August 2, 2011
There’s quite a history of musicians and sound artists doing creative things with speech synthesis. One of the best known examples is the Radiohead track Fitter Happier from the album OK Computer, and its not hard to find other cases of commercial artists incorporating this kind of material in tracks.
Very often this has been done on the mac, which has always had speech synthesis built in. (There’s a very interesting anecdote about how speech synthesis came to be included on the very first macs at the personal insistence of Steve Jobs.
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July 29, 2011
I saw a great new opera recently, The Sloans Project. Composed by Gareth Williams with a libretto by David Brook, it was set and performed in the historic Sloans Bar and Restaurant. Yes, that’ll be opera performed in a pub! The opening scene was a coup de theatre. As the audience milled about in the bar downstairs, the show just started right there, with a couple at the bar bursting into song, soon to be answered by another drunken-looking guy at the bar.
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July 26, 2011
[soundcloud url=“http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/19798777"]
Mags and I were enjoying a pleasant evening walk in Maxwell Park, when she had a lucky find: a pound coin sitting on the grass beside a metal park bench. We had some fun sitting in the sun and improvising with the sound of the bench and the coin, which I recorded on my new HTC Wildfire S Android phone. I made the track in Logic using nothing but those sounds: fairly minimal effects, just some pitch shifting and fake stereo.
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May 1, 2011
This Tuesday 3rd May at 1600 sees the performance of the only piece I have in this year’s Plug festival at the RSAMD in Glasgow, Liebesglück hat tausend Zungen – a lied, for soprano and piano. Now, why on earth, you say would anyone in this day and age want to write a lied of all things?! Good question: I’m not sure I know the answer. However, the fact is that the unifying theme of this year’s festival is deemed to be something called the Glasgow Liederbuch, to which all the composer have been invited to contribute.
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May 20, 2010
So here I am at the Forum for Innovation in Music Production and Composition at Leeds College of Music. It’s been a while since I’ve attended a conference, but I’m getting back into the swing of it. It’s hardly coalmining; nevertheless, it’s quite tiring to sit still all day listening to a long series of what can be quite dense and complicated presentations.
The subject matter for this conference at least is consistently up my street.
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April 27, 2010
The programme note for my latest piece Étude-Poème pour Pianiste Récitant, being performed this evening at 1830 by Silviya Mihaylova.
‘So, here’s the idea; a piano étude where the pianist speaks to the audience, playing along with what she is saying. This idea has several things going for it, for one, hopefully nobody else will have hit on the selfsame thing. Also… here’s what it says in the Oxford Companion to Music, under ‘étude’;
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October 22, 2009
ARTMUSFAIR is… well, I guess you could describe it as a trade fair for contemporary music (stop giggling) which this year is happening in Glasgow, Thur 29 Oct to Sun 1 Nov. I’ve got two things confirmed and a third in the pipeline.
First up is a new piece certain assumptions, which was accepted in a call for scores by the Red Note Ensemble. It’s for alto flute, horn, marimba, cello and ’tape’, with the latter part composed using a patch I made at the pd bootcamp in Wales earlier this year.
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September 23, 2009
Nothing earth-shaking here, just the very first Max/MSP patch I built with my Performance Technology students today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgQIun-H70
April 15, 2009
This years Plug 2009 festival of new music at the RSAMD starts soon, 27 April - 1 May. One of the features this year is a new set of ‘Glasgow’ sequenzas, written variously by students and staff and interspersed among larger programme items. Mine is for trombone and, between myself and Head of Composition Gordon McPherson, we’ve cooked up a plan to, um, kill a trombonist? Here’s my description from the score;
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March 16, 2009
[slideshow]
(Pics by Tamara Polajnar)