My piece this week was a live performance piece, and because including an MP3 of my piece wouldn’t really fully demonstrate the live components of my work, I’ve included a Youtube video instead demonstrating my performance of the piece, as well as a rather lengthy explanation about my reasoning for the piece’s design as well as the program I used to create it. But for those of you who don’t want to sit through a 15 minute long video of me talking to the camera, here’s a short summary of what I did (my program note) and why I did it (my blog entry).
(For some reason, WordPress isn’t letting me embed the video; here’s a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjTTi0sPno4)
While the example piece we saw last week examined a very specific structural characteristic of the prion (i.e. dissecting the prion down to each amino acid and distinguishing each amino acid by assigning a note in the diatonic scale to it), I wanted to explore a structural element that was a bit broader and that piqued my personal curiosities a bit more.
As someone who’s not particularly in tune with the science world, I find myself constantly taking for granted the amount of precision and “neatly arranged coincidences” required for many things in the natural world to work properly. This week, this thought came to mind as I was reading the primer on proteins included in the assignment and found myself in slight disbelief in the fact that the joining of two amino acids requires something very specific (a water molecule) to be eliminated in order for another very specific bond to be created between two atoms (the peptide bond). It reminded me of a puzzle — but even when we put together puzzles, sometimes it takes us several tries for us to orient a piece in the right way so that it fits into the slot. How does nature do the same thing so quickly, so naturally, and with so little room for error?
That last thought brought me back to prions and the fact that the diseased form of PrP is only “diseased” due to a misfolding in the protein. However, one tiny “mistake” in a microscopic world running on strict, unwritten rules and protocols can result in such catastrophic diseases and sizable “real world” consequences, such as the thousands of cows that were killed as a result of the mad cow epidemic and its economic toll on the beef-raising industry.
The idea of one tiny mistake having sizable consequences conveniently brought me back to my final project that I created in MUS 275 last semester, which was taught by Professor Johnson. For this project, I wanted to recreate this live performance of “Just For Now” by Imogen Heap. From this original performance, one might assume that the carefree, “artistic” nature of the song requires little coordination and is all a matter of “feeling the music.” I initially thought the same; in starting the project, my main goal wasn’t to pull off a good performance, because I thought that would be the easy part. The main objective of my project was actually to recreate a piece of hardware that Imogen used in that performance — a looping station, which is an actual nuts-and-bolts machine with buttons and switches and levers that can be purchased in one piece on the market. Instead of using this machine, I wanted to design my own from scratch using a program called Max. Max is very similar to Puredata, which is the program we used last week.
However, designing my homemade looping station in Max turned out to be the easy part of the project. When it came time to test out my creation and begin practicing the song, I came to realize that because the piece relies heavily on live-recorded loops that build on top of one another, timing my live recordings correctly was of utmost importance. The opening line sounds very free-flowing with little real sense of rhythm; it sounds as if the singer just holds out the note for however long she wishes and waits for the loop to come back around before recording the next line on top of it. However, the most crucial part of the piece is actually the claps; they’re the only component of the piece that keeps time using a straight beat and, in essence, act as a type of metronome for the entire performance. Without first establishing that metronome, the entire piece goes to waste.
It took me many long and frustrating days to realize the importance of establishing this metronome, so for my final performance I actually used a small headphone and listened to a recording of my “metronome beat” as I sang those first few lines. In addition, I had to make many careful adjustments to my original patch in order to accommodate my tempo; in particular, the length of each looping “tape” had to be calculated down to the millisecond so that all the layers of each loop would align perfectly with each other. For example, I had to record two rounds of the claps on top of each other, and so the looping “tape” that held the claps needed to be just the right length so that my first clap of the second round would fall right on top of the first clap of the first round.
So the patch itself is already highly customized to this specific piece, which I think helps to illustrate the nature of a misfolded prion even more clearly because the misfoldings take place within the structure of the individual protein itself. Even if the protein has evolved to a point where it’s a perfect little machine with gears that spin in perfect time with each other, one wrench into the machine can kill the whole thing. That’s the idea I wanted to explore with my project.
To demonstrate this, I decided to eliminate one small point in my performance to see what would happen. Usually when I perform this piece, I’ll be able to hear what I’ve already recorded through some sort of speaker. But for this performance, I completely eliminated that element. As I recorded each loop into my patch, I muted the speakers on my computer so that I wouldn’t be able to hear what I had already recorded. As seen in the video, the results basically speak for themselves: nothing aligns with anything and while all the basic components are all there and perfectly recognizable, the end result is one big mess that only gets worse as you add more layers to it.
While it might seem that taking away my “privilege” of listening to my work as I record my loops makes for a huge disadvantage, it actually shouldn’t have made such a big difference. As aforementioned, the patch is designed in a way to prevent errors as much as possible, much like how proteins evolve in a way that eliminates room for error as a matter of Darwinian survival. On top of that, I’ve performed this piece countless numbers of times and I have a pretty good sense of rhythm and pitch, to the point where one might think I should be able to “feel” where each line goes without relying on prior recordings or metronomes to help me. However, despite these handicaps, the end result still turned out to be a complete mess.
In choosing to execute this assignment in this way, I wanted to capture the dramatic contrast between PrP-C and PrP-Sc. The normal isoform is greatly beneficial to the neural functions of all sorts of mammals, to the point where scientists can confidently say that PrP-C is a necessary and important protein in maintaining proper biological function, and yet we have no idea what it actually does. PrP-Sc on the other hand, turns brains into Swiss cheese. Yet, the only difference between these two forms of the same protein lies in a simple misfolding — a mistake.
We expect all the elements of the natural world to work perfectly and take for granted the perfect cohesiveness of “nature,” and we fail to realize the amount of precision that is required to maintain our organic, free-flowing purview of nature. Music – particularly electronic music – can be seen similarly. As we discussed in class last week, 20th century electronic music is often described as sounding random, having no logic, or just being “noise.” I used to think the same way, but after studying electronic music and gaining an appreciation for it over the past few years, it’s clear that despite its “random”-sounding nature, electronic music requires just as much precision as traditional-sounding forms of music, if not more. Even a more conventional sounding song like “Just For Now” requires an immense amount of control and precision despite the fact that it’s oftentimes seen as a free-spirited song with no rules — just like how many people might view nature.
In doing this exercise, I also thought about the usage of music as a means of communicating a scientific concept. The past two weeks have been both interesting and conceptually challenging for me, as writing and music are my two main artistic venues, and, being the stubborn person that I am, I don’t like to see non-artistic things meddling in them too much! Even now, it seems really unnatural and unartistic for me to write a poem that explicitly lays out the technical happenings behind a chemical reaction, or write a song that spells out the names of amino acids straight out. To me, doing so still feels extremely disjointed and forced and, at the risk of sounding a bit selfish and egotistical, the end result just doesn’t look like something I’d create. I’ve been trying to find ways to blend science and art without compromising one for the sake of the other and without compromising my own artistic style as well.
The solution I’ve settled on for now is simply using science as an inspiration for art. This was my approach when I wrote the poem from last week, and in some ways, it’s my approach for this week’s assignment as well. While I don’t think I can get to the point where I’m explicitly using scientific terms in my art, I think I can exercise my creativity in illustrating and communicating these scientific concepts in a way that feels natural to the artistic medium.