Name: Gamut Inc.
Members: Marion Wörle (computer-musician), Maciej Śledziecki (composer)
Nationality: German
Current release: Gamut Inc's new album Sum to Infinity is out via Morphine.

If you enjoyed this interview with Gamut Inc. and would like to keep up to date with their music, visit the duo's official website. They are also on Facebook.




Over the past decade, I've conducted almost 3,000 interviews for the website. It is only over the past two years that the word “humanity” keeps coming up more and more, to the point of being a key topic. Are you finding that your work with music machines is more and more embedded into a wider conversation about what “being human” truly means?

As early as the Enlightenment, Julien Offray de La Mettrie spoke of humans as "upright walking machines." Metaphors for the mind and brain have always been based on the state of technology.

In antiquity, the brain was compared to a scroll, later to clockwork, now it´s a network of synapses. One looks for the ghost in the machine - as if there was something in man that is more than the mechanics of biochemistry. This is an old pattern that seeks to give man a special status in the biosphere and now technosphere. But if you let go the idea of a soul separated from the body, you lose nothing - except for the immortality of this soul. And the soul was the thing that ensured a distinction between human and animal.

In more and more areas - including intellectual tasks - that are classically considered typically human, machines are performing better and better. So if we finally no longer see the distinction between man, machine and animal - so strictly, it could lead to a somewhat more modest self-image in the world.

On your website you state that your “self-playing automatons translate ancient acoustic considerations into a sound language of the present time.” Which considerations, specifically, are you talking about here?

The sentence honestly needs some revision ... It comes from our project AVANT AVANTGARDE, in which we explored early sound pioneers before the 20th century. We were fascinated by how kinetic sound sculptures were already common in ancient Greece. In the Arabic Renaissance around 800 A.D., the Banu Masu brothers developed several sound machines - up to an apparatus that could record a human flute player and play it back through an device.

During the Enlightenment, flute clocks were popular, and composers such as Mozart and Beethoven composed music for them. Not to forget the invention of the metronome by Mälzel, which dates back to the same period.

And finally, the tradition of orchestrions at the end of the 19th century. These devices are still the best known - after all, they were the only way to reproduce music at that time - in some cases even to record it. There was a whole industry around these machines, which disappeared within a few years when the first working amplifiers and loudspeakers got on the market in the 1920s.

That whole tradition fascinated us, and showed that machines have always been a part - if only a side arm - of music history. We pick up on that with Gamut Inc - using the technical means and aesthetics of today.

Why is it important for your approach that machines are translating these considerations? And why is it important the machines are actually physically playing the instruments?

With organs, for example, the architecture is the sound body of the instrument, and so closely connected to it that a digital simulation makes no sense for us. And the sound of basses from well-intonated 32-foot stops is unique!

We have developed our own machines - partly together with the instrument maker Gerhard Kern - according to our sound ideas. The accordion, for example, has eight motors that influence the airflow and sound in a variety of ways. To simulate that would be absurd.

We have always liked a hybrid sound - even when Marion was still playing laptop pure, she mainly used found footage, field recordings and analog recordings that she processed. Now this process becomes more visible as the analog sounds are created live on stage.

In an interview with you I read you included the following quote: “Of course the audience could see the ropes of the machane – the crane-device that let actors “fly” to the stage as gods ex machina. But the magic works anyway.” So what is the magic in this case, to you personally?

Although we know how the motors, magnets and wind machines of our instruments work, it is always fascinating to stand in the middle of the thumping, beating and pumping apparatus.

This year, we're doing the large-scale music theater ZEROTH LAW with the RIAS Chamber Choir and the largest robot orchestra in the world - the Logos Foundation from Ghent. They have built more than 60 machines - if you spread them around the room, you stand in the middle of a hybrid sound sculpture - the sound is around you from all sides. The juxtaposition with the choir mediates between the human and the machine.

The visual element seems to be important to your music – I certainly thought videos of your performances to be extremely impressive as multi-sense-experiences. How did you approach recording an album – rather than releasing a video? What was the process like for Sum to Infinity?

Marion comes from architecture, and also works as a graphic designer, Maciej has composed a lot of film music, so the visual aspect always plays a role in our work.

With Sum to Infinity we had the idea of the moving grid in mind. Then we did a lot of drawings and shape experiments - it sometimes looked like technical drawing. In a way, we felt that if a shape looked good graphically, it would probably sound good acoustically. This has been confirmed in most cases, although with music as a time-related art, one's own attention span always plays a role and there are other perceptual limits.

Then there is the combination of light and sound, which we are constantly expanding for live concerts. This also comes from our music theater productions, and ideally the theater or stage space then becomes a pulsating machine room.

A few years back I spoke to Moritz Simon Geist, and he said that robotics and music machines offer “a different way of interacting with the music.” Is that something you can relate to?

Definitely. For example, compared to purely electronic music, the instruments also greatly limit the possibilities - if you don't want to constantly build new machines. This is good in a time when the sound possibilities in computers are so immense that the decision-making processes require great discipline.

In our work with machines, there is also the question: why do I need a machine for this? What are convincing forms of expression compared to work with pure electronics or human players? These questions often lead to new approaches in compositions.

You're designing and building (I would assume) your own machine instruments / instrument machines. Where do ideas come from? What does usually come first – the machine or the idea for the composition played by the machine?  

In the first years we experimented a lot with different music machines. Mostly imitations of existing instruments like percussion, glockenspiels but also aeorophones like the accordion.

There was an old banjo in the studio that no one had touched for years - at some point the idea came up to equip it with ebows and movable bridges. Then we heard a rattling sound when the ebows touched the strings and thought: that's interesting, we should incorporate that too ... So it goes quite organically hand in hand.

Right now, we're very happy with the machines we have - also that we now have modular beaters that can be clamped to different surfaces or percussions. Those are used prominently on Sum to Infinity. If we were to start building new machines again, we'd probably start from a sound ideal first.

Tell me a bit about the early phase of Gamut Inc, and some of the challenges you faced, please, especially with regards to building the machines?

Since Maciej comes from jazz and Marion from electronics, we first played as a guitar - electronics duo. By then the guitar was already heavily modified, prepared and abused. At a concert with the robot orchestra of the Logos Foundation we heard the potential of music machines for the first time. And through a composition commission on the famous computerized organ at the Kunst-Station St Peter in Cologne, we were finally hooked.

For the first machines we worked with the instrument maker Gerhard Kern. The challenge was to get the machines small enough so we could tour - Gerhard was designing big barrel organs and carillons at the time. Then we had to learn all the electronics, programming Arduinos.

And above all, learn to limit ourselves - in the beginning we always had new ideas, without really estimating the time it takes to get such a machine running reliably. And the time it takes to make idiosyncratic music with it.

Around the time you started out, having techno played by humans was a pretty popular concept. Would you say that this is essentially the same thing just from a different angle? Are you interested in this at all?

It's clear that this also plays a role, although we don't do techno, even if the aesthetics overlap sometimes. Try dancing to Sum to Infinity !

Maybe it has to do with digital fatigue, wanting to see more analog, but ultimately it's a process of inspiration, right? Everything that is once out in the world inspires what is to come. So - at least in our scene - the once discussed distinction between electronic and analog is actually as good as obsolete. Music machines as hybrids between these worlds make this even clearer.

Today, the debate about machine music has been almost completely taken over by AI. The differences between what you're doing and working with AI are obvious - where do you see the overlaps? Could you see integrating AI concepts into what you are doing?

It's like 3D cinema - there's always the hype and then the disappointment, and it can't be ruled out that there will soon be another "AI Winter“ - the disillusion about what AI can do. We follow these developments, of course, but have not yet found a hook in them that is relevant for our music.

In our music theater production OVER THE EDGE CLUB we had parts of the libretto written by an AI. That was interesting, but quite disillusioning as to what the limits of text synthesis available in 2020 were.

What we found interesting is that text can be generated faster than you can read it. This means that selection and curation will play an increasingly important role.

You've performed many different pieces at many different venues with many different machines. From your experience, what kinds of approaches work best - what kind of music do machines “prefer to play”?

Since we do not have the necessary infrastructure to enable independent interpretation skills on the instruments, they perform the pieces quite stiffly at first. This limitation already excludes many musical possibilities - and at the same time inspires others.

So we try to transfer textures and procedures from electronics like pulse width modulation to the instruments, and have developed our own tools that can shape phrases dynamically. Since this can quickly become a lot of MIDI notes, we use Supercollider to generate MIDI shapes and forms, which we then arrange by hand.

This way, we gradually build up a library of sound phenomena that interest us and that can be adapted to the respective pieces.

Have there been situations where you were genuinely surprised by the aural results of working with your machines? Is there an element of creativity in what these machines are doing?

We are always looking for the surprising sounds and textures. In our work with the machines, we also hope to overcome the clichés of what is "machine-like."

But: There is no creativity in machines. There is no consciousness in machines. And for all we know, it will stay that way for a while. But the most interesting software and hardware machines are powerful proofs that incredible efficiency and diversity is possible without consciousness.

There has almost always been an element of speculation about the future when it comes to working with machines. In relation to music, which direction could things move towards in the future? Which direction do you see your own work going?

Automation of the human voice would be very interesting - there are already these incredible machines from Martin Riches. For our piece OVER THE EDGE CLUB we got quite interesting results with speech synthesis.

We are also working more with human musicians and want to see how the composition methods developed for the music machines can be transferred to humans. We are also developing an interactive system for composing and improvising for performers with the machines. Musicians play their instruments and are "played" at the same time, and the interaction cross-fertilizes.

But beyond our fascination with the technical possibilities, we are primarily interested in compositional procedures and form-building processes for the machines. In the end, the goal is to make interesting and sensually stimulating music.