Tide (extract)

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A recording of 10 pages of the score to my new piece, Tide.

Performers
Scott Mc Laughlin: Acoustic Guitar, Vibraphone, Timpani, Bass Drum
Alannah Halay: Piano, Triangle, Cymbal, Floor Tom
Oliver Thurley: Glockenspiel, Double Bass, Tamtam, Tubular Bells
Alex De Little: Zither, Trombone, Triangle, Bass Drum
James Lavender: Electric Guitar, Zither, Cymbal, Timpano
Phill Harding: Sine Waves

Recorded in Leeds: 26th November, 2013

Hexahedral vertex permutations [Max]

Spent the weekend reading analyses of Xenakis’ Nomos Alpha, so I knocked up a little hexahedral permutation program instrument. Vertices are parsed out as x,y,z and can be hooked up as parametric controls based on the hexahedron’s position in 3D space! Hooray!

Xenakis uses isomorphic permutations of a cube to order elements of a set using pretty standard permutations (rotate 90º, rotate 180º, etc). His process is much more based in boolean logic and set theory, but I took the basic principal ofusing the isomorphic permutations as parametric controls, but running in real time. So you can drag the cube about, or animate it, and it spits out a bunch of numbers which you could use to control anything. (ie. bow technique, dynamic, durations, pitch, or whatever digitally!).

A Thomas DeLio article on Nomos Alpha largely ignores Xenakis’ use of hexahedral vertices and looks at the set more simply: thats worth looking at:http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/843739?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21102363132331

Code is here (albeit in an awkward, copy-and-paste-into-Max kinda format)

 

A dead hard-drive is still useful

So my new Macbook Pro’s hard-drive corrupted itself over the weekend. Lost a fair amount of unbacked-up work I’m ashamed to say. But rather than mourn the dead, I figured I’d have some fun with a corpse (so to speak…)

(ex)hard-drive rotary controller/turntable from owmtxy on Vimeo.

Its a really simple hack, just hook up some wire to the 4 copper pads under the platter, one acts as ground and any of the others act as your signal. Run it into the sound card and you’ve got a very low-frequency oscillator! In the above video I’m using the drive as a ring-modulator, and as a sample playback device with a [phasor~] and [lookup~] in Max!