Next month I have a concert that is being planned at Le Bourg in Lausanne. Le Bourg was a cinema that closed some years ago and was transformed into a Café-Théâtre. I’ll say more about the upcoming event soon.
As it was a cinema, it’s a great place for projecting visuals and I want to take this chance to setup my first “visual installation”. I use Processing so I’m coding in Java… and I realize that my code starts looking like a piece of crap. I’ve been focused on visual rendering rather than modelisation I guess.
I’ve got different renderings but the main process is simple: I get the frequency spectrum of the incoming audio signal (using the Sonia library), it returns an array of values which correspond to the amplitude of frequency bands. For each value I draw an object for which the shape, position and transparency change depending on sound. The color is picked from an image so it’s easy to control the set of colors. It never gives the same results thanks to some random settings.
I hope I’ll manage to complete that work before the event. At least I have a friend who’s ok to give me his laptop for running the Processing patch during the concert.
In January I went fishing in Akashi, close to Kobe. Don’t believe I’m a good fisherman, it was the first time I fished and I only managed to catch one very small fish in 3 hours! While I was fishing I started hearing a strident sound… I wondered who the hell was doing it… the Yaki Imo man!! “Yaki Imo” means baked sweet potato. During winter the Yaki Imo man drives a light truck with cooking equipement carried on the back. The strident sound comes from the log-fired oven. And normally the vendor sings “ya-ki imo…ishiyakiimo” to announce his presence (actually it’s a tape recording that loops). People run to it as they hear it!
I still have some old k7 tapes at my parents’ house. Some I recorded 15 years ago and some older from the 60’s which belonged to my parents… This medium is completely obsolete nowadays.
I even found some recordings I did with my best friend when I was around 14 years old. We used a Revox tape recorder and recorded many instruments: drums, piano, african percussions and even synth sounds using midi program on a Mac. We were trying to do hip-hop! And the result was quite… bizarre.
The way we record music has dramatically changed. We’re now in the digital age and the production cycle is getting shorter and shorter thanks to computers. But I’m sure some people are still using vintage tools… just because they love them. For instance Jérôme Noetinger uses a Revox on stage, not as a recorder but as a mechanical object for making electro-acoustic sounds.
Mario is an international icon and it’s funny to see how people reinterpret the myth. Here is a beautiful drawing of Mario (with the Princess who’s been giving him a lot of work through all these years!) by José “Emroca” Flores.
Mario is a source of inspiration musically too. XOC, a guy from Sacramento, has covered the complete sountrack of Super Mario World. Excellent stuff! I chose a track that fits the image above.
(Copy/paste from Wikipedia) Circuit bending is the creative short-circuiting of low voltage, battery-powered electronic audio devices such as guitar effects, children’s toys and small synthesizers to create new musical instruments and sound generators.
If you miss the 8-bit sound of your old beloved NES, then you should like this track by Maru…
Maru: Fairy tale confusion
Maru and USK have created Portalenz, one of the top chip tunes group in Japan. They use gameboys and bent instruments (TI speak & spell for instance) on stage. Rock on!
The best way to control music softwares (Ableton Live for instance) is definitely midi controllers. But they are often poorly designed compare to Playstation-like game controllers. So I wanted to try using a game controller for controlling Ableton Live. I bought one and started looking for an interface that would get data from the USB port, map data to midi and then send it to Live (or any midi-enabled software). The first product I found was junXion by Steim. It covers all my needs but costs 75 Euros (old version for 25 Euros). I kept searching and eventually found a max/msp patch that basically does the same as the first version of junXion: MultiControl. The Max/MSP runtime (it’s free) needs to be installed for running the patch.
Plug the USB controller.
Launch the MultiControl patch.
Press/move the controller’s buttons, the patch detects the action and assign the control to a midi channel. Press all the buttons! There are only 16 midi channels that can be assigned… x/y controls take 2 channels. Be careful, if you first press the button #2, it will be assigned to the first line, then if you press the button #1 it will be assigned to the first line as well. Do it in the right order.
For each control assign a unique midi channel (by default they are all assigned to midi channel 1/1). In the screenshot I’ve chosen 5/1, 5/2, 5/3, etc.
Launch your DAW (Digital Audio Worstation), in your midi settings check that MidiControl is detected.
Select the “Midi learn” mode in the DAW, select a component to control via midi, press a controller’s button… you’re done!
For the “We Are All Photographers Now!” exhibition (see my previous post), I could have chosen one of the 2 pictures below that show people taking photos in funny positions. I won’t submit them because the quality of the original is not so good (the resolution is too low so I can hardly improve them). I took both of them at the Kiyomizu Dera temple (my favourite one!) in Kyoto in 2002, not the same day though.
There is currently an exhibition called “We Are All Photographers Now!” at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne (where I live) and anyone can participate to it by sending a picture through the exhibition’s website. Photos are projected onto the walls of the museum. This project shows through this interactive installation that digital tools such as cameras, cell-phones, internet sharing sites, etc. are greatly impacting the world of photography.
Today I’ve submitted the picture below. Why did I choose this one? Because this is one of the very few pictures I’ve got on which the people look at the camera. I always feel guilty of taking people’s eyes as if I was trying to steal their minds. I like portraits but I’m very bad at it. Moreover in this picture, you see the kid telling a nice “Fuck” to me! Haha! So now it’s my turn to forward it to people at the exhibition! I’m the 24,107th contributor to upload a photo…
