Had the rare opportunity to improvise with a fish yesterday. I went to my friend David Moré's house to play with him and Jeff Kimmel, and we plugged his gnathonemus petersii, Alex, into her amp to make a quartet. Alex is an elephantnose fish from Western Africa that emits a weak electrical field to figure out where she is in relation to food, objects, and other fish. When she "plays" with us, she actually has next to no perception of our existence, other than perhaps a darkening of her already weak visual field and the odd electrical surges that may or may not be emanating from either her amp or her surrounds...
Anyway, it was interesting improvising with her, or rather improvising within her sonic/electric environment, and reinforced my pipe dream of building an improvising automaton that reacts to its sonic environment as an insect would. I've always felt that building a computer patch to respond to my playing (or whoever's playing) as a human would end up being kind of predictable and boring, seeing as whatever characteristics I give it I will have given it - made it in my image, so to speak, and I'm not really that excited by my image. If I am ever allowed the time or willpower (preferably both, actually) to build a patch that improvises with me, I want to it interact to its sonic environment as a nonhuman. What's the point of playing with a computer if it's trying to act like a human? There are plenty of humans.
fish/patch
I think what could be interesting about a computer patch, and why you shouldn't necessarily write it off, is how predictable you decide to make it. If you make it react in a purely random way, that's not so interesting, but if you make it react in a mostly inscrutable way, the more you play with it, you'll begin to understand how it reacts to you. So you'll have "made" it, but what you made could begin to remake the way you play. If you're not that excited by your own image, a well crafted patch could be a way of remaking yourself in the end. The fish's music, though, is inherently inscrutable, but the fish is making decisions. It's just that those decisions may have nothing to do with improvising. And I imagine that David, after playing with Alex for some time, has a musical relationship with her that is similar to the one that you could eventually develop with a well-crafted patch. Which raises a couple questions worth thinking about... Jacob K