Meta-Trombone Revisited

The recent release of version 2.0 of Mobius has spurred me to redesign my meta-trombone Bidule patch.  Since I can have both the new and the old version in the same patch, my matrix mixer (and some of the most complex patching) can be eliminated by using both versions of the looper. 

The first looper will be the one that is “played” by trombone notes.  This is what I mean by playing the looper:

• trombone notes will trigger the loop playback from a position determined by the note value
• and/or trombone notes will change the playback rate relative to the note played
• and the amplitude of the loop will follow the trombone performance by using an envelope follower.

I’ll have a second instance of Mobius down the line that will resample the output of the first looper in addition to (or in the absence of) any incoming audio.  Effects will be applied after audio in, after the envelope follower and after the resampling looper.  I’ve yet to determine exactly what those effects will be, but the success of my vocal set patch leads me to consider a rather minimalist approach.

Speaking of minimalism, I’ve been listening to a lot of Steve Reich these days and I’d like to incorporate some phasing pattern play into my set for my upcoming performance at this year’s Y2K festival.  One way to quickly create some interesting phasing composition is to capture a loop to several tracks at once and then trim some of the tracks by a predetermined amount.  This can be easily accomplished with a script and I’ve been toying with some ideas along those lines. 

Something else to which I’ve given some consideration is the development of midi effects to insert on the midi notes interpreted from the trombone performance.  Some midi effects that would be easy to implement:

• midi note delay;
• arpeggiator;
• remapper (to specific key signature);
• transposer.

It will be interesting to see what impact these effects will have on the loop playback of the first looper.  Another idea is to remap notes to parameter selection or note velocity to parameter value.

Another significant change is that I’ve acquired hardware to interpret midi notes from trombone performance.  I’ve decided to go with the Sonuus I2M instead of my previously discussed approach mainly because I was wasting too much time try to make the ultrasonic sensor work properly.  Bottom line, it wasn’t that interesting and I’d rather be playing music. My current plan is to use a contact microphone to feed audio to the I2M and to have a gate on the midi notes it generates in Bidule that I’ll activate with a footswitch.

I’ll also be designing performance software for the iOS as I intend to attach an iPod touch to the trombone to serve as my heads-up display for various system states (updated wirelessly with OSC).  I’ll be controlling the iPod with a Bluetooth page-turning footswitch.  One pedal on the footswitch will change between different screens and the other pedal will activate an action available on that screen.  For instance, on the notation screen, pressing the action pedal will display a new melodic line (either algorithmically generated or randomly chosen from previously composed fragments).

Now all I have to do is build it (and they will come…  or more accurately, I will go to them).

New Album Release: sans jamais ni demain

I’ve just released a new album on Bandcamp: sans jamais ni demain. It’s a collection of experimental electronic music and recent explorations. Nothing grandiose, but I felt the need to update my bandcamp and share what I’ve been working on. A little more details about the songs:

the longing for repetition

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”
---Milan Kundera

This is a song I made for CT-One Minute. All sounds are derived from a 10-second bass clarinet phrase sample that can be downloaded freely from the Philharmonia Orchestra's website. The sample was played back at various playback rates, forward and backward, through various envelopes using the Samplewiz sampler on my iPod. This performance was recorded in one take with all looping and effects done in samplewiz. No further editing or effects except for copy and pasting the beginning at the end to bring closure to the piece.
I approached samplewiz as a livelooper, since, in "note hold" mode, every note on the keyboard can be seen as a track on a multi-track looper (each with a different playback rate). For this piece, I used the forward and backwards loop settings in the wave window, so things get go sound a bit different. I added some delay and messed with the envelope and it started to sound nice. Once I had a good bed of asynchronous loops, I left "note hold" by tapping rather than swiping the control box (this kept the held notes). I then changed the settings around and played over the loops without "overdubbing".
Samplewiz is quite powerful... You can also change the loop start and end points in between notes to add variety, without affecting the notes that are already being held.

tutus de chemin

This is the soundtrack for a short film I made in a weekend with my wife. I started with a vocal recording of my wife that I sent through Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch. The resulting audio file was played back as a looop in Bidule. I sent the audio to a pitch shifting plug-in (I believe I was using PitchWheel at the time) and then to a midi gate group and finally to the Mobius looper. I performed the sounds two-handed on my Trigger Finger. One hand was controlling a fader that was assigned to pitch shifting and the other was triggering pads to control the midi gate (the note envelope) and various functions in Mobius.

Three of a kind

This piece started out as an assignment for a course in Electroacoustic composition I took at SFU a few years ago.  The sound source was a homemade instrument, but everything was mangled and cut-up.  This piece features heavy use of the short loop fabrication technique familiar to readers of this blog.  I used Acid to assemble everything and add some effect automation throughout the piece.

le train

This is the soundtrack to a short animation film I made last year.  I used Soundgrain to isolate parts of the original sound's spectrum and used that software to create loops that I mixed  while recording.  I think this musical cutup is well-matched with the visual cutup it was meant to accompany.

Game music

This songs was made using my soon to be released iOS app: BreakOSC!  This app is a game that sends OSC messages based on in-game events.  In this case, when the ball hit blue and green bricks, Bidule triggered four instances of iZotope's Iris.  The paddle served as a cross-fader and mixed all those sounds together.  The results were sent to a generous amount of reverb courtesy of Audio Damage's Eos.

sans jamais ni demain

Another composition I made for the aforementionned course in electroacoustic composiiton I took at SFU.  The only sound source for this piece is a recording of myself reading an old poem I wrote in high-school.  The slow moving textures were made by isolating parts of those words, slowing them down and layering them over each other to create very long notes of varying pitch that fade in and out over time.  The more rythmic stuff I made using a now familiar technique.

July 8 2011

This piece is a recording of a live (from my basement) performance of what will one day become my meta-trombone.  A short loop is created at the top (what is heard twice in the beginning) and then altered in different ways determined by trombone performance.

Twice through the looking glass

This song was also made for CT-One Minute using the exact same sound source as the longing of repetition. This time, however, I used Iris to change the character of the sound and created two different sound patches.  I made two recordings with each of these patches by triggering the sounds with my new Pulse controller.  My three-month old daughter also took part by adding her own surface hitting contributions, making this our first father-daugther collaboration.  Once I had made these two recordings, I brought them in Bidule and placed them into Audio file players.  The amplitude of output of each player was controlled via faders on my Trigger Finger and the result was recorded to file.

Metatrombone

Here is a little beat I created recently using my homemade instrument as a sound source and exploring my previously discussed cut-up technique with Mobius and Bidule.



What is significant with this recording is that I varied the pitch on the playback of my sound source using my flight-simulator joystick.  This opens up some interesting possibilities, since I could easily hack my joystick to create my very own music controller.
Using the game pad’s electronics as an interface to the computer, I intend to replace the pads, buttons and joysticks with various sensors and triggers that I will install on my trombone.  My aim is to gain access to some of the powerful sound processing techniques that I have learned over the summer, and deploy them live to extend the range of performance of the trombone.
In doing this, I’m following in the footsteps of Nicolas Collins, whose excellent book Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking is the definite guide to making things go beep. His book is mostly devoted to creating unique electronic instruments, but a later chapter discusses transforming a game controller into a custom computer music controller.
Collins has also built a novel electronic musical instrument from an old beat-up trombone.

His “trombone-propelled electronics” is certainly an interesting approach, but quite far from what I intend to do.  For one thing, Collins is not a trombone player and uses the horn (equipped with sensors) as a controller and as resonator, since the speaker is placed above the mouthpiece and the sound travels through the instrument before exiting from the bell.  In fact, this is something that Collins exploits very well in this composition when he uses long notes and moves the slide around so that different partials are emphasized by the instrument.  Regardless, what I find most inspiring are the visuals: the trombone full of sensors that captures performance information (the placement of the slide, for instance) that is used to modulate the parameters of effects and settings.  Also, that keypad is pretty slick.

Another source of inspiration is Matthew Burtner’s Metasaxophone. 

The idea of using sensors placed on an instrument to enhance its performance is definitely what I’m looking to do.

New composition

Here’s a new musique concrète composition I’ve put together using only sounds from my previously discussed home-made instrument.  It’s not much, but you can dance to it…



My next musical project is an album of electro-acoustic music based on scenes from horror movies.  I’ve personally been marked by a series of traumatic horror scenes in my youth, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.  The idea is to create each songs using sounds made from objects found in the scene in question.  I’m hoping that tying my songs to some emotionally charged memories will help them succeed and provide some thematic unity to the whole work.  I’m open to suggestions, if you want to nominate your favourite scene.

Learning stuff online

The web is a great resource when it comes to learning stuff. Google has become my default reference library for everything from DIY projects to black holes. But as much as I like the immediacy of information that the web provides, the lack of coherent presentation and the ease with which one enquiry can lead to another is not always conducive to in-depth learning. One of my defining traits as a person is that I find everything interesting. The web’s very structure panders to my tendency to follow every thread to its next logical point. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time on Wikipedia going from one article to the next (starting with Pluto and ending with spaghetti) will know what I mean.
One strategy I’ve developed over the years to make sure my focus stays in one place long enough to learn something is to take a course.  I’ve taken a number of courses (university and otherwise) in a number of subjects and I will continue to do so.  A course brings me the structure I would otherwise lack.  Scheduled class time and assignments deadlines ensure that I will put in the work, do the reading and show up to learn…  otherwise I could easily get interested in something else (or, worse, spend my time writing poetry).  I find that the time requirements for a single course are usually manageable and allow me plenty of free time to explore other interests as they arise.
This summer I’m taking my first online course. It’s a course in electro-acoustic composition from Simon-Frasier University.  Here is the first composition I produced for this course:



It’s more of a study than a full-out creative outburst…  but I still like it.  I made used of my previously mentioned loop-making technique to create this song using only vocal sound source.
This online learning experience has been very positive so far. In fact, I’m thinking of taking more online courses in the future.
One concern I have is getting my money’s worth. The web is notorious for education scams luring suckers to spend good money on digitized copies of public domain books. Although I think I’m a rather sophisticated web reader and I wouldn’t fall for most of the scams out there, I’m sure there are sophisticated thieves devising sophisticated scams. In the words of an old friend who has since disappeared: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.
Another issue is finding courses.  It’s easy enough to find courses on topics that already interest me.  For instant, I was able to find the following music courses without too much trouble:
Music for the Media
Sound Design for the Electronic Musician
Sound Design
All expensive, but certainly interesting.  The web page for the second one features an endorsement apparently from the professor of my current course. 
But, what about all the stuff out there that might interest me, even though I don’t currently know that it does/might/will?  What am I missing out on?  How do I discover more online courses on topics I’m not even looking for?  Do I have to read through every university website?  Maybe.  I can also use Einztein.
Einztein (http://einztein.com/) is a directory of freely available course materials from universities worldwide.  Browsing through Einztein, I’ve created a shortlist of 27 courses that I’d like to take on subjects as varied as Astronomy (outside the solar system), Navigation, Calculus, Information, News writing, Filmmaking, Photography, contemporary arts, jazz composition, typography, ear training, screenwriting and more (including furniture making).
What materials you get vary from course to course and from university to university.  Sometimes, you get only a syllabus, a reading list and assignments.  Sometimes, you get video of every lecture.  You never know what you're going to get.  It’s like a box of chocolates.  For the mind.
The course I’m most excited about is one on Douglas Hofstadter’s Gõdel, Escher, Bach from MIT.  I can’t wait to read that wonderful book once again with the aid of someone who’s put considerably more time than I’ll ever have learning the concepts it presents.  Good times.

Building an instrument

An approach to electro-acoustic music that fascinates me is to create an instrument from scratch to generate new sounds. I see this as continuation of the exploration into sound that motivated Varèse to compose for percussion ensembles and that lead John Cage to compose for prepared piano. Through the works of these composers, music becomes less about the pleasing presentation of notes and more about the aesthetics possibilities of sound itself.

Diego Stocco

Diego Stocco is a more current inspiration for my adventure into instrument building. His bassoforte (video below) is a particularly effective demonstration of the possibilities available to the composer who creates his own instrument. Through careful design, Stocco is able to produce a myriad of sounds that retain a similar character and give the composition a sense of unity, in part because they all come from the same instrument.

Of course, this is a hybrid instrument. Stocco has placed several microphones of different types around and on his instrument. The signals from these microphones are mixed and processed by his nearby laptop to produce the actual sounds of the instrument. Combining different microphone types and placement with different processing gives him plenty of options to choose from to design his sounds. His approach is perhaps better understood by watching his music from a tree performance.

Instrument #1

My first attempt at instrument building is rather modest in comparison, but that reflects not so much my means as my aims. Unlike Stocco, I don’t intend to record a song by performing all its parts one after the other. Rather, I’ll record several sessions where I coax out as many varied sounds as possible from my instrument. These recordings will become the sound source for musique concrète manipulations and other processing to produce an electro-acoustic composition.

The design is fairly simple. I made a resonator box from scrap wood and inserted some nails at each end. I wrapped two types of metal wires around those nails to create strings. A movable bridge adjusts the pitch of the strings. I’ve installed a homemade contact microphone to the soundboard to capture the various sounds of this instrument.

Sounds

Sounds can be made by hitting any wooden surface, the strings or the nails. I can strum or rub the strings with my fingers or with objects. I can also use a piece of wood to “bow” the open end of the box to produce a complex (and aggressive) sound. I can also buzz my lips into a small hole at the other end of the instrument (as a jug player would do) to produce a sound that has a certain brass instrument quality to it.

Here are some examples of these sounds:

Next steps

Over the next couple weeks, I’ll be recording more sounds and editing and processing them into a composition.

Musique concrète with Bidule and Mobius

For a recent composition, I wanted to create a short rhythmic loop by combining small fragments of a sound event I recorded. This project was inspired by the works of early musique concrète composers who would edit their tape recordings into unrecognizable rhythms and gestures.
Editing sounds has since moved beyond the necessity of cutting and splicing tape, but the tedium of using a sound editor to cut and paste short sound fragments can yield results that lack the spontaneity of a musical performance. I would rather perform my loop, cutting and pasting sounds and creating my rhythm on the fly. My vision was to reduce the cutting and pasting to a single key press that would incorporate the selected sound automatically into the loop, while both the sound source and the resulting loop played back in real time.

Software

To do this I needed some specialized tools. The first was a looper that would allow me to grab short even portions of incoming audio. I also needed a way to monitor both the loop and the sound source and to record my results. I found I could accomplish all of this by using Mobius and Bidule.
Mobius is a free software looper (stand alone and plug-in) developed by Jeff Larson as an emulation of Gibson’s Echoplex Digital Pro, but it has since taken a life of its own. It is free and its user community is welcoming and immensely resourceful.
Plogue’s Bidule is a modular audio environment like no other. It allows the user to create complex patches between bidules; little boxes in the software’s interface that stand in for VST effects, VST instruments, file players or recorders, Rewire applications, midi and audio devices, oscillators, filters and pretty much anything else that a computer musician might need. Bidule is demoware and costs 95$ (CAD). However, the trial licence lasts for a couple of months, so you’ll have plenty of time to try it out and to appreciate its usefulness.

Setting up

The first thing I did was to setup a patch in Bidule containing an audio device (my antiquated UA-100), an audio file player, a file recorder, a Trigger Finger midi interface and Mobius. I loaded my source sound into the file player and looped its playback.
I patched the output of the file player to the left channel of my UA-100’s audio out and to the audio input of Mobius. I also patched the midi out of the Trigger Finger to the midi input of Mobius. Then, I patched the output of Mobius into the file recorder and the right channel of the UA-100’s audio out. This way, wearing headphones, I heard the sound source in my left ear and my rhythmic loop in my right ear.

Next, I assigned some of Mobius’ commands to the Trigger Finger’s pads. For this session, I only used Record, SUS Substitute and Undo. I also assigned Secondary Feedback to a slider control on the Trigger Finger. Here’s what those commands do:

Record
Press once to start the loop and another time to end recording.

SUS Substitute
This command substitutes a part of the loop with incoming audio for as long as the key is pressed.

Undo
This cancels the last action.

Secondary Feedback
When Substitute is used, Mobius records over a portion of the loop. If secondary feedback is set to 127, the audio from that portion of the loop will remain at the same volume. If secondary feedback is set to 0, it will completely disappear from the loop. Anything else will mix the sounds accordingly.

Next I had to tweak a few of Mobius’ parameters. Mobius is quite complex and I only scratch the surface of its capabilities with this experiment. One of the settings I had to change was the 8ths per Cycle. In Mobius-speak, an 8ths is the number of divisions the software will make in the recorded loop. Let says I record a 1 second loop and the 8ths is the set to 10. In this case, Mobius will create cue points for the loop at every 0.10 second. If the quantize setting is set to Subcycle, then some of Mobius’ commands (such as SUS Substitute) will only begin and end on those cue points yielding instant rhythmic madness.

Playing the loop

I monitored the source sound playing continuously in the file player through the left channel of my headphones. I started by pressing Record once to start recording the loop, ending it with another press of Record. I automatically heard the result in the right channel of my headphones. I had two asynchronous loops going and I started substituting small parts of that newly created loop using SUS Substitute to insert elements of the source sound. All substitutions began and ended on a cue point (8ths) and lasted for as long as I pressed the command’s pad. I experimented with using various levels of Secondary Feedback to retain, at lower amplitude, the sounds over which the substitution took place, using the occasional Undo to reverse an unwanted change.

The results

This is the sound source I recorded. It’s a ten second performance of fingers rubbing on a plastic shower wall.


Here are examples of loops that were created with this method:




Here is a loop that I created using the same method, but with the original sound source replaced by the first loop above. A bit of a remix…

Thoughts for further experimentation

The obvious next step would be to introduce some complexity to the Bidule patch. For instance, I could send the output of the file player to several effects (filters or pitch shifters and so on) instead of sending it straight to Mobius. The output of these individual effects could be sent to a mixer before reaching Mobius’ input. The faders on that mixer could be assigned to an external controller to select how much (if any) of the effected versions of the sound source make it to the looper. I could play those faders with my hands while triggering the Substitute function with a foot pedal. I would also like to try changing the 8ths value while the loop is playing. If this is possible, it would greatly increase the rhythmic diversity of the loop and introduce some polyrhythmic opportunities.