Update 'content/topic/improvisation-and-control.md'

content/topic/improvisation-and-control.md

@@ -44,22 +44,25 @@ Jessica Feldman's essay, "The Problem of the Adjective," describes a further fro
  
 ## Rainbow Family
 
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 A young, black man is sitting at a white desk. In front of him is a bank of Apple II computers, connected to a trio of Yamaha DX-7 synthesisers, and four performers on stage. A woman playing an upright bass starts strumming out a rhythm and the system responds; then the soprano sax, followed by the rest of the ensemble. They are improvising. The machine is listening. The machine is improvising. They are listening.
 
-This is the 1984 premiere of George Lewis' Rainbow Family at IRCAM, Paris, then - as now - a global center for avant-garde composition, computer music and electro-acoustic research. Robert Rowe spent time there in the 1980s, and Lewis would perform at the debut of Rowe's interactive music system, Cypher, at MIT in 1988. The concert was called Hyperinstruments.
+This is the 1984 premiere of George Lewis' [Rainbow Family](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4bS-0tsVEg&feature=emb_title) at [IRCAM](https://www.ircam.fr/), Paris, then - as now - a global center for avant-garde composition, computer music and electro-acoustic research. Robert Rowe spent time there in the 1980s, and Lewis would perform at the debut of Rowe's interactive music system, Cypher, at MIT in 1988. The concert was called Hyperinstruments.[^Rowe]
 
-But this is the first of Lewis' 'interactive virtual orchestra' pieces, in which software designed by Lewis both responds to the sounds of the human performers, and operates independently, according to its own internal processes. There is no 'score'. And Lewis is not, in the language of European 'art music', the piece's 'composer'. Instead, Rainbow Family comprises [quote] 'multiple parallel streams of music generation, emanating from both the computers and the humans—a non-hierarchical, improvisational, subject-subject model of discourse.'
+But this is the first of Lewis' 'interactive virtual orchestra' pieces, in which software designed by Lewis both responds to the sounds of the human performers, and operates independently, according to its own internal processes. There is no 'score'. And Lewis is not, in the language of European 'art music', the piece's 'composer'. Instead, Rainbow Family comprises 'multiple parallel streams of music generation, emanating from both the computers and the humans—a non-hierarchical, improvisational, subject-subject model of discourse.'[^Lewis]
 
-This is not an accident. It is a deliberate aesthetic, technical and political strategy by Lewis, to produce 'a kind of computer music-making embodying African-American aesthetics and musical practices'; a form of human computer collaboration embodying similar ideals to those of the African American musicians' collective AACM - the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The group was founded in Chicago 1965 and, for Paul Steinbeck, it remains 'the most significant collective organization in the history of jazz and experimental music.'
+This is not an accident. It is a deliberate aesthetic, technical and political strategy by Lewis, to produce 'a kind of computer music-making embodying African-American aesthetics and musical practices';[^Lewis] a form of human computer collaboration embodying similar ideals to those of the African American musicians' collective AACM - the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The group was founded in Chicago 1965 and, for Paul Steinbeck, it remains 'the most significant collective organization in the history of jazz and experimental music.'[^Steinbeck]
 
-Lewis would later call this AACM-inspired aesthetic 'mulitdominance'. The idea is developed from an essay by the artist and critic Robert L. Douglas. Lewis writes:
+Lewis would later call this AACM-inspired aesthetic 'mulitdominance'. The idea is developed from an essay by the artist and critic Robert L. Douglas.[^Douglas] Lewis writes:
 
->By way of introduction to his theory, Douglas recalls from his art-student days that interviews with “most African-American artists with Eurocentric art training will reveal that they received similar instructions, such as ‘tone down your colors, too many colors’” [11]. Apparently, these “helpful” pedagogical interventions were presented as somehow universal and transcendent, rather than as emanating from a particular culturally or historically situated worldview, or as based in networks of political or social power. Douglas, in observing that [quote] “such culturally narrow aesthetic views would have separated us altogether from our rich African heritage if we had accepted them without question,” goes on to compare this aspect of Eurocentric art training to Eurocentric music training, which in his view does not equip its students to hear music with multidominant rhythmic and melodic elements as anything but “noise,” “frenzy” or perhaps “chaos” [12].
+>By way of introduction to his theory, Douglas recalls from his art-student days that interviews with “most African-American artists with Eurocentric art training will reveal that they received similar instructions, such as ‘tone down your colors, too many colors’”. Apparently, these “helpful” pedagogical interventions were presented as somehow universal and transcendent, rather than as emanating from a particular culturally or historically situated worldview, or as based in networks of political or social power. Douglas, in observing that “such culturally narrow aesthetic views would have separated us altogether from our rich African heritage if we had accepted them without question,” goes on to compare this aspect of Eurocentric art training to Eurocentric music training, which in his view does not equip its students to hear music with multidominant rhythmic and melodic elements as anything but “noise,” “frenzy” or perhaps “chaos”.[^Lewis]
 
 When we listen to Rainbow Family then, Lewis doesn't want us to hear synchronicity, harmony, or even polyphony. He wants us to hear multidominance: as both an aesthetic and a political value, expressed and encapsulated now partly as code. This is a model of human-computer interaction premised on formal equality, difference, independence, and commonality of purpose; a system that is, Lewis explains,
 
->'happy to listen to you and dialog with you, or sometimes ignore you, but the conceptual aspect of it is that it's pretty autonomous. You can't tell it what to do .... So improvisation becomes a negotiation where you have to work with [the system] rather than just be in control.' (Lewis, quoted in Parker 2005, 85)
->'In African American music there is always an instrumentality connected with sounds; you make sounds for pedagogical purposes, to embody history or to tell stories, and so on. (Lewis, quoted in Casserley, 2006)
+>'happy to listen to you and dialog with you, or sometimes ignore you, but the conceptual aspect of it is that it's pretty autonomous. You can't tell it what to do .... So improvisation becomes a negotiation where you have to work with [the system] rather than just be in control.'[^Parker]
+
+>'In African American music there is always an instrumentality connected with sounds; you make sounds for pedagogical purposes, to embody history or to tell stories, and so on.[^Casserley] 
 
 If Rainbow Family is pedagogy then its lesson is surely that computers, and machine listeners in particular, are part of these stories too; that they already were as early as the 1980s. What is being contested in fact is machine listening's soul, the aesthetic and political ideals it both expresses and reproduces, years before the term first began to circulate at and around MIT.
 
@@ -68,26 +71,28 @@ What would an alternate machine listening system modeled along Lewis' lines be l
 
 ## DARPA improv
 
-In this YouTube video, a white woman plays guitar with an Artificial Intelligence. The computer listens and responds. Once again, we find ourselves in a version of Yershov's diagram. It is almost as if she is having a conversation with the AI. She plays, and it listens and responds. She listens to its response and plays some more. This improvised conversation is like the exchange between [video] scientists and aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It might be playful, or maybe antagonistic - we don't and can't know the meaning even if we could participate in the dialog.
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+In [this YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRJYcqpbZ9o), a white woman plays guitar with an Artificial Intelligence. The computer listens and responds. Once again, we find ourselves in a version of Yershov's diagram. It is almost as if she is having a conversation with the AI. She plays, and it listens and responds. She listens to its response and plays some more. This improvised conversation is like the exchange between scientists and aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It might be playful, or maybe antagonistic - we don't and can't know the meaning even if we could participate in the dialog.
 
-The woman playing the guitar also created the alien AI that she improvises with. Still, she can't know the meaning of what it says or what she says in response. The fact that she can't know the meaning and she can't know what response her playing will provoke is precisely what excites her. She wants to create things that she can't quite control. She doesn't play her AI, the way she might play a piano or her guitar, she plays with it.
+[The woman playing the guitar](http://donyaquick.com/) also created the alien AI that she improvises with. Still, she can't know the meaning of what it says or what she says in response. The fact that she can't know the meaning and she can't know what response her playing will provoke is precisely what excites her. She wants to create things that she can't quite control. She doesn't play her AI, the way she might play a piano or her guitar, she plays with it.
 
-This woman and this AI and this amateurish video are part of a research project called MUSICA, short for Musical Interactive Collaborative Agent. The project is funded by DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded some of the early breakthroughs in automatic speech recognition beginning in the 1970s. MUSICA is part of DARPA's 'Communicating with Computers' program. It has two parts: one is called "Composition by Conversation"; the other "Jazz and Musical Improvisation".
+This woman and this AI and this amateurish video are part of a research project called [MUSICA](http://www.musicaresearch.org/), short for Musical Interactive Collaborative Agent. The project is [funded by DARPA](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/darpa-wants-make-jazz-playing-robot-can-jam-humans-n449371), the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded some of the early breakthroughs in automatic speech recognition beginning in the 1970s. MUSICA is part of DARPA's 'Communicating with Computers' program. It has two parts: one is called "Composition by Conversation"; the other "Jazz and Musical Improvisation".
 
 So the question is: why? Why is DARPA into Jazz? Why is it so interested in machines that improvise? What does it think it will learn? What does DARPA imagine improvisation will help it do?
 
 The contemporary battle field is nonlinear. It is often urban. Commanders no longer concentrate their forces along one line or at one point, but disperse them into a 360-degree battlefield. The individual soldier might experience anxiety, even a sense of isolation. They don't simply follow orders, but communicate and flexibly coordinate with other isolated, anxious soldiers. They improvise.
 
-Soldiers improvise with each other, but also with intelligent machines. Another project by the same research group teaches AIs how to infer the internal states of their human teammates, solving problems collaboratively with them, and communicating with them in a socially-aware manner. The practice stage here is Minecraft, where soldiers-in-training can enter a besieged village, [next image] fight a zombie, [image] and are invited to intermittently reflect on their emotional state.
+Soldiers improvise with each other, but also with intelligent machines. [Another project by the same research group](https://ml4ai.github.io/tomcat/) teaches AIs how to infer the internal states of their human teammates, solving problems collaboratively with them, and communicating with them in a socially-aware manner. The practice stage here is Minecraft, where soldiers-in-training can enter a besieged village, fight a zombie, and are invited to intermittently reflect on their emotional state.
 
 Many actors of seemingly different politics have an ideological and tactical investment in improvisation. Improvisation as freedom. Improvisation as multidominance. Improvisation as counter-hegemony; the opposite of control. Mattin has written about "this supposedly self-inherent critical potential of improvisation," and points instead to the way "improvisers embody the precarious qualities of contemporary labor." This is improvisation as corporate agility. Improvisation as zero hours contracts. Improvisation as moving fast and breaking things.
 
 The ability to go off script, off score, to innovate in the moment with what is at hand, becomes a way both of accumulating capital and surviving in the labor market. Evidently for DARPA, improvisation is also the future of combat, so that it is keen to mine the communicative virtuosity of jazz improvisation for whatever secrets it may hold.
 
-In addition to jazz robots, DARPA has two other programs, Improv and Improv2, in which hobbyists (or research labs pretending to be hobbyists) try to create military grade weapons using readily available software and off the shelf technology.
+In addition to jazz robots, DARPA has two other programs, [Improv](https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2016-03-11) and [Improv2](https://govtribe.com/opportunity/federal-contract-opportunity/improv-2-hr001117s0047), in which hobbyists (or research labs pretending to be hobbyists) try to create military grade weapons using readily available software and off the shelf technology.
 Improvisation is both a technique and a generative source of knowledge to extract. 
 
-But one thing DARPA's Improv program manager says reminds us that their improvisational imaginary has real constraints: "DARPA’s in the surprise business and part of our goal is to prevent surprise." In time, there is no more need for human input in the ensemble. The machine improvises with itself.
+But one thing DARPA's Improv program manager says reminds us that their improvisational imaginary has real constraints: ["DARPA’s in the surprise business and part of our goal is to prevent surprise."](https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/military/darpa-invites-techies-to-turn-offtheshelf-products-into-weapons-in-new-improv-challenge) In time, there is no more need for human input in the ensemble. The machine improvises with itself.
 
 
 # Resources
@@ -98,4 +103,12 @@ But one thing DARPA's Improv program manager says reminds us that their improvis
 [^Ellis]: Archived email exchange between Dan Ellis and [Michael Casey](https://music.dartmouth.edu/people/michael-casey), 28 March 1994. According to Casey, "Dan suggested "Machine Audition", to which I responded that term "audition" was not widely used outside of hearing sciences and medicine, and that it could be a confusing name for a group that was known for working on music--think "music audition". I believe we discussed the word hearing, but I--we?--thought it implied passivity as in "hearing aid", and instead I suggested the name "machine listening" because it had connotations of attention and intelligence, concepts that were of interest to us all at that time. That is what I remember." 
 [^Brand]: ![](bib:f840b2fa-8e2a-48b3-8ad7-1f138313d2b3)
 [^Audioset]: Gemmeke et al. [_Audioset: An Ontology and Human-Labelled Dataset for Audio Events_](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45857.pdf)
-[^Feldman]: ![](bib:284b6cc8-1fe8-4d3f-b0b0-d53d4117370b)
+[^Feldman]: ![](bib:284b6cc8-1fe8-4d3f-b0b0-d53d4117370b)
+[^Rowe]: Robert Rowe, [_Interactive Music Systems: Machine Listening and Composing_](https://wp.nyu.edu/robert_rowe/text/interactive-music-systems-1993/) (MIT Press, 1993), 72.
+[^Lewis]: George Lewis, 'Too Many Notes', LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL (2000), pp. 33–39, 36-37.
+[^Lewis]: George Lewis, 'Too Many Notes', LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL (2000), pp. 33–39, 33.
+[^Steinbeck]: Paul Steinbeck, 'George Lewis' Voyager' _The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies_ (2018), 261-270, 261.
+[^Lewis]: George Lewis, 'Too Many Notes', LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL (2000), pp. 33–39, 34.
+[^Douglas]: Robert L. Douglas, “Formalizing an African-American Aesthetic,” New Art Examiner (June/Summer 1991) pp. 18–24.
+[^Parker]: George Lewis, quoted in Jeff Parker, "George Lewis." BOMB, no. 93 (Fall 2005): 82-88, 85.
+[^Casserley]: George Lewis, quoted in Lawrence Casserley, "Person to ... Person?" _Resonance Magazine_ (1997)