Five Output Atemporal Looper

5_out_looperHere’s a screen grab of a patch I’m working on to successively loop five phrases of sound repetitively. For example, looping another phrase after the fifth time will replace the first and so on. The goal of this patch is to allow me to feed in audio signals from my multi-touch glitch machine into the looper so I can build compositions for a five speaker sound art installation I’m doing at the end of this semester at the University of Minnesota.

For the example I routed outputs 1, 3 and 5 to the left channel and outputs 2 and 4 to the right channel. I also temporarily generated a randomly pitched sinusoid to run into the looper for testing. The large toggle in the upper left initiates the looping and pressing it again stops it. Currently there’s no mechanism to find zero crossings, so the result has lots of clicking in the output. To make good use of the clicks (I’ll be fixing this later) I routed the output into Ableton Live, and loaded on heaping portions of distortion and delay. If life gives you clicks, make click-on-aid.

Clicky Five Ouput Atemporal Looper Example

A Glorious Dawn


This has clearly been making the rounds, so it’s likely that you’ve already had the pleasure, but I can’t resist linking it to it here.

The piece features video and auto-tuned dialog of Carl Sagan from his amazing series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, mashed-up into a melancholy, downtempo, new-age, retro music video with just enough (or perhaps not enough) tongue in cheek. Finally, auto-tune use to be proud of!

The piece was produced by John Boswell. More about him and his music is available on his site. He has also made a download of the track and the video available here.

 

 

 

500 Million Years From Now

dotsIt was recently estimated by Edward Guinan at the XXVIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union that our lonely planet is nearing the end of its habitability for life as we know. Albeit, on a cosmological timescale. Between .5 and 1 billion years from now, increases in the Sun’s temperature will cause the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere to evaporate.

Shortly after reading this article I opened up my Ableton Live set from Sunday night to listen to some of the loops I had captured with the GMS during the show. After opening the document I pressed play and heard a stark landscape of reverberation. I saw visions of a lifeless, peace 500 million years from now.

What had happened was that when saving the document I had left all my master effects in their last position. I decided to capture these sounds and vary them over time. The effect chain on the master track included a low pass filter, bit reduction, delay, and reverb with nine parameters mapped to knobs on a controller. Here’s what I ended up with on the second take.

500 Million Years From Now

Time Correction Mangled Audio With Reverb and Delay

halfIt’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

External Sync Feature Added to the GMS

With some expert help from Grant Muller I have successfully added the capability of synchronization with an external MIDI signal to the GMS. This feature opens up vast possibilities for performance and collaboration with the tool. To test the feature I sent external sync from Ableton Live to the GMS, which in turn routed note information back through the IAC drivers into Ableton to drive a VST FM synth. I started by live looping a few phrases from the sequencer including a bass line, mid-range arpeggio, and some heavily delayed FM clav, then put it together with a recycled beat into a two minute micro-track. Everything heard, except the drums, are notes output from the GMS via video stimulus.

GMS External Sync Test