Dear list,
The situation went from "you can't project there" to "you can but we're not
paying for it" to me stopping by the place and discovering a nice projector
mounted on the ceiling with matching screen above the stage. I later
gathered the organisation had taken to saying "no" to everything they
thought they could say "no" to as they were understaffed and over-stressed.
Understandable but in this case a single phone call could've saved trouble.
Oh, well, it turned out the projector was linked to a large TV by the
entrance which felt quite luxurious so I was happy.
I started out calmly while people walked in with sonifying my keyboard
presses which I thought would place more emphasis on the text being the
interface to the sound for random passers by. To cover up for silences while
thinking or debugging I sampled that output and made it play back in a
looped way at a randomised rate.
While my keyboard was merrily clicking and clanging along I set up some
infrastructure for sequencing and proceeded to generate some rhythms based
modulo functions on the sequencer's step number and melodies based around a
scale of integer multiples of 200Hz (I've been liking that lately). Despite
some initial bugs this went quite well once it got going. I later quantised
the re-sampling to the beat so it was less distracting yet still gave
variations and then developed some progressions and variations on this whole
structure.
I thought it was quite well received considering that few people there had
any idea about this way of performing (sadly Luc couldn't make it). Quite a
few people picked up on the idea. It's become clear to me that I need to
practice transitions, progressions and endings more; building up a piece
went much more smoothly then I had anticipated but once it was there I had
little idea of how to take it further and at times got lost in the amount of
open editing buffers. This is probably a result of my practice sessions
which have typically been build-ups followed by me listening to the
behaviour of the result for a while, then quitting. Looking back that's a
bit obvious but I suppose it took a 1 hour set for a live audience to
realise this. A hour is quite long and does demand a bit more planning ahead
or larger repertoire of manipulations on existing code, I suppose. I may
have been too reluctant to re-start with a completely fresh structure
halfway through as well. More practice is needed, particularly more
structure in practicing.
Still; not bad at all as a next step for me and I hope people who've taken
to (more or less) regular practice will be able to learn from my lesson
here.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Sun Sep 28 2008 - 04:05:16 BST