1-BIT SYMPHONY: AN INTERVIEW WITH TRISTAN PERICH

Four weeks ago I had never heard of artist Tristan Perich, but once I came across his 1-Bit Symphony—“an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip”—and discovered the complex yet elegant nature of his art, I now find it hard to stop hearing his compelling compositions running constantly in my head. His is the sort of work that sticks to your bones long after consuming it, all the while making you feel moved, perplexed and oddly uncomfortable while it still works it way through your psyche.

Inspired by the aesthetics of math and physics, Perich melds acoustic and electronic music with physical and digital mediums in his art. Most recently, he created 1-Bit Symphony, the second installment in his exploration of the “relationship between physical and electronic sound…juxtaposing the grand form of classical symphony with the minimal nature of 1-bit circuitry.” His first foray into such experimentation was his similarly-named 1-Bit Music, completed in 2006.

1-Bit Symphony really must be seen—and heard—to be fully experienced and understood. Self-contained in a CD jewel case, the music is housed on a single computer chip, wired to a volume control knob, battery, on/off switch, fast-forward button and finally, to a headphone jack on the side of the case. Plug in your headphones, turn it on, and suddenly and inexplicably you're listening to something nearly indescribable—with no computer, CD, mp3, cassette or LCD screen required.

First, check out the video below to hear and see 1-Bit Symphony in action. Then, read on. Tristan was a wonderful responder, and his answers are both insightful and revealing.

And of course, get your hands on one of these as soon as you can… it’s worth the rush.

 
Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Symphony (Part 1: Overview) from Tristan Perich on Vimeo.

1-Bit Symphony is your second project exploring the “performance” of music in a self-contained object, or jewel case. What prompted you to create the first electronic composition, 1-Bit Music?

Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Music was my excited response to finally being able to create electronic music. I say "being able" because, while I had always dabbled personally in electronica, it never had the same formality and rigor that my classical compositions had. I grew up on minimalist music and minimalist art and their conceptual completeness kept me away from using electronics in my own formal work. The computer could always do too much; it didn't really have an identity like a violin did, for example. That all changed when I began working with microchip-based art and music, learning it from Douglas Repetto, the founder of dorkbot. I started working with them with the goal of creating kinetic art, inspired by Danny Rozin's Wooden Mirror [video below], but became consumed with sound after I found out I could create simple digital tones with the chips themselves. I was inspired by the fact that the system was conceptually interesting, to create sound with the most primitive digital information, binary data. And it gave a physical meaning to electronics that laptops didn't offer, the direct controlling of on and off pulses of electricity, routed from microchip to headphone speaker, to create sound. The CD case packaging brought it all together, allowing the audience to witness the process first-hand, instead of mediated through a recording.

 

How does 1-Bit Symphony compare to 1-Bit Music? How has the piece evolved?

Four years separated the two albums, during which I wrote a lot of music for traditional classical ensembles accompanied by 1-bit music. These compositions allowed me to explore the primitive electronic square waves against what I considered primitive acoustic instruments. Violins, creating tone by a vibrating string, exercise one of the most basic ways of creating sound. Speakers are similar, turning electronic impulse into the movement of air with an electromagnet. Sending 1-bit waveforms to them allowed me to focus on the sound of the speakers themselves, turning on and off. I wanted the audience to be aware of the speakers, instead of having the speakers transparently tracing a recorded waveform in perfect emulative fidelity. All of this provoked returning to the original CD case format to essentially create a response to the first album. I rewrote the software in Assembly, to get even closer to the hardware and have more processing power for greater polyphony. And I treated the new album as a long composition instead of a collection of songs, an examination of what a symphony could mean when written for such minimal hardware.

How do you write the music for these compositions? Do you start on an instrument, write the music on paper, or start in the 1-bit medium from the very beginning?

They're 1-bit from the beginning, in a way. I wrote a special version of the software that takes input from the computer so I can work in other audio software to sketch out ideas. Ultimately, I rewrite everything as sequences of numbers that represent pitches, melodies, different voices, and the structure of the music. It's interesting how the music and the software are stored the same way in the chip's memory. When Alan Turing first described his abstract model of the "universal computer," its universality came from the fact that the computer hardware and the software were separate. The computer was a set mechanism, and the software a series of symbols on an infinite tape. In this way, the computer interpreted the software step-by-step, and both the software and the data that the software manipulated were stored in the same space. My music is influenced a lot by this way of thinking, which is not so far off from how musicians read sheet music, itself a kind of early programming language. From start to finish, how long does it take you to create these pieces? I've wanted to create a follow-up to my first album for years, but the specific idea of the Symphony came in early 2009, along with its more minimal layout of components and wires. I then spent a month rewriting the code and then the next four or so writing the music. The next year was spent tracking down the right parts and planning the production of the units themselves. I have around four assistants in New York who laboriously realize the idea with drills, adhesives, soldering irons and compressed air.

What is it about these contraptions, with movable parts, headphone jacks and working wires, that moves us? Why are people drawn to this artifact in a way in which they are not to, say, a regular CD, digital file, or cassette tape? 

We aren't privy to the inner workings of electronics much these days. A while has passed since televisions could be fixed by the guy on the corner, due to obscene yet entirely rationalized miniaturization. We have no ideas how our laptops work, and while we take for granted that there is science in there, most of us are as close to understanding it as magic. Circuit benders—who create music and art by opening up consumer electronics, manipulating and repurposing them to do things they weren't designed to do—are working to empower us to understand these things we use every day. My own response is an attempt at transparency, visually tracing the path electricity takes from the battery, through the power switch to the microchip, then through the volume knob to the headphone jack. Ultimately, these are simple things. I print the source code in the liner notes to communicate the side of the circuit you don't see: what happens inside that little black computer chip.

Stay Tuned for Part II of My Interview with Tristan Perich