Category Archives: Music

Art Code Music

Standing Waves

“Standing Waves” is an interactive multimedia installation based off of a 3D implementation of the universal wave equation. Motion-tracking controllers allow the audience to physically “drag” waves through the virtual pool. A system of oscillators hidden beneath these waves is used to sonify the amount of energy at each region of the system. Because each oscillator is tuned to a different frequency, participants can hear energy propagate throughout the system as they interact with it.

The piece was created with Processing using the glGraphics, PeasyCam, and minim libraries.

Art Code Music Voice of Sisyphus

Voice of Sisyphus Presented at ICAD

On June 19th I gave a talk with my colleague Ryan McGee at the 2012 International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD), hosted by Georgia Tech. Our presentation was about image sonification (turning pixels into sound) and a piece we created using this technique called “Voice of Sisyphus.”  Here’s a link to the white paper: Voice of Sisyphus: an Image Sonifcation Multimedia Installation

Voice of Sisyphus is a multimedia installation created in conjunction with Ryan McGee under the artistic direction of George Legrady. It opens at Nature Morte Gallery, Berlin on September 7th, 2012 and was displayed at the Edward Cella Gallery, Los Angeles November 2011 – February 2012.

Art Music

Oscilloscope Interface Studies

Over the past year I’ve been experimenting every so often with an audio-visual performance interface based off of Lissajous Displays and the 3D Oscilloscope series by Dan Iglesia. My version uses a glove-based motion capture interface that we have here at UCSB in the Allosphere, our 3-story mutlimedia environment. Here’s what they look like:

And here are are a few screenshots of the performances. Basically the performer puts on these gloves, which control the frequencies of multiple oscillators. These are then visualized as an oscilloscope display and the resulting pixels are translated into sound. A skilled performer can access many interesting shapes like the ones below tuning the oscillators in harmonic ratios.

Code Music

Algorhythmic Dubstep Competition


The British algorithmic dubstep artist Kiti le Step recently released the source code for their latest track and the Super Collider Symposium is sponsoring a competition to see who can create the best remix- either through traditional means or by hacking the code to create a new self-generative composition. The winner will get a Novation Launchpad ( !! ) and as an added twist the competition will be completely judged by computers. I decided to take a stab at modifying the code and using it as an excuse to learn Super Collider. Here’s the result that I entered into the competition. Hopefully the A.I. judges find my beat sufficiently dirty.

[audio:http://amusesmile.com/old/sound/algostepMaster.mp3|titles=Golliwog’s Cakestep]
Music

Granular Synthesis

Curtis Roads is the master of granular synthesis (aka composing with small particles of sound) and I’ve been fortunate enough to study with him for the past few months. The resulting piece won the informal “People’s Choice Award.” It’s a study on sound transformation and gestural composition.

All of the sounds are manipulations of samples taken from the previous post, Player Piano Study. I put these samples into a granular synthesis instrument that’s controlled through a motion capture controller I’m working for my thesis. Depending on what parameters I specify, it creates really strange, mechanical sounds such as the ones you hear toward the beginning of the piece, or more mellow chirps such as the ones about two-thirds of the way through. It’s meant to be played in 4-channels (speakers).

[audio:http://amusesmile.com/old/sound/roadsMaster.mp3|titles=Pantograph]
Music

Player Piano Study

This piece is the result of experimenting with a Kawaii Digital Player Piano over the past few weeks. I used Renoise to create seven melodic sequences ahead of time and then performed the piece by activating different combinations of these sequences live. While recording I also improvised with the piano’s sustain pedal in order to build and fade intensity.

[audio:http://amusesmile.com/old/sound/Geiringer.mp3|titles=Geiringer Hall]
Code Music

Old Song, Old Language

Here’s a piece I dug up from last year when I was working quite a bit with RTcmix (Brad Garton’s awesome albeit antiquated musical scripting language). I like the piece’s meditative quality and how varied it sounds for being written with only a few lines of code. It doesn’t follow canonic form at all, but when I hear it I can’t help getting this impression.

[audio:http://amusesmile.com/old/sound/Canon_Mastered.mp3|titles=Canon]
maxamp = 1000
amp = maketable("line", 1000, 0, 0, 50, 1, 51, 1, 100, 0)

wavetable = maketable("wave", 1000, 1, 0.3, 0.2)
pan = 0.5

start = 0.0
start2 = 0.0
freq = 2000.0
freq2 = 0.0

for (i = 0; i < 100; i += 1) {
freq2 = freq/round(irand(1,6))
WAVETABLE(start, 4, 10000*amp, freq2, (.2 + random(0, 0.6)))
freq2 = freq/round(irand(1,12))
WAVETABLE(start, 4, 10000*amp, freq2, (.2 + random(0, 0.6)))

freq2 = freq/round(irand(1,12))
WAVETABLE(start2,  6, 10000*amp, freq2, (.2 + random(0, 0.6)))
start += 2
start2 += 3
MAXMESSAGE(0 \, freq2)
}