Reflection on the self project and further developments
The self project I completed was an interesting exercise, but after playing around with parameters, the artistic result was not interesting. After hearing the projects of others, and synthesizing ideas from discussions on performer autonomy and system feedback, I have decided to pursue the concept of autonomie from a different angle, and one that incorporates a sounding body and live human agents interacting.
I began with this idea: I took intervals from two tetrachords (C, D, E, F and G, A, B, C) and figured out which harmonics could play these intervals on the bass, then rearranged them into various configurations to create an endless sort of looping piece. I thought it would be interesting to explore these intervals with the different harmonics because of the different tunings that would be produced on different strings. And this would be a really slow, but extremely rigid time-based canon, so if live performers are involved, it gives them autonomy to start and stop in any place in the piece that they choose (as it would be a circular piece), but they would have to stick to rigid timing.
Here is a diagram of all the pitches, and the lowest harmonic capable of sounding those pitches on the double bass.
