Here’s some more of the Talk and Learn Alphabet Center recording. I edited it down to a sequence of numbers. There are some great sample stutters, some deliberate, and some just caused by dirty contacts or sticky buttons.
Sticky Buttons on the Talk and Learn
I spent most of my week long break from teaching continuing development of my Gestural Music Sequencer. I’m not sure if I should call it a sequencer or an arpeggiator. It’s really more like an instrument than either of those. The Gestural Musical Instrument perhaps?
Anyway, it’s far from complete, but I added the ability to toggle sustain on the notes as well a menu to choose from available MIDI device drivers. I decided to use a library for Processing called controlP5 to build the UI controls as shown in the screen grab to the right. All of the controls allow keyboard input, so the application can function while the interface is hidden, only displaying the video.
I’m also planning on adding a function to drop video files into the application to create musical phrases from pre-recorded video pieces. Here’s a section of audio captured from the GMS while attached to the Java Sound Synthesizer Sun Microsystems driver. The default sound for this device is an acoustic piano. You can hear the sustain stop around fifteen seconds in then come back on at the end.
GMS Piano Arpeggio
Here’s a five bar loop of the pedal noise from the last entry. This time with no processing at all except a bit of amp modeling. In the last example I had equalized away most of the low frequencies.
This version is fairly clean so you can hear the pedal knocking sound followed by the dissonance as all of the Rhodes tines vibrate slightly after the pedal is depressed.
Unprocessed and Looped Rhodes Pedal Noise
Here’s an excerpt from a piece of music that I created using the noise that the pedal on my suitcase Rhodes makes if you step on it the right way. The sound is processed using some of my usual techniques. I also programmed a beat of the top and laid down some reversed Rhodes and well as a simple chord progression. This probably won’t get developed much further, but perhaps I’ll use it as a segue piece of some sort.
Rhodes Pedal Noise
This typical, mundane sound has become nostalgic in many respects, but not altogether antiquated. However, this example is less typical, mainly because the sharpener was not mounted on the wall.
Derrin and Doug had to work together; one person holding the sharpener down while the other one turned the crank. This gives the sound a laborious quality that’s interesting to me.
Pencil Sharpening