In her talk from 2016 Holly Herndon, an American composer, touches upon her process, laptop music and performance, the need for contextualising work, government surveillance and many more interesting topics, that I believe are very relevant for many working with sound.
I relate a lot to Holly’s position on the process as a fuel for artwork itself. The process that reveals more possibilities and therefore makes our work malleable and flexible during its creation, rather than thoroughly planned and structured from its beginings.
I use that method while working on my pieces and also trying to learn some new skill during the process.
Holly also talks a lot about how using the laptop as her instrument has been problematic in different environments and how she had to often justify her artistic choices depending on what her practice was, wether it was related to academy or to her private performance. She called her laptop the most intimate instrument and I agree with this statement on every level. The talk and the experiments I did inspired by Holly and new Ableton techniques below:
Her groundbreaking editing methods came from the experimentation with different mediums and not obeying the pressure. The way she plays with human voice and digital possibilities of Ableton and Max for Live, gives the possibility of classically sounding vocals and ultra-modern breaks and folds of digital sounds to merge into one strangely chaotic and harmonic in one creation.
