Progress

Over the last few days and during last week, Carla and I have been tackling getting control from the MIDI suit interface through movement. We rerecorded our samples to more of a melodic tone and listened to the affect of this. We then made the following judgements:

• We would play and control where each sample was mapped using Kontakt as a plug in in Max/MSP as the interface was easy to use and much more intuitive than both Max and Logic. (We overcame the problem of sample stealing by using the script editor (tip from Jonathon)).
• We have decreased the number of sample to use significantly in order to obtain more control over what movement triggers what samples.
• We then studied what movements triggered what range of MIDI values (we are using less than half our original amount of values) in order to map only one sample to each movements range (which was decreased from eight to four)
• We have observed there was less chance of a sample being triggered unintentionally (when meant to be standing still or through other movements) by not mapping the sample over the full range
• We discarded information coming from wrist twist because we observed that it was almost impossible to move the wrist without both twisting and tilting and activating the wrong sample
• Some of the values we were unsure what movement triggered them so we disregarded this aswell.

So at present we are only using 12 samples out of 128! However, in hindsight it would have been next to impossible to control each samples using the MIDI suit using this process and considering the length of the audio being used and that they were to be played linearly.

Over the week we have been thinking about Para Para dancing, a Japanese fad that the Ganguro girls often do. It involves a sequence of moves that are danced together in time to the beat. (We both thought it was absurd because the over the top way the girls dress is to create individuality but because they all do this it they really are just conforming anyway, doing a dance sequence simultaneously also does not promote individuality). Carla and I discussed contemporary dance and decided if we were to dance in a comtemporary style the outcome would be quite a confused one, in the same way as the ganguro girls style and para para dancing. Carla choreographed a short contemporary dance to use to do when in the suit in order to activate the samples. This included a few ideas from the story our samples were from.

We are interesting in making an experimental pop song and video. We have a mulitude of recordings now and we plan to abstract them far enough so to compose a piece of electroacoustic music to form the backing track to our vocal line. This is certainly very interesting to me and I showed Carla a few freeware programs to play with at home (SoundHack and SPEAR) we decided we would try and compose something individually and then bringing our ideas together to compose a completed piece. I am interested in the notion of displaying a transformation of sound or emulating the way it is a fad for Japanese girls to radically change image every few months using sounds. I intend to utilise either Simon Emmersons theory of 'mimetic discourse' or the use of musical motif to portray this.

Tomorrow we will record our vocal line by doing our dance in the suit in order to trigger the samples.

Alteration

On Wednesday Carla and I got our samples to playback using the suit successfully. The resulting sound was really cool but not what we wanted as the vocal line to our song. Mainly because of the lack of melodic range in the samples. We had a go at transposing the samples to create different pitches to each of the samples but the result didn't sound natural. After having a chat with Lamberto we decided to record the words in the samples but to different tones so that if they were played in succession they would form a melody. The interesting thing about it was that we could use the chopped up words or sometimes reversed words and sing it phonetically which would enhance the result with respect to our idea of singing a foreign language.

In our Performance with Technology session today, Jonathon mentioned that we could do a something similar but in a live performance. Where we would have a singer singing into a mic and the words could be played back jumbled up through speakers.

In relation to capturing our melody next week using the rerecorded samples and the MIDI suit, the combination of movements could either be random, or be intended. I personally think that the MIDI suit should be used in the same why as an instrument, so we spend a bit of time familiarising ourselves with what movements activate what samples and make an artistic decision as to what combination of movements should be used to form the melody- and also what of the question about the piece being played live? should probably be discussed.

Logic Sucks

Today Carla and I imported our samples into Logic, it was not easy and I'm finding logic increasingly unintuitive as it gets more advanced. We were shown how to map our samples onto logics sampler so all 128 span across the keyboard interface. We had a few problems with the pitch being altered but managed to sort them out successfully. We had a play around with some effects, however, we decided that the samples were far too small to apply effects individually to as we predicted the end result wouldn't run lyrically if the samples weren't clean. To solve the problem of the samples playing over the top of each other the sampler was set to MONO. Tomorrow we will set up the MIDI suit to input MIDI data into the sampler and attempt to record a vocal line into logic. Carla and I thought about incorporating a Para Para dance routine to generate the information from the MIDI suit.

I forsee that the vocal line could sound like a foreign language, however, perhaps we might rerecord it singing to a melody. This would solve the problem of different voices singing different words in the vocal line (which could sound odd) and the result would sound more 'musical'.

This is the first blog for an entire week. (Broken Computer) I will try and summarise!

On Tuesday Carla and I met at the VRU lab to discuss our collaborative project for the first time, after going through a few things about the assessment with Greg we wanted to get a few ideas down so we could make a start. Carla and I were both keen to get started right away as it is quite impossible to predict what direction a project of this sort would go in, and we thought it would be best if we did much experimentation and exploration within the time we had.

Our ideas started from Gregory suggesting we used Google to search a random word and see what came up. I am going to try and make a mind map to represent these ideas next time I am in the VRU lab and post it here to give a clearer picture how our ideas were developed.

Presently I have made the observation that our ideas have developed further since we started thinking about, and experimenting with, the technology. I am interested in reading into projects of a similar kind and how they were developed, mainly for inspiration. Greg suggests in the reading list: Digital Performance by Steve Dixon.

On Wednesday Carla and I met again at the VRU lab to play around with the motion capture suit. Carla had already worked with it previously so I had a go and I think its brilliant!! The information was in MIDI which could be very useful if we use any audio software like Logic. (of which I am almost familiar with)! We intend to use the MIDI data outputted by the suit to control audio samples etc. To program the information we looked at Modul8 software, however, we didn't find it very intuitive to use and its potential lies mostly with visual programming. We then had a chat with Jonathon and Mike who suggested we looked at using the sampler within Logic or Max/MSP. (Max Session with Jonathon today was very useful and I feel there is a lot we could do with Max for this project once we grasp how to use it properly!)

The audio material we want to use would form a new or foreign language, this idea stems from making a Japanese pop song and pop video. As neither of us can speak in Japanese we thought it would be interesting to use a 'language of our own' using words from a story written by Carla about Little Red Riding Hood (we felt that the story tied in morally with our initial Ganguro girls subject (see mind map (ytbp - yet to be posted!)))

On Thursday we met at the studio to record our material. Carla wrote out the story for me and to begin with we chose what words or series of words represented the story or sounded good phonetically and wrote them down to read in the recording. The recording ran rather smoothly and we got four takes of our words and phrases. Once read through normally and secondly with some crazy articulation (highly amusing!) from both of us. The second take was in order to give the future arrangement of the words and phrases more colour and sound more lyrical- like a Japanese pop song!

On Friday Carla and I aimed to edit the audio material into 128 samples. To do this we used Protools to select certain parts of the audio file and bounced down smaller files. We aimed to select the most interesting combinations of words and strange or alien sounding phonetics from the material. We even reversed a few phrases to create new words. We intend to use these samples as the lyrics for our Japanese pop song, the suit I mentioned towards the beginning of this post would control what order the samples are played - which we will aim to set up on monday. I think it would also be interesting to be able to control the speed of which the samples are played and the rate they were played back, because I can see a few problems if the samples were played back too fast the result wouldn't sound like dialogue. However, I am excited about the resulting sound! Carla expressed an interest in using sounds effects on the audio which could make it even more interesting. I certainly like the idea of being able to mould our samples into something that is likely to be unpredictable because of the nature of the selection from the information produced from the suit. Carla liked the idea of using the movement used to produce the arrangement in a performance that could appear in the video.

As yet we haven't decided whether we want to have a go at composing the backing track for our pop song ourselves or collaboration with someone else. (Carla mentioned she had a friend who might be interested in doing this).

Introduction

First post for my MA in Digital Arts in Performance. The Blog is intended to be used to keep a record of my progress on the programme.

Progress so far: Set up Blog! I have also set up accounts with googles docs and flickr to share photos and documents online.