Joshua Banks Mailman is an American music theorist, as well an analyst, composer, improvisor, philosopher, critic, and technologist of music.
Early life and education Joshua Banks Mailman was born in New York City and attended Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of the Arts. He gained a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music of University of Rochester. Among his teachers were Charles Rosen, Ted Cohen (philosopher), Richard Cohn, Allen Forte, and Robert Morris.
Career Mailman has taught predominantly at Columbia University, as well as at New York University, University of Alabama, and University of California, Santa Barbara. He has lectured at the Japan Society (NYC), the Society for Music Analysis (UK), IRCAM (Paris), the Symposium (SIMPOM) of Brazilian Studies in Music (Rio de Janeiro)., and the Symposium on Computer-assisted Composition, Istituto per la Musica, Cini Foundation (Venice, Italy).
Research and writing His writings, published in numerous scholarly journals and books, contribute to several areas of music theory, analysis, and technology, spanning such topics as narrativity, phenomenology, metaphor, form as process and dynamic form, cybernetics, music visualization, and range over repertoires from Arnold Schoenberg, Elliott Carter, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Milton Babbitt, to György Ligeti, Luciano Berio, Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Gerard Grisey, and Kaija Saariaho.
Dynamism, process, and emergence in music According to Katherine Lee, “Theorist Joshua Mailman has written prodigiously of… dynamic form in Western Music…[arguing] that musical form should be interpreted as dynamic or as the ‘retrospective contour of the flux of intensity of qualities, [challenging] oft-held views of musical form as architectonic or structural.” Several writers have noted the indebtedness of their work to this idea. Mailman's work on dynamic form in music focuses on “emergent properties in dynamic processes”, for instance ‘’temporal density’’ (‘’interonset density’’) as a generator of phenomenologically emergent properties. This includes an “eloquent example of the conflict between clearly and diffusely delineated boundaries in [Mailman’s] discussion of the form of Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody”. Yet the analyses and concepts that Mailman presents reveal underlying principles of electroacoustic music operating also in music outside the electroacoustic realm, such as in Robert Morris’s String Quartet Arc.
Mailman has examined “flux and flow in music by [Elliott] Carter and [Luciano] Berio, [modeling these] on multi-layered graphs showing the curve of various musical features” with the graphs aligned to indicate visually “the degree of coordination of flux among these salient musical elements, [with] a high degree of coordination [being] said to contribute to a more assertive (rather than furtive) projection of form, one that is more easily apprehended in time. Yet Berio’s Points on the Curve to Find was shown [by Mailman] to assertively project form through a completely different unconventional flux that did not depend on such coordination.” Other emergent properties Mailman identifies as generators of dynamic form include echo rate, pitch freshness, pitch permeation, time-point permeation, and so forth.
More generally Mailman’s “broad-reaching meditation on ‘dynamism’ in relation to musical form [... includes...] a working definition of ‘’dynamism theory’’ as an analysis that ‘asserts motion, change, process, or energy (potential motion, change, or process) as existing in the course of a piece or a performance, as it elapses’”
Cybernetics, phenomenology, and emergence
Mailman’s extensive writing on cybernetic phenomenology of music engages Speculative Realism, exemplifying that “the experience, and indeed the very constitution of the world does not necessarily have to refer to linguistic mediation.”. It may reference the real but nevertheless diverge from it, constituting “[m]ixed realities…resulting in new narrative opportunities through artistic practice” As music is enacted in time (showing rather than telling), its most important properties are not basic, instantaneous, or immediate; rather “this enactment occurs through ‘emergent properties’ that arise out the combinations of the fundamental elements of music (such as pitch, timbre, and duration) into holistic musical features,” Mailman explains how these “emergent properties” can arise through bodily motion (using conventional instruments or ‘’comprovisational’’ technology). “Mailman suggest that, when we conceive of musical properties in terms of physical reference, musical listening can, in turn, present new notions of bodily experience.” Mailman argues that as such properties emerge they can give rise to noticeable processes.
In his lengthy 2016 article on cybernetic phenomenology (see Second-order cybernetics) Mailman uses the rules of the ancient two-player strategy board game Go (; ), to generate brief snippets of music and discusses the ‘’emergent properties’’ that arise only indirectly from these rules, but which can be heard in the snippets. As Tim Summers explains it: “Under Mailman’s mode of listening, music in its sounding is also a form of world-building—we perceive not only the musical material in front of us, but also that there are sets of parameters, rules, and procedures that give rise to this music. Much like game theorist Jesper Juul’s conception of learning a game’s rules through its fictions, Mailman suggest that the ‘rules’ that underpin the worlds of musical pieces are implied by the sounded material. These rules/processes can be established, subverted, fulfilled, and so on. The music plays out within these frames and processes... Mailman's ‘properties’ within ‘rules’....imply that we are hearing only one musical articulation within broader spaces of possibilities—the music we hear has the potential to be otherwise”
Mailman has theorized and demonstrated processes for creating formalized models for various perceived musical effects or emergent properties. “Such processes of ‘listening, phenomenology, and computational modeling’” are what Mailman calls ‘’cybernetic phenomenology’’ (See also Second-order cybernetics).
Thus, as described in various sources, Mailman does not just propose these ‘’emergent properties’’ as ineffable, but rather explicates them through analysis (which in some cases enables them to be synthesized or emulated technologically—through custom-designed algorithms). Yet this explication has to be prompted by phenomenology of listening leading into a feedback loop involving some technical analytical procedures or algorithm, whose output is monitored and which is adjusted in response to that monitoring. As Benjamin Hansberry explains it: “Mailman describes this analytical methodology [cybernetic phenomenology] as involving ‘computational analytic procedures prompted by [one’s] hearing, procedures whose output in turn enhanced [one’s] experience as a listener…Mailman…foregrounds the creative potential of such a methodology as part of the performative turn in music analysis.” As Hansberry describes it, this process has three stages: (1) The analyst translates their phenomenal experience into formal terms. (2) The formal terms are worked out systematically. (3) The results are “re-translated” back into phenomenal experience—except that in Mailman's cybernetic phenomenology these stages occur in a loop, where stage 3 feeds back into another iteration of stage 1. “The notion of this cybernetic phenomenology as an underlying analytical practice is a common theme in Mailman’s work.”
Comprovisation, embodiment, interactive music and visualization algorithms (improvised synesthesia)
Regarding the term "comprovisation", Mailman’s use of this term clearly shows that improvised and composed music are so interwoven with each other down to even their presuppositions, that only the label assigned to them allows one to, arbitrarily, distinguish them. At the same time Mailman offers a justification for the composite term as described in Arthur Farac’s account of it: Comprovisation is compositional since it “involves the composition of algorithms for generating music guided by an aesthetic concern,” and “the semi-stochastic algorithm can be considered as 'improvisation', since the determination of certain details cannot be predicted in advance” “In an analysis of his own comprovisational computer music practice, Joshua Mailman explains that improvisation has been an activity located between composition and performance, drawing substance from each….comprovisation as carried out in the design of interactive artworks unites planning with performance, predictability with spontaneity, and rewards the artist who engages in their art-making processes with a spirit of experimentation and an embrace of unexpected outcomes with the possibility of finding inspiration in chance events.”
Mailman’s work on comprovisation, embodiment, and interactive music involves developing and using custom-built technologies, using wireless hardware sensors to control meta-parameters of algorithms, where these meta-parameters correlate to emergent properties “Mailman …rightly critiques what he sees as a ‘universalizing impetus’ of embodied cognition that insists on a ‘natural’ relationship between musical sounds and their embodiment, suggesting instead an approach that highlights music's artifact and allows for the expansion and extension of how music is embodied.” Therefore rather than trying to manipulate typical musical properties, “Mailman advocates listening to and analyzing music in order to discover alternative musical parameters to manipulate via body movements. These alternative elements can then become embodied in a new way through associative learning while using the IMS [Interactive Music System]. Some of the musical features Mailman demonstrates include rhythmic sparseness, viscosity of texture, and harmonic space. He pairs these features with types of body motions, such as pressing the hands closer together or further apart" Caitlin Trevor calls this a “more enriching and creative way to build IMS” and “an inverting, boundary-pushing new perspective on the subject.”
In terms of technology, Mailman has developed the audio component of these systems using ports of Real-time Cmix (RTcmix) for iOS as well as Max/MSP. For instance, in his iOS implementations, features such as attack density, timbre (low-pass filter), or pitch-collection can be manipulated through sliders or tilting the phone.
At the same time, Mailman's IMSs also involve a visual component, live computer graphics animation, steered by the same body controlled sensors as steer the audio components. As David Wright remarks: “Visualization of music … serve[s] as the basis for experimental work in live digital visuals…[Mailman’s Montreal Comprovisation No. 1] provides an excellent example.”
In this work, as explained by Zuhal Oktem Demir (2021), the music and graphics are created by the physical movement of the user, who acts as both a dancer and musician, creating an audio-visual space with graphics shaped according to these physical movements.