Five Movements for Five Sampled Sounds in Five Loud Speakers

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

fives

Last Tuesday I performed a sound art installation titled, Fives, at the University of Minnesota. The subtitle of the work is, Five Movements for Five Sampled Sounds in Five Loud Speakers. To produce the sound for the work I used the wavetable glitch machine that I have discussed in a number of recent entries, controlled over a wireless network with an iPod Touch running TouchOSC. The sound objects generated were amplified through five distinct loud speakers arranged on pedestals at about chest height in a pentagonal configuration.

I have more detailed documentation about the project on my portfolio site along with a few photographs taken during the performance, and a 15:37 audio study of the piece in stereo, simulating the five channels necessary to perform the work. Check it out at the link below.

Documentation for FIves on johnkeston.com

Music for People on Shelves

Posted on December 10, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

people_on_shelves I’ve just rendered my full eighty-six minute Ostraka set from last night’s event at the West Bank Social Center. So, while waiting for the delightful documentation that Andrea Streudel is sure to produce, here’s a short segment of audio from the set.

I used Ableton Live to produce in real-time and my wavetable glitch machine Max patch to make most of the noises, which I routed into Live using Soundflower.

The projection work of the evening was top notch. An entire wall of the building across from the WBSC was covered with animated silhouettes of attendees on simulated three dimensional “shelves”.

Here’s the excerpt. I’m also including a link to the entire eighty-six minute set that I uploaded to soundcloud.com for all the brave people who’d like to hear the full set.

Excerpt from Music for People on Shelves

Ableton Live Users Group

Posted on November 30, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

I will be presenting and performing at the Minneapolis Ableton Live Users Group on December 8, 2009, 7:00pm at the Nomad in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In my presentation I’ll be showing what I do with custom built applications and Ableton Live, including the GMS and my new Wavetable Glitch Machine. Currently I interface my custom built applications with Live, using MIDI via the IAC drivers in Mac OS X, and Soundflower for audio. Soon I’ll be converting my audio based Max patches over to Max for Live, so I can use them in Live directly.

Also appearing is Ali Momeni who’ll be showing some of his Max for Live patches, and JP Hungelmann who also organizes the event. Last time the group met it was held at IPR and there was an excellent turn out. The speakers were terrific and they gave away Ableton demo discs and t-shirts at the end of the event. If you use Live, have any interest in it, or electronic music in general, I highly recommend attending.

Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration

Posted on November 6, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

With help from Josh Clos I have shot a short video documenting what my latest MaxMSP project does.

It’s a sort of swiss army knife of wavetable glitch machine and sample scrubbing tools. Hopefully the video will shed some light on what this project is about. I’ve been trying to describe it in a few other posts without much success, but seeing it in action seems to make a bit more sense.

The next step invovles integrating this tool into the Five Output Atemporal Looper i describe in my last entry.

For more information check out some of the related posts including Physically Modeling Multitouch Controls, Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis, and TouchOSC Controlled Glitch Looper in MaxMSP.

Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Five Output Atemporal Looper

Posted on November 4, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

Here’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