Not algorave

I’m interested in now taking the SuperCollider livecoding techniques that I’ve developed in the context of algorave and applying them to the creation of fixed media sound works. Here is one, using some prepared piano samples that Dr Kurt James Werner has been kind enough to put online.

pylon-country.mp3

It’s not perfect: there is still a strong element of improvisation in this way of working, and there are places in this track where, on listening back, I might have wished to have performed differently. A compromise, perhaps, between the raw and the cooked.

Livecode improvisation with Anne-Liis Poll

As part of the team that organised the third METRIC Improvisation Intensive at the Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow, I did not have as much time as I might have liked to improvise myself. I was pleased however to be joined for an impromptu livecoded session by Anne-Liis Poll, Professor of Improvisation at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre:

This did not quite turn out the way I had intended! In recent work I have been looking to find a way to respond in code to live human improvisations: this session turned into more of an algorave-ish groove built up from mechanical trumpet sounds, over which Anne-Liis worked with the voice. Even so, this was quite succesful. I hope to do more playing with other people along these lines.

Getting ready to be five (/four)

Next Friday I’m going to to be taking part in a 24 hour online algorave event wearefive to celebrate five years of the algorave movement. By accident or design I’m on back to back with co￥ﾡpt (aka Sean Cotterill) who is one of only a couple of us livecoding in pure SuperCollider, rather than the by-now overwelmingly popular TidalCycles.

Sean has been putting together an interesting set of pages on his approach to livecoding in SC, particularly on the things that need to be set up beforehand. I’ve evolved some similar ideas myself, perhaps little a less organised and more hacky. For interest, I’ve put my current setup files with comments on sccode.org and also a wee example of the kind of code I use.

Admittedly, some of this won’t make sense without the particular arrangement of samples and loops that I use. I’ve recently hit upon the idea of using an array of 32 different drum samples organised roughly in the following pattern:

00 a bass drum sound
01 hi hat
02 a snare
03 a different hi hat (or other hit)
04 a different bass drum sound
… etc

That way, I can make a basic un-ta-ka-ta beat just by stepping through all 32, or segments thereof:

Pseq(~arrayOfHits, inf)
Pseq(~arrayOfHits[4..7], inf)

I’ve also discovered some really quite good longer patterns with this layout, using Pslide:

Pslide(~arrayOfHits,inf,4,3)

Guess we’ll see how all of this sounds at the rather unravy time of 0800 GMT next Friday!

Getting my fingers burned

Sooner or later, I’m going to have to get back to the ‘ol soldering iron:

I have a plan: to reconstruct the PE Minisonic you can see above, that I made while I was in school. I still have some of the boards…

Here’s my screen

Show us your screens! Ok, well at last maybe I’m ready. Here’s five minutes or so of me improvising in SuperCollider that’s not as embarrassing as some of my other attempts:

The code is on GitHub if anyone is madly interested.