Category Archives: One Sound Every Day

From July 28, 2008 – July 28, 2009 John Keston posted a sound every day in this category.

Sixty Fourth Notes from Twenty BPM to One Thousand and Back

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I’ve already posted a few glitchy sounds created by the GMS in it’s various states of development. Most of them created by some bug, which I love. Serendipity never looses its charm for me. This sound is more deliberate and illustrates how sixty fourth notes sound played on a basic piano sample from twenty beats per minute all the up to nine-hundred and ninety-nine BPM. I’m not sure how accurately the GMS is reproducing these durations at tempos greater than five-hundred beats per minutes, but it sounds pretty wicked anyway.

From 20bpm to 999bpm and Back

Bobcat Jackhammer Attachment

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009 was a beautifully sunny day in Minneapolis. This quarter my schedule includes a three hour break, which I usually use for catching up on curriculum, ACB entries or meeting with students, but this time I let Spring fever take hold and got on my bike a rode around one of my favorite city lakes. There’s a nice spot on the lake where I sometimes read or take an afternoon nap. Unfortunately just across the lake from my spot was a work crew using a jackhammer to break up a cement driveway. If you can’t beat ‘um, join ‘um right? Having my PCM-D50 along, I finally gave up on the idea of a few Zs and rode over to the action to make a recording. It took a minute to get the levels right, but I think they were going to be at it all day, so there was plenty of time for a good long recording. Here’s a few passes of the jackhammer engaged and splitting concrete.

Bobcat Jackhammer

External Sync Feature Added to the GMS

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With some expert help from Grant Muller I have successfully added the capability of synchronization with an external MIDI signal to the GMS. This feature opens up vast possibilities for performance and collaboration with the tool. To test the feature I sent external sync from Ableton Live to the GMS, which in turn routed note information back through the IAC drivers into Ableton to drive a VST FM synth. I started by live looping a few phrases from the sequencer including a bass line, mid-range arpeggio, and some heavily delayed FM clav, then put it together with a recycled beat into a two minute micro-track. Everything heard, except the drums, are notes output from the GMS via video stimulus.

GMS External Sync Test

Chromatic Currents Part II

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This second part to “Chromatic Currents” was produced with the GMS by using a string of lights placed into a large glass vase. I moved the camera around the vase to direct the flow of musical phrases with one hand while I adjusted transposition and note duration settings in the sequencer with my right.

You might notice that the video stimulus does not resemble lights in a vase. This is because I applied a negative filter to the video after capturing the performance. Once again I used a pleasant pentatonic scale interspersed with rare dissonant notes and probability distributions in the note durations to give it an eerie awkwardness.

GMS: Chromatic Currents Part II from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

 

Chromatic Currents Part I

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Here’s a segment of sound from another GMS video I produced yesterday called Chromatic Currents. Once again I was letting the visuals drive the piece, while I controlled parameters in the GMS. On Sound Globules I used the circle of fourths with probability distributions so that C was the most frequent note followed by F, Bb, Eb and so on. I really liked the rare dissonant pitch making its way into the sequence, so I tried a similar technique for Chromatic Currents. The scale was strongly C minor pentatonic, weighted with the Dorian mode by adding less-likely probabilities for D and A. However, every note that was not part of the scale still had a small possibility of occurring. This led to occasional blue or dissonant pitches in the stream of notes. The possibility of having any note within a chromatic scale occur in the stream led me to the title.

Chromatic Currents