My friend Pete Vilk and I recently finished a little website about our Tea and Jam project. Check it out!
The idea was to build an interface where people could come help us make some sound and music while drinking tea in a relaxing atmosphere. We’re going to keep developing it, so this will probably evolve a lot in the near future.
This week I’m working on a short video. It will be done by Friday, I’ll upload it here as soon as it’s finished. See you then!
Thanks to Anna Seppa, Alex Fong, and others, I have some video footage from my show at the Forest Cafe the other day. The audio is a bit distorted, but it’s rather fun to watch.
Before we get to those, if you’re interested in my current studio project you can read about it (and listen and watch videos) here. It involved building a tea set that generates music and sound. Very fun stuff.
And here are a couple of songs from the show.
Good For Me:
The Oh Be Gentle Strut click to hear the studio version:
Five More Minutes click to hear the studio version:
Each Possible Conclusion (featuring the Wii controller)
No music this time, but here are a couple of other things for you.
As I mentioned earlier, one of my current school projects entails making “Loop Composer” software that uses a Nintendo Wii wireless controller as an interface.
I’ve finished a very early prototype, which you can play with if you happen to have Max/MSP, a Wii controller, and a bluetooth enabled computer. Click here to download the Max patch, directions, and a pdf of a short presentation I will be giving on thursday. If anyone does test it I would be grateful for feedback. Right now it is quite skeletal with very few features, but it responds well enough and I’ll be using it at my show tomorrow night. [edit: this version is no longer supported! go download the new, much fancier version]
Which reminds me, I’m playing a show with a lot of friends tomorrow night at 8pm in the Forest Cafe here in Edinburgh. It’s free and it should be a good time! 
Last week I wrote a film sound analysis about silent Soviet film of the 20’s. Read it here! It’s called “The Sound of War in Silent Soviet Film” and talks mostly about The Battleship Potemkin and The End of St. Petersburg.
One of the scenes (from “The End of St. Petersburg) I talk about can be watched on youtube.
For some reason the other scene (from “The Battleship Potemkin”) won’t upload to youtube, but the full film is available for free download at archive.org.
I’ve made some pretty cool field recordings recently, and I thought I would share the excitement…for starters, this is the sound from my window this afternoon:
Bagpipes in the distance
And 10 days ago I borrowed the binaural microphones from my school and went to a Hibernian FC soccer game with a friend. Here are some of the results:
The game gets started
Just after a goal is scored (the recording of the goal itself is too distorted, sorry).
You’ll notice that the stereo image is only really effective on headphones, particularly for those last two recordings.
You’ll also notice a nice little change on this blog…I’ve discovered a very cool little mp3 embedding system made by del.icio.us. Now you can just click the blue arrows to play, or right click (ctrl-click) the name of the song to download.
Yesterday I made a web tutorial/explanation about the work that goes into making an album – in particular, the forthcoming Groanbox Boys album. It has pictures, sound clips, and short discussions about the various stages involved:
This is a little anecdote about playing underground hip hop for high school students at a vocational school in France.
It’s quite short and simple, I did it all this morning using music by Aesop Rock and an old NPR recording from last November.
In other news, I’m back in Pittsburgh. My trip to the UK was everything I was hoping it to be, and more. Now I’m looking forward to getting back to work on my Projects with a capital P.
[edit: whoops! That mp3 cut off before the end. I’m fixing it now, it should be fixed in a few minutes]
I’m not really sure how to describe this…I’ve been saying “sound documentary” but it’s really more of a story than a documentary. It’s the story of my car breaking down on the highway a few weeks ago.
In any event, I’ve been working on this for the past week or so. I wrote all of the text and music (except the Gillian Welch song, as you’ll see). The sound effects are a mix between stuff I recorded in my house and tracks from the BBC Sound Effects Library.
It’s long – about 15 minutes – and the file is about 16 mb, so be patient!
Oh, and the song that I talk about at the end can be listened to in its entirety here.
Thanks to a little encouragement (and a lot of help) from my friend Jonathon I recently started learning how to use After Effects – the software that I’m now realizing is used to make every car commercial that you see on TV. I picked it up fairly quickly, probably because of the similarities with audio software. I think I’m only barely scratching the surface, but it’s a useful skill to have, and I thoroughly enjoy it, even though waiting for video to render is the most mind numbing activity ever.
In any event I used After Effects to compile a lot of footage that I took at the Farm one day over the summer, and I lengthened and remixed an old song of mine to create a music video! I’m fairly happy with it. I think it’s a good initial foray into the world of video.
Click here to watch or download. It’s a 20 mb quicktime file, so be patient! Make sure your volume is turned up or else it gets kinda boring.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been working on a short sound documentary. I originally wanted to use it as part of my Handface documentary, but now I’m not so sure. In any event it was a very good exercise for me, and I hope you enjoy it. Click here to listen or download.
As usual, it will be much more enjoyable if you are able to listen on real speakers or headphones…laptop speakers are not so great.
Please let me know what you think! This was definitely an experiment so I would like to hear some opinions.
The past few days have been spent working on the Seznec Brothers recordings, which are turning out well, a little bit of Rolo music, and my Handface documentary.
For those of you who don’t know, Handface is my band. Well, I suppose it was, since the drummer is now off in Chile for six months.
In any event, a few months ago I realized that the Handface story is compelling, funny, and in a way is an analogy for (among other thing) Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, techies vs luddites, America vs TheRestOfTheWorld, etc etc etc
So I decided to make a documentary that would show all of these things. I finally settled on making a series of short audio-only pieces that would then be animated by my friends (and me).
Handface was composed of three people, who I will call Alberto, Jon, and Yann. Handface theorists often point out that Alberto represents the acoustic, Jon the electronic, and Yann (me) the electro-acoustic…therefore I figured that a good way to start the project would be by making short vignettes about each of the three members that somehow epitomize their characters.
All this is to say that I have finished the outline of chapter one, and you can listen to it here:
A Story About Techno
I would strongly suggest listening to it on headphones or real speakers. Laptop speakers won’t cut it for this one…
This episode is about Jon. He wrote the story, which can be found on his blog. When I read it I was struck by the stark imagery and poetic quality of the text – I found it reflected his personality quite well. I wrote the music, which is a remix of a Handface song.
It looks like my friend Aurelia will be helping me with the animation for this episode. I will probably add a lot to the soundtrack once the animation is finished, but I thought you all would be interested! Questions, comments, and suggestions are always welcome.
It was really rainy here on tuesday, and I really liked the sound of the rain on the shed where we keep the Truck with a capital T. So I made a little movie about it. Let me know what you think!
Car horns have not really changed for a hundred years. Other than those novelty horns that play “Bolero” or the like, car horns have always made the same obnoxiously loud noise – whether you are beeping hello to your friends, telling someone to hurry up, or honking simply as retribution.
In addition, there are tons of situations when a honk simply doesn’t convey your emotion. How do you honk “I’m sorry” or “Thank you”? It’s virtually impossible with the standard hardware. I was discussing this problem with my friend Dan, and his original idea was to have a dedicated “thank you” horn, which could potentially double as an apology horn. From a sound design perspective, this wouldn’t be particularly difficult…two short ‘beep’ or ‘boop’ sounds, the first at a higher pitch, would probably do the job quite well.
This got us thinking, however, and we tried to figure out how one could convey a whole range of emotions through a car horn. Our solution, as the picture suggests, entails a touch pad with an x and y axis, the extremes of which would correspond to a pure emotion. I labeled these as Anger/Happiness and Grateful/Apologetic, but those could certainly be improved and refined.
The difficult part of this project, of course, would be the sound design, particularly since the sounds should probably be as simple as possible. What does monophonic anger sound like? And is it be possible to make a smoothly variable sound that can shift between anger and happiness, and nail every nuanced emotion in between? More philosophically, if it is possible to find an anger sound, could one find a happiness coefficient?
Another aspect of this, that my designer friends would understand better than I, would be the effect on the user. Would someone be able to eventually become familiar with the interface enough to instantly be able to pick the precise spot that reflects how they are feeling? Righteous indignation, or embarassment, or pride… what would that sound like?
Maybe eventually people could use a device like this to communicate without words. Maybe.
In other words, it’s interesting to think about the possibilities of sound design, and its limits.