On Saturday afternoon, April 2, 2016, as part of Jacques Soddell's "Undue Noise at Punctum" series, I performed at the ICU space of Punctum Arts in Castlemaine. I was part of a very long (but fun) afternoon and evening of performances by many wonderful people. More details HERE.
My piece was 43 minutes long, for Keyboard Sampler and Pre-recorded Soundtracks. In the first half of the piece, the prerecorded part was made with Kaleidoscope sonifying star maps from the SkyView app. The live samples were made with the new UVI Falcon sampler, using a variety of favorite souds from the past, such as my homemade Balloon Gongs and Tuning Forks, Bird Calls, Wind Chords (from Samples III, 1987!), and new sources such as a Fractal Wavetable, and the squeaking gate on the south side of Victoria Park, Daylesford.
In the second half of the piece, one prerecorded sequence consists of my sonifications of the Rorschach drawings from Benjamin Boretz's "If I Am a Musical Thinker," which I developed for Carmen Chan's realization of that text. The other prerecorded sequence uses newly recorded sounds of a Cicada, a drainage tunnel at Rickett's Point, Vic; and some Port Phillip Bay waves, also from Rickett's point. Also there are the sounds of sonified fractal drawings; an old Bill Evans CD, fragmented and stretched and blurred using the Composers' Desktop Project software; some stretches of the drainage tunnel sounds (also with CDP), and at the end, a 2 minute segment of algorithmically generated drum music, made with a new free drum sample set that my friend and Soundbytesmag.net colleague Sulieman Ali was involved with the making of. The live part consists of me playing keyboard which is controlling two instances of the Modartt Pianoteq piano, one in 19 tone equal temperament, the other in 13 tone equal temperament. The order of the pitches in both scales has been scrambled. That is, the notes of each scale are not ascending, but randomly reordered. There are, in fact, two different random orderings of each scale, one in the first half of the section, the other in the second half. In the middle of this section, I also add the granulation and fragmentations made possible by the GRM Tools Shuffling module.
I'm quite pleased with the sound of this piece. There seems to be a very nice mix of sound types, and a nice progression of sounds. I'm still learning to listen to what I've done here, and so far, I like what I hear, and I hope you do too.
And for those of you on machines without access to the Flash Player, you can download the piece HERE.