Improvisation within music is a long standing, inspired practice. Improvisation, traditionally, allows a musician to be more free and expressive within their performance, allowing the presentation of momentary emotions to be translated via an instrument and losing the judgement that tends to come with polished products. Within technological based music, improvisation finds its self in an isolated, confusing world of its own. Music within technology generally involves programmed patterns and repetitive cycles, which makes the prospect of improvisation hard to grasp. In essence improvisation is reacting to spontaneous stimuli. In the more traditional concept of music this stimulus comes in the form of animated change from fellow musicians or personal emotion. When working within a computer this spontaneity is hard to achieve because the computer requires instruction to function. This can however be offset by certain workflow habits and preemptive actions. Within Ableton Live there are a few methods of introducing this. One may use programming instructions such as follow actions to achieve a randomly generative song sequencer, this does however require the pre-planned element of writing parts to place in clips or the practiced ability to this on the fly. However, this becomes more interesting when one considers the possibility of using Ableton as a clip looper. To be used with or without random follow actions ableton can be used to loop large collections of sounds either spontaneously created or pre-inserted either way spontaneously launching them to create unique sounds and structures.
FKJ Improvisation Session
Methods like this are used by FKJ throughout his music. FKJ usually implements the use of an AKAI APC40, a Machine controller, a laptop and assorted instruments including Rhodes Keys, Guitar, bass and saxophone. FKJ uses this equipment to form a live looping session in either an improvised manner or a more planned structure. A good example of an improvised session by this artist is his Eton Messy session in Red Bull Studios. This track begins with a simple guitar motif and new instruments are introduced periodically and mixed live to create a unique, random performance. To improvise in this manner requires a lot of experience and one must already have preconceived ideas of ones music to create such a cohesive fluid piece and in this sense can almost definitely be compared to that of a more traditional musicians ideology. One can however, draw heavy comparisons from this and his other work arguing that a lot of his playing throughout this track is not true improvisation instead arguing that this work contains a lot of familiar motifs and musical ideas, caused by said experience and muscle memory drawing fingers to familiar keys. So is this truly improvised?
Yes and no. It must be said that the definition of improvisation is very definitely subjective. If your definition describes improvisation to be the reaction of ones application of music to external stimulus then perhaps not because all of the components of this composition are self created and understood. However, the unplanned nature of the song allows for personal interpretation. Personally, to me if a piece of music is unplanned or unformed as an idea before it’s performance it is in fact improvised.
Jordan Vaughan: Creative Sound Design 