Bleepwatch

[David Keifer interviews Franz Rosati]

Franz Rosati is a talented—and busy—musician and visual artist from Rome, who’s work, both live and recorded, is know for it’s technical innovation and emotional depth. Franz released a new album entitled Pleisochronous through dharmasound, an Italia net-label. Through the course of a couple of weeks last December, Franz and I exchanged emails in which we discussed his work. Below is a lightly edited version of that correspondence.

Q. How would you describe your music?

A. I’ve never really described my music aesthetically, but my aim would be to represent something similar to the stream of consciousness of a living bio-digital creature, with his movements from unpredictable to static, and passing through slow morphings and chaotic situations. This is the main idea behind Pleisochronous, which consists of organized sounds far from our idea of musical perfection and balance, but with an accurate behavior pattern. For around a year I’ve–temporarily, at least–put aside any kind of post production or editing methods or music production software, and instead, used my own software, which is specifically conceived and designed for this purpose.

Q. So you record your pieces in real time?

A. Yes, all the tracks are played with my maxmsp or puredata patches and recorded at the same time on hard disk. All you hear is done in real time, from sampling recording and manipulation (as in Echus Chasma) to synthesis. My first experiment in this way was Echus Chasma (still unreleased but you could listen to it and some other tracks, on my site), which is based on real-time sampling and manipulation of recorded, pre-recorded and incoming sounds.

Q. Wow. That’s a fascinating–and very risky :) –way to compose. Are the pieces improvisations? Or do you have certain sounds you want to work with, or ideas to guide you?

A. Thank you! The pieces are improvisations, there’s no planning of the track before the realization. But I have a discrete previous idea of what I’m gonna do because, first of all, I know perfectly well the software I’ve designed and its limits and features. This method allows me to have more feelings with my musical idea, and gives me the impression of translating thoughts into sounds directly… which is nothing new–every good musician does that every day–but I think with electronic music it is a little bit more difficult!

By the way, the improvisation technique in Plesiochronous is based only on controlling pure granular synthesis through some mathematical probability distribution. In this way I can control many different parameters, every grain’s characteristics such as timbre, envelope, pitch, stereo position and so on, with some facillitations. The improvisation in Echus Chasma is realized doing real time sampling of incoming external sources–granulation, delay lines, filterbanks and so on. So Pleisochronous is a little bit “generative” while Echus Chasma was realized with a more “classical” approach, but I consider both to be improvisations.

Q. Those two pieces have very different feels–it’s really interesting to learn that part of that is because they were created in different ways. I see that you have a binaural beats generator vst available for download at your website. Do you have any plans to make any of your other software available?

A. I’d like to do that but I’ve no time to write any documentation or other kind of “facilities” for my software…. And source code is a really private thing, so if my source code isn’t well written, I’m shy about sharing it. The Binaural Beat Generator is a funny and easy plug-in, and I’d like to release a version for Windows when I have time. Anyway, even if I’m a linux guy and a computer science lover, I’m not a traditional programmer–I don’t know C++ or Java as real programmers do. So writing software in MaxMSP and PureData, or experimenting with SuperCollider or Processing, is a sort of “side effect” that’s come from the necessity of exploring in a deep way various sonic fields, audio/video real-time synchronicity and synaesthetics experiments. And also the installations projects I’m preparing for, which employ motion captures, sensors, and things like that.

Q. I see. Actually, you answered my next question–which was if your software grew out of your own immediate musical needs. It strikes me that electronic musicians–if they’re technical enough–are in the more-or-less unique position of being able not only to modify their instruments, but to create entirely new ones. Can you talk a bit about the installations you have coming up?

A. Yes that’s true, but is also true that with commercial hardware or virtual synthesizers you can produce really great and new sounds. I think the true revolution of those kinds of software is the possibility to interconnect different media, interfacing “strange” peripherals to control sounds, and work with sensors and develop at really low level your digital signal processing algorithms, obtaining really great results. The installation I’m planning will utilize all those things, and it’s great to do something that uses music, sounds, images and is strictly connected to the observer—allowing him to receive sonic and image feedback that he produces himself. See, in this installation the observer will displace images projected on a screen and produce sounds without touching anything material. This is not a “new” idea, lot of people experimented this way a lot, but I think that interactive installation are really an interesting way to conceive art. It’s also true that an installation is not necessarily something where the observer needs do something to produce some effects in the space. Granular Synthesis’ works do a similar thing by using DVDs and non real time media–the observer doesn’t interact but still receives deep perceptive stimulus provoking great emotive impact. Simply amazing!

Q. Amazing, indeed! Will there be something on your website about the installation?

A. Of course. I’ll upload the project, along with some videos and some footage after realization.

Q. Have you thought about an interactive website–where visitors could somehow influence the site’s content?

A. I’d love to do something like that! But unfortunately I’m not a webmaster, so I’d have to study a lot to get good results. Or I’d have to team up with a webmaster–that would be a better idea. Anyway I’m aware of some possibilities about doing a project like that using something like Processing (www.processing.org), for example. This Open Source language gives you a lot of possibilities—it’s a meta-language of Java, so it’s really easy to learn for non-programmers, and it gives you the opportunity to do a lot of things in the field of video (with a little bit of audio), and you can do it all in this in HTML code. But unfortunately it’s really, really heavy on the CPU…. Actually, a lot of the images I show on my site are done with Processing, especially the monochrome series. The others are done with Puredata.

Q. Speaking of the web–how did you become involved with dharmasound?

A. I came to know dharmasound through Kurregomma–a.k.a. Stefano–who’s the artistic director for the label. We often do live sets together in which I do generative visuals while he plays his damned great music. So when he asked me if I’d like to release some tracks for them and I accepted without a second thought!

By the way, I think dharma has a lot of great artists in their catalogue, and the great thing is that they don’t stick to any specific genre–so you can find pop, trip-hop, electronic-music, funky stuff, progressive rock, and chamber music. No doubt, that’s one of the first things I liked about dharmasound.

Q. Dharmasound really is different in that respect–it seems like more than 90% of the stuff on net-labels is electronic music. And there’s certainly no problem with that, but it’s very nice to see so much variety in a net-label’s catalogue. What do you think net-labels can offer musicians (of any type) that traditional labels can’t?

A. First of all, free sharing and the totally absolute power to decide what to publish and what to not publish. I also think that is important for artists to share their music on the net, and to allow others easy access to it. I believe that’s a positive thing for both artists and art-consumers.

Q. One last question–aside from the installations and the upcoming release on dharmasound, what do you hope to accomplish in 2007?

A. Well, I’d like to release other two music projects involving an acoustic instruments—one with an acoustic guitar and some ethnic instruments, and another electroacoustic elaboration. So I’ll be putting aside the programming and more technical stuff to concentrate more on the aesthetic. I’m also writing the script for a short film. And I’m working on a project about opensource multimedia software. And last but not least, I have to study a lot of harmony!