This week I tested a new version of the piece which i developed after the previous test (see last post). This version is much more rhythmic and contains a kick drum and hi-hats that provide a steady pulse for the more abstract found sounds and melodic parts. It also had 12 different sine waves which built up and then became randomised. For this test i bounced 12 separate versions for 12 machines, each of which had unique sounds and and some shared sounds. I wasn't able to upload them all to Soundcloud in time so it was necessary to import the bounces onto the computers from a memory stick. This was very labour intensive and there were only 5 people at the tutorial so some people had to start 3 computers. As a result some machines were significantly later than others. However, the overall effect was still musical and interesting.
The found sound rhythms again worked well, these sounds were were all individually rooted to a different machine as were the sine wave tones. This gave a feeling of movement around the space, as the computers are arranged around the edge of the room which is a large rectangle. The kick drum and hi-hat sounds were each on an individual machine. This meant that there was no movement in these sounds and that was a criticism from some of my peers. I also felt that if i pursue this direction then i would try and make those sounds move too. The next step for the development of this piece is to look into using Max MSP in order to network the computers. This will allow me to have elements of control such as volume, mute, and possibly speed of playback from a central computer. It would also allow me to build a patch that i could install on each computer which would hopefully make performing the piece easier. Another idea I am keen to introduce to the piece is having a selection of material that audience members would be free to start and stop as they see fit. This idea is based on the Terry Riley composition "In C" and the internet collaborative project "in B flat" which was conceived by Darren Soloman (see link below). This material would work on the same principle as both of these works in that it would be in the same key and would work in what ever combination it was triggered. http://www.inbflat.net/
The trial version of the new piece is available below.
On Monday (13th Jan 2014) I tested my piece, as it is (see 5th post), in the Scott 105 using 9 computers. I was quite surprised by the results. It sounded very different to the approximation that i produced in Logic. Hearing it spread out around a large room on multiple machines was very useful and ideas that i had ruled out from the prototype piece such as complex rhythms and lower frequency sounds seem much more possible and even necessary.
Aspects that i felt worked well were the glitchy-found sounds and the other percussion sounds that seemed to jump from machine to machine. This is something that i will build on. Sharp, short sounds seem very effective as your ear can easily detect them appearing in different places in the room. I like the idea of creating complex rhythms that seem to jump around the room in sequences or at random and i think there is a lot of potential for this. The melodic ideas were fixed to particular versions and although they sounded nice, they were a bit boring but pad type sounds maybe useful to counter balance the percussion. The glockenspiel worked quite well as it is semi percussive and you could hear the delay type effect between different machines. Overall i felt that the piece became a bit boring after about 2 minutes and there was a lack of lower frequency sounds. The speakers on the IMacs can cope with frequencies down to around 100hz so i can use some bass and kick drum sounds to remedy this. Another idea that struck me was building up chords or drones gradually with a single note on several different computers. I am definitely now thinking of writing separate versions of the same piece for up to 10 machines. David Strang suggested using sine waves to do this as they will interact with the harmonics and resonance of the space. He suggested looking into the work of Phill Niblock who builds up multiple single tones to make dense, sustained drones. He describes his work on his website.
“I
recorded tones played by an instrument (by an instrumentalist),
arranging these single tones into mutli-layered settings, making
thick textured drones, with many microtones. In the early days, I
prescribed the microtones, tuning the instrumentalist, when I was
using audio tape. Later, I used the software ProTools, and made the
microtones as I made the pieces.”
Niblock
(2013) I like the idea of building up chords or drones using individual tones on separate machines but i want to sequence them and have them move around the room in interesting ways, maybe moving in and out of sequence with the the percussion sounds.
I think my piece is starting to move away from the original idea of the clouds of sound which are a feature of Phil Kline's work and is becoming a composition for multiple machines that will have aspects of a surround sound piece. However, i still want to incorporate some of the original ideas as well as the newer ones. Another consideration is adding another layer of control by networking the computers and having access to volume, mute and speed of play back from one master computer. This would require some work in Max MSP but it should not be too complicated and would also allow me to have playback of the different parts of the composition from the Max patch on the computer. The audience members could select a part from a drop down menu as instructed or at their own choice depending on how the piece develops. This aspect of a hidden layer of control could bring an interesting dimension to the work, possibly similar to the competitive compositions of John Zorn or Iannis Xenakis where players try to gain control of the piece. If I have control of volume and mute perhaps the people sitting at the computers will notice and turn the volume back up. There is certainly a lot to consider but my main focus is still the composition.
I have also been thinking about how this will be performed and how much control I want to have over the performers/audience. At the moment there are 3 different versions that will need to be divided up fairly evenly between the audience. This could be done by assigning each person a number that would relate to the version they would need to download. Once everyone has there music downloaded to their device it would simply be a case of "1, 2, 3 Go!' and the the piece would play out on the phones. This is how i plan to test my prototype as i want to keep it as simple as possible to start with. However, in later versions i would like to bring in sounds from other devices such as the computers in Scott 105 (our teaching room for music tech at Plym Uni). It would be interesting to have people starting the new audio at different points in the performance and this could be done via a colour coding system for the computers and a message projected onto the screen of the classroom. Another idea would be to make lots of different versions of differing lengths and let people re-trigger their audio as and when they want. This would make the piece a bit like Terry Riley's In C and would make the end result even more unpredictable. I think my ideas about control and organisation of the piece will develop naturally as the piece develops. For now the most important thing is testing it in a live situation with multiple devices.
I decided to make a second version of my piece and to try experimenting with writing 3 different versions. This will mean that parts of the music can be spread out over different devices rather than all being played at the same time. I found in the previous version that some of my rhythmic elements became too confused so i hope this will simplify that and add some interesting movement. I spread the percussion parts over 3 tracks and labelled them so that i could easily bounce the 3 different versions.
I did the same with the other elements in the track so that piano, strings and glockenspiel are all divided between the 3 different versions.
I then bounced the 3 versions and uploaded them to SoundCloud so that they could be easily accessed by anyone participating in my trial version.
I was hoping to be able to test the piece during a tutorial but it was not a suitable situation. Testing the pieces in a live situation is going to be one of the biggest challenges of this project. Getting a suitably large number of people together will take careful planning and organisation. However, one way of getting an idea of how it might sound is to create multiple instances of each version in a DAW and offset them slightly as well as panning them.
This gives a rough idea of how the piece might sound but I will attempt to record a performance on multiple devices over Christmas.
Musical Experiments I have started creating music that will be part of my prototype phone cloud performance. Obviously as these sounds will be played on phone speakers there is no point in using sounds with any bass so i have focused on higher frequencies. I wanted to have a mixture of textural, rhythmic and pad sounds so i made some rhythmic loops using found sound recordings made from going through my recycling. Scrunching plastic bottles, hitting tin cans and popping bubble wrap. I then processed the sounds and made some loops.
I wanted to have an orchestral string pad to play some constant chords so i played a simple two chord pattern but with descending notes that make it slightly confusing as where the start of the sequence is. I also added a glockenspiel pattern and a synth with some delay.
Listening back on the computer speakers i felt the sounds were pretty good so bounced it to a MP3 and tried playing it from my phone and computer at the same time. This made me realise that there was too much going on with both devices playing all the sounds. The percussion became very confusing but the strings, glockenspiel and synth sounded good. There was a nice polyrhythmic delay happening with the single notes and the string pad sounded nice. When i muted some of the percussion on the computer it worked better so i will need to think about how to make percussion work. I think it will need to be a lot less dense than the complex glitchy loops i created. I will try making 3 different versions of the music, so the different sounds are spread over different devices. I will also experiment with different parts of the same sound being on different phones so that the sounds seem to jump around from device to device. This might work particularly well with percussion sounds. The basic piece is below and i will test it with multiple devices as soon as possible.
Before writing my proposal i began researching the work of composers, and sound artists such as Alvin Lucier, Steve Reich, Max Neuhaus and David Cunningham.
Alvin Lucier's most well known work is called "I am Sitting In a Room" and in it he records his voice then plays it back into the room and rerecords it. He repeats this process until the rooms resonant frequencies make his speech unintelligible yet strangely musical. This is an incredibly simple yet profound piece of sound art that shows how a space can have it's own identity.
Steve Reich's early tape compositions "It's Gonna Rain"(1965) and "Come Out"(1966) were hugely influential and began his exploration of phasing which informed much of his following work. In these compositions he uses to tape loops one of which very gradually goes out of sync with the other producing endless variations until it returns into time. This work was very like an influence on Phil Kline's work with tape recorders.
Max Neuhaus is a highly respected sound artist and I particularly like one of his permanent installations in Pulheim, Germany outside the Stommeln Synagogue. Here is his description of the piece. ‘In Time Piece Stommeln I’ve†managed to make a sound that you really don't hear until just before it actually disappears. Over the past several weeks, working with the complex sounds of traffic moving around the small square adjacent to the synagogue, I've built a sound texture which transforms these sounds. It integrates itself within them by blending with them and tracking them, changing itself with their changes. This texture is made up of low, powerful ingredients that have a wonderful kind of grace. As it grows you realize that there is also a fundamental harmony within it. It is only at the very end of each sounding that it emerges from its ambient, shows itself and disappears.’ It is only as it stops that you realise that it was there and I love how this refreshes passers-by's ears, making them suddenly aware of the everyday sounds around them.
Proposal for Interactive Sound Environments Module
Background
I
want to create an interactive and partly indeterminate composition in
which the audience act as the orchestra. The piece is strongly
influenced by Phil Kline's Unsilent
Night which
is a massive moving sound cloud made up of hundreds of people
carrying portable cassette players (boom boxes). The boom boxes all
contain Kline's preprepared material and are started simultaneously.
The machines playback at varying speeds and the people carrying them
move and interact with each other and this produces a constantly
changing and evolving soundscape that achieves amazing complexity
from very simple source material.
“If
any one piece of music can be said to represent the technically
sophisticated, but non-Internet related, world of interactive music
of the 1990's, it is Phil Kline's Unsilent Night, a forty-minute,
genre-blurring, musical tour de force employing dozens, if not
hundreds, of boom box tape players carried by the audience as they
parade through and perform in the streets of downtown New York.”
Duckworth
(2005) Kline's ideas can be seen as a
continuation of Steve Reich's piece It's
Gonna Rain which
uses two tape loops that gradually go out of phase producing endless
variations before gradually returning into sync. Kline may also have
been influenced by Glenn Branca who he worked with as part of
Branca's guitar ensemble in New York during the 1980's. Branca wrote
pieces for large groups of specially tuned guitars that produced
dense clouds of sound and also explored micro-tonality.
Aims
My intention
is to use mobile phones and computers instead of boom boxes and to
keep the performance within a room such as Scott 105. Kline's and
Reich's pieces use analogue machines and tape which by their nature
do not play at exactly the same speeds. With digital technology the
speed of the playback will not fluctuate. However, it would be
impossible for a large group of people to all press play
simultaneously so there would be timing differences immediately and
if the material was rhythmic this would produce interesting
poly-rhythms. Also, if the material that the audience/orchestra have
downloaded to their phones varies slightly in tempo and length, the
effect would be a constantly changing and morphing rhythmic cloud
that could produce some granular like effects.
If the
phones are producing one layer of rhythmic sound then the computers
with their inbuilt speakers could be used to produce another layer or
multiple layers of melodic or new rhythmic patterns. My plan would
be to compose some melodic and drone-like loops and have these ready
installed on the computers ready to be played by an
audience/orchestra member pushing the space bar at a given signal. If
these pieces of music were being played through Max MSP then the
player could be given some control over their particular sound via
midi controllers, such as filter cut off, resonance and any other
desired parameter.
At this
point it might be possible to introduce some live acoustic
instruments to add further textures to the sound cloud. One
possibility would be to have a guitar ensemble similar to Branca's
where a number of guitars would be tuned to the same open tuning that
would work in conjunction with the material on the phones and
computers. This would mean that the players would not need to be
expert, as simply strumming the open strings in any way would add to
the overall effect in a pleasing way.
Method
and Issues
The success
of this piece would depend on having a fairly large number of people
with mobile phones capable of playing audio and for them to be able
to download the relevant material to their phones in a simple and
understandable way. Research would need to be done to find the most
efficient way of doing this. If more than one piece of audio is to be
used then it would be necessary to find a way of making sure this was
distributed evenly throughout the orchestra in order to achieve the
most effective results.
Preparation
and organisation would be key to the success of the performance and
it will be important to research and develop the right kind of audio
to play from the phones and computers. There is a temptation to
overcomplicate such a performance by adding too many elements and
giving audience/orchestra members multiple roles that might make the
execution too complex. I would propose to develop a number of pieces
starting with a very simple one that would only use a small number of
phones. This would allow me to identify problems and develop material
and systems that work on a basic level and then to gradually increase
the layers and numbers of participants.
It would be
necessary to build a network of people willing to participate in the
development of the piece and this could be done by using social
networks such as Facebook and SoundCloud. SoundCloud would be a
useful way of making the audio material I compose available to the
participants and could also perhaps allow other composers to
contribute material to the performance. This could potentially make
the piece even more interactive and would move it on from Kline's
piece which is highly interactive but only features one composer. For
this to work, certain conditions would have to be set such as a
general key and a time restriction of some kind.
Some kind of
instruction and arrangement would be important and this could be done
using powerpoint and a projector. Perhaps dividing the participants
into three colour coded groups each with a separate file to download.
The projection could then indicate when each group was to start the
audio from phones and computers. This system for orchestrating the
performance would be equally important as the music created.
Another
avenue to explore would be using a network to control the computers,
this would allow me to control multiple computers simultaneously and
therefore simplify the role of the audience/orchestra members. This
technique has some interesting potential for further developing the
piece and I will do some research into it. However, I think this will
come at a later stage after I have explored my basic idea further.
Phil Kline's Unsilent Night. A moving sound sculpture for multiple boom boxes and inspiration form my project.
Bibliography
Duckworth, W. Virtual Music (2005) Routledge Taylor & Francis Group
Cipriani, C and Giri, M. Electronic Music and Sound Design (2010) ConTempoNet
Emmerson, S Music, Electronic Media and Culture (2000) Ashgate Publishing
Niblock, P. 2014. Phill Niblock [online]Available at: http://www.phillniblock.com Accessed 28.04.2014
Locus Sonus. 2014. Locus Sonus – Audio In Art [online]Available at: http://locusonus.org/ Accessed 28.04.2014
Grant, J. 2009. The Fragmented Orchestra by Dan Jones, Tim Hodgson, Jane Grant, John Matthias, Nicholas Outram, Nick Ryan. [online]Available at: http://www.academia.edu/4067716/The_Fragmented_Orchestra_by_Dan_Jones_Tim_Hodgson_Jane_Grant_John_Matthias_Nicholas_Outram_Nick_Ryan Accessed 28.04.2014
Loock, U. 2007. The Time Piece for the Stommeln Synagogue. [online]Available at: http://www.max-neuhaus.info/bibliography/Stommeln.htm Accessed 28.04.2014
I have been thinking a lot about this module and what I want to achieve in it. Interactive Sound Environments is a rather vague and potentially vast topic to explore so trying to find a focus has been giving me some trouble. However, i am now thinking about what i feel is lacking in my own music and what tools i might be able to design that would help me create better and more unique tracks.
When i look at the electronic musicians i most admire such as Jon Hopkins, Clark, Amon Tobin and Autechre it is their sound design that is the most impressive part for me. They all use elements of found sounds in their music and this is a tradition that goes back t the earliest pioneers of electronic music such as Pierre Schaeffer and the Musique Concrete movement. I have been using found sounds in my music too with some success but i feel i am relying on the same processes and my ideas are getting stale. I am therefore going to look at ways i can use Max MSP to inhance my use of found sounds and improve my sound design. The areas i want to focus on are granular synthesis and vocoding and i also want to investigate drum synthesis, wave tables and pitch shifting.
Today i have been reading about granular synthesis and building some simple granular patches. Above is one of my first attempts which i built following a tutorial by Rupa Dhillon which i found here: http://www.cs.au.dk/~dsound/DigitalAudio.dir/Papers/IntroToGranSynth.pdf
The patch is single grain strand produce by using an envelope and cycle~ object which is an oscillator. It is then split and one stream goes through a delay line and the other is pitch shifted.
I then went on to build another version which had a few more controls and used audio files instead of the cycle~ object. This one also used the random object to affect the length of the grains and the amount they were shifted by.
In the second patch the granular parts are encapsulated within the p gran object shown below.
I found this video about the making of Amon Tobin’s The Foley Room album very useful and inspiring. The film shows the lengths he and his crew went to to collect interesting sounds in order to make the album.
