Jean-Francois Charles

Great clarinetists Petra Stump and Heinz-Peter Linshalm are celebrating tonight at the Porgy & Bess in Vienna their Shortcuts recording . The CD is part of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik collection. Among the numerous composers involved, two of them are especially close to my heart: first Chaya Czernowin , of course, who has been a friend of the composers at Harvard for years, and second Johannes Kretz , because we meet regularly during the Prisma group meetings. The three miniatures of mine on the CD are Play along 1, 2, and 3 - clarinet duos designed for a student and a teacher (listen to a live recording, different from the studio version - tracks 11, 12, 13 on this page ).

When teaching composers about voice, giving a class on the talk box & the vocoder is a great complement. Here are a couple of notes I took to prepare the class I'm giving tomorrow. Talk box The talk box is mostly known as an effect enabling to apply vocalic sound colors to guitar sounds. My teaching material includes: a copy of the original patent for an electronic voice box apparatus , designed to be used as an artificial larynx. a video of Peter Frampton performing with guitar & talk box (the device is used from around 5:40 in the video): a picture of Peter Frampton's talk box, by Carl Lender: drawings on the blackboard, to remind students about formants , resonances of the vocal track, voiced and un-voiced sounds, vocal folds, guitar strings, and more. Vocoder Going from the talk box to the vocoder, it's going from real-world formants to modeled ones , where the resonances are not made by a human's vocal tract, but thanks to electronic resonator circuits

Martin Jaroszewicz just made available a free application that might be useful to composers & music producers: Spectral Tools . He programmed it with Max & Jitter . In case you want to control more details, tweak the analysis parameters to suit your own sounds, feel free to make your own version from the patches you'll find under my name on Cycling 74's share page . But using Martin's work, you benefit from a nice interface, you can go straight to making music!

Yesterday, I attended the last concert of the Screaming Headless Torsos ’ European Tour 2010. David Fuze Fiuczynski is an amazing musician - I already told you when he came to talk with the composers at Harvard . The band was in great shape. The essence of today's funk, straight from New-York. And a killer duo made of drummer Louis Cato and percussionist Daniel Sadownick . In addition to playing originals, they kept with the tradition of playing “standards”: like Bach when he was re-writing Vivaldi, like the boppers when they were playing the Broadway hits, the Torsos rendered the most funky version of Michael Jackson’s Remember the Time. Well, they also played Charlie Parker, it was a “jazz” concert, after all. Amazon.com Widgets