Alvin Lucier's Memory Space
If this had been all, it would have been enough. However, the evening finished with the proposal that improvisation is a form of neural scan. As Einbond put it, "every day musicians, especially improvisers, are doing this same kind of transcription" of the neural processing of stimuli. "We do not think of it as such," he said. "We are used to [hearing] it as musical activity." By bringing in a more familiar kind of musical improvisation after we had digested the sonified fMRI scans, Einbond offered the audience an opportunity to experience musical improvisation by professional musicians as a kind of neural scan that allows the audience to experience the consciousness of the performer (Einbond 2012).
Einbond chose to perform Alvin Lucier’s [Hartford] Memory Space (1970), written for "any number of singers and players of acoustic instruments." The score for Lucier's original composition includes the following instructions:
"Go to outside environments (urban, rural, hostile, benign) and record by any means (memory, written notations, tape recordings) the sound situations of those environments. Returning to an inside performance space at any later time, re-create, solely by means of your voices and instruments and with the aid of your memory devices (with additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations."
For this iteration of Memory Space, Einbond used his field recordings of passageways, a clip of which is here:
Einbond's field recordings were played for the performers through headphones worn by Einbond and the Yarn/Wire musicians, who improvised their musical responses to Einbond's field recordings:
In the same way that Lloyd's sonifications are music, musical, and a rendering of a person's response to music, the Lucier piece is at once music, the perception of music, and a musical rendering of a group of musicians' neural responses to a particular soundscape. Both pieces are also portraits of the player. And both are performed performance modes of analyzing spectatorship.
Einbond chose to perform Alvin Lucier’s [Hartford] Memory Space (1970), written for "any number of singers and players of acoustic instruments." The score for Lucier's original composition includes the following instructions:
"Go to outside environments (urban, rural, hostile, benign) and record by any means (memory, written notations, tape recordings) the sound situations of those environments. Returning to an inside performance space at any later time, re-create, solely by means of your voices and instruments and with the aid of your memory devices (with additions, deletions, improvisation, interpretation) those outside sound situations."
For this iteration of Memory Space, Einbond used his field recordings of passageways, a clip of which is here:
Einbond's field recordings were played for the performers through headphones worn by Einbond and the Yarn/Wire musicians, who improvised their musical responses to Einbond's field recordings:
In the same way that Lloyd's sonifications are music, musical, and a rendering of a person's response to music, the Lucier piece is at once music, the perception of music, and a musical rendering of a group of musicians' neural responses to a particular soundscape. Both pieces are also portraits of the player. And both are performed performance modes of analyzing spectatorship.
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