Designing Constraints: Composing and Performing with Digital Musical Systems

Currently, a musician working with digital technology is faced with a panoply of musical tools that can be roughly characterized by a split between ready-made music production software on the one hand, and audio-programming environments such as SuperCollider, CSound, Pure Data, Max/MSP, ChucK, or Audiomulch (to name but a few) on the other. Problems with the former lie in the conceptual and compositional constraints imposed upon users by software tools that clearly define the scope of available musical expressions. It is for this reason that many musicians, determined to fight the fossilization of music into stylistic boxes, often choose to work with programming environments that allow for more extensive experimentation. However, problems here include the practically infinite expressive scope of the environment, sometimes resulting in a creative paralysis or in the frequent symptom of a musician-turned-engineer. Consequently, a common strategy can be detected, defined here as that of designing constraints, where the instrument designer, the composer, or the performer (a distinction often irrelevant in these systems; see Drummond 2009) devises a relatively high-level system of constraints, encapsulating a defined space for potential expression, whether of compositional or gestural nature. This article engages with this situation by exploring the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) concepts of affordances, constraints, and mapping. We examine how computational systems of musical expression always involve the establishment of a particular stratum that provides certain affordances to the musician, while concurrently posing important constraints. The article studies how constraints can serve as sources for creative explorations. For this purpose, three systems are analyzed: the mLog, Phalanger, and the ixi lang. All these systems are instantiations that proscribe complexity in favor