Nils Westdal shot this video of myself and Graham O’Brien on drums performing with the GMS during one of the Flashbelt after parties on June 8, 2009. The party was held in the back alley of One on One bike studio, considered the bike Mecca of the Midwest.
Recorded using the internal mic on the video camera, the mix is chatty and pretty drum heavy for the first half, but you can hear the GMS sequencing a little better toward the end.
The setup consists of a MacBook Pro running the GMS synced to Ableton Live 7, an M-Audio Firewire 410 interface, a Mackie 1202 mixer, my Korg MS2000 for external control of the GMS, a Casio projector, and a variety of bike lights and spinning LED tops as “light controllers”.
Josh Clos produced this documentary short about the GMS recently. He and his colleagues Julie Kistler and Brian Smith shot video during my performance in Downtown Minneapolis with Minneapolis Art on Wheels on May 13, 2009. Later Josh interviewed me in the audio studio at Art Institutes Minnesota where I teach interactive media and audio production. As a student in my audio production class, Josh edited the sound and video together with minimal input from myself. His short illustrates what the GMS does and how I’ve been using it to compose music in real-time. Thanks, Josh, for a job well done!
Speaking of the GMS, I have recently slowed down its development, and I’m considering releasing a beta version of the application in a few months. Soon afterward I plan to release the code as Open Source so that the application can be developed further by artists interested in creating music through gestural input.
This segment of audio from the GMS is an unused section from Chromatic Currents Part II. I had slowed the durations and focused the video stimulus on low frequencies for this part of the piece.
Since getting Ableton Live 8, I have yet to use it for a show due to performance issues and a lack of time to troubleshoot what’s causing garbled audio. I don’t have the same problem with 7, so perhaps 8 has more overhead. I’ll be looking into this soon. In any case I have had the opportunity to experiment with some of the instruments, including Electric. Although I still prefer the sound of my actual Rhodes pianos, Electric does a great job of simulating them, but more importantly it is capable of producing entirely new Rhodes-like instrument sounds. Here I started with an instrument out of the rack, tweaked it a little and then used it to play a loop I originally captured using the GMS.
Here’s a segment from another jam session using the GMS with Graham O’Brien on drums. This was our second attempt, and performed at a slower tempo than the third piece that I posted excerpts from recently. I’m looking forward to the next session because I’ve done a bit of refining within the GMS code, including some optimization and bug fixing.
I was going to name this project “Particle System” (as in particles of light that drive the GMS), but then I learned that there’s a popular band called “Particle” and decided against it. I’m horrible at naming things, so if any of you ACB readers have any brilliant ideas, let ‘um fly.
Here’s another segment from the late April MAW outing. Once again the stuck note persists. A vibes patch is in use, and a key change occurs at one minute and seven seconds into the excerpt.
Here’s a third segment from the late April MAW outing. Almost the entire hour and five minutes of this set has a drone throughout the sound. The drone is a stuck note that happened early on in the set. I had yet to create the ability to stop stuck notes. I managed to use the drone for the performance, but needless to say, I fixed the problem soon afterward.
Here’s a segment of audio captured from a early performance using the GMS during a MAW outing in April. An earlier part of the same one hour and five minute set was posted in GMS Audio Captured During MAW Outing.
As I mentioned in a previous entry, I’ve been planning on using the GMS in an ensemble setting. I finally had the chance to do this as a duet with Graham O’Brien on drums. Things went fairly well, although I managed to discover another bug my application handling the external sync. Rather than trying to fix it during the session, I just used an old version and tiptoed around the difficulties by not using an external controller as I had wanted to. Nevertheless we were able to produce some nice studies for our first attempt. Here’s an excerpt from our third jam of the evening.
After a few performances live looping with Ableton and the GMS, I have found it cumbersome and frustrating to have to repeatedly swap between the two applications. To solve this, I have added he ability to control the GMS with an external MIDI device. I achieved this by creating an XML document with the parameters included as tags with a CC attribute to designate what control change value to use for each setting here’s a few lines out of the XML document.
As you can see I’m using knobs to adjust some settings and buttons to adjust others. It’s really fun to turn a knob on my Korg MS2000 and see the sliders in my software start to move in response. Program change for presets and note on for transposition will work from any old controller, but the rest of the parameters need to be mapped to knobs, sliders or buttons. In total I have around thirty-six specific parameters that are now adjustable with a controller.
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Since getting 
Here’s a segment from another jam session using the 
As I mentioned in a previous entry, I’ve been planning on using the 