Jred Smyth Triggered Drum Performance

Posted on September 28, 2010 by John CS Keston

Graham O’Brien and I really enjoyed our Ostracon performance at the In / Out Festival recently. Part of what made this festival for us was all of the other incredible performers and speakers at the event, such as Rosa Menkman and Peter Kirn. One prominent example was Jred Smyth who gave an energetic and inspired solo drumming concert featuring triggered sounds that transformed the work into evolving structured compositions. Checkout the video clip above of Jred Smyth with Blair Neal on visuals.

Cappuccino Synth Video Via CDM

Posted on August 26, 2010 by John CS Keston

Cappuccino Synth from Gijs on Vimeo.

I first saw this on Create Digital Music a few days ago, and although I think most ACB readers keep well abreast of what’s up on CDM, I’ve watched this several times now and think it deserves a re-post here. For more about this video visit the original post.

Experimental guitarists have been doing similar things like holding power tools or more recently, mobile phones, up to their pickups to generate interesting sounds. Here’s a video I shot of Siamese Bug a duet of Tim Glenn on drums with contact mics, and Jeremy Ylvisaker on prepared guitar.

Siamese Bug Video

Ever Wonder What it Would be Like to Draw Sound?

Posted on July 14, 2010 by John CS Keston

I’m working on a MaxMSP performance patch that uses a Wacom tablet to draw light onto dancers holding light sensitive instruments. Last night we decided to apply sound to the strokes to give the illustrator another way to interact in the piece. Currently the pressure from the pen is translated into the volume and the velocity is translated into pitch. It will need some fine tuning, but I think you can get the idea from the video.

Chromatic Textures Shown at 6X6 #5: Mystery

Posted on July 8, 2010 by John CS 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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Sound Builders: Inventor of Circuit Bending Reed Ghazala

Posted on June 3, 2010 by John CS 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.