res·tor·a·tion [noun]
– the return of something to a former or original state. (Canadian Oxford Dictionary, Second Edition)
– the process of restoring a building, work of art, etc. to its original condition. (Oxford Dictionary of English, Third Edition)
The Legacy Project A few years ago, I was hired as a VR consultant, (initially) to restore the audio for Char Davies' two pioneering immersive artworks, Osmose (1995) and Ephémère (1998).
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Recently I was doing more experiments in lightweight binaural spatialization for VR. Using the Ambisonic Toolkit (aka ATK), in SuperCollider, I implemented a binaural mixer for arbitrary number of 3D sources that includes Doppler shift and a faked reverb cue as audio sources move further away.
Here’s a quick test, with some spaceship-like sounds whizzing past (mostly from side to side, because the effect is more obvious). Listen with headphones if possible:
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I’ve recently taken on a few more of the Disquiet Junto weekly musical/audio challenges.
Last week’s project used a very technical Oulipian-style constraint.
Disquiet Junto Project 0097: Ford Madox Ford Page 99 Remix
This week’s project takes as its source a comment attributed to the author Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.
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After a long span of lots of hard work (more about that in the coming month) but no performances, I had not one but two gigs this week, performing with my co-conspirators from the wú:: Collective, Alex and Roger.
Announcement of the WeArt SubverJam.
First, on Wednesday, we took part in the SubverJam session (in polite company, referred to as a New Media Art event), as part of the closing of the 2013 WeArt Festival.
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…but try to avoid doing any harm to your mother’s back.
For this piece, I took a map showing a small portion of the San Andreas fault, and mapped the fault lines into melodic and harmonic lines. The map was randomly assigned to me (see details of this 73rd Disquiet Junto project below). I programmed the score and instruments in SuperCollider, recorded three complete takes in real time, and finally mixed them together.
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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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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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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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