André Michelle at Flashbelt 2010

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 Pulverisateur 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.

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About John CS Keston

John CS Keston is an award winning transdisciplinary artist reimagining how music, video art, and computer science intersect. His work both questions and embraces his backgrounds in music technology, software development, and improvisation leading him toward unconventional compositions that convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, while contributing to his collaborative work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of Digital Media Arts at the University of St Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research. John has spoken, performed, or exhibited original work at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2022), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2022), the International Digital Media Arts Conference (iDMAa 2022), International Sound in Science Technology and the Arts (ISSTA 2017-2019), Northern Spark (2011-2017), the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Institute of Art, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He produced and performed in the piece Instant Cinema: Teleportation Platform X, a featured project at Northern Spark 2013. He composed and performed the music for In Habit: Life in Patterns (2012) and Words to Dead Lips (2011) in collaboration with the dance company Aniccha Arts. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for former Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time performance series. His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015). He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on UnearthedMusic.com.

2 thoughts on “André Michelle at Flashbelt 2010

  1. I wasn’t able to attend Flashbelt this year but it was great seeing/hearing you and André at the after party! Oh yeah, and Audiotool is tha shiznit!

  2. I am really curious about how this will affect social media on the web. Since photos and videos are embedded easily, audio is left behind.
    maybe this will be the solution.

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