MAW Kids on Bikes

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

Thursday was my first outing with Minneapolis Art on Wheels (MAW) and my first opportunity to project my work on the GMS in a public space. The sheer scope of the event was impressive. My friend Kevin could hardly believe all of the equipment that was transported by bicycles to the location. There was some really good work on display, some bizarre random events, and exhaustive video documentation that I expect we’ll see on MAW soon.

After the outing, on the ride back to base, everyone was giddy from the nice weather. We get a bit cooped up during the long Minnesota Winters. In not one of my finest cases of judgment I decided to dig out my PCM-D50 from its protective case and record the proceedings while riding my bike. I don’t necessarily recommend this sort of behavior, but I held on tight and threw caution to the wind. Here’s a segment of audio from the bike ride back.

MAW Kids on Bikes

GMS Probability Distributions

Posted on April 15, 2009 by John C.S. 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

Leafcutter John Remix Competition

Posted on April 14, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

ACB contributor, recording artist, educator, one-man-software-house, installation artist, and luthier, Leafcutter John is having a remix competition. Click the image for more details on how to enter the competition. I’d love to be involved, but am too busy with my GMS and other projects at the moment. Hopefully some ACB readers will take this on so I can live vicariously through them. There’s lots of really good remixes already, so get cracking!

Mendota Springs Sparkling Water Can Being Opened

Posted on April 14, 2009 by grahamob

Hi, my name is Graham O’Brien and I’m a drummer, audio engineer, and composer living in St. Paul, MN. I play in some really fun bands around town (including Keston & Westdal!) and specialize in drumming and writing for sequenced music. And having gotten a recording degree, I do some work recording and mixing radio commercials at Marketing Architects ad agency in Mineeapolis. I also am building a drum recording studio in my basement that’s coming along really well and I’ll be posting plenty of really cool stuff from there. Now, for my first post to Audio Cookbook.

This is a short but pristine recording of me opening a can of Mendota Springs Sparkling Water (Lemon flavor). I recorded it at the radio production studio I work at, and the recording chain is amazing. First we tuned and sound-proofed the recording booth down to -32dB of isolation. Here’s the recording chain:

Neumann U87a (cardiod pattern, hi pass off)> Great River Electronics MP-2NV Mercenary Edition Class A Mic Pre > Langevin Electro/Optical Compressor/limiter > Pro Tools HD via 192 i/o interface

This recording was done at 44.1Khz, 16bit. The only processing I used is the Massey L2007 Limiter to make it louder: mendota-springs-can-loud