Jean-Francois Charles

You liked the trailer ? Enjoy now Dziga Vertov 's 1928 movie with its brand new soundtrack! Dziga Vertov's The Eleventh Year on youtube . (youtube movie updated January 29th, 2017) Close-up of faces in The Eleventh Year , from Lev Manovich's Vizualizing Vertov article.

For a long time, this wonderful collection of recordings was available only on a set of 3 CDs, coming with a detailed booklet. Great news: the Centre de Recherche en Ethno-musicologie du CNRS now makes the files accessible online, including a pdf of the booklet: Les voix du monde, une anthologie des expressions vocales ( Voices of the World, an Anthology of Vocal Expression ) I use these sounds regularly when teaching: for instance, the beetle-propelled Papua New Guinea melody #33 on CD #2 is very interesting when discussing formants. More generally, it is a well organized and documented collection of recordings dedicated to voices, and focusing on: Solo Voice Techniques: from calls to breath, from spoken voice to harmonic singing, from timbre to ornamentation. Polyphonic Techniques: from heterophony to chords, from drones to counterpoint. I also occasionally found there some inspiration when composing: I wrote the coda for Risorius for six singers after listening to this gi...

During the Thanksgiving break, I watched on PBS the whole Soundbreaking series. This great show, subtitled Stories From The Cutting Edge Of Recorded Music , sheds light on the process of record and music making, through eight episodes: The Art of Recording Painting with Sound The Human Instrument Going Electric Four on the Floor The World is Yours Sound and Vision I Am My Music Here is the official trailer: Precisions about the Talk Box I found just one piece of incorrect information in the series, when the great Ben Harper describes how the Talk Box works. I have been teaching a course called The Spectral Nature of Sound at the University of Iowa, and I love to introduce the students to the Talkbox before studying other voice-processing machines such as the analog vocoder, the phase vocoder, a.o. In the episode about Voice, the Human Instrument , Ben Harper shows a great Roger Troutman excerpt, and says that the box sends electrical current down the throat of th...

Coming soon! A new soundtrack to Dziga Vertov 's movie The Eleventh Year . A collective project with musicians Nicolas Sidoroff, Clélia Bobichon, Guillaume Hamet, Krystian Sarrau, and Sébastien Sauvage. Here is a picture of our creation studio during the summer of 2015:

LOUi is the Laptop Orchestra at the University of Iowa . Our ensemble is actually more than a laptop orchestra: the students explore and develop musical links between acoustics & electronics, using instruments such as laptops, analog synthesizers, acoustic and amplified instruments. Here are excerpts from a jam with dancer, choreographer, and rapper Jhe Russel:

EPX, a video game studio, is a great student organization at the University of Iowa: a real art-technology project, gathering motivated and talented students. It was a treat to be their guest, and to listen to Jon Lonngren, developer of the boardgame Fallen Land . He presented his epic game, as well as the epic development process!

You are invited this Friday, October 14th, at the School of Music for a showcase by the Public Digital Arts cluster faculty. My colleagues Kyle Rector (Computer Science), Daniel Miller (School of Art & Art History - Sculpture Area), Mike Gibisser (Department of Cinematic Arts), Daniel Fine (Theatre Arts | Dance), Andrew Casto (School of Art & Art History - Ceramics), Steve Baek (College of Engineering Mechanical & Industrial Engineering), and I will be presenting aspects of our creative research. I will be showing live interactive music with PhD candidate composer Nima Hamidi .