Ergodic and Emergent Qualities of Real-Time Scores. Anna & Marie and Gamified Audiovisual Compositions

This paper describes the functionality and aesthetic implications of the real-time score-system developed for the composition Anna & Marie by Marko Ciciliani. It originates from the artistic research project GAPPP and was first performed at Donaueschinger Musiktage 2019. By referring to examples of historic tendencies towards non-linear scores, the terms ergodicity and emergence are introduced to the understanding of the score properties of the real-time virtual performance space. This first part is then exemplified by describing the ergodic score of Anna & Marie. A particularity of this work is that two violinists navigate avatars in two virtual 3D environments by their manner of playing. The environment offers distinct audiovisual situations distributed in the virtual space and is identified as a spatial score. The musicians' musical effort of spatially traversing the virtual performance space consequently allows the audiovisual gestalt of the performance to emerge. The entanglement of spatial score and symbolic score, generated and presented on tablets, and mediated by the performers, is shown to be a characteristic of the composition. It is investigated, how the emerging performances question a notion of ergodicity where a prior text is followed by a technology reproducing it. In conclusion, the group of categories of real-time scores is extended by ergodic emergent scores