Music Looper

Electro-Acoustic research ideas

Music of the marginalized

Stemming from my work in social services embark on a project to record musical contributions voice and instrument etc from otherwise unheard sections of society. Adults with learning disabilities, the homeless, mentally ill and elderly people.

Add, manipulate and integrate these sounds into compositions to form a cohesive piece. (see Gavin Bryars ‘Jesus blood never failed me yet’)

The great machine society

Machines industrial and otherwise issue a plethora of curious, percussive and ‘tuneful’ sounds. Capture these noises to form texture and structure, add acoustic instruments, tuba accordion etc and sequence waveforms using the computer.

Speeches/voices of the 20th century

Use sound archive material of historically poignant or socially significant human experience. Add mix and manipulate through the computer to form pieces of work.

Anomalous electro-mechanical music

Construct a machine or machines that can randomise sound inputs fed to it live. Use live looping technology (phrase samplers) and input from acoustic instruments. Work on capturing unexpected outcomes and non linear sound events.

Music of the general public

As with Leon Theremin’s dancers in the 1920’s use an electro-magnetic wave device that is affected by people who act as an electrical conductor entering the field. This device can be set up in a public location, different situations ie in a shop or market. Mix the ambient sounds and the field generated sounds into compositions.

The Music of Language

Turning text into music Glean original writings (poems ,prose etc) from friends or students on the creative writing course and then using sampling and sequencing software assign the letters, space bar, punctuation etc on a computer keyboard to patches.

Acoustic samples that I have pre-record from the accordion, tuba, piano, guitar etc, any instrument really, I can recruit the skills of my fellows.

Performance

The author types in a darkened room with the text projected on a screen. As they type the music develops and I control in real time the length, attack, effects of the sample through my computer. The typist could have some control too by setting the keyboard to different parameters.

Soundplant Screenshot

The Music of language.

Set up
Using free software found on the web called Soundplant (screen shot above). I have randomly assigned samples to the computer keyboard letters and punctuation. The software is able to have 8 channels going at once and this creates an added variable i.e. at its limit it may cancel out a sample depending on its length or whether it is looped or not.

Looping is assignable to any key and for the following I have looped the full stop and the enter key (used when selecting a new paragraph) and the letter N.

I have chosen specific samples for the looped keys. Then I have played the pieces by typing in text. Two recorded pieces follow:

Uses the 1st stanza of the Tennyson poem typed twice.

Come into the garden Maud
For the black bat night has flown
Come into the garden Maud
I am here at the gate alone
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad
And the musk of the roses blown.

Listen to sound sample 2.47MB (WinMedia file)

The full stop at the end triggers the looped drum sample in between repeats but is soon cancelled out as the 7 channels are used up. The other loop in this set up is triggered by the last letter in the stanza the ‘N’.

Uses the words ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ of QWERTY fame. Randomly assigned percussion samples except for the full stop loop which provides some texture. The phrase is typed 8 times and the full stop and the enter key provide the loops, sometimes layering over themselves. The loops are allowed to do their thing for a while at the end and then fade.

Listen to sound sample 2.55MB (WinMedia file)

The future

I will be able to have the words projected at the same time as I play the samples, this means some re-jigging of the software so that the keyboard can trigger two events, a letter event and a sample.

Not finding letters being triggered to be particularly satisfying my plans are to have whole words triggered by assigning samples to letters in a less random way and then the word is triggered by hitting the space bar. Punctuation being rhythmical in nature could have percussion assigned to the keys. The experimenting continues.

March 05 Decided that the product was not that interesting to me musically and decided to move on.

Remembered my improvising with Eddie Prevost from the free Jazz group AMM I decided to go back to basics rather than try and reinvent myself musically. Work with the instruments I know and set up experiments with them instead. Prepared accordion through effects, see what happens.

The 1st set of experiments I did in preparation for the SARC concert in Belfast involved attaching a permanent mic to the accordion and then playing that through a live looping machine. The loop machine was connected to a guitar effects pedal. Once the loop had been built on and established I could choose to put down the accordion and effectively.

Sonorities Concert

SARC Belfast May 2nd 2005

Accordion looping set-up for a live performance

Listen to sound sample 2.09MB (WinMedia file)

Finding the predictability of live looping and processing through an effects pedal a little unappealing I decided that I was mostly interested in unpredictable musical outcomes and anomalous events. So I read (some of) John Bowers work on improvising machines and began to experiment with the internal mechanics of the accordion.

The metal reeds of the accordion vibrate at different frequencies due to many variables. These are some that I have noted.

• Temperature

• Relative humidity

• The space its being played in

• Load i.e. force of air from the bellows

• Direction of load i.e. pull or push of bellows

• Sympathetic frequencies i.e. the other reeds being played around it or other outside frequencies acting on it.

I spent some time with a cheap ebay accordion modifying reeds, ripping wax onto then changing their position in the reed stock drilling holes, adding solder, cutting down the reed metal. The poor thing is a mess now but it taught me a lot about reed frequency manipulation.

Then the ‘Circuits of malpractice’ concert began to loom and I wanted to have something that incorporated my interest in anomaly and reed frequency manipulation from an outside source. Decided to connect the accordion through the external signal processor of a Korg MS20 analogue synth and experiment with that. Listen to sound sample.

The result was appealing to me as I found that with practice I could dip in and out of 3 different frequency affecting modes.

1. The somewhat unstable voltage controlled oscillators on the MS20 tried to process the external signal from the accordion. This led to unexpected frequency modulation between the electronic and acoustic signals and enhanced the kind of effect I had witnessed when affecting the direction of load ie push or pull of bellows.
2. I could choose to play the accordion signal from the pick up back through the system so that I could hear both the accordion acoustically in the room and amplified. This added greater scope for anomaly and unexpected outcomes.
3. By setting up in a space that gave me easy access to the loud speaker I was able to effectively play the feedback by moving in and out of the feedback zone thus creating more frequency modulation opportunities. In a performance this added a spatial component as the movement of my body affected the outcome.

With feedback from the accordion
Listen to sound sample 1.26MB (WinMedia file)

Without feedback…
Listen to sound sample 1.75MB (WinMedia file)

The Future.

Continue to work with accordion and anomalous frequency outcomes. My next experiment will involve affecting an object That has no direct electrical link to the accordion or tuba and capture the frequencies sympathetic or otherwise.

EG directing acoustic sounds towards a wind chime or similar set of vibrating pipes and recording the outcome.

This could be particularly interesting in a performance as the room and the objects placed in it could be arranged in a feedback loop that creates an interactive rolling set of sound events.