Subprime by Beeple with Sound Design by Kyle Vande Slunt

Posted on April 29, 2009 by John CS Keston

Minneapolis based sound designer and Nobot band member Kyle Vande Slunt recently alerted me to an excellent animated short titled Subprime – “watch the american housing market spiral out of control”. The animation was produced by Beeple, otherwise known as graphic designer, short film and music video producer Mike Winkelmann.

The music was produced by Nobot and the sound design by Kyle Vande Slunt. Kyle is a talented musician and sound designer working actively in the industry. You can view his demo reel and hear examples of his work at standingwavesound.com. He has also offered to contribute to ACB, so keep a lookout for an article or two from him soon.

Subprime from Beeple on Vimeo.

Grant Muller’s Game of Life Sequencer

Posted on April 24, 2009 by John CS Keston

You might remember me posting an article called Three Phase Oscillator produced using a Ruin & Wesen tutorial on creating a “game of life” sequencer. Well, Grant Muller has run with the idea and created a robust, fully featured, multitimbral sequencing application. I have just started scratching the surface of possibilities that his tool offers. Features include a long list of possible scales, including all the modes, and Turkish to name a few. What I like most is that six versions of the sequencer run in tandem so that you can have separate voices on different MIDI channels and / or devices. For more information, or to download his sequencer visit Grant Muller’s site. Here’s a short example I made with the Game of Life Sequencer Bank Beta.

GOL Recording Part I

Chromatic Currents Part I

Posted on April 19, 2009 by John CS Keston

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

GMS Piece: Dodger of Red Lights

Posted on April 17, 2009 by John CS Keston

Today I decided to see if I could create a version of what I performed at the MAW outing last night, as a streaming video with good quality sound. I opted not to use screen capture software so that all the processing on my Macbook Pro could go into rendering the images and sound. The imagery was created by manipulating a red, LED, bike light near the lens of the camera. The screen was then shot with a second camera while the audio was recorded externally using my PCM-D50.

I built a pentatonic scale using the note probability distribution feature in the GMS. The most likely note was a C followed by D, G, G#, and then B natural. I also used the probability distributions on the durations to get some stumbling rhythms centered around sixteenth notes.

Dodger of Red Lights from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

GMS Probability Distributions

Posted on April 15, 2009 by John CS Keston

The most recent addition I have made to the GMS is probability distributions for note pitches and durations. The way this works is that the user adjusts sliders from zero to one-hundred for each note in the twelve tone (chromatic) scale.

When note probability distributions are enabled, the randomness is weighted so that notes set to zero will never play while at one-hundred the note has the maximum probability of playing. This way the user can setup any sequence of notes in a scale or chord, then toss in a small (or large) possibility for an altered or dissonant note.

The same is true for duration probabilities except that I have the dotted durations as a separate possibility that is applied to the duration determined by the weighted random function. Here’s an example of the note and duration probability distributions in action with the settings as shown in the image.

GMS Probability Distributions