Joshua Banks Mailman
Joshua Banks Mailman was born in New York City and attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Arts.
[6] His writings, published in numerous scholarly journals and books, contribute to several areas of music theory, analysis, and technology, spanning such topics as narrativity, phenomenology, metaphor, form as process and dynamic form, cybernetics, music visualization, and range over repertoires from Arnold Schoenberg, Elliott Carter, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Milton Babbitt, to Gyorgy Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Gerard Grisey, and Kaija Saariaho.
[17][10] More generally Mailman’s “broad-reaching meditation on ‘dynamism’ in relation to musical form [... includes...] a working definition of ‘’dynamism theory’’ as an analysis that ‘asserts motion, change, process, or energy (potential motion, change, or process) as existing in the course of a piece or a performance, as it elapses’” [18] Mailman’s extensive writing on cybernetic phenomenology of music engages Speculative Realism, exemplifying that “the experience, and indeed the very constitution of the world does not necessarily have to refer to linguistic mediation.”.
Thus, as described in various sources, Mailman does not just propose these ‘’emergent properties’’ as ineffable, but rather explicates them through analysis (which in some cases enables them to be synthesized or emulated technologically—through custom-designed algorithms).
As Benjamin Hansberry explains it: “Mailman describes this analytical methodology [cybernetic phenomenology] as involving ‘computational analytic procedures prompted by [one’s] hearing, procedures whose output in turn enhanced [one’s] experience as a listener…Mailman…foregrounds the creative potential of such a methodology as part of the performative turn in music analysis.” [26]As Hansberry describes it, this process has three stages: (1) The analyst translates their phenomenal experience into formal terms.
He pairs these features with types of body motions, such as pressing the hands closer together or further apart"[24] Caitlin Trevor calls this a “more enriching and creative way to build IMS” and “an inverting, boundary-pushing new perspective on the subject.”[33] In terms of technology, Mailman has developed the audio component of these systems using ports of Real-time Cmix (RTcmix) for iOS as well as Max/MSP.
For instance, in his iOS implementations, features such as attack density, timbre (low-pass filter), or pitch-collection can be manipulated through sliders or tilting the phone.
[34] As David Wright remarks: “Visualization of music … serve[s] as the basis for experimental work in live digital visuals…[Mailman’s Montreal Comprovisation No.
[37] The harmonious complexity and diversity are spontaneously impressive, arising from the system at provides shaping, revealing a multi-layered multi-form experience, says Demir, who continues to describe Mailman’s ‘’improvising synesthesia’’ as follows: Fluxations and FluxNoisations equipment is operated by a musician-dancer moving in a room in front of the infrared camera wearing wireless sensor gloves.
In this way the graphics noticeably coordinate with the music, creating an immersive world whose associated audiovisual trajectories are constantly directed and shaped by the movements of the human body moving through space.
The generative algorithms are designed to maximize the variety and consistency of the musical and visual experience, including cross-mode relationships between them and explosions and bubbling bursts of evolving particles.
[38] Arthur Farac and Manuel Falleiros (2019) describe Mailman’s comprovisation in aspirational terms as a performing art in which interactive technological systems are essential, as they enable what was previously impossible: the design of complex streams of semi-Stochastic events that are generated complexity achieved through technological tools, that is, the use of algorithms, are in this way essential for the characterization of comprovisation.
From composition, the comprovising new media artist draws a tendency to "compose music-generating algorithms as guided by aesthetic concerns," and the inclusion of a "planned choreography of physical movements."
[41] His analysis of Gerard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum and Kaija Saariaho's Lichtbogen employ his own custom-designed computer graphics animations to analyze texture and temporal processes.
[43] But in Mailman’s analyses of Schoenberg, transformation theory plays merely a role within a larger looser framework that focusses on chord-event hierarchies emerging from melodic contour and other motivic or contextual features, whose configurations help to ‘emancipate’ previously unfamiliar chords: Joshua Mailman’s study, which investigates a selection of Schoenberg’s works, suggests that concepts of prolongation and structural levels are inappropriate for his music.
21, engages a modernist aesthetic perspective, but by analyzing phrase-like entities and thereby overcoming what Arnold Whittall has called the ‘Martian’-like approach that sometimes typifies pc-set analysis.
[45] This is done by identifying associational (pitch contour or other contextual) features that bring out contrasts or kinships between consecutive or non-consecutive phrase-like segments.
[47] To do this, Mailman examines mutually exclusive aspects of their interval content, uses Klumpenhouwer networks to demonstrate a pattern in relation to these peaks, and analyzes the melodic contour activity.
[49] “Mailman…is of the new generation of musicians who have absorbed the text and sense of Milton's music as a natal environment and think naturally within its terms” says Benjamin Boretz[50] Mailman is acknowledged for developing a flexible approach,[51] and for drawing attention to and theorizing liminal periodicity (usually some “lopsided groove” arising from recurrence of two recurring time-points among others, a phenomenon called ‘time-point permeation’),[52][53] and because of “focusing on ways in which passages of [Babbitt’s] music can both function in a serial context and reference tonality”,[54][55][56] Mailman is acknowledged for his systematic interpretation of Babbitt’s 12-tone music as a sequence of tonal jazz chord changes,[57] also known as ‘portmantonality’ (double entendre allusions to jazz and Tin Pan Alley songs),[54][58][59][60][61] as well as, related to this, for demonstrating the analogy of jazz improvisation for Babbitt’s practice of composing note-by-note details somewhat spontaneously based on a pitch chart, somewhat analogous to a jazz lead sheet.
[56]Thus both the ‘portmantonality’ and improvisatory characterizations that Mailman offers counteract the common misconception that Babbitt’s way of composition was algorithmic, that once an array had been selected for pitches and rhythms, and once parameters for instrumental and registral projection had been determined, then the rest (the sonic details heard) would follow trivially.
“Mailman 2019…[demonstrates how] Babbitt’s compositional technique sets limits on the choices he could make in the process of writing but it did not make these choices automatically.”[66] In these ways Mailman’s work has fueled the newly emerging consensus that the more fruitful way of viewing Babbitt’s serialism is as “creat[ing] a musical space within which he could be creative”[66] and as an “instance of the American tendency to put together unexpected combinations of influences, just to see what happens.” [64] In his writing on metaphors for (music) listening, "Mailman offers a range of images to illustrate the diversity of listening" [67] As Marty explains it, whereas psychology and phenomenology of music typically emphasize a view of listening as deterministic, Mailman, inspired by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory, emphasizes that, our experience of music is inescapably mediated by metaphors because metaphors are the basis of all non-basic cognition.
Mailman has appeared in Robert Hilferty’s documentary film Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer, in Ryan Camarada’s documentary film Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod, and on TV in the ABC’s News Nightline segment “Why Some Songs Make us Sad” where he likened the bluesy, minor-key pitches in Pharrell Williams’s song "Happy" to the appeal of salted caramel.
