Roger Alsop & Paul Fletcher Victorian College of the Arts 234 St Kilda Rd Southbank, 3006 Australia r.alsop@vca.unimelb.edu.au p.fletcher@vca.unimelb.edu.au Weaving relationships between sound and image in improvised performance. Abstract Integrating video and audio elements in improvised performance can be problematic in that the conventions of both media cause expectations in both the improvisers and their audience. These problems are magnified when more than one improviser is at play. A system that has roots in musical, narrative, and/or linguistic structures can be a starting point from which to form semantic zones. Within these zones, improvisers are free to react to the visual and aural elements resulting from the improvisation, while influencing those elements as the improvisation develops. This paper discusses methods of building semantic zones; possible structural analogies between music, narrative, and language; and the development of an improvisational system based on those precepts. Introduction It can be argued that humans like to make sense of the events they witness or are involved in; that we look for a meaning or logic that fits our internal paradigms and hegemonies, and that we can understand and relate to in some way. This desire for understanding in music can be seen in the number of journal articles, where much of the discussion centres on attempts to better explain, and therefore understand, the affect and effect of 'music'. It is important to acknowledge that the understanding, of what ever the event may be personal, and can be an emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or of any other kind. When developing an understanding of an art work, particularly in temporally based forms such as music of film, the viewer may form a story or narrative from which they recollect to develop an understanding and opinion of the artwork. When discussing the use of film as an educational tool Gary Berg saw that "Viewers of film clips tend to try and put a narrative structure onto the clips even if none is intended"(Berg 2000), it is possible that the same occurs when an audience is listening to music.. This need for, and method of, understanding may be either inherited, trained, or, most likely, mix of the two. Margaret Boden describes a successful creative artwork as containing: "An arresting metaphor or poetic image, an unpredicted twist of the plot, a novel style of music, painting, or dance...all these unexpected things amaze and delight us." she precedes her sentence with "Devotees of the humanities expect to be surprised."(Boden 1995) Here Boden describes one of the paradigms through which ideal artists, and perhaps consequently an ideal arts audience, engage with an artwork. What she infers is that there are paradigms that the viewer expects and through which they initially filter their understanding of the art work that are confronted, subverted or indeed surprised by event that do not fit those paradigms. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson expand on this idea saying "Like emotion, meaning is important to our experience of artworks. As an active perceiver, the spectator is constantly testing the work [he or she is viewing] for larger significance, for what it says or suggests. The sorts of meanings that the spectator attributes to the work may vary considerably."(Bordwell 2001) . This constitutes a search for understanding beyond the work itself, fitting the work into a familiar story or methodology, and perhaps then seeing some relevancy to themselves. An audience searches for and constructs methods of understanding/assimilating an artistic work. Perhaps the artist engages and communicates with their audience by coaxing understanding from and within them. He or she may do this by defining the methodologies through which the audience members create their own idiosyncratic understandings. The diversity of this understanding may or may not bear any relation to the artist's intentions, and it is this diversity that often gives the work strength and relevance to different cultures at different times. In traditional narrative based film, as with other text/word-based media such as drama or the novel, the unfolding of ideas usually follows a template. By fitting into conventional methods of understanding, this process allows the viewer to understand and assimilate the information without having to confront or reconstruct those methods. It is through the text that the work generates its affect. While the affect of music is not as easy to describe within textual paradigms there are many conventions used by composers to guide an audience's understanding, and that audiences use to gain a shared understanding. These are usually in the non-textual/emotional realm, and are then described or conveyed in the textual/intellectual realm.