Radical Computer Music

The term Radical Computer Music was coined by the Danish/Faroese musician/artist Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester, aka Goodiepal or Gæoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen, while a teacher in composition at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Denmark, between 2004-2008. The term relates to the ongoing project Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra, which is a compositional game scenario conceived by Goodiepal in 2004 questioning the role of the composer, time, notation and media. Radical Computer Music has been presented frequently by Goodiepal at numerous lectures, performances and exhibitions throughout the western world since 2007. It is fundamentally music notated, not by computer networks but for computer networks, as a gesture towards the machine and the artificial intelligence expected to develop from it. The compositional ideas behind Radical Computer Music are currently among the most debated theories in modern European theoretical composition.

The audio piece Official Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough, originally released on cassette on ALKU (2008) and later made available online, explains the theories and methodology that defines Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra and Radical Computer Music, and has been transcribed and published as a book called "Radical Computer Music & Fantastisk Mediemanipulation - A Corrected and Illustrated Transcript of the Official Mort Aux Vaches Ekstra Extra Walkthrough" by the publishing houses MPH (US) and Pork Salad Press (DK).

Radical Computer Music as a term refers to the habit in Scandinavia of addressing notated music as “serious music”. As such it not only presents a different, more wide-ranging, approach to computer music, based on the acceptance of the medium as intelligent (AI or ALI, the latter term created by Goodiepal to describe alternative intelligence) but also includes media art as a field at risk of trivialisation and lack of utopian aspirations. According to Goodiepal, the scarcity of a utopian spark in contemporary computer music and media art is exacerbated by the low level of content in most computer based communication, as a preference for sheer documentation appears to have come to motivate most media activities. Generally, as Goodiepal has demonstrated in numerous of his lectures about Radical Computer Music, a call for easy access and convenience permeates the relation between humans and computers, rather than the aspiration for cultural evolution through technological refinement. In the process of this deflation, human language is reduced to machine-like commandos when humans increasingly address machines as machines without making use of an otherwise highly refined associative and context-based sense of language. Goodiepal advocates that these communicative skills can be strengthened in humans through the creation of musical scores in languages at the same time challenging the mindsets of computers, artificial, and alternative intelligences. Through this mutually beneficial communication exercise the man-machine relationship can potentially move to a higher level.

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