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Sonic Performance: Research and Development

Week 1

For the first stage of my instrument, I have kept it strictly acoustic. My main focus of the instrument at this point was fitting the strings in, the vase and deadlock are there to add two other types of sound to my palate. My intention with the vase was to be able to ring out the resonance of hitting it but it seems that the physical action of hitting the vase seems to be predominant over the resonance that I want to bring out. The box that I have chosen as my instrument rack seems to be a little to non-conductive for me to be able to ring out resonances and pick up string vibration without having to push gains a little bit and pluck the string very hard.   

Week 2

In this week my main concern was that the wood the box was made out of, that I am using for my instrument, isn’t conductive enough and that it is a little bit damp giving me grounding issues when I sit down. The box was perfect size so I didn’t really want to give it up so instead, I got hold of some plywood and built a raised platform for it so that it had enough room from the top surface of the box underneath to fully transmit all the vibrations through to the contact microphone. After having done this my instrument was overall cleaner and easier to use. Having the contact microphone available at a higher sensitivity due to the plywood being so conductive made me realise that this has opened a door for being able to apply more textural sound to my instrument, it not being sensitive enough beforehand means that I couldn’t pick up all the small obscure textural sounds.

Week 3

By having upgraded my instrument rack by installing this new bit of plywood it has made t easier for me to pick up resonances in my sound objects. It was easier to pick up the vase’s resonance but it was also easier to pick up the sound of the vase being hit itself, the sound of the vase is loud enough without going through the contact microphone. After playing around with different beaters for a little while I ended up choosing to swap out the vase for a kalimba that I have sitting around at home. This ended up being a great swap as the resonance of the kalimba was easier to isolate from the initial hit by a long way. The kalimba also having a series of notes was great as I could randomly play tones without them sounding related, the plastic knife also worked well as an exciter for the kalimba.  

Week 4

Over the last day or two, I had slowly been building this little ‘build your own’ synthesizer that I had lying about so I thought why not add it to my instrument. This small synth wasn’t the most versatile synth but it had controllable parameters built into it so it worked out well as quite a performative part of my instrument. I also had another issue with running through Ableton so I could add effects to it, it seemed signal was coming in but it would never affect the signal if I added different types of processing to it, I saw this as quite a big problem for the future. I kept it as part of my instrument but was already thinking about how I could expand if it ends up not quite doing the job. This week I have also added some rounded rocks I found on the beach, some slate and some bits of sandpaper. These are all for textural sounds and for excitation, they also all work well with each other. I can bash the rocks together, scrape them on one another, excite the rocks with sandpaper, rub them on the plywood or excite the strings with them. There are a nice variety of ways I can use them giving me multiple different grainy sounds to use

Week 5

After the addition of the mini synth, I thought it would be good to add an external bit of hardware that has pots to make my instrument easier to control when I have multiple things going on at the same time. So I ended up adding the MPD32 which was a great idea as it gave me a whole new level of control. From fading into changing the rate of a filter to doing both at the same time. Overall this made my contribution the ensembles sound seem more seamless and fitting as there weren’t as many brash sounds on my end. Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite the same for my micro synth as this still didn’t register any effects that it was being sent through.

Week 6

This week I have had to restrict myself to only using beeps on my synth as the synth bursts into sound and doesn’t steadily let you control its volume parameter. When I built the synth I ended up resoldering the speaker output onto a jack so I could plug it into my interface, this seems to have slowly made it bug out over time. This week I have also added a small plastic box full off buttons, string, a plastic knife and a plastic fork. These are all to be used as different exciters for various different elements and also as textural sound objects. The box of buttons works really well acoustically layered amongst some other gentle sounds. The plastic knife, plastic fork and string are all for excitation and have proven to be really effective and have become my main source of excitation.

Cymbal Stridulation: https://youtu.be/Ub42A7HGoDY

Week 7

After trying multiple different methods to try and integrate this synth into my instrument completely I gave up and thought I might as well make an effort to try and get something more versatile and easily controllable. After having added the MPD32 I thought I might as well use a digital internal synth as already having an MPD32 would give me control over any parameter with ease. As this made the most sense I decided to include massive as part of my instrument. After having had a play and making sure it would fit as part of my instrument I soon came to realise that I can adapt my synth to each type piece that we would play and also change the effects to how it would suit the piece best. I set up two different tracks with a different patch on each track so that I could easily switch between so I could navigate fast and my sounds wouldn’t get repetitive.

Massive Example:https://youtu.be/Qrsx8q2vMkc

Week 8

This week I have been mainly practicing and setting up my Ableton project so that I have everything ready with all the parameters set up before I next play. I also set up a variation of effects and types of processing for each track with a massive patch on it. To balance my instrument I have been trying to keep the acoustic sounds as raw and as unprocessed as possible. Having the acoustic sounding objects stripped back with minimal processing complements my Massive set up which is very electronic and digital sounding. Having this set up of contrasting sounds has given me a pallet of sound which can accommodate for pretty much most types of pieces we play and it covers the full frequency range. I am really happy with the variety that I have managed to achieve, I used to find myself repeating the sounds I played and would sometimes even get bored of what I was playing but I have managed to squeeze in more material to give me that wide scope I feel I have ended in.  

Practice Clip: https://soundcloud.com/user-127195804/practice-clip

Here the Set Lists for both performances so you can get an idea of what sound palette I had to accommodate for -

Burdall’s Yard Performance

Set 1 - (21 mins) - All cue'd by Gabe??

1 - Open Play 3 mins. Be Confident, make relationships with sounds in the speakers.  Gabriel Visual cue start/end

Segue

2 - Sine Swells 3 mins (stable sine waves, slow fade in/out, changing frequencies) (NO Ciaran, Ed, Jacob).  Gabriel Visual end (when you see raised hand, that is your last event!)

Segue

3 - Shiii - Tisshhhh 3 mins (arriving scrapes with paired decays / scurrying insects. Play with anticipation, visual cue to other ensemble players) Gabriel Visual cue in/out

Segue

4 - Very High, Very Low 3 mins (Sparse Sub under 120htz Jacob, Ed, Toby, Tony. Everyone else = Over 10K, clicks, taps, chinks, gesture shaped textures/scrapes etc..)  Gabriel Visual cue

Segue

5 - Spaces 3 mins (only present reverb traces and tails, pace entries, allow slow decay) Gabriel visual cue start/end

Segue

6 - Transformers 3 mins (Ty Lock Groove. Big, Bold sonic shapes - machines, hiss, clank, rachets etc. No Terrell, Eliza, Henri, Tom D) Gabriel - visual cue start/end

Segue

7 - Open Play 3 mins. Be Confident, make relationships with sounds in the speakers.   Gabriel Visual cue start/stop

Beef Collective at the Brunswick Club

Recordings of performance - https://soundcloud.com/user-127195804/sets/brunswick-club-performances

Set 1 - (35 mins) 8pm start

1 - Open Play 8 mins. Be Confident, make relationships with sounds in the speakers. Visual cue start/stop Who?

2 - Sine Swells 6 mins (stable sine waves, slow fade in/out, changing frequencies) (NO Ciaran, Ed, Jacob). Tom D Aural Cue start. Visual end (when you see raised hand, that is your last event!)

3 - Shiii - Tisshhhh 4 mins (arriving scrapes with paired decays / scurrying insects. Play with anticipation, visual cue to other ensemble players) Visual cue in/out who?

4 - Sub Group 1 3 mins (Jack, Ed, Ty, Tony, Eliza)

Segue

5 - Strings Stridulating 4 mins (string scrapes, grains. Jacob, Ciaran, Henry, Tony, Toby, Henri, Tom, Gabriel, Jack. ) Ciaran cue start / Follow his gesture shapes / Cue end

6 - Sub group 2 3 mins (Ciaran, Terrell, Jack, Toby) cue?

Segue

7 - Open Play 5 mins.  Be Confident, make relationships with sounds in the speakers. Visual cue start/stop Who?

Set 2 - (35 mins) 9pm start

1 - Transformers 5 mins (Ty Lock Groove. Big, Bold sonic shapes - machines, hiss, clank, rachets etc. No Terrell, Eliza, Henri, Tom D) Ty - visual cue start/end

2 - Very High, Very Low 4 mins (Sparse Sub under 120htz Jacob, Ed, Toby, Tony. Everyone else = Over 10K, clicks, taps, chinks, gesture shaped textures/scrapes etc..) CUE who?

Segue

3 - Sub Group 3 3 mins (Henry, Tom, Henri, Gabriel)

Segue

4 - Bells 5mins (attack transients with shaped harmonic decays. Metallic sounds with piano envelopes) No Terrell, who else? Who CUE?

5 - 15 Seconds 6 mins (ON or Off, stable textures, filtered layers) Henry creates 15 sec click, and Visual Cue in/out (when you see raised hand, that is your last event!)

6 - Spaces 6 mins (only present reverb traces and tails, pace entries, allow slow decay) Gabriel visual cue start/end

Segue

7 - Open Play. 8 mins. Be Confident, make relationships with sounds in the speakers. Visual cue start/stop Who?

Set Up in action at rehearsals

Set Up at performance for the BEEF Collective