I’m finishing a kind of “Instant Satie” Max patch for a workshop with kids visiting the Music and Media Arts facilities tomorrow. There will be three 40 minutes blocks that each group of 4-5 students will take turns to visit. Two of them will deal with live electronics and voice recoring and editing, respectively. In my part of the course we’ll listen to Erik Satie’s “Vexations” and learn about his idea of a musique d’ameublement. We’ll then use the studio’s Yamaha Disklavier (a MIDI-controllable grand piano) to create a kind of generative musique d’ameublement where three players interact with each other to steer an algorithm that will play the instrument. One player will play the piano itself and in doing so feed the computer with pitch and velocity data. The two other players, one on an iPad and one on a laptop, will select the number of notes that the computer will memorize the pitch and velocity of, and in what order, speed, transposition, and with what kind of velocity variations and polyphony it will generate derivatives and send them back to the piano in real time – while the pianist is already playing even more notes for it to learn. Here’s a screenshot from the tryouts I did this afternoon. I’ll be sharing an mp3 of what you see here with my email list later this week.
It’s not blogging but it’s a start. After two months of rehearsing and performing with pulp.noir this is the third new course I’m teaching within only five days. I hope to be writing more on this site soon – starting with the other two workshops.
Subscribe to the blog and sign up for the accompanying email newsletter where I share further thoughts, essays and materials related to the blog 1-2x per month.
