Tuesday, February 12, 2008
During my stay in Boston I attended a course at the MIT with Peter Whincop (he teaches the course "Composing with Computer" over there, and was great in allowing me to participate in the course). The idea for this essentially started with a discussing with Peter about Steve Reich's pendulum music. At the end the only connection with it is really the fact that I used swinging microphones.
All was done with a Max patch creating a virtual pendulum inside the computer which controlled several FM synthesizers. The position of the pendulums outside (the microphones) would control the fundamental frequency and harmonicity of the FM synthesis (in fact to get the position of the mics I just calculated the loudness of the sound that they were receiving, so it is a quite rough attempt since I had no sensors at all), as well as the several sub-harmonics of the all sound. So I could play around with the relative position of the microphone around the speakers, but also with speaker and microphones themselves. The sound captured by each microphone was being played in a single speaker but its sound was being processed (I think a bit of pitch shift and delay) depending on the position of the other microphone. The final sound was at the end very dependent on the performance itself.
I think that was it, but by now I can't remember all the details of how was it done because I lost all the data in my hard drive last Xmas and there were the patches and recordings of it. Also for that I only have this video that is a recording that Rosa did with her camera (the ones that are supposed to take pictures but also do rough movies), so the quality of the image and the sound are pretty bad.
This performance was held at the Killian Hall (MIT), as part of the course final concert last fall. At the performance I asked one person from the audience to play it with me. It was cool because as you interact with the other person you get to control better the sound and that's when it gets more interesting to play.