Tag Archives: computer_music

PLOrk

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The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) is a visionary new ensemble of laptopists, the first of its size and kind.

Founded in 2005 by Dan Trueman and Perry Cook, PLOrk takes the traditional model of the orchestra and reinvents it for the 21st century; each laptopist performs with a laptop and custom designed hemispherical speaker that emulates the way traditional orchestral instruments cast their sound in space. Wireless networking and video augment the familiar role of the conductor, suggesting unprecedented ways of organizing large ensembles.

In 2008, Trueman and Cook were awarded a major grant from the MacArthur Foundation to support further PLOrk developments. Performers and composers who have worked with PLOrk include Zakir Hussain, Pauline Oliveros, Matmos, So Percussion, the American Composers Orchestra, and others. In its still short lifetime, PLOrk has performed widely (presented by Carnegie Hall, the Northwestern Spring Festival in Chicago, the American Academy of Sciences in DC, the Kitchen (NYC) and others) and has inspired the formation of laptop orchestras across the world, from Oslo to Bangkok.

“Connectome” Performed by the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) (Director Jeff Snyder), PLOrk[10] concert, May 3 2017 Composition: Mike Mulshine Neuron model audio synthesis: Jeff Snyder and Aatish Bhatia Projection: Drew Wallace

Other multimedia materials here.

140 chars of music

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A twitter. An SMS. That’s the challenge. Writing a piece of electronic digital music using only 140 chars of code.

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire‘s online readership here.

Of course, to satisfy such a constraint, you need a very compact programming language and SuperCollider is the best choice (see also here). It is an environment and programming language for real time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It provides an interpreted object-oriented language which functions as a network client to a state of the art, realtime sound synthesis server.

SuperCollider was written by James McCartney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project maintained and developed by various people. It is used by musicians, scientists and artists working with sound. For some background, see SuperCollider described by Wikipedia.

You can listen to all the pieces or download the whole album on this page and also look at the code snippets here. Note that many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you have a working SuperCollider environment and re-run the source code you get a new (i.e. slightly different) piece of music.

Some excerpts:

The artists notes are here.

Anthèmes 2

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Anthèmes 2 (1997), by Pierre Boulez, has evolved from Anthèmes, a substantially shorter piece for solo violin.

Andrew Gerzso has for many years been the composer’s chief collaborator on works involving live electronics and the two men regularly discuss their work together. He describes the way in which all the nuances in this nucleus of works were examined in the studio in order to find out which elements could be electronically processed and differentiated. As a result, the process of expanding these works is based not only on abstract structural considerations (such as the questions as to how it may be possible to use electronic procedures to spatialize and to merge or separate specific complexes of sound),but also on concrete considerations bound up with performing practice: in a word, on the way in which the instrument’s technical possibilities may be developed along figurative lines.

As a result, Anthèmes 2 provides us with both an analysis and an interpretation of Anthèmes: it is a text in its own right and the same time a sub-text of the earlier piece.

[notes from the CD]

Pacific Fanfare

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Barry Truax, Pacific Fanfare (1996).

Pacific Fanfare was composed to mark the 25th anniversary of both the Vancouver New Music Society and the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University. It is comprised of ten soundmarks recorded by the WSP in the Vancouver area either from the early 1970’s or more recently, and thus reflects the changing soundscape of the city. The various sound signals are heard both in their original state, and digitally resonated and time-stretched in order to let them “resonate” in our own memories.

Pacific Fanfare is part of the Islands CD that can be ordered on the author’s site

cover

Melodie Rituali

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Ritual Melodies è una composizione del 1990 di Jonathan Harvey realizzata all’IRCAM.

A dispetto delle sonorità, alcune delle quali a un primo ascolto possono sembrare strumentali, si tratta invece di pura computer music. Tutti i suoni sono generati e manipolati dal computer. Nessuno è stato campionato, se non per fini di analisi e risintesi.

Questo procedimento è stato attuato per creare un materiale sonoro in continua trasformazione. I suoni base del brano sono risintesi di strumenti di origine cerimoniale e/o rituale (es: oboe indiano, campane tibetane, flauto di bambù, frammenti vocali di diversa origine…) le cui caratteristiche vengono poi alterate in fase di sintesi per creare suoni intermedi.

A mio avviso è decisamente un bel brano, sia dal punto di vista compositivo che da quello tecnico. L’unico lato che per me è un po’ disturbante è costituito da alcune sonorità di tipica marca IRCAM, come quel maledetto scampanio sulle frequenze alte, che sarà anche bello a un primo ascolto, ma ormai si trova in quasi tutti i brani realizzati laggiù.

Neptune

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manouryPhilippe Manoury è attualmente uno dei più importanti ricercatori e compositori francesi. Attivo da anni nell’area della musica elettroacustica, avvalendosi della collaborazione di Miller Puckette, ha scritto alcuni dei primi lavori per strumento e elaborazione effettuata totalmente in tempo reale (Jupiter, 1987 e Pluton, 1988, entrambi inseriti nel ciclo Sonus ex Machina).

Qui vi presentiamo la parte 5 di Neptune (op. 21, 1991) per tre percussionisti ed elettronica. I percussionisti suonano 2 vibrafoni MIDI, tam-tam e marimba e sono elaborati e contrappuntati in tempo reale.

Moorer Interview

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Gli amici di USO Project pubblicano una intervista in tre parti con James Andy Moorer, uno dei pionieri della computer music, che potete trovare sul loro blog.

Duetto per un pianista

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Susanne Achilles performs the Duet for One Pianist by Jean Claude Risset, an important name in computer music.

This piece, composed at MIT in 1989, is for disklavier and computer. The disklavier is a grand piano made by Yamaha, whose mechanics are motorized and can be controlled via MIDI. So the disklavier can play pieces on its own, but, more interestingly, a pianist’s performance data (pitches, dynamics, durations) can be sent, in real time, to a computer which can react by driving the disklavier according to rules formalized in software by the composer.

This is what happens in Duet for One Pianist, hence the title. The piece is divided into eight sketches in which the computer manipulates and sends back the material performed by the performer based on the principles cited in the title of each movement: Double, Mirror, Extensions, Fractals, Stretch, Resonances, Up Down and Metronome.

The pianist is accompanied, like a shadow, by a second, invisible performer, who plays his own piano with lowering keys.

En écho

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Un estratto da un brano di Philippe Manoury (En écho, 1993-1994, testo di Emmanuel Hocquart) in cui il computer genera suoni in tempo reale seguendo l’esecuzione del soprano. In pratica il computer è in grado di ascoltare l’interprete e a fronte della partitura, riesce a seguirlo nonostante eventuali rallentando o accelerando.

In questo caso tutto è reso più semplice dal fatto che l’esecutore è un solista e non un ensemble, quindi si deve seguire una sola voce, ma anche così non si tratta di una faccenda banale.

Written in collaboration with programmer Miller Puckette, “En Echo” uses real time score-following software which responds to the singer’s voice. In Emille Hocquart’s text, a young woman recollects a heated affair.

“The computer is automatically following the voice,” Mr. Manoury explained. “It functions as what we call a ‘score-follower.’ The singer sings in tempo, or with an acceleration, and the computer synchronizes to make synthetic sounds that are deduced from alterations in the voice — not precalculated, but produced in real time. If the voice modifies the vowels, for example, it modifies the electronics.” Messrs. Manoury and Puckette have worked since the latter moved from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 and joined Mr. Manoury at the famous studios at IRCAM (l’Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique), which Pierre Boulez founded in Paris.

Multiplication Virtuelle

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Un brano per percussioni e live electronic di Mei-Fang Lin (1973), compositrice cinese di Taiwan attualmente negli USA.

Note di programma:

Multiplication Virtuelle (2003) is a musical work written for solo percussionist performing on a wide array of pitched and non-pitched acoustic instruments. Audio signals taken from microphones placed in close proximity to each instrument are used to control a real-time computer-based electroacoustic component. The percussionist plays and interacts with the electronic part that is triggered by the percussion attacks. The intensity of each attack is used to control the playback rate of the stored samples; in other words, the pitch of the sample is determined by how loud the percussionist plays. The execution of the electroacoustic score is managed by the computer in real-time using Max/MSP, a graphical software environment for music, audio, and multimedia.

As implied by the piece’s title and instrumental setup, ideas of circular motion and repeated patterns come into play in both the surface material in the music and the global structure of the piece itself. Specific rhythmic patterns are repeated (or, in a more visual sense, multiplied) before moving on to new but related patterns. The structure proceeds in a circular motion in how its rhythmic patterns evolve. The piece also thwarts the audience’s musical expectations by blurring the distinction between sample-based sounds and their acoustic counterparts. This effect is enhanced by carefully establishing and then breaking the connections between simultaneous visual and aural events.

Multiplication Virtuelle is dedicated to the percussionist Jean Geoffroy, who premiered the piece in 2004 in Paris. The work was funded in part by the Composer Assistance Program of the American Music Center.