This is a demo for a monome 40h/64 patch I’ve been working on in ChucK. It’s a tool for granularizing the sound input through your computer’s soundcard.
Basically, there is a set of eight filter banks, one for each row of monome keys. If you don’t touch anything, the sound just plays through without much modification. If you do hit some keys, however, the live sound will be turned off and instead, slices of delayed sound will be played through that filter bank. You can also add in random grains, too.
The cool thing about it (I think) is that it’s a modeless interaction — that means a button press will always do the same thing. I wanted to make a monome app that was simple and intuitive, and didn’t have a row of mode-changing keys taking up an eighth of the surface. Obviously, you give up a lot of flexibility in favor of simplicity by doing this, but I’m pleased with the results.
The captions are really fast in the video, though, so feel free to pause. Also, there is a nasty clicking problem which I’m going to work on in the next version.
For this project, I used some video that Brett and I shot when we were driving from out to California several years ago. I wrote the music to go along with it, and the process seemed to fix the memories in a new way.
Most of the audio was composed beforehand, but the video was performed live using a patch written in Puredata and Gem.
This is really documentation of an ephemeral project, as opposed to a document in itself. The project culminated as a performance where I mixed the video live using the midi keyboard seen in the opening frames; I also hooked my rig up to a small television and made viewers crowd around it instead of using a larger projection screen. As you can imagine, the result was quite different experience than the one you see here.
For a class assignment on synesthesia, I decided to build something to turn a video input into sound. This was in some ways a culmination of a several interactions I created with the clear purpose of being counter-intuitive. In this case, the video camera provides the material to be translated into sound, but it’s set up such that only moving sections of video will result in nonzero samples: the video output being scanned is seen on the television in the background. At the same time, a wii remote is used to control the rate that the pixels are being scanned, which adds some gross control of pitch. The two simultaneous interactions are sometimes at odds with each other.
I set this up for my classmates and let them try it out, which added the element of physical performance. Afterwards, my professor asked me, “Where is the piece?” or, in other words, where should we be looking? At the screen or at the person gesticulating wildly? I didn’t have an answer: later I realized that I was pleased with the ambiguity.
This piece is a simple music video, as opposed to documentation of a performance; there’s not really any technical wizardry here, but I am really pleased with the way it came out, especially the song. The recording isn’t very clean, but my vocal happened quickly and was really heartfelt. The assignment was called “Voice, Word, Glyph,” which should explain the long passage at the end where I’m writing…but it was also what got me thinking about memory and my mother.
This is documentation of a final project for a class on human-computer interaction. This video gives a clear idea of the interactions, and hints at some of the musical material that Jeff, one of my collaborators and a fantastic dj, was able to do with it. Jeff’s ability to actually use the pendulums to make some compelling music was the reason why I felt like this project was a success.
This is a piece that I did at the end of my first semester at CCRMA. While it may seem a bit goofy to some, once the elements were there, it all seemed quite obvious to me.
This video is about five minutes of me controlling a feedback loop with the tilt sensor in an Apple laptop; I’ll make the code available as well, here. It’s written in ChucK, a free language designed for audio usage. It’s a bit buggy, but it can do a lot of stuff, including synthesis, wave file manipulation, and interaction with other stuff via OSC or midi.
I know I should have smashed the laptop or set it on fire at the end, but I’m saving that for my first stadium show.
Here we have a recording that turned me on to the possibilities of sound:
it was found on a friend’s hard drive, and he’d clearly recorded it as he was walking home one night.
There is a wonderful percussive element from cloth rubbing the microphone; I also like the section
when the truck goes by, distorting the entire recording. Despite the fact that it was all digital,
I find it very pleasant. The recording is not edited in any way
The experience of first hearing it was a transformative moment: because none of us knew what it was, we all paid close attention; I tried to imagine the scenarios and visualize the locations based only on the sonic information. It was vivid and intense, and I hope that you can hear it that way as well.