Chromatic Currents Part II

Posted on April 20, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

This second part to “Chromatic Currents” was produced with the GMS by using a string of lights placed into a large glass vase. I moved the camera around the vase to direct the flow of musical phrases with one hand while I adjusted transposition and note duration settings in the sequencer with my right.

You might notice that the video stimulus does not resemble lights in a vase. This is because I applied a negative filter to the video after capturing the performance. Once again I used a pleasant pentatonic scale interspersed with rare dissonant notes and probability distributions in the note durations to give it an eerie awkwardness.

GMS: Chromatic Currents Part II from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Chromatic Currents Part I

Posted on April 19, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Here’s a segment of sound from another GMS video I produced yesterday called Chromatic Currents. Once again I was letting the visuals drive the piece, while I controlled parameters in the GMS. On Sound Globules I used the circle of fourths with probability distributions so that C was the most frequent note followed by F, Bb, Eb and so on. I really liked the rare dissonant pitch making its way into the sequence, so I tried a similar technique for Chromatic Currents. The scale was strongly C minor pentatonic, weighted with the Dorian mode by adding less-likely probabilities for D and A. However, every note that was not part of the scale still had a small possibility of occurring. This led to occasional blue or dissonant pitches in the stream of notes. The possibility of having any note within a chromatic scale occur in the stream led me to the title.

Chromatic Currents

GMS Videos and Interface

Posted on April 18, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Today I made two more videos with the GMS using a different technique than in Dodger of Red Lights. This time I wanted to explore what could be produced using visual input that I wasn’t directly controlling. The obvious, albeit cheesy, lava lamp came to mind, so I turned it on and went to work.

I connected a separate video camera via firewire, leaving a screen with all my interface controls available for me to tweak while recording. I recorded the video to MiniDV on the external camera, and as before recorded the output onto my PCM-D50 to free up the CPU for Reason and the GMS. Since I was recording the video on the external camera I had to the flip the video so that the image corresponded properly with the sound. This led me add a feature for toggling the mirroring in the GMS.

Click the image to see a full sized screen shot of the interface. All three videos are available on the Unearthed Music Vimeo account. Here’s an excerpt of audio from the piece titled Sound Globules.

GMS: Sound Globules

GMS Piece: Dodger of Red Lights

Posted on April 17, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Today I decided to see if I could create a version of what I performed at the MAW outing last night, as a streaming video with good quality sound. I opted not to use screen capture software so that all the processing on my Macbook Pro could go into rendering the images and sound. The imagery was created by manipulating a red, LED, bike light near the lens of the camera. The screen was then shot with a second camera while the audio was recorded externally using my PCM-D50.

I built a pentatonic scale using the note probability distribution feature in the GMS. The most likely note was a C followed by D, G, G#, and then B natural. I also used the probability distributions on the durations to get some stumbling rhythms centered around sixteenth notes.

Dodger of Red Lights from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Kutiman Remixes YouTube on Thur-You.com

Posted on March 7, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Early last week a student showed me Thru-You.com, a collection of YouTube video mashups by Israeli, neo-funk artist Kutiman. I was thoroughly impressed with his work, but soon afterward the site went down due to bandwidth limits. Since then it’s been up and down several times. Hopefully they’ll have their bandwidth problems sorted out soon, so If you can’t view these videos straight away, bookmark the site and check back because they’re worth the wait. Update: The videos have been moved to YouTube, so there should be no more bandwidth issues.