Ablinger says it is “always the connection between modules, the edge, is the crucial part: the perfect cut”. ​The facility to coordinate multiple channels of audio on iPads via WiFi was used to precisely synchronise the unfolding of each module and its contrasting performance practice.

In 2018, the Limited Hangout: in the field project, a series of site-specific long form compositions responding to the sonic/physical environment of a chosen locale, using tools such as acoustic measurement and analysis, topographical mapping, physical structures and weather conditions of specific spaces and times.
This presentation discusses performances presented so far in the the Limited Hangout project as well as 2 other works by the author willson's downfall [2018] for three instruments and field recordings, and decompression [2019] for 144 musicians and the St. Pauli Elbe tunnel. These works explore a number of approaches to the creation of site-specific music and means of establishing connections and interaction between sound and site, including the use of field recordings, topographical information, transcriptions, resonant frequencies of an 864 meter two tube tunnel respectively to interact with site-specific locations. The paper discusses methods of synthesising big data sets, for the generation of scores for acoustic instruments and electronic audio components and approaches to creating spatial audio environments within existing ambient natural environments. These approaches are compared to the work of composers such as R. Murray Schafer, Matthew Burtner, Marta Tiesenga, Vanessa Tomlinson and Charles Underriner.
A series of 6 site-specific performances responding to the sonic/physical environment of their chosen locale. 6 composers are challenged to create sounds interacting with particular environments using tools such as acoustic measurement and analysis, topographical mapping, physical structures and weather conditions of specific spaces and times. The initial concept was to limit the audience for each performance to 30 and to only supply the precise location will only be shared a week in advance of the performance.

Sage Pbbbt Narrows / Expands / Elides [2018]  29 Jul 2018 5pm
The first performance in the Limited Hangout series was Sage Pbbbt’sNarrows / Expands / Elides. The site for the work was the underside of the Perth Narrows Bridge –the central conduit between the north and south sides of the Swan river. The piececonsists of three movements; the first two attempting to “explore ideas of (non)striated space and (de)colonization” and the third reflecting on the problematic nature of such attempts.

Movement I: through a clumsy musickalanalogy of de-striatification/ de-colonization

njookenbooro [2018] for 12 performers at  Herdsman Lake 2 Sep 2018 8pm

The first section of the score was created through the transcription of prominent environmental frequencies which were mapped directly onto a spectrogram of a field recording made at the location several days earlier.

New piece for GreyWing for the concert Artificial Field - rising water. A field recording by Leah Barclay of flood waters in Queensland was resynthesised: firstly by using frequency data to control amplitude and amplitude data to control frequency; secondly by "threshing" - using and sustaining only the strongest sinusoids (the lower spectrogram); and finally by "freezing" the frequency spectrum at points of prominent amplitude transitions (the upper spectrogram). The spectral freeze points were then used to derive a sectional formal structure for the work. "Lyrebird" software was used to create a "base" score representing strongest sinusoids and coloring them according to their timbral qualities. This score was then separated into three colours (timbres) and distributed to the three instruments (bass clarinet, electric guitar and harp). Then layers sometimes obscuring this score were built by transcribing shapes from the "thresh" and freeze" spectrograms. The variation in this  material was used to define the sectional structure (which had been derived from the data in the original recording). Thanks to Leah Barclay for letting me use another of her fantastic field recordings. Below is the opening few seconds of the "full score".

kurui [2018] for bass clarinet, piano​/​melodica and percussion was written for a performance at the Cooroora Institute on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland. The performance was part of my sub-residency within a residency by Clocked Out (Erik Griswold and Vanessa Tomlinson) at the Griffith Conservatorium in Brisbane. The institute’s name is derived from the name for possum in the Gubi Gubi language: kurui. Although it is a scrolling score the notation is relatively traditional, aiming to bridge the space between 'faithful" transcription of sound on its own terms and a more "interpretive" transcription of sound in human "musical" terms. 

The work ends with the repetitive huff/clicks of the possum. Some of the prominent pitched content is highlights on bass clarinet and melodica.

​The score for willsons downfall [2018] was written for a performance at Harrigan's Lane a property in the Great Dividing Range on the border of New South Wales and Queensland.

​The final score (excerpt below) comprises the lines (representing the volume/spatiality of the field recordings) and the stylised representations of terrain, forest and river.

The performer’s relationship to Lyrebird in the example below is the most “score-like”, in that the pitch, rhythmic and dynamic contours of the bullfrog croaks from the field recording are adhered to with a great deal of  precision. The task is perhaps simplified because the pitch range of the croaks is limited to about 3 semitones, however the spectrogram indicates that this method of synchronisation of the recording and the performance by pianist and composer Michael Terren is effective in this instance. 
​

TLQ#7 -
Lindsay Vickery September 14, 2017 
in TLQThe same questions, asked to different improvisers in Perth. Credit for the idea, and some of the questions, goes to the amazing Addlimb archive.

and podcast
MAKING CONVERSATION,
EPISODE 16: REBECCA ERIN SMITH INTERVIEWS LINDSAY VICKERY

In the process of developing the work Field Notes, I made a Max patch to analyse field recordings and derive pitches, translate them into MIDI notes and record them as the basis of a score. It became easier to record the MIDI output into a Logic file where they could be further threshed into information that might become a score: the Max Patch was quite capable of generating data that was too complex to transcribe into a traditional score. (In fact it brought into focus just how little information can be captured in a traditional score: because of the temporal grid that the score imposes). In any case I found that the output could also be used to generate an interesting accompaniment for an improvisation. The sample below demonstrates this idea - using an electric piano sound that (to me anyway) sounded a little like the Zawinal/Corea accompaniments found in Mile Davis' Bitches Brew. I'm yet to turn this into a viable performance tool: it took a lot of tweeking to get the output heard here.

In the sense proposed by Deleuze and Guatarri, some of the earliest examples of rhizomatic works in Western Art music, include, Karlheinz Stockhausen Klavierstück XI [1956], John Cage Concert for Piano [1958], Pierre Boulez Third Piano Sonata [1963-], Mauricio Kagel Prima Vista [1962-3] and Earle Brown Event Synergy II [1967]. (It is perhaps notable that it was not necessary to negotiate functional harmony in a rhizomatic context in any of these works). These are works allowing for a multiplicity of re-orderings of different but determinate pathways to be explored, not simply exhibiting the non-linear “asignifying ruptures” found in Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments [1920] [19] or Charles Ives Holidays Symphony [1913] [D. Thurmaier. Time and Compositional Process in Charles Ives’s Holidays Symphony. PhD Indiana University, 2006, 26-82.
], or “lines of flight” [J. Gilbert.  Deleuze and Music. Edinburgh U.P., 2004] as found in jazz improvisation [J. Barham. Rhizomes and plateaus: Rethinking
jazz historiography and the jazz-‘classical’ relationship. Jazz Res. J., 3, 2, 2010, 171-202. ].
Boulez, for example, describes the Third Piano Sonata as a Labyrinth, in which,

A number of problems beset the first generation of paper-based rhizomatic scores:

• since the audience always experiences the works in a linear fashion, sequentially in time, their indeterminacy is unverifiable: the audience cannot compare the pathways chosen to those that were not. In this sense, the rhizomatic qualities are evident to the performer(s) alone;
• performances are arguably undermined by the fact that any particular instantiation may have been potentially been less satisfying than another;
• there can be no overarching cartographical representation of its the structural potentials for the audience inhibiting communication of the structural/performative principles in play;
• the length and complexity of alternate “pathways” are limited to passages accommodated by the printed score (Klavierstück XI uses a very large sheet of paper (53 x 94 cm), and a balsa wood frame to stand it upright);
• the quality of “immanent choice” that is one of the affordances of a rhizomatic structure, can only be executed by a single performer unless conductor(s) are used, (Event Synergy II), otherwise the route through the structure must be pre-determined (Concert for Piano, Third Piano Sonata, Prima Vista);
• indicating and limiting the number of potential connections between pathways is extremely difficult;
• Western music notation is almost exclusively read horizontally from left to right, meaning that pathways remain on a single plane and cannot easily be joined together 2-dimensionally;
• although pathways may consist of varied musical materials and therefore result in diverse musical outcomes, the sounds themselves remain situated in the instruments that make them, excluding the possibility of communication of the rhizomatic structure through the form-bearing [S. McAdams. Psychological Constraints on Form-Bearing Dimensions in Music. Contemporary Music Review, 4, 1, 1989, 181-198.] parameter of spatialisation.

As Žižek noted in relation to the cinematic qualities of novels immediately prior to the emergence of film, the burst of rhizomatic musical works in the 1960s seems “to point towards a new technology that will be able to serve as a more ‘natural’ and appropriate “objective correlative” [S. Žižek. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime. Seattle Washington: University of Washington Press, 2000, 39.]. The appropriate technology was graphical computing, but its emergence was still more than 30 years away and compositional concerns moved on to other diverse issues including Spectralism and Minimalism. Despite the permeation of rhizomatic concepts in New Media [R. W. Sweeny. Dysfunction and Decentralization in New Media Art and Education. Fishponds: Bristol, 2015, 79-108] and literature [G. P. Landow. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Johns Hopkins U.P., 2006.] from the 1990s onward, musical notation proved stubbornly resistant to adaptation to the screen.

Berlin the graffiti score begins to peel away revealing a five part harmonization of the East German national anthem in traditional notation, which they perform to end the work. Ubahn then, is a concatenative structure [A. Coenen. Stockhausen's Paradigm: A Survey of His Theories. 
Perspectives of New Music, 32, 2, 1994, 200-225.] comprising a freely rhizomatic first section, an indeterminate graphic notation section and a final traditionally notated section. The rhizomatic section has an idiosyncratic form in the sense that the pathway materials are quiet and combine together as a background layer, while the nodal points contain soloistic material. This arrangement highlights the nodal points and provides a contrasting, indeterminate texture.

detritus explores the “territorializing” [G. Deleuze, & F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism 
and schizophrenia. Minneapolis, University 
of Minnesota Press, 1987: 317. ] idea of the refrain, an element of rhizomatic structure also discussed by Deleuze and Guattari. They state that the refrain “organizes a limited space around a center in order to keep “the forces of chaos” outside as much as possible” [ibid]. In detritus the score always commences from the same point, a distinctive passage lasting about 10 seconds. At the conclusion of this passage the pathways trifurcate and continue to progressively proliferate. The structure emerges as a consequence of the repetition of this process for different periods of time (between 19 and 145 seconds), allowing a variety of pathways to be charted.
In this way the consequence of the rhizomatic score structure can be emphasized through the exposition of diverse outcomes originating from the same starting point. The use of a Refrain acts against what Deleuze and Guattari would call the ‘deterritorializing’ effect of indeterminate movement through the rhizomatic score structure.
Each performer in detritus has separate parts. The parts are horizontally (temporally) coordinated in the fashion typical of traditional music. This means that when the performers move together their parts are audibly more synchronized than when they are independent of one another. The semantic graphical score was assembled using rhythms and pitch contours from fragments (detritus) of a traditionally notated ensemble piece, cities sunk in endless slumber [2012] for violin, clarinet and piano.