Wicked Portability: As I’m going to be overseas for all of January I scaled down to this portable rig for programming and sound development. Shown here is “KamoniVision” - a Max-based live performance instrument I’m working on that integrates perfectly with the DrumKat.
Junction Sonifications by Aurchinaut
Aurchinaut SoundCloud page now has some of the Junction generations from the past few weeks. Some of them are individual NYC intersections, others represent the entire grid. Each generation captures only a few minutes of the ongoing sculpture.
MachineKits has finally been released today! It was a long road to get it out the door but I’m proud to finally have it distributed by both Puremagnetik and Ableton. It was created last year by myself and Brian Cass. We intended it to be a follow-up to Ableton’s Drum Machines released in 2007 and I think we succeeded. Some great kits, clips and overall sound design in this.
EDP Wasp sampling & programming sessions - Day 2 (EDP Wasp, Api Lunchbox as DI, Dunlop Brick Power Supply, RME Fireface)
The National Space Weather Prediction Center publishes a continually updated resource of solar wind measurements. I’ve begun parsing the data for sonification.
A similar project has been completed by The University of Michigan with pre-programmed, musically arranged material. My goal is to use the same concept but harness the data to synthesize sounds “organically” in real-time.
More testing with Junction. Better hue calibration depending on time of day, improved tracking, larger sound palette. Thanks Rachel for the stills.
Junction is a sound sculpture powered in real-time by thousands of New York City taxi cabs controlling Cycling74’s Max/Jitter and Symbolic Sound’s Kyma. Through the use of publicly available live footage from New York’s Traffic Management Center, Junction tracks the movements of taxis in some of the city’s busiest intersections. It uses their position, velocity and overall density to synthesize sounds. The onlooker gains a feeling of omniscience, as if “watching from above”, while every tracked taxi’s indeterministic movements become part of a larger symphony.
A taxi’s position might control only one partial of a complex frequency spectrum, or a single frame of a granular cloud. Up to 40 taxis are tracked on the grid simultaneously. They are indexed and vectored every 50 milliseconds. Once a taxi leaves the scene, its index dies and a new taxi is tracked. Junction is powered by Cycling 74’s Max and Jitter with the cv.jit externals by Jean-Marc Pelletier. Data from Max are sent to a Kyma system for realtime synthesis based on dynamic event variables.
The included video documentation is but one iteration of Junction, edited to provide a sampling of the sound palette that is created. Just as traffic morphs over many hours so does a sonification of that pattern. Thus, for brevity’s sake, I have consolidated many of the generated sequences into the short documentation.
(Source: vimeo.com)
I recently spoke on the IMSTA Festa Technology panel with Wire to the Ear’s Oliver Chesler. We followed up with this short Q&A: http://www.wiretotheear.com/2010/09/29/interview-with-micah-frank-of-puremagnetik/
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Tectonic debuted last weekend at 319 Scholes. Six speaker surround array and a kiosk with visualizations programmed by Dave Linnenbank.
Ableton recently came to my studio and I showed off Puremagnetik’s Retro Synths. The video is on their home page this month along with an update for Retro Synths.
What happens when you do everything wrong? Digital Blasphemy contains excerpts from an afternoon jam I had in Kyma. Raw and unedited, do what you like with it. Mistreated waveshapers, hyper-resonating pulses, harshly modulating synthetic spectrums run through overdriven compression, non-harmonic ring-modulated frequency controllers…. the list goes on. If it’s wrong, I think I did it.
I personally find it very useful to cut up some bits to make a glitchy (think Alva Noto) kit. Enjoy!
Sound Design (not music) for http://www.hendricksgin.com
Produced at Nise Music, Brooklyn NYC
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