Contrafacta
Getting a word in...
On the morning after a presidential debate, there is always lots of unpacking to do, so I dialed up the transcript because I was curious how they handled the crosstalk.
In vocal music, contrafactum (or contrafact, pl. contrafacta) is "the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrafactum
It reminds me of an idea I had to write a song that had two sets of lyrics, one sung into the right channel, and one into the left. I am sure this has been done before, and I vaguely remember a song by The Clash that did this.
Like the Necker Cube, it creates an alternating focus of attention. When you try to return to the center to pay attention to them at once, as one would in counterpoint in music, it flips back to the duck-rabbit illusion. Of all the things that the brain can't decide upon, politics and democracy are The Center (the Arena)--or in the crosstalk. You want to find the useful Center but it's impossible: It's still essentially the loud infomercial on TV at 3 a.m. in a household addicted to TV and sleep-deprived.
The exformation is in the debate itself: a clue that the system is broken to the core. It's time to restore (restore) the old tunes with new lyrics--or just leave them out altogether and compose instrumentals and ambient music, because in many cases the words are throwaways anyway--until they gather significance in the future for mysterious reasons.
If you're interested in finding this song (or songs), with two sets of lyrics, you can peruse the Google results:
P.S.:
A band called "Black Box" an improvisatory (jazz) group that uses an "AI Box" which is either on the stage or off stage which just throws out random musical elements which the musicians react to and/or the black box responds. It would be for the most part a cacophony because nothing would be resolved--or couldn't be resolved in the moment.
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9/20/2024: In the 19th century people wrote crossed letters, primarily to save paper. You would think this would be confusing but the writing was very legible. They forced you to concentrate on the words and meaning.
My Orange Peel work on paper, as a kind of "cross-writing":
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