What happens when improvising musicians meet with their digital shadow but this one shows its own personality? How do they interact?
Nicolas Kummert will be experimenting with various musicians, manipulating their sound in real-time through a computer while they improvise, instantly sharing control of what becomes a single hybrid instrument.
His objective is to determine how this particular collaborative process could be valuable to researchers in the fields of electroacoustic music, collaborative improvisation, the psychology of creativity, and to his way of making music.
Through recordings and interviews, he will observe how this shared control of the sound influences the occurrence of intersubjectivity and empathy between the two musicians, which he considers as the core elements of improvisation.
At a time when AI is more and more considered as a viable musical partner Nicolas is focusing on the central role of human relations in improvised electroacoustic music.
He will also reflect on how electronic manipulation disconnects the music from our physical reality and the instrument, and how it increases the level of abstraction and poetry of the music in the way rhetorical devices contribute to turning prose into poetry.
In a second phase, Nicolas will explore this interaction in interdisciplinary contexts to seek new inspirations and open up new prospects for the future of this research. They consist in manipulating an actor’s speech and offering a dancer the possibility to manipulate the sound of an improvising musician through midi controlling sensors. This improvising duet will give visual substance to sound modulation and explore the intersubjectivity between sound and movement.
