Description
Paul Turowski · 2015
A digital game piece, described in the composer’s own catalogue as being “for indeterminate ensemble improvisation”: the players read an animated score that is also a running game, and their playing is what drives it.
Several performers fly a single spaceship. Each player’s pitch produces a direction vector, and the ship travels along the average of the vectors currently being produced — so no player steers, and no player is ignored. Obstacles along the way call for different sonic characteristics, so the ensemble has to arrive at both a direction and a sound at the same time.
Turowski is a composer and Lecturer in Music for Digital Games at the University of Liverpool; Frontier sits in a line of his game pieces running from Hyperions (2014) through Plurality Spring (2017) and SQ2 (2019) to H3.
⚠ Where this description comes from. The mechanics above are as set out in Turowski, Fukuda and Hutchinson, Gameful Compositions in Interactive Computer Music (Springer, pp. 39–40). The composer’s own website lists the work but does not document how it plays, and and no score is available online. The composer’s own video of the piece is embedded below, but it carries no explanation. Check the book before citing any detail.
source — the composer’s catalogue · Turowski, Fukuda & Hutchinson, Gameful Compositions in Interactive Computer Music, Springer Series on Cultural Computing
video: Frontier — Paul Turowski, YouTube