3. AIMS OF "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON "

A. Artistic aspect

Often the music serves the image....here they will be at the same level.

"3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON " is on one side a musical piece that you can listen to, and on the other one a visual piece that you enjoy to look at.

-The visual part of "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON" is nice to look at. But the esthetic aspect is not the most important. The choices we had to make were mainly conditionned by the rules we had to respect so the project could work. So when we found the shapes and how to set them, we did nothave a lot of possibilities. These shapes were the only possibility. That’s why the esthetic aspect was almost imposed. But still, Jason made the world of a nice way. We also had technical and time limitations.

-The musical part

I would like that, contrary to most cases, when there is music with images, the music will not be relegated to the second level but will be primordial. So this music is an artistic project, even if I am limitated by the question of styles, and by the fact that the different groups must work together.

Very simplely I could say that I composed, played, recorded and realized that piece with the wish that it will be pleasant, but also that it will work when someone navigates in the world.

Even if the project has to work technically (and this was not easy to do), even if it could be looked at as an experiment, i still see it as an artistic work, a piece of music that you can look at (and modify), or an interactive 3D world that you navigate in listening to a piece of music.

B. Entertainment object

The 3D world is black. It is like the space. The user can imagine that the tetrahedrons are planets or a spaceship, and using the computers’s mouse, "travels" in a 3D space, gets closer or farer from shapes, enter into them, goes from one to another one, and by doing that modifies the music.

So the user is travelling in the space where flyes a big nice shape built of 20 tetrahedrons and looking almost like a sphere, and is listening to a piece of music, as we listen to a CD in our living-room. But when you listen to a CD you can’t modify the music. Here you can, that’s why "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON" can be considered as a game.

If we look at "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON" as a game, this game’s aim can be defined so: to enjoy oneself, listen to music, watch at a nice scene, but also look for one specific music, look for the point that the 7 groups are listened together (where all the 20 instruments play together), look for a certain mix, and look for the points where no music is heard.

Also the user can try to remember the instruments according to the colors of the tetrahedrons’ sides: each instrument has his color.

All that makes me say that this work could be considered as a game project.

C. "Not really scientific" experiment

Do styles really exist? What and why are they?

We will try in brief to examine what are these styles, how some major companies or producers create styles with a commercial purpose, and explain how, with "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON", we will try to make the styles disappear.

-Natural musical styles. What are they?

Are styles an illusion? No, for sure. We can easily make the difference between a rock band and a balinese group, or between a baroque chamber orchestra, an african percussion group and a tzigane quartet. Styles are conditionned by the sounds, the timbres of instruments, harmony, rhythm, melodies, the way to organize orchestras, words, the way to play, to articulate.

So we can say that styles depend on ethnical and cultural parameters. And obviously they are also connected to the time and the history. They depend on technology.

- Artificial styles

If styles have been created and developed during the history and the years by human, cultural and natural phenomenons, they also used to appear for economic or business reasons. They are connected to the record’s market. Specially in the western capitalist consumer society it is clear that we see new names for kind of musics that are not so different from others, even if sometimes, the given name really expresses a particularity, a difference.

But the fact that they have a specific name helps to sell CD’s.

Is it really interesting or true to speak about "Hard Bop Revival" instead of "Hard Bop " or "Be Bop" ? The bands that play these musics play the same music. Or talking about cuban music, there are a lot of names that often correspond to different rhythms : "Mambo", "Cha Cha Cha", "Son", "Guaganco", "Guajira", but on the other hand, there is a generic name used for many kind of "afro-cuban" music: Salsa.

"Rhythm and Blues" was also a name given to a kind of Soul Music made in Memphis, Tennessee in the late 60-ties. It was inspired by Blues, Rock, Gospel, but it was generally a music used to dance. With the "FORMIDABLE" and "STAX" LP’s, people used to dance with Otis Redding, Wilson Picket, Sam and Dave ‘s energic songs.

Anyway, even if this muic was really different from the one of Ray Charles, The Rolling Stones, or the Doors, the fact that it had another name was helpful to the producers to sell: people could remember more easilly this style.

-Let’s make the styles disappear

"3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON" is a composition played by a 20 pieces orchestra formed by 7 groups. Each group corresponds to a style. I wrote the score so that each band can play separately, or mixed, integrated to the others, even all together. This way, the audience will forget the styles:they will be erased to create "one music", an entity without style, THE MUSIC.

It would be pretentious to say that "3D MUSIC TETRAHEDRON" is a scientific experiment. But with the help of it we will have the opportunity to think about the questions of styles in music, and will try to create an "universal music", with no style.

(I insist on the fact that this in only an experiment, or a question)