June 18, 2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QhG4cpS9ik
Updated # I guess it’s just possible some people might not get what’s going on here :) SuperCollider is a very powerful text-based programming language for sound. If you know what you’re doing, then with just a couple of lines of code you can create really fascinating sounds and textures, even entire compositions; see for instance sc140, an album where each piece is created using just a twitter-long 140 characters of code.
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April 10, 2010
Having some free time over the Easter break, and in preparation for taking part in a performance of Cage’s Musicircus at Tramway on 30 May, I’ve been playing with the Lexicon MPX 100 effects unit which Allan Neave gave me, feeding it back into itself, which works particularly nicely on the pitch-shift-plus-delay patches. At the same time I’ve been working on a Max patch which drifts five-note chords gradually through a modulating set of hexatonic regions, so… without really meaning to, I ended up putting together a sort of ambient track combing the two;
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February 1, 2010
This is the sort of thing where there’s probably a video out there already explaining it, but as I ended up figuring it out myself anyway, I thought I might as well make my own video… This is how to send midi information from Max/MSP to Logic Pro, in particular how to use Max to control the automation parameters of a softsynth running in Logic. Probably best to watch these fullscreeen; http://youtu.
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September 11, 2009
A long-standing frustration of mine is the way the music notation package Sibelius handles the ’tilde’ sign ~ in text. As a sort of clever bodge or hack, it is used to hide midi messages, so that a control change for example can be put in the score as ‘~C64,127’, but won’t print out.
However, I’m of the frequent habit of using the ~ sign to mean ‘approximately’; I’d love to be able to mark a pause, for instance as ‘~45 seconds’, meaning roughly 45 seconds, but when you do that the text gets hidden.
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September 4, 2009
All week I’ve been on a PureData course at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, with Simon Kilshaw. PureData, or Pd, is a free and open source graphical programming language for music and video; in plain language, a system allows one to plug together a series of graphical objects on a screen in order to create an original work of digital art.
Pd is closely allied with another very similar language, Max/MSP, both having in fact been initiated by the same programmer, Miller Puckette.
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September 2, 2009
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFvzKT-GeIc
Well, it’s a start; learning the basics of GEM in Pd. And, whoever would have thought that the quicktime midi synth on the mac had that ‘Punch’ sound hidden in one of it’s alternate banks :)
August 29, 2009
I’m working on a new piece towards ARTMUSFAIR/2009, for flute, horn, cello, marimba and ’tape’; this is me working towards the latter, the fixed audio part of the piece. Up to my usual text-to-screech tricks here; this shows some of the tools and methods I use to put things like this together.
[vimeo 6326582]
(If you go to the original on vimeo you can watch it pretty much full desktop size.
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April 8, 2009
I’m quite excited today to discover a free/open-source music notation program I hadn’t previously heard of, MuseScore. (That I hadn’t heard of it probably has something to do with the fact that they’ve only just released a mac binary.) Very early days so far, but already I’m very excited to see the beginnings of what could be a foss alternative to Sibelius and Finale, something which I think the world badly needs.
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February 15, 2009
I was round at Eddie’s house the other day, and we had a go at circuit bending an old Yamaha RX17 drum machine;
This is pretty standard stuff, a well-known bend linking pins 4 and 12 of IC 116. After some experimentation, we decided on a 100k log pot with a 1k resistor in series. Ed is a bit iffy about the whole idea of circuit-bending, kind of goes against the grain for someone who was trained in electronic engineering!
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December 16, 2008
Managing to do the same kind of thing now in SuperCollider, speaking one word at a time, which kind of makes more sense in this context; loudcoding?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG8hMLAXs_U&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
(Amazed at getting this to work, actually. I’m *so* not a programmer!)