STEIM's Project Blog

My name is Marlon Barrios-Solano and I created dance-tech.net

This is a link to video that explains the residency.

In late February of 2008, I came to STEIM to perform the audiovisual performance TONEWHEELS (along with Dutch graphic designer Sara Kolster), and to work on some specific hardware issues I was having with the equipment I’ve been developing for the performance.

About TONEWHEELS:

TONEWHEELS is an experiment in converting graphical imagery to sound, inspired by some of the pioneering 20th Century electronic music inventions. Transparent tonewheels with repeating patterns are spun over light-sensitive electronic circuitry to produce sound and light pulsations and textures, while projected graphical loops and textures add richness to the visual environment. This all-analog set is performed entirely live without the use of computers, using only overhead projectors as light source, performance interface and audience display. In this way, TONEWHEELS aims to open up the “black box” of electronic music and video by exposing the working processes of the performance for the audience to see.

Tonewheels website

[more…]

STEIM studio residency Jan.23.-31. / performance at puntWG Jan.30.+31.

“…of cannibals” (text by Götz Rogge)

is a project that combines visual projection with theatrical speech using the active role of a given space resonance. The spoken word (and other sounds) is simply recorded, played back and rerecorded until it has desolved into an entropy of musical overtones. The „I’m sitting in a room“ thing as Joel Ryan rightly called it, referring to the great conceptual piece by Alvin Lucier of 1970; another prominent example of the transformative role in resonance is Karlheinz Stockhausen’s „Solo for Melody Instrument and Feedback Loop“ (1966).

For the last ten years I have been researching the flexibility of an acoustic entropy, often in collaboration with the composer and musician Olaf Rupp(BeastieShopBeach). Setups have been varying in number of sound sources and even entered the environment of a forest („whisper“, 2005 Hörspaziergang Saarbrücken).

At STEIM we directed our focus on creating a setup that would sustain a live performance; turn the space into the instrument (at first glance this seems easy, but it literally takes days to probe into the unique reverberation).

the words -

The truely poetic motiv of information as spoken word dissolving into the abstractions of overtones – and viceversa – has something of self-propagating or self-devouring. In order not simply to exhibit a known effect, but contextualize a metaphorical meaning into our performance, we adapted parts of an essay by Michel de Montaigne „Of Cannibals“ from 1562 (frenchp.404/engl.p.285). This text from the early modern period describes the social life of natives in the new world (Brazil) as a true paradise. There is no lying, treason, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, indulgence; these ‘barbarians’ kill and eat their enemies for revenge, but in a completely rational matter. Montaigne, who had never been to the new world himself, tried to mirror the attrocities of his own culture through the purity of these “primitive people”. By today’s standard of a waning morality his essay is often quoted for the failure of relativism, by conservative philosophers and the church. For us this is a good enough reason to pull the peg from the drain of ideology and feed the vortex of our performance with different sorts of propaganda and their disillusions.

Naturally during our week at STEIM we were occupied mainly with elaborating the technical audio set up. Thus, for the two nights at puntWG, besides Montaigne we ended up with a rather odd mix of speech by L.F.Céline, M.Houellebesq, three letters of racketeers, Transhumanism and a lottery of 1000€ … Now - not only from an occult point of view - this assemblage of text still needs a bit of research.

“nothing remains; only my thought” - german racketeers: pure disillusion

the sound -

The audio equipment consisted of two microphones (Neumann), two speakers (Macki), a Nord Modular and a laptop running LiSa/junXion in combination with several midi controllers. Obviously the quality of microphone and speakers are crucial to the outcome of a defined feed-back. Still, more sophistication makes it often harder to handle. I have experimented on mono set-ups that played along beautifully for days with a good resonace without the need of interference. At puntWG we had to balance certain frequencies permanently, sometimes feeling helpless without a realtime analyser. The equalizer being the microtonal keys of the instrument: a damping down or raising of a certain frequency can cause other signals - after several generations of entropy - to overmodulate. That means one has to almost foresee the slightest tendencies. Most subtle was the EQing of the mics.

Joel Ryan made a good suggestion of using narrow pitch shifters instead of an equalizer (billiard with eggs?), but we couldn’t try that one anymore.

Alltogether: there were so many influences on the set up that someone could easily write a PhD.

the visuals -

The projection creates an athmosphere of contemplation in colour, structure and rythm. Rather than adapting the rereproduction theme, I chose a simple multilayering of stills in permanent succession, that produces a flow of highly abstract, subtle moving tableaux. It supports the somewhat organic process of a hidden nature. The images consist of close ups of an elemantal world - plants, stones, water - dispersed by historical and contemporary visions of paradise, to keep a level for sudden association.

Technically this is realised in Keyworx.

the performance -

The presentation “of cannibals” is flexible between installation and show. The two nights at puntWG had a duration from 60-80min plus the 15min of entrance with sounds at the bar, barking of dogs and singing in the audience was incorporated and build a first hum for the beginning.

The space had been cleared but for the microphones and the speakers to an empty playground. Texts were in French, Dutch, English and German. Happily the wonderful french artist Frédéric le Junter supported us with his obsession for singing, and incorporated some of his smaller obscure sound objects. In addition Tobias Klein played contra-bass clarinet, so we transformed a big variety of singing, lamenting, shouting, hissing and lecturing in the diverse languages together with sounds spread into the room. The multilayering of speech rose in times to noisy clusters that spread again into an ambient flow. It seemed some people felt slightly intimidated (the dogs for sure) and couldn’t grasp the fatally humorous side of the presentation…

To this kind of ritualistic act, precise timing is everything, but most important for future presentations is a further stabilized reverb, that allows for full concentration on the semi-theatrical performance.

Thanks to STEIM for supporting the creation.

to view a 15min sample of the show please click here / quicktime7 req.

Götz Rogge - www.halqa.de

Tobias Klein - www.tobiasklein.nl

Frédéric le Junter - www.lejunter.net

download of the full text as pdf - cannibalsteim

Developed prototype of HID footswitch with Takuro Mizuta Lippit. Basis: STEIM junXion board. USB-powered. GNU/Linux software interface in C. Essentially similar to a MIDI footswitch I had been abusing by parsing highly verbose MIDI messages in order to distill integers. HID-based version eliminates the overhead and provides greater flexibility.

february 1, 2008
Götz Rogge and i spent 6 days at STEIM to develop a feedback setup for our ‘of cannibals’ performance/installation. The aim was to create an environment of acoustic entropy. We sampled shorter or longer fragments of speech (and all accidental noise along with them), re-recording them while they played back and repeating that process until the speech was lost in the room resonance. The next fragment would be recorded and treated likewise.
We adjusted the placement of microphones between the speakers, the distance of microphones to the speech source, recording and playback levels … that took a while. The crucial part was that of EQing. Certain frequencies would become very dominant after a while and untreated they would drown all the rest. The ratio of dominant frequencies was mainly 2:3:4 and so on. But when mellowing some dominant frequency too drastically, another, sometimes totally unexpected frequency would sometimes appear.
The whole set-up was at the same time very simple and very complex…
After our days at STEIM, we were joined by Frédéric le Junter for two days of rehearsal at puntWG where we performed the thing on january 30 and 31. Many thanks to STEIM for the use of rooms and material!
Tobias Klein

I have been working on this project for over one year now. During my residency at STEIM in September 2007, I was focusing on the sound design, hoewever, there is still some testing and improvements on the pattern recognition algorithms to be done. The project is now assuming its final shape and a complete (A/V/Text) documentation is provided at:

http://www.ciglar.mur.at/3rd_pole.html

..and here a short resume:

“3rd. Pole” - a Composition Performed via Gestural Cues

“3rd. Pole” is a piece for a dancer and a motion tracking system. The aim was to develop a gesture recognition system, so the dancer would be able to s elect the musical material accompanying his choreographic actions in real-time through a predefined vocabulary of full-body gestures. In a dance performance, there are usually 2 elements (visual and audible) that need to be arranged and put into a contrasting or harmonizing etc. context. The title “3rd. Pole” should indicate the inclusion of a third, a haptic component contributed by an electronic current running through the dancer’s body, which is conditioned through the content of his choreography. Gestural cues induce the sound but there is also a second instance of it – the sound in its primary (the electronic form), which is in direct contact with the performer’s body, namely through a cable, he is holding in his mouth. This enables a different corporal perception and interpretation of the caused sound, since now the performer does not only have the audible but also a haptic reference - i.e. pain, caused by the electric current - for the choice of his following actions. The performer is exposed to a situation where he is in absolute decision power and needs to consider and outbalance all three elements (poles). Therefore, also the process of composition or better to say, the final arrangement of pre-composed material is only possible in real time, since we are interested in an alternative arrangement of the choreographic and musical progression. A pre-composed form or sequence of events would not make any sense, apart from satisfying possible sadistic tendencies of the composer.

The main focus of my residency was to experiment with multi-channel audio treatments with the goal of adding them to the performance environment that I regularly perform with, Metamorphic_Gestures. I have been working on this series of patches for several years, and have actually done a few multi-channel performances, usually with an 8 channel sound system. Unfortunately, It always feels very rushed and somehow I inevitably loose the time and attention to really focus on the issues of spatialization and instead just end up moving point sources around the various speakers. I have worked on multi-channel pieces in the studio before, and wanted to try and incorporate some of the more complex gestures and textures into the live setting.
The first thing I tested out was the individual panning of overlapping grains in a granular process. I created this subpatch:

It gives you an x-y graphical display to control of both angle and distance for each of the 8 subgrains (as opposed to using the panner to move the mix of the 8 grains). Here is a schematic of the signal flow:

(Actually, I just realized that this schematic is a little incorrect - the volume and pan on each grain at the right should actually be connected to all 8 of the output channels - too many lines to draw though…). I also added in a function to automatically trigger a move to a new position over a given interpolation time.

The results were pretty amazing (I’m sure this has all been done before, but for me it was a very new experience). All of a sudden the sound became more dynamic and somehow alive. Also, changing the size of the grain had an interesting effect which is lost in the stereo reduction. This got me thinking about what other types of audio treatments could benefit from this type of lower-level multi-channel routing.

The next thing I tried was a series of filtering patches I use, which basically create chord clusters of up to 32 resonant filters each tuned to a specific frequency. In the past the output of each filter has been added together and then spatialized. I had a similar reaction when I started to individually pan the filters in the clusters. It is exactly the same audio signal, but when it is diffused this way it achieves a very different and enveloping psychoacoustic effect. With these processes there is an element of uncertainty about which notes/frequences will be excited by a given impulse. When you include the uncertainty of where that sound will then come from it adds another dimension to the process. Very fun.

For two days in the second week I was fortunate to be joined by UK-based composer and performer Lawrence Williams. We had discussed working on a series of improvisations using contact microphones attached to his saxophone and various other instruments he uses (dictaphone, melodica, tuner/metronome, various bottles, etc).

We had some very interesting results, many of which used some of the new spatialization patches I had been working on. He was also very interested in working with feedback inside of the sax, which he can control by pressing or releasing keys effectively changing the size of the space that is feeding back. I will post a few excerpts from our experiments here (http://www.konradkaczmarek.com/steim).
In all it was a very successful residency, and I found the working environment there well suited for this kind creative experimentation. I look forward to using this new arsenal of spatialization tools in my upcoming performances. Thanks again!

Well, it hasn’t been quite a year yet. But in the past 9 months i have suffered through 3 ear infections and 2 ruptured ear drums (same ear drum, twice). Needless to say this put a bit of a damper on sound making for the past 9 months.
Sorry for my blogging delay…..

I initially went to STEIM to work with sensors for a dance / sound collaboration that I have been involved with for the past 8 years or so, the Pima Group. At the time I was on the fence about incorporating laptop into live performance do to just how boring, sterile, and canned it can come off, so I was hoping my visit to STEIM could help me overcome this hangup. After working (jet lagged) in my studio with the Junxion Box for a few days, i began to see the potential for using movement to control parameters of sound for performance.
Though a few problems arose.

1. I had no dancer or context to practice this potential.

2. I was unable to obtain a Junxion Box for the long term! I came home without being able to purchase one, make one, ect

(Perhaps i was not loud enough in my interest but it led me to another place all together)

After Frank’s demonstration with touch screens and Junxion i had a better idea of incorporating laptop back into my live set up without the added stigma of the normal, boring, email checking laptop performance.
When i returned to philadelphia, i purchased 2 - 6 inch usb touch screens from a car electronics outlet and began experimenting.
I had a friend build me a custom case for the touch screens, which actually came out quite solid. I have been incorporating the laptop with a circuit bent drum machine i built as well as a couple of homemade / bent pedals and voice. I have been using Junxion to control Spongefork and most of the material used is from these homemade pedals, drum machines, and sometimes double bass.
The result has been documented on a few short run releases under the name “embarker” in a variety of formats on heat retention records, deep fried tapes, breathmint records, and soon, malleable records.
I intend to work on a few installations using Junxion and HID’s in 2008 and possibly a few tours. (hopefully returning to STEIM at some point)
thanks*

www.sendhelp.org

I’m a composer and musician and I like to use electronics to add unpredictability to my works. For a number of years now I’ve been achieving this using feedbacking microcontrollers (active rather than interactive). Until recently those controllers would communicate with computers and software. But I slightly got fed up with “digital sound” (not with digital control), because regardless of your platform or software all computers sound the same, i.e. the sound of the D/A converters of your sound card (and there isn’t much character difference in them). So I wanted to move to analog sound processing (though I realize with the electronic parts of today this is a relative concept). But how do you control analog interfaces with a microcontroller, without either complex mechanical contraptions or very limited relay circuitry? I went for the easy way out: digital pots…and had to conclude early on that it wouldn’t work as there was no way to avoid signal noise with them. I needed electrical separation between the microcontroller and the analog sound circuitry. One look at my Morley volume pedal (which uses optocoupling to avoid the usual pot noise volume pedals are plagued with) and I knew optocoupling would be the way to go. And STEIM seemed to be the right place for R&D on the subject.

I was glad STEIM seemed to think my work was worth a residency on their premises…The idea was to use a microcontroller (basic stamp, I’m an old fashioned guy, never got beyond linear programming) to control a light source and have that light source “read” by an LDR controlling different stages of the analog circuitry. The first problem that occurred was that on a very simple level the microcontroller cannot multitask, i.e. I could have one light source doing things, but meanwhile couldn’t do anything else: useless. I found the answer to this problem in the 74HC595 (8-bit serial or parallel shift register). And the beauty of the 74HC595 is that you can daisy chain them, meaning that with just 3 of the 16 basic stamp pins I could control n times 8 LEDs. This meant countless combination possibilities, with certain LEDs staying on while others were changing, and meanwhile I could use other pins of the controller to do other things. From there on it was “easy”, the only thing I had to research was the calibration of the LDRs, on both ends: I had to find out the effect of the LEDs (and researched colour combinations) and call upon Ohm’s law to adjust the resistance of the LDRs. After one week I had a satisfying prototype to take home and to turn into a first version, to be used in a new work commissioned by Ensemble Intégrales. In this work, which is for three instruments, two of the instruments go through a separate ring modulator, the pitch of which is controlled by LEDs (7 per ring modulator), another set of LEDs controls the dry/wet balance of each channel (very simple, the LDRs acting as balance pots on the signal input). A third LDR (part of an RC circuit) send its reading back into the microcontroller as a random seed, guaranteeing ever changing, unpredictable LED patterns and determining MIDI CC data that the controller sends to the overall reverb machine.

It all fits snugly in a little box and works like a charm (I tested it during a solo concert I gave at the Experimentelle Musik Festival in Munich early December, and it is now off to Ensemble Intégrales to be used in the premiere of the new work in Hamburg at the end of January).

I do confess that it still isn’t full analog sound processing: there’s the digital overall reverb and the ring modulators aren’t real ring modulators, they’re based on Tim Escobedo’s “Thing Modulator” (cf. http://www.geocities.com/tpe123/folkurban/fuzz/snippets.html ) built around the LMC567 (cmos), and a cmos IC can hardly be said to be analog. Still it doesn’t sound like computer processing and it sounds close enough to a real ring modulator to fool any old modernist. But, now that the concept has proven to be working I’m in the process of building a second version, which will be way more analog as it will control a fully analog wah and a vintage Hammond B3 spring reverb.

You can always contact me if you like to know more about schematics, coding, etc…though everything is fairly straightforward and can easily be found online. (guy(at)guydebievre.org)

Download a small movie clip here.

I just did the orientation week in steim in december, and was glad to be able already then to put some ideas in practice. My project consists of building a midi ratchet for a piece I will write for the percussion-laptop trio Electronic Hammer. (www.electronichammer.com). My idea is to be able to capture its motoric motion both through its speed and through the contact of the attack of the wooden flange against each tooth of the gearwheel. When the ratchet’s mechanism is put in motion, each tooth will therefore be able to trigger different parameters for processing of events, samples and images.
In these beggining stages of the research, I simply placed a Wii controler on one end of the rathet (which in this case measures 45 cms) to capture the differences in speed with one of the wii’s 3 accelerometers. The data received is used to control the pitch and speed of a prerecorded sample of a ratchet’s loud KLACK. This was done both with lisa and junXion. In order to have the possibiliy to trigger the data with or without the actual acoustic sound attack of the ratchet, I put a sponge on one side of the wooden flange, so that one can choose between spinning clockwise or anticlockwise to either hear only electronic or both the acoustic and the sample simultaneously.
You can watch this simple yet effective example in this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Honmhlt2trU

The next step will be to build in an Arduino BT box to capture each attack.

Juan Felipe Waller