Croft · via Lüneburg / GAPPP (2018)
What it says
A live electronic system is only meaningfully live if a difference in how the performer plays produces a difference in how the result sounds. Not merely that input triggers output — that a subtler input produces a subtler output. Playing harder, softer, more roughly must be audible as such.
Does it hold for my work
Conditional on the installation using sound, which so far it always has.
It is a stricter test than discernibility, and worth keeping separate for that reason. Meaningful play asks whether the audience can tell that their action caused the result. Aesthetic liveness asks whether the quality of the action survives into the result.
Phosphor mostly fails this. A gamepad thumbstick has position and velocity, and the mappings use position — walk into a space, get its reverb. Whether you walked in hesitantly or decisively changes nothing. The input is aesthetically flat before it reaches the mapping.
Why that is worth writing down
It is a criticism of my own work that came from a criterion, not from taste. If the thesis is going to argue that a controller can be an instrument, this is the standard that claim has to meet — and right now it does not meet it.