I am posting a daily audio blog for Tectonic with high quality, freely downloadable excerpts from the ‘daily earthquake’. Here are a few from this past week.
Tectonic’s Max output is now interfacing directly with a Kyma system. This has enabled me to realize the project’s full potential through various types of synthesis created organically, through the the many parameters being passed to Kyma. The initial planning of the port basically took place in this sketch.
Programming this “flowchart” in Kyma is taking place slowly day-by-day. However, most of the synthesis channels are completed. So what’s happening here?
When Max picks up a new earthquake it sends the data to Kyma generating a new synthetic spectrum. From there, based on a parameter (like latitude) the spectrum gets resynthesized through 1 of four methods - granular resynthesis, waveshaping, subtractive or physical modeling.
As in the original prototype, longitude controls the output of the speaker array. It will automatically spatialize the longitudinal coordinates across multiple speakers. Basically, this means that Tectonic is no longer limited to one speaker per zone. Instead, the reading can register at any point in a 360-degree radius.
Finally finished the prototype for Tectonic after 2 months of work. Tectonic is a system I’ve been developing to create realtime synthesis based on data from seismic activity. It will ultimately be a complete install with a projector and over 12 speakers (see models below). This is the first working prototype I have set up in the studio.
I’ve already begun making new implementations and alterations. It’s quite amazing how flexible the system actually is - and a very powerful content generator. The other day I created an entire live performance powered by the barrage of seismic activity in Chile. It really is endless…
About Tectonic
Tectonic is a sound sculpture created in real time by earthquakes as they occur across the globe. A tightly integrated system between Max/MSP, Google Earth and Ableton Live processes a stream of real-time data that is translated into synthesis and sample playback parameters.
When an earthquake occurs, seismic data is relayed to the system, sound is produced and Google Earth immediately flies to the coordinates of the latest earthquake giving us a visual representation of the newest developments. As multiple earthquakes occur daily, the sculpture builds, enmeshing itself in a complex soundscape of textures and tones - every second, different from the last and never repeating the same stage twice.
0
