For the lack of a better name, I have dubbed this simple little MSP app the Vinyl Harp. For awhile now I've been interested in the potential of using vinyl run-out grooves as a compositional device. Philip Jeck and Christian Marclay's investigations into this esoteric medium are pretty well known, so I've been trying to produce something original for the past week.
As the record player's stylus is stereo it reads both sides of the run out groove which are diffrent to each other on a micoscopic level, but can be articulated with the right kind of processing.
The Vinyl Harp is straightforward enough; it's a two-channel input into Max/MSP where the signals can be sonically tranformed using a biquad filter and comb filter. Each of these effects can be used individually or in consort with each other. I've found that the most interesting results have been acheived with the comb filter - applying a quarter to half second delay and using a strong feedback level. This articulates the vinyl's clicks, pops and crackles quite well and produces a nice sustained bell/plucked string sound. The biquad filter is also useful for scanning the resonant areas of the clicks and pops and can be very handy in conjunction with the comb filter.
I've also incorporated a sample playback option for pre-recorded run-out grooves.
I did some documentation last night, but I don't have time to upload it today. Check back here in a couple of days. There's plenty more to come over the next couple of weeks.
In preparation for a show in a month or so, I've decided to revisit a previous work and attempt to refine its technical process via Max/MSP. So far, so good...albeit a bit clicky.
The Sky Falling patch
The buffer~ patcher
The individual phoneme patchers
Today I've been agonising over the many activities and projects that are going on at the moment. My sound assignment for Lynda Lou Murphy's EAF installation is one of these, and has been at the mercy of over-complicated approaches and strategies in putting the sound components together. Lots of flow charts, lists, weird sketches and amorpheous graphic scores are scattered around my work space at home, a good thing I came to work in my uni space then, which is model poverty pack Ikea in its cold austerity and minimalist functionality.
Anyhow, I decided to take a leaf out of the brain of Brian (Eno) and write a personal strategy card for myself - in the vien of the Eno/Schmidtt Oblique Strategies:
KEEP IT FUCKING SIMPLE.
It seems to be working - my Sumi_Matic Max patch chews up and abuses samples and Garageband (eeeeek!) crudley bashes them into sonorous disharmony. Perfect.
Today I made a very simple sample and hold emulation using Max/MSP. It uses three record~ and groove~ objects to record the sound and subsequently loop it, it also features variable playback speed as well. Once running, new sounds can be recorded and looped. It's clunky at best, but fun to use.
The YouTube example is a duex for two teapots. My apologies for the video quality, a mobile phone is lo-fi at best.
This post is to field a request left in the comments box of the previous post on the Sumi_matic. The Cascade subpatcher is essentially a counter that ramps back and forth from a value of 0.1 to 1.0. This value then controls the playback speed of the sample.
Pretty simple really.
Visitors who frequent this blog may have read about a work called Sumi_. I'm currently revisting it after receiving some critical feedback on it from sound artist and mentor Robin Minard. One of Minard's concerns related to some aspects of the orginal sound, specifically the fact that I'd been very naughty and used a Plogue delay bidule to 'flesh out' the overall sound texture (which is, as we all know, cheating.) So in order to reform myself and do things the proper way, I took advantage of my current Max fetish and decided to build a simple little module to mash some sound together and flesh-it-out the good old fashioned way: dry, quiet and looped.
This patch is nothing special, it just simply loops eight identical samples (each with variable playback speeds - determined by a looping preset module) which emulates a phase relation of sorts, the combined audio is then filtered using a biquad~ object and a filter graph. The raw sound? A lovely rainstick sample that came with the Max bundle. I would post an example YouTube, but my mobile phone video camera delivers no love or decent sound quality for that matter.
Though this is essentially an experiment and means of trialing some homogenous sound textures, it's a much more faithful and well-behaved step in the right direction.
For someone who considers themselves a sound artist, I've waited a while get around to buying Max/MSP outright and actually using it.
Hoorah!
