Whose Opera Is This, Anyway?

Jon Ippolito

Guggenheim Museum, Soho
ji@guggenheim.org

 

Tod Machover & MIT Media Lab’s interactive Brain Opera, performed at Lincoln Center, NYC, July 23-August 3, 1996.

 

Composer and MIT Media Lab Professor Tod Machover believes anyone can make music. At least that’s what it says on the cover of the glossy brochure for his Brain Opera, which premiered last July 23rd at Lincoln Center in New York. Part science exhibit, part music recital, the Brain Opera promises its audience a chance to play electronic instruments in an Interactive Lobby and then hear a 45-minute performance based on their impromptu riffs and recitatives. The fact is, however, that the Brain Opera doesn’t exactly deliver on this promise–which makes Machover’s professed faith in his audience’s ability to make music a bit less convincing than his brochure would have us believe.

 

I had been told in advance that the Brain Opera‘s Interactive Lobby contained a battery of 40 or so computer workstations that produce sounds and video based on visitors’ inputs. Since for me “a battery of computer workstations” conjures up phosphorescent screens set into sleek metal consoles with shiny right angles, I was a bit surprised upon entering the lobby to find myself in a dark jungle of amorphous pods, plastic toadstools, and oversized potatoes hanging from the ceiling, all interlaced with vines of computer cable. It seems that Machover and his collaborators hoped that a touchy-feely room of bouncing legumes would allay the public fear of technology. Judging from the crowd’s reaction, there was some justification for this hope: visitors streaming in the door eagerly hopped from pod to pod, thumping rubber protrusions to play crude rhythms or leaning their heads inside plastic cowls to chat insouciantly with videos of Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky.

 

It was not just the somewhat chintzy-looking plastic tubers that were designed to appeal to the computer illiterate, but also the way that these “hyperinstruments” responded to the audience’s presence. A particularly successful example was called the Singing Tree, though it looked more like a giant plastic mushroom: by singing a pure tone into a microphone found under the mushroom’s canopy, I was rewarded by a slightly delayed wash of sound harmonized to my voice, accompanied by the image on a video screen of a hand opening. The experience was unexpectedly gratifying–certainly the most intimate encounter I’ve ever had with a computer. The gratification was even more immediate with the Brain Opera‘s other hyperinstruments. Waving my hand in front of the Gesture Wall, for example, triggered a big splashy sound that I was told was the consequence of my hand interrupting an electric field generated by the Gesture Wall’s bud-like protuberances. The trouble was, when I placed my hand at different points in the field to map out the way the sound was affected by my hand position, I found that no matter where I placed my hand or how fast I moved it the music sounded pretty much the same. Ironically, the same mechanism that enabled me to make a sumptuous sound easily–a computer algorithm generating musical phrases based somewhat loosely on my hand position–prevented me from understanding, and hence controlling, the sound I was triggering. The result felt a little like having a conversation with a schizophrenic: it’s hard to tell whether he’s listening or not.

 

I felt this frustration at many of the hyperinstruments in the first room of the opera, whether I was drumming plastic protuberances, waving my hands in front of video screens, or listening to Marvin Minsky respond to my questions with non sequiturs. With any interactive work, the important question is not how to make it interactive–which is relatively easy with today’s technology–but how to make the interaction rich and meaningful. This “quality of interactivity” problem is especially acute when the object of interaction is simultaneously billed as an artwork and an instrument (or “hyperinstrument”). One approach is to make an instrument that is highly underdetermined, something like leaving a guitar in the gallery for visitors to play. By plucking a few strings or strumming a few chords, they’ll be able to figure out how it works quite easily; the problem is that it takes a lot of practice to produce something really interesting. The alternative approach is to give the responsibility for making interesting sounds to the machine, as exemplified by the Brain Opera‘s hyperinstruments, which respond to visitors’ gestures with entire phrases rather than individual notes. Machover may have chosen this latter approach to ensure that visitors would not be intimidated by instruments that are too hard to learn. And his instruments do succeed in momentarily entertaining visitors flitting from station to station–it’s just that they fail to interest them in sustained learning. The sounds are rich; the interaction is not.

 

After a half hour of hyperpummeling and hyperwaving, the audience moved to a theater for a performance featuring two hyperinstrumentalists, a conductor, contributions from the Internet, and a lot of prerecorded sound and video. The result was a multimedia cocktail containing something to please every taste: more or less three parts Minsky-esque aphorism (“The mind is too complicated to summarize”), two parts Bach fugue, and one part each NASA photograph, Bill Viola video, and Luciano Berio soundtrack. There was even an ingredient added by the audience: we were told that sounds made earlier by visitors playing hyperinstruments would crop up in the performance, and that remote players joining in from the World Wide Web could exert some control over the sounds heard during a short section of the opera. Perhaps the most important instruction in Machover’s recipe was to blend the contents thoroughly. For unlike the abrupt transitions found in more discordant postmodern compositions, Machover’s careful engineering of the overall sound mellowed the potential cacophony of all the contributors, with the result that his concoction became surprisingly “easy listening”–especially in comparison to the sonic anarchy of horn-honking taxis and chattering crowds that greeted me when I stepped out into Lincoln Center Plaza after the performance.

 

The Brain Opera‘s attempt to embody bottom-up programming–to make the work accessible to listeners by incorporating their own contributions–was in explicit homage to Marvin Minsky, whose 1985 book The Society of Mind described a mind consisting of countless agents contributing to the daily upkeep of the psyche. In its mode of composition, however, the piece was an implicit homage to a composer who advocated a bottom-up approach long before Minsky: John Cage. Cage pioneered a number of methods for throwing authoritarian control out the window, including mathematical determination, chance operations, and indeterminacy. In an indeterminate composition like Music for One of 1984, the score gives the players leeway as to when and how long to hold certain notes. Cage called the unintentional montage when performers play overlapping sounds “interpenetration without obstruction,” a phrase he borrowed from the Avatamsaka Sutra of Mahayana Buddhism.

 

Cage’s decision to incorporate the choices of others into his work was a reaction against the model of an authoritarian conductor telling the oboe player when to play a C-sharp and how long to hold it. The Brain Opera seemed to aspire to a similar democratic ideal–but then what was the conductor doing on stage during the performance, digital baton in hand, pointing at various players and inputs to emphasize certain voices and suppress others? And how much influence did the amateur hyperinstrumentalists and Net musicians really have over the music, once their unruly contributions were blended into seamless music by the opera’s engineers twiddling knobs and setting levels? To be sure, Minsky’s “society of mind,” the model invoked in the Brain Opera brochure, places a greater emphasis on cooperation and competition among agents than does Cage’s ensemble of autonomous musicians; if Cage’s society is anarchic, Minsky’s is more of a representative democracy, albeit a tangled “heterarchy” with agents at lower levels influencing the outcome at the levels above. Nevertheless, what Machover has realized is not Minsky’s representative democracy, but an oligarchy that subsumes the voices of the masses into a preconceived aesthetic program. As I took in its deftly modulated voice-overs and carefully synched video images, the Brain Opera seemed to have less to do with the startling juxtapositions of Cage’s acoustic experiments than with a commercial for Muzak I had seen on TV years back, in which technicians in white lab coats twiddled dials while a voice-over touted the benefits of “scientifically engineered music.” Perhaps Machover has succeeded in engineering music that appeals to a broad audience. The irony of his achievement is that in order to prevent the listeners from being alienated by a truly “bottom-up” performance, the artist and his collaborators had to wrest control of the performance away from them. Unfortunately for the Brain Opera, what is user-friendly for today’s audience will probably sound hackneyed and sentimental for tomorrow’s. Somewhere in all great music there is a gap, a gap the listener must leap across to find meaning. If the Brain Opera had such a gap, its ingratiating sound-and-light show made it all too easy for the audience to slide right over it, walk outside, and never think about the piece again.

 

That’s why the most successful moments in the Brain Opera were unmediated by a preexisting idea of what sounds or looks good. The Melody Easels in the lobby were video screens with abstract images reminiscent of the surface of a pond; by running a finger across the screen, a visitor could create wave effects rippling across this surface. One of the Melody Easels, however, produced a bizarre rectilinear wave when stroked, a pixellation that was definitely at odds with the natural motifs developed in most of the other hyperinstruments. I later learned that this effect was an “artifact”–the unexpected result of an algorithm gone bad. The fact that this Melody Easel was also most interesting to play confirmed for me the power of bottom-up programming over a preconceived aesthetic.

 

From New York the Brain Opera is scheduled to open in Linz, Austria, followed by select venues in Europe and Asia. As this mobile composition tours the world, it would only be consistent with the Brain Opera‘s stated ideals for it to evolve in response to feedback from its listeners. So here’s mine: Don’t be afraid of the sparks that fly when algorithmic composition meets audience participation; present the unfamiliar noise produced by their encounter raw, without sugarcoating. John Cage regretted that his work was not appreciated by a larger percentage of the general public, but he refused to dumb down his ideas to match the public’s taste. The Brain Opera‘s organizers have a real potential to achieve their goal of bottom-up programming–but to do so they will have to be satisfied with a stronger experience for the few rather than a weaker experience for the many.