10th Post - Testing the Network and Adding a Visual Element

I tested the fully networked piece on 10.04.2014 and i was surprised at how well it worked. The audio was generally well synced and the composition was not drastically altered or out of time. However, the play back was not perfect and there seemed to subtle timing issues that made it slightly different each time. This was mostly to do with how the rhythmic elements interacted. especially the moving elements such as the kick and high hats which seemed to disappear sometimes. I assumed this was to do with the randomised gate system which made those parts jump around from machine to machine. 

In the top right corner you can see the system for moving the kick and hats around. In this version, however, the kick and hats did not have their own individual buffer and groove. I realised that I needed to make a different version of the composition where i bounced the kick, hats and melodic elements as individual stems as opposed to this version where the 12 different audio files often had more than one sound.

This was a time yet another time consuming aspect of the composition but it was necessary. David Strang helped me to improve the system for moving elements and suggested using the bonk object which measures the attack of a sound and a counter so that the kick would move after a certain number of hits. Below you can see that the kick is now only sent out of 4 gates which limits it to one end of the room. The hats however, are moving through 8 machines which gives the piece a more controlled and defined sense of space.

The next thing to add was a visual feedback system using the computer monitors and again David Strang was able to help me realise this idea. I wanted the screens to flash from black to white when that machine played a sound. David showed me how to use the peakamp and clip objects as well as the swatch object so the screen would move through the grey scale from black to white depending on the intensity of the sound.

When i tested the new improved patch with the visual receive patches on 12 machines the effect was very impressive and made a huge improvement to the piece. The video below, shot on my phone gives some idea of how it looks but fails to do it justice.

                  

 

Bellow is the final version of the main patch. Here there are duplicates of the melodic parts that i was able to mix into the composition live. The original idea was to make these duplicates go in and out of time with the composition similar to the Steve Reich's phasing tapes. Unfortunately i did not have enough time to develop this and i was afraid of making my patch more complex incase it stopped working before the final presentation.