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.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
I will be presenting and performing at the Minneapolis Ableton Live Users Group on December 8, 2009 at the Nomad in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In my presentation I’ll be showing what I do with custom built applications and Ableton Live, including the GMS and my new Wavetable Glitch Machine. Currently I interface my custom built applications with Live, using MIDI via the IAC drivers in Mac OS X, and Soundflower for audio. Soon I’ll be converting my audio based Max patches over to Max for Live, so I can use them in Live directly.
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.
My new experimental music project with Graham O’Brien, Ostraka with Dial System, will be performing on December 20, 2009.
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.
My new experimental music project with Graham O’Brien, Ostraka with Dial System, will be performing on December 20, 2009.