Musings of a Digital Brain

In July I visited NK in Berlin for a workshop in Granular Synthesis by Fredrik Olaffson.
The workshop was great and showed me how best to apply the ideas of granular synthesis in SuperCollider. SuperCollider is my favourite toy now, but Fredrik's approach to granular synthesis was very different from how I used to do it.
I came home with lots of fresh ideas and the usual plans for sonic world domination.
The beauty of granular synthesis is that it is extremely suitable for a finegrained algorithmic control of the sound. You can literally order and blow clouds of tiny sound particles, to shape textured, percussive or melodic sounds to the mold of your algorithms and performance.

Though I'm sure many people think I'm pretty self-confident about my work, in general I talk very little about how I feel about it. I have a strong dislike of disproportionate concept-talk and hot air spewing (well for an artist at least).
Nevertheless, seeing as this is my site, I imagine visitors can be both curious and confused about what I try to do exactly.

When I first followed a workshop at OKNO, in 2006 I believe, I got completely obsessed by generative algorithms and the process-driven beauty they evoke.
This is somewhat difficult to explain in text, but most easily explained it's trying not to paint a tree by looking at it, but to understand how it grows, express this dynamic in a set of formalisms and trying to recreate that.

The point is not necessarily to recreate nature's processes, but to find processes that are inherently elegant and beautifull like all the ones that surround us. A typical example is a flock of birds, you can watch them for hours, yet the rules by which the move and self-organize are deceivingly simple.

I got interested in visual forms, interactivity and the entire field of what is commony called new media.At the same time I was fed up with recorded electronic music and strongly believe that performance is where music lives, at least for me.
Computer music performance is widely accepted as an underdeveloped practice, even though there is an established academic tradition.
The complex nature of making synthetic sound, organizing it in music and expressing it in realtime demand a great deal of the aspiring musician.
Typically the experimental electronic musician has to be a programmer, an instrument builder, a composer and an instrumentalist at the same time. If like me you have no formal education, you're in for an intense study.

So the dream, the vision I try to make happen is to capture algorithmic beauty in generative processes, to expressively manipulate them in a musical performance and get a glimpse of the algorithmic beauty.
I often get frustrated, get the impression that I'll never get there, but I've come to accept that it's a long term goal, just need to work long and hard. In the meanwhile there are snapshots of where I am in this silly quest, some nice, most not, that's experimentalism for you.