Tag Archives: Music

Art Code Drip Music

Drip: a Water Powered Sound Installation

I created this piece in collaboration with the new media artist Muhammad Hafiz Wan Rosli this spring. It was featured in the UCSB Media Art and Technology Program’s “Bits and Pieces” Exhibition back in May and we’ll also be showing it on September 1st at the Soundwalk Festival in Longbeach.

This is a technical description from the Soundwalk proposal:

“Drip is an interactive sound sculpture consisting of 16 tuned metal bars hung from a 3” by 3” by 5” high (freestanding) iron frame. Attached to the frame above each bar are solenoid water valves that can be triggered by an Arduino microcontroller. As the valves are opened and closed, drops of water pass through them falling onto each of the sixteen bars. The resulting sound is acoustically amplified through attached piezoelectric microphones. This action of falling water produces rhythms and melodies which are sequenced in real time and which can be altered by the audience’s interaction via light sensors embedded in the piece. Since all sound is generated acoustically, viewers can also interact with the piece by directly tapping the bars or plucking the nylon wire that suspends them in the air. The resulting soundscape is something like a surrealist version of rain falling on a tin roof or a collection of gongs being struck in chaotic mathematical patterns.”

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.

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)
}
Music

New Tracks Summer 2011

I’ve made a couple new songs recently, both of which are a practice in film composition. The first is a study on the work of Eduard Artemyev, a Soviet composer who worked with the director Andrei Tarkovsky on the film “Stalker.” Here, I’m attempting to copy the affect of the films opening sequence, for which Artemyev wanted to create a mixture of eastern and western aesthetics.

[audio:http://amusesmile.com/old/sound/rasa.mp3|titles=Stalker Rasa]

From Wikipedia: “[Artemyev and Tarkovsky] finally found the solution in a theme that would create a state of inner calmness and inner satisfaction, or as Tarkovsky said “space frozen in a dynamic equilibrium.” Artemyev knew about a musical piece from Indian classical music where a prolonged and unchanged background tone is performed on a tambura. As this gave Artemyev the impression of frozen space, he used this inspiration and created a background tone on his synthesizer similar to the background tone performed on the tambura. The tar then improvised on the background sound, together with a flute as a European, Western instrument. To mask the obvious combination of European and Oriental instruments he passed the foreground music through the effect channels of his SYNTHI 100 synthesizer. These effects included modulating the sound of the flute and lowering the speed of the tar, so that what Artemyev called “the life of one string” could be heard. Tarkovsky was amazed by the result, especially liking the sound of the tar, and used the theme without any alterations in the film.”

The second is a track I made entirely from the sampled first measure of “In a Sentimental Mood” by Ellington and Coltrane. I thought of it as appropriate for a busy city street scene, but a close friend of mine says it sounds more like someone is loosing his/her mind. The beat starts at 0:36.

[audio:http://amusesmile.com/old/sound/July2011.mp3|titles=July 2011]