Timing and Phrasing in Voyager
Since its premiere at the Massachusetts College of Art in October 1987, my computer music work Voyager and its successors have gone through many transformations of hardware, software, and materials. In all cases, however, the interactive conception of the work and its predecessors remains central: human and/or non-human musicians are engaged in live, completely improvised dialogue with a computer-driven, interactive “virtual improvisor.” that analyzes aspects of the improvisors’ performance in real time, using that analysis to guide an automatic composition (or, if you will, improvisation) program that generates both complex responses to the musician’s playing and independent behavior that arises from its own internal processes. The system does not need outside input to generate music and does not need to wait for such input to commence its performance. Since 2004, a new wrinkle was added: a set of behavior-supervising clocks that operate concurrently to generate much more supple and detailed musical phrasing and response. This paper will discuss the implications of these internal temporal workings in terms of the understanding that as with any software, the emergent decisions made by these clocks tend to express not only the design decisions of the composer and the real-time decisions by the humans and the machines on stage, but also larger, culturally imbued notions of musical time.