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Showing posts from October, 2019

Water Clock: Top of the Hour

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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 .

Sonic Pi Workshop

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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 note play 70 Cmd-R to run the code Chord play 72 play 75 play 79 Melody play 72 sleep 1 play 75 sleep 1 play 79 Play with durations & pitch Duration 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: 1 Using synthesizers use_synth :saw p

Scientific Concert Teaser 02

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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.

Scientific Concert Teaser 1

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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.