Is live electronic music inherently research based?

As a composer and performer, I have a fairly mixed background. I was one of the first graduates on the BA in Sonic arts at Middlesex University, where I learnt ‘pure’ instrumental composition, studio and live technologies, music history, aesthetics, theory; and experimented with a range of artistic approaches including improvisations, music for dance and theatre, installation art and ‘concert hall’ music. I then completed an M.Phil. in Composition as part of BEAST, where I composed mainly electro-acoustic music for ‘fixed media’, but also worked with digital instrument design and performance. Now I am close to completion of a Ph.D. in Composition with Technology at Birmingham Conservatoire, where I have focused entirely on composition and performance with live electronics with a particular focus on developing new tools for working with electronics.

It feels like I have come to a pivotal point and that it is time for some reflection. Looking back over the past 13 years, it feels like I have always been fascinated by the sound world made available by digital technology, and nowhere is this sound world more refined, more delicate, or more vivid than in the studio. By contrast, the sounds offered by live electronics often seem one dimensional, bland, and lacking in depth. Why then, would a composer chose live electronics as an outlet for their creativity?

The reasons for me are twofold. Firstly I find that there is something slightly unhuman about studio-based electro-acoustic music. I take a leap of imagination and place myself into the sound world created by the composer, and this works well when listening in private — I can lose myself in the music. However in a live situation I find electro-acoustic music for fixed media problematic. The performance element usually consists of diffusion, which is undertaken by a performer with their back to the audience (usually) moving faders on a mixing desk quite slowly. This seems to me quite unsatisfying both socially and musically. Someone once likened the experience of a BEAST concert as being like a bunch of friends sitting playing CDs to each other! Live electronic music overcomes this predicament by drawing upon the performance traditions of ‘classical’ instrumental music and (more recently) recent laptop-based performance traditions. These come with their own social and musical caveats, but in general I find this more exciting.

The second reason I find myself specialising in live electronics (and the main point of this post) is an interest in the challenge of making the live electronic music idiom ‘better’. That is, enabling more engaging and expressive music to be made live with less effort. This is increasingly becoming the focus of my work: whilst I feel that studio-based electro-acoustic music has an established set of tools, idioms and practises resulting in recognisable stylistic traits, live electronics is often hampered by the limitations of the technology, the limitations in technical ability of the composer or both. Simply put, as an art form, I don’t believe that live electronics is ‘there’ yet. In fact it has a very long way to go. It is therefore a fantastic research and development challenge to invent new tools and provide improvements for the broader community to engage with.

I believe these are some of the main factors that motivate practitioners in choosing ‘live’ over ‘studio’. Live electronics carries with it an inherent risk — will the electronics work? will things go as planned? — which leads to exciting performances and an engaging social element to the music. Live electronics is also immensely challenging, requiring an extensive range of skills and knowledge.

So the question is, in composing and performing with live electronics, are we inherently undertaking research? Probably not always. However, most of the time, I think the answer is ‘yes’!