'Cultivate positive relationships': Scott Deal's insights on music, work, and life

The integration of technological innovation with powerful performances is central to Professor of Music Technology Scott Deal's impressive career. However, he explains that cultivating relationships with friends, family, and colleagues has been just as important to his life and work. During his talk for the 2024 Last Lecture Series on November 8 at 2 p.m. in the Campus Center's Lower Level Theater, Deal will reflect on the impactful people, conversations, and experiences that have shaped his 33-year career. In this candid conversation, Deal gives us a sneak peek into his lecture and shares some thoughts on art, relationships, and the importance of "living with the end in mind."

HERRON: How would you describe the work you do?

SCOTT DEAL: It's all about computer interactivity and music performance, in many phases and in many forms. If there's a computer involved and musicians playing instruments, then it is something I would be interested in.

HERRON: When you say "if there's a computer involved," you're not just talking about digital music, right? Do you mean artificial intelligence is involved in your music?

SCOTT DEAL: That definitely includes artificial intelligence. More broadly, I would call what I do "interactive computational processes involving musical performance." For instance, something I've been working with for a very long time is telematics. Telematics is all about putting performers together that are separated by distance over the internet and combining media, live performers, content, information, and fixed media.

A lot of my work has been using the computer as a portal to a world where suddenly any space is a performance space and no one's limited by distance and you can have multiple audiences.

HERRON: Post-2020, virtual meetings and virtual performances are more commonplace. When you started doing telematics, it probably wasn't as familiar, right?

SCOTT DEAL: I started doing this kind of work in 2003 at the University of Alaska. The kind of bandwidth we all enjoy in our house now was considered research-grade bandwidth in 2003, available only to select universities who could afford it and even then, the use of it was heavily controlled.

The University of Alaska is a research university, and they wanted to get going on internet research, so they approached me for collaboration because I was a percussion professor who also happened be doing all this crazy electronic stuff and doing things with technology. They told me, "There's a group of artists across the United States that are working together on stuff like you."

I teamed up with them through the UAF Supercomputing Center, which was well-funded, so I got whatever I needed to do this research. It was a dream come true, and much more fun for me than being a traditional musician. So what I started working on was a kind of interactivity where I'm here and there's a screen with other people on the other side. I'm doing processes or playing, and then someone on the other end is getting my audio signal and they're processing it with their computer to make crazy electronic sounds and create interesting visual media.

After I came to IUPUI [now IU Indianapolis], I worked with a researcher named Ben Smith and we developed some difficult to use (but really interesting) machine learning systems. He was the coder, and I was the musician. I couldn't program something if my life depended on it and I told the department that when they hired me. So I collaborate with the coders and the programmers, because often they can't do what I do, which is to create original musical content and perform it in front of live audiences. It's always a team effort, an interdisciplinary effort.

Lately I've been working with Jason Palamara who's also a professor in Herron's music technology department. He's developed this really amazing app called AVATAR. I play the vibraphone and the app listens to the vibraphone. That's actually a big development because it used to be that you just in-putted MIDI, which is a music language for computers. It's not recording, it's not the sound, it's just replaying the language. Now computers are fast and sophisticated enough that they can listen to real audio and pick out the notes that I'm playing. The app can play with me, which is mind-blowing.

Jason is the coder and he puts the software together and builds it and then we get together and install it on my computer and then I take it and I work with it. I practice endlessly and try things out and try to make some art with it. Then we get back together and I report about what works and what doesn't. So that's how we've developed it: I'm the user and the beta person and then we write papers together.

HERRON: In November you'll take part in the Last Lecture series. How difficult has it been to try to distill your life's work into a single talk?

SCOTT DEAL: That's the question of the hour! It's a huge honor and I'm delighted that they asked me to do it. I'm supposed to talk about my life's work, distilled down to 40 minutes of what's really important.

As I was writing the talk, I thought back to what I tell my students every year: the best thing they can do for their career is to use the mantra, "Cultivate positive relationships." It's really powerful and significant and it's the truth. It's just true because collectively we're not on our own; we're together, we're connected. There's an interconnectivity in humanity and nobody does anything alone, nobody. You can't survive alone and you certainly can't have a career alone.

Since relationships are a large component to a career, I like to think about cultivating relationships. I like that word cultivate because you plant a plant, and then you water it, and you make sure it gets sunlight—you cultivate it. Relationships are that way: you can't just suddenly be instant friends and expect people to do things for you. It's about cultivating and there is also a lot of giving involved. Sometimes it takes a long time, but as long as you stay in the mindset of cultivating relationships and creating positive connections, then your career just kind of takes care of itself.

HERRON: Earlier, you shared with me that you have stage four prostate cancer. How does living with a terminal illness affect your work, or affect how you think about your work?

SCOTT DEAL: One of the things I plan to share in my talk is my experience with this disease. I was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer three years ago. I had been getting annual checkups, but it snuck into me. A year and a half ago it was upgraded to stage four, and my doctors told me there was no cure. That was a shocker for sure, and a difficult time. But from that, probably the most important thing I have learned is to live and be happy with the end of life in mind. If you can get to that mindset, it's wonderful! I feel light as a feather, I do! I feel so unburdened and happy.

What I can tell people is just think about what would happen if you knew that tomorrow would be your last day: what's important to you? Suddenly, so many things that you thought were important just fall off. You're carrying all these weights and they just fall to the wayside. I'm not advocating that people be irresponsible, but just think about the emotional burdens of life—they build and build and build. Which of them are truly important? I would argue not too many.

For me, what's important are the people I love, having a meaningful conversation with a friend, engaging my students, making music, and realizing how incredibly fortunate I am. You realize what a gift life is and understanding that can permeate into everything else. It's made me more creative, and I have more energy. I'm happier because I've let go of worry and fear.

I don't know what my mindset would be if I hadn't had this terminal diagnosis, but with it, life has sprung forth. Sometimes on my walks I have almost an ecstatic feeling even though time is short. It's helped me to hyper-concentrate on what I do have, which is so much. These are the best years of my life emotionally and in terms of understanding what life is.

I mean sure, who wants to die? Everybody wants to live to be an old person and me too! But if you can't have that, if you engage the brevity of life and allow it to be a truth, then you can still be a very happy person.

HERRON: What role has grief played for you in your art?

SCOTT DEAL: I know my time's limited. I just want my performances to really count. Also, I just don't do anything I don't want to do, that's a big one.

In terms of performance, I'm pretty selective in what I choose to perform. I'd say 99% of the music I play has gone through a collaborative process where a composer writes music for me and we collaborate together, or I am the composer and I work with performing musicians. I basically never play music off of the shelf, so to speak. There's this synergy and there's this human integration that comes from the collaborative process that is a critical component to my creative process.

Currently, I'm composing a science fiction opera titled "Lexia" about the future, with the climate crisis humanity will face as a backdrop. [Note: "Lexia" will premiere January 11, 2025 at the Phoenix Theater in Indianapolis.] It's going to get really hot and it’s going to get really bad. This doesn't mean we're going to get destroyed, but certainly things are going to change for humanity.

I commissioned the playwright to write a libretto where people are transforming and evolving into birds. The idea of transformation really resonates with me because that is how life on the earth operates. It adapts and transforms, sometimes over a long period of time, sometimes very quickly. But the transformation is the operational tool of endurance for all of life.

I'm determined to be a very happy person until the very end. I don't want to go out depressed. Life is such a miracle and it's so incredible that we're sentient beings we're on this planet. You can't find any other planets like this one, and it's just mind-blowing. There's this ecstasy about being here and being present, so that's what I reflect on. I know that death is very much a natural part of life; you can't extricate it. It's meant to be lived with, so to speak.