! Reading Response 3

! It’s neat to see the many layers of the ocarina button design come

together to make one cohesive form. I like the visual trick of the outer layers

expanding while the inner layer contracts and I’m deﬁnitely taking note of these

clever ways to make a ﬂat medium seem more tactile."

! Principle 3.3 talks about imbuing personality, taking the digital world’s

inherent rigidness and making it feel more organic through design. There’s a

musical term called “phrasing” which deﬁnes the way a musician “shapes” a

series of notes to convey emotion or expression. In the classical world there are

a lot of incredible players that can perfectly execute a complicated passage, but

their delivery often sounds “mechanical.” Without thoughtful phrasing, a

performance misses a sort of gestural rendering that emotionally coheres the

complex relationship between time, rhythm, volume, and ADSR. After reading

this chapter, I think the visual analog to phrasing would be animation using slew.

Another thought I had while reading this section was, “wait, are friction/gravity

the interpolators of life?” They are forces which shape the ﬂow of motion, create

resistance and pull things together to ultimately smooth reality's transitions. ! "

! Principle 3.12 regards pragmatics, the experiencer making sense of the

design without a need for explanation. When I was younger I had a hard time

accepting that this was a designer’s responsibility, especially when creating

experimental work. I used to brush oﬀ an audience-disconnect as, “oh well, they

just don’t get it.” Now, I really try to consider altering the project's concept,

delivery method, set or setting if people can’t connect the dots. I’m aiming to

make art for humans, and if humans aren’t clicking, something is oﬀ on my end."

! Principle 3.13 talks about inventing artful constraints, which reminds me

of a favorite compositional challenge from a professor in undergrad. He would

walk around and play a completely random midi passage for each student. That

was then the start point from which we were to compose a new piece.

“Randomness” as a constraint sounds almost paradoxical, but to be

constrained to using his speciﬁc random pattern turned out some really

interesting ideas. I often carry this into songwriting today, generating a random

string of words that I must use in lyrics. Taking this concept to it’s comical

maximum, I once held a workshop where I used a geiger counter to

stochastically generate musical constraints. In the form of radioactive decay, I

captured ultimate randomness and transformed this into canonical

compositional restrictions. Additionally, an exercise that we are currently doing

in Mark Applebaum’s electronic sound poetry course involves using literary

constraints such as univocalism (only one vowel allowed), anadiplosis (last word

of each line is ﬁrst word of the next), and anaphora (each line begins the same

way). The diﬀerent bursts of inspiration that blossom from these simple self-

imposed rules are truly wild. Makes me think of Conway’s Game of Life.