June 17, 2013
A couple of interesting connections between the show and the University of Strathclyde. The first is – and I didn’t spot this till the other day – it’s actually mentioned in the original movie. At around 16 minutes, during the segment where Bruce and Mark visit the National Engineering Laboratory, there’s this exchange:
NEL Employee: We’ve got about three hundred and forty engineering graduates and scientific workers here, so we can tackle all sorts of engineering problems.
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June 6, 2013
Exactly a month to go now to ‘Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride’, my Cryptic Nights show at the CCA. Today I met with Steve Ford, who, as well as playing bass is going to be doing the live audio chemistry. Here’s an example of the kind of thing we won’t be doing: Somehow that one never got through the risk assessment :)
March 7, 2013
Rather cool to be sharing the bill with ‘Six Pianos’ tomorrow night. Call me a boring old minimalist, but I still love that piece.
Here’s the lineup:
Multiple Piano Extravaganza 7.30pm Stevenson Hall, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland £9.50/£6.50
Steve Reich Six pianos Jonathan Plowright, Alina Horvath, Maraike Breuning, Monika Palsauskaite, Catherine Clark, Donal McHugh
Vera Stanojevic Droplets of Dew for 4 pianos and electronics (World Premiere) Sinae Lee, Graeme McNaught, Fali Pavri and Aaron Shorr
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February 21, 2013
From the second rehearsal for RITE: pianists Sinae Lee, Fionnuala Ward, Beth Jerem and Marlon Bordas Gonzalez trying out the fx units, and my script for the piece so far.
RITE for for four performers, four pianos, and four effects units: Friday March 8, 1930, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Also featuring works by Steve Reich and Vera Stanojevic, improvisations by Alistair MacDonald, Anto Pett, and Anne-Liis Poll.
January 27, 2013
Here’s a screenshot of something I’ve been working on today for ‘Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride’:
Regular readers of this blog (ahem) will recall that this all started with a piece of music I heard in a dream, for a double rock band plus a big squad of french horns. Well, the double rock band is doable, but the french horns were going to be impractical for the gig.
So, I’m building a sort of video sampler.
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January 19, 2013
We’ve just had the first rehearsal for ‘Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride’, which is a new piece I’m putting together for Cryptic Nights, 4 & 5 July of this year. This piece is a fantasy: an reimagination of my own East Kilbride childhood, as expressed through the medium of my alter ego Edward ‘Teddy’ Edwards, unsung hero of early British electronica.
The musical starting point for this piece was a dream I had, where I heard a fragment of music for what seemed to be a double rock band plus an orchestral horn section.
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November 27, 2012
I’m working on three pieces of music at the moment. Well, that is, I’m supposed to be working on three pieces of music at the moment – today I actually managed to get some work done on two of them, at any rate.
The big project I have on the go is Why Scotland, Why East Kilbride, a music theatre piece for Cryptic Nights, CCA Glasgow 4 & 5 July next year.
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July 20, 2012
For today’s exciting episode, I’m using the simplified spectrum data from glycine to generate a sound, and then looping round the same data to play the sound in a kind of ‘rhythm’:
[sourcecode] ( ~name = "glycine"; ~path = Document.current.dir.asString++"/"++ ~name ++".csv"; f = CSVFileReader.readInterpret(~path); f = ((f.flop[1] * -1) + 1).normalize; f = (f*100).asInteger; f = f.differentiate.removeEvery([0]).integrate; f = f/100; ~peaksIndices = f.differentiate.sign.findAll([1,-1]); g = Array.fill(f.size, 0); ~peaksIndices.do { |i| g[i] = f[i] }; // Daniel's line ~amps = g; // [f,~amps].
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July 19, 2012
Emperor Joseph II: Well, I mean occasionally it seems to have, how shall one say? [he stops in difficulty; turning to Orsini-Rosenberg] How shall one say, Director? Orsini-Rosenberg: Too many notes, Your Majesty? Emperor Joseph II: [to Mozart] Exactly. Very well put. Too many notes. From Amadeus (1984)
It occured to me after a while that my previous attempts at dealing with these sets of data were running into a ’too many notes’ problem: 784 resonators at once is always likely to sound like noise!
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July 18, 2012
Going off in a bit of a different direction here, using the data as automation to drive the pitch of a synth:
( f = CSVFileReader.readInterpret(Document.current.dir.asString++"/water.csv");
f = ((f.flop[1] * -1) + 1).normalize(48,84); //midinotes
Pmono( \default, \midinote, Pseq(f, inf), \dur, 0.005).play )
In this recording, looping up the three chemicals one by one. Kind of cute - early days for this approach.
[audio src=“https://tedthetrumpet.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/pmono01.mp3"][/audio]
pmono01.mp3