audio

Granular synthesis in SC

This morning I started to work on a granular machine in SuperCollider. This is what I got so far:

Princess preview

Trying to move forward with more music, more ‘honest’, ‘true-to-self’ creations means finishing old unfinished tracks of work. In the primary view is therefore the finishing of the album with tracks from Frozen Images performance we did with Maja Delak (Wanda & Nova deViator) in early 2010. At the moment there are now 7 tracks pretty much above 90% finished. There are 4 tracks that seem realistic to finish by the end of the month. I find it extremely difficult to restructure, upgrade and finish music that we rehearsed and performed so many times (3 years?!). My creative process with music works like so, that I need to hear something (musical ideas) in my head and feel it in my body in order to start working on it outside of me. This is not true for momentary and very short sound/musical ‘object’, but more for compositional, larger structural blocks.

Anyhow, the sprint and finish line is before 30th of january. After that I will take what we have and give it to the mixing engineer and mastering engineer.

I finished the 7th track – an instrumental track called “Princess” (for now) few days ago and I’m too eager to share it, so here’s preview:

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/74763833″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

implicit integration of music in society

Anthony Storr: Music and the Mind

Anthony Storr: Music and the Mind

“Pre-literate societies have very little idea of the individual as a separate entity. They regard the individual as indissolubly part of the family, and the family as part of the larger society. Ritual and aesthetic activities are integral parts of social existence, not superstructures or luxuries which only the rich can afford. Amongst the Venda of the Northern Transvaal, music plays and important part in initiation ceremonies, work, dancing, religious worship, political protest — in fact in every collective activity. Especially important is tshikona, the national dance. This music can only be performed when ‘twenty or more men blow differently tuned pipes with a precision that depends on holding one’s own part as well as blending with others, and at least four women play different drums in polyrhythmic harmony.‘

— Music and The Mind by Anthony Storr

TSHIKONA Pipe Ensemble:

lucky outtakes album

I’m working on a some kind of outtakes release with material from the process of creating music for Matija Ferlin’s “Sad Sam Lucky” performance which premiered last month in Zagreb, Croatia and a week later in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is going to have a world premiere on Paris this month. The leftover material feels to me as quite powerful, but seems to fall into two extreme groups: long, emotional harmonic content, and quite harsh agressive noise material. At the moment I’m looking at it (listening) as a flow that jumps from one extreme to the other with abrupt cuts. However I’m not sure if it works well like this. The idea that I’m most inclined to at the moment is to create two releases – “ambiental/harmonic” one, and a noise one. Soon something comes out of it.

Echo Indigo DJx on Ubuntu Linux

Few days ago I ordered an Echo Indigo DJx audio card from Amazon. It’s an expressCard device with 4 analog outputs – just perfect for a digital DJ. I used to own one few years ago and had a very good experience with it. It’s pretty much flawless – just two lowlatency stereo outputs – all you need to use your laptop for a DJ situation.

Well, guess what? It’s just works. Out of the box. I plugged it in and it was instantly available as an alsa device. The only thing that I had to do to get some sound from it was to install alsa-tools-gui package in run “echomixer” and lift all levels for virtual mixer 0. Now onto “mixxx”.