Singling Live: Story Music and the Immanent Future of Sharing Thoughts

Abstract

This will be a live quintet performance of a collaborative future narrative using the instrument/platform of Singling, a Text-to-MIDI (Musial Instrument Digital Interface) linguistic data sonification software developed by the Digital Literacy Centre at the University of British Columbia. Capable of sounding characters, symbols and punctuation, or word forms in lexicogrammatical categories of English language texts, Singling will be used in conjunction with other MIDI instruments to produce a unique composition played live as we type a nonlinear narrative about an imagined future of human interactions with literate technologies. Our narrative will be storied in a practice/performance that engages with the live sounding of our text to contribute to the shaping of the narrative and imagined future space. This musical collaboration extends the textual narrative, layered with live audience chat posts, into a dynamic arts-based conversation of subjectivities, sounds, and meanings – a conversation that can serve research specific purposes as well as arts-based methodologies. First we will introduce Singling, then the narrative context, then co-create a composition that is both futuristic music and post-humanist story in one. This practice of collaborative performance of future imaginary is an encounter and elaboration on techniques we have developed to produce artfully othered forms of reading, writing, and futuring.