Category Archives: SuperCollider

Sounds created with SuperCollider program

Nice to See You

[play]Nice to See You by No More Twist (2008)

No More Twist is a new duo of Polly Moller and I. We played this improvised set live on KFJC on 17 July 2008. She was on flute(s) and noisemakers and I played a live sampling application (written in SuperCollider). We were featured to promote the Edgetone New Music Summit. We will be playing there on Wednesday (23 July 2008), where we will be premiering a piece called “Inquisition.” It’s going to have Polly hooked up to a lie detector that I built and I’ll be interpreting her biometric data as she answers questions posed by the audience.

This piece here, however, has text from a long spam email and uses the latest iteration of my SC program SimpleSample.

Play

Joystick Intermezzo

[play]Joystick Intermezzo (2008)

All of my SuperCollider pieces require several silent seconds to clear existing memory, pre-compute data and load joystick drivers. I find it helpful in many circumstances to play short tape pieces as intermezzos while other, longer pieces, get ready to play. This particular one is designed to be used between pieces involving an old fashioned, large joystick. I timed how long it takes to load pieces that involve that joystick and it tends to be around 40 seconds, so this intermezzo is 45 seconds long.

The musical sounds are generated in SuperCollider, using pulse width modulation, constrained to 8 bit resolution, to give it a retro videogame sound. The game sound FX are from Wolfenstein 3d, the first first person shooter, in front of which I wasted many many hours of my youth. Thanks to Eric Bumstead who actually had a copy of it!

Play

Phreaking

[play]Phreaking (2008)

I wrote this piece for BrumCon 07. The con was sponsored by our local 2600 group, so I decided to use telephone in-line signaling codes as source materials. I spent a lot of time readin up on phone phreaking, which was just so completely cool. I never did it as a kid because the threats my dad made against me were so dire. But man, it was awesome!

The piece, though, is slightly silly. Well, maybe more than slightly. I doubt I’ll play it again, but I think the logic I used around the drum beats will definitely be refined and reused.

In the spirit of the con, the fugly, un-clean code is below the cut, along with some explanation of what the heck is going on. When I say ugly and unclean, I really, really mean it.

Continue reading

Play

Shot

Every other week, I have to give myself an injection of testosterone. I find it really hard to actually pierce my flesh with a needle. It’s like stabbing myself. At the same time, having testosterone in my body is crucial to my identity.

About a month ago, I used a small digital camera and apple’s photobooth software to film myself from either side, trying to do the shot. The pressure was intense. The shot went terribly wrong. It took me forever to work up the nerve to actually push in the needle and when I did, I didn’t push it in far enough. The testosterone leaked back out of my leg through the puncture.

I created a soundtrack to this disaster using SuperCollider. The sound sources are my voice and de-tuned sine wave generators. The left and the right channels differ by 10 Hz. The sine waves move along a tuning lattice but with so much imprecision that the lattice becomes meaningless. Their timing is out of synch. Finally, a clock ticking sound comes in. How long has this been going on? How long have I been sitting here holding my needle? How long is this going to take me? How many more times will I have to go through with this?

Until the end of my life.

The video is created with Processing.org. Every time a new sound starts, the picture updates, but with a a lot of transparency, so time bleeds together and the images become blurry. I’d hoped that through the repetition of images that I experienced in making this piece, that doing the shot would become demystified and I would exorcise my demons. Did it work? I’ll tell you in two weeks.

[play] Shot (2008)

Play

Shorts #26 Ecstatic Rivulet

[play] Shorts: #26 Ecstatic Rivulet (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Clyde Niesen

For this piece, I wanted to use a field recording that I made while camping over the summer. Visually, the campground looked like it would make a suitable set for a horror movie. The animals were correspondingly loud and screetchy at night and so I made a recording with my cell phone.

I listened to the recording a few times and it made me think of GrainPic, a project that I had intended to abandon. Everything I do with this always sounds kind of rough and unpolished, which is why I stopped working with it. But it seems to fit well with my memory of that campground.

Play

Are You a Feminist (Part 2)

[play] Are You a Feminist (Part 2) (2007)

I started making recordings for this piece well before I made the piece, when I recorded two women in Paris answering the question “Est-que ce tu es une feministe? Pourquoi ou pourquoi pas?” (Are you a feminist? Why or why not?) Then, uncertain how to proceed with the material, I let it sit on my hard drive for over a year until Sula, one of the voices, contacted me asking if I wanted to play some music at ETC, a feminist hacker con.

Rather than do the piece entirely in French, I asked the same question in English to some of my American friends and then in German to some of the con attendees. All but one of the participants was put on the spot with the question. Part two uses the voices of Solène, Anna, and Aileen.

Some of the paramteres of this piece are controlled with a game pad.

Play

Are You a Feminist (Part 1)

[play] Are You a Feminist (Part 1) (2007)

I started making recordings for this piece well before I made the piece, when I recorded two women in Paris answering the question “Est-que ce tu es une feministe? Pourquoi ou pourquoi pas?” (Are you a feminist? Why or why not?) Then, uncertain how to proceed with the material, I let it sit on my hard drive for over a year until Sula, one of the voices, contacted me asking if I wanted to play some music at ETC, a feminist hacker con.

Rather than do the piece entirely in French, I asked the same question in English to some of my American friends and then in German to some of the con attendees. All but one of the participants was put on the spot with the question. Part one uses the voices of Kendra, Nick Dave and Sula.

Play

Live at the 1510 Performance Space

[play] Live at the 1510 Performance Space (2008)

Les HUTCHINS and Matt DAVIGNON

Live improvisation recorded at the 1510 Performance space in Oakland, California on 5 February 2008.

I played an Evenfall Minimodular synthesizer, looped with a SuperCollider program. Matt played a bunch of pedals and cool little boxes.

Recording by Clyde NIESEN

Play

Shorts: #21 Anarchy and Rapture

[play]Shorts: #21 Anarchy and Rapture (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Polly Moller in memory of Leigh Ann Hussey, who died tragically in a motorcycle accident on May 16, 2006.

I didn’t ever meet Leigh Ann, but I typed her name into google and found a memorial. It was clear right away that I would have liked her. Polly said, “she was like a pillar of fire,” the god of Moses. I’ve been reading a deconstruction of the Left Behind books from an evangelical who is as appalled by them as I am. The series is essentially about death, which comes for us all. A mystery we fear and around which we grope for meaning. In How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland argues that death is what gives life meaning. We feel urgency to act and to create because we know it’s not forever.

But despite the meaning that death gives our lives, despite the necessity of entropy in the creation of life and it’s inherent implication of destruction, despite the beautiful simplicity, it still feels like a theft. I never knew Leigh Ann, but I’ve known many who have passed. Every time, I ask the same question. I know the answer, but I don’t feel it.

To create this piece, I recorded myself screaming and then convolved it with some impulses generated by SuperCollider. (The code is below.) I used Audacity to pitch shift some of the versions of this file and mixed them with sounds from my synthesizer.

Continue reading

Play

Shorts #10 Meditation Bustle

[play] Shorts #10 Meditation Bustle (2007)

Titled and commissioned by Jen Savage.

As I was making this, I recalled that I had a file on my computer which was Jen Savage talking. I’d asked years ago if I could make it into a piece, but hadn’t had a clear idea of what to do with it. Then I read something about subliminal messages, which inspired me to experiment with convolution. I convolved Jen’s voice with intermittent pulses and used the resulting timbre at the beginning and the end of the piece.

The other sounds come from my synthesizer. I made high pitch ticks by taking a couple really slow modulated pulsewaves and ran them through a high pass filter. The more ringing sounds have the same process again, but this time going through a low pass filter after the high pass, with the frequencies of both tuned very near to each other and the Q turned up so high it’s on the verge of a terrible high whine.

Play