Axes

At the 2019 Sound and Music Computing conference in Malaga, Spain, my work, Axes was selected for a main curated concert at Sala María Cristina. In this work, I continue to explore making as performance amplifying the sounds of digital fabrication. In this instance, three stepper motors were driven to follow the contours of a digital model of a Spanish guitar, executing a toolpath associated with guitar’s geometry. The motors were placed on the soundboard of a physical version of the instrument half assembled by hand. This assemblage juxtaposes manual modes of production in craft with the increasingly ubiquitous automated ones that recast traditional forms within digital grids.

Axes was a response to the SMC call for works that would,

... engage with music information technologies and techniques through contemporary variations of Spanish music...Malagueñas (earlier fandango from the area of Málaga) variations are strongly encouraged, including the use of typical microtones and exploring new guitar and piano accompaniments. The works in this category are encouraged to take the form of AI composed works for acoustic instruments, amplification of arthroscopic instrumental sounds, NIMES, and/or as live-electronic processing.

Axes is a response to this call as it engages with the way local musical traditions and instruments are dimensionally reduced when packaged for global markets of consumption. T he motors were driven by a simplified mesh model of the guitar on which they were placed, just as the guitar tends towards homogeneity in its global representation in pop music. During the piece, a motoric fandango rhythm emerged at times from a sequencer using samples from recordings I collected in the Malaga, and reduced the nuances of such rhythms to metronomic grids. These grids can diminish the diversity of musical species (and their instruments). To further this focus on the effects of such distribution, generic models of jets (originally sold to airlines in the 70s by an advertising agency) rotated erratically with the motor motion and in synchrony with the trio of microtonal motors.