July 17, 2012
Finding the .resamp1 method in SuperCollider gave me an idea for reducing this rather large set of data into something perhaps more musically useful. Could I make something more like a tonal chord, with pitches repeated in every octave?
I first drastically resampled my data into just twelve points:
f = ((f.flop[1] * -1) + 1).resamp1(12); These would then be the probabilities of those twelve pitch classes appearing across a range of eight and a half octaves:
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July 16, 2012
I’m in the very early stages of a collaborative project with Dr Steven Ford, Senior Research Fellow and QC Manager at the Cancer Research UK Formulation Unit of Strathclyde University. Steve came to me with an idea about sonifying IR spectroscopy data, with a view to perhaps drawing some creative parallels between vibrations at the atomic scale and musical sound.
Steve sent me some IR data relating to three compounds, water, glycine and tyrosine, and I’ve been trying some things out in SuperCollider.
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May 1, 2012
After lunch today we had a joint session, with three people presenting their experience of teaching gamelan in schools and universities. I am presently engaged on a project to attempt to establish a gamelan at Stevenson College Edinburgh (soon to be Edinburgh College), so this area is of particular interest to me.
Ruth Andrews runs a gamelan programme for 12-17 year olds at the International School of Amsterdam, which sounds like it would be a model to aim for.
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May 1, 2012
Substantial chunks of the day were taken up by a series of rehearsals for the wayang. The venue was a modern dining hall, with a kind of semicircular shape. Spacially this allowed for a very good arrangement, with room for audience all around, and a separate staging area off to one side for dance and video. The ceiling was perhaps a little low, and the sound less resonant than might have been ideal.
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May 1, 2012
Today’s conference activities were somewhat disrupted by a revised schedule of wayang rehersals, which also caused our Scottish group a certain amount of last minute phone calls to try to get everyone there in time. I was fortunately able to make Helen Loth’s paper session ‘“Why gamelan, couldn’t we just use steel-pans?”: The use of gamelan with special needs groups and populations’. Helen is engaged on doctoral research in this area, and presented an illuminating account of her findings so far.
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May 1, 2012
At last, we get to the piece we have all been working towards for so many months:
Kanda Buwana is the company name of dhalang Matthew Isaac Cohen. I have known Matthew for a number of years, most notably during the period when he was at Glasgow University. Matthew was responsible for bringing dhalang Ki Joko Susilo to Scotland, and Mas Joko, as we called him, was in turn reponsible for a transformation in the approach of Gamelan Naga Mas.
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April 30, 2012
Day 1 of the Gathering of the Gamelans here at York was very exciting and engaging. A great chance to catch up with old friends from the gamelan world, put faces to names, and meet new people.
I left Glasgow purposely very early in order to get down in time to catch Charles Matthews’ presentation ‘Searching for an approach to gamelan and electronic music’. I’ve been following Charles on twitter on his recent trip to Indonesia where he was exploring some of these approaches in their native setting, and I was very curious to see what he has been up to.
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April 30, 2012
Our first session today was the fascinating tale of the Dutch group ‘Babar Layar’, as researched by Maria Mendonça. It’s a story worthy of Hollywood: a group of Dutch teenagers who decided to construct their own gamelan under the Nazi occupation, going on to become a key influence on gamelan in Europe and the States. There’s a clip of them playing at an Eistedfodd in Wales in 1953 (about 1'50 into that clip).
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April 23, 2012
From Thursday of this week to Monday of next I’m going to be at the Gathering of the Gamelans in York. This event is part academic conference, and partly a performative celebration of gamelan in the UK, most particularly the 30 years that Gamelan Sekar Petak has been at the University of York.
For the last couple of months, gamelan groups all over the UK have been rehearsing both separately and collaboratively towards ‘Lokananta, Gamelan of the Gods’.
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April 20, 2012
I’m having two new pieces performed at the Plug festival at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland next week. The first is called Dr Mueller? Dr Mueller!? Oh, boy :( and is a postlude to Spiricom, the third piece in Gordon McPherson’s 2007 trilogy Ghosts. The ‘spiricom’ was a psuedoscientific electronic device built by a couple of cranks in the 1980s, who convinced themselves that with it they could hear and talk to dead people including, supposedly, a certain ‘Dr Mueller’.
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