A showcase of a spicy effect. The origin story: I was listening to this mix. I wanted to recreate a similar sound occurring in the first 2 minutes. I also had this project to do. I created a MIDI -> Wekinator -> Chuck System to control LFO-gain/LFO-panning. That was boring. So I decided to train a gesture model real quick and see if my meditation poses could effectively control these things. It is a simple and useless thing but in the spirit of “wekinating” my world it was fun. Also wouldn’t it be cool to start of a DJ set with some strongly timed gestures to effect controls and then slap the audience with a drop? This gave me an idea to incorporate a variation of Yoga poses, I think smooth effects on some drone sounds will align well with the flow of yoga and real time audio feedback might have an effect on the practice. The final system was VisionOSC -> Chuck -> Wekinator -> Chuck.
I remembered I added Tom’s Diner to a Spotify Playlist once. It was the wrong one–the acapella version. 4 days ago it proved to be useful. Bought the track on Amazon, chopped up the verbs. After 2 days of considering training my model (just considering and hating the idea) and dancing instead, I created a backtrack using Maschine MK3. It sounded cool and thus I created motivation to train a gesture model. After getting the VisionOSC -> Chuck -> Wekinator -> ChucK system working I loaded up the vocal samples into ChucK and made a trigger system with different poses. Originally I choreographed a dance but my roommate works long days at the lab so I didn’t have help pressing the record button for data. And voila, a screwed up re-imagined biography of Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner, where I am doing everything to avoid doing that one thing. Like sitting, drinking, waiting, turning, shaking, kissing, listening. The title means I am having an instrumental breakdown in Tom’s Diner, but many people might relate to having a mental breakdown in a space with invasive internal monologues.