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Jacopo Baboni Schilingi will continue his collaboration with IRCAM this season under a contract beginning in October. For the Paris research centre he is completing a work to be premiered by Ensemble Court-circuit on 13 January in IRCAM’s Espace de projection. Approximately seven minutes long, it is scored for oboe, B-flat clarinet, percussion and magnetic tape, and entitled Profils. Here is the composer’s introduction:
“The entire work was created through a new compositional technique provisionally called Composition through Interactive Models. Its first practical result was the development of Profile, a computer-assisted composition program. The main purpose is to allow a composer to make a composition’s different musical parameters interact. Conceived and developed at IRCAM by Mikhail Malt and myself, Profile is the computational support through which the whole of Profils was conceived.
“Technically, the electronic component, on tape, was realised in IRCAM’s studios using four sound-synthesis techniques: frequency-modulation, additive and granular synthesis—all three implemented with Csound—and resonance-model synthesis using Chant. Every element on tape, from a single impulse to the most complex sequences, was created by applying Profile to synthesis, controlling each parameter as it unfolds in time. Many synthesised sounds were also processed through various musical-signal techniques, always formally controlled by Profile.
“The remainder of the composition, entrusted to acoustic oboe, clarinet and percussion, was entirely created and developed through the Interactive Models technique managed and controlled by Profile. In brief, this technique essentially treats every musical ‘theme’ as an entity manifesting itself in time and subject to changes linked to other entities’ presence.
“Interaction is based on action and reaction, establishing a general relationship between two or more musical entities. As that relationship unfolds, each entity repeatedly modifies its behaviour in relation to the behaviour of another or several others. It can anticipate or respond to another entity’s behaviour. Thus interaction itself is governed by the models through which the musical entities are made to interact.
“Models used in Profils include derivation, integration, dynamic interpolation, perturbation, dynamic simplification and geometric reflections. The entire five-section composition centres on melodic profile, developed and elaborated in each section through these techniques.”
Recent activities include two lectures scheduled for 23 September at Milan’s Università Statale and 26 September in IRCAM’s Espace de projection. The latter addressed [a line is missing] IRCAM computer music work selected as one of the four most representative projects carried out at the centre the previous year. Alongside Baboni Schilingi’s work, presentations included Farinelli, whose soundtrack was produced with IRCAM, Boulez’s Explosante-fixe and Levinas’s latest opera. The Milan lecture addressed his work on Composition through Interactive Models.
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