Teufelsberg

An acoustically interesting dome in an abandoned spy station at the highest point in Berlin.

dome

We ran into flutist Thomas Von Der Brücke in the woods around Teufelsberg. Thomas has often recorded and performed in the dome. He invited us to come along for a tour.

thomas

Thomas on Flute…

Thomas on vocals and flute, with me on percussion

 

Photographs by Rebecca Zicarelli

Glacier Sounds

Overlapping loops of varying duration to represent natural cycles.

glacier1

In October I collaborated with Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen P. Nguyen to compose and perform the sounds of a glacier for their installation at the Gem theatre in Bethel, Maine. The glacier was made from paper.

Wade and Stephen:

wadeandsteven

A time-lapse video of the project:

A time-lapse video of a similar project they did in Minnesota 2005:

The approach was to take a series of ambient loops and organize them by duration. The longer loops would represent the slow movement of time. Shorter loops would represent events like avalanches. One-shot samples would represent quick events, like the cracking of ice.

It took several iterations to produce something slow and boring enough to be convincing. I used samples from the Ron MacLeod’s Cyclic Waves library from Cycling 74 https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/cyclic-waves/. Samples were pitched down to imply largeness.

Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 1.09.59 AM

Each vertical column in an Ableton Live set represents a time-frame of waves. That is, the far left column contains quick events and the far right column contains long cycle events. Left to right, the columns have gradually increasing cycle durations.  I used a Push controller to trigger samples in real time as people walked through the theatre to see the glacier.

The theatre speakers were arranged in stereo but from front to back. Since the glacier was also arranged along the same axis, a slow auto-panning effect sent sounds drifting off into the distance, or vice versa. Visually and sonically there was a sense that the space extended beyond the walls of the theatre.

In the “control room” above the theatre… using Push to trigger samples and a Korg NanoKontrol to set panning positions of each track:

glacer2

The performance lasted about 45 minutes. Occasionally the cracking of ice would startle people in the room. There were kids crawling around underneath the paper glacier. Afterwards we just let the sounds play on their own. A short excerpt:

 

Photographs by Rebecca Zicarelli.

Ascii art

Characters drawn with characters.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_art

page274

 notes

On auto-generating ascii art…

Mplayer AALIB support: http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/h/4441

sudo install aalib

To install mplayer in macports:

sudo port install mplayer-devel

To watch a ‘normal video’

mplayer video1.avi

To watch an “ascii video”

mplayer -vo aa video1.avi

So far have not been able to get aalib running with mplayer in macports. Here’s how it works in linux: http://jamsubuntu.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-to-watch-any-video-in-ascii.html

 

Jitter in javascript

Why would you write Jitter code inside a js object?

  • Math expressions
  • File IO
  • Borrowed code
  • You’re just that way

There are three Jitter javascript tutorials (built in to Max) 45-47

Screen Shot 2015-04-24 at 12.55.44 AM

The Max javascript documentation is generally far flung. A helpful reference by Tim Schenk https://reactivemusic.net/?p=17445

Here’s an example to get started with. It downsamples a movie and changes the background color. Something I often dream about.

Screen Shot 2015-04-24 at 12.35.31 AM

Download

https://github.com/tkzic/max-projects

Folder: jitter-js

  • patch: downsamp-thing.maxpat
  • javascript source: downsamp.js

Jitter gen

Tutorials by Gregory Taylor

gen~ for beginners (not Jitter) https://cycling74.com/wiki/index.php?title=gen~_For_Beginners

Delicious Max Tutorials by dude837 

http://otherbirds.com/tutorials/

Pixelface (gen): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e49qgv5NuUQ

Video media converter ADVC-110

Bidirectional analog/digital conversion of composite, s-video, and firewire/ilink.

By Grass Valley

http://www.grassvalley.com/products/advc110

20091222_prodctShot_ADVC110.1920x1080.VidRes.png_305_0

Using this device on Mac OS X 10.9, analog video input shows up as a system device. It also works as a firewire video output device.

Input

 

Using Jitter you can get real time input from analog video devices like cameras and VCR’s. Here’s an example using jit.grab (Max help file) to get input from an analog camcorder.

Screen Shot 2015-04-22 at 8.48.35 PM

 

Output

Sending output via firewire to a TV using jit.qt.videoout (Jitter tutorial 22):

Screen Shot 2015-04-22 at 9.53.39 PM

This is what it looks like on a TV:

tv-out2