Aidan Gold (b. 1997) is a composer and percussionist who created numerous interactive works, many of which can be read and listened to at http://aidanjgold.com.
Can you tell a bit about your background that is relevant to your practice? Does past education is important for what you do now?
My background is largely as a composer, percussionist, conductor, and music educator. All of these facets impact my current practice in several ways. I think that as an educator I often view musical games through the lens of learning about music: how can mechanics be developed that test or encourage the use of various listening skills? Making interactive activities in the classroom also has a lot of overlap with making interactive performance experiences. Additionally, my time as a percussionist at the University of Washington influenced me in many ways, from first learning about pieces with performer agency (playing Zyklus, as well as open instrumentation scores), playing In C with the ensemble several times, my first exposure to musical games in percussion ensemble such as Danny Clay’s Playbook and George Lewis’s Artificial Life 2007, and more. I also think that percussion informs my tendency to think about music from a theatrical perspective: as a set of percussion instruments often becomes like a physical stage set that one has to navigate, becoming a character within it that exerts influence on various parts of it through playing the instruments.
I think another part of my background that is important to my practice is growing up in the Pacific Northwest. My parents were avid mountain climbers and naturalists, often taking me hiking in the Cascade mountains. I was always fascinated by the immense scale and interconnectedness of the natural world and its diverse ecosystems, and I think this definitely plays into how I pursue interconnection in my work.
I also have a bit of background in coding — I did a double degree in my undergrad with composition and computer science. This is occasionally important to my practice. I’ve done quite a few projects involving interactive technology, such as a violin piece using the MUGIC motion sensor to create interactive electronic characters; a remote piece involving a “telephone” duet where performers have to imitate each other while only hearing processed versions of each other; and a musical game where a program calculates scores for the performers based on how closely the pitch collection implies their goal keys. I think that having the CS background definitely allowed me to learn and integrate these tools better into my music. After all, there’s definitely some overlap between video game programming and making interactive musical games!
Please, tell us a few words about your most recent project. How long did it take, and how many people were involved?
One of my recent large projects has been my ensemble work with Away From Keyboard. AFK is a chamber music collective which includes myself, pianist/violinist Gabrielle Chou, pianist Baron Fenwick, and bassist Dominic Law, and we focus specifically on musical games and participatory performance. In 2024-25, we received the Presser Music Award to put on two concerts in NYC, commission composers, design new musical games, and present workshops to several organizations around the city, such as the New York Youth Symphony Composition Program, LaGuardia School of the Arts, and the Manhattan School of Music Contemporary Performance Program. We commissioned Kerrith Livengood and Sofia Ouyang for new musical game works, and also designed a few new ones of our own. We got to collaborate with creative coder Brian Ellis on Drawjam, a system where we got the audience to draw on their phones and it got sent to us in real time where we realized it as a graphic score. We also did another participatory performance called see you on the other side, where we got the audience to control us with gestures, and they had to use that control to achieve various musical tasks on a BINGO card. Through these projects we learned a lot about designing these interactive performances and all the various facets to think about such as individual control, encouraging listening/responding to one another, and more.
A recent video on AFK on your YouTube channel shows the diversity in ensemble's activities. What was an event for you that went the furthest away from "contemporary music concert" formula (be it as for the venue, separation of audience and performers, premieres of authored pieces, etc.)?
We held a “musical game night” event at Juilliard that functioned as a mix between a workshop and a traditional “board game night.” This was perhaps one of our events that went furthest away from the concert formula, since everyone who came was basically an equal participant in the games. We would explain how to play each game, perhaps demonstrate it a bit, and then have everyone play each game in groups, either on their own instruments or on instruments we provided. It was a very informal event — lots of trying stuff out, talking during the games, general socializing, no specific program, etc. It turned out to be very fun — it was a group of around 10 people plus us, which was a great size to make sure everyone could participate and engage in different combinations.
I think our educational workshops (particularly our one with the MSM contemporary performance program) also deviated significantly from the concert formula — as once again we would have everyone participate and try out each of the games in different ways. In addition, for the latter part of the workshop we did a mini-hackathon where all the participants got in groups and designed their own new game ideas (including a wonderfully evil new version of Pulse Pass where you have to keep track of a rhythm with gaps in it and not play if you fall into the gaps!).
While our actual concerts did feel like “contemporary music concerts”, we hoped that for many of the pieces we opened up ways for the audience to connect and participate in ways that were artistically and creatively fulfilling. Some of the participatory activities (especially see you on the other side with the BINGO card) did sometimes start to feel like they were breaking out of the “concert hall” and constructing a more informal game-night space where everyone was talking and strategizing.
What do you value most in collaboration? Do you work with amateur artists, or do you prefer professionals?
For me, what is vastly more important than amateur vs. professional is an open mind and a willingness to engage with the ideas of the project. I prefer working over a longer period of time with people who are also passionate about the ideas than a few brief rehearsals with some professional group that also plays a billion other things. I think that building these stronger connections allows the work to be more multifaceted, as the people more invested in the project will be able to have ideas/thoughts that more clearly reflect what the project is.
How would you describe your field and artistic context? Do you accept labels like ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’?
I’m not entirely sure how I would describe my artistic context. I think the field of “composition”, even just for concert music, is getting quite nebulous and multifaceted these days. I would describe my practice as closely related to that of some experimental improv groups like the Pink Noise Ensemble, and also groups that use technology to create participatory performances like the Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble.
I definitely like the label ‘experimental’, for the reason that I think so much of musical games is playfully experimenting with what is possible in terms of ways to connect and respond to one another through sound. I think that fundamentally all forms of collaborative music making are experimental in that you don’t know exactly what it’s going to sound like, since each person brings their own experience/sound world to the table. I think there is perhaps an expectation (especially in the classical composition world) that the composer is somehow supposed to know exactly how everything is going to sound before it happens, and I find that to be a bit boring. If I know exactly how something is going to sound already, then what’s the point in trying it out? Obviously this isn’t the case for every type of project, but I think being open to surprises and trying things that I don’t know what the result will be is a core part of many of my projects.
I’m less of a fan of the term “avant-garde”, because to me at least that signals a kind of positive valuation of exclusivity, complexity, and/or obfuscation. I think that communication is a central goal of my work, and I wouldn’t consider a piece successful unless it is able to be perceptually understood within some framework (obviously what that means is different from piece to piece). One of the reasons why I am so drawn to interactive performance is that the ways in which people respond to each other in real time is something that can be made readily perceptible without any musical background. You don’t need to be able to identify a V7b5/ii as you are hearing the music in order to be able to see how people on stage are responding to one another, especially if there are theatrical elements to the music as well. While I do love playing around with elements of the music that do require knowledge to understand (such as harmony), I always try to make sure that core elements of the piece are not only accessible but clearly perceptible to those without any specific musical training.
How do you approach the relation between theory and practice in art? Any book or article recommendations?
My relationship to music theory specifically is complicated — I teach it a lot, at various different levels, and often my own practice uses it in a variety of different ways, but I also often struggle with the artistic comprehensibility of certain aspects of theory, especially when the central impetus of a work hinges on knowledge/understanding of that theory. One aspect of theory I think about a lot concerning my own work is the potential overlaps in how we understand/analyze the different art forms, such as music, theater, and games (on a related note, I remember being really excited when I discovered that Max’s Jitter library, for controlling images, involves much of the same math as processing audio, such as the concept of “reverb” when applied to a video!)
I think that one of the exciting things about musical games is that they potentially present a lot of opportunities for combining music theory and game design in unexpected ways. In the tic-tac-toe game I designed with AFK, the goal is to complete major or minor triads (each player takes one new note per turn). After a few revisions, I developed a combo system where players could complete multiple triads at once (e.g., if you get the collection C E G B you complete both C major and E minor). It turned out that early 20th-century music set theory was the best framework to analyze ideal strategies in this game because of how it relied on pitch collections, subsets, and goal sets, which was really exciting for me. I also worked on a game that tried to quantify how much a given set of pitches pulls towards a given key by assigning each note a score value depending on what scale degree it was. What I thought was interesting is that by gamifying these more abstract analytical systems, they take on a direct, perceptible focus as the music/game develops, and also directly ties the sonic result to the mechanical actions, which is something I value a lot in musical games.
For reading recommendations, my friend (and ensemble co-founder) Gabrielle Chou wrote a great dissertation on defining what musical games and “ludic pieces” are, called “Play Makes Perfect: An Exploration of Game and Play Elements in Composition and Performance.”
"Play Makes Perfect" is a great read and you gave also an interview for that work. Do you see some significant changes in your approach to ludic pieces over the years that went by?
My initial approach to ludic pieces was focused on “performer agency” — how can I create situations where performers can make interesting choices? This was because of the pieces I played in undergrad (e.g. Zyklus’s logistical puzzles of where to insert figures within the box so that they are playable simultaneously with the fixed music, or George Lewis’s Artificial Life 2007 where you have to respond to others in certain ways). The first piece that I made that might have some “game” elements was River Echo, a percussion ensemble piece from 2018, where the performers chose specific instruments, as well as which notes of certain figures to play to create various hocketed combinations of sounds.
My first piece that you might truly classify as a ludic piece was For Whom do We “Perform”?, particularly the board game movement. This was my first attempt at directly translating board game mechanics into a musical piece, and I feel like there were some elements that were not very successful in that piece. I think as I continued developing ludic pieces, I became more focused on how adapting game mechanics into a piece of music requires significant translation, as opposed to just putting music on top of fundamentally non-musical mechanics. In the board game, there was an element of tension between the physicality of the board and how the players were supposed to sonically understand where they were on it (since they were playing continuously, they couldn’t move physical markers on the board). Keeping track of 3 other simultaneous streams of music while you are also playing yourself is very difficult and ended up making the various player interactions hard to achieve. I think that I had more success with a piece like I’m Actually Just Making Stuff Up because while the mechanic is still “translated” from non-musical games (the idea of bluffing/deceiving other players as to what you have or what you’re doing), the way in which the mechanic manifests is fundamentally musical (improvisation vs. composition, how to blend with the texture as the improviser).
I think that with my more recent ludic pieces, I’ve focused more on setting up interesting psychological scenarios and exploring the resulting musical effects. Instead of purely dealing with “agency,” I try to create situations where you have to reframe your understanding of your choices and goals. For example, in CLOSEART the musicians have to play fixed music (scales, chords), but the “ludic” element is that they randomly drew crotales and don’t initially know which notes they have. They have to listen to one another as they attempt to play the passage in order to discover which notes they have, and then give space for each other in order to correctly place each part within the larger whole. The musical result is a scale or progression that gradually assembles itself from a more chaotic, disjointed beginning.
This is perhaps a generalization, though. I feel like it’s perhaps more that my approach has broadened than shifted? I do still try to create space for agency and decision-making (those are central to the audience participatory activities that AFK did this past year). I also have no idea where my work will go in the future, so I suppose we’ll see!
What music do you enjoy? Is there a difference between what you perform and what you listen to? Any guilty pleasures?
I go to a lot of different kinds of concerts in NYC, and I find that some of my favorite performances are ones in non-traditional venues where I get to participate or engage with the music creatively in some way. I have really loved the Brooklyn Motion Capture Dance Ensemble performances because they involve teaching the audience to move and make sound in various ways – through video mapping, phone gesture control, etc. I really like the sense of community this creates – even though I don’t necessarily know the other people in the room, we are all together responding and reacting to one another to create something, our individual ideas acting as ripples on a collective ocean of sound, which to me is a very powerful experience, and one I drew inspiration from when designing some of my own participatory work.
On my own I listen to a lot of different stuff, from big orchestra pieces (I love Mahler) to video game soundtracks and more. I think that there is a difference in what I listen to based on the venue/medium, and that serves to highlight how important the context surrounding a piece of music is. I wouldn’t necessarily listen to some of the musical games I’ve written on my own as just pure audio, but that’s because they were designed as a collective, live experience. Conversely, some of the music that I listen to wouldn’t necessarily function great as concert music either.
Do you have a favourite game? Or a game genre/mechanic?
In terms of video games, my favorite game is probably Celeste — it’s a platformer with a beautiful story and a big community custom level scene that I am involved with. I even got to write three tracks for the level pack Celeste Strawberry Jam, each of which explores different possible game mechanic interactions with the music (a highlight being polyrhythmic cassette blocks that force the player to keep track of two different rhythms at once). Another one of my favorite games is Outer Wilds, for its incredible sense of exploration and environmental puzzles, and how everything comes together in a really powerful narrative.
For group games/board games I tend to prefer things that allow for the potential of wacky strategic thinking.
Have you played some published board games that reach towards music or sound-making? A rhythm game, an audio game, or something with limited communication? Or are you more like an occasional player, not participating that actively in the boardgaming hobby?
I’m perhaps not as into board games as one might expect given the kind of musical games I make — as a kid I did play a lot of standard board games with my family, but I remember I always preferred watching them to actually participating in them, as participating often felt quite stressful to me, while watching them I could simply revel in the devious strategies people were using. I do remember that a board game I did really like to play was Europareise — my family discovered it when we were hiking in Switzerland in 2009; it was at one of the mountain huts we were staying at. I remember really liking how that game has a mechanic where you measure physical distance in several ways — with a straight stick to measure the distance that your planes can fly, while with a bending chain to measure the distance your boats can go (since the chain has to bend to avoid going on land). I don’t know how well that game would hold up for me now, but as a kid I loved it.
I don’t think that I’ve played any officially published board games that specifically use audio mechanics (there might be some that I’m not recalling right now though). I have played musical versions of charades and other more informal sound-based games (e.g. getting a bunch of percussion instruments together, other people close their eyes and you make a wacky sound and they have to guess which instrument produced it). I suppose percussion performance is kind of its own spatial game (how on earth can I set up that instrument in a manner so that I can also play it at the same time as these other 6 instruments). I would definitely be interested in learning about what music/sound-based board games are out there!
Do you see something missing from the current landscape of music/game intersection? Or something you'd like to see more of?
I think that a lot of the musical games that I tend to see (and often, many that I’ve made as well), fall closer to the “game” side of things than “piece”. That is to say that their primary focus is on setting up a game for the performers, without necessarily also functioning as a coherent piece of music that can be performed for an audience in a way that is comprehensible. I feel like I am more drawn to musical games that also have a specific, clear identity — e.g., musical material that makes up the core part of the game. As an example, works such as Artificial Life 2007, AFK’s Drawjam, and my own Pile of Notes are constructed almost entirely through their rulesets: there are no written musical notes to play, and the music emerges entirely out of the interactions that take place. As a result, the works are drastically different each performance. This is not to say that they don’t function well as concert works, but sometimes I feel like there could be space for more musical game works in which mechanics work in combination with specific, pre-written musical material, such as in Kerrith Livengood’s Scrawl Etude (where players gradually make changes to a pre-written loop of music), or my I’m Actually Just Making Stuff Up (where three players are playing fixed musical cells and one player is improvising and trying to fit in without being caught).
I also think that there is a lot of potential for more video game-like systems or installations that allow people to engage with various facets of music and use them for challenge or creative expression. I haven’t done any installation-style works in the past but this is an area that I am interested in pursuing in the near future.
In the past, you had success with musical adaptations of pre-existing games. What you suggest here seems to go far beyond that approach, or maybe even against it? Are there some limitations of adaptation that you discovered that pushed you further or do you think there is still a lot to be done on that front?
I don’t think that having games with more specific musical material is necessarily “against” the idea of adaptation, though it does perhaps require more drastic translation. I think that the success of a musical adaptation of a pre-existing game depends on how well the mechanics are musically translated. An example of a poor translation (to me) would be a musical game that is essentially identical to the non-musical version, but with added “sound effects” (e.g. a board game where you play something when you land on each square, but what you play doesn’t affect the game or relate to the state of the game at all). This is why adapting tic-tac-toe as musical notes in a 3x3 grid with unchanged mechanics didn’t work out so well — it was just pasting some notes on top of non-sonic mechanics. Instead, we found more success when we removed the grid entirely and adapted the game to musical space: creating musical sets (triads) as our goal instead of rows, columns, or diagonals in physical space. I think that I’m Actually Just Making Stuff Up is an example of both a successful adaptation of a game mechanic and a work that incorporates lots of fixed musical material, because the fixed material is necessary for the mechanic (the difference between improvisation and composition; or as the non-musical version being bluffing/deceiving others in general) to function.
I do think there are some limits to adaptation in that there are many game mechanics that don’t have clear musical “translations,” especially ones that make use of things like our visual sense, as it is a lot easier to independently see the location of many things on a board than to independently hear 4 or more simultaneous different sounds and comprehend what they tell us about location.
Conversely, there can also be musical mechanics that don’t have any clear non-musical analogue, such as the key area weights of Pile of Notes, where players are assigned scores based on how closely the collection of pitches suggests their assigned key, a calculation that involves a lot of music theory-specific ideas such as tendency tones.
I think that there is definitely still a lot to be done in terms of adaptation, but I think that there is equally a lot of untapped potential in designing uniquely musical mechanics from the ground up. I also think that venue and type of event are considerations as well that have a lot of potential to affect how certain games or ideas might be adapted and how successful those adaptations might be.
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