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.