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[Computer​]​-​[​Piano]

by John Wall

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about

John Wall computer, piano,
editing / composing/ manipulation of sampled and original sound material.

This short composition consists of piano recordings ( that were not subject to any computer manipulations ) and computer created sounds that were built around those analogue sounds.
The objective was to create a work that combined the analogue and digital into a aesthetically convincing structured work.

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Historically, the analog-digital “divide” has proven to be fertile ground for experimentalists, largely due to its deceptively complex and open-ended nature. On one level, the divide raises the question of authenticity, “realness”: advocates of the latter might argue that the piano roll lacks a certain “human” expressiveness, unpredictability, texture, and so on. On another interrelated level, the divide gets to the very essence of our relationship with technology, and where the border really lies between “us” and our “tools.”

The obvious solution is to bridge the divide by any means necessary. Various artists have treated the digital realm as an augmentation of an inherently limited human potential—software can play faster, do more at once, etc.—or, conversely, have attempted to train and corral the computer into being more “like us,” usually in terms of its ability to improvise, dynamically respond to a rapidly changing environment, make decisions on the fly (or at least appear to).

To be clear, experiments conducted along these lines have resulted in some of the very best music ever made. But there is also something to be said for maintaining that admittedly artificial separation between analog and digital, as John Wall does in “[Computer]-[Piano],” where he very clearly specifies that the piano recordings “were not subject to any computer manipulations,” and that “computer created sounds were built around those analogue sounds” (emphasis mine).

There is something decidedly old-fashioned about this approach—there is no breathless, Futuristic optimism about the untapped potentialities of technology to be found here. Instead, each half of the divide is simply treated like any other raw material: each has its properties, strengths and weaknesses—that is all. As a result, the end goal is no longer to bend one half in the direction of the other, or to attain some kind of perfect human-machine singularity. Instead, the driving force becomes a desire to explore and unfold in real-time the material properties of each half.

Contrary to expectations, this artificially “parallel” approach actually explodes the boundary between analog and digital rather than reifying it. Over the 6-minute duration of Wall’s piece, piano and computer seem to merge: percussive, harmonic-rich strikes of hammer to string appear to splinter into three-dimensional slivers of digital noise and, conversely, the piano constantly emerges, mirage-like, from pools of filtered and time-stretched abstraction. But this is all an illusion: the two, however deftly they interweave, remain separate in reality.

This conflict between illusion and reality, merging and separation, illuminates the complexity of the analog-digital divide by reminding us of the narrowness of that divide, and the divisions within the divisions—not only between computer and piano, but also between human and piano, human and computer, the user of software and its architect. The end result is a distinctly contemporary music that could not exist without very particular technological advances, but a music that also stubbornly refuses to fetishize the latter, dispelling myths and rooting us in the material reality and history of the tools and processes at hand. It is this sober quality that gives such power to Wall’s work—and makes the moments of lift-off that much more thrilling.

review by Sunik Kim

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released October 28, 2021

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John Wall London, UK

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