What is an expert user? What is an expert of any instrument other than one who has best contorted themselves to the form it demands? This instrument – which simply appropriates a standard laptop – explores this question, by superimposing an action (typing) onto a contrasting task (improvised music).
The piece uses natural language processing to generate strings of text. Performers can progress the piece by typing the endless text, triggering environmental and nondiegetic sounds with keywords. They can also deviate from the instructions, or use the microphone to resonate their voice.
Through this exercise, I hope to probe at opportunities to challenge and reform our interactions with technology, as well as with music. My Nana was a typist and a seamstress, unnoticed virtuosities I could only dream of, contorting her to technologies (adversarially designed to the extent that it impacted other aspects of her life).
How is this not music?
Similarly, how is the mechanical reproduction of a score any more worthy of attention? We must reshape our means of creating artefacts, and we must begin to appreciate artefacts outside of their appeal to capitalism and its artifices.