Caillois-four_play_types (Photo credit: michieldelange)

Musical Games
MUS 87 A00
Section ID: 788841
Dubnov, Shlomo  (Email: sdubnov@ucsd.edu)
Location: WLH  2136
Tuesdays, 10:00 a.m. to 11:50 a.m.
Seminar will meet October 8 - October 29

We will learn about music principles and do some improvisation by creating games with musical materials. Students will learn basic musicanship through playing, interacting and conducting. Some computer examples will be shown as well. No musical knowledge or preconceptions are assumed. 

http://ugseminars.ucsd.edu/UGSEM_SeminarListing.asp

Syllabus

1. Why people play? - the 4  categories, Paidia - Ludus axis (Roger Caillois)
2. Chance and Rules in Music - Mozart Dice Game, Lexikon Sonata (Karlheinz Essel)
3. Affordances - instruments, toys and their possibilities (Don Norman and Jamos Gibson)
4. (rules implied in the object design)
5. Soundpainting - structured improvisation, ensemble as an instrument (Walter Thompson)
6. Aesthetics - art object as a game, challenge and its payoff (George Birkhoff)
7. Temporal Aesthetics - gratification in time (Shlomo Dubnov)
8. OMax - machine improvisation, automatic discovery of possibilities and play in a musical recording (Gerard Assayag and Shlomo Dubnov)
9. Flow - learning, play and the arts, balance of skill and challenge as a metric for success (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
10. Expectation - Violation - Explanation (EVE) - Wow and Aha, ITPRA Anticipation (David Huron)
11. John Zorn's Cobra - social play, interactive communication
12. Culture as game (Johan Huizinga)

Sylabus

Meeting 1: Toys, Plays and Games
Affordances and Toys
Babbling, Enactment and Playing
Schemata and Expectations
Improvisation vs. Composition
Social / Collective aspects of music
How games describe collaboration
Musical Examples:
Mozart Dice Game, Lexicon Sonata
Trevor Wishart: Music Games
Conducted Improvisation
Walter Thompson: Sound Painting

Meeting 2: Playing games
Ballon Game – Cristyn
Computer Sound Game

Meeting 3:
Slot Machines and Memex Music
Psychology of prospect
Introduction to formal game theory
Xenaks
Evolutionary games
Game as a tool to understand music
Introduction to Cobra

Meeting 4: Game Pieces
John Zorn’s Cobra and other Game Pieces

Meeting 1: Toys, Play and Game

In the first meeting we explore different physical toys (balls, frisbees, juggling stick) for their "playability" and introduce the notion of affordances. We talk about the importance of affordances in design in reference to Gibson and Norman work. We discuss the role of learning (babbling) in discovering the playing potential of physical and sonic / musical objects.

Next we introduce Trevor Wishart's "Sounds Fun" book and use several games to learn about sound parameters and social aspects of musical interaction. This also serves as a prepartion to Sound Painting, to be done later on during the meeting.

The importance of mental models and patterns (schemata) versus cognitive processing is demonstrated using the game of tic-tac-toe. We introduce the idea of chance and indeterminacy as a way to create variations in musical materials. This is demonstrated in two examples of chance operations- Mozart Dice Games and Essel's Lexikon Sonata. We then discuss the role of variability in traditional music versus contemporary culture.

The experience gathered allows us to discuss what we learned so far: what are the differences between toys, play and competition? How "playability" potential of a toy is discovered and why the interplay of perception and production is needed to developing ways of playing? We ask whether competition is necessary to distinguish games for play, and what aspects along the toy-play-game axis result in feelings of fun?

At the final part of the first meeting we proceed to discuss the differences between improvisation, composition and games, and introduce the concept of conducted improvisation. We learn some of the basic conducting gestures of Walter Thompson's Sound Painiting, and perform few short musical improvisations.