"Take the horn out of your mouth": strategies for controlling group improvisation

This paper will focus on one of the most common problems encountered whenever laptop musicians come together for a group improvisation: devising suitable strategies to prevent the usual descent into an unintelligible cacophony of noise as each performer struggles to find themselves in the mix. I will use examples from my own personal experience as a performer in various laptop ensembles, detailing some of the more successful strategies as well as the complete failures.

I will also present some systems which I am currently developing for this purpose. The systems are based on the interactions between signalling molecules during the early development of the human body. I will look at the processes involved, how they will be mapped to musically useful parameters, the deployment of the generated control data and the role of the individual performer within all of this.

Jason Dixon