During a residency project at STEIM from the 16th to the 22nd of October 2007, I worked on Immediate Interactive Improvisation. In principle, this system picks up music and generates immediately new music, which matches – in some way – the input. The word ‘music’ in this description is essential, as the system doesn’t process sound samples (frequencies, amplitudes…), but musical entities (notes, rhythms…) according to musical algorithms (scales, chords…). The program is built in the Synthedit environment on pc over a period of 3 years. It includes an intelligent ‘pitch tracking’ module. The recognized musical notes can be played back on 4 synchronized delay levels, thus creating associative melodies. The rhythm and timing can either be based on the input or on the built in ‘metronome’ with a variable random function.

Since the beginning of 2007 I used the system not only for experiments in a studio setting, but also in performances with a pc, a microphone and a clarinet. The STEIM residency project proved to be very valuable for new developments in this direction. Detailed information of experienced performers of electronic music like Michel Waisvisz, Robert van Heumen, Daniel Schromo and Takuro Mizuta Lippit was extremely useful. Experiments with the Lisa system of STEIM inspired me to include a module with which complex settings of the program can be changed with a single keystroke on a midi controller. With these options it will be possible to play longer pieces with varying structure.

The exchange of ideas and collaboration with my residency colleagues Sabine Vogel and Alex Nowitz were of great value too. They worked on projects for sensor controlled live sampling in Lisa and Junction, but as a flute player Sabine and I experienced exactly the same problems using a wind instrument and a computer at the same time. All three of us worked with clear musical objectives in mind. At the end of the week we could make some interesting recordings with three musicians and two brand new musical applications.

More information about my continuing work on this system and about other artistic experiments, you can find on http://www.jazzperiments.com > Music > Experiments log.

Photo: Sabine Vogel and Alex Nowitz using live sampling and immediate interactive improvisation.
Recording: Sabine Vogel – voice + flute + computer, Alex Nowitz – voice, Teun de Lange – clarinet + computer:
http://www.jazzperiments.com/site/mp3/sabine_alex_teun.mp3

In 2005, Seamus Cater (laptop/wacom tablet), Nate Wooley (trumpet) and Robert van Heumen (laptop/controllers) played together with Jack Wright (saxophone) at the Kraakgeluiden concert series. This collaboration was very ad-hoc, without preparation. A year later Nate returned, bringing Audrey Chen (cello/voice/analog synth) and Lionel Kaplan (trumpet) to play as Silo. The second set in this DNK concert was Nate, Audrey, Seamus and Robert. Again this was a completely improvised set.

Both concerts were succesfull, but the idea came up to spend more time together to develop some kind of structure to guide the improvisation.

So we got into STEIM’s studio 1 from October 10 – 15, planning to present the initial results at a STEIM concert on Oct 12, and the final presentation at DNK on Monday Oct 15.
The constraints for this research were:

• 3 acoustic intruments: Nate on trumpet, Audrey on cello & voice, Seamus on harmonica (yes: Seamus switched instruments!);
• 1 electronic instrument (Robert on laptop), mainly sampling the acoustic instruments;
• describing global structures in terms of soundworlds and transitions between them.

The final structures that were defined are:

• Noise / high tones / point-to-pitch: starting with a more or less constant noisy texture, until Seamus would come in with these crazy high pitches from the harmonica – we would all join him there, until someone starts with injecting discrete short sounds – again followed by others, slowly transforming the short sounds to sustained pitches, ending in a romantic way
• Breathing layers: everyone in his own ‘breathing’ tempo playing textural sounds – trying not to pay attention to others wrt breath lengths – so these would sometimes coincide, but usually be independent of eachother; somewhere during this process more rythmical ‘breaths’ would emerge, building up to some kind of polyrythmical structure; going back to the original breaths, that would end it.

nutshell:

I came to STEIM from Oct 1st to Oct 15th to develop new music for my wearable music system, robotcowboy, using gamepads, yet ended up focusing more on musical exploration and creating song structure/sequencing objects in PureData as well as wiimote application for guitar gesture control.

backstory – robotcowboy project synopsis:

The robotcowboy project is my attempt at using a computer for live musical performance. No laptop but a screen-less wearable computer running linux and PureData. By wearing all of the computational hardware on my person and building tactile controllers, I’m trying to embody the sound back into the person making the music. The man and machine become a symbiotic organism in which the machine responds to my control signals and generates sound which I respond to in like. I want to be able to run around and jump and idiot when I play and a laptop wont let me do it …
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I came to STEIM invited by Dan Wilcox to make an artistic residence from October the 1^st to Oct the 15^th. The idea of my project was to create circuit electronics with integrated drawings in the printed boards.The fist attempt of my project is the drawing of a landscape with the schematic of a simple volume meter that was created for a sound installation in Linköping, Sweden.

Fascinated by the aesthetics of electronic circuit boards, it was until i start building my custom circuit electronics, that i got familiar with the PCB etching technique. For this project i used laminates coated with UV sensitive photoresist. To produce a working printed circuit board the track pattern is imaged on the laminate using UV light, the photoresist is then developed and acid chemicals is used later to etch away the unrequired copper.

At STEIM i was able to develop two projects:

1. Feedback installation : Two audio amplifiers ( one with a medieval image of Jesus Christ and the other from a demon) are connected together to build a sound installation that works with the principles of audio feedback both in a technical and a conceptual way.
2. An alternative printed board for Michel Waisvisz cracklebox: Build with the depiction of a Medusa, the new cracklebox is designed to be played by worms.

I would like to thank the people from STEIM (especially to Takuro Mizuta who helped me even on weekends!) for all his help and support. I must say that the outcome of this project it’s going be the construction of a feedback installation ( with 6 audio amplifiers) for a live performance plus some alternative designs for different custom electronics.

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