Jean-Francois Charles

I just received an e-mail from Didier Breuque, a friend and clarinet player in the Orchestre Lyrique de Région Avignon Provence (OLRAP) . He calls for help because the orchestra is in a very difficult financial situation and is in need of more support by French cultural institutions, sponsors or patrons. The call was also relayed by the Cahiers de la Musique Classique . The OLRAP is more than a lyric orchestra : the versatility, curiosity, and involvement of the musicians has enabled them to perform a wide repertoire, from baroque to symphonic repertoire to contemporary creation . They notably performed the premières of two works of mine: Nigritella nigra for clarinet and string quartet (in 1998) and Helianthus musca for ensemble (in 1999). The current musical director is the American conductor Jonathan Schiffman . I'm sure they would appreciate your help: you need only sign the on-line petition Save the Orchestre Lyrique Région Avignon-Provence (French only). Amazon.com W...

The Hot Club de Lyon is celebrating its 60th birthday from September 19th to October 1st. See the complete program on citizenjazz and most importantly, go to the concerts! In 1997, we performed there with the Insa Big Band . Great musicians were in the band, and we invited Maurice Merle for a special concert. On the left, you can see the musical battle that took place between Maurice Merle and Alex Desenfant during my composition Sonatine pour des enfants .

I just made available this Max/MSP/Jitter patch (a computer program) aimed at performance-time automatic segmentation of sounds. Listen to the music with the player at the bottom on this page. Noise hits are played at segmentation points. Discover the under-the-hood details in my recent article " A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing Using Max/MSP and Jitter ". If you are a Max/MSP user, feel free to download this patch . Going through the series of patches is highly recommended! This is the ninth and most advanced one for the moment. In case you want to give it a try, download Max/MSP and Jitter 30-day demo on cycling 74 web site .

Ken Ueno is a great musician, an outstanding composer, and an amazing educator. I am thrilled to announce that the 14th minute of the composition project 60/60 is dedicated to him. Thank you Ken for your participation to the project, and for your great gift: Derek Bailey 's book Improvisation - Its Nature and Practice in Music . An active Composer in Red Sneakers , Ken Ueno is now Assistant Professor at University of California, Berkeley . The miniature 14/60 is called Alive Hic ; you can listen to it and download the file on last.fm . The performers are Vincent Daoud and Yuji Noguchi , two members of the group Hic and nunc . They were recorded in Lausanne, Switzerland. The composition process went like that: I sent the performers a sonorous score based on an improvisation night Ken and I (a.o.) had around Boston. Vincent and Yuji played imitations and reactions to the sonorous score. Finally, the quick editing and sound processing was my first attempt at using and learning ...

When I discovered electronic music during the Centre Acanthes 2000/Ircam , my favorite topic was real time sound processing in frequency domain. Hans Tutschku taught the wonders of AudioSculpt in Avignon, before Benjamin Thigpen taught Max/MSP in Helsinki. Now, the Computer Music Journal just published an article I wrote about spectral sound processing in real time and performance time ( whereas real-time treatments are applied on a live sound stream, performance-time treatments are transformations of sound files that are generated during a performance ). If you are interested in graphical sound synthesis, phase vocoder , and sonograms (or spectrograms) , I hope you will enjoy this tutorial. The great news is that you can download the article for free on the page of the Computer Music Journal, Issue 32, Volume 3 . Max/MSP/Jitter patches You can readily apply the described techniques in the development environment Max/MSP/Jitter . For a hands-on approach, make sure you download t...

Bagict is a duet for clarinet and saxophone. I am thrilled to dedicate this work to two friends, musicians, and scholars: Ryan Raul Banagale (have a look at amusicology.com ) and Michael Scott Cuthbert . Both of them are participants in the project 60/60. Because they joined the creation almost at the same time, I decided to pair them. The piece is called Bagict : hear a little magic and a little Babbitt (it's related to the presents each of them chose - more on that another time). Here is the current version of the first page of the score: Announcement We are very lucky: the work will be premiered next week by Vincent Daoud and Yuji Noguchi , wonderful performers of the ensemble Hic Et Nunc . An excerpt of the tasteful invitation I received - original version, of course: Freitag, 15. August 2008, ab 19.00 Uhr Théâtre de Poche, Brunngasse 1, 2502 Biel ( http://map.search.ch/biel-bienne/brunngasse-1 ) Programm: ab 19.00 Uhr     Eintreffen der Gäste 19.15...

A sonogram (also called spectrogram ) represents graphically the distribution of energy of a sound through frequencies, in function of time. It may be funny or useful to transform the data graphically before resynthesizing the sound. This is made easy by a development environment like Max/MSP/Jitter, which allows to work in real time with sound and video. In this video , I show a few graphical treatments one can apply to a sonogram: If you wish to realize similar sound processing, here are Max/MSP/Jitter patches for spectral sound processing . Update: Computer Music Journal Tutorial on Graphical Spectral Sound Synthesis Read more explanations about this type of graphical sound synthesis in the free pdf article: A Tutorial on Spectral Sound Processing with Max/MSP & Jitter .