I am currently working on a project with Casey Sokol for which he has received funding from the Toronto Arts Council. Casey had the question "What would it be like if we could hear the improvised music that was not played?"
"The realization of each artistic choice is necessarily made at the expense of all other possible choices, yet none of these alternative directions is ever heard, either by the performer or the listener. In traditional forms of improvisation, some of these alternates may be revisited upon reentering the same melodic or harmonic sequences as, for example, playing numerous times through the same tune. In “free” or “open” or “non-idiomatic” improvised music, those unsounded paths inevitably remain inaccessible. I have an idea."
"This project aims to experimentally enact and record the “untaken roads.” The process will be as follows. An initial improvisation will be recorded, anywhere from 2 to 60 minutes in duration. There will inevitably be a number, perhaps as many as 40 “nodes” or moments of bifurcation, where decisions of major import occur: moments where the creative “road” diverges with unrealized but clearly perceived implications."
The project involves the linking of many pieces of music (approx. 120) and both activating and tracking them via a graphic interface.
The graphics will be in the format of a tree using the Javascript library, D3. While there will be several possible points of entry (roots or trunks) into the 120 pieces, most of them will be secondary and tertiary ‘tributaries’ or branches of those few starting points. The purpose of this form is to make it possible able to hear the way the piece might have ‘otherwise’ proceeded; many possible continuities will exist where usually only one is possible.
The listener will have the ability to click on an end point (a ‘leaf’) and hear the particular string of pieces which belong to that branch, but they should also be able to see where they are in the piece and also where the music is going to branch off to reach the selected end point.