Sound

Music, Sound Design, Sound Art, and Video

Five Movements for Five Sampled Sounds in Five Loud Speakers

fives

On Tuesday, December 7, 2009 I presented a sound art installation titled, Fives, at the University of Minnesota. The subtitle of the work is, Five Movements for Five Sampled Sounds in Five Loud Speakers. To produce the sound for the work I developed an instrument designed to explore granular interpretations of digitized waveforms. The instrument was controlled over a wireless network with a multi-touch device. The sound objects generated were amplified through five distinct loud speakers arranged on pedestals at about chest height in a pentagonal configuration.
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Forgotten Complex

This piece, titled Forgotten Complex, was originally exhibited on audiocookbook.org and came about as a side effect of my contributions to the One Sound Every Day project. Rather than a percussion driven piece, Forgotten Complex relies on ambient Rhodes and other processed sound effects to create the lonely atmosphere of an abandoned warehouse. The piece is included on my solo album, Precambrian Resonance by Ostraka (Unearthed Music, 2009).

Forgotten Complex:

Chromatic Currents II

This second part to “Chromatic Currents” was produced with the GMS by using a string of lights placed into a large glass vase. I moved the camera around the vase to direct the flow of musical phrases with one hand while I adjusted transposition and note duration settings in the sequencer with my right.

You might notice that the video stimulus does not resemble lights in a vase. This is because I applied a negative filter to the video after capturing the performance. I used a pentatonic scale interspersed with rare dissonant notes and probability distributions in the note durations to give it an eerie awkwardness.

GMS: Chromatic Currents Part II from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis

This sound was generated using an instrument that I developed using MaxMSP tentatively titled the Wave Table Glitch Machine. The instrument uses TouchOSC as a controller running on an iPod Touch. I interfaced the accelerometer on the iPod to a filter so that when turned on with a toggle, tilting it on the y axis causes a lowpass filter to effect the sound. By setting a threshold on the z axis, giving the iPod Touch a brisk shake will cause the patch to loop a randomly selected grain of random length from a randomly selected buffer played back at a randomly selected rate. The variety of sounds possible with five short samples is expansive. Here’s a selection of sound produced with just one sample selected.

Etude in 8 Bits for Multitouch Graintable Synthesis:

Chromatic Currents I

Chromatic Currents Part I is a generative music piece driven by particles floating in a liquid. No intervention in particle behavior occurred while the piece was being performed using the GMS. The scale was strongly C minor pentatonic, weighted with a Dorian mode by adding less-likely probabilities for D and A. However, every note that was not part of the scale still had a small possibility of occurring. This led to occasional blue or dissonant pitches in the sequence. The possibility of occurrences for any note within a twelve tone chromatic scale led me to the title.

GMS: Chromatic Currents Part I from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.