This is a rough rendering of a short piece of sound that is part of a larger dance piece that is being produced by Annichia Arts. I’ll explain more about the piece at a later date. A shorter, less processed version of the piece was posted here.
On Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Olivia Solon of Wired.co.uk wrote an article describing my piece, Voice Lessons. I have creativeapplications.net to thank for this one. Olivia found the article about my piece there and then emailed me to ask for a brief interview. We conducted the interview over email and the article was published the next day. Read the article by Filip Visnjic on Creative Applications Network. Read the article from Olivia Solon on Wired. Thanks, Filip and Olivia!
Voice Lessons is an electronic, audio device that interrogates the popular myth that every musical instrument imitates the human voice. Touching the screen allows the participant to manipulate the visuals and vocalizations of the “voice teacher” as he recites vocal warm up exercises.
The piece resides in the space between a musical instrument and voice lesson. Move the touch point left, right, up, and down to explore the visual and auditory possibilities. Rapid high pitched loops occur while touching near the top of the screen while lower pitched longer loops are heard near the bottom.
The actor, also named John Keston, is my retired father who became a voice teacher after a long career on stage in plays, operas, and musicals with the Royal Shakespeare Company in our native country England and abroad.
Voice Lessons
32” interactive touch screen installation
By John Keston 2011
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After more than two months of spare time spent searching and replacing, all of the audio and image files that were lost in the crash have been recovered. It is possible that a few things have fallen through the cracks. I have been clicking “Visit Random Entry” to do occasional spot checks since wrapping up my data recovery todo list, and a couple of things have come up missing that way.
It has been interesting to revisit the old content, but I am ready to move on and get back to posting some of my latest projects. If you’d like to help out the recovery process, click the “Visit Random Entry” link in the right sidebar a few times, and if you find something that doesn’t play, or a missing image or video, please post a comment with a link to the post in question. Thanks!
Voice Lessons is an interactive touch-screen installation that I recently presented during a graduate critique seminar at MCAD. The piece, developed in Max/MSP, granulates both sound and video as the viewer touches the screen while maintaining synchronization. I will be installing the piece again next month for an open studio night on December 9, 2011 at the MCAD Whittier Studios, 2835 Harriet Avenue South, Minneapolis. I will also be sharing more complete documentation about the piece soon. For now, please enjoy this short segment of audio sampled from the piece as it was in use.
For those of you in or near New York City, the In/Out Festival of Digital Petformance has another great lineup this year as you can see from the attached flier. Checkout their site (inoutfest.org) for the details.
Forgotten Channels is a generative music and projected video performance piece that aims to discover connections between our visual memory and our response to peculiar soundscapes.
The visuals for the piece are made up of fifteen shots selected from hundreds of mobile phone videos. The videos make up a score that was prepared by playing them on a large LCD display then re-shooting them with another mobile device to frame mysterious elements and expose the imperfections within the digital media.
To perform the piece the visual score is abstracted again by playing it on yet another mobile device positioned below a camera plugged into a computer. Custom software analyses the input to produce a real-time stream of algorithmic music. The musical information is captured and manipulated by the performer in response to the imagery.
Former A&R rep and all-around minneapolis music nut, John Kass recently posted eight tracks ripped from a couple of demo tapes that we submitted to his record label back in the mid-90s. You can check out all of the tracks on his blog gojohnnygo.com. I’m including an instrumental track below that’s loaded with some note-y Pro-One lines revealing that I have been using that synth for at least sixteen years. Crazy!
I’m currently preparing a performance for my graduate critique seminar on October 4, 2011. As I have been working on the piece, tentatively titled Forgotten Channels, I have been capturing little chunks of interesting sound. Here’s an example of something I decided to preserve from a recent practice session.
And we’re back… After twenty days of five-minutes-here and one-hour-there since the crash I have managed to recover a significant percentage of the original content of AudioCookbook.org. There are still hundreds of audio files that need to be put back in place, and probably a lot of lost images, but the first ten (of eighty) pages are cloase to 100% recovered. I have also created a new design based on the clean and functional Twenty Eleven WordPress theme. This responsive design looks nicer and will also provide a better user experience on mobile devices.
Although there is lots more to be done, now it is time to get back to the business at hand. Making sounds! At this stage I can’t guarantee daily output, but I intend to work up to it. Here’s a chordal drone that I created recently using my Roland MKS-80. I modulated the filter and the VCO frequency with the LFO set to a sine wave. However, you will not hear the pitch sweeping because the oscillator that is modulated is synched to the unmodulated one.
Sync and Filter Modulated Chordal Drone