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. Continue reading →
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. Continue reading →
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).
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.
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:
Examples of work in sound, imagery, and interaction
This piece, titled Forgotten Complex, was originally exhibited on 
This sound was generated using an instrument that I developed using MaxMSP tentatively titled the Wave Table Glitch Machine. The instrument uses