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
Continue reading
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.
This evening I have been working on the user interface for GrainMachine, a Max for Live instrument I developed for personal use in October of 2009. In the process of tonight’s testing I came up with this sound. I started with a sample of water dripping, loaded it into GrainMachine and then chose a very narrow grain at a fairly low frequency. Finally I swept slowly through the position of the sample creating the result heard below.
Water Dripping Sample in GrainMachine
Tonight I am demoing my Grain Machine Max for Live instrument at Handmade Music Minneapolis #6 (click for details). Lots of other people are showing off their goodies including Kris Peck of Xenharmonic Instruments, Adam Loper showing his DIY MIDI controller, MCTC students sound synthesis projects, and more. Here’s a few seconds of typical Grain Machine output to wet your appetite.
In my third example of using Granulator I started by manipulating some of the Granulator parameters manually during the recording. I followed this up by improvising on the keyboard to create an abstract landscape of metallic tones. It might sound like it, but no processing was applied before or after the Granulator instrument, or to the snow globe recording.
For my second experiment with Granulator I used the same Three Wind-Up Snow Globes recording, but changed many of the settings including seting up velocity sensitivity so that I could play the grains expressively with a MIDI keyboard. Here’s an excerpt from what I played. Once again, no processing was used other than what is built into Granulator.
By now most Ableton users, especially Max for Live developers, know about the latest update and price cuts to Max for Live. Peter Kirn has written a couple of articles on the topic (see Music Patchwork: Ableton Makes Max for Live Cheaper, Showcases Creations by Henke, Hawtin, More and Ableton Delivers Max for Live Improvements and Guidelines, Responds to Feedback). Consequently you may already know that Ableton is giving away several amazing Max for Live instruments. These are perfect devices to explore for my One Synthesizer Sound Everyday project, and although I’m already backed up with weeks worth of analog sounds in the can it won’t hurt to interject some experiments from the M4L pool.
The first one of the new devices that I tried was Granulator by Robert Henke. Within a couple of hours experimenting I had enough material for a couple of weeks! Granulator is brilliant. Having developed my own M4L instrument, Grain Machine, I can really appreciate what Mr. Henke has done here. I even opened up his perfectly organized patch in Max for Live to get a look under the hood and I fully endorse his work (not that this means anything coming from me, but trust me it’s good). Here’s the first of a series of sounds I produced using Granulator with a recording of Three Wind-Up Snow Globes. Absolutely no processing was applied before or after the Granulator instrument, or to the snow globe recording.
Here’s a sound I produced during a live set at Nick and Eddie for the Thursday Funhouse series under my Ostraka moniker. You can download the entire set that I released as a holiday gift last month. I used Grain Machine which is a touch based granular synthesis instrument that I developed in Max for Live to create the sound. Grain Machine requires a device running TouchOSC such as an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android device for the touch based control. There’s a rotary wheel with friction modeling, and an x-y pad for granular exploration.
Grain Machine from Thursday Funhouse
As I’ve mentioned in some previous articles, I have been working on a multi-media dance collaboration, Words to Dead Lips, with Annichia Arts since last December that has finally come to a close. We staged three performances at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis this weekend to a mostly full house. My part in the collaborative effort was to produce the music, and I was given an open mandate to do so. As is my preference, I opted to perform the work to the dance and projected imagery, rather than submit pre-recorded material. Although I adhered to an agreed framework for the soundscape, the improvisational nature of this approach made every performance unique.
The main tool that I used to generate the sound was my Max for Live patch, Grain Machine that explores granular synthesis via a multi-touch controller. I loaded it with five samples including Snow Melting into Lake Superior, One Hundred Sounds in Eight Seconds, High and Low Frequency Drone, and a couple of others for the piece.
Another component to the sonic environment was the noise shield. This device, that I built into saucer sleds, was used by the dancers to synthesize sounds using body contacts and a light dependent resistor. Here’s a five minute excerpt of audio from the closing night’s performance.