Electro-chamber music: around Mantra

The fourth session of my Electro-chamber music course was dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen's classic Mantra.

This composition for two pianos (with rind modulators, crotales, woodblock, and more) is a beautiful example of new soundscapes unveiled with live electronic music. It reminds as well that the artistic use of live electronic sound processing predates digital technology.

Composing for a traditional instrument and live electronics

During the class, the students explored crucial moments of the composition. In Mantra, Stockhausen found many great connections between the acoustic properties of the piano and the ring modulation process.

For instance, at the top, the first piano's modulator frequency is set at 220Hz, the fundamental frequency of the A3 repeated in the melody (musical formula, to use Stockhausen's lingo). With this setting, the piano sounds almost natural on the A3 note, and grows stranger and stranger the farther the note is from this central pitch.

Page 27 comes an awesome suspended time section. The pianists play the piano and the ring modulator with quite some space for personal interpretation.

At the core of this electro-chamber music class lies the connection between theory and practice: the students improvised playing both their instrument and, in lieu of ring modulator, the software simulation Ringshifter, part of Apple's Mainstage (and Logic).

The score and a recording of Mantra are available at Stockhausen Verlag.

My December readings

During this month of December 2011, I spent some time learning more about Physical Computing and the related topic Embedded systems.

Here are the two books I found great:

• The first is the reference in the domain of physical computing for artists: Physical computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers. It is a very good reading to get started with connecting sensors and actuators to multimedia computers.
• The second is a book about PIC micro-controllers:Designing embedded systems with PIC microcontrollers. It requires a little more scientific background, and is not specifically written for artists, but it is a thorough introduction to the world of micro-controllers.

I am going to include more physical computing studies in the course I teach in the "Multimedia Master - Music & Sound track", at the University of Franche-Comté. I'll let you know about that, in 2012!

Happy new year!

Composit: a new music festival for composers

Young composers, get ready for Composit, a new international summer music festival for composers.

Dedicated to new music, this festival is staring, for its first edition (Summer of 2012), French "spectral" composers Joshua Fineberg & Tristan Murail.

I wish all the best to this exciting project. Organizers include two dear friends of mine:

• Davide Ianni, who got a Ph.D. in music/composition from Boston University, and who is a very active music professional in the Boston area.
• Gabriele Vanoni, whom I studied with at Harvard University.

If you are a young composer looking for a great experience in Italy next summer, make sure you visit the composit web site and get in touch with the organizers to get more details.

Electro-chamber music: playing with delays

The second session of our Electro-chamber music class was dedicated to delays. We played with a great piece of gear: the Boss DD-7.

It's a powerful compact digital delay pedal, complete with expression pedal input to continually vary the delay time for instance. But to fully understand what's going on when we're using such gear, knowing about the history of delay effects comes very handy.

Analog tape delays

That's why I introduced in class a couple of great musical examples featuring tape delays. Of course, two major actors in 20th century electronic music are mentioned: the group Pink Floyd and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Here are a few visuals:

David Gilmour used a Binson Echorec extensively with Pink Floyd
between 1968 and 1977.

 

The very first commercialized guitar delay
was inside the Echosonic amplifier

 

Excerpt from Ray Butts' patent for the tape delay inside the Echosonic.
Check out the recording head (REH) and the play head (PH).

 

Overview of the setup for Karlheinz Stockhausen's composition Solo,
for solo instrument & live electronics (1966)

 

Focus on the recording unit.

10 Max patches for spectral sound processing

The 10 Max patches I designed for my workshop in Brooklyn on October 11th, 2011 are online. Download them from cycling74 : Live spectral processing.

The set includes :

• 5 patches to have fun with audio freeze
• 4 variations on a phase vocoder
• a live machine learning tool - yes, machine learning we can use musically!

Many thanks to Rob, from cycling74, who took the picture and sent it to me!
Hope to see you again soon!

Beyoncé is the... one

I got interested in Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker's choreographic work when I was a student at Strasbourg Conservatory. Around 2003, Marie-Claude Ségard, head of the conservatory, organized a visit to the dance school lead by the choreographer : P.A.R.T.S, in Brussels - I was invited and it was a great experience. At the same time, I and a couple of friends were playing Thierry De Mey's music: we performed a Maximalist! program during the international contemporary music festival Musica.

You can imagine my surprise when, on October 27th, aboard the Boston-NYC Chinatown bus, I came upon the following note in the People section of the New York Times:

I must confess that, among all of the new music I've been listening to this year, Beyoncé's album 4 (sponsored link) ranks at the very top. Anchored in the tradition, she is also innovating, but as importantly, the production quality is up to high standards.

I was glad to read that Beyoncé completely acknowledges having borrowed from this choreographer, a famous one in the European modern dance community. If you haven't seen it yet, watch this split screen showing Beyoncé's work on the left, Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker's one on the right :

As you can see, the "sampling" tradition in music has been extended to dance here, and even to Thierry De Mey's original ideas for sets and film making. Beyoncé did not credit de Keersmaeker, but there is little doubt lawyers are gonna find an arrangement: hip hop artists have been crediting music samples for quite some time now.
For the record, you'll find below Beyoncé's original video Countdown:

Max/MSP: programming guide for artists

During Expo '74 in Brooklyn, New-York, it was great to meet again with composer Francisco Colasanto. But Francisco is much more than a composer, starting with being currently the technical coordinator of the Mexican Center for Music and Sonic Arts (CMMAS) .

If you are interested in programming interactive music, especially in the software package Max MSP, I encourage you to check out his book: Max/MSP: programming guide for artists (www.maxmsptutorial.com). This first volume helps artists getting started with visual programming in the Max MSP environment. On the book's web site, you will find all of the "patches" illustrating the tutorials.

Francisco is currently working on the second volume, an e-book including tutorial videos: it will be one more great addition to the electronic music litterature.

To know more about Francisco and this book, make sure you read his interview on cycling74 web site.

Finally, discover on the following video Francisco Colasanto's work Baile for contrabass clarinet and live electronics, as performed by clarinetist Marco Mazzini: