@emmaharner is epic. Particularly the picking pattern in her tune ‘Gale’ (see slide 2).
Learning it made me think about the guitar as a kind of sequencer: the left hand pre-programs the notes, and the right hand sequences them. In this case, you pluck one finger at a time, then move your anchor position up by one, until you get to the top where you do the entire thing in reverse. (It’s also in Animals as Leaders’ ‘Apeirophobia’, but thats way harder to acronymise)
I came up with this little patch in the process. I called it GALE: Guitar-Adjacent (e)Lectronic Expression (or List Expansion). You can choose the open strings, fret the rest via MIDI, and use a simple list comprehension to generate the picking patterns. Each “string” is then routed to its own MIDI channel in Ableton, for per-string monophony and panning.
I like the ‘picking as sequencing’ idea, both for computer music and guitar-ing. There seems to be some potential to strike a nice balance between playability (using midi for fretted notes) and complexity (list comprehension can get gnarly verrrry quickly). Hmmm!
Patch on github, blog post soon!
#maxmsp #maxmspjitter
Sample-based-music-embodiment-folk-joy dump cause life continues to be epic. Lore below:
1. Marc Leman keynote on embodiment in music perception
2. Boids for granular synthesis (me)
3+4. University of Oslo + Modular bleeps courtesy of @vincenzo_madaghiele
5. At the international conference for AI & musical creativity, discussing AI and its impact on provenance in sample-based music communities @club.wip and @createdefinerelease
6. Score for typists + feedback (me)
7. Human sequencer
8. Rhythm trumpet prototype (me)
9. Improv on ‘colonisation in reverse’ by Louise Bennett-Coverley
10. RAWR XD
Thanks @lily__montague and @sophieduryvanbeestholle for letting me write a little love letter to Cornwall with you.
Puddletown (as well as the rest of lily’s Heaven-sent EP) is out now.
Pictured: hiking in the south-west, red-lining the conference call
Exploring my relationship with voice and meaning.
I had jaw surgery this summer - full ‘through the wire’ style – and while recovering my relationship to speech has been odd.
Speech is so much more than communicating a thought. In philosophy of language, the word ‘utterance’ is used to acknowledge the chaotic interplay between a thing that is said and its context.
The ability of sound to be ambiguous is part of why I love it so much. It provides an opportunity to decouple meaning from speech/voice.
Inspired by the works of Trevor Wishart and Elaine Mitchener – who really highlight the space between words/phrases and utterances – I’ve been exploring these non-semantic dimensions through non-words, mantra, and electronic manipulation.
Slides:
1. Before performing at @musicking_event last month
2. Revisiting a composition for @club.wip - made entirely with manipulated voice
3. Weaving word association around desire
4. Communicating via whiteboard
5. Improvised electroacoustic piece - singing alongside and manipulating the hold tone for my GP
6. Sequencing speech and synthesis based on rhythmic and timbral features of a simple sentence
7. ‘If a Monolith the price of freedom and good air then I aint paying’ - s/o to @feltsoundsystem for throwing a party outside my house (and s/o to field hockey)
8. Sling bag by yours truly
I’m doing studies to inform the design of new systems for sampling! Currently recruiting for *paid* interviews.
If you make sound/art/music/etc with samples, hit me up.
Half Frames - Iteration 1
Currently obsessed with Daido Moriyama’s Half-Frames, in which he leverages the medium of half frame 35mm film to juxtapose subsequent images.
I thought it might be interesting to explore something similar with stereo algorithmic music. Performing different contexts simultaneously, bringing them in and out of dialogue with one another, exploring their (inter)subjectivity, and questioning the absurdity of context itself.
Here are some ideas with two algorithms. Left is essentially @p__meyer ‘a intra patch. Right is a variant of that which I made to implement Bresenham’s line algorithm in real-time. They’re being fed the exact same information, and controlling two instances of an FM synth (operator). What’s fun is that they are inverted - as intra becomes denser, the bresenhamians become sparser. Also feeding their position in the bar to pitch, and modulating their time unit with sine waves. They’re sometimes consonant, sometimes dissonant. Always fun, in any case.
Visual Description: Each slide has three frames. A visualisation of the left hand signal, in grey and yellow, my hands on an ableton push, which lights up on some squares. Another visualisation.
