John Cage - Variations II

John Cage - Variations II Designed and performed by Christopher Howard Epilepsy warning - contains flashing images Cage's Variations are a series of indeterminate pieces that rely on the performer to follow directions, normally driven by chance procedures, to create their own realization of the piece. In this way, each performer's rendition (and indeed, sometimes even multiple renditions by the same performer) can be completely different. In Variations II, the score consists of a series of transparency sheets with 6 containing lines and 5 containing dots. These transparencies are then supposed to be cast or superimposed in any way so that the performer can draw perpendicular lines from each of the 6 lines to each of the 5 dots. The length of these perpendicular lines are then used to determine all aspects of the sound of the performance, including pitch/frequency, amplitude, duration, timbre, and structure of the section/performance. Cage also leaves the specifics of how this is done up to the performer, and suggests that other questions could also be answered by using these same measurements (for example, choosing which instrument to play, choosing a specific audio sample to play, or choosing a certain effect to be applied to a sound). The performer can then repeat this over and over with different arrangements of the lines and dots to get as many readings as necessary to create the realization. As I was casting these transparencies and taking measurements, I was interested in coming up with a way to quickly cast and calculate them with some programming in Max/MSP. While I was figuring that out, I accidentally started drawing many random instances on top of each other all at once, creating a striking visual image. I was then inspired to experiment and see what other types of visual effects I could produce by drawing the lines and dots over and over again, eventually building out a kind of visual vocabulary. Once I had that, I was able to use the same perpendicular measurements of the score to determine the order, length, and other details of the visual effects to create a video to accompany the performance. While each performance has the same order of visual effects, each line and dot is placed randomly and chance is also used to determine most of the drawing speed and color changes as well, meaning that each performance is unique and subtly different. The instrumentation used in this realization of Variations II is comprised of a piece of wood with a contact microphone, threaded metal rods, superball mallets, a Japanese ink stone, a walking wind-up baby chick toy, a telephone pickup, a mini-disc player, an Audubon Society bird call, a video game joystick for 4-channel spatialization, samples drawn from my personal sample library, and projected visuals.