Agential Scores:
MOTHERBIRD for flutes, electronics, & artificial life simulation

World Premiere: Monday, April 3rd, 2023
MIT Media Lab, 6th Floor Lecture Hall
Composition by Jessica Shand

Featuring Jessica Shand, flutes and Manuel Cherep, live electronics & Max/MSP

with support from Jack Armitage, Max/MSP & Tölvera Alife software library; Lingdong Huang, visuals; Max Addae, live sound; Nikhil Singh, Max/MSP; Jimmy Day, documentation

PROGRAM NOTE

MOTHERBIRD for flutes, electronics, and artificial life simulation reimagines the centuries-old flute-as-bird archetype in a 21st-century context in which anthropogenic climate change has drastically altered the soundscapes of the natural world. An early instantiation of the Agential Scores project, a mode of score creation which challenges entangling human performers and musical instruments with artificial life simulations, the piece positions the flute as one organism within an indeterminate global ecosystem—an ecosystem in which changing sonic textures mediate the flocking behaviors of birds, or Boids, in real time. Per the speculative writings of Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and others, how might storytelling and fictionality serve as tools for deconstructing anthropocentric regimes? In MOTHERBIRD, reality is front-and-center, urging listeners to engage critically in becoming-with non-human and more-than-human worlds. The work represents the first iteration of an international collaborative effort toward a new piece for augmented flute, live electronics, and artificial life simulation, with visuals by Lingdong Huang, live programming by Jack Armitage, and electronics by Manuel Cherep debuted at the eighth International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation (TENOR) in May 2023.
—J. Shand