Denotation: Interactive composition

Experts weigh in on the definition and context of a popular term.

Professor of the Practice David Marchant performing Leonardo’s Chimes, an interactive dance. (Photo: Courtesy of David Marchant)

Interactive Composition: A composition or improvisation where software interprets human interaction to modify or enhance the composition.

In the mid-1980s, when computers were starting to become household items, trombonist George Lewis began experimenting with “computer music” and created Voyager, a sound-processing software that responded in real time to one or two other human players.

Since then, this type of music, now called interactive composition, has spread to video games, dance music and other genres.

But interactive composition is a problematic term. “[The software] has a very detailed algorithmic architecture, a set of sounds, tone colors, virtual instruments,” says Paul Steinbeck, PhD, assistant professor of music theory and composition in Arts & Sciences. “So it fits all of the requirements of a composition. … But at the same time, anything can happen, and there’s a real-time interaction that’s completely undetermined. I’m not sure whether it’s composition or improvisation or something in between.”

David Marchant, professor of the practice in the Performing Arts Department in Arts & Sciences, would consider interactive composition more an act of improvisation. In 2007, he performed the interactive dance Leonardo’s Chimes. Marchant, along with musician John Toenjes and computer programmer Ben Smith, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, created a computer program that produced music generated by dancing.

The space where Marchant danced had interactive areas that triggered sounds. “Then John remixed the sounds that my movement generated,” Marchant says. The music inspired Marchant’s dancing. “So it’s this big three-way conversation going on between the computer; the re-mixer; and me, the mover-generator of sounds.”

Marchant, who is known for his improvisational dancing, received a one-month fellowship in 2014 to visit Mutianyu, China, where he and his wife, Holly Seitz Marchant, gave site-specific performances in the local landscape.

“[Improvisation] is much more difficult than reading music. You don’t have to be very gifted to read a novel. You do to write a novel.”

Rich O’Donnell

“In a studio, you basically have an empty box, and then you have to fill it with whatever comes out of your own body or imagination,” Marchant says. “What I really love about working with a specific location is that I have to become interactively responsive to the ‘other,’ whether that is a tree, a rock or the way a computer interprets my actions.”

For Rich O’Donnell, director of the Electronic Music Studio in the Department of Music and principal percussionist for the St. Louis Symphony for 43 years, the key to interactive composition is the interaction. An innovative and experimental musician, O’Donnell has created new instruments and even a new drumming technique. He also programs software to conduct free improvisation.

“[With] free improv, you make up the rules as you go. The idea of form becomes a verb rather than a noun,” O’Donnell says. “I use a lot of randomness in the computer program interaction. With enough random functions built in and algorithms that are intended to generate a lot of unexpected events, it gives you a lot of possibilities to explore.”

For O’Donnell, exploring those possibilities is what makes interactive composition so fascinating. “You can play along. You can accompany. You can argue. You can debate, which is something I like to do. I don’t like always to agree, because that sounds boring after a while.” He pauses. “It’s much more difficult than reading music. You don’t have to be very gifted to read a novel. You do to write a novel.”