My project Ostracon (John Keston and Graham O’Brien) has been selected to perform at the In/Out Digital Performance Festival in New York this September, 2010. The schedule hasn’t been finalized yet, but we’ll be playing either on the 17th or 18th of the month at the Tank Theater, 354 West 45th Street, New York, NY 10036. Last year’s lineup included Monome creator, tehn (Brian Crabtree), and Peter Kirn of Creative Digital Music. From the In/Out Festival website.
In/Out is an annual festival that features leading performers, developers, artists, and tinkerers of the digital design community in hopes bridging the gap between the forum based world and the stage. The festival seeks to bring digitally driven performances into the limelight with two full days of workshops and performances.
This video is a live studio piece shot by Ai student Josh Clos, and recorded at Ai Minnesota by John Keston and Graham O’Brien. It’s representative of the music that we are generating during our live performances. For more checkout the Ostracon tag here on ACB, or visit our bio on Unearthed Music.
Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of introducing André Michelle at the Flashbelt conference in Minneapolis. André is the lead developer of Audiotool. If you’re not familiar with Audiotool it is, in my view, the best web based audio production application I have ever seen. The bulk of André’s presentation involved showing Flash built demos of advanced audio functionality, like granular synthesis, guitar modeling, and using physical modeling to influence sounds and sequences.
Toward the end of his presentation he brought Audiotool into the mix. Audiotool is an application built in Flash. The nearest thing I could compare it to is Reason. The biggest difference is that it runs on the web. This allows for social media opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Instruments built into Audiotool, include very convincing emulation of several popular Roland devices, like the TR-808 and the TB-303. It also includes a modular synth called Pulverisatuer and a number of effect processors.
Finally, there is an audio track module that allows you to bring in samples stored within a pretty big library provided by Loopmasters. You can’t bring in your own samples yet, but André assured us it was in the works.
André played me a few examples of some of his favorite user generated tracks from Audiotool and I was very impressed with the sound quality and scope. It’s easy to dismiss a web based audio application as a novelty, but the community around it is creating some totally professional sounding stuff that can’t be ignored.
Seoul based artist and engineer, Hojun Song, is one of the featured artists on the Creators Project. Hojun engineers custom MIDI controllers, satellites, and “The Strongest Weapon in the World”; an unbreakable machine that prints out beautiful messages. The Creators Project is “…a global initiative bringing together the world’s leading and most relevant innovators in music, art, film, design and architecture through a common passion for creativity and technology.” Other featured artists include Diplo, Muti Randolph, Richie Hawtin, Karl Sadler, Phoenix, with dozens more on deck. Check it out at www.thecreatorsproject.com.
I’m currently working on a sound design project for a client who is looking for a way to generate specific sorts of sounds using easy to understand controls. I started by creating a frequency modulated drone generator. The tool has a mixer with six preset pitches plus noise. I also included amplitude modulation, with sliders to control the amount, LFO, and a frequency multiplier to allow for FM synthesis effects. Here’s an audio example that illustrates the range of sounds possible with this set of fairly simple and intuitive controls.
I am excited to have the opportunity to teach an upper level sound design class to digital film students this Fall. I have several books in my collection that relate to sound design that cover very specific topics, but what I’ll need for the class is a book that covers a broad spectrum of concepts within the field. The course competencies include multi-tracking, mixing, sampling techniques, signal processing, equalization, editing, synchronization of audio and video, Foley, and ADR. Does anyone have any suggestions for a book focused on sound design, but general enough to cover all of these topics?
To give you an idea of what I’m looking for, I currently use Real World Digital Audio by Peter Kirn for an entry level audio production class that is a prerequisite for the sound design class. Peter’s book works really well because it’s current and covers exactly what I wanted for the audio production class in an illustrated, thorough, yet clear and concise way.
I just got a note from Matt Musick at Vice Magazine regarding a feature on Devo just posted on Motherboard.tv. I haven’t had a chance to properly watch the entire feature, but I’ve been anticipating this, and will give it a good watch as soon as I am able. Here’s Matt’s note:
Hello John. I really think the Audio Cookbook audience would get a kick out of this piece and wanted to pass your way. The new episode of Electric Independence documents a rare look inside Devo’s studio. Mark Mothersbaugh himself gives us a tour through the space and shows us some of his favorite (and strangest) synths and circuit bending noisemakers. The guys even tell us some funny stories of their early Akron days, like the large girls (or “mother hens” as they like to call them) who would circle their equipment to warm it up before playing on those cold Ohio nights.
Glyn over at ProKits has offered a few free downloads for ACB readers. ProKits is an online resource for custom-made, individual and unique sample kits in formats like Native Instruments Kontakt and Battery. Here’s a few descriptions of their sample kits from Glyn:
Grainy
This instrument is a granular synthesis pad machine created in Kontakt using devious scripting to firing thousands of tiny ‘blips’ at your ears at random. The frequency of the effect can be controlled using the mod-wheel and the custom interface has additional controls for release-time, choral layer volume and distortion. The whole effect created a texture that can go from sonar-ping blippy to the Russian red army chorus to a desert wind howling in the night.
Wooden Frog
A Kontakt instrument created from the humble little wooden percussion frog. A wide selection of sounds were recorded at different velocity levels, with alternate sounds triggered in round-robin fashion, for a very expressive instrument (over 40 samples), going all the way from the frog’s natural range to a pitched-down bass thud.
The Kontakt script has knobs for tuning the sounds, and the mod-wheel brings in an impulse reverb. The reverb is based on an impulse made by my very own acoustic-space modeling program, and is not available anywhere else.
Here’s what Glyn has made freely available for AudioCookbook readers. To extract the RAR files linked below use the password “audiocookbook”.
My student, Dane Messall, has been experimenting with the GMS over the break and just posted this video experiment. He imported the video into the GMS and then interfaced it with Reason’s Thor synthesizer to generate the sound. Nice one, Dane!
Andrea Streudel just posted some really nice video documentation of the People on Shelves exhibit that was performed on December 9, 2009 at the West Bank Social Center, using music I created during the show. From the original post, “The world premiere of maw.shelves, a software for dynamic 3-dimensional projection. We overlaid another projector to place our real-time, full-body silhouettes on the “shelves”. Music was performed live by Ostraka.” Checkout Minneapolis Art on Wheels for more details.
I’ve just rendered my full eighty-six minute Ostraka set from last night’s event at the West Bank Social Center. So, while waiting for the delightful documentation that Andrea Streudel is sure to produce, here’s a short segment of audio from the set.
The projection work of the evening was top notch. An entire wall of the building across from the WBSC was covered with animated silhouettes of attendees on simulated three dimensional “shelves”.
Here’s the excerpt. I’m also including a link to the entire eighty-six minute set that I uploaded to soundcloud.com for all the brave people who’d like to hear the full set.
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I am excited to have the opportunity to teach an upper level sound design class to digital film students this Fall. I have several books in my collection that relate to sound design that cover very specific topics, but what I’ll need for the class is a book that covers a broad spectrum of concepts within the field. The course competencies include multi-tracking, mixing, sampling techniques, signal processing, equalization, editing, synchronization of audio and video, Foley, and ADR. Does anyone have any suggestions for a book focused on sound design, but general enough to cover all of these topics?
Glyn over at 
I’ve just rendered my full eighty-six minute 