SUSTAINABLE LIVE ELECTRO-ACOUSTIC MUSIC Nicola Bernardini Conservatorio di Padova Padova, Italy Alvise Vidolin Conservatorio di Venezia Venezia, Italy ABSTRACT Real–time/performed electro–acoustic music (also known as live electro–acoustic music) is currently facing a se- rious sustainability problem: while its production is in- deed considered very recent from the music history point of view, several technological generations and revolutions have gone by in the meantime. Thus, most of these works can hardly be performed because the technologies used have gone lost since a long time and no long-standing no- tational precaution was taken. This paper presents some typical case studies and examples and introduces some techniques that might lead to a partial – when not com- pletely adequate – solution to the sustainability problem. 1. INTRODUCTION Digital preservation and archival of cultural assets is now a widely-studied and active research problem everywhere (cf.[11, 13, 14, 9]). The music domain is no exception to this rule, ranging from the preservation of score manu- scripts to that of antique musical instruments, old record- ings 1 , electro-acoustic music on tape (cf.[15, 5]), etc. In general, from these studies it appears that digital preser- vation of dense documents 2 coupled with symbolic rep- resentation of linguistic elements (where available) would be sufficient to preserve most artistic works in the music domain. There is a specific music field, however, which presents many more problems in the preservation of its works: live electro–acoustic music. Most, if not all, live electro–a- coustic works are endangered today because their sustain- ability in time is extremely low (cf. Sec. 2) – there is an urgent need for research and solutions to face an other- wise inevitable loss of many masterpieces of last century. Furthermore, if the sustainability problems of live electro– acoustic music are not tackled, current and future works may well face the same fate of their predecessors. 2. PROBLEMS Live electro–acoustic music is indeed a “performance– intensive” art form which may somehow relate to 1 cf.http://www.aes.org/technical/documentIndex.cfm#ardl 2 the term dense is taken from early semiotic studies (cf.[6, p.241 and sec.3.4.7], [7, III, 3] and [3]). It basically means documents that carry all the information within themselves, i.e. they are not symbolic repre- sentations to be further interpreted and converted into a final artifact. other similar musical formats: jazz, popular music or “performer–centered” interpretations are the first that come to mind. These may include, for example, the jazz standards performed by an extraordinary artist, rock-band concerts and records, sublime interpretation of classical works by legendary singers or players, etc. In general, preserving these formats implies preserving the recorded documents that contain them. While that is not the per- formance per se, its high-quality reproduction is deemed acceptable for memory preservation. Live electro–acoustic music is different in that we seek to preserve not only a single, memorable performance but rather the ability to to perform, study and re-interpret the same work over and over again, with different per- formances proposing different interpretations. A recorded document of the first (or indeed, of any) performance of a live electro–acoustic music work is instead completely insufficient and inadequate to the re-creation of the work itself. Of course, this would call for a score capable of pro- viding the necessary performance indications to the com- plete re-construction of the piece. Symbolic notation, ab- stracted from practical implementation and the underlying technology, is extremely important here. In this case, no- tation should be both descriptive and prescriptive to some extent (it should define which result is sought and how to get it — always in device–independent terms). However, live electro–acoustic music currently possesses notational conventions and practices that can be compared at best to middle ages tablatures. This is due to several factors, the most important being the availability of recording technol- ogy which has been considered, for years, as the proper way to preserve the details concerning the electro–acous- tic performance. This, in connection with a) use of end–user configuration patches using pro- prietary software and hardware technologies (cf. Sec. 4.1 on the next page); b) use of binary and especially proprietary file formats has lead to huge losses in performance information of many live electro–acoustic music works. It is now time to think about the sustainability of these past, present and future works. 3. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS Scores are essential to speculative (i.e.: non–commercial, non–programme) music to preserve two fundamental mu-