Atmospheres of Inference

Jean Brazeau's MFA Defence
Monday, October 17, 2022 | 10:00 AM
Room 4350 – SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts, 149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver & via Zoom

Please contact Christopher Anderson, the SCA's Graduate Program Assistant, at sca_gpa@sfu.ca to RSVP for the Zoom link

There is a persisting affection for analog audio equipment developed over the second half of the 20th century. Unlike instruments based on digital technologies, early analog instruments exhibit unpredictable behaviours contingent on their environmental conditions and the components which furnish their circuit boards. These components and their acute material properties, drastically affect an instruments’ performance and functionality. In a world calibrated to the binary logic of digital technologies (discrete processes of quantification, capture, validation, and storage), the analog (continuous, unstable, and entropic) demarcates an exceptional space laden with contingency. This project aims to instrumentalize new recursive strategies in digital signal processing, specifically deep learning (DL), which are blurring the phenomenological distinctions between these two regimes of electronic technics. Through a musical rhetoric, Atmospheres of Inference attempts to dramatise these two factional systems by performing a 1976 Serge Modular alongside an inferred abstraction of the same instrument: a variational autoencoder trained on a corpus of Serge recordings.