Here’s another glitch created with the GMS running at an unreasonably high tempo. This time it sounds a bit like the racket that comes from an acoustic modem as it makes a connection. Remember those things that people used to use to log on to the internets?
Acoustic Modem Glitch
To celebrate the University of Minnesota Northrop Auditorium’s 80th anniversary season a concert was performed on Friday by three-hundred students from the School of Music’s Symphony Orchestra and Combined Choirs. The piece was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Op. 125 “Choral.” The event was sold out and by the time I got tickets all the good seats were taken, so my recording suffered significantly. I was located near the front, but as far as possible to stage left. This left me in front of the ancient speaker system used to amplify the concert. There was also loud ventilation and the crowd ambiance seemed to collect in my corner of the space. Never-the-less the concert was thoroughly enjoyable, but it’s unlikely that I’ll do much listening to my ragged bootleg version. Here’s the orchestra tuning their instruments.
U of M Orchestra Tuning
This eight minute segment of audio generated by the GMS is from the first eight minutes of our most recent MAW (minneapolisartonwheels.org) outing.
This was my first chance to take advantage of the presets feature, but the performance led me to expand the octave setting to include adjustments for the top and bottom octaves. During this performance the octave setting was limited to only allowing the top octave to be lowered. This made it so that instruments with a limited range, like drums, are difficult to play since much of the screen might be inactive.
MAW Outing Segment
The latest feature I have added to the GMS is a way to store ten presets. Each preset holds thirty-four distinct settings including all twelve note probability values, all seven duration probability values, note probabilities on/off, duration probabilities on/off, sustain on/off, free time mode vs bpm, dotted notes on/off, video mirroring on/off, tempo in BPM, note durations, transposition, scale, MIDI out channel, dotted note probabilities, note randomness, and octave range minimum and maximum. The presets can be changed by clicking a radio button, or pressing control plus the preset number. This feature makes it possible to instantly and dramatically change the behavior of the GMS. I also added a primitive save and load feature to mantain the content of the presets. Here’s a segment from a test recording.
GMS Preset Test Audio
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.