frey

initial RGB tests with PWM – on the final there are four LED’s per colour, rather than just two as shown here.

I do very much like the colour mixing that happens as a result of all of the beams of light being out of alignment and inconsistent..

Just dug this one up from my archives: seems I never published it. Here you go:

June 28th 2006:
I’ve been thinking about causality in music lately.

Earlier this year, we had a lecture in my electroacoustic music class where we looked at a piece of music that was all about causation. It started with the sound of a clockwork toy being wound up, and then used the metaphorical energy of the winding to make the sounds following it make sense. There was a clear cause-and-effect chain between the elements in the music.

Now, this is academic electroacoustic music; but I’m more interested in how these ideas can be put to use in ‘popular’ music. Specifically, if we think about rhythm, I’m interested in how different elements of a beat can be said to cause different other bits.

I used to listen to Adam F back when he was making drum’n'bass, and one of the things I noticed about his track Jaxx was the way the noises making up the beat at any one time have a noise centre pitch that moved around the spectrum rhythmically — and that over the course of a four-bar pattern this noise centre visits each portion of the spectrum a vaguely equivalent amount. It’s like the beat is a single conscious object that is moving up and down the spectrum.

Berestez is an even better example. Plokcity’s beat is composed of little beat creatures than run around and chase each other. For the first 1 minute the bass/kick and percussive elements share a single space, dancing backward and forward like capoeira players, then listen as the ride symbol and that upward-sliding bass thing swap places, and then when it makes the 2 minute mark, they’re joined by even more — but listen how even at its most complex the beat feels like a single line.

I think this is to do with implying causality. A beat is a small logical system; a good beat is a small tight highly cohesive logic system, where each element is the best possible response to what came before it, and with a clear relationship to what comes after it. Each bit needs to relate to all the other bits, and all the other bits need to relate to it; the parts need to sound like they cause each other.

Right, I’m off to listen to some complicated machinery…

Hey everyone,

Sorry about the total lack of updates. I have been going completely nuts making Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound go. It’s all working now.

Details are as follows:

tracking:
- infrared security camera
- high-powered LED-based infrared emitter
- custom tracking code based on OpenCV. I hope to release the source code to this a bit later on.

sound:
- puredata based system, with a number of ’scenes’ that it moves through.

light:
- 5 custom-made RGB-controllable light boards, each with 4 x red 30000 mcd, 4 x green 30000 mcd, and 4x blue 10000 mcd ultra-bright LEDs. I can set each board individually to a 24-bit RGB colour, with an optional crossfade setting with various speeds, as well as a speed-adjustable strobe, again individually assignable for each board.
- pc interface via a Wiring board

Running at the moment are an intro sequence which totally blacks out the room once you properly enter, followed by a tone generator sensitive to observer position via polar coordinates (r=volume, theta=tone), then a single-grain granular synthesis engine again sensitive to observer position via polar coordinates (r=sample width, theta=sample start point) with some music as samples, and an exit sequence.

People seem to love it. I’ve had some groups of kids through, and they go completely nuts. I had some artists tell me they thought it was beautiful.

It’s been something of a learning exercise opening the space like this up to the public, and as a result I’m constantly tweaking the code based on what people do. While I had hoped people would pick up on the fact that what they’re doing modulates the sound and light, it seems that it is a little too subtle — or more likely, I’m significantly more attuned to it since I’m the one who built the thing. So I’ve taken to telling people that their movement directly controls it, which seems to lead to a richer experience on the part of the audience. It’s the old audience vs creator/performer/artist divide again: how does an artist know that what they are trying to say is what the audience actually hears?

A consistent issue has been pacing and control. I’m trying to steer clear of having a brute-force timer that just cuts out after a certain time period, as this is likely to lead to an unnatural break in the experience. However experiments with setting up an audience-triggered exit mechanism more often than not leads to people walking out before the full thing is played through.

There’s a steep staircase you have to climb down to enter the space, and I’m using stepping-off-the-bottom-of-the-staircase as a ‘begin’ trigger to black out the room from the ‘intro’ scene and start off the system proper, so perhaps I could use stepping back on the staircase as a ’shutdown’ or ‘next scene’ trigger. I like the idea of ‘next scene’ being the exit — you think you’ve seen all there is to see, and so you go to leave, and then it changes, and suddenly leaving doesn’t look quite so attractive any more…

Anyway, if you’re around town, please do come and check it out.

Sounds Like Light, Lights Like Sound
February 23, 24, 25, 28, & March 1, 2, 3
10am – 7pm
at The Fridge, next to Happy,
corner Tory and Vivian St
Wellington