Friday, April 29, 2011

Laxative Wow



All matter of madness in reading this one.

Image Play




A couple of non panorama images stiched into a panorama.

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Wave facts and some sound



The above image is from a drive from SB to p alt where I stopped at Denner to pick up a few bottles of wine and well, I had to sample and stare at the hills.

For waves which do not require a medium, such as light or gravity in general relativity

from wikipedia on doppler

and

The upper frequency limit in humans (approximately 20 kHz) is due to limitations of the middle ear, which acts as a low-pass filter. Ultrasonic hearing can occur if ultrasound is fed directly into the skull bone and reaches the cochlea through bone conduction without passing through the middle ear.

from wikipedia on ultrasound

some step sequenced filtered granulation on 2 cello samples
I am in the process of imagining how to make this a realtime application for a string piece. Even this long example of subtle variations on a 2 looped cello sounds, not more than 3 seconds each, is rather interesting. I am working out how I want to use this on a live signal and what to play with it. I sort of like some of the sounds and simply want to transcribe them, which may be the piece. I spent 3 hours listening to stuff like this yesterday, and really enjoyed it.

some more step sequenced filtered granulation on 2 cello samples


This is the room (studio E at CCRMA) where I spent Thursday making a piece in memory of Max Mathews who passed away at 84. It is an 8 channel piece that uses the smae technique heard in the above material, but on Max's stuff. (Daisy, Phasering Tensor Love, an interview and Max playing Chopin with the Radio Batton).



At the concert that I performed at CCRMA on Thursday evening (where I presented ToLEtFony) they played Numerology. I had not heard this piece before. I love it!!


This is an interesting collection of ">EA history videos.

3d sound via a cross talk filter.


an elegant machine

Drawingmachine by Eske Rex from Core77 on Vimeo.


Thursday, April 21, 2011

HD slo mo

Some New SuperCollider Ideas



Above is an image that I created on my phone while waiting for a concert to start at UCSB. It was a player piano concert and featured a work by Luke Thomas Taylor in support of his Qualification Exams. It was a very good and a very Luke piece. The drawing is a procedural drawing app where I build and erase layers. It is conceptually similar to this audio, only more free. Maybe the audio will be more free in a few days...

I have been remaking the same patch/audio program for 3 or so years on and off. This is my latest installment of an approach to granulation that affords me the automated control I wish. This version is made in SuperCollider (others have been in MaxMSP). What is significant in this latest iteration is that there are 4 short sounds that are repeated over and over and the what changes is the granulation. The sounds are passed through a series of 50 bandpass filters and are granulated with a rhythmic series that is ties to each of these granulations. The pattern starts together and spreads out before conforming again. Each of the four sounds have unique control parameters (actually they are regions that continually shift).They are sort of like step sequencers that move through a series of filters. I am happy that I was able to construct this so simply and elegantly after all these years of thinking about it. Also, there are some interesting sounds that I rather like.

SCidea1

SCidea2

I like this one best.....
SCidea3

and the idea applied to Roy Orbison.....
SCidea4

Monday, April 18, 2011

Classic Links


http://youtu.be/Kl6nsbaMv3w
http://www.horus-online.com/home.html


Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Abstract Woody


I watched a lot of Woody as a small child, Popeye as well. And while I did watch many other things, these are what I consider the classics that have had the greatest impact on my world view, aesthetically and pragmatically. The NYTimes say this
“Culhane essentially ‘hid’ his artful excursions in plain sight, letting them rush past too rapidly for the notice of most of his audience,” Mr. Klein writes in the 15-page article, titled “Woody Abstracted: Film Experiments in the Cartoons of Shamus Culhane.”
In the article Mr. Klein describes Mr. Culhane, who was credited in his work then as James Culhane, as a devotee of the avant-garde. He was influenced by the writings of Russian theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Mr. Klein writes, and spent evenings at the American Contemporary Gallery in Hollywood. There, he watched films by Fritz Lang and Jean Renoir, might have seen paintings by Oskar Fischinger and definitely “was inclined to wear a beret.”

Mr. Klein writes that one of (Culhane's) experiments was a two-second piece of an explosion in “Woody Dines Out,” from 1945. He finds the frames “improvised like visual music” in what Mr. Culhane acknowledged in his autobiography, “Talking Animals and Other People,” was an Eisenstein-inspired moment.

The longest such experimental sequence was in the seven-second steamroller smash-up in “The Loose Nut,” also from 1945. And, later in that cartoon, Woody is blown into an abstract configuration that Mr. Klein, in his article, calls “the convergence of animation and Soviet montage.”

Here is the abstract from the paper
In his autobiography, animator Shamus Culhane describes the mid-1940s as a period of artistic awakening for him, when he engaged with the works of film theorists such as Russian Formalists Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.Working at that point as a director at the Walter Lantz studio, he resolved to put theory to practice and began experimenting within the Lantz cartoons, taking liberties with approved storyboards to apply modern techniques.Working largely on such commercial fare as Woody Woodpecker cartoons, Culhane had little latitude to create anything that was avant-garde, so he employed a hit-and-run approach, offering moments of musical and filmic experimentation.Although the Woody cartoons might seem an unlikely vehicle for this, this article reveals how the wild and zany Woodpecker characterization provided a fairly ideal opportunity for Culhane’s modernist mischief to blend in with the frenetic vigor of these short films.

Here is a video.



And.. sorting algorithms explained through dance


And now for blob transportation....

GOOP SCOOP

And this is a really great inspiration. Some very good insight buried in the pretension (it s not to aggressive, but there).



Friday, April 08, 2011

Publication Today.


A new article that I wrote on In Vitro Oink was just published on eContact!

The descriptive blurb reads
In Vitro Oink is a composition exploring the translation of two piano sounds into a work for piano and electronics. This overview traces the compositional process and illustrates the use of Wii-remote in both the creation and performance.

Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Suwappu

This is just beautiful. There are some interesting ideas behind this (in the following quote) but I am in love with the sound world of this video, it is so elegant.
Suwappu is a group of characters that can take lots of different forms. Primarily (or initially), the toys seen in the film - a set of collectible and swappable figures, readable by connected devices, opening up a layer of content. The Suwappu's head signifies his personality, and his pants signify his environment - the app produces content according to its reading of each half.
Beyond these toys, we think Suwappu is a new kind of content platform, with various exciting social, creative and commercial possibilities.

Our project name for this has been Haitsu. Haitsu is the art of hybrid communications, a made-up idea that we find useful. It's a little bit philosophical (the belief that combining advertising, content, media and product is the future of communications), and a little bit practical (looking for interesting hybrid clashes, like analogue and digital). Project Haitsu is part of the Making Future Magic series of collaborations.


Monday, April 04, 2011

instrument


There is a subtle character to this advert which I find refreshing. It is also interesting to note that when the camera is shifted or rather there is a different camera, there is a different microphone so you can hear more or less of the contact noise.