by davidestevens on April 4, 2009
in Recent
flugelhorn with sensors
At the moment I’m developing a system called “sunday morning”, for which the original inspiration is the sound of church bells chiming in the distance, a sound that I grew up with.
The piece is already mutating away from the original idea, although the actual processes (extreme time-stretching) remain the same.
Over the last week I’ve been modifying the software to allow me to control various processes using sensors attached to my flugel horn. Why? Well, in the beginning, the only performance part was to play 3 seconds of sound into a series of buffers (think of buffers as storage “areas” in the computer which hold a recording for playback in one form or another) and to listen as the computer played slowly through the sounds (taking around 3 minutes to play through the 3 second buffer). It was producing some very interesting textures, but the performance element was obviously somewhat, er, minimal.
So I’ve changed three of the buffers so that they can be played like a synthesiser – the movement sensor attached to the body of the flugel valves moves a play “pointer” around in the sound buffers; the sensors attached to the valve heads do two things – they act like notes on a keyboard, press one down and a sound plays (each valve with its own buffer, and hence own sound), and at the same time the amount of up/down controls the frequency setting on a filter, so the timbre of the sound can be changed whilst playing.
It seems to me that the basic software/system is useable now. The next step is to practice more with it so that playing it becomes more automatic and intuitive, and to learn the relationships between the kinds of sound recorded and what comes out – and how they fit together in an interesting and meaningful way.
Tagged as:
experimental music,
interactive instrument,
performance system,
software
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Imagine a clear plastic tube, fifty foot long and about ten feet high. There are four loudspeakers arranged around the tube – one each at the top and bottom ends of the tube, and the other two along the sides. People are sitting inside the tube, listening to a musician performing at the top end.
This is the Tube, the smallest of the structures designed by the Colourscape artist Peter Jones. The idea is that you are sitting inside the body of a wind instrument, listening to the sound of the instrument as it starts at one end of the tube and rushes past you on it’s way to the other end. If the musician plays a single short note – “bip” – you hear “bip” in front of you, “bip” to the right just ahead of you, to the left just behind you, and finally behind you, all within the space of a second or less.
That’s how it was originally. When I started performing with the Tube, I added feedback delays to the system, so that the sound could loop around and around, front to back, back to front, every which way. And I used a Korg Kaoss pad to add real time effects to the sound – more delays, shifting the sound up and down in pitch, and so on. The first piece, above, is from the first Tube performance that I was involved with, in Harrow back around 1999 (I think). Unfortunately, I don’t remember who the saxophonist was.
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The second piece is from around 2004, when the software was much more developed. The shakuhachi player is the excellent
Nick Parkin.
And here’s a picture of all of the electronics sitting inside my Smart car: amps and radio mic receivers in the back of the car, laptop sideways on the driver seat, a couple of small monitor speakers on the dashboard, and the Kaoss pad on my lap. Possibly the smallest mobile studio ever?
Finally, here’s a picture of Simon Desorgher (one of the founders of the Colourscape Festival) playing bass flute. (The headband is actually holding a Shure SM58 microphone in place on Simon’s forehead. We do like to improvise 
)
Tagged as:
ambient,
drone,
experimental music,
soundscape
