Some Background
23/04/08 12:00
Part of my funding to attend Stanford University is
being provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (S.S.H.R.C.) for a proposal I wrote to them in
October of 2006. The gist of the proposal was for
me to investigate, test, build, and compose a
piece for a new "more emotive" interface for
electroacoustic performance.
***"more emotive": At the time I was experienced with and aware of only a few interfaces for electroacoustic performance, all of which were lacking to some degree a desired amount of physical interaction with the performer (and also a connection between the sound and the performers work on the interface) (i.e. buttons, knobs, even gestural controllers such as the Radio Baton), a repeatable performability (i.e. they are better suited to improvised music and sounds), and/or they were just awkward and more readily used for their primary non-musical uses (i.e. mice, keyboards, etc...).
My first real experiments in pursuing this project involved mapping an existing interface for an improvised performance piece in order not only to attempt an intuitive and emotive mapping for the interface but also to isolate a single and very important part of the project and so to get my feet wet. The interface I used was a Wacom Tablet designed for photo and digital art editing and creation. The piece, "Clusters, Gears, and Wedges" (2007) is an improvisation construct written for the University of Alberta Laptop Trio ("Über Concrête") and can last anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes as predetermined by the performers. Mine was of course only one of three parts of the ensemble — I used Max/MSP to map the gestures of the tablet onto sweeping accretions of sine waves of varying durations and amplitudes. The result was a palpable connection between the work I was doing on and with the interface and the sounds that the mapping was synthesizing. But the sounds themselves were very simple and it was not possible due to the nature of the interface and the mapping I chose to recreate a particular performance without noticeable variations.
In the Fall of 2007 I participated in MUSIC 250A: Physical Interactive Design at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (C.C.R.M.A.). Taking this class gave me the opportunity to reexamine the assumptions made in my 2006 proposal (see above), and explore elements of interface-design in a very hands-on, intensive, and collaborative atmosphere. In this class, my fellow classmates Lawrence Fyfe, David Black, and Lea Simon, and I worked together to create the "Electric Goblet" for our final presentation in December of 2007. The "Electric Goblet" is designed metaphorically after the Glass Harmonica or simply the use of traditional crystal wine glasses and goblets to produce musical tones. The performer excites the wine glasses to reverberate at frequencies dependent upon both the glass size and the amount of water it contains, by tracing his finger around its upper/outer edge/lip at a steady pace. The "Electric Goblet" works in a similar way to this. It consists of a plexiglass ring that sits on a plexiglass surface fixed with Force Sensitive Resistors (F.S.R.s). The player traces his finger around the ring and the F.S.R.s sense the pressure that results. All four F.S.R.s are coupled physically together by the ring itself, and the flow of numbers that this coupling produces allows for polar coordinates (analogous to the players finger position around the ring) to be interpolated by the software. From these coordinates the software calculates the speed and direction that the player is touching the device and both of these factors control the sound synthesizer.
The "Electric Goblets" are very dependent on the innate physical coupling between the plexiglass ring and the sensors. This allows for both the performers and the listeners to sense a direct connection between the performative actions and the sounds being performed. Unfortunately the control is limited to very broad gestures and amount of physical feedback provided is not sufficient to deal with the variability in the sound, so performances are not repeatable in the same way as are those of traditional acoustic instruments.
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***"more emotive": At the time I was experienced with and aware of only a few interfaces for electroacoustic performance, all of which were lacking to some degree a desired amount of physical interaction with the performer (and also a connection between the sound and the performers work on the interface) (i.e. buttons, knobs, even gestural controllers such as the Radio Baton), a repeatable performability (i.e. they are better suited to improvised music and sounds), and/or they were just awkward and more readily used for their primary non-musical uses (i.e. mice, keyboards, etc...).
My first real experiments in pursuing this project involved mapping an existing interface for an improvised performance piece in order not only to attempt an intuitive and emotive mapping for the interface but also to isolate a single and very important part of the project and so to get my feet wet. The interface I used was a Wacom Tablet designed for photo and digital art editing and creation. The piece, "Clusters, Gears, and Wedges" (2007) is an improvisation construct written for the University of Alberta Laptop Trio ("Über Concrête") and can last anywhere between 5 and 15 minutes as predetermined by the performers. Mine was of course only one of three parts of the ensemble — I used Max/MSP to map the gestures of the tablet onto sweeping accretions of sine waves of varying durations and amplitudes. The result was a palpable connection between the work I was doing on and with the interface and the sounds that the mapping was synthesizing. But the sounds themselves were very simple and it was not possible due to the nature of the interface and the mapping I chose to recreate a particular performance without noticeable variations.
In the Fall of 2007 I participated in MUSIC 250A: Physical Interactive Design at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (C.C.R.M.A.). Taking this class gave me the opportunity to reexamine the assumptions made in my 2006 proposal (see above), and explore elements of interface-design in a very hands-on, intensive, and collaborative atmosphere. In this class, my fellow classmates Lawrence Fyfe, David Black, and Lea Simon, and I worked together to create the "Electric Goblet" for our final presentation in December of 2007. The "Electric Goblet" is designed metaphorically after the Glass Harmonica or simply the use of traditional crystal wine glasses and goblets to produce musical tones. The performer excites the wine glasses to reverberate at frequencies dependent upon both the glass size and the amount of water it contains, by tracing his finger around its upper/outer edge/lip at a steady pace. The "Electric Goblet" works in a similar way to this. It consists of a plexiglass ring that sits on a plexiglass surface fixed with Force Sensitive Resistors (F.S.R.s). The player traces his finger around the ring and the F.S.R.s sense the pressure that results. All four F.S.R.s are coupled physically together by the ring itself, and the flow of numbers that this coupling produces allows for polar coordinates (analogous to the players finger position around the ring) to be interpolated by the software. From these coordinates the software calculates the speed and direction that the player is touching the device and both of these factors control the sound synthesizer.
The "Electric Goblets" are very dependent on the innate physical coupling between the plexiglass ring and the sensors. This allows for both the performers and the listeners to sense a direct connection between the performative actions and the sounds being performed. Unfortunately the control is limited to very broad gestures and amount of physical feedback provided is not sufficient to deal with the variability in the sound, so performances are not repeatable in the same way as are those of traditional acoustic instruments.
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