The SAT is pleased to interview American composer Matthew D. Gantt. From July 23 to 25, 2024, Gantt will present the immersive performance Music in the Shape of a Sphere, part of SAT’s artistic residency program.

The Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) is a research and creation laboratory open to the world, multiplying technological possibilities and the hybridization of realities and artistic disciplines. Its residency program aims to accompany innovative projects towards realization, providing artistic teams with the support they need to progress through one or more phases of creation.

SAT: How does this project fit in your musical and artistic journey?

A lifetime ago I studied at conservatory for guitar and improvised music, which at the time made a lot of creative and conceptual sense to me (ie: ‘I’m a musician that plays an instrument, I have an embodied relationship to that instrument, if I make a recording, it’s a documentation of that relationship, etc’).  

Eventually, I started drifting away from the guitar towards electronic music, finding myself excited about the aesthetic possibilities of this new space, but confused by the ‘metaphor’ of what I was doing: is the software itself an instrument? What constitutes a ‘live’ performance, and how is it different from the recorded artifact? Why do so many laptop concerts sound amazing but feel like watching someone check their email on stage? 

Around 2015, I was fortunate to get a research grant to study Max/MSP and electronic composition at IRCAM in Paris. At the time, I’d been having similar conversations about digital music and embodiment with a choreographer friend, as well as another electronic composer also visiting Paris. While they were there, we were able to catch an organ recital at the Notre Dame cathedral together – a beautiful experience, but one we walked away from saying “wait a minute – that was just as disembodied as a laptop concert!” 

Thinking about the difference in scale between a person and a pipe organ vs a person and guitar, as well as the positioning of the organ player behind the audience became something of an ‘open sesame’ moment for me, where I started thinking about my own composition in terms of architecture and gesture, rather than through the metaphor of performer, instrument, and recorded document. (I of course later found there was already extensive precedent here in things like the Corbusier/Xenakis/Varese Philips Pavilion, David Tudor at the Pepsi Dome in Osaka, and countless others)

As I’ve begun creating virtual environments in game engines and similar in the time since, I’ve been trying to carry that line of thinking with me, where these 3D spaces and objects can operate somewhere between a virtual architectural space, a collection of ‘digital sound sculptures’ or as a set of kinetic ‘sound objects’ unto themselves.

Working this way, I’ve been trying to think of the relationship between sound and virtual space as an integrated whole, rather than as a kind of ‘here’s a musical performance with a visualizer’ or ‘here’s an abstract film with a musical score’. In Music in the Shape of a Sphere, all the sounds and 3D environments are generated in real-time and influence each other, creating a kind of feedback loop where I become the conductor of a sort of abstract ensemble, rather than an instrumentalist at the laptop. 

SAT: Your work includes a rich and colorful approach to technology, highlighting its lifelike aspects through the use of generative music and organic sound bites. How did this approach lead you to working in immersive spaces?

There’s kind of two main threads here: The first is mostly pragmatic – when I first started thinking about spatial sound or ‘sound environments’ in the context of my early experiments with digital music, I was fairly limited as an independent artist in the sense that I didn’t have the financial resources to work with multiple speaker arrays, large audio interfaces, or access to institutional spaces that could support this kind of work. Around that time, game engines like Unity and Unreal (as well as WebVR platforms like Mozilla Hubs) were starting to enter the mainstream, and it occurred to me that this software could become both a creative and functional way of exploring ideas around sound in space, even if i couldn’t afford my own studio to try the ideas out IRL. Eventually, this began to push me out of thinking of these virtual sound spaces as a replacement or ‘simulation’ of physical space, and towards thinking about what kinds of music or structures might be unique, or only possible in this new context.

The second thread is coming out of an extended studio practice composing electronic music: It feels like there’s often this weird trend of fetishizing the like, ‘perfect generative system’ or arriving at some kind of Rube Goldberg-esque Max/MSP patch, or synthesizer arrangement or whatever where you can just hit the ‘on’ button or turn on the faucet and out comes this endless stream of interesting sonic activity. I find myself very much interested in the Eno-eque tradition of systems music, though in a practical sense, I feel like the quest for this sort of macro-level ‘perfect’ sequencer or system has always fallen flat for me, personally at least. Something that’s felt really exciting for me in my own practice is using real-time simulation as a kind of compositional environment where various ‘sound objects’ or sound agents can interact with each other, create unexpected emergent behavior, or take on unexpected meaning or gesture after being activated inside the virtual terrarium of the game engine. Artists like Ian Cheng have felt like a big influence in that regard. 

SAT: What inspired you when crafting the sonic and visual ecosystem?

Generally, I tend not to work very like, ‘narratively/symbolically’ (ie: “oh, the cube represents love, the blob thing represents anguish”). Usually, as I’m developing or selecting materials for a work, I tend to gravitate towards objects that offer an unexpected structural or mechanic possibility, rather than for their immediate associative quality. For example, in the second section of this piece, there’s a set of sound objects made from a combine of virtual ram’s bone, cloth flags, and geometric spheres. This came about less for any narrative quality, but rather because the combination of objects bouncing within the physics simulation began to generate interesting rhythms due to their asymmetrical shape. 

There’s an old PS2 game called Katamari Damacy, where you play the role of this tiny, impossibly adhesive ball that begins to pick up various small objects, becoming larger and larger in size, eventually going from picking up thumbtacks and similar to growing to the size of a skyscraper. Similarly, I tend to think of these sonic and visual ecosystems as something that starts as an investigation of the material or structural qualities of their components, which then take on an internal symbolic or associative logic as the various pieces cohere into a ‘vocabulary’. 

A potential cheap narrative read on the piece might be that the wooden mannequin’s progression throughout the various movements of the work are tantamount to a kind of Fantasia-esque ‘hero’s journey’, in which they start off battered around by a number of objects and sculptures, later growing in scale to find a kind of mastery in dialogue with them, only to be later returned to a state of confusion towards the end (though the piece certainly wasn’t conceived of this way!) 

SAT : For ‘Music in the shape of a sphere’, you have been exploring game engines and social XR platforms as to build bridges between physical and virtual spaces. As a performing artist, did this exploration bring new perspectives to your practice?

Unsure if this is apocryphal, but there’s this Brecht quote about ‘not hiding the levers and pulleys’ of a theatrical production, or, put another way, acknowledging the artifice and mediation of the performance environment, rather than attempting to hoodwink the audience thru technical illusion. I’ve always been interested in virtual reality and digital space as less of a kind of magical “wow I’m really skydiving/on a mountain/in a spaceship” spectacle, and more as a kind of mirror for our cultural desires and technical drive to manifest them. 

With all that said, I’ve been interested in the physical infrastructures that support these immersive spaces (the SAT dome, VR headsets and the wild aesthetics of gaming PCs, etc), as well as the way that even physical performances can implicitly allude to virtual space (a DIY performance drenched in reverb creating the hybrid sonic space of a hypothetical cavern inside a physical basement venue, etc). 

In my own work, I’m interested in the ways that there can be slippage between these contexts, or different media platforms: The various ‘virtual sound sculptures” I’m creating can exist between the SAT dome, the Satellite WebVR online spaces, or potentially as fabricated physical objects, each retaining their own character, but responding the affordances and associations of various contexts. 

This kind of ‘portability’ has been something (hopefully!) getting me out of the ‘brain in a jar squinting at a laptop’ mindset, and more into a space of working with sculptural sound materials that triangulate themselves across a broader landscape. 

SAT: What are your biggest current influences, visually and musically?

Oh man, probably too many to name, but a few that come to mind quickly: Keith Rankin, Seth Graham and the entire Orange Milk family are a constant north star for me. Working as a studio assistant to Mort Subotnick definitely still looms large, both thru the whole Buchla paradigm, and the related McLuhan notion of critical investigation of medium as form, rather than just focusing on what ‘content’ is made. Pauline Oliveros’s ideas around her ‘Expanded Instrument System’ as a cybernetic feedback loop. Less aesthetic similarities in our work, but Laurie Spiegel is a longtime personal hero as a kind of ‘grassroots technologist’ working between DIY gumption and institutional research zones. George Lewis and the earnest MIDI virtuosity of the Voyager system. Stockhausen and the whole ‘cat walking on a piano’ hyper-gesturalism of the 20th century avant garde. I want my music to sound like Stockhausen made out of pastel plastic. 

Visually, I love the Memphis Group just in terms of like, sheer weird beauty and surprise, and I’m sure some early formative experiences with the video games Myst and Riven factor in here as far as my own visual language with game engines. Anna Uddenberg is someone who’s work I find super inspiring, especially in the way she finds a kind of unexpected sensuality in like, ‘hard’ or prefabricated surfaces. In the context of this project, I’ve been thinking a lot about Maya Deren’s ‘Study in Choreography for Camera” and Michael Snow’s La Région Centrale with regard to how to ‘frame’ the projections inside the SAT dome as a material condition rather than just a neutral visual window to look ‘thru’ as well. List goes on and on though.