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 some 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 a music video that I made for a class; 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 another final project; this time from a class on human-computer interaction. This video gives a clear idea of the interactions, and hints at some of the musical stuff that my Jeff, one of my collaborators and a fantastic dj, was able to do with it.
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’ve decided to use this blog as a showcase for works I’m making this year. So — I’m going to place a few updates above with stuff I’ve done this far. It’s not “found sound” per se, but I actually have content, so here it shall live.
I’ve moved to Palo Alto, into a place that I like a lot. It’s a duplex, it’s old and kinda run-down, and it has a nice yard. It’s in a nice neighborhood to boot. You can hear the train roll by…in short it’s perfect. The only possible downside is that, right next door, they are building two gigantic houses on one fairly small lot, which, as you might imagine, means that from 8am until 4pm every weekday, there is quite a bit of construction noise. Which is fairly bad.
Then, last week, they started tarring the flat roofs. This meant several things: the smell of tar permeating my house, for one, and for another, a gigantic, loud machine which heats the tar and pumps it up onto the roof for application.
This is one of those times when a recording simply doesn’t do justice to the source: you can hear that deep bass tone, but over the speakers it doesn’t pervade one’s entire existence in the same way. Furthermore, this is far too short: the machine would run for what seemed like hours at a time, taking short breaks when the tar was hot enough, perhaps, or they had plenty to work with already on the roof level. So just crank up your stereo and leave this playing in a loop, 8-4, for a week and a half. Thanks.
This second recording is less accidental; I was trying to record my cat purring as I went to sleep.
But when I played it back, I was impressed by the timing of the events, as well as the distortion (caused
by my cat). This required some compression to bring the very low levels up into the audible range. here
Here we have the song that turned me on to this:
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. Here.