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.

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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.

What:

I will analyze and discuss a performance I did together with Sigurd Ytre-Arne (live visuals).

Why:

I want to become more aware of how I work.

How:

I will analyze a video of the performance and discuss some thoughts I have on improvising together with a VJ.

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Preface:

I was invited to perform at “Musikkbaren”, a stage where students at my academy can present what they are working on. I intended to bring the project “Sound Picking“, but since the dancer was not available at that date, I had to find something else to present. For a while I considered just doing a solo performance, but I decided I wanted to take advantage of the situation and bring in another element to challenge my self. As stated in my project description, I want to:

Look into how I can make video react on sound or controllers using the MaxMsp extensions Jitter and Vizzie.

The perfect man to help me with this was my friend Sigurd Ytre-Arne

Since I trust him as a person and enjoy his work as an artist, I decided we would not rehearse, we would just meet at the venue for some hours before the performance and share thoughts. He challenged me in advance to gather some video clips that he should use so that I would have more impact on the overall outcome of the performance, at this task I completely failed.

I suggested massive and intense videos such as:

But he humbly rejected them and after getting to know his approach both trough this performance and another that I will write about soon, I realized that the beauty of his work lies in the trivial and minimalistic shades of daily life.

Video:

Analysis:

• 00:06: Nice and clear start, I like that Sigurd wait with the visuals so that the audience can start focusing on one element at the time.
• 00:23: It is good that you already can see the connection between the audio and the video, that it is triggered.
• 00:38: I like that I work with the texture in the drum
• 01:14: I make a lot of open space and keep the ideas clear. Good.
• 01:29: Could have waited longer with the low frequencies.
• 02:00: I should try to avoid hitting the cymbals by accident, but hey, it was an accident …
• 02:04: Nice sudden change in texture. Would have been better if what was before the change was higher in pitch.
• 03:07: I should have been more clear about using that sample, sound like I didn’t mean to do it … Maybe I didn’t …
• 03:23: I’m glad I just used that repeater once. But it was quite a messy build-up, maybe I should start making clearer ideas in advance and rather improvise the transition between them.
• 03:34: Nice drop.
• 04:22: Could have stayed in that idea longer.
• 04:22 – 04:53: I Like that I take my time with this idea.
• 04:57: Elegant transit, well done by Sigurd Ytre-Arne.
• 05:47: I like the part until here, but now it got too loud.
• 05:58: The looping process goes almost undetected, good.
• 06:07: The reversing of the sound destroyed the flow …
• 06:07 – 06:39: Too messy part, didn’t like it, not clear enough.
• 06:57: The video clearly get’s the focus as I just let the loop go, nice part even though I’m quite tired of that sound.
• 07:41: Sigurd leads me into a new part by changing the video drastically, I should probably have presented a clearer change than just continuing with the slow and large sound I had already done for quite some time …
• 07:51: Should have stopped the loop.
• 08:18: I start to like it, the drums are so clear that they act as a soloist on top of the loop.
• 08:18 – 09:19: I like this part.
• 09:22: Should have stopped the resonating loop as I was clearly moving somewhere new …
• 09:40: Sigurd is with me though, bringing more red to the set.
• 10:03: Nice beat repeat.
• 10:06: The loop that had been going on for so long was cut in a way that it seemed like it was an mistake, not cool! But it’s at least good that I choose to stop it.
• 10:07: Cool new room, both auditive and visually. I had been going with long and strong sounds for ten minutes now, it was nice to change texture.
• 11:24: Should not have moved, seemed like I was done, I should have trusted that I know what I am doing …
• 11:38: Nice new element, and very fitting visuals.
• 12:22: As we see someone walking by in the background on the visuals, I feel it somehow destroys the illusion that we tried to create for the audience to step into. Bad luck.
• 12:40: Talking/blowing into the microphone … That was not cool and a bad idea in this context … I’m not trying to make the soundtrack for star wars here …
• 13:03: Cool visuals! Blending in different movie clips with the live video-feed of me enhances the illusion that we try to create …
• 13:37: I don’t think the poem fitted into this context either, too “epic”.
• 14:22: I like that I start presenting higher pitches again, but still in a floating form.
• 15:36: Should have kept it going instead of going to the common “fast playing on the side of the drums in abrupt patterns”.
• 15:48: It definitely helps with some delay.
• 15:58: Nice place to cut the loop with the low frequencies.
• 15:58 – 16:37: I like this space.
• 16:37 – 16:54: I like this space even better, should have kept it for longer …
• 16:54: Well played by Sigurd keeping the picture frozen. Could have kept it like that even longer.
• 17:43: Nice visuals, I feel they directly reflect the music. I probably stayed longer in this musical room since I saw Sigurd was with me on it. Good interaction.
• 18:48: Yeah! Cool minimalistic music and video. Could have kept it going.
• 19:50: Apparently I felt like I was in a hurry and didn’t know where to go since I had to fall back to this, an idea I definitely use way too much. But it was a nice and clear change. Could have had more high end though.
• 20:35: I don’t hit the kick hard enough so the sample isn’t triggered, but it sounds good and I manage to work with it and the video response is nice and clear.
• 21:14: Same thing happens, probably because I learned from before that it was cool.
• 21:23: The transition from being played to being looped seems quite subtile on the recurring, but I fear that the loss of the direct sound from the kick in the room probably decreased the intensity of the flow in a negative way.
• 21:50: I think it starts to get boring.
• 21:52: I feel that the visuals bring new life to the musical flow by taking focus, good job Sigurd!
• 22:50: You see only visible audience member gets interested in understanding the relevance between what is going on at the canvas and what is happening in realtime. A good proof that the visuals are in focus.
• 19:50 – 23:00: This part, as mentioned is somehow my safe place and I am starting to get extremely bored with it. I’ll try avoiding it at all costs from now on. But still I hope the audience enjoyed it since. It is a clear and strong musical room.
• 23:00: Nice with a change in pitch.
• 23:57: Apparently  I suddenly decide to play in time, since that is such a strong statement in this context I should have done it much clearer. Too much hihat.
• 24:22: Using my voice here is a strong statement that I like and is how I should have started the previous phrase.
• 24:22 – 25:30: I think I like this part. It’s good because it is on one side something different from the rest as it is in time and still it keep the “native” touch the whole piece has (hard to avoid when just using drums). The aspect I don’t like about it is that it sounds quite messy and I feel it’s starting to be a “clich’e” to play drums with delay.
• 25:48: Here I present another comfort sone of mine, it has nice musical impact, but I’m tired of it …
• 27:27: It’s not good that the volume drops when I turn on the reverb.
• 28:37: Should have kept the cymbal-thing going for a little longer …
• 30:02: Nice long fade-out and we managed to keep the audience silent together with us for a while.

Summary:

I remember feeling quite good about this performance and I believe it was due to the calm and slow evolving nature of the piece. In hindsight, as stated, I fell that it was maybe too slow. But still a nice piece with good structure.

Regarding the interaction between Sigurd and I, I think we had a fairly good interaction (see analysis). The clearest moments of interaction where of course those where the video and music where mirroring each other (eg glitchy music and glitchy video), Other interesting moments, that might not have been as clear, were when the video inspired the music to take new directions and vice versa. Another concept of interplay that was present from time to time was contrasts, that one stood still and the other moved or that one was choppy and the other floating. These are concepts that we could pursuit in the future through rehearsal techniques similar to those I have been doing in Sound Picking and Dancer.

The post Performing with live improvised visuals, drums and electronics appeared first on Drums and electronics.

What:

I made a song based on samples from an iron monument.

Why:

I was hired to do it.

How:

I sampled the monument and processed the samples in Ableton Live.

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Finished piece:

Download:

Ableton Live Project

Preface:

The museum “Maihaugen” in Lillehammer, Norway, hired me to do an electronic composition for the anniversary of their founder: “Anders Sandvig”. The composition were to be based on sounds I could make from their new monument of Sandvig.

A presentation of Maihaugen as found on maihaugen.no/en/:

Maihaugen is an open air museum with 200 old and new buildings, exhibitions, cafes and lots of activities. It was founded by the dentist Anders Sandvig in 1887. Maihaugen is a part of Lillehammer museum, together with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Aulestad, Sigrid Undset’s Bjerkebæk, the Norwegian Olympic Museum and the Norwegian Post Museum.

The monument consists of many tall vertical iron columns shaped slightly differently so that they together project the face of “Anders Sandvig”, see picture at top.

Procedure:

I went to Lillehammer one week before the show to sample the monument with a zoom h4n. Afterwards I took the two and a half hour long trip back home to Oslo, where my recorder was stolen and I had to go back to Lillehammer the next day with a borrowed recorder to do everything again.

I am a backup maniac, I use both dropbox, icloud and jotta, but apparently the handheld recorder I used is not synced to neither of these services. I learned:

Always make sure important files are backed up.

Raw samples:

I imported the sound files into ableton live and extracted the clearest and most distinct parts into new audio files.

Structure:

The piece was going to be presented with several dancers and two musicians playing on top of it, me playing live on the monument and Andreas Ljones playing the Jew’s Harp.

I was asked to satisfy many needs:

• It had to be in tune with the Jew’s Harp.
• It had to be in 5/4.
• It had to have a touch of traditional Norwegian folk music.
• It had to be danceable.
• It had to last for 10 minutes.
• It had to be simple and minimalistic.
• It had to be obvious that the sound was made from the statue.

I chose to use a side-chain compressor on every beat to make it easier for the dancers to follow, and I made the 5/4 timing quite diffuse so it wouldn’t confuse them. The emphasis on the first and fifth beat is my attempt to make it more like Norwegian folk music, I try to draw a parallel to “Rørospols” where they emphasize the first and third beat in 3/4 timing.

As you might have discovered by now, the piece is looped once, with the structure ABAB, where the second AB is an exact copy of the first AB. That might be a quite cheap and lazy trick, but I think it worked well …

Watch:

News Reportage:

Video from the audience:

Summary:

It was interesting to have such a short deadline and having to satisfy all the mentioned criteria. It would obviously have been better if I had more time, but it is good to know that I can make something that is good enough within a small time frame.

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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.

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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.

Kjetil Husebø – Keys

Terje Evensen – Drums

Kristoffer Lislegaard – Electronics

Jonas Barsten Johnsen – Drums

(Everybody – Electronics)

Tord Knudsen – Lights and Video

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The piece is improvised, we had two rehearsals in advance to get to know each other better.

Feel free to comment.

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SkRR is a sound collective based in Oslo. We arrange concerts, workshops and social gatherings where we focus on production and performance of electronic music, sound design, sound programming and experimenting with auditive and visual expressions.

You can follow SkRR on:

Twitter (Norwegian)

Origo (Norwegian)

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Here is a concert we did at “Victoria” in Oslo in May 2011.

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On saturday (october 8th 2011) we had a workshop, I did not contribute to the execution of the project this time, but I joined as one of 12 participants. We were divided into four groups and were each given a theme randomly from a max-patch (on the bottom of this page) based on an idea from John Cage.

The main idea was “matchmaking”, to encourage more people to join the collective and to get to know each other better.

We worked together for some hours, had a nice lunch, and then performed our pieces for each other.

My group got the theme “__.aUto”, we interpreted this to a peace that would start some what ambient and static (graphically like this: “__.”) and evolve into music by the band “U2” (“Uto”≈”U2”). We wanted U2 to be mixed into the venue where we were, so we did some field recordings of the surroundings. We also decided to make a beat based composition. We ripped U2 songs of Spotify with soundflower, and this was the result:

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MaxPatch by Anders Tveit (right-click -> save as):

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Bjørn Charles Dreyer Group is a product of Dreyer’s master studies at the University of Agder. I was doing a bachelor degree at the same University, and he invited me to be a part of his project, you can read his master thesis here.

The master degree ran over a period of two years resulting in a final exam concert were we invited Ariel de Wolf (cello) and Snorre Saga (bass) to play with us.

Being a part of this project I’ve been given time and inspiration to develop my self as an improvising musician. And I am utterly grateful to Dreyer for inviting me to be a part of this.

One of the main purposes of the project is to challenge the listening habits of the audience. We sit in each our corner of the room by each our speaker, the stereo signal is distributed diagonally from where we sit and the audience is placed in the middle facing each other, so they also can react upon each others reactions to the music. I made a short video of the setting:

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We did two concerts three weeks ago, one in Kristiansand and one in Kvinesdal. The composition we performed is mainly improvised, but there are four ideas that we can use if we want:

– Dreyer and I play alone for 15 minutes.

– Around 30 minutes I start with the sound previously mentioned.

– Somewhere after that we start a more heavy theme in time.

– The ending can be a romantic soft theme in contrast to the last one.

We have talked a lot about these ideas and sometimes we stick strictly to them, some times some of us don’t use them at all, some times we change them. But these were the basic and only ideas we had for the composition on this tour.

We recorded both performances, you can listen to them here, and please feel free to comment on them. Both recordings were done taking a stereo line signal from the mixer into a Zoom H4n.

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Unfortunately, the memory card on the H4n was full 4 minutes before the end, so I had to do a short fadeout.

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