimension, can take different shapes, embodying itself into mini-softwares, somehow interactive, which amuse the user for some time, but which can pave the way for subsequent steps where those same technologies rise to the status of new means of intellectual production. Carbonated Jazz is the nickname of Alexander Chen, a designer with an impressive portfolio, who treats music as an object to be described visually and to be generated with diverse techniques. Beginning from the first 'Noise' video, with little metal cyborgs which manipulate sound bases, the artist produced 'Bpm_Sqlrrrp', a drum sequencer made with Flash which forces the samples to adapt to fixed patterns and tempos, 'Stereovis', an armonic dance of creatures over long looping drones, 'Progress', where the tones aren't simply randomly generated, but are constructed using different intervals (perfect consonance, imperfect consonance, diatonic dissonance and microtonal dissonance) applied to the set of notes, giving birth to an endless concatenation of random musical intervals. On his site there's also a Quicktime demo of 'Sonata for the Unaware', an extremely interesting work which tries to trace the movements of the commuters of Philadelphia and turn them into carillon notes, therefore obtaining a real urban symphony using the scripting features of Director.