Jean-Francois Charles

To cap a great day with two performances of the Scientific Concert, the clock greeted the audience with the top of its hour: the minutes column is reset while the hours display is incremented from 3 to 4 bulbs.The clock was built by Benjamin Revis at the University of Iowa. It was invented by French artist Bernard Gitton.

Last week, I gave a workshop at the University of Iowa College of Engineering, introducing students to the Sonic Pi language and environment. This music-oriented programming language is designed for live coding. It can also be used to introduce text-based coding to people with no programming experience. The students were very curious and active: we had the time to go through all of the examples and to introduce what live coding is in the electronic music community. Find below the code excerpts I used for this one-hour workshop.Play a noteplay 70
Cmd-R to run the codeChordplay 72
play 75
play 79Melodyplay 72
sleep 1
play 75
sleep 1
play 79Play with durations & pitchDuration is in “beats”. Default BPM is 60, i.e. 1 beat is 1 second.
Pitch is the MIDI note number. Try 60.25 if you like eighth tones.First option: amp
play 50, amp: 0.1
sleep 0.25
play 55, amp: 0.2
sleep 0.25
play 57, amp: 0.4
sleep 0.25
play 62, amp: 1Using synthesizersuse_synth :saw
play 38
sleep 0.25
play 50
sleep 0.25…

Come and let yourself be enchanted by the water clock built by Benjamin Revis after French artist Bernard Gitton's design: it's going to be live on stage this Sunday, October 27, 2019.Scientific Concert at the University of Iowa School of Music.
2 performances: 3pm & 5 pm.

I'm excited to share with you a couple of images from work and rehearsals before the upcoming Scientific Concert. In this video, Matthew Wortel and Dan Moore are extracting sounds hidden inside of an Iowa stone:Only on October 27, 2019, University of Iowa School of Music.
2 performances: 3 pm and 5 pm.