Music for People on Shelves

Posted on December 10, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

people_on_shelves 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.

I used Ableton Live to produce in real-time and my wavetable glitch machine Max patch to make most of the noises, which I routed into Live using Soundflower.

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.

Excerpt from Music for People on Shelves

Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis

Posted on October 12, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

messy_patch I have begun to refine the patch I described in the last entry, creating an instrument that allows you to traverse through samples using an x-y controller and a slider. The x axis controls the forward or backward playback frequency of the grain. The y axis controls the width of the grain; either very narrow (minimum of 10ms), to an adjustable percentage of the sample at the widest (15% by default). The slider controls the position of the grain in the sample. Buttons across the top allow you to choose one of five preset samples. Alternatives can be loaded in the patch or set as defaults.

So far the TouchOSC controller is working quite well for the project. It was a bit tricky getting the interface to reflect changes in the patch, since radio button behavior is not supported in TouchOSC. Fortunately it supports an input port, so I managed to get all the buttons toggled properly by sending data back to the iPod Touch. I have connected the accelerometer to a filter so that when turned on with a toggle, tilting it on the y axis causes a lowpass filter to effect the output. Finally, by setting a threshold on the z axis, giving the iPod Touch a brisk shake will cause the patch to loop a randomly selected grain of random length from a randomly selected buffer played back at a randomly selected rate. The variety of sounds possible with five short samples is huge. Here’s a selection of sound produced with one sample selected. The sound source is from a vintage video game. I’m curious to see if anyone can recognize it. Please post your guess in a comment.

Etude in 8 Bits for Multitouch Graintable Synthesis

Excerpt from Solo Set at MAW Party

Posted on September 11, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

beat_box_insides Recently I was invited to perform during a rare indoors Minneapolis Art on Wheels event at the West Bank Social Club, a new media artist space above the Nomad in Minneapolis. The space contained a newer (1970s) Hammond organ, sans tone wheels and drawbars, with an after market analog beat box including buttons for “Rock 1”, “Rock 2”, “Rumba”, and more. The idea was to do a bit of improvising on the organ while various projections went on inside and outside the space.

I brought my laptop with Ableton and started by sampling all the patterns on the analog beat box. I also brought along my iPod Touch running Bebot to make some live loops to go along with the beats. Here’s an excerpt from the set. The only sound sources used were Bebot and and the Hammond analog beat box.

MAW Party Ostraka Set Excerpt

Time Correction Mangled Audio With Reverb and Delay

Posted on July 16, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

half It’s been a while since I have gone crazy applying layers and layers of mad processing to a chunk of sound just to hear what happens, but tonight I was demonstrating signal processing to my audio production class, which gave me an excuse to let loose and over process something into oblivion. I started with a one bar loop that I ripped to a .wav using iTunes, then applied reverse and pitch shifting with and without time correction. I topped it off with reverb and delay to meet the requirements of the exercise.

Mangled Time Corrected Audio

YAPCRTP

Posted on July 13, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

forgotten_complex Although it looks as though I just mashed the keyboard with the capslock on, the title of this entry is an acronym for “Yet Another Pre[C]ambrian Resonance Track Preview”. In just twelve days Precambrian Resonance will be released and I will have posted 365 daily sounds on AudioCookbook.org. This piece, titled Forgetten Complex, is a bit of a departure from the earlier examples posted for preview. It was originally exhibited on ACB, and rather than a percussion driven piece Forgotten Complex relies on ambient Rhodes and other processed sound effects to create the lonely atmosphere of an abandoned warehouse.