Chromatic Textures Shown at 6X6 #5: Mystery

Posted on July 8, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

On Wednesday, July 7, 2010 my piece Chromatic Textures was shown at 6X6 #5: Mystery, an exhibition at Ciné Lab in Athens, Georgia. My work was accepted along with five other artists, “…including Denton Crawford’s eyeballs, Aaron Oldenburg’s plunge into asphyxia, and a performance streamed live over the Internet from California.” Here’s my abstract for Chromatic Textures.

Chromatic Textures is a study on the synesthetic nature of our senses of sound and sight. Video input is used to produce generative musical phrases. The visual media is analyzed by the GMS (Gestural Music Sequencer) to create the musical forms in real-time. The software includes adjustable probability distribution maps for the scale and rhythm. Adjusting these settings allows familiar structures to emerge. The settings chosen for this piece cause notes within a particular scale to play more frequently, however, it is still possible for any note within the twelve-tone chromatic system to occur. As a result, dissonant or blue notes can be heard at rare instances throughout the piece.
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Monophonic Step Sequencer Max for Live Device

Posted on June 23, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

I have converted a Max patch I build into a Max for Live device as an exercise for learning M4L. The original patch is a monophonic step sequencer that I wrote about in Step Sequencer Built in MaxMSP. I ran into some difficulties converting the patch along the way. Although it worked perfectly in Live, for some reason it was causing Live to crash after saving. It was also not storing the values in the Live number boxes, drop-downs, and sliders. The problem went away when I went through the tedious process of recreating the patch rather than copying and pasting my original work. This is a little worrisome since the next conversion will not be so simple (Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration). Here’s an audio example with a little reverb to give you an idea of what it does.

M4L StepSequencer

André Michelle at Flashbelt 2010

Posted on June 17, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

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.

Sound Builders: Inventor of Circuit Bending Reed Ghazala

Posted on June 3, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

I’m really enjoying the Sound Builder series on Motherboard.tv, but this episode is brilliant. Now if I could just get the real-time version of that sped up footage! For more about Reed Ghazala checkout his bio and sounds from his instruments on anti-theory.com.

The Visible Pocket Oscillator

Posted on May 27, 2010 by John C.S. Keston

I really love this instrument. It’s simple to build and operate, yet the variety of sounds possible is broader than you would expect. This is the third Posc I’ve built. The first one I assembled into a small cardboard box. Let’s call it the Cardboard Posc. I disassembled the Cardboard Posc to build a prototype sound object for a dance piece.

For my third version I decided to build it into a transparent plastic case, formerly packaging for my iPod Touch. Let’s call it the Visible Posc. Right now it’s held together with a rubber band, but I’ll probably replace it with a screw or something to open it up for battery replacement. For more checkout these posts:

Saucer Sled Synth
POSC Pocket Oscillator