Vincent Goudard

Vincent Goudard

This article presents "John", an open-source software designed to help collective free improvisation. It provides generated screen-scores running on distributed, reactive web-browsers. The musicians can then concurrently edit the scores in their own browser. John is used by ONE, a septet playing improvised electro-acoustic music with digital musical instruments (DMI). One of the original features of John is that its design takes care of leaving the musician's attention as free as possible. Firstly, a quick review of the context of screen-based scores will help situate this research in the history of contemporary music notation. Then I will trace back how improvisation sessions led to John's particular "notational perspective". A brief description of the software will precede a discussion about the various aspects guiding its design.

Vincent Goudard

This article questions the notion of ephemerality of digital musical instruments (DMI). Longevity is generally regarded as a valuable quality that good design criteria should help to achieve. However, the nature of the tools, of the performance conditions and of the music itself may lead to think of ephemerality as an intrinsic modality of the existence of DMIs. In particular, the conditions of contemporary musical production suggest that contextual adaptations of instrumental devices beyond the monolithic unity of classical instruments should be considered. The first two parts of this article analyse various reasons to reassess the issue of longevity and ephemerality. The last two sections attempt to propose an articulation of these two aspects to inform both the design of the DMI and their learning.