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.
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