As Petteri Mäkiniemi and I are preparing to perform in the Pan Sonic Tribute concert at the Helsinki Music Centre next Friday 1.2, as part of the Musica nova 2019 festival, we did a brief interview for the festival about the upcoming performance. The original posts are in Finnish, recreated here in English. Topic: Petteri’s Ginette and my “afrorithmic” system.
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In the Tribute to Pan Sonic concert the composer, music producer and sound artist Ilpo Jauhiainen and the musician, composer and instrument maker Petteri Mäkiniemi will present a partially improvised new work in which electroacoustic composition, minimalism and experimental electronic music meet West African musical influences, in a form inspired by Pan Sonic’s abstract, subdued and uncompromising aesthetic.

The concert will be realized together with musicians from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra at the Helsinki Music Centre on Fri 1 February.

Petteri, what is Ginette?

Ginette is an electronic musical instrument designed and built by me, based on the French ondes Martenot electronic instrument developed in 1928. Ginette is played so that the right hand controls the pitch by moving a ring along a wire, while the left hand controls the loudness of the note with a stepless key. The design of the instrument enables expressive gestures such as vibrato, glissando and a wide dynamic range similar to bowed string instruments. All this happens through the fingertips of the player, not by turning knobs. In the musical performance I’m fascinated by the naked presence of human condition – how for example a gentle touch of the hand or an intimate blow from the mouth is audible in the characteristic sound of an instrument. This is also possible in electronic music. Currently I’m developing a new, more versatile version of Ginette.

Ilpo, in your performance you intend to use elements of field recordings made in West Africa that can be set to progress autonomously during the gig with the help of generative algorithms. What does this self-evolution of algorithms mean in terms of the live performance?

Generative i.e. self-evolving and -organizing elements bring a degree of surprise and added liveliness to the performance, both for the audience and performers alike. In this scenario, a computer sort of improvises how it transforms and reproduces the source material with the rules and processes that we’ve provided, and operates thus as one of the “human” performers. Algorithms can be designed to produce almost any kind of behaviour, but we’re fascinated mostly by certain consistency where the music evolves in a slightly random, probabilistic manner while retaining a recognizable character – like a river that flows. In our performance one of the field recordings progresses and changes quite freely on its own whereas with the others the program introduces tiny variations around the gestures made by the performer.

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Recently we also had our first rehearsal with the full ensemble for the concert. The ensemble consists of Jaani Helander (cello), Heikki Nikula (bass clarinet), Petteri Mäkiniemi (Ginette) and me (“afrorithmic generator”).

This was my first time of playing together with members of a philharmonic orchestra, and it felt and sounded exhilarating!