Show announcement.
Last week was a busy one! After Tuesday’s Moritz/Insectotròpics event, on Thursday I had another concert with the Barcelona Laptop Orchestra – this time at l'Auditori, in Sala 2 (Oriol Martorell). There wasn’t enough advance publicity, and we ended up very (very!) far from filling the 600-seat venue, but it was a great experience nonetheless. It was fun to be behind the scenes at such a large and professionally-run venue.
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All abuzz about Insectotròpics and the wú Collective! From the hands of Insectotròpics' painter Xanu.
This past Tuesday we were invited, by the Insectotròpics theatre troupe, to participate in an event presenting the Programa Suport a la Creació 2013 (production grants) from FiraTàrrega (an international performing and street arts festival in Tàrrega, Catalunya). The event was held at Barcelona’s beautiful Fàbrica Moritz (historical brewery), recently redesigned by architect Jean Nouvel.
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I finally managed to put together a video of my live coding performance at Niu. Enjoy! (that is, if you have 23 minutes to kill)
2nd annual “Live Coding Sessions” evening at Niu, on March 22, 2013
Coding was done in [SuperCollider](http://supercollider.github.io) 3.6, and I set myself the constraint of only using the most basic building blocks of sound: sine waves (as oscillators, LFOs, envelopes, even as arpeggiators driving patterns of scale degrees).
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El Teatrillu (a Catalan diminutive of teatre, meaning: “little theatre”) is software for the performing arts. It’s an application, built on top of openFrameworks, that I’ve been working on with the other members of the wú:: collective. Alex and Roger had already created the first version of this software – a mix of interactive theatre, live stop-motion animation, puppeteering and digital sleight of hand – when I came along last summer and asked if I could join the party.
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A nice new video of our January Phonos concert is available now on Youtube (thanks, Sònia!).
Since then, we had a more intimate and playful performance (February 8) at a small art space called Niu – it went down really well (maybe drinks helped – audience and/or performers ;-)). We performed three pieces, including extended and more improvisatorial versions of CliX ReduX and Six Pianos (which didn’t use pianos at all this time, instead Hammond organs, electric guitar/bass and a few other funky things).
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Barcelona Laptop Orchestra performing Cage’s ‘Variations II’, with remote contributions (and Skype presence, on an iPad on the pedestal) by developer William Brent. (Photo: Álvaro Sarasúa)
We had our Phonos concert last Thursday (January 31), and in spite of not being 100% prepared – in spite of a big final-week push – I think it was a success. Probably 30-40 people attended in the “sala polivalent” at the UPF, and they were treated to a very complex setup and six very different pieces.
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This project started from the recording of a clock. I recorded our kitchen clock, but unfortunately it ended up a bit noisier than I’d have liked. There’s some of hiss in there (more obvious once you layer dozens of versions of it!), and there might be the odd muffled street noise. Okay, so I don’t have a silent recording studio. Texture, yeah, that’s what I call it. (-;
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Have been working slavishly on several pieces for the Barcelona Laptop Orchestra. Among them, an optical-recognition piece that took Steve Reich’s Six Pianos as its starting point (or – more accurately – it’s ultimate goal, and we’re not quite there yet!), and a piece we call CliX ReduX, inspired by Ge Wang and the Princeton Laptop Orchestra’s original CliX.
We have our Phonos concert coming up next Thursday (January 31, 2013), at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
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I recorded myself dropping and shaking ice in a pint glass. Then I used this single sample (of about 7 seconds) to produce all the sounds (percussion, drones, semi-pitched) in this track. Produced entirely in SuperCollider.
Produced for Disquiet Junto project 0053.
Instructions: Please record the sound of an ice cube rattling in a glass, and make something of it.
Background: Longtime participants in, and observers of, the Disquiet Junto series will recognize this single sentence as the very first Disquiet Junto project, the same one that launched the series on the first Thursday of 2012.
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This fall I joined the Barcelona Laptop Orchestra, a technically-saavy musical ensemble founded by folks from the Sonology Group at ESMUC (l’Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya) and the Music Technology Group at UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra). They also allow a few of us non-affiliated “outsiders” to join, thankfully…
If you’re up for a bit of Catalan practice, you can read this great blog post/interview about us (essentially, trying to answer the question: “what is a laptop orchestra?
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