Emptying the Haunted Air

Rudd executed

I will no longer be posting things called travel diaries, because I was never really travelling in the first place. Hell, it’s not even a working holiday – my salary here doesn’t translate too favourably into my home currency, as XE.com is alsways quick to remind me.

In a week where Australian democracy has taken a bit of a pummelling (there is too much good coverage of Kevin Rudd’s political execution at the hands of the NSW Right to select a single story to link) I have tried to distract myself from it all by, once again, surrounding myself with numerous, wondrous tools for digital media creation, in aid of ideas that will probably never come to fruition. Still, it’s fun to fantasize; and I still chase that lofty dream of having a career in the video games industry, and hold, in my ghostly heart, Shanghai as the place to achieve it.

One such idea that has so consumed me is, in fact, a game idea. The idea being that, if I stop daydreaming and pull my finger out, and actually do something game-related, I might stand a chance of getting into the industry. But the idea is the distillate of a certain chain of events (daydreams, mostly), which I shall document on this here blog!

A few weeks ago, I went to my first music gig in Shanghai, at Yuyintang. It was called Good Jive 3 (whose jiving was, presumably, the third in some sort of jive sequence), and it was fun. It was a lot of fun in fact, despite there being a pretty weak turn-out. As in, the audience were so few that we felt collectively intimidated at the thought of approaching the stage. Still, the bands rocked, and jived where appropriate. The Beat Bandits, a sunny, surf-rock quartet, opened the evening, singing about stuff I didn’t really understand, but nonetheless delighting. Ho-Tom the Conqueror (no Douban link!) came next with an acoustic quartet (guitar, banjo, mandolin and mouth organ). This guy has a really warm, good-humoured stage presence and, among his funny, catchy songs about life in Shanghai, he sung the best cover of Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ that I have ever heard. X is Y followed with some pretty solid semi-math rock, and Stegosaurus? brought the whole gig to a close with some energetic and kooky garage-rock.

Like I said, it was all a lot of fun.

The thing is – and it hits me every time I sit in front of Ableton Live or AudioMulch, or whatever – I find myself constantly having to justify what I’m doing to myself. Not just because it’s a total waste of damn time, but also in a Modernist sense. I mean, surely – surely, in the postdigital age of media creation – the traditional modalities of music composition are well and truly exhausted. Every timbre, every rhythm, every harmony is accounted for, either as data floating around cyberspace; or else as ideas that are well within a human listener’s capacity for wonder.

This isn’t to say that music can’t amaze and excite, provoke and reach into one’s heart; and that these aren’t noble goals in and of themselves. The bands at Yuyintang the other night demonstrated this with jiving exhuberance. And, shit, there’s more incredible music that ever being released today, most of it free, and wholly aware of the grand musical traditions that inspire the composers in the first place. And that’s the thing. If all this great music is being released, what’s the point of me sitting in front of Ableton Live and attempting to create something that falls into the same traditions?

Certainly, AudioMulch (and, of course, Max/MSP, SuperCollider, and a dozen other software environments) have much more potential to create entirely new musical traditions, and change the way we listen. Listen to everything, that is; to music, to the television, to the world. And, this is where I began (I think). At University, I was fortunate enough to be taught by a handful of people who genuinely changed the way I looked at the world. Maybe that says more about the wonder of  young adulthood, rather than my own experience, but the fact is I wouldn’t be in Shanghai now were it not for these people. I’d probably be working as a media buyer at some pissweak media company.

(Out of respect, I’ll name them all, although I’ll only be talking about one. First, Shannon O’Neill, who drew me into the world of music and audio, after which I subsequently took on all audio subjects where I’d originally planned to study film production. He also supervised my thesis, and basically introduced me to electronic music. Tom Ellard, of the Severed Heads, taught  my Creative Audio Techniques subject for the semester when, for one reason or another, Shannon couldn’t teach it. Again, it was totally mind-opening, and, above all else, he encouraged us to approach music and sound design with ideas. Finally, another one-semester teacher during my Honours year, Theo Van Leeuwen who, aside from being a nifty jazz pianist, introduced me to the form of structural analysis with which I approach art, social semiotics.)

In my final year of university, Theo Van Leeuwen got me thinking about modalities – specific ways that data can be encoded to produce meaning. Obviously, as a discourse it isn’t without problems, but to me it’s the stuff of daydreams. I wonder about the beat divisions in Western music that have been so enduring; can a single beat be divided into five parts (rather than two, three or four), or seven, and still be meaningful, or even listenable? I listen to spoken Mandarin every day and think about tone. (This owes a lot to Tom Ellard, who originally got me thinking about this). That is, tone withour regard to scale, or harmony, or intervals. Just raw tone; it’s upper and lower limits, and how it changes with respect to time.

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And then there’s interactive audio. Or game audio, as I’d prefer to call it, for I can’t imagine a construct outside of the artistic and commercial reaches of gaming in which audio might be ‘interactive’. I also don’t like the word interactive, and consider it a verbal resort for the inarticulate. Game audio is much more relevant and meaningful, and I just happen to like games very much. Which is the reason I’d like – really like, not just half-arsed like – to make a game in Unity 3 and FMOD. I believe it’s well-within my ability, given time and patience. I don’t even intend to design much of a visual element (I completely lack the ability, anyway) as, in this ill-formed, foetal stage, the idea is to explore the concept of ‘emergent gameplay‘ with regard to sound. Like I said, totally premature, and with naïve assumptions about my programing ability. Suffice to say, for now, that I dream of a future where game soundtracks develop and evolve over the entire course of a game; that reflect the choices, style and preferences of the player, in the way Deus Ex’s narrative did ten years ago.

Ah- of course! That’s the other thing that’s been the subject of my daydreaming of late – Happy 10th Birthday, Deus Ex. We love you more that can ever be exressed. RPS’s coverage is as good as anyone’s.