December 29, 2018
Here is the piece I contributed to the Sounding Nature project on Cities and Memory:
https://clyp.it/btdilbxd
It is a reworking of an audio file called ‘093 SOUTH AFRICA savannah polyrhythms’. As someone who spent part of their childhood in South Africa, the bird sounds in the source recording are very familiar to me: most particularly the distinctive monotonous call of Streptopelia capicola, the Ring-necked Dove, or, as I used to call it, the Cape Turtle Dove, the name given in the edition of Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa that I owned at the time. In the current edition of Roberts the call is transliterated as ‘work harder’, but in the older volume it is given in Afrikaans as ‘werk stadig’ which, given the slightly harsher sound of that language, actually works rather better.
I always thought ‘werk stadig’ meant ‘work steadily’ but it seems a more accurate translation would be ‘work slowly’. Whichever way: for several years now I have been working steadily, or slowly, through a process of learning the SuperCollider programming language. This composition is to some extent a study in that language: yet another attempt to use livecoding approaches as a means to develop a fixed piece. New ideas in this work include FFT as a means of cleaning up the original recording, and the use of a Routine to script JITLib objects in time.
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September 1, 2018
A short interview that Reverb Magazine did with me at the Sheffield Algorave 01/09/2018 – talking about combining livecoding, gamelan samples, and trumpet playing.
https://youtu.be/wX51frpG0TY
July 13, 2018
Once again happily proving to myself how possible it is to work with open-source software on basic hardware. Just upgraded to Ubuntu Studio 18.04 on a refurb 11" Dell Inspiron netbook, and built SuperCollider 3.9.3 from source. Here’s an algorave-ish test track made using this setup:
https://clyp.it/5d3lo4na
Some new code idioms:
Plazy({Pseq((0..15).scramble,4)}).repeat(inf)
is easier to type than
Pn(Plazy({Pseq((0..15).scramble,4)}))
and similarly
Pseq([2,6,4,7],inf).stutter(32)
instead of
Pstutter(32, Pseq([2,6,4,7],inf))
also
Pseq((0..15).scramble,inf).clump(3)
April 21, 2018
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.
The sound world inside this unusual structure is distinctive. I took some recordings (available on freesound.org, or they will be once the finish uploading), that I am going to be using in a livecoded SuperCollider improvisation this Monday during one of the ‘Sonic Nights’ series at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where staff and students diffuse new electroacoustic works on a multi-channel sound system. If it seems practical, I may stream the performance as well.
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April 15, 2018
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. A compromise, perhaps, between the raw and the cooked.
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April 12, 2018
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! In recent work I have been looking to find a way to respond in code to live human improvisations: this session turned into more of an algorave-ish groove built up from mechanical trumpet sounds, over which Anne-Liis worked with the voice. Even so, this was quite succesful. I hope to do more playing with other people along these lines.
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February 16, 2018
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.
Below, a more-or-less unedited trial run of some new stuff tonight: specifically, a collection of samples made purely from mechanical sounds of my trumpet, close-miked: springs, valve noise, slide pops and so forth.
https://youtu.be/7Yud8TjJMP0
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July 14, 2017
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.
Here’s the poster for a workshop I’ll be giving at UPH, that will take in a livecoding demo and a performance of Steadily-Stop! alongside an analysis of Antichthon.
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May 27, 2017
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. Now to push it a little harder…
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March 8, 2017
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. I’ve evolved some similar ideas myself, perhaps little a less organised and more hacky. For interest, I’ve put my current setup files with comments on sccode.org and also a wee example of the kind of code I use.
Admittedly, some of this won’t make sense without the particular arrangement of samples and loops that I use. I’ve recently hit upon the idea of using an array of 32 different drum samples organised roughly in the following pattern:
00 a bass drum sound 01 hi hat 02 a snare 03 a different hi hat (or other hit) 04 a different bass drum sound … etc
That way, I can make a basic un-ta-ka-ta beat just by stepping through all 32, or segments thereof:
Pseq(~arrayOfHits, inf) Pseq(~arrayOfHits[4..7], inf)
I’ve also discovered some really quite good longer patterns with this layout, using Pslide:
Pslide(~arrayOfHits,inf,4,3)
Guess we’ll see how all of this sounds at the rather unravy time of 0800 GMT next Friday!
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