[eu-gene] Feedback

[douglas repetto]

Thanks to everyone for your Feedback responses (on and off list). Lots 
of great stuff to look/listen at/to and think about. I'll post the 
syllabi for the two courses I mentioned once they exist...

Irwin mentioned that there's no good forum for these topics, but I think 
that eu-gene is a perfect forum. No?


I'd love to hear even more examples of more conceptual feedback -- I 
think that feedback is active in very many generative works, but we 
don't always think of it in that context. The use of literal audio/video 
feedback is usually pretty clear. But other kinds of feedback can be 
harder to perceive. I think that has a lot to do with time -- in 
audio/video feedback there's an immediacy that makes it clear what's 
going on, whereas in non-immediate works it can be difficult to 
understand how/that the feedback loop is being closed, particularly if 
parts of the feedback loop involve translations between media/types of 
signals.

"I am sitting in a room" is a kinda in-between case -- it's obviously a 
type of audio feedback, but time is dealt with in chunks instead of as a 
continuous stream. Another really nice example is Nick Didkovsky's Zero 
Waste, where a pianist plays an algorithmically generated musical 
passage and a computer analyzes that performance and re-presents what 
the pianist just played as the next passage to be played. The pianist 
plays that (imperfectly, of course) and the loop continues. The piece 
evolves via a similar sort of chunk-time feedback loop, but this time 
instead of the resonances of the room we end up hearing the resonances 
between the player's sight reading skills and physiology and the 
computer's music parsing capabilities.


best,
douglas

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