A "principled" approach to new-media composition

The purpose of this post is to do a summary or roundup of our travels this week, with an emphasis on the third area of focus or questioning --namely, what is unique about new-media composing specifically?

In general terms, we began the week by defining composing as a matter of "putting things together." We went on from there to uncover, articulate, and explore intriguing implications in this basic definition --including implications that allied composing to perceiving and representation, and implications that saw in composing a stable form that exhibited the characteristic of self-similarity across a wide range of scales. We compose neurons in our minds into attitudes, and we also compose vocations and avocations (and hopefully a few vacations and meaningful relationships) into a life.

We also conversationally uncovered and explored the subtle point that composing is a two-way street. While we are constantly doing our own composing --putting our own thoughts and activities together-- we are also constantly being composed by others, and by external influences, events, occurrences, circumstances, cultural markers and expectations, and so forth. We frame the world, and we are also framed by it. This is another way to put it.

In-between the largest the smallest forms of composing, we also noted that we compose things like music, dances, plays, characters, set-designs, drawings, photographs, paintings, films, animations, sculptures, performance pieces, multimedia pieces, and so on. These are probably the types of things people normally think of when they hear the word composing.

A collage I made circa 2007

We went on a collective hunting and gathering expedition in search of large, small, and in-between sized composition resources. Intriguingly, the things we gathered tended to be inspirational in character --and this underscored a notable importance assigned to the element of inspiration in our online conversation. It may be that part of the composing composers need to do is arrange their synapses, and their internet travels, to be in a state of being inspired more often than not. It's interesting to think about this, and it's also interesting as an example of how the dance of conversation uncovers or reveals what's important. The post about inspiration generated an almost immediate conversational swirl. These sorts of patterns are very revealing.

We still don't know a great deal --not yet anyway-- about how music composing differs from film composing and other forms of composing. We did come up with a few resources on the how-to aspects of music composing, the how-to aspects of still-image/video composing, and one on writing, but we don't have anything yet for dance/choreography, or acting (creating or composing a character, or composing a production). No worries, though, we can close these gaps.

We also don't yet have any nitty-gritty information about process. This I think we can only get from interviews. I'm doing an interview with Joe Mills on his process of composing poetry, and on his process of writing prose. I'm interested in what he has to say about how he approaches these two different sorts of text-media composing. And what I'm after here is what he actually does, what his process is, and how he articulates it. I'm working with Joe to set this up to happen via Skype. My fortune cookie message says interviewing may be in your future as well, so please be thinking of someone you know in your field who you could interview about their compositional process.

This attempt to get nitty-gritty details about process from composers intersects with a piece of the field of instructional design --which is a field I'm interested in and have taught courses in. In what's called task analysis, instructional designers interview people who really know what they are doing in a particular arena. They do this in order to learn, and then codify, the expert's process and decision-points, so they can teach others how to do whatever it is that the expert does so well. Sometimes this type of knowledge only comes out via an interview process, and even then only with some prodding (which sort of reminds me of how it is often to get my teenaged sons to talk :)  Often if you ask an expert about their process, they might be baffled because they do their thing without thinking about it for the most part. But if you can get them talking they will be able to tell you how they do what they do.

The interview process is interesting. Experts will leave out details because it all strikes them as fluid and natural. Like Nike, they just do it. So you have to ask them to back up sometimes, ask them to talk more about something they say, break down a single step in their process into smaller steps, etc. in order to get the information. Or sometimes, if possible, you might ask them to demonstrate their skill, whatever it is, and talk about it as they are doing it. This can be very effective in some cases. Anyway, we need to do some interviewing about compositional processes.

In terms of getting at the unique aspects of new-media composition, often you guys are the experts for having grown up with all of the things that strike older folks as noteworthy --i.e., writing in order to communicate; this signifies a big shift for older folks who wrote only for teachers and grades, but seems to strike many of you as something along the lines of, "Well duh, I mean why else would someone write!  So you are experts in general with new-media, and this puts you nicely within reach of developing specific expertise as new-media composers (some of you may already be there :) It's not just a youth thing, though. We all bring valuable things to the table, and this is precisely why conversation is so critical to learning: it unerringly brings out or elicits each person's unique gifts.

Okay, end of part one. Now I want to briefly share with you what I regard as the basic principles of new-media composing, in order to wrap-up this part of our work.  Here goes:

The principles identified by Manovich seem solid to me --numerical representation, modularity, variability, automation, and transcoding all seem to me to be principles that can be usefully mined for inspiration and applied in compositional practices. Some of Manovich's principles are less new than others -- modularity and variability for example have been used extensively in musical composing probably forever (I mean they are both very close to repetition and rhythm itself). And a lot of classical music seems to be built of loops, no?  But even these principles, while not new in all respects, are remarkably accessible on the new-media palette; as such they have a new prominence perhaps, and  they also arguably become new in proximity and in combination with one another.

A frame from a short movie

Meanwhile, numerical representation is very new I think. For example, being able to make a string of numbers = a sound, or = a color, etc., allows for a new degree of synesthesia to occur at the deepest levels of the media itself. I think we're just now beginning to see some of the potentials of this new synesthesia emerge.

New-media automation is also truly new as I see it. The ability to to write software that in turn automatically produces compositions of various sorts signifies a deep change.


Transcoding is not new --people mine whatever is on the technical scene for metaphors, and the metaphors then impact society and institutions (i.e., early industrial tech generated the metaphors that produced standardized education and testing, etc.). But even transcoding has new nuances and velocity, I think, in our era.

Notably for our purposes, music has been on the automation beat for some time --think about music boxes, player-pianos, then electronic music, and now digitalia galore. Other fields are arriving later to the party, later to the realization of deep change, and later to the aesthetic possibilities the deep change contains (music is ahead in many ways, and I'll say more in just a bit about why I think that's the case) but it's all coming to those fields too. Creativity isn't going anywhere, but it is going somewhere --to specific places, collecting like snowdrifts, often at new levels or scales. That's my view. For example, hip hop uses all of Manovich's principles at a higher level, it just takes 'em up, and then spins them back into DIY artmaking. The creativity sort of moves to another layer, one floor or level up, down, or sideways, then returns into the hands of the trickster who is the artist. I think that's what I'd want to say about it.

Some of the creativity moves to programming --a compositional activity which involves writing code (of all things, writing has not disappeared either!) in languages that make software that produces things like automatic compositions. This is why we'll take a glimpse at the programming part of the new-media universe or multiverse later in the term.

Meanwhile, and now we approach the end of the story for now, Marshall McLuhan introduces a couple or three principles that kinda sorta act as glue to hold together Manovich's principles. McLuhan talks a great deal about us being in an "acoustic" age (so there's music's edge) in which the world is literally all around us, like sensaround in a way, like sound itself moves in a way. He notes that this is MUCH different from orienting ourselves via face-forward visual understandings of the world and composition. And I think he's spot-on about this.

We're now, according to McLuhan, re-orienting ourselves to a world that suddenly seems to be coming at us from everywhere and all the time (he sometimes calls everywhere 'global' and all the time 'simultaneous'). These don't have to be vague terms. Simultaneous --more than one thing at a time-- can simply mean layered. Everywhere can simply means a kind of portability, or a general synesthesia the effectively dissolves all boundaries, electrons acting like a solvent. Again this does not usually strike young folk as a sudden change or even noteworthy because it's more or less the world as you've always known it. Yet even for young folk it can sometimes be disconcerting. McLuhan described all this in the years around 1964, inspired interestingly enough by great literature, the work of James Joyce and others.

The magnificent VW microbus

Anyway, maybe we might could call McLuhan's main three principles acousticity, ubiquity, and simultaneity --with boundary-dissolution added as a kind synergistic by-product perhaps. Again I think these are principles that can be mined and used as raw materials by any type of composer. These, too, are not entirely new --and in fact McLuhan, like Walter Ong, on many occasions notes that the acoustic, aural, or oral is a much more common organizing principle in human history than the visual is. It's also of interest in this regard that 'youth culture' --starting with my generation in some ways, again around the year 1964, when we were your age and micro-buses were micro-buses-- tends to orient around popular music. This too could be a sign of the acoustic times.

I think a principle of new-media that is often missed, or not made enough of, is reflexivity. This is the sort of 'hall of mirrors' principle that I think I've mentioned elsewhere, on the course website for example. Dance, music, writing --all of which are already forms of representation in themselves-- are now re-represented by new-media. This sets up a world that spawns representations of representations of representations of representations... Reflexivity. I think I thunk this principle of new-media up on my own, which means millions of people also thunk it up on their own probably, or maybe only 647,965 people did. In any case this principle, too, can be mined and applied to the many areas of new-media composition that are now open to us, and the many areas that we can invent or open or write on our own once we understand and learn how to articulate and use the above principles in our compositional work.

Finally, we would also want to include what might be called the 'hyper' principle of new-media. We live in a time that is hyper-individual and hyper-social at the same time, which is vastly different from the quasi-individual and quasi-social, mass-industrial, and/or broadcast era that preceded the current one.

Find below an experiment I did using the Pixlr image editor to make a collage-like self-portrait composition on the theme of reflexivity. I'm finding this cloud-based editor to be a tiny bit glitchy but otherwise very powerful.

A collage I made this morning May 24 2012