Voice Lessons is an electronic, audio device that interrogates the popular myth that every musical instrument imitates the human voice. Touching the screen allows the participant to manipulate the visuals and vocalizations of the “voice teacher” as he recites vocal warm up exercises.

The piece resides in the space between a musical instrument and voice lesson. Move the touch point left, right, up, and down to explore the visual and auditory possibilities. Rapid high pitched loops occur while touching near the top of the screen while lower pitched longer loops are heard near the bottom.

The actor, also named John Keston, is the artist’s retired father who became a voice teacher after a long career on stage in plays, operas, and musicals with the Royal Shakespeare Company in his native country England and abroad.

Voice Lessons
32” interactive touch screen installation
2011

This documentation is from when Voice Lessons was installed at the MCAD Whittier Studios for a session of the graduate critique seminar in November, 2011.

The piece, developed in Max/MSP, granulates both sound and video as the viewer touches the screen while maintaining synchronization. The piece will be installed again for an open studio night on December 9, 2011 at the MCAD Whittier Studios, 2835 Harriet Avenue South, Minneapolis.

The image above shows the main patch window for Voice Lessons. The X and Y coordinates of the touch-screen are translated into position, frequency, and grain width for the audio and video. When the screen is not being touched video without sound of the subject looking around the environment is played. I call this the idle mode and it serves to attract the viewer into interacting with the piece.

When the idle mode has been active for 1.5 seconds a new video and corresponding sound is randomly selected from a pool of five possibilities. Each video is a distinct performance of vocal exercises that explore a variety of vowels and consonants.

My project Ostracon (John Keston and Graham O’Brien) was accepted and performed at the In/Out Festival of Digital Performance in New York, September, 2010. Ostracon performs generative, improvisational compositions using my custom software, the GMS (Gestural Music Sequencer), that converts video input into musical phrases. I capture, layer, loop and process melodic segments in real-time out of the stream of notes created by my gestural input, and tailor them with probability distribution algorithms. O’Brien accompanies these angular, electronic structures, with dynamic playing that, at times, verges on the chaotic.

The lineup this year included Monome creator, tehn (Brian Crabtree), and Peter Kirn of Creative Digital Music. From the In/Out Festival website.

In/Out is an annual festival that features leading performers, developers, artists, and tinkerers of the digital design community in hopes bridging the gap between the forum based world and the stage. The festival seeks to bring digitally driven performances into the limelight with two full days of workshops and performances.

This video above is a live studio piece shot by Ai student Josh Clos, and recorded at Ai Minnesota by John Keston and Graham O’Brien. It’s representative of the music that we are generating during our live performances. For more visit the Ostracon tag on AudioCookbook.org, or visit Unearthed Music.

Ostracon at the In / Out Festival of Digital Performance.

On Wednesday, July 7, 2010 my piece Chromatic Textures was shown at 6X6 #5: Mystery, an exhibition at Ciné Lab in Athens, Georgia. My work was accepted along with five other artists, “…including Denton Crawford’s eyeballs, Aaron Oldenburg’s plunge into asphyxia, and a performance streamed live over the Internet from California.” Here’s my abstract for Chromatic Textures.

Chromatic Textures is a study on the synesthetic nature of our senses of sound and sight. Video input is used to produce generative musical phrases. The visual media is analyzed by the GMS (Gestural Music Sequencer) to create the musical forms in real-time. The software includes adjustable probability distribution maps for the scale and rhythm. Adjusting these settings allows familiar structures to emerge. The settings chosen for this piece cause notes within a particular scale to play more frequently, however, it is still possible for any note within the twelve-tone chromatic system to occur. As a result, dissonant or blue notes can be heard at rare instances throughout the piece.

The process for this piece involved shooting a collection of hand-held, macro-focused videos of various objects and textures. The intent was to frame high-contrast images that would work well with my analysis algorithms built into GMS and create a sense of mystery in keeping with the theme of the exhibition. After choosing the best shots from the collection, I edited them together and applied processing such as converting the majority of the clips to black and white, and slight adjustments to the brightness and contrast. I captured the musical forms in real-time as the visual media was analyzed by GMS. Next I selected short phrases from the generated music and looped them on separate layers for emphasis. Finally I automated the processing to enhance the dynamics in the generative composition.

Although it might seem that this work represents computer generated music, my process maintains a dominant human influence by gathering information from organic, time-based, visual media and using it to produce dynamic musical phrases. GMS is an instrument with a camera operator as the musician. This method aims to satisfy my curiosity for “auralizing” visuals as opposed to visualizing sound.

“6X6 is a monthly media arts event in Athens, Georgia, a cross between an art show and a film festival, first Wednesday of the month at Ciné Lab. Six curated short video, film, performance, sound, or other time-based combination works.” For more about the 6X6 event visit their site at hexadic.blogspot.com.

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.

Each of the five movements in the piece were written to highlight features that I built into the instrument and the samples that I produced for it.
I. The Ingredients involved playing granules of the samples individually.
II. Specific Grains continued the granular exploration through the juxtaposition of various sound objects discovered through improvisation with the instrument.
III. Filtered Sounds illustrated the use of the accelerometer as a way to process the sound objects.
IV. Rotary Pitch Decay linked a virtual dial on the controller to the play speed and direction of the sound objects. Variable “friction” on the dial caused the pitch to decay over adjustable timescales.
V. Granular Mixtures comprised a mash-up of the techniques possible with the instrument and closed with five subdued grains that died off one at a time leaving a final sound at the conclusion of the piece.

The following audio example is a study for the piece in stereo using panning to simulate each of the five channels necessary for the performance. Hard left is channel one, ninety degrees is channel two, one-hundred-eighty degrees is channel three, two-hundred-seventy degrees is channel four, and hard right is channel five. The second movement starts at 5:05, followed by the third at 7:15, the fourth at 9:58, and concluding with the fifth movement at 11:57.

Fives Study in Stereo

Also appearing is Ali Momeni who’ll be showing some of his Max for Live patches, and JP Hungelmann who also organizes the event. Last time the group met it was held at IPR and there was an excellent turn out. The speakers were terrific and they gave away Ableton demo discs and t-shirts at the end of the event. If you use Live, have any interest in it, or electronic music in general, I highly recommend attending.

Forgotten Complex

Ostraka with Dial System is myself on laptop using my custom developed application, the Gestural Music Sequencer (GMS), and Graham O’Brien on drums. For more details, including audio examples and video produced using the GMS, checkout the GMS category on audiocookbook.org. There’s also a Gestural Music Sequencer Documentary Short produced by Josh Clos, that does a good job of illustrating what the software does.

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.

Etude in 8 Bits for Multitouch Graintable Synthesis

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