…life under hylaster

June 9, 2008

Stoa Poikile

Here is a recording of “Stoa Poikile,” my final project for the seminar in Electronic Music Perfromance, recorded at the class concert on May 8. The photo was taken from the Lisser Hall sound booth by Luke Selden, TA and sound engineer extraordinaire.

“Stoa Poikile” is composed for a band of radical democrats (or small ensemble of non-fixed pitch instruments) and 96 resonant bandpass filters. This performance features Brendan Aanes on violin, Danishta Rivero on cello, Cutis McKinney on contrabass, and me on electronics.

The instruments are fed through a bank of 96 resonant bandpass filters tuned to frequencies derived from just intonation tunings. Each tuning of the filter creates a unique sonic structure – a virtual space to be explored by the instrumentalists. The instrumentalists gradually learn their way around the interior of the structure – initially by playing slow glissandi and seeking out the resonant nodes of the tuning. When excited, the frequencies from the scale will be audible as tone swells, similar to an Aeolian Harp or sympathetic strings. When each instrumentalist excites a resonating frequency he or she likes, that tone should be held. When all instrumentalists are playing sustained tones and a resonant chord is sounding, the filter player changes the tuning and the process repeats.

I wrote a Max/MSP patch to provide the bank of tunable filters and a trigger for changing tunings:

You can’t tell from the concert photo, but the Jitter visuals projected across the performers consist of ripples flowing upward. The waves respond to the amplitude coming from the patch. Very simple, and borrowed in part from Andrew Benson:

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May 19, 2008

John Yoo, Torture Professor

Here is last week’s East Bay Express article on UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo. Yoo authored the infamous “torture memos” when he served as legal consultant to the White House in 2003, giving legal carte blanche to the Bush administration to torture people in your name and in mine.

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finale

To: All Music Grad Students,

On behalf of all the undergraduates living in Orchard Meadow who were studying for their finals/trying to sleep on Tuesday night, I would really like to thank you for having a rockin’ dance party in the Music building until 1:30AM. I was just sitting there thinking, “Hmm, there’s nothing that would help me study/sleep better at this particular moment that really obnoxious, bass-heavy music being played so goddamn loud that it makes my windows rattle.” Cue you guys! Thanks so much for the kindness, respect and consideration.

Sincerely, I’M BEING SARCASTIC, YOU JERKS

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May 1, 2008

Happy May Day

…

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April 24, 2008

control

Here’s one project I’ve managed to complete this semester. For a while I have wanted a tactile controller for my analog setup. As much as I enjoy letting the machine play itself, there are certain situations where it is preferable to have the instrument “shut up” when I’m not touching it (as David Wessel would put it.) This kind of control has been notably absent in situations where I am playing with acoustic musicians.

I was initially inspired by the touch capacitance controllers designed by Don Buchla for his modular synths. Here is one of two Buchla touch controllers we have at Mills:

I like how Buchla’s design doesn’t really have anything to do with a traditional keyboard - this seems logical given how new the electronic instrument paradigm was when Buchla built his first synth in 1964. Buchla’s synthesizers were designed to make experimental electronic music, or live “tape music” as it was called back then. But the Moog approach caught on commercially, and soon people associated synthesizers with piano style keyboards and electronic emulations of acoustic instruments.

Each touch plate is pressure (actually capacitance) sensitive and has adjustable control voltage (cv) range. There is also a sample and hold circuit to “remember” the most recent voltage. I wanted to make something similar, but quickly realized that with today’s sensor technology I could make something with the same functionality and a lot less trouble using force sensing resistors, or FSR’s. James Fei has a small box with FSR’s and I tested James’ controller to make sure this was what I wanted.

I wanted my controller to be compact and easy to play with one hand, with an ergonomic layout of the touch pads. I also wanted a linear potentiometer used in ribbon controllers to supplement the pressure sensors with a different kind of gestural control. I decided that each sensor should have an adjustable cv range like the Buchla, separate cv out, that the two larger touch pads and the ribbon would have individual trigger outputs for opening VCA’s and triggering envelopes, and that there would be a master trigger output. The circuitry is quite simple - 12v comes in, each sensor has a voltage divider to send the variable voltage out, and a LM339 comparator chip is used to process 5v trigger voltage outputs.

Here are some photos of the build process.