Finally some music!

Last week I played a show with Arvind Vasudevan [one of the students I work with/co-supervise] and Sidney Fels [the main professor I work with], showcasing a very early version of the instrument we’ve been working on for more than a year now.

Here is the video, it was shot at the Canadian Acoustics Association meeting 2016, here in Vancouver:

Basically the system we used is an enhanced version of Aerophones, the project that inspired the dawn of DIGITAL_DUETS, packed up together with some interactive technologies into a [not yet sophisticated] musical instrument. So, we are still talking about Linux, C++, GPU, accompanied by a graphic tablet and MIDI this time. In line with my previous instrument’s legacy, it’s remarkably mono.

With this, we built a simple performance which starts showcasing how the system works. We focused on the simulation of pressure propagation in 2D and on how the sources could be manipulated to generate soundscapes and to build virtual wind instruments. To do this, we introduce 3 “characters”: a sinusoidal source, a squarewave source and a white noise source. In the second part, these same characters and techniques are used to play along with some easy EDM [we did not want to overwhelm the audience with too much abstract music]. Finally, the music ends up into an audio/visual psychedelic trip that slowly reveals and peals off each of the 3 characters, until silence swallows everything.

It was a great experience, especially considering that most of the musical features we used in the performance stem from the vocal synthesis part of the project.

Of course, Sid and I are riding the momentum and started to design a proper interface for the system…we think this deserves to become an outrageously slick instrument!
Hopefully some students will join us in the development of this cool device, we have tow undergrad positions available for a short project.

looking ff to writing down more updates on this_

P.S. some shots from the night