12.13.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 5:58 pm by ibex
So the end of the semester has arrived and with it the end of this module. We have learned a lot about seeing our laptops in a new way, as a musical instrument in its own right. We learned some basics in coding on SuperCollider and sample manipulation on ixiQuarks, but more than that we have learned to relate the laptop with the process of music making both individually and in ensembles, and the importance of interaction between musicians while composing and performing together on this new instrument.
I have to say this has probably been my favourite of all four modules this semester, because albeit sometimes lacking in structure, the workshops have brought more for me than the note-taking lectures and seminars from the other modules. We were free to experiment and be creative at every stage of every task meaning that you really did get as much out of it as you pit in.
Permalink
12.11.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:07 am by ibex
Here is a basic graphic score of my Task 2 piece. It shows the basic shape of the piece and of its parts. It does not show details such as dynamics and effects.
The score shows the three main materials in my piece – speech samples, instrumental samples (taken from my two busker samples) and the full song busker sample, the most important of which are the speech parts as they are the concept behind the piece. So the score lies on a timeline which follows the speech parts as events, showing the time in minutes and seconds of when each comes in.
The different shapes in each part represent different ideas but they do not relate to similar shapes in other parts (it’s just a matter of lacking variety of shapes in the prgoramme i used to make this) so for example the green star and red star don’t show a similarity. So each row is to be seen in its own right with shapes just demonstrating the ideas in THAT part.
In the speech samples, the piece starts with a short intro of the sample ‘ where is your happy place?’ followed by (A) which is three cycles of a sequence of short speech samples, which becomes thicker in texture with each cycle. Then a new idea comes in, (B) which contains the most effects from ixiQuarks and is- if this were explained through traditional musical structures – my ‘development’ section. Towards the end the speech part dies down to short samples spread over the underlying song sample. This is (C)
Instrumentally, the first quarter of the piece follows the shape of the speech parts quite closely. The three red diamonds show the recorder sample (from one of my buskers) which precedes the speech sequence each time it repeats. The rectangles labelled ‘notes’ are the areas where I inserted a mixture of my three guitar-note samples: ‘notes1′, ‘notes2′ and ‘notes3′. The shapes labelled ‘chords’ and ’scratch’ are a bit more self-explanatory, showing moments where I used my ‘chords’ and ’scratch’ guitar samples made on ixiQuarks.
The song row shows the three times I used my singer busker sample, first in slow motion, then fast motion and then right at the end as it is originally, which links back to part (C) of the speech part which it accompanies.
Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:07 am by ibex
I know it is not compulsory to name our tasks for laptop musicianship but i felt somewhat obliged to name this one because it explains a bit of the meaning behind this piece.
It’s based on a notion that I have thought about many times in my life whilst walking outdoors, particularly around a city: when I walk past people waking the streets also, I may hear a snippet of their conversation, which brushes past me quickly like a car driving past. This sound is meaningless to me and is just part of the ‘background noise’. But I realize that to them this has meaning- whatever it may be- it is a part of their conversation which relates to their life in some way; a life which is as complex as mine and has as much depth as mine, or anyone i know. But to me, they are still just a second of sound that comes closer and moves on as I go by.
So then I wonder whether if i took note of these sounds and actually listened to them, would I be able to venture a guess as to the meaning behind them. I could guess the people’s mood, intention, maybe even lifestyle by the way they sound and what they say, but I’d never know for sure.
In this piece I wanted to explore this notion, by recording what I hear as I walk around Cambridge on an ordinary week-day and trying to arrange it into a context which is entirely my own.
i recorded about an hour’s worth of audio samples capturing vocal sounds: speech, song, yells, laughter etc.. which I then looked over and edited, cutting out all unwanted sounds heard in town such as cars. For esthetic purposes I decided to leave in two samples of busking that I also captured which include sounds unrelated to speech, one being a recorder and the other a guitar. This was simply to give me some melodic material so that I’d have a basis for creating a harmonic backbone for the piece.
I arranged my samples in Logic and used ixiQuarks for samples with effects which I then recorded in ixi and inserted into Logic to be arranged with all the other parts.
The tools in ixiQuarks that I used on my samples are as follows:
SoundScratcher
scratch function on guitar segment from busker sample= creating ‘guitar scratch’ sample
grain squares function on vocal notes from busker sample= creating ‘notes1′ ‘notes2′ and ‘notes 3′ samples
grain squares function on guitar chords of the busker sample(+ ixi ‘chorus’ effect)=creating ‘chords’ sample
GrainBox – on ‘didn’t you hear him?’ sample
Predators – on ‘didn’t you hear him?’ sample
PolyMahchine – on ‘me against the guys’ and ‘mudame’ samples= creating 2 beat loops
BufferPlayer – to play two channels of the full busker song sample, slightly out of sync with each other, panned to either extreme and slowed down= creating ’slow song’ sample/ speeded up= creating ‘fast song’ sample.
Permalink
12.03.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:50 pm by ibex
Here is the basic outline of my Super Collider group piece:
Here is a demonstration of my chord part:
~mo= {MouseButton.kr ( 66 , 73 , 0.4) };
~mo2= {MouseButton.kr ( 69 , 78 , 0.5)};
~mo3={MouseY.kr(0.98,1.0)}
~mo4={MouseX.kr(0.98,1.0)}
~sig= {SinOsc.ar ([1*~mo4*~mo.midicps, 1*~mo4*~mo2.midicps ], mul: 0.6) };
~sig.fadeTime=3;
~sig.play
~sig.stop(6)
The values in bold are those which I change to get the different chords. And these changes happen as follows:
A chord ( 69 , 76 )
( 73 , 81 )
D chord ( 74 , 81 )
( 78 , 86 )
Permalink
11.27.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:02 pm by ibex
I met up with my SC group to work on our piece and try to finish it off. We each played our parts but I struggled with keeping in time because with each chord change I not only had to change the values in my chords but also alter my Pbind part. I tried writing out the Pbind code for each chord in turn but when I evaluated these one after the other they kept playing on top of one another rather than replacing the previous chord each time.
Simeon then showed me a method he found which brings a flow to changing between different Pbind parts. where only the first Pbind is defined as (z=Pbind( and finishes with ).play) and all other Pbinds following are defined as (z.stream = Pbind( and finishes with ).asStream) instead. This way each one replaces the previous one thus I can change from one chord to another with my Pbinds.
So my Pbind part now looks like this:
//F sharp minor:
(
z = Pbind (
\degree, Pseq ( [0,4,3,7], inf),
\dur, 0.25,
\octave,6,
\root,6,
\sustain, 1.5,
\amp, 0.2
).play
)
//A Major:
(
z.stream = Pbind (
\degree, Pseq ( [0,4,3,7], inf),
\dur, 0.25,
\octave, 6,
\root, 9,
\sustain, 1.5,
\amp,0.2
).asStream
)
// D major:
(
z.stream = Pbind (
\degree, Pseq ( [7,3,4,0], inf),
\dur, 0.25,
\octave, 5,
\root,14,
\sustain, 1.5,
\amp, 0.2
).asStream
)
//F sharp minor:
(
z.stream = Pbind(
\degree, Pseq ( [0,4,3,7], inf),
\dur, 0.25,
\octave,6,
\root,6,
\sustain, 1.5,
\amp, 0.2
).asStream
)
Permalink
11.12.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:22 pm by ibex
This week Laptop Musicianship didn’t take the form of a workshop as usual but instead we were given this week’s time to reflect on the module through blogging, continuing work with our groups or exploring resources for research in the library. I went to the library and had a look at the CD collection and found lots of CDs of many of the musicians we have touched on not just in Laptop Musicianship but also in my other modules for example Steve Reich, Kraftwerk, Aphex Twin, John Cage and more..
I borrowed some CDs from the library for further listening at home. One that stood out for me was a CD by Paul Lansky called ‘More Than Idle Chatter’ which I remembered being mentioned briefly in one of the early FoEM lectures. Its focus and main source of aural material is the human voice which is explored through different angles in the different tracks on the CD. This inspired me musically but on a more practical level it encouraged me to try out an idea I’ve had for my second Laptop Musicianship task, to use as my source only recorded samples of voice (following a concept I have thought about in the past regarding speech that one hears but is not associated with.) So this week’s research has definitely been of use to me. :]
Permalink
10.20.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 1:38 am by ibex
OK, I just came on my blog site now to see if i’ve had any comments or anything, and what do I find? SHOCK and HORROR! None of my blogs are appearing on it! It’s taken me about 10 minutes to work this out but I realized now, when you write a post on this there are two buttons to the right, one is the ’save’ and the other is ‘publish’. Like an idiot, I of course have been pressing the save button on all my blogs so they havn’t been posing!
I’m going to go back now and PUBLISH all my previous blog entries.
My apologies,
I hope one day we will come to a time when I understand the world of blogging :[
Permalink
10.17.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:33 pm by ibex
This is how our Supercollider piece now stands with the added Pbind parts and is how we performed it in the Week 4 workshop:
Nick has the bass part, with the Mousebutton function to change octaves of his notes in the chords, and has a low Pbind part now added.
Greg has a higher part, with midi values of the chords ranging in the 50’s and 60’s and a high Pbind on top
My part is higher still, with midi notes in my chords ranging at values in 70’s and 80’s. I have a Mousebutton function which changes between two parts of each chord (unlike Nick’s part which uses the Mousebutton to change octaves), one part being the first and fifth notes and the second part being the third note and the first note again in the next octave. So each of my chords is a broken 4-note chord when the mouse button is pressed and released. I also have a high Pbind part which runs alongside Greg’s Pbind.
my Pbind part:
(
z = Pbind (
\degree, Pseq ( [0,4,3,7], inf),
\dur, 0.25,
\octave,6,
\root,6,
\sustain, 1.5,
\amp, 0.2
).play
)
which is then altered a bit for each chord.
Simeon is our main Pbind guy and has a Pbind part that stands out at midrange pitch.
Permalink
10.14.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:41 pm by ibex
Today’s session felt like a short one even though it was the whole 3 hour lesson.. maybe because we learned a lot today by just messing about with ixiQuarks and time flies when you’re having fun..
Julio began the lesson by showing us a video of some live coding done in the style of a jazz musician. What we could see was just the SuperCollider window where the performer was continuously writing, evaluating and deleting things which seemed incredibly complex! I couldn’t follow what he was doing obviously, but I was just amazed at how he managed to make a coding software sound like an expressive instrument! He used a Ugen that sounded like a piano, and whilst some parts of the piece sounded quite mechanical, (particularly when he added quick scales), the overall performance was full of emotion because he changed dynamics over time and used accents to give an attack and decay to his notes just as a real piano can do.
After this listening exercise, we spent some time listening to people perform their improved group pieces from last week. Ours turned out a bit chaotic compared to last week’s neat performance but we did manage to show how we incorporated a Pbind into it. We will spend more time on this during this week for the next Laptop Musicianship session.
During the rest of today’s session we learned how to record samples onto ixiQuarks to then be used with the instruments of the program like soundscratcher and predator etc..I found this very enjoyable, creating silly samples and watching the effects of the instruments of ixi on them. As long as I learn from this, what’s the harm? : ]
At the end of today Julio assigned us our next group task, to make a short piece for ixiQuarks using what we learned today.
Permalink
10.07.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 11:12 pm by ibex
It seems that playing around with SC at home payed off! Before the lesson today I spent a few hours with the group to arrange our piece. I showed them the MouseButton idea I had and they seemed to like it so we decided to use it; albeit differently from how i thought we would, because I imagined that we’d use this tool to switch chords i.e. change quickly from notes of one chord to notes of the next chord. But instead we decided to still change chords the long way- by adjusting the values of the notes, but whilst doing so, enhancing the chord we are on with the MouseButton.
During the lesson, setting up for our piece was a bit messy because we had to swap rooms twice, and with one Laptop in the group not being a mac, this made things even more difficult. Just as Julio had heard all the other group pieces and was about to give up on ours, we pretty much begged to perform our piece.. And once we did, as I said, seems it all payed off because the class was very impressed with it. I think mostly because we had spend much time organizing ourselves for it that we had really good communication between the members of our team during the performance.
After performing, we learned something new on SuperCollider- the ‘Pbind’ which is a way of writing out a pattern of notes. This was rather confusing at first with all the parentheses and square brackets involved, but once Julio explained it a second time more slowly and in more detail I began to understand.
With a Pbind, you can control the different aspects or ‘arguments’ of a pattern e.g. \dur (duration) or \midinote (pitch) by using lists of values for each one, to be played either in order using a ‘Pseq’ or randomly using ‘ Prand’.
I hope we get to do more about this in the next session. For now, Julio wants us to use what we learned to try and add to our group piece from last week..I’ve already got some ideas in mind : ]
Permalink
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
