New Album: Thin white layers

Early this year I was delighted to be approached by Norah Lorway to contribute a release to her netlabel Xylem Records, specialising in Ambient and Algorithmic music. I was just about finishing RPM2013 and was also planning a major studio upgrade! The weather was also turning colder again…with snow forecast just about everywhere!

The studio upgrades were to Ableton Live 9 from live 8, to a new 64 bit laptop (I base my studio around laptops rather than desktops). Equipment ordered, the first track recorded was Sine Waves, which was based on an idea I had on my HD for a while.

The new computer arrived, Live 9 64 bit installed, Max 6.1 installed. Only snag in this set up was I also like Csound, and unfortunately nobody has written a csound~ external that supports 64 bit, so the old laptop stays in the studio, running csound, which its perfectly happy doing. This is one of the most synthetic of my albums of late, though I use extensive use of Granular sampling, there isn’t much in the way of field recordings, apart from the church bells on Shopland, theres a huge amount of FM synthesis from Csound, Abletons Operator, and several patches of mine in Max, only a couple of tracks make use of old school analogue subtractive synthesis (Sine Waves, Cold and Soft)

By this time in mid March it was getting very cold indeed! This was giving me very musical ideas. I resisted sampling ice cracking and the sound of fresh snow being trodden, but concentrated on my response on all the cold, whiteness and greyness. The cold rolled on past Easter, the weekend before was very snowy where I live, and I took the above pictures.

The coldest tracks to me Shopland, Soft, The Naze all came from around this time, The Naze featured a sample of David Reinstein (A friend) vocalising down a trombone, which I granular sampled,  as did the title track “Thin white layers over earth colours” which came directly from the photographs I had taken. FInally the weather got warmer and I brought the album to a close, and here it is:-

How sound art is continuous with music

This blog is the result of my thoughts on the subject, which Ive now tried to clarify, in my own head at least, prompted by a conversation with composer and musicologist Lauren Redhead

Before I start:

A common definition of sound art (from wikipedia) : “Sound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus. There are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists.”

A common definition of music “An often-cited definition of music, coined by Edgard Varèse, is that it is “organized sound” (Goldman 1961, 133)

I’ve chosen the above definition because its the broadest and the most inclusive of all genres.

My thoughts on how the two disciplines (if they are truly two separate disciplines) have such a symbiosis are:

1. Both sound art and music require listening- this sounds statement of obvious but my point is both require a form of production and intent to communicate this to at least one other person- and that production can take many forms; extreme lo-fi to extreme state-of-art hi-fi and everything inbetween but what appears must be considered (even if its content is based on chance, or anything else)

2. Traditional musical instruments can produce sound art as well as music: Instruments taken out traditional timbrel and musical context can produce sound art and used as part of sound art- an example of this might be taking a well-known instrument, reducing its musical content to a bare minimum- one note for example, then concentrating on its timbrel qualities and producing a piece whereby such timbrel effects are showcased and thus replace where notes and other musical conventions may be.

3. Sound art can also be music: with modern technology it is possible to give pitched note values to sounds not made by musical instruments. Before samplers many composers made extensive use of the tape recorder to give non-musical sounds a musical voice, and these techniques have not been restricted to musique concrete either- the early BBC radiophonic workshop made extensive use of recorded sounds, used in a pop context- heres an example of a musical fill-in by John baker, (link here) with the source sound being water poured from a cider bottle!

4. Art demands form: both music and sound art require organisation- composition or improvisation- weather its notated or made on the spot- it requires decisions to be made about whats going to happen or system which allocates chance into a role (or several roles).

5. Form demands intent:  Both music and sound art require a reason somewhere- it needn’t be a subject, and it can be a discovery- something that the artist has found and wishes to present- at which point the presentation and it context dictate the form.

6. Both sound art and music can be exploratory in nature- in the writing and the performance and as such can be presented as an experiment and run as an experiment if so required

7. Sound art and music can co-exist in the same piece, at the same time: its entirely possible to add musical content to a sound art piece and vice-versa. This is a tradition going back to the Italian Futurists and back to music drama which contains sound effects as well as music- which has a very long tradition

Analogue Synth or digital synth?

Today I’ve conducted a small scale experiment via Twitter and Facebook-

asking people if they thought this sound recording was either a digital synth or an analogue synth.

The majority of people came to the conclusion that this was an analogue synth unit. Two people was sure it was a digital synth.

I can now reveal…

It is in fact a max/MSP patch running in Ableton! (in the form of Max For live). Its a crude patch- a single sine oscillator (cycle~) being modulated by another as an LFO (low frequency oscillator, again cycle~) with two controls, one for rate, the other for depth. There are no filters in this patch, and its monophonic. However what I did was to assign those virtual knobs to real knobs on a control surface then played them as I would with an analogue monosynth, altering LFO rate and depth whilst holding down a key.

Why I did this experiment

I am interested in finding out if what we perceive is down to the intrinsic clinical quality of a synthesizer or how its manipulated/ played. The original concept of a synthesizer is that it is essentially a blank canvas on which we make imagined sounds. The reality was (and still is) that with the best intentions, each make of synth and synthesis approach have their own characteristics, and as such, those characteristics influence how a synth is used, so I chose a very typical approach for an analogue monosynth only played it on a fairly neutral max patch (which the max for live version does some nice accurate oscillator and filter effects) and recorded the result.

Conclusion

I think from this very loose informal experiment that the context and means by which a synthesizer is used is perhaps more important than what it actually is. However there still resides these characteristics; one perceptive listener came to the correct conclusion of a digital synth due the the volume of the higher frequencies- something not present with analogue systems- also, of course, the very capricious nature of analogue systems can produce all sorts of unpredictable effects, that just wouldnt happen with a digital system, even with the use of randomness (which is never truly random in a digital domain).

 

 

And now for something completely different!

First piece of 2013! Ive had a lot of artistic success in 2012 but I had reached the point of knowing how to do what I wanted to do, and after two albums in one year Im getting bored with what Ive been doing:-

Soo- firstly i wanted to explore granular synthesis more- this meant some extended Max/MSP patching- and in particular I became interested in doing some short “portrait” pieces which centered on singular sound sources. This is a standard art school technique but it is useful for exploring new approaches.

First of these was cymbals: A par of crash cymbals, played once, with sticks, granulated and played with synthesizer keyboard:

The next was to do the same, but with an acoustic guitar, and this time to abandon my usual tools of composition; this time there would be no crescendi, beats, big swells etc. What I had been listening to was late 60s/ early 70s psychedelia , especially Pink Floyd’s Meddle album, and thinking about deconstructing that sound and reconstructing it in a new, electroacoustic context; this means no song, lyrics, chord progressions in the usual sense. It will possibly come across as an extended ‘feel’ if you like. I had no idea if this would even work, but already I can build on my findings from this piece to further experiments..

Csound for Live

I had been meaning to experiment with this for some time; Audivation have  brought out some Max for Live based plugins to embed Csound into Ableton Live. These are cross platform and basically you need Live 8.2+ max for live and Csound running on your computer. In fact you need 3 applications aside from Ableton and Max; Csound (free), Csound~ external object (free), QuteCsound (front end, free).

Then, of course, Max for Live and Ableton Live.

You can then load the plugins in the say way you would any Max for Live patches.

There are some free plugins, which is what ive started with; then the collection divides into six-packs, selected by theme; FM Synth Collection, Granular, Physical Modelling etc. They’re very cheap- each six pack is £4.95 and the entire collection can be purchased for £37!

Installation

Installation was a nightmare, made worse by having no previous Csound experience. Although the website provides the three essentials for installation (Csound, Csound~ and Qutesound) it makes no reference that for this to work Qutesound has to be running in the background as well as Ableton. Whats more the Csound~ object must match Qutesound- So if Qutesound Double is used the Csound~ has to be Csound~_double. This took a fair amount of googling and testing to get this to work, and really this should be on the website especially bearing in mind this product is about spreading understanding and use of Csound further; theres nothing more off putting than incomplete installation guides.

Also found that if I installed Csound 5.18 then the plugin would load in Ableton- and promptly crashed, taking Ableton with it. At the moment Im running Csound 5.13 and its working fine, in due course I will endeavour to find out what the issue with Csound 5.18 is, it could well be my previous configuration.

In use

Ive installed masters collection 1&2,  Theres a good cross section of stuff here; theres a brilliant but super-CPU heavy additive 10-harmonic synth Additive10, by Ian McCurdy which is a stunning tool ,but boy does it drink CPU! Normallay on my powerful laptop I can run 8 softsynths in Ableton and CPU rarely goes over 35-40% leaving headroom for lots of other stuff, but one of my keyboard improvisations tipped the meter to 65%! So this, I think, will be a studio tool as opposed to a live tool, unless I use it exclusively

Dr. Richard Boulanger, is represented with 5 synths and one effect here. These are all superb and very usable out of the box. I’ve put together a short demo here of using the synths Pearl and Copper

Click here for Audioboo link 

My comments are Im very pleased with the sound but there are artifacts in the upper registers which I will endeavour to code out or EQ out in any mix where Im likely to use these.

Update- Another demo, this time using the other three- Blue, Emerald and Taupe

Click here

Learning Csound

One of the great things with this is the plugins can show the source code, so its a great help in learning Csound (am already familiar with Max) so that this workflow can be extended into my own (future) Csound patches; basically Max for Live acts as a host, sending control data to Csound and receiving audio back, which is then passed onto Ableton- with the advantages of not having to bother with Jack or Soundflower and being able to automate from Ableton- this level of integration means in a developing piece I can control Csound just like any other synth/effect making mixes much more straightforward and live use more stable.

I look forward to experimenting more with this format

New Piece: Havengore Point

Havengore point is the northern end of Havengore island on the river Havengore creek. It is surrounded by MOD firing ranges but at the weekend its host to pleasure boating, mostly sailing and the wildlife.

I have memories of sleeping on board and hearing the lanyards slap against the masts when the wind blew- at the end of the piece you can hear field recordings of this happening.

This piece is about evoking that memory; a guitar imitates the sound, followed by the real thing. This music is also very linear- its made entirely of the chord Em/D and its (few) variations from both guitar and electric piano- but the basis is always this chord- so its its pretty flat, which goes with the terrain of flat marshland and sea walls that this piece is about.

 

Update: SAF 2012 and Hilltown festival

Sonic Arts Forum 2012- Leeds University

Have returned from another very successful SAF, unveiling my piece for the cool fusion project, which went rather well. As per usual a very eclectic group of composers, musicians, computer programmers and installation artists, all of whom, use sound and technology as part of their art from. There were some stunning works on display this year; Frederico Macedo diffused a stunning three movement piano acousmatic piece in quad, Some very interesting field recordings by Paul Wilson on a recent China, an electroacoustic work by David Hindemarsh, which expressed how being blind affected the way he perceives sounds, and in particular, acoustic shadows, where an object partially masks another sound (which is what happens if you partially cover one ear). There was also a lovely multi-tracked 4 violin piece by Franscesco Sani using scordatura tuning which built up to a frenzied crescendo.

The innovators were equally interesting:

Patrick McGlynn came over from Ireland to show the App he has developed for the Ipad that’s exploits its tactile-data system to drive another music device such as a computer or synth. He demonstrated by getting it to drive a laptop running a Tibetan Bowl sample. \the gestures he made on the Ipad refected what was coming out of the speakers; so if he gently stroked it, you got a ringing sound, with dynamics, if he tapped his fingers you got tapping sounds, and crucially, if you did both, you got both. Hes still working on this, but the prototype proved to be highly popular. He sees this could control all manner of things from audio stuff to entire lighting rigs

Anton Jidkov has also developed an Ipad application, this time for mixing sound channels, and like Patricks, its very tactileness allows the possibilites of some really performance based diffusion, away from a conventional mixer.

Simon Bradley has developed an application for the Iphone which uses the GPS location data to stream audio. The idea of this is to create a map using google maps and have different sound centres then what you heard depended on your location- so if you’re between two points you would hear a mix of both, if you moved closer to one of them you would hear more of one than the other and so on. This has been tested on a soundwalk in yourkshire, and whilst still in the development process, the initial test was successful. This has a huge range of possible uses from both the artistic, the practical for use in outdoor ancient monuments- it’s a step up from traditional audio guides because the system is not dependant on the person following a specific route! It also has gaming possibilites for orienteering, paintball etc.

Both the above have serious commercial potential.

There is an improvisation slot in the programme, which allowed me and Chrissie Caulfield, playing an octave violin through a 1 watt (yes 1!!) fender amp-

 

 

 

 

 

A 10 minute clip of the improvisation here courtesy of Paul Wilson

 

 

All in all a very stimulating Saturday with technical innovators mixing with electronic composers- I have plans to bring this event to firstsite, Colchester, next year- this is potentially popular with London-based practitioners of sound art, electronic music and technical innovators

In other news, once again I have a piece included in this years Hilltown Festival, in Castlepollard, Ireland- This is the second time in two successive years I’ve had a piece featured, and yet again Im unable to attend, this year due to cool fusion commitments! However you can hear the piece online via the original blog here:

Setting up

Any questions?