My experimental music project, Ostraka with Graham O’Brien on Drums, is performing on January 27, 2010 at Big V’s in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’ll be on laptop using my custom developed application, the Gestural Music Sequencer (GMS). I’m also using my iPod Touch controlled grain-table glitch generating Max patch for another layer of texture. Chain Fight and Juhyo round out the bill.
It’s also about time I mentioned that I’m in the process of producing a new Ostraka album that features Graham O’Brien on drums. We recorded it recently at Masters Recording, formerly Flyte Tyme of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis fame. The studio was just sold again and from what I understand will be called Madison Media Institute. In any case it was an amazing facility to lay down tracks. Here’s a shot of our setup in Studio A.
This video was shot during a performance of Fives at the University of Minnesota last December. The sound quality is poor, but I think it illustrates how I was able to sort of “pour” my looped granular experiments into each of the five channels using the iPod Touch as a controller. For more about this project visit my portfolio site at www.johnkeston.com.
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.
Last Tuesday I performed a sound art installation titled, Fives, at the University of Minnesota. The subtitle of the work is, Five Movements for Five Sampled Sounds in Five Loud Speakers. To produce the sound for the work I used the wavetable glitch machine that I have discussed in a number of recent entries, controlled over a wireless network with an iPod Touch running TouchOSC. The sound objects generated were amplified through five distinct loud speakers arranged on pedestals at about chest height in a pentagonal configuration.
I have more detailed documentation about the project on my portfolio site along with a few photographs taken during the performance, and a 15:37 audio study of the piece in stereo, simulating the five channels necessary to perform the work. Check it out at the link below.
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.
I will be presenting and performing at the Minneapolis Ableton Live Users Group on December 8, 2009, 7:00pm at the Nomad in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In my presentation I’ll be showing what I do with custom built applications and Ableton Live, including the GMS and my new Wavetable Glitch Machine. Currently I interface my custom built applications with Live, using MIDI via the IAC drivers in Mac OS X, and Soundflower for audio. Soon I’ll be converting my audio based Max patches over to Max for Live, so I can use them in Live directly.
Also appearing is Ali Momeni who’ll be showing some of his Max for Live patches, and JP Hungelmann who also organizes the event. Last time the group met it was held at IPR and there was an excellent turn out. The speakers were terrific and they gave away Ableton demo discs and t-shirts at the end of the event. If you use Live, have any interest in it, or electronic music in general, I highly recommend attending.
Recently in my class with Ali Momeni, we had an exercise surrounding the idea of a networked ensemble of computers. It turns out to be a fairly easy and effective technique. In a couple of hours we had fifteen computers all talking to each other by sending OSC messages over a wireless network. The messages could trigger a sinusoid at a specified volume and frequency, noise at a specified volume and duration, or one of five samples played at a specified volume and rate. The samples were selected and loaded locally, so only the OSC messages were being transmitted over the network.
By the end of the experiment all fifteen computers were producing chaotic mash-ups of randomly pitched sine waves, random white noise, and an eclectic collection of pitch shifted and/or reversed sampled sounds. Unfortunately I didn’t have a portable recorder on hand, but what I did do was capture the audio that was being generated from the messages that were being received on my laptop. Here’s an excerpt of what that sounded like. Now try to imagine that times fifteen. I’m also attaching the patch in case anyone would like have have a look. Just be aware that it was made quickly (I did clean it up a bit before uploading) and there’s a dependency on an external called ali.samplor that can be found here.
With help from Josh Clos I have shot a short video documenting what my latest MaxMSP project does.
It’s a sort of swiss army knife of wavetable glitch machine and sample scrubbing tools. Hopefully the video will shed some light on what this project is about. I’ve been trying to describe it in a few other posts without much success, but seeing it in action seems to make a bit more sense.
Here’s a screen grab of a patch I’m working on to successively loop five phrases of sound repetitively. For example, looping another phrase after the fifth time will replace the first and so on. The goal of this patch is to allow me to feed in audio signals from my multi-touch glitch machine into the looper so I can build compositions for a five speaker sound art installation I’m doing at the end of this semester at the University of Minnesota.
For the example I routed outputs 1, 3 and 5 to the left channel and outputs 2 and 4 to the right channel. I also temporarily generated a randomly pitched sinusoid to run into the looper for testing. The large toggle in the upper left initiates the looping and pressing it again stops it. Currently there’s no mechanism to find zero crossings, so the result has lots of clicking in the output. To make good use of the clicks (I’ll be fixing this later) I routed the output into Ableton Live, and loaded on heaping portions of distortion and delay. If life gives you clicks, make click-on-aid.
For the last two weeks I have been working on a performance application that I’m developing in MaxMSP controlled with TouchOSC on the iPhone or iPod Touch. The application is coming along quite well. I have the granular traversal piece working how I want, as I described in Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis.
Now I’m working on another feature of the application designed to allow the user to play samples with a rotary dial; not unlike manually spinning a record on a turntable. The basics of getting this going were pretty simple, but I also wanted to be able to spin the dial and have it continue to rotate based on the acceleration applied. Secondly, I wanted to have a slider that would adjust the amount of friction, from frictionless to instant braking.
This essentially involved physically modeling the control to behave like a turntable or other spinning device. After trying four or five techniques using standard Max objects I managed to get it working, but it wasn’t pretty. Instead I decided to try using a few lines of Javascript to do the calculations and adjust the position of the dial. This worked much better and only required about 35 lines of code. The best way to illustrate this application will be with video. I’ll shoot a few minutes to get the point across and share it here soon. For now here’s a recording made with the modeled controller I described and just a small amount of friction.
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My experimental music project, Ostraka with Graham O’Brien on Drums, is performing on January 27, 2010 at Big V’s in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’ll be on laptop using my custom developed application, the Gestural Music Sequencer (GMS). I’m also using my iPod Touch controlled grain-table glitch generating Max patch for another layer of texture. Chain Fight and Juhyo round out the bill.
I’ve just rendered my full eighty-six minute 
For the last two weeks I have been working on a performance application that I’m developing in 