Richard Salvatore Lo Bianco

I have drawn great interest to incorporating the concept of phasing into the second Laptop Mus. piece. I’ve been listening to some of Steve Reich’s music such as Clapping Music, which I think can spice up rhythmic patterns of a more traditional musical composition.

Basically Clapping Music consists on this simple clapping pattern played by two people in unison and the shifting one of the patterns by a quaver every so often. The music explains it easier than my words and it can be seen here

Here’s a video of Reich performing what I believe to be the last portion of Clapping music in which the phased patterns come back to unison

Clapping Music

It’s been interesting having different teachers approach the same concepts and even the same software. I’ve been testing some recordings on SuperCollider but at a very basic level that does not allow to record yet in ProxySpace, so I’m definitely looking forward to learning that to be able to record our group piece.

On the other hand I’ve been reading a bit about TOPLAP since I’ve been hearing things about it recently and I’ve had different input from different points of view on the whole issue of live coding. I think it’s really funny how they came up with a made-up meaning for the initials just to be able to make the acronym “T.O.P.L.A.P”. According to their website:

(Temporary|Transnational|Terrestrial|Transdimensional) Organisation for the (Promotion|Proliferation|Permanence|Purity) of Live (Algorithm|Audio|Art|Artistic) Programming

Basically, the process to make the graphic was the following:

We recorded, as a group, a quick performance of our piece by using a mic in the middle of our speakers. Each member set the task to hear carefully to our own part and make some draft of a graphic representation of it. After timing my part and the moment each event was played, I started drafting the graphic.

After I got the idea on paper similar to the one on the post below I used Microsoft Power Point to graph it. Basically all I use is different coloured shapes and lines. The basic boxes were easy to make, so was adding the time markings. The real challenge was some of the curved lines, but there is enough to manipulate in the programme to reach the desired results. I really used Power Point instead of say Paint, PhotoShop or Illustrator, because I don’t really know how to manipulate them…

It’s been an arduous process trying to notate my part of the piece for Laptop M. Having looked at a Ligeti notation was truly inspiring but after having 2 failed trials at my own notation, I think the 3rd one’s the charm. The first idea was raw, in pen and paper. Then the second one looked like a carnival flying with colours. Finally I came up with this nice-looking graphic of my part of the piece. Now, without hearing the piece or knowing what each line and box stands for it doesn’t make much sense, but it works.

So our group performed the ixi + SC piece for the class yesterday. I believe it was great success.

It’s amazing how the more we learn (although it’s still basic), the more the pieces from different groups start steering in different directions. Now we have the task to somehow notate what we’ve done.

Already with some ideas in mind we came up with the bright idea to record our piece, even if it was done with a mic onto our speakers, to get the general idea of what it sounds as a whole and be able to write individually our thoughts on how to notate our own parts, to later put them all together. The recording ended up sounding rather good for the setting in which it was recorded. There will be more to add once we get together to get our ideas down in paper. The file looked something like this:

After taking a couple of days from SC last week testing recordings on Ixi, we come back to some useful basic concepts in Sound Design by the end of the week. The weekend was very productive on Ixi, though…

On friday I attended the Electro-Greece workshop with Andreas Mniestris and heard some acousmatic music, I got inspired on the use of voice diffused throughout space.

Even though we’re not dealing with multi-channel just yet, the idea of using spoken words mixed with what we’ve been doing so far is very interesting. I’ve been experimenting a bit with recording some famous quotes I like in different languages, and messing around them with Ixi. Some J. Morrison translated into italian and then manipulated might just be the final touch that was missing from my Laptop Musicianship group piece.

” E’ nel momento in cui dubiti di volare, che perdi per sempre la facoltà di farlo”

Hello to everyone,

I have recently found a dashboard widget for Super Collider, haven’t had the time to check out all the links but maybe someone else may find it useful.

You can get to the apple website and search for Dashboard Collider in Widgets or click here

Hope it helps!

I’ve been experimenting mixing several Pulses at different low frequencies with a single sine wave to achieve a rhythmic Morse-code sounding pattern. I’ve also been working on Pbind inside Pdef.

By mistake I came across an interesting idea. I was trying to learn most of the codes that I was introduced to. While changing the parameters of a Pbind I decided to create a Pseq telling SC the midinotes that I wanted to play in a line of code that should have looked as such:

Pbind( \dur,Pseq( [1/2] , inf ), \midinote,Pseq( [20, 27, 23, 55, 27, 50], inf) )  ).play;

However, I must have been distracted because I ended up writing:

Pbind(\dur,Pseq([1/2],inf) , \midinote,Pseq( [20.midicps, 27.midicps, 23.midicps, 55.midicps, 27.midicps, 50.midicps], inf) )  ).play;

The midinote parameter must have multiplied when interpreting the midicps values.

I’ll be doing some experiments with this to try to achieve the same effect intentionally.

After getting a fair share of Super Collider on both Laptop Mus. and Sound Design, we finally got around to get together to test our 1-week knowledge of SuperCollider. As for me, I finally get around to writing here after EduBlogs was down over the weekend. As a group we managed to setup basic cues to make a simple harmonic progression for our Laptop assignment, which I believe will work out just fine. I’ll find out tomorrow.

Since SuperCollider works in coded programming language, it looks hard to use. But since we’ve learned only a little bit, and I’ve repeated several times what we’ve done over the week, I’ve learned it well by memory: creating a proxy space, creating a SinOsc, Saw or Pulse, setting the frequency in hz or midicps, setting up Mouse controls for frequency and/or volume (amplitude), and incorporating the knowledge we got in SDaC on UGens and other concepts.

I am really looking forward to learning how to make sound waves “glide” from one frequency to another as I’ve heard in the SC help examples.

Alright… so after a few hours reading the help menus and playing around ixi quarks yesterday I used more of a practical approach today (lèase “jurungar”) and got the hang of some of it. Mainly the instrument called GrainBox which I fought with so much yesterday. I guess I found something interesting (at least for my discoveries) which I decided to share here. Today I was able to set some parameters on GrainBox and reroute the weird noises I was getting to some of the other instruments. I took a snapshot rerouting GrainBox to Predators:

You can see I have a couple of sound files uploaded into the BufferPool that I was manipulating through GrainBox and was able to select 2,3 as the output and then select that same channels as the audiostream inbus on Predators to have the small creatures play around my weird noises from GrainBox. Anyway, it might be a simple thing, but it took me enough to figure out.