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Themesicon: navigation pathSound and Imageicon: navigation pathAudiovisions
 
Small Fish (Furukawa, Kiyoshi; Fujihata, Masaki; Münch, Wolfgang), 1999
 
 
 

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other hand, is ephemeral and strongly dependent on subjective judgement. And so it is not really suited to the electronic superbrain, the machine, which primarily serves the efficiencyoriented elimination of uncertainties. [37]

Accordingly, like in a library, all computer data, regardless of whether they contain text, sound, or image, are archived alphabetically according to their language designation. Even today there are no sound databases that allow archiving according to tonal criteria or even performing an auditory search. [38]

Interactive audio applications deal with this kind of visually-guided navigation through sound and thus also with issues of notation. The direct transmission of the two central notation coordinates—time in the horizontal and pitch in the vertical, which are read out linearly by a cursor—places the clueless user in the precarious position of having to arrange concrete sound occurrences in time, therefore to ‹compose.› Because s/he is in most cases inexperienced, it is no wonder that many examples of this kind supply unsatisfactory results.

 

In the modules of the work «Small Fish» on CD-ROM by Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masaki Fujihata and Wolfgang Münch, the linear version of the cursor has been replaced by the simulation of the behavior of organic systems. Users produce and influence the music by manipulating graphic objects that lead an individual, ‹independent existence.› With the aid of object-oriented programming, the behavior of the individual objects has been structured in such a way that they exchange information among themselves. The user's interaction and collisions with other objects alter the state of individual objects and thus the overall system. None of the objects knows all of the connections, i.e. there is no point in the system where all information runs together. So a dynamic system of autonomous objects is coupled to the autonomous actions performed by the user. Here the tradition of musical notation on a surface is interwoven with the behavior of organisms and physical systems. The systems' behavior orients itself towards natural and mechanical processes, and this is why despite their complexity, they can—as is the

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