Interdisciplinary

• Main Authors: Alexis Kirke, Samuel Freeman, Eduardo Miranda, Simon Ingram, Centre For Computer
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blue whale
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.300.7803; http://cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk/publications/978-Kirke.pdf

„Fast Travel ‟ is named after a Blue Whale call, and is both a scientific experiment in computer-modelling of schools of artificial singing whales and a live performance for saxophone and electronics. The audience hear a live surround sound interaction between a saxophonist and artificial schools of whales. The whales hear the sax as if it is another whale. The audience are surrounded by at least four speakers and a sub-woofer with a saxophonist in the middle. The whale sounds, driven by a computer model, move from speaker to speaker, as the invisible but audible artificial whales move within an invisible sea- the audience are "underwater " with the schools in this “sound sea”. The artificially intelligent whale models sing synthesized electronic sounds, evolving new songs live based on hearing each others' performances. The composition title is not just because of the Blue Whale-type song, but because of the way it speeds up the evolution of the whales‟ song-tuning. Decades are compressed down into the 12 minutes as the audience time travel through the evolution of the underwater music. But the song evolution is driven here by the saxophone, rather than solely by other whales or man-made acoustic phenomena. The scored saxophone is audible to the whales, and influences their tunes through imitation. Although the majority of the saxophone music will be pre-scored, the behaviour of the whales is not 100% predictable because of complex interactions, thus the performance will differ each time. 1.