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Livecoding Erraid

April 21, 2018
News

https://flic.kr/p/fCkH4E On a number of occasions I have used sounds collected at a particular location as a coherent set of resources for a livecoded set. For the last week I’ve been in retreat on with the community on the isle of Erraid, which has been a welcome break from the city! One of the features of the island is the ‘observatory’. This is a circular tin structure, about two meters across by three high: a restored remnant of the building of the Dubh Artach lighthouse that took place there between 1867 and 1872. ...

Not algorave

April 15, 2018
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I’m interested in now taking the SuperCollider livecoding techniques that I’ve developed in the context of algorave and applying them to the creation of fixed media sound works. Here is one, using some prepared piano samples that Dr Kurt James Werner has been kind enough to put online. [audio src=“https://tedthetrumpet.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/pylon-country.mp3"][/audio] pylon-country.mp3 It’s not perfect: there is still a strong element of improvisation in this way of working, and there are places in this track where, on listening back, I might have wished to have performed differently. ...

Livecode improvisation with Anne-Liis Poll

April 12, 2018
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As part of the team that organised the third METRIC Improvisation Intensive at the Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow, I did not have as much time as I might have liked to improvise myself. I was pleased however to be joined for an impromptu livecoded session by Anne-Liis Poll, Professor of Improvisation at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjlTZuKa7iw?rel=0] This did not quite turn out the way I had intended! ...

Livecoding again

February 16, 2018
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Back at the livecoding again. A couple of weeks ago, a quite succesful workshop for the students on the Interactive Composition module at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Coming up: a couple of things. In March there is going to be another long-form online algorave that I’ll be contributing a half-hour set to, Friday 16th at 1330 GMT. In April the METRIC Intensive III at the RCS sees staff and students converge on Glasgow for a week of improvisation: again, as well as leading some gamelan improvisation, expect to be SuperColliding as well. ...

Giving a workshop in Jakarta

July 14, 2017
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My institution, The Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow, have sent me on a trip to make connections with a number of potential partners in Indonesia, including the UPH Conservatory of Music, the Jakarta Institute of Arts (IKJ), and Institut Seni Indonesia Surakarta (ISI Solo). I’ll also be visiting Singapore to see Setan Jawa, and talk to the producers about bringing this to Glasgow for a Festival of Gamelan and the Moving Image that we are planning here for September. ...

Ubuntu Studio, SuperCollider, Dell Inspirion 11 3000 - success!

May 27, 2017
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Having a very positive experience at the moment with Ubuntu Studio 17.04 running SuperCollider 3.8.0 on a £150 refurb 11" Dell Inspiron. Apart from an initial UEFI glitch with getting it to boot, Ubuntu Studio installed easily and works seamlessly so far. The SuperCollider install was made simple by this script install_supercollider_sc3plugins_buntu.sh from @theseansco – thanks Sean! When it came to actually booting SuperCollider, I did not even need to mess around with Jack or any other at all, everything on the audio side seems to just work. ...

Getting ready to be five (/four)

March 8, 2017
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Next Friday I’m going to to be taking part in a 24 hour online algorave event wearefive to celebrate five years of the algorave movement. By accident or design I’m on back to back with co¥ᄀpt (aka Sean Cotterill) who is one of only a couple of us livecoding in pure SuperCollider, rather than the by-now overwelmingly popular TidalCycles. Sean has been putting together an interesting set of pages on his approach to livecoding in SC, particularly on the things that need to be set up beforehand. ...

Rave the Space

October 6, 2016
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Last night I gave a performance called ‘Rave the Space’ at Stereo in Glasgow, part of a series of events called INTER run by Iain Findlay-Walsh ‘creating a focused, public listening context for deep experiments in / with sound’. My proposal was to ‘perform the soundscape of the venue through the medium of livecoding’. What I did was to visit the venue the day before, at a quiet time, and make some recordings – a fairly typical basement club/rock venue, so I was able to wander onstage, through dressing rooms, behind the bar, into the toilets etc, all the while recording both the ambience and, in some cases, tapping or hitting objects of particular interest – there was a group of CO2 cylinders that were particularly nice. ...

Getting my fingers burned

July 28, 2016
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Sooner or later, I’m going to have to get back to the ‘ol soldering iron: I have a plan: to reconstruct the PE Minisonic you can see above, that I made while I was in school. I still have some of the boards…

Here's my screen

July 13, 2016
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Show us your screens! Ok, well at last maybe I’m ready. Here’s five minutes or so of me improvising in SuperCollider that’s not as embarrassing as some of my other attempts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhprsv_c27o The code is on GitHub if anyone is madly interested.