Live Performance

Contributing to that miracle called laptop live act is the fact the audience would not even get much useful information from the knowledge of what software is running on that computer, since in most cases the software used for performing is not the same as the one used for creating the music. Even if it is, the process of performing is quite different from the process of composing. If we want to get a clue of what goes on when someone plays a laptop on stage we need to dive deeper here, deeper into technology and into the history of electronic music. And by doing so we might get a more precise idea of it all.

A classical non-electronic musical instrument relies on a constant user-interaction in order to produce a sound. The instrument has specific physical properties, defining its sound and the way it wants to be played. The music is a result of the properties of the instrument and the skills of the player. The listener has a sense of what goes on, even if they do not play any instrument themselves. It is obvious that a very small instrument sounds different from a very big one, that an orchestra sounds most massive and most complex if everyone there moves a lot, and that hitting a surface with another surface creates some sort of percussion, depending on the nature of the material. A whole world of silent movie jokes is based around this universal experience and knowledge. If hitting a head with a pan makes boioiooioioioioioggggg the comical element is the mismatch between expectation and result. Now explain to someone why pressing a space bar on a computer sounds like Bruce Springsteen one time and the next time you try it makes no sound at all... With "real" instruments it is also obvious that precision, speed, volume, dynamics, richness and variation in sound are the result of hard work, and that becoming a master needs training, education and talent. Without the player doing something there is nothing but silence.

The image above shows a Ampico-Player Piano from Marshall & Wendell, made in the 1920s. It was used by composer Conlon Nancarrow to realize compositions unplayable by human players. The invention of electricity made much more complex "self playing" instruments possible, and due to further technological progress in electronics and computer science, those machines became small enough to be affordable and sonically rich enough to make them interesting for composers. Nowadays two main types of electronic instruments exist - those which are made for classical instrumentalists, mostly equipped with a mechanical keyboard, and those for the composer, allowing for recording, editing, and manipulating music. And all kinds in between.

During the creation of electronic music this non-realtime process allows for an almost infinite complexity and detail, since each part of the composition can be modified again and again. New technologies make this possible to a previously unthinkable extent. We live in a world of musical undo and versioning. A computer is the perfect tool for these kinds of operations, capable of storing numerous versions of the same work, and also allowing for extreme precision in detail. The general workflow is much more efficient than the complex classical studio setup, with a giant mixing desk, lots of hardware units and physical instruments, even with ten assistants running around all the time. The result of working for several weeks with music software might be a piece of audio which is the equivalent of two hundred musicians, five huge racks of different effects units, and massive layering of instruments. Very impressive, indeed. So, now go, put this on stage...

chapter II - the tape concerts

At the very beginning of computer music, the only way to perform a concert was to play back a tape. The so-called tape concert was born, and the audience had a hard time accepting the fact that a concert means someone pressing a play button at the beginning and stop button at the end. Ironically, half a century later, this is what all of us have been experiencing numerous times when someone performs with a laptop. Trying to re-create a complex electronic composition live on stage from scratch is a quite absurd and, most of the time, simply impossible task.

The bottleneck is not that today's computers cannot produce all those layers of sound in realtime, but that one single performer is not able to control that process in a meaningful and expressive way. Even if someone owned all of the instruments of an orchestra and even if that person is capable of playing them all, it is obviously impossible for this person to perform a symphony alone.

Even while these concerts were referred to as tape concerts, there was the notion of the speaker as the instrument. The speakers were what the audience could see, and then there was the operator with his mixing desk and the tape machine. The speakers were located on stage, replacing the musicians, while the operator was sitting in the middle of the audience or at the back of the room, but not on stage. Visually it was clear that he was not the musician, but the operator. There was a very practical reason for this. Similar to the role of the conductor, the operator was the person controlling the sound of the performance, and this could only be done by a placement close enough to the audience. This became even more important once composers started to use multiple speakers.

The DJ concept has a connection to the tape operator concept: Both are taking whole recorded pieces and re-contextualize them. One by diffusion in space, the other by combining music with other music. No one in the audience listening to a choir on a record assumes that at the moment she experiences that choir, some very tiny little singers are having a good time inside a black disk of vinyl. We all know what goes on and we judge the DJ by other criteria than the intonation of the micro-choir inside the record. A good DJ set offers all we normally expect from a good performance. We can understand the process, we can judge the skills, and we can correlate the musical output to input from the DJ; we have learned to judge the instrument "turntable and mixer". The same is true for the distribution of pre- recorded music to multiple speakers. There is a chance we understand the concept and this helps to evaluate the quality of the performance more independently from the quality of the piece performed.

When listening to one of those more or less pre-recorded live sets playing back from a laptop, we have almost no idea of how to evaluate the actual performance, and we might want to compare a completely improvised set (which is indeed also possible now with a laptop if you accept reduced complexity of interaction) with a completely pre-recorded set. We have no sense for the kind of work carried out on stage. What we see is that glowing apple in the darkness and a person doing something we cannot figure out even if we are very familiar with the available tools. This scenario is not only unsatisfying for the audience but also for the performing composer. The audience cannot really judge the quality of the performance, only the quality of the underlying musical or visual work, but it might be fooled by a pretentious performer, might compare a complete improvised performance, full of potential failure, with a presentation of a pre- composed and perfectly well-balanced work - without being able to distinguish the two. Also the performer himself might want to be more flexible, might want to interact more, or at least might feel a bit stupid alone with his laptop on a 15 meter long 5 meter deep stage with the audience staring at him, expecting the great show which he will not deliver.

chapter III - the golden age of hardware

Historically, academic computer music is closely connected to research in instrument and interface design. And the typical concert audience appreciates or at least accepts experimental setups of all kinds, even if the result might be not 100% satisfying. I remember a concert years ago in a church, during a computer music conference. In front of us on tables was a battery of Silicon Graphics computer workstations, and racks full of electronics of unknown origin.

miiiiioooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuiiiiiioooooooooooooooooooooooooooo............ ...............iuiuiuuiuiuiuiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii............ Most of the audience seemed not to find this particularly strange or funny but I had a hard time not laughing out loud. And I was not even stoned. Data gloves did not make their way into the mainstream music scene, but obviously a performer doing something dramatic on stage which leads to an comprehensible musical result had potential.

While the creation of academic computer music was, from the very beginning, more of a non-realtime process than an actual performance, the late sixties saw the development of the first commercial synthesizers, equipped with a piano keyboard, and ready to be played by musicians rather than operated by engineers. Suddenly, electronic sound became accessible to real musicians - this led not only to impressive stacks of Moog, Oberheim, Yamaha and Roland keyboards on stage but also to a public awareness and notification of electronically created sounds. The peak of this development was the stage shows of electronic post-rock bands like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk in the late seventies and early eighties.

The giant keyboard stacks and effects racks not only looked good on stage, they were the same kinds of instruments as the ones used in the studio during the creation of the recordings preceding the live concerts. Putting them on stage was the most straightforward and clear way to perform electronic music and, since they were so incredibly expensive, the costs of transport and maintanance did not matter so much. If you could afford these tools you probably sold enough albums to pay for transportation and to attract enough people for a stage show. The classical rock scenario, music for the masses. This is the past, the golden age of electronic super groups and the times of super expensive hardware. Starting from the late 1980s inexpensive computer technology changed things dramatically. Creating electronic music became affordable for a broader range of people with the advent of home computer-based MIDI sequencing. This not only had an influence on the process of creation but also on performance.

chapter IV - fame and minaturization

If the creation of electronic music is possible in a bedroom, it is also possible to put the content of this bedroom (minus the bed) on stage. Or right from the trunk of a car down to a dance-floor or temporal concert space established in the basement of an abandoned warehouse, without stage, right in front of the audience, preferably close to the bar. The revolutionary counterpoint to the giant stage shows of the previous decade was the low-profile, non-stage appearance of the techno producer in the early nineties. The equipment became smaller and the distance between performer and audience became smaller too. I remember nights in Berlin clubs at this time, where I spent my time watching guys operating a Roland TR-808 drum computer or muting patterns on a mixer or in their sequencers on their Atari computers. The music was rough, and its structure was simple enough to be decodable as the direct result of actions taken by the performers. Flashing lights on mixer, all fingers on mutes, eye contact with the partner, and here comes the break! Ecstatic moments, created using inexpensive and simple to operate equipment, right in amongst the audience. Obscure enough to be fascinating, but at the same time an open book to read for those interested, and in every case very direct and, yes!, live!!

It's the tragic effect of history that these moments come to an end, driven by the same forces enabling them in the first place. Computers became cheaper and more powerful, and more and more complex functions could be carried out hidden in a small box.

This would all be fine, if performance conditions reflected this, but obviously it does not happen in most cases. Instead we experience performers who are more or less pretending to do something essential or carrying out little manipulations of mostly predefined music. The performer becomes the slave of their machine, disconnected from their own work as well as from the audience, which has to do with the second big motor of change: fame.

Fame puts the performer on stage, away from the audience. Miniaturization puts the orchestra inside the laptop. Fame plus miniaturization works very effectively as a performance killer.

When I started playing electronic music for audiences it was always in a very non-commercial situation, and I enjoyed this a lot. People came because of the music and not because there was a big name on a poster. Being close to the listeners enhanced the feeling of being part of a common idea.

This situation not only leads the audience to conclude the person on stage might be checking email or flight dates, but it is also extremely unsatisfying for the performer. Performing electronic music on a stage without acoustic feedback from the room, completely relying on some monitors, is quite a challenge and most of the time far from being fun for the artist. The sound would be so much better if we on stage could hear what the audience hears. The most horrible situation you can find yourself in is the classic rock setup. Two towers of giant speakers, bad floor monitors and a lonely performer behind a table, obscured by smoke, hiding behind the laptop. Usually no sound guy in the audience who has any real idea of what you're gonna do or how you want it to sound, and no band colleagues who could provide some means of social interaction; instead, there is just you and your laptop. The best recipe to survive this is to play very loud, with very low complexity and hope for an audience in a chemically enhanced mode.

Unfortunately most typical concert situations outside the academic computer music community do not support the idea of playing right in the middle of the audience. In a club, it is often impossible since there is the dance-floor and you do not want to be right in there with a laptop on a small table at four in the morning, and even if you do find a situation appropriate for a centered performance, maybe at a festival, after successfully arguing with a sound technician for several hours you might be confronted with the dynamics of the expectations of fans:

They want you elevated, they want you on stage, they want to look up to you, they want the show they are used to, and no 'weird experimental setup'.

We could come to the conclusion that only simple, rough and direct performances are real performances, forget about complexity and detail and next time we are invited to perform we grab a drum computer, a cheap keyboard, a microphone, and make sure we are really drunk. It might actually work very well. But what to do, if this it is not what we want musically?

* The End *

A german version can be downloaded as Word Document here: - Deutsche Fassung -