My friend and colleage Kath has persuaded me to sign up for a ten-hour sponsored improvisation which she is organising. The event is in support of Common Wheel, a Glasgow-based charity who provided 'meaningful activity for people with mental illness'. They have two strands to their work, a bicyle project and the music project 'Polyphony'. The latter runs at Gartnaval Hospital, where they are asking interested musicians to join them on 28 January for ten hours of sponsored musical improvisation.

I've agreed to sign up for nine hours, which is the longest they are allowing people to attempt. I'm intending to play a variety of instruments, probably all piped through the laptop, maybe sruti box, trumpet, ketipung, and a synth. Should be interesting! As an experiment I had a wee go myself at improvising vocally and over the sruti box the other night, was able to keep going for well over an hour. Still, nine hours… I wonder how that is going to feel!

As well as the musical challenge, of course, it's about the money. If you'd like to sponsor me, you can use the donate link on the Common Wheel website, send me an email as well so that I know, tedthetrumpet (at) gmail.com.

calling-all-musicians_sponsored-improv-jan28th.pdf

Not be much to listen to, maybe, but feels an important moment for me: a new direction after finishing the PhD, satisfyingly far away from score-based contemporary 'classical' nonpop, or whatever you call all that stuff. Next up: more of this kind of thing, plus more gamelan. Happy days.

I've been working on a piece for this year's Plug festival at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, which will be in May sometime. The theme this time round is 'postludes'. Head of Composition Gordon McPherson has invited all the composers here, including staff like myself, to compose something which draws on, or reflects, or comments upon in some way, a piece from a previous Plug festival.

I've found myself drawn immediately to one of Gordon's own pieces from 2007, 'Spiricom', part of a trilogy of pieces called 'Ghosts' which deal in various ways with death and a possible afterlife. 'Spiricom' refers to... we'll, you can google it, a strange and mad episode in the history of pseudoscience, a couple of cranks who convinced themselves they had built a machine which would talk to dead people.

My postlude will be for solo clarinet and acoustic laptop: by which I mean a laptop operating entirely by itself, using just the internal mics and speakers. I've written a patch in Pd which will (quietly) transform long notes played by the clarinet, these long notes being a (very) approximate by-ear transcription of certain passages within Gordon's original piece. I have Fraser Langton lined up to play the clarinet, and we've had a wee try out with the patch: sounds ok.

A frustrating, ugly, boring piece to listen to, I imagine. But it will only be short :)

Just found out that the Bremen gamelan group Gamelan Kancil are playing Running in the Dark on Nov 27, working from the score they found here. Hope they make a recording, be curious to see what they make of it…

I've just got a new toy (tx John!). It's a Cheetah MQ8 midi sequencer. This is UK made, apparently released sometime in the late 80s as a competitor to the Alesis MMT-8. I've only just started to figure it out: pretty crazy trying to do everything with a combination of button presses and a tiny, dim LCD screen!

cheetr.mp3

Don't listen to this one at all unless you like really hardcore distortion. No, scrub that, just don't listen to this one. Please. (Brownian walks in SuperCollider, samples & fx in Logic Pro.)

gamhum.mp3

The gendèr miking strategy just got simpler again. After some experimentation, it turned out I was getting better results by just whacking all seven mikes in parallel and 'mixing' them with a single 10k resistor. Loads of cross talk, but for this setup it doesn't really matter. The virtual-earth op-amp design wasn't working out, trying to make it run from a single 9v battery was giving me headaches. This is sounding pretty good, perhaps a bit too much percussive thump at the start of the note: need to find a different way of mounting the mikes, at the moment they are just blu-tacked to the casing.

Not sure if this is really going anywhere really, but… a little bit of gendèr and ketipung impro sliced up in SuperCollider:

afrbfr.mp3

'trip points one-shot cap' is (yet another) piece inspired by ripped off from alluding to Louis Andriessen's gritty post-minimalist classic 'Hoketus'.

There are two main building blocks. The first is… I was rummaging around in my box of old electronics, and found an optical theremin I'd built years ago. The IC at the heart of this is a bit of a classic, a Texas Instruments SN76477, a very early chip designed to make sounds for toys and games, also great for musical experimentation.

The second part of the track is itself made up of two layers. At the bottom is a two-second slice (ntfot82.aif) of an improvisation made with… well, to tell the truth, I can't remember! An out-of-tune guitar played with a chopstick, I think, but I'm not sure what I was processing it through, might have been hardware, might have been software. This short file was then sliced up and remixed in SuperCollider (code below).

The final track was composed in Logic 9: no added effects there apart from a bit of fake stereo.

//SuperCollider code
s.boot;

p = “/Users/jsimon/Music/tedsound/prosim/nolap_firstofthese/slices/ntfot82.aif”;
b = Buffer.read(s, p);
b = Buffer.read(s, p, bufnum: 0);
b.play; //quick check

b.free; // eventually

(
SynthDef(\mybuf, { |out, bufnum, sig, rate=1, slices=16, slice=16|
var myenv, env, start, len;
len = BufFrames.kr(bufnum);
start = (len / slices * slice);
myenv = Env.linen(0.01, 0.2, 0.1); //attack, sustain, release
sig = PlayBuf.ar(2, bufnum, BufRateScale.kr(bufnum) * rate, startPos: start, loop: 1);
env = EnvGen.kr(myenv, Impulse.kr(0), doneAction: 2);
Out.ar(out, sig * env)
}).add;
)

(
a = Pbind(
\instrument, \mybuf,
\slice, Prand((1 .. 16), inf)
);
)

a.play;

(
b = Pbind(
\instrument, \mybuf,
\slice, Pseq((1 .. 16).scramble, inf)
);
)

b.play;

(
c = Pbind(
\instrument, \mybuf,
\slice, Pseq((1 .. 16).pyramid, inf)
);
)

c.play;

// this is medium fab
// need to get \freq or something in the synth also
// also figger out how buffer number allocation works
// could allocate several buffers and switch between?!?

TempoClock.default.tempo = 160/60;

(
d = Pbind(
\instrument, \mybuf,
\slice, Pseq((1 .. 16).pyramid(9), 1),
// careful pyramid returns all kinds of different length arrays
// 136, 256, 271 seems to be the three possibilities
// (1 .. 16).pyramid(9).size; -> 256
\dur, 0.5
);
)

d.play;