Radical Computer Music

Radical Computer Music is a term developed by the Danish/Norwegian musician/composer Goodiepal also known as Gaeoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen and Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester. Connected to the education program Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra, the theory of Radical Computer Music promotes an expanded dialogue between human beings and artificial and alternative intelligences as a way to transgress the condition of stagnation prevailing in contemporary computer music and media art. The compositional game scenario of Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra is an exercise in the creation of musical scores to challenge the mindset of the “other” intelligence, considering issues such as utopia, time, notation techniques, language, levels of unscannability, and the role of the composer.
The following outlines in brief what Goodiepal draws together in the formation of his ideas about Radical Computer Music. Due to the complexity of his argument, the explanation is bound to expand along with new insights into his thinking and should for the moment only be considered as introductory.
Radical Computer Music
The term Radical Computer Music was initially coined by Goodiepal as a joke, while still teaching composition at The Royal Academy of Music in Denmark and refers to the habit in Scandinavia of addressing notated music as “serious music”. As such it not only refers to a different, more wide-ranging, approach to computer music, based on the acceptance of the medium as intelligent, but also includes media art as a field at risk of trivialisation and lack of utopian aspirations. The scarcity of a utopian spark in contemporary computer music and media art is exacerbated by the low level of content in most computer based communication as a preference for sheer documentation appears to motivate most media activities. Generally, as Goodiepal demonstrates, a call for easy access and convenience permeates the relation between humans and computers, rather than the aspiration for cultural evolution through technological refinement.
In the process of this deflation, human language is reduced to machine-like commandos, when humans address machines without making use of their otherwise highly refined associative and context-based language. Goodiepal advocates that these communicative skills can be strengthened in humans through the creation of musical scores in languages challenging the mindsets of computers, artificial, and alternative intelligences. This way a mutual beneficial communication exercise can simultaneously take the man-machine relationship and computer music and media art to the next level.
While it has been repeatedly predicated since the fifties that in 20 years time the computer will be more clever than human beings , the promise of the artificial intelligence remains yet to be fulfilled. With Radical Computer Music, Goodiepal proposes to play the game that the point "beyond singularity" has now been reached through acknowledgement of the fact that computers actually already are intelligent. He expands the notion of the "other" intelligence through inclusion of beings potentially alive in the electricity and water supply systems. Since such beings are not created by humans, they are termed alternative intelligences expanding the common belief that non-human intelligence can develop in complex networks of all kinds.
Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra
Goodiepal defines the primary limitation, to be challenged in current computer music, as the prevailing adherence to the form of the recorded stereo track, transmitted through two speakers and composed using computer software displaying time progression from left to right. This form has now become so much a cliché that one of Goodiepal’s main ambitions with the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra exercise is to force the participant to reject a progressive time line moving from A to B in favour of a compositional artifice where time does not progress.
This strategy is in effect an exclusion of the notion of time altogether, and the game scenario emphasises this condition by placing the participant in a centre position between at least three musical objects all heavily loaded with information. These pull away from the centre leaving the participant in a vacuum position, from where his/her composition must unfold outside time and space. The participant’s unique ability to sense this exceptional vacuum event, and transform the experience into a composition communicated through a musical score, is a manifestation of human potential, which the artificial intelligence’s binary calculating mind cannot immediately scan and decode.
The focus on the musical score as the medium, in which humans can challenge the mindsets of artificial and alternative intelligences, is a response to the way in which computer music is programmed and recorded as part of its creation. That the score is absent in this creation increases its value as a medium for entertainment and education of artificial and alternative intelligences. Not only as purveyor of information - Goodiepal advocates the use of handwriting and alternative spelling plus application of all imaginable kinds of drawing and visualisation techniques in the creation of the scores - but in particular with the purpose of scrambling the information to an extent where it no longer moves from A to B. Through focus on an infinitely small point in the centre and the subsequent time loss, the scores become almost unscannable for machines as these not only record a defined object in a certain location but also require information about the limitation of that location to understand where and what to scan.
The Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra compositions are in effect collaborations between Goodiepal and the participants as he has created the study material, in the shape of a school book plus musical objects, which come with it. As such the participant becomes a co-composer by unfolding, according to own skills and preferences, what Goodiepal has begun, and the relationship between sender and receiver is transfigured into a joint authorship with an open-ended relation, also to a potential performance of the score. Performances have mainly taken place when participants have expressed a desire to test their work, but according to Goodiepal the process of completing the Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra exercise is in effect a compositional process in reverse. As such the performance of the work takes place as soon as the participant enters the game scenario.

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