Composer Scott Miller releases Coincident, a collection of works exploring the potential of telematic collaboration (musicians playing together via remote technology) and graphic score notation. Featuring performances by Twin Cities based Zeitgeist ensemble and Miller himself on electronics, Coincident is a continuation of Miller's restless creativity in mining the possibilities afforded by innovations in technology in music.


"Coincident (the work) is a telematic, multi-episode, audio visual collaboration with new music ensemble Zeitgeist (Heather Barringer, Patti Cudd, Pat O’Keefe, Nikki Melville), video/installation artist Carole Kim, spoken word artist Joseph Horton, and Cara Tweed and Nicholas Diodore from the ensemble No Exit. Coincident was commissioned by Zeitgeist in May 2020, the first work produced as part of Zeitgeist’s DECADE FIVE commissioning series. Coincident was developed, recorded, and released episodically over the course of 2021. The development process led down different paths, forks along a trail of artistic inquiry informed by the central themes of communication, isolation, and distance, themes that guided the exploration of different technical and aesthetic strategies for telematic collaborative creation.
Each artist participating in the creation of Coincident (both the composition and the album) performed from their home studio, connected by software that preserves audio quality while reducing latency (time lag due to the internet connection and distances the sound must travel). Because latency is reduced, but not eliminated, the music on this album embraces asynchronicity; individual events can occur at different relative times without compromising the musical idea.
Miller was first inspired in his approach by the sci-fi genre of space opera; epic, galaxy or universe spanning stories that necessarily involve long periods of isolation, unfathomably long distances, asynchronous communication and latency, all impacted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The fact that there’s a universal speed limit—the speed of light—means that at best we merely have the perception of instantaneous, synchronous communication. At a certain point it is largely coincidental. Introduce enough latency by inserting enough distance between transmitter and receiver and the perception of synchronicity collapses. The connection to our situation in 2020 was obvious with collaborating members across 21 time zones in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and New Zealand.
A key part of the creative process in Coincident was finding strategies addressing the technical challenges of latency and potentially glitchy audio. Miller employs musical processes allowing individual performers to produce music based on local information, free from typical synchronous expectations, and coordinates performances with shared events that can’t be synchronously experienced. These strategies use ancient approaches to process music; by seeking inspiration from imitative and contrapuntal traditions, Miller creates a polyphony of truly independent voices mediated by a latent/asynchronous communication system.
He works with timbral material that masks or is sonically-adjacent to the glitches and distortions inherent in audio signals transmitted over the internet, and programs synthesis and digital signal processing designed to fail over time through use. And his scores are realized in graphic notation and as animated music, incorporating collective improvisation to varying degrees, from tightly controlled to structurally free.
Several of the compositions on the album are not part of the Coincident project, but were developed alongside and in artistic conversation with it. These coincidental works include pieces from two graphic score collections, Spring 2020 and Summer 2020 (tracks 3, 5, & 7). hARvest is notated as an animated graphic score visible via augmented reality, geolocated on the Barringer Family Farm in Wisconsin for its premiere. A corresponding smartphone app allows users to view the animated score while listening to the recording of Zeitgeist’s performance. MKHP is from a collaboration with Pat O’Keefe begun in 2018 but only fully realized in 2021. MKHP also has a corresponding smartphone app, but one that generates an audio-reactive AR sculpture.
More details about the works and artists on this album, the Coincident project, and related AR apps can be found at scottlmiller.net/projects/coincident, zeitgeistnewmusic.org, and noexitnewmusic.com."


- Scott Miller