What

I will explain how Bendik Hovik Kjeldsberg and I made an interactive sound installation.

Why

We were invited to make a sound installation.

How

I will go trough the process and discuss some issues we encountered.

——–

About the exhibition:

Bendik Hovik Kjeldsberg and I were invited by Bilder Nordic School of Photography to contribute to an exhibition they called Shameless:

«An exhibition by the graduating students  of Bilder Nordic School of Photography:

SHAMLESS IS A REFLECTION ON SEXUALITY

Sexuality is vital for our survival as a species and gives meaning to our lives. The simple function of reproduction is challenged by the complexity of our heart and brain.

Shameless explores contemporary issues of identity in our society, and the notion of feeling ashamed. Self-image, fantasies, puberty, HIV, minority groups and children’s understanding of sexuality are some of the themes we look into.»

from: bildernordic.no

The exhibition had over 5000 visitors and ran over a period of 10 days.

Placement:

They wanted sound to appear three places in the exhibition hall, all should be short sounds triggered by movement. These places and movements were:

1. When someone went into a room.
2. When someone laid down in a bed.
3. When someone went to the toilet.

Sensors:

Wanting to keep things as simple as possible, we figured out that the sensors that would work for all three scenarios where contact microphones. Contact mics are cheap and robust and works well when you just need an on/off signal.

We soldered xlr plugs to some piezo elements and we were ready to go.

For a more sensitive installation, for example if we wanted to measure how fast some one went into the next room or how heavy the person laying in the bed was, we would have to use other kinds of sensors such as cameras and pressure sensors.

Speakers:

We used three pairs of small handheld speakers and pulled many meters of mini-jack extensions all over the exhibition, I was worried there would be some signal-loss because of the cable length and on the speakers furthest away and we had some problems getting the volume high enough, but still it served it’s purpose.

Sounds:

The thought behind the sounds didn’t emerge from a profound reflection over the theme “shameless”, it was rather a simple and naive way to make the audience feel embraced and some how present an aspect of sexuality in music.

To find the sounds we needed we browsed an open source sound library, freesound.org, we also browsed some porn sites, but we found that quite embarrassing and couldn’t keep it serious.

We chose to have two alternating sounds per area:

System:

I made a standalone application in Max/MSP that ran on an iMac and we used an Avid Mbox Pro sound card for in- and output.

I had to define a limit for how frequent the sensors were active, if not, they would have triggered sounds all the time when there were many people in the exhibition hall. In the application you can define this your self in the number box called “antall sekunder å vente”.

As you can see, the program is divided into four sections. The two faders to the left in each section decide the volume of left and right of the first sample, the two faders at the right decide the volume of the second sample, the fader in the middle decides the threshold for the volume needed from the contact microphone to trigger the sample. The “replace”-button lets you load new samples.

The little square in the middle turns everything on and the “open”-button shows you audio preferences.

Downloads:

Standalone (MAC)

Source Code (Max/MSP)

As those of you familiar with Max/MSP might see, it was made in a hurry.

As I had to make the application in the exhibition hall with a limited amount of time, it ended up quite unsymmetrical and with a language mixture of English and Norwegian, this however reminded me that the patches doesn’t have to look good to work as a one-task-tool that only I have to look at. In this scenario it is more important to get it up and running and focusing on the overall experience of the installation rather than on the layout of the program running it.

Stability:

The system ran flawlessly for 10 days in a row without being turned off (except from when a girl turned off the sound card since it “was so warm”), so it is extremely stable, I was at least expecting to have to go down there once to fix it, but it just worked.

Reactions:

On the day of the opening, the exhibition hall was packed with people and the sounds on the bed and when passing into the other room didn’t quite come to it’s right because of all the chattering and frequent triggering of the sounds. But the setup in the toilet was rather successful since there were constantly people going there and they shared their experiences with the people standing in line when they leaved the toilet, so people started talking about the embarrassing experience of going to the toilet. Due to the nature of the triggered sounds (as sown above), to the presence of a dildo and challenging pictures in the bathroom and to the volume level on the speakers placed there, I must say it made quite an impression having to take a pee in those circumstances.

Timelaps:

Thanks to Anders Tveit for lending us some piezo elements.

The post Making an interactive sound installation appeared first on Drums and electronics.

Bendik Hovik Kjeldsberg is studying composition at the same Academy as I am doing my master degree.

He asked me to perform one of his compositions with him.

Since the composition’s nature is very electronic it presented some challenges when we were to perform it.

Listen to the composition here, keep in mind that this is intended to be a score and that the actual composition is what we perform based on this:

After some intents to solve this with Ableton Live, I decided the best way would be to just use MaxMsp for this project. I’ll elaborate later in the following text.

The first “blipp”-sounds that appear I wanted to play by triggering them one at a time in a sequence. In Ableton I could slice the track to MIDI on it’s transients, then extract each section, put them one after another in an audio track as clips, than map the MIDI-signal generated from the amplitude of the input signal to “next scene” and set global quantization to “none”. But it is quite self-explanatory that this is not particularly favorable.

As an alternative I tried to figure out how to do transient-detection on an audio file in Max, and then play the transients one after another, but I ended up manually putting all the transients locations in millisecond format in a [coll] object, then triggering them one at a time trough a [play~] object.

I’ve been looking into the [slice~] object, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet.

I’m extremely open for suggestions on this subject.

Our main intention with the performance of the piece was that the sounds Kjeldsberg had created in advance should be our instrument and what we performed should only be based on the mentioned composition and not contain any backing tracks. We achieved this using the following methods:

– All the sounds Kjeldsberg wanted to use where broken apart to as small pieces as we saw convenient.

– All drum sounds that I could manage to play at one time where removed from Kjeldsbergs setup.

– Sounds that were layered with these drum sounds were triggered by the corresponding drum using this max patch I made.

– Since the mentioned layered sounds changed during the performance, I added the ability to in real time change the sound that were to be triggered.

…

Kjeldsberg wanted to play both a melody line and a bass line at the same time with one one hand while triggering samples with the other hand.

Since the melody and bass line were not unison, that presented a challenge.

Bendik wanted to play the top melody line shown in the picture bellow while triggering the corresponding bass notes. We could of course have triggered a clip containing the bass notes in a certain tempo he would have to follow, but then we would loose his unique phrasing.

So I made a Max for Live patch that triggers each notes corresponding bass notes (some of the top notes are harmonized with different bass notes) in the right sequence, only problem is that the performer have to press a “reset sequence”-button for each time he or she plays it. I could have had the sequence restart when the last note is played, but we figured out that this was the easiest and most convenient method in this context.

…

I enjoy this way of interpreting a composition since it’s a lot like how I’ve been working earlier when extracting sounds from pieces I like. But then again this IS the actual composition as the composer intended it to be, in earlier examples I’ve only extracted sounds to make them part of a new, improvised piece.

In a way this is like going back to the original way of composing, where the composer didn’t make the final auditive experience, but rather a score for the performers or conductor to interpret. And since there are not yet instruments capable of making most of these sounds, we have to modify our own instruments to perform the composers intentions. Again, this is a fairly strange thought, since it is some how comparable to that some one writing a piano piece before the piano was even invented. This also incorporates the role of the instrument maker into what’s expected from the performer and/or the composer.

Here is a video from a concert where we perform the piece (the picture gets more descriptive at 2:00):

The post Performing an electronic composition appeared first on Drums and electronics.