You’re not, in fact, a lonely bedroom musician with no friends. You’ve got friends. You’ve got collaborators. You’ve got audio and visual artists who want to play with your laptop with sync piped between you, and yet wireless synchronization for laptop performance has often been an elusive ideal. Here, in spectacular fashion, you can see it all come together over WiFi with Ableton Live, a projection-mapped coffeemaker, and everything from percolation sounds to the keypad sound effect from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This just in from Barcelona – a new Max for Live plug-in is making laptops and coffee pots jam in harmony. A proper review is in order from CDM. (Well, once we find a few friends… by astounding coincidence, I’ll be surrounded by Ableton users – visual and audio – next week in Rome. I’ll make it happen.) But that’s no reason to deny you the pleasure of the video now. It’s the best part of waking up.

More: http://www.ooeevv.com/

Some of you are probably already sitting on top of a Max for Live license for your copy of Ableton Live. It’s there, just waiting to do … something. Maybe you’ve loaded one of the many extraordinary patches out there – good move. But as for building your own patches, you may easily have become overwhelmed by choice. Max is a blank slate, and a blank slate that can do everything can make it hard to start with anything.

It’s easy to overlook simple first steps. Max was originally built just to do simple math on messages, before it even had audio capabilities. So that means simple message processing is a great place to start. The Ableton Cookbook’s Anthony Arroyo introduces Max for Live in just that fashion, by starting you out building an arpeggiator. No fancy granular audio processing, no mind-bending processing of the event engine in Live – just some simple, old-fashioned arithmetic. You’ll learn MIDI in, MIDI out, monitoring what’s going on, basic math, and sliders. You can always go deeper after that.

This is the first of more videos to come, all promising to focus on simple devices; I’m curious to see where they go.

Not quite your speed? Here are two more intro tutorials – and one advanced tutorial – to get you going.

Ready to get a little advanced? It’s an older video, but still relevant to new versions of Live – don’t let the date stop you. Here, a serious Max for Live guru goes deep into spectral mixing. It’s not at all the simple, step-by-step approach I’ve just endorsed, but … hey, you’re still with me, and this is fun. Description:

In this video new addition to the Dubspot team Dave Linnenbank, creator of Puremagnetik’s Max Fuel collection of patches for Ableton and Cycling 74′s Max For Live walks us through his Spectral Mixer patch. It allows you to adjust the volume of the loud, medium and quiet parts of a sound and create some very interesting sounds.

Blog post and downloads: Max for Live Tutorial :: ‘Spectral Mixer’ [Dubspot Blog]

Could a piece of software make you think differently about sound? Could it reflect ideas, the culture of listening?

The developers of the SUFI series of plug-ins seem to think so. In place of screencasts showing which knob to turn which way, they head with a video crew to Morocco. The “instruction” might be about the value of reflection or call to prayer, about living as much as how to use a tool. You can see the first two examples: a meditation on the idea of daily interruptions in the soundscape coming from God, and a collection of electronic drones set to a beautifully-shot backdrop. The interfaces are rendered in graphics and (for the vast majority of us) a foreign language, and instead of reverting to the conventions of plug-in design, they assimilate ideas from another culture about tonality and function.

The plug-ins will be released for Max for Live on the 8th of May, and VST plug-ins later on. (Some version of the Max for Live plug-ins are available now – links at bottom.) The collection includes:

• DEVOTION, lowering your volume five times a day at the time of call to prayer
• A drone machine (in the second video, sounding quite nice)
• Four soft synths tuned to Arabic maqam scales. (They describe these as “North African maqams,” but I believe the tuning should be consistent with the use of maqam elsewhere around the Mediterranean and Arabic world.
• One drum machine amidst the synths, Palmas, with a hand-clapping UI (see screenshot).

You have a week to practice learning to read neo-Tifinaght Amazigh script.

Updated: There are in fact no references in the videos here to Sufism, but the creators respond to questions about why they selected this name on their FAQ. As with the videos above, collaborations and friendship inspired their thinking. They write:

The title is an homage to several Moroccan Sufi musicians we’ve worked with over the years who influenced our thinking about musicianship & sound itself, as well as a way of foregrounding the complex but largely unremarked relationship between faith and technology. We’re fascinated with how software and digital environments encode cultural values and beliefs by conditioning choices and framing possibilities. For example, If Apple is a secular religion, selling contemporary magic, then should that change the way we feel about – and engage with – its operating system? The spirit of Sufi aphorisms, we hope, is manifest in these plug-ins. At a literal level, many of the roll-over infotexts come from Sufi verse.

Apart from being an interesting “cross-cultural” exercise, though, these plug-ins can serve as a reminder of two things. First, design choices are constrained only by your imagination. Aside from any perceived cultural values, you can really make software do, theoretically, anything – and make any sound. Convention can be a useful tool, but it can also become a prison. Second, the creators consider VST compatibility as a way to reach users in the Middle East and Africa. Whether this particular effort is successful or not, those are massive and growing audiences. (To anyone reading there, by the way, hello from way up at this end of the Northern Hemisphere!) Of course, these plug-ins will be just as foreign to nearly all of that audience as it is to, say, producers in Melbourne or London, but as we watch the videos from Morocco, it’s worth considering just how small our Internet-connected planet is – and how wonderfully-vast the spaces between us, and the possibility contained there, remains.

Software can serve for a medium for collaboration, as in this case, which ties together a variety of backgrounds from traditional producer to Amazigh musician. The Amazigh people, tying together modern Arabic culture and language with Phoenician roots (much like my own Lebanese ancestry), represent a rich practice of music. Just as the remote, historical world of J.S. Bach might direct a modern software plug-in, these can, too – and in living fashion.

The work is led by Jace Clayton (DJ Rupture), with programmer Bill Bowen, designer Rosten Woo, Amazigh musician Hassan Wargui , and videographers Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcón Durán. The creators report that “a physical Sufi Plug Ins Forever Box is expected for late 2012, and Clayton is currently preparing an installation version of the Sufi Plug Ins.”

Mark your calendar for next Tuesday, or join the mailing list at the site. More information:

http://www.beyond-digital.org/sufiplugins/

Thanks, Jesse Engel!

As seen on maxforlive.com (thanks, David):

Devotion: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1140/devotion
Drone: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1139/drone
Palmas: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1138/palmas
Hijaz: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1137/hijaz
Bayati: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1136/bayati
Saba: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1134/saba
Khomasi: http://www.maxforlive.com/library/device/1133/khomasi

As Max for Live has matured, this tool for extending the functionality of Ableton Live has played host to a growing wave of brilliant custom tools – enough so that it can be hard to keep track. This month saw a few that deserve special mention. In particular, two tools help make MIDI mapping and automation recording easier in Live, and point the way for what the host itself could implement in a future update. (Live 9, we’re looking at you.) And in a very different vein, from Max for Live regular Protofuse, we see an intriguing alternative approach to sequencing.

Clip Automation does something simple: it patches a limitation in Live itself, by allowing you to record mapped automation controls directly in the Session View clips. (As the developer puts it, it grabs your “knob-twisting craziness in Session View.”) The work of Tête De Son (Jul), it’s an elegant enough solution that I hope the Abletons take note.

Clip Automation

Mapulator goes even further, re-conceiving how mapping in general works in Ableton – that is, how Live processes a change in an input (like a knob) with a change in a parameter (like a filter cutoff). Live does allow you to set minimum and maximum mappings, and reverse direction of those mappings. But the interpolation between the two is linear. Mapulator allows you to ramp in curves or even up and down again.

There’s more: you can also control multiple parameters, each at different rates. And that can be a gateway into custom devices, all implemented in control mappings. BentoSan writes:

For example, if you wanted to create a delay effect that morphs into a phaser, then cuts out and finally morphs into a reverb with an awesome freeze effect, you would be able to do this with just a single knob…

Again, this seems to me not just a clever Max for Live hack, but an illustration of how Ableton itself might work all the time, in that it’s a usable and general solution to a need many users have. Sometimes the itch Max for Live patchers scratch is an itch other people have, too.

Lots of additional detail and the full download on the excellent DJ TechTools:
Mapulator: An Advanced MIDI Mapping Tool for Ableton

Protoclidean We’ve seen Euclidean rhythms many times before, but this takes the notion of these evenly-spaced rhythmic devices to a novel sequencer. Developed by Julien Bayle, aka artist Protofuse, the Max for Live device is also a nice use of JavaScript in Max patching. See it in action in the video above. There are custom display options for added visual feedback, and whereas we’ve seen Euclidean notions in use commonly with percussion, the notion here is melodic gestures. Additional features:

• Eight channels
• Independent pitch, velocity, and offset controls
• Scale mapping
• For percussion, map to General MIDI drum maps (Eep – darn you, English, we’re using the word “map” a lot!)
• Randomization
• MIDI thru, transport sync, more…

More information:
http://designthemedia.com/theprotoclidean

Also, if you’re looking for more goodness to feed your Live rig, Ableton has added a new section to their own site called Library. You can find specific Max for Live content in that area, as well:
http://www.ableton.com/library
http://www.ableton.com/library/tags/mfl/

This is in addition to the community-hosted, community-run, not-officially-Ableton Max for Live library, which is the broadest resource online for Max for Live downloads:
http://maxforlive.com/library/

You know the type. The drummer who, even robbed of drum sticks, is tapping on the walls, the car door, the desk… and maybe you are that person. When rhythms and musical gestures are bouncing around your head, the whole world just feels like something you want to play. It seems as natural as breathing.

So, given your computer can make anything an input, why shouldn’t it let you play like that?

A new controller and software combo seeks to make that possible. The work of one enterprising musician and creator, Stephan Vankov, it includes an affordable accessory with a piezo microphone and companion software to map it your taps to MIDI messages, for use with your favorite software musical instruments. Plug in the mic sensor, and you can tap your desk or slap your laptop or play any other surface.

We’ve seen this idea in various iterations before – most recently, at the party we co-sponsored in Los Angeles last month, we witnessed an entire ensemble using the motion sensors in their laptops. (That tool is available as an open source download, if you fancy hitting your computer.) Until now, though, these piezo controller rigs been a DIY affair. Stephan’s solution includes what appears to be nicely-made hardware — so you can dump it in your carry-on without worry. And the software includes a wide array of settings to map more easily to percussion and melodic instruments. (The software is now available for Mac, but with Windows and Max for Live versions on the way.) I hope to get one to test soon.

Intro pricing begins at US$59.

http://www.pulsecontroller.com

Stephan writes:

I wanted to let you know about a product I’ve been developing – the Pulse Surface Controller. The idea behind Pulse Surface Controller is to liberate computer-based musicians from conventional input devices of predetermined form factor and layout, and allow the user to turn a surface of various size, orientation and material into an expressive, flexible, reconfigurable MIDI controller.

The system includes a wired piezo microphone that can be attached to a surface via the integrated suction cup (or the included velcro strips) and connected to any computer audio input, as well as a standalone software application that converts acoustical impulses from the microphone into velocity-sensitive MIDI data. With the Pulse Surface Controller System, controlling percussive instruments has a more visceral, immediate quality, and via a powerful Melodic Generator that can generate notes in various scales the user can easily extend into the melodic domain to tap into an inspiring world of happy accidents.

I am very excited to share this project with fellow musicians and hope that you find this idea to be worth sharing with the CDM community!

More description:

The idea behind Pulse Controller was born out of the belief that as computer-based musicians and performers we should not feel relegated to a grid of small 1×1″ pads or a keyboard to create our rhythms and provide pulse to our music. Controllers once intended to give us the immediacy of playing an instrument often end up feeling more disconnected and distracting. With the Pulse Surface Controller System, controlling percussive instruments has a more visceral, immediate quality, and via a powerful MIDI generator that generates notes in predefined musical scales the user can easily extend into the melodic domain to tap into an inspiring world of happy accidents. Power to the fingers!

System Features:

+ Piezo microphone and powerful software interface
+ Attaches to any surface via integrated suction cup
(velcro strips also provided)
+ Connects to external audio device or built-in audio inputs
(1/4″ and 1/8″)
+ Velocity-sensitive and highly responsive
+ Low-latency performance
+ Compatible with all software that accepts MIDI Note messages (Cubase, Ableton Live, Pro Tools, VST plug-ins, etc)
+ Generate fixed note or random notes in a selected scale,
with control of octave, octave width, root pitch and 21 Scales
+ Fixed note length and note choke modes
+ Store and recall presets
+ Keyboard shortcuts for quick access to presets and important controls
+ Mac OS 10.5, 10.6, 10.7 compatible (Windows / Ableton Live users, please contact us about M4L version)

Side note: interestingly enough, I got to know Stephan in person at a NAMM afterparty we threw in LA, at which Stephan was playing a Karate Kid AV mashup with friends Shane Hazleton and Momo The Monster. So, nice to see what Stephan has been working on!

Digital: disposable, identical, infinitely reproducible. Recordings: static, unchanging.

Or … are they?

Icarus’ Fake Fish Distribution (FFD), a self-described “album in 1000 variations,” generates a one-of-a-kind download for each purchaser. Generative, parametric software takes the composition, by London-based musicians-slash-software engineers Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, and tailors the output so that each file is distinct.

If you’re the 437th purchaser of the limited-run of 1000, in other words, you get a composition that is different from 436 before you and 438 after you. The process breaks two commonly-understood notions about recordings: one, that digital files can’t be released as a “limited edition” in the way a tangible object can, and two, that recordings are identical copies of a fixed, pre-composed structure.

Happily, the music is evocative and adventurous, a meandering path through a soundworld of warm hums and clockwork-like buzzes and rattles, insistent rhythms and jazz-like flourishes of timbre and melody. It’s in turns moody and whimsical. The structure trickles over the surface like water, perfectly suited to the generative outline. At moments – particularly with the echoes of spoken word drifting through cracks in the texture – it recalls the work of Brian Eno. Eno’s shadow is certainly seen here, conceptually; his Generative Music release (and notions of so-called “ambient music” in general) easily predicted today’s generative experiments. But Eno was ahead of his time technically: software and digital distribution – both of files and apps – now makes what was once impractical almost obvious. (See also: Xenakis, whom the composers talk about below.)

You can listen to some samples, though it’s just a taste of the larger musical environment.

Fake Fish Distribution – version 500 sampler by Icarus…

12 GBP buys you your very own MP3 (320 kbps). Details:
http://www.icarus.nu/FFD/

The creators weigh in on the project for Q Magazine:
Guest column – Electronic band Icarus on whether algorithms can be artists?

The conceptual experiment is all-encompassing. Just to prove the file is “yours,” you can even use it to earn royalties – in theory. As David Abravanel, Ableton community/social manager by day and tipster on this story, writes:

“As a sort-of justification for the price, all Fake Fish Distribution owners are entitled to 50% of the royalties should the music on that specific version ever be licensed. A very unlikely outcome, but at least it’s sticking to concept.

I spoke with Ollie and Sam to share a bit about how the mechanism of this musical machine operates. Using Ableton Live and Max for Live, each rendition is “conducted” from threads and variables into a sibling of the others. The pair talk about what that means compositionally, but also how it fits into a larger landscape of music and thought. Of course, you can also go and just experience your own download (first, or exclusively) to let the music wash over you, an experience I also find successful. But if you want to dive into the deep end as far as the theory, here we go.

CDM: How is the generative software put together? What sorts of parameters are manipulated?

Ollie: The basic plan to do the album came before any decision about how to actually realise it, and we initially thought we’d approach the whole thing from a very low level, such as scripting it all in the Beads Java library that has been a pet project of mine for some time. But although we love the creative power of working at a low level, the thought of making an entire album in this way was pretty unappealing. We looked at some of the scripting APIs that are emerging in what you might call the hacker-friendy generation of audio tools like Ardour, Audacity, and Reaper, but these also seemed like a too-convoluted way to go about it.

Even though Max for Live was in hindsight the obvious choice, it wasn’t so obvious at the time, because we weren’t sure how much top-down control it provided. (As a matter of fact, one of the hardest things turned out to be managing the most top-level part of the process: setting up a process that would continuously render out all 1000 versions of each track.) Although it was quite elementary and unstable (at the time), [Max for Live] did everything we wanted to do: control the transport, control clips, device parameters, mix parameters, the tempo … you could even select and manipulate things like MIDI elements, although we didn’t attempt that. 

So we made our tracks as Live project files, as you might do for a live set (i.e., without arranging the tracks on the timeline), then set up a number of parametric controls to manipulate things in the tracks. Many of these were just effects and synth parameters, which we grouped through mappings so that one parameter might turn up the attack on a synth whilst turning down the compression attack in a compensatory way. So the parameter space was quite carefully controlled, a kind of composed object in its own right.

We also separated single tracks out into component parts so that they could be parametrically blended. For example, a kick drum pattern could be spilt into the 1 and 3 beats on the one hand, and a bunch of finer detail patterning on the other, so that you could glide between a slow steady pattern and a fast more syncopated one. So loads of the actual parameterisation of the music could actually be achieved in Live without doing any programming. Likewise, for many of the parts on the track, we made many clip variations, say about 30, such as different loops of a breakbeat. The progression through those clips — quantised in Live, of course — could also be mapped to parameters.

Finally, by parameterising track volumes and using diverse source material in our clips, we could ultimately parameterise the movement through high-level structures in the tracks. So we could do things like have a track start with completely different beginnings but end up in the same place. We did this in Two Mbiras, which is probably the track where we felt most like we were just naturally composing a single piece of music which just happened to be manifest it a multiplicity of forms. In that sense, this was the most successful track. Some of the other tracks involved more of an iterative approach where we didn’t have a clear plan for how to parameterise the track to begin with, but that fits with our natural approach to making tracks. At one point, we wondered if we could just drop a bank of 1000 different sound effects files into an Ableton track, to load as clips. To our glee, Live just crunched for a couple of seconds and then they were there, ready to be parametrically triggered. So each version of the track MD Skillz could end on a different sound effect.

The Max software consisted of a generic parametric music manager and track-specific patches that farmed out parametric control to the elements that we’d defined in Live. The manager device centred around a master “version dial”, a kind of second dimension (along with time), so you could think of the compositional process as one of composing each track in time-version space.

We used Emanuel Jourdan’s ej.function object, which is a powerful JavaScript alternative to the built-in Max breakpoint function object, and wrote some of our own custom function generators and function interpolation tools to interact with it. Using the ej.function object, we composed many alternative timelines to control the parameters, and then used the version dial to interpolate smoothly between these timelines, resulting in a very gentle transition between versions. I.e., version 245 and 246 are going to be imperceptibly different, but version 124 and 875 will be notably different (we quickly broke from our own rule and started to introduce non-smooth number sequences into some of the tracks, so for example in Colour Field two adjacent versions will actually have quite different structures). We spent some time making it well integrated into Live so that once we really got into the compositional process it would work smoothly and be generally applicable to all of the different ideas we wanted to throw at it. That said, it’s a few steps of refinement from being releasable software. 

Pictured: the master controller device, very minimal, just a version dial and a few debug controls. Double clicking on bp_gui leads to the other figure, a multitrack timeline editor, with generative tools for automatically generating timeline data using different probability distributions.

How did you approach this piece compositionally, both in terms of those elements that do get generated, and the musical conception as a whole?

Sam: Since 2005, we had been working a lot in the context of performance, not only as Icarus, but with improvising musicians through our label / collective Not Applicable. This is reflected in the records we put out both as Icarus and individually during that time, which increasingly used generative and algorithmic compositional techniques as structural catalysts for live improvisations. (As Icarus: Carnivalesque, Sylt and All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible World. Individually: Rubik Compression Vero, Five Loose Plans, Nowhere, Erase, Chaleur and The Resurfacing Of An Atavistic Trait). Our performance software was made using Max/MSP and Beads and we started by crafting various low level tools that would loop and sequence audio files in various different ways, giving us control parameters that were devised around musical seeds we were interested in exploring.

In many respects, our approach was very similar and partly inspired by Xenakis’ writings in Formalised Music, although the context is obviously very different. These low-level tools were augmented by various hand-crafted MSP processing tools which used generated trajectories and audio analysis as a method of automating the various parameters that effected the sounds themselves, the logic being that an FX unit as a manipulator of sound is in some way loosely coupled to the musical scenario it is contextualised in. In both cases above, the idea was to step back from performance ‘knob twiddling’ by using the computer to simulate specific types of behaviour that would control these processes directly (hence the reason why we have never used controllers in performance).

Our search for different methods of coupling our increasing parameter space led us to develop various higher-level control strategies at Goldsmiths and IRCAM respectively, culminating in autonomous performance systems built in the context of the Live Algorithms for Music Group at Goldsmiths College. The autonomous systems we developed used a battery of different techniques to effect control, from CTRNNs and RBNs to analysis-based sound mosaicing, psychoacoustic mapping and pattern recognition. This work resulted in us being commissioned to put together a suite of pieces for autonomous software in collaboration with improvising musicians Tom Arthurs and Lothar Ohlmeier called “Long Division” for the North Sea Jazz Festival in 2010. The challenge of putting together a 45-minute programme of autonomous music really forced us to think more strategically about how it was possible to structure musical elements within a defined software framework and how they could vary not only within each individual piece, but also from piece to piece.

The most obvious inspiration for how we might do this ultimately came from reflecting on what it is we do when we perform live as Icarus. The experience of working up entirely new live material and touring it without formulating it as specific tracks or compositions proved to be an ideal prototype not only for Long Division, but also ultimately for FFD. Here, in a similar sense to the work of John Cage, large-scale structure and form became a contextually-flexible entity, which meant that for us it became to a far greater extent derived from the idiosyncrasies of the performance software we developed and keyed in by our own specific way of listening out for certain musical structures and responding to them in either a complementary or deliberately obstructive fashion (or perhaps even not at all). Creating these two pieces (‘Long Division’ and ‘All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible Worlds’) gave us the conviction that we could devise musical structures that were both detailed enough and robust enough to benefit positively from some level of automated control.

Therefore, when we came to start working on FFD, the main question we had to ask ourselves was; within the music making practices we had already been working with, what were the tolerances for automation within which we were still ultimately in control of and ultimately composing the music we were creating? In the end, the framework we set up was comparatively restrained; the generative aspect of each track was always notated as a performance via a breakpoint function and therefore able to be rationalised by us, the variation between different versions of the same track was done using interpolation and is completely predictable and incremental and finally, the entire space of variation is bounded to 1000 versions, meaning that the trajectories of the variation never extend into some extreme and unrealisable space.

More notes on the album:

Web: http://www.icarus.nu
RSS: feed://www.icarus.nu/wp/feed/

Last.FM: http://www.last.fm/music/Icarus
Discogs: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Icarus+(2)

SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/icaruselectronic
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/birdy_electric

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/icaruselectronic
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Icarus/132324596558

CREDITS

Music, Software, Scripting – Icarus (Ollie Bown and Sam Britton)
Mastering – Will Worsley, Trouble Studios
Artwork – Harrison Graphic Design

Icarus gratefully thank the following for their support of the FFD project

The PRSF Foundation (UK)
STEIM (Netherlands)
Ableton (Germany)
The University of Sydney (Australia)
Emmanuel Jourdan (France)

Continuing our insight into this view into electronic music performance and art through the lens of BodyControlled in Berlin, we’re joined by guest writer Kristin Trethewey. Kristin, a Canadian-born video artist and curator, takes another look at LEAP and BodyControlled, on the eve of its second installment. She gets straight at the question of what “BodyControlled” means, and what it can mean for sonic performance and creation. And I wanted to make sure to subtract myself from this write-up, seeing as I was playing – but see the excellent timelapse of the evening, above. -Ed.

LEAP is one of these spectacular Berlin venues you’ve been hearing so much about. It’s a huge, raw space with a view of Berlin’s landmark TV tower, hosting interesting art events with cheap drinks and the potential for a late-night party. But it’s unique, too, in its focus on electronic arts. And unlike other media arts centers, it’s not filled with computers and half-finished electronic projects. I’ve truly gotten lost trying to find this place (it’s tucked away in a mall), so I would recommend watching the timelapse video LEAP shot that guides you to the entrance before attempting to go there. Tonight is the second edition of BodyControlled, a new bimonthly performance series at the space. This installment, called “matter incompatible,” is held in conjunction with the Transmediale Festival under the satellite program, Vorspiel.

BodyControlled is a series focused on the intersection of performance and electronics. You can expect future programming to focus around ideas of “feedback” and “bio” related electronic performances. In its first installment back in November, a packed LEAP gallery witnessed performances by Robert Henke, Peter Kirn [editor of this site], Stephen Cornford, and Paul Whitty. The event was called “Other Spaces” and took the physical architecture of the gallery as a point of departure. Having the space filled with people made for a secondary concern of space: its use. In a series whose title mentions the body, I witnessed one performance engaging the bodies that were filling the space. Robert Henke’s twelve-hour set activated interactions between the audience, performer, and environment. He moved around, listened and mingled with the audience, even though he had this amazing, souped-up control station complete with ambient lighting.

Other artists put more emphasis on the manipulation and dislocation of space through the use and abuse of electronics. Kirn worked with a custom rig with tablet-controlled original software built in open-source software Pure Data (Pd), controlled by a tablet running Konkreet Performer. Excerpt:

Excerpt – LEAP Gallery Berlin, 26.11 by peterkirn

Whitty and Cornford actively deconstructed electronics in front of the audience:
it pays my way and it corrodes my soul (2011)

Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty’s performance “it pays my way and it corrodes my soul” seeks out musical material by physically dismembering playback equipment. A reel-to-reel tape recorder is switched on and its mechanism amplified with a variety of microphones while it is taken to pieces. The sounds produced are then fed through an array of pedals: the machine’s belts, gears, switches and casing becoming an instrument subjected to a live audio autopsy

Excerpt:
Excerpt: Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty, LEAP Berlin, 26 November by cdm

Cornford was also interviewed by LEAP for his installation work, featuring repurposed tape machines:

As João Pais, co-curator of the event with LEAP’s Daniel Franke, puts it:

“BodyControlled means the main direction of the series, to present performance and installation works that have a strong, corporal identity. This can be manifested in many ways, not only implying a “moving performer”. The purpose is to avoid the extreme of abstract performances made by a laptop-er, sitting down as if writing emails. In the first event, this idea was shown by interpreting/filling the space of LEAP through a sound-performance (Kirn, Henke), or an installation (Cornford, Mathy, Oliver).”

See also my write-up for ARTSCARDS from last month:
Other Spaces Generates New Spaces Through Sound at LEAP

The second event, “matter incompatible,” draws reference to the Transmediale theme: In/compatible, acknowledging the less clear, even dark forces at play in the artistic and political climate today. Matter Controlled questions the idea of the object or anti-object within sonification. See CDM’s write-up from yesterday:

Watch Artists Talk About Making Sound From Matter; Thursday Event and Stream in Transmediale Prelude

From the Transmediale podcast, some explanations of the theme of the larger festival:

Jacob Lillemose on the exhibition Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times by transmediale

Kristoffer Gansing elaborates on the festival theme in/compatible, as well as the in/compatible symposium: systems | publics | aesthetics.
Tatiana Bazzichelli is the curator for out new project reSource of transmedial culture and speaks about its concept.
Jacob Lillemose speaks about exhibition Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times which he is curating for transmediale 2012 in/compatible.
Sandra Naumann is the curator for this year’s performance programme The Ghosts in the Maschine, which she explains a bit more in detail.
And Marcel Schwierin tells us about his concept for the video programme he is curating for transmediale 2012 in/compatible.

Performances by Echo Ho, Mario De Vega, Alex Nowitz and Ignaz Schick will investigate this blurry region between the immaterial and material. I am curious to see what objects they will bring to play with. As they potentially seek liberation from the physical objects, by reimagining their sonification, I wonder how they are also reliant and maybe even drawn towards their objectification. Bringing these disparate emotions into play is at the heart of tonights investigation. In today’s climate fractures exist between so many aspects of our lives. These performances seek to bring some of them together, compatible or incompatible as we might discover.

You can watch the proceedings via live Internet stream, for the majority of you not in Berlin for the live show.

www.leapknecht.de

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About the Author

Kristin Trethewey is a Canadian video artist, cinema performer, and curator. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College in Performance and Interactive Media. A multi-disciplinary curator and artist for the past ten years, she has recently completed a residency at the Node Center for Curatorial Arts, was co-Director/co-Curator of the INDEX Festival. She currently lives in Berlin.

Look around the room you’re in. Drum your fingers against some of the objects around you. Now imagine that you could turn those touches into any imaginable sound – and all you’d need to play them is a single contact mic. And we’re not talking just simplistic sounds – think expressive, responsive transformation of the world around you, all with just that one mic, thanks to clever gestural recognition.

Bruno Zamborlin has made that idea a reality, with hold-onto-your-chair results. It’s not available yet for public consumption, but it’s coming.

Bruno explains to CDM:

Mogees is a novel way for transforming any surface into a musical instrument.

By putting a (very cheap) contact microphone over a surface, the software can recognise different types of touch and associate them with different synthesisers.

Users can train the software with their own ‘gestures’, using both bare hands and objects. In the video demo we put the microphone over different surfaces such as kitchen tables and balloons.

The sound synthesis is based on two different techniques:

1 – physical modeling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws. Different materials can be simulated, such as membranes, strings, tubes and plates

2 – mosaicing, that works as follow: first, users load a sound folder; then, the noise coming from the microphone is analysed and the software continuously finds and plays its closest segment within the sound folder.

Mogees has not been realised yet. It could be published as Max4Live patch in some month.

Yes, we’ll be watching for future versions and publication, with bated breath and eager hands.

http://www.brunozamborlin.com/mogees

Update: Readers point to similar earlier work; obviously, contact mics have long been readily available. I’m not always concerned with whether something is new or not – old and cool can be cool. But what does appear to be new here is the additional gestural analysis to work more accurately with location. That takes an existing technique and refines its musicality. -PK

For fans of slicing, dicing, glitching, reversing, and shuffling incoming audio streams, this Max for Live Device is for you. Shuffler 2.0 is the latest in a series of “modular” Max for Live devices from developer Isotonik Studios. Mappable to MIDI, the suite of Devices focuses on simpler tasks in ways that can be combined. There are interactive Follow Actions, for instance — a feature I’ve long argued should be native to Ableton Live — plus tools for more easily mapping MIDI to envelopes. There’s a convenient Looper.

From last week, there’s a module called Smart, capable of mapping some eight macros to one knob.

The entire series is sold as a subscription for 17 quid:
http://isotonikstudios.com/modular/

Check out the Follow actions in the video below.

Sound and light artist, guitarist, Max patcher, and all-around sonically-fascinating guy Christopher Willits has opened up his “Tiger Flower Circle Sun” record on Ghostly to remixing. Halfway through the project, we talk to Chris about what’s going on – and what the results so far sound like. And we share, from earlier this fall, a composition in which you can recharge.

The project begins not with stems, but with samples, the raw materials on which the album was based. Christopher walks CDM through the audio highlights, one sample at a time. Along the way – as with all these samples – you begin to appreciate the process by which Christopher makes his decisions, how he moves from samples like pieces of wood to the finished structure. And of course, by opening these up to remixing, you have an opportunity to hear the work differently in his finished, released form, as well as to find your own, distinct decision-making process. It’s perhaps obvious in a remix project, but what this does is to allow the sounds a life separate from the fixed set of decisions that produced the album.

And that can even change Christopher’s own view of the work, he says. He tells us:

I think it’s fun to play the set like an album. I’ve heard these pieces so many times that it’s really refreshing to me to hear them alone. Now I hear the pieces differently.

That was actually one of the thoughts behind sharing all of these sounds, so people can hear the layers, and if they wish, tune their ears to the subtleties and intention I wanted to create in the mixes.

You can find the remix project at:
http://willits-sample-library-vol1.herokuapp.com/

“The stuff i’ve heard so far is AMAZING,” Christopher tells us. “I can’t wait to feature the best of the best. We’ll be releasing a free comp on [Christopher's experimetal label] Overlap and Ghostly will feature my favorite remix on a free comp, too.” Winning remixes get Ableton and SoundCloud prizes.

Let’s hear a few words from Christopher about the sounds he’s produced.

A Tour of the Sounds

A lot of the samples are about variation of common materials, so there’s plenty to explore. Christopher tells us that just one sample – like this guitar solo – can take on very different meanings with different processing, heard in two variations.

Guitar process solo1-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar process solo2-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

This tone is created from a custom-made Big Muff > BOSS distortion > Fender Twin with a couple power tubes removed for low volume and max distortion. This is a trick that ted from Flipper showed me around that time, and it created the exact orange laser beam i was hearing in my imagination.

Guitar solo long noise-Sun Body-Willits-120 by Willits

Guitar solo-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The whole piece “Plant Body” came from this guitar improvisation. With releases like “Folding and the Tea” and “Seven Machines for Summer,”

I set the process to be only the guitar recordings. With this release, I gave myself a new set of constraints and permissions, allowing my imagination to add whatever comes up for me. No judgement on which one is better to me, they are just different. There are infinite possibilities within any process I determine, yet discerning the process that resonates with my true intention is what creates the shapes and forms and colors that feel like love.

Guitar process4 fold-Plant Body-Willits-120 by Willits

The drum samples come from:

…my great friend Jeff Pierre – one of the best drummer I’ve ever worked with, and the youngest, as well. All of Jeff’s takes were one take; this sample is shortened from the original length, but you get the idea.

Drum2-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

Drums distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Jeff Pierre-Willits-120 by Willits

I just love the lightness and feel of this sound — like the funkiest insects in the jungle, getting down.

Perc1-The Hands Connect To The Heart-Willits-120 by Willits

Someone please make a disco track out of this.

Synth arp-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

Me and my friend Reiko were messing with patterns; then we would find a loop. We were laughing so hard as we were playing this stuff.

Perc-Intend-Evolve-Willits-120 by Willits

Check your volume for this one — probably should have exported it at a lower volume for this set! The heat of this, the crushed distortion, is from a technique called input flipping on the SSL. This is an input flip with the preamps cranked, with odd harmonics.

Ryan (Ryan Kleeman) and I just about lost it when we first input flipped like this for a distorted sound. It became a theme in a sense that resonated with this orange laser beam electromagnetic sound that much of the work stems from.

Synth arp noise-The Heart Connects To The Head-Willits-120 by Willits

You can also hear it here- and a few other places on the record, to a less extreme degree. There is something about this texture that has a cleaning function to me. Washes things off, away, cleans the ears out. Resets your space.

Branches Into Flowers-Willits by Willits

“Could hear many more strings and horns in this piece.”

Guitar2-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this floating feeling.”
Guitar lasers-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“This pattern makes me want to get down.”
Perc distorted1-You Are Always Surrounded By Stars-Willits-120 by Willits

“Love this kind of generative sound.”
Subconscious Transmission-Willits-120 by Willits

Two samples that were not used in “Light into Branches.” Made the baritone thing in one mode of listening, came back and asked myself, why did I put a baritone guitar solo in the middle of this song? Did I really think that’s what it needed, or did I just want to play my baritone along with this song for fun? The answer was the latter. But here it is anyway.

The ambient layers sample was to create more depth of field in the mix, have it floating behind at a low volume, but it was not doing was I wanted it to, so I cut it out.

Baritone solo unused-Light Into Branches-baritone-Willits-75ish by Willits

Guitar layers unused-Light Into Branches Willits-75ish by Willits

Videos

From the original record release:

More information:
http://ghostly.com/releases/tiger-flower-circle-sun

Soak in a Sound Bath

Another release from this year revealing Willits’ musical approach, “GOLD” is an ambient piece in you can inhabit, in which you can restore yourself, according to its maker:

GOLD is a 24 minute and 17 second sound bath / ambient piece to soak into. Listen, relax and recharge. This harmonic weaving of sound was created with the vibration of affinity, love.

Made with voice, processed guitar, and a low-frequency oscillation out of a Nord Lead synth, Christopher actually encourages people to share how they “used’ the piece and how they made it felt, a kind of design experiment for spiritual being in sound. Have a listen or pay-what-you-will on Bandcamp:

Read up on what he has to say about this release:
New Release – GOLD [Sound + Light - Chris' blog]

Infinite

It seems only appropriate to close with this reflection from Christopher:

After working on this project, I’m realizing so tangibly what I’ve always known — that any mix is a sonic photograph of vibrational affinity, and even with a grounded intention behind any mix, and a very clear outline for a process in which you allow that intention to emerge, there are infinite possibilities of expression. Infinite. It is so beautiful.