For anyone interested in the project I’ve uploaded my progress report which i had to hand in today.  It gives a fairly brief summary of the project and what you can expect at the concert on Sept 8th/9th 2008 at SARC in Belfast.

link:

http://www.MajorC.co.uk/InterimReport.pdf

I will not begin this post with a rant about the lack of a ‘#’ button on my mac keyboard…

Puppet Whispers is in phase 2 after an initial rehearsal/experimenting session.  Had some excellent feedback from the musicians regarding what worked and what was quite definitely impossible!  Discovered a fairly large issue regarding traditional notation, which is time based, and my dynamically shifting score which made performance from it headache inducing.  The idea we were testing looks like this:

An Idea based on John Cage and Tug of War

Essentially, in something like John Cage’s Music for piano where imperfections in the paper inform the placement of notes, I’m designing a system that superimposes Clefs and staves over a page full of notes.  The score itself is shifted left and right based on performers leaning back and forward.  The problem is that playing music from a traditional staff makes no sense when there is no sense of time and so to fix this problem i will try taking snapshots of the music which remain static for short periods, and also with a moving caret/progress bar type indicator.  Below is the Graphic score in action (clef graphic courtesy of Chris McClelland).

Notes are also somewhat limited to short percussive attacks at the moment, so i’ll be updating them so there’s some variety of note durations.  The whole thing is being done, as usual, in Processing and Max/MSP.

The Performance will be free entry at the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC) on Sept. 8th 2008 in Belfast at the Queen’s University Belfast.  Feel free to come if graphic animated notation and ideas from network performance interest you.

]]> http://majorc.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/puppet-whispers-tug-of-score/feed/ 0 DjChongy An Idea based on John Cage and Tug of War http://majorc.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/graphic-notation-puppet-whispers/ http://majorc.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/graphic-notation-puppet-whispers/#comments Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:49:24 +0000 DjChongy http://majorc.wordpress.com/?p=44 ]]>

The latest project! This summer I’ve set myself the task of designing a piece of animated music notation software that converts ensemble gestures into data which affects a musical score. The idea was initially to design a performance framework where performers could be separated visually allowing a composer/mediator to control the level of interactivity between each instrumentalist.

The interaction found in the traditional game of ‘Chinese Whispers‘ or ‘telephone‘ will be used as a central theme for the pieces performed in concert. The transmission of gestural and aural information and its transformation as it is constantly recycled in addition to composed materials.

Each performer will have a computer generated graphic score. I’ve been prototyping the score as a program in Processing which is a great tool for visual/sonic artists who understand programming concepts. I will be using pressure sensitive resistors on the performers’ feet to collect time lapsed data and accelerometers attached to the performer to control the drawn imaged in the ’shared space’ half of the graphic score.  The software in its current state looks like this.

I will be keeping this blog updated as the system evolves. The current shadow screens are too small and the pieces to be performed are still being developed. At the moment the software divides the screen into an individual and shared spaces. The individual space presents each performer with different information dependent on the movement gestures captured by an adjacent performer. The shared space allows for communication between all 4 performers simultaneously but as with the other gestural information, its visibility is controlled by a mediator.

Any comments and suggestions are welcome at this early stage of development!!
-Major C

I’m aware that these ‘phase’ names really don’t mean anything but I’ll use them anyway!  This is the current state of my ‘Sonic Window’.  So far it has 10-point multi-touch control and allows you to mix the sounds of 4 different sources with noise.  The idea is that you can’t really see what’s on the other side of the window, and by touching the window you can spread the noisy elements apart from the pitched sound elements and ‘hear’ the world on the other side of the window.

Sounds generated in Max/MSP/Jitter 5 and blob tracking is implemented using the cv.jit objects.  The noisy visualisation is done in a program i wrote using Processing.  The man you see very elegantly demo’ing the installation for you is Javier Jaimovich, he too is working on an installation using electronic circuits connected by the metal surfaces of the Sonic Lab.

So, as a quick demo to see whether my set-up is suitable for ‘blob tracking’ I downloaded the open source Reactivision software from the people who make Reactables and apart from a huge white spot in the middle of the screen the system appears to work!! Fingers placed on screen seem to cause bounding rectangles to appear which is a good sign.  The next step is either to rebuild the software for my own sinister purposes…or to just use OSC to get the data into Processing.

It may be a little hard to understand what’s going on here.  The white spot in the middle is probably because my light isn’t diffused properly.  my fingertips are the four small blobs in the bottom left hand corner.