Managing to do the same kind of thing now in SuperCollider, speaking one word at a time, which kind of makes more sense in this context; loudcoding?

(Amazed at getting this to work, actually. I'm *so* not a programmer!)

Updated version of the Bare Wires text interface;

Hers is a very early and approximate proof-of-concept video of a possible text-to-screech interface for 'Bare Wires';

The idea is to have a laptop and screen onstage, visible to the audience. The setup is used by various performers during the piece, in various ways; to address the audience, or to direct an improvisation, ask questions, tell a story… anything, really.

'text-to-screech' is my coining for taking familiar text-to-speak technology built into many modern computers, and mangle it, creatively misuse it. The most extensive project I have done along these lines was a commission in 2005 for an online piece for Paragon, which is unfortunately not up any more. A similar strategy was used in 'The Other Other Hand', where creatively edited machine speech was used to represent the voice of the Edwardian composer C. Hubert H. Parry.

The interface shown above is done in Max/MSP, using the built-in voices on a mac. The first aim was to program it so that it would speak each word immediately after it was typed, which was relatively simple to achieve. In addtition, when an 'x' is typed in a word, the partcular voice used changes, typing 'u' or 'v' subtly affects the rate and pitch of the voice. For the next iteration, I want to try the effect of having it speak the word then display it; also to munge the spoken text more drastically, perhaps mutliple voices speaking, perhaps a more clearly pitched approach, perhaps looping a word, so that the result is more 'musical'.

The demo video above fakes up very roughly what it might be like if one performer types up instructions to the others, and then addresses the audience. Another idea I have been playing with is a game whereby the performers are instructed, for instance, to make some sort of distinctive gesture every time an 'a' is typed, and no to obey any other instructions given. So, for instance, the audience sees the performers being told 'play a note'. The performers actually respond to the two 'a's in the sentence by throwing a book to the floor, which is a the prearranged (invisible) instruction. Then the gag is blown by by one of the performers explaining onscreen what is going on. Then another performer changes the rules… etc etc.

(Another, umm, visual/performative reference here is to livecoding, where an artist improvises live onscreen with a computer programming language to produce music and/or visuals, some nice examples here. I've been doing some experimenting in that direction myself using SuperCollider, which can also, as it happens, do text-to-speech. Watch this space…)

The performance of The Whirlies the other night was a bit of a stunning success. Good audience, including the arts editor of the Herald, Keith Bruce, who seemed to really get the piece;

'The new music came from J Simon van der Walt, whose The Whirlies pitted his own prepared multiphonic scrabbling with table-top banjo ukulele and electronic gizmos against lush concert-orchestra strings - a collision only enhanced by the shattering of a glass behind the bar.

There was some theatre, too, in his intensity and the swaying of the cellists, in as perfect a musical encapsulation of the East Kilbride road system as I ever expect to hear.'

The East Kilbride Mail also wrote up the piece enthusiastically, and even did one of those celebrity twenty question interviews;

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I'm putting in a proposal to Cryptic Nights to do a show called, to give it its full title, Ted Edwards proudly presents Bare Wires - Live in concert or just Bare Wires for short. Below I've gathered together in one place some relevant video and other documentation;

'The Other Other Hand' is pretty much fully documented from initial ideas to final performance at workingtitle08.blogspot.com - the best place to start is probably the three-minute preview video at the top of that page, also available on YouTube. A fully edited 80 minute edited video of the complete show is online here.

Also on my YouTube page are two videos which show one of the starting points for the Ted Edwards project; my fortuitous discovery of several pieces of interesting retro music gear discarded in the street near where I live, in this case a Novation BassStation synth.

Further down this blog you will find some information about the forthcoming performance of a new commission The Whirlies for the Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra at Òran Mór on November 17th. This will be the first show in which I myself appear in my Ted Edwards role; below you will find a photo and description of the gear to be used, plus a demo recording of the piece.

For a thorough background on my work for the last twenty years or so, go to jsimonvanderwalt.com - particularly relevant to Bare Wires might be the Openings series of works, such as CIRCULARTHING, the score for which is shortly to be published in Notations 21, a followup book to John Cage's seminal 1968 collection of graphic scores 'Notations'.

The performance of 'The Whirlies' is coming up very soon;

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The Whirlies by J. Simon van der Walt A new piece for strings and electro-junk improviser, inspired by the roundabouts of East Kilbride

Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra Cond Peter Cynfryn Jones Solist Edward 'Teddy' Edwards

Òran Mór (Byre's Road, Glasgow) Monday 17 Nov 2008 Doors open at 1715, Concert begins at 1815 £10 includes cocktail and canapés 0141 357 6200

Also featuring Vaughan Williams A Lark Ascending Debussy Danses Sacré et Profane Respighi Il Tramonto

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Here's a wee snippet of the piece, midi strings, but the impro material is for real:

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Composer's note

"What is East Kilbride famous for? I'm not entirely sure how most people would answer that question! For myself, although I'm not exactly Scottish born and bred, there is a big chunk of me which is 'from' East Kilbride; I spent two highly formative periods of my life there, during my primary school years, and again for the last couple of years of high school before university. And one of the things which always sticks in my head about East Kilbride is… roundabouts! Being one of those 60's new towns, it has an elaborate road plan, with sweeping dual carriageways carefully separated from winding dead-end closes; the kind of town where you can see the house you're trying to get to, but there seems to be no way of actually getting there…

The biggest roundabout in East Kilbride is known to most residents by name; 'The Whirlies'. In recent times it's been rather travestied by the addition of traffic lights, but in it's heyday it was a madness of a junction, roads spiralling off in every direction…

Of course, a piece of music can't really be about a roundabout. More than that, this is a reminiscence of my teenage years, when I first started to become seriously interested in music. There were two strands to this. Firstly, I was starting to branch out from my Father's transcendental but admittedly rather limited listening diet of Bach, Wagner, and, er nothing else, to explore the delights of jazz, experimental rock music, Stravinsky, and Bartók. My second way into music was through the soldering iron, literally getting my fingers burnt hacking together home-made noisemakers using transistors salvaged from broken hi-fi sets and the like.

The piece also forms a trailer of sorts for a forthcoming project provisionally entitled 'The Ted Edwards Electr-O-Matic Orchestra', or something like that.

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Here's the setup I'm using for the electro-junk impro;

That's my grandfather's old banjo-ukulele through a pickup to a genuine original Realistic Electronic Reverb (with added feedback loop), through a mixer to keep the levels under control. No live computer processing! (but a tiny amount of reverb added in the demo to make it 'sit' with the dodgy washy midi strings.)

I hope you like my new direction :|

According to MySpace Music, there are no bands within 100 miles of Glasgow;

Seems a bit of a shame, really. Anybody feel like starting a band?

Some music I'm working on for a puppet show…

I have a commission for another piece from the Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra, for a concert at Òran Mór in Glasgow on 17 November. It's going to be called 'The Whirlies', which is a famous roundabout in East Kilbride; to be the first movement of a suite dedicated to the, er, roundabouts of East Kilbride!

The piece is essentially for strings, but - and I haven't exactly told them this yet - I intend to turn up and do some live electro-junk impro along with the piece as well:

Two bits of string material so far;

Well, Gareth and I got a really excellent review for our concert last night from Michael Tumelty in the Glasgow Herald;

'Let's not mess about. Never mind technical shortcomings, rough edges, the fractured tenor who was clearly in discomfort. Last night's offering by RSAMD students in the academy's festival of new music, Plug, gets five stars for the originality of creative thought that flowed from student composers Simon van der Walt and Gareth Williams into two new works for theatrical performance.

In another era, van der Walt's Schaduwee would have been called a song cycle. This creation, for soprano, four bassoons, piano, electronics, kazoo, projected images and some horseplay (I've never seen the pianist hilariously heave out the innards of a prepared piano as part of a piece) was something else, though there were enough Malherian devices to give a hook into the familiar. The piece, a musical, literary and theatrical questioning of language, was abundant with ideas, arcane and mundane, but was dazzlingly performed by stratospheric soprano Alexa Mason and her team of intrumentalists.

Gareth Williams' one-act boxing opera, Love in the Blue Corner, is like nothing else I've seen in a theatre. It turns its subject inside out. There is only one boxer. He's a loser and he dies, beaten to a pulp. He stands, silent and still in the read-lit centre of the ring, while a make-up artist daubs him with the sweat, bruises, cuts, fractures and wounds that leave him wrecked. The action of the match is in Williams's postminimalist, postmodern music, belted out by the ensemble, and given voice by the trainer, who exhorts his stubborn failure of a protege to move, jab, dance, persist.

It was a heartbreaking tragedy in a mind expanding night from the students.'