Liquid Tensioning

Liquid Tensioning was selected and premiered at the ICMC 2026 Conference that took place in Hamburg in May 2026. The concert was in the Speicher Kaufhauskanal, a historical building in the Hamburg Harbour. The 13th of May. Vlatko Kučanat, bass clarinet, and Myrsini Bekakou, violin, played to work.

Liquid Tensioning is a work for violin and bass clarinet, live notation, live generative system, live electronics, and attendees’ participation. Liquid tensioning is a Collaborative and interactive work. The work is real-time, created by the evaluations of the attendees. The attendees will evaluate the evolution of the material via a web app, and the musical generative system will change according to the evaluation in real time. The Musicians will receive the notes via a live notation system on their mobile phones. The title of the works refers to the model of tensioning provided by the generative system.   This model is based on a musical tensioning that is not related to the properties of the musical material. This work belongs to a series of works in which the composer creates a self-referential musical generative system based on the real-time evaluation of the work. The main musical material of this work is its evaluation.

Program notes

Liquid tensioning

This work is a creative hybrid networked framework that integrates the musical generative system and its evaluation. The attendees, the generative system, and the Musicians integrate into a hybrid networked creative system. This work is at the same time a musical and a social experiment. The data from the attendees’ evaluations will be recorded, processed, and shared as Open Data. The Live notation system used in this work is not improvisation; the musicians are expected to play with as much precision as the events they receive on their mobile phones.

Liquid Tensioning as an aesthetic-social experiment

From the perspective of a social-aesthetic experiment, this work researches three different aspects. First, we want to know whether the same cooperative patterns occur in each realization of the work, or whether, in each realization, the attendees´ evaluations are completely different.

Second, we want to know whether participation through the evaluation itself generates a new way of listening and engagement with the work.   Do we listen in the same way when we are creating the work by changing the work by its very own evaluation? How does participation in the real-time evaluation of the work influence listening to the work?

Third, is there something like a collective listening embodiment? Can we say that the attendees work as a collective embodied sensory system, or do they act individually?

Description of the work

The form and narrative of the work is the history of its evaluation. The formal development of the materials is not determined a priori; it depends on real-time evaluation by attendees.   The work is conceived as a loop between the generative system and the attendees.

Fig. 1. This is the web application that the attending public will use to evaluate the work.

This Work is a circular self-referential musical cooperative game. The attendees connect to a Wi-Fi network and then to a web server. They will interact with the system through a web page, evaluating the sounding result every 30 seconds. Then the generative system will react to the evaluations. If the evaluations are positive, the system will not change. If the evaluations are negative, the system will change, and the sounding result will change.

Fig.2. This is the web application that the attending public will use to evaluate the work.

Fig. 3. This is the application used by the interpreter to receive the notes to be played. The musician will receive the exact note to be played.

References

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