On Thursday, March 28, as people noshed on Thin Mints and sipped Moxie before the senior recital of Tobias Butler ’13 seemed to begin, the music was well underway. Crouched in a corner of the main room of 200 Church, Butler seemed to be manipulating his Macbook to produce a series of chromatic-sounding mutant robot noises. As the performance began and audience members trickled in, a sign was hoisted requesting visitors to visit http://t.obi.as on their mobile phone browsers. As Butler explained to me, it turns out that each visit to the website and the scrolling of each user was what was controlling the sounds.
I sat down with Butler to discuss the technology underpinning this portion of the performance, his composition techniques more generally and what led him down this kind of musical path. Click through the break for the full text of my interview with Tobias Butler, after some introductory thoughts by yours truly.
This first portion of Butler’s recital, the installation for mobile browsers and web server, gradually built into an expansive, thumping mass of wonky beats and siren-like wobbles. Eventually, in the second or third movement of the piece, percussion was introduced with drone-y growls placed over top. Bells and bumping beats ensued.
