Brian Baumbusch – Polytempo Music and 3D Sound Choreography I think of the relationship between the musical form of Polytempo Music and the way in which each instrumental line is programmed to move around the 3D stage as a choreography of sound. This choreography is composed at the same level of granularity and counterpoint as the music itself, though via different means. To design music, I use a combination of notation techniques to organize and decorate sound over time; to create the sound choreography, I use a collection of proprietary scripts and drive them with keyframe animation, a technique that dates back over 100 years. Both practices involve dividing, organizing, and decorating time, and therefore work in tandem in my own practice. By writing all of the music before beginning the design of the sound choreography, I knew in advance what my intentions were for “staging” the music into a fluid 3D animation, and I had a preliminary concept of how the musical structure and counterpoint might manifest into a sound choreography. Often, the sound choreography is intended to spatialize the music so that as the listener, we can interact with different ways of hearing the music by moving around it intentionally. In this interview, I describe how the sound choreography is sometimes designed to allow the listener to choose which tempo stream they want to hear most prominently by moving to different positions around the stage in order to get closer to the instruments that are playing in those different tempo streams; the relevant portion of the interview starts at 3:05. Often, the sound choreography was directly inspired by my process of composing the music. On many occasions, my first step in writing sections of music was to hand draw a tempo map to outline a polytempo structure for the 12 instruments.
(Movement 5: “Hex Tree” – tempo map) In several instances, the visual designs of these tempo maps helped to inspire the ensuing sound choreography. The end of movement 9 provides an example of this.