VIX Sound+Light+Motion

My first week in New York city has been so busy that I have not had much time to do a retrospective of my eventful week, from August 15th to 22nd at EMPAC in Troy, NY.

I am happy to report that I was successful in creating a “visual music” presentation on 3 screens with one of the aspects controlled in real time using gesture control.

Adafruit shipped my Arduino boards to EMPAC and I was able to research on the internet and receive help from others in the workshop to understand how to make the system work. I chose the infra-red distance sensor and used information from the Adafruit website to help me program the board. My trusty Ubuntu computer handled all of the Arduino code uploading while I ran the Isadora program on the Macbook.

My performance was thrilling for me, but I was inspired and informed by the work that everyone else in the class showed on Saturday, August 21, 2010.

The first work we saw was by Joff, a theatre instructor who has a company that puts on plays in Second Life. The work included a grassy field with images of human figures that were short videos. The figures would fade in, seem to be sleeping, then move in some way, then fade out. We were invited to interact with the figures, but I found it fascinating just to watch them.

It was eerie and engaging as an installation and Joff might develop it further as a performance or to be more interactive. (continue reading…)

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I was very honoured to be asked to produce the film that was shown as the visual component of this concert in the Walter Phillips Gallery, located in the Banff Centre for the Arts.

Pauline Oliveros explained the concept and gave me freedom to develop the 20 minute film using the photos provided and my own digital artworks. Ms. Oliveros was inspired by President Obama’s speech in Cairo and the Codepink efforts to encourage peace by building three playgrounds in Gaza.  I obtained permission to use photos from the Codepink Flikr stream, with attribution, from:

Jean Stevens
National Media Coordinator
CODEPINK Women for Peace

The Codepink  projects are very worthy and I was proud to be able to support them and be associated with an initiative that is intended to bring people together to work for peace.  In addition to the photos of children and playground construction in Gaza, we used photos of American children playing in a playground provided by Ione.  She explained at the concert that she thought it was nice for them to play together. Ione was inspirational in the production of this film as she helped me to gain a more precise understanding of the concept of the musical work.

Many people complimented me on my work after the show and it will remain one of the highlights of my time in Banff. I did document the performance on video and the audio was recorded by the Banff Centre technicians, led by John DS Adams. At some point, I hope that my film, “A New Beginning: A Playground” will be shown during future concerts when Pauline and Ione perform this piece. When the audio is mixed, there are plans to produce a DVD with the soundtrack of the concert.  When it is complete, it will be available from the Deep Listening Institute site.

Tech Notes: All photographs and digital artworks were prepared in open source software, The Gimp. The film was created using Final Cut Studio on a Macintosh workstation owned by the Banff Centre.

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Chris Chafe, pictured left, has an office at the Banff Centre and I was completely impressed with his musicianship and improvising talent. I have been informed by Pauline Oliveros that:

Chris Chafe is the director of CCRMA at Stanford University. He is on sabbatical leave and is in residence at Banff Centre until September 2009.

While I was in Banff, he was involved in several Telematic concerts that involved Pauline Oliveros and Ione in the “Chris Chafe, Pauline Oliveros, Ione Trio”.

I was thrilled to find a Ubuntu Linux user and he told me that he was using an application called jacktrip, based on jackd to patch the Telematic communication over the internet.

I will talk more about this later, but I witnessed some very low latency musical interaction between Chris (in Toronto) and Pauline Oliveros and Ione in Banff. This concert could also be experienced live in Second Life, a virtual reality, on-line world. These mixed reality concerts, where avatars are watching concerts that the real person is playing in are a new experience for me.

After he returned to Banff, a rehearsal with Jonas, who I met in WA, and another musician I did not know, both  in NY state;  joined Chris and Pauline in Banff through the internet connection facilitated by jacktrip. They recorded in Banff using Ardour on Ubuntu Linux.

This is a really interesting area to explore in Linux and he will be an invaluable resource to help me develop my move into Open Source music. “The Chris Chafe Trio”, including Chris, Pauline and Ione,  also performed live in the Walter Philips Gallery in Banff and I produced the film that accompanied their musical performance. I will devote a post to this concert, and write much more about all of the exciting work that I was involved in supporting Fleck Fellow, Pauline Oliveros. While I was in Banff, I was too busy doing the work to write about my experiences. I did take photos and will be posting them as soon as I can.

Right now I am at an internet cafe in Calgary and I plan to start my journey home to Vancouver with stops in Banff, and Summerland. More photos and posts as soon as I have reliable internet. Thanks to Pauline Oliveros for the corrections.

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This past week, I have been involved in documenting the programming and rehearsals and finally, the recording of the audio for the musical quartet, EHRES. This is only one of the projects I have been involved in while I have been in Banff, and it has been very exciting to watch the MAX/MSP programmer, Ryan, work on creating a gesture control patch.

John DS Adams not only plays in the group, he was the recording engineer on a hugely complex session that included 36 tracks of recorded audio. I have lots of work to do editing the video and photos and  then editing them to the music that was recorded yesterday and today.  I should have some photos ready to post soon, but I want the group to see them first.

The next steps include processing the photos, editing the video, matching the visuals to the mixed audio and authoring a DVD.  I will be busy for a while doing this.

I have quoted some information about the ensemble sent to me by Norm Adams, composer, cellist and electronics player.

Exteme High Risk Entertainment System (EHRES)

EHRES is Pauline Oliveros, John DS Adams, Ione, and Norman Adams: a quartet of performers employing a groundbreaking system of acoustic and electronic interconnections for live performance. EHRES creates multilayered networks of connections allowing all sounds to be shared, processed and distributed to a multi-channel sound system.

The web of connections begins with the interaction of the artist’s immediate music making process. EHRES balances on the unique qualities of listening, intuition, emotion, timbre, and range that make their individual methods of music making present. Their web extends further into electronic sound, as the musicians process various signals, as the artists interact with one another’s acoustic and electronic sounds and as the sounds move through the performance space, via the immersive, eight channel speaker array.

Musical structures are created spontaneously within each of the performer’s instruments/systems and extends into the interconnections and interactions between the artists and the control of their systems.

EHRES has performed on the suddenlyLISTEN Series in Halifax, Nova Scotia; on the NUMUS Series in Waterloo, Ontario; and at The Lincoln Center Outdoor Festival in New York City.

Tech Notes: I have tagged this post as Open Source because all of the photos will be processed in Ubuntu Linux using various software. Ubuntu software handles RAW conversion with a Gimp plug-in or in RAW Studio.

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My trip to Banff is now confirmed. I will be riding my trusty Yamaha FJ 1200 to Banff to meet with Pauline Oliveros and Ione to document their residency. My goals include completely documenting the current residency with audio/video/still images and to work on the material that was recorded at the Fort Worden Cistern and the  Seattle concert to produce streaming promotional material.

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Tech Notes:  The facility at Banff does not have a Blu-ray DVD burner,  so I am considering purchasing one so I can author a completed DVD.  I am going to try to Google map my trip as it happens – I have embedded the code from Google, but I hope to power this through a wordpress plug-in.  Thanks to the plug-in maker, “MapPress makes it easy to insert Google Maps in WordPress posts and pages. By Chris Richardson.”

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