4 posts tagged with "collaboration"

Here's the collaboration that Bill Whitmer and I did for Radiophrenia

This week I'm taking my algorave work in a new direction. In collaboration with Bill Whitmer, we are going to be presenting a half-hour show called 'Radio Automata Live in the Studio' as part of Radiophrenia, a temporary art radio station broadcasting from the CCA in Glasgow.

The idea for the show is: if the last remaining creative decisions in broadcast radio were entirely automatic, would anyone notice? Bill has been experimenting with algorithmically generated text and chatbots for the spoken part of the show. For my part, I'm going to be creating cut-up mashups using the slicing techniques I've been developing in SuperCollider.

In previous work along these lines, I've always used source material that was either explicitly open source, or, at least, grey-area material that I was unlikely to be sued for, like old TV themes and midi module demo songs.

In this show, for the first time I'm taking a so-sue-me approach, using… well, I won't give the game away, but some *very* well known material indeed, arising from 'suggestions' 'made' by the bots Bill has been working with. In early experiments this is sounding very interesting indeed. Watch this space, or rather, listen to this wavelength!

• 23rd May 2019
• 1100-1130
• 87.9FM across Glasgow

Improviser Núria Andorrà visited Glasgow in March to teach on the International Collaboration in Contemporary Improvisation module at the Royal Conservatoire of Glasgow. My colleage Una McGlone took the opportunity to organise a gig for her at Hairdressers, in collaboration with a number of Glasgow improvisers.

I did a short set alongside trumpet player Robert Henderson, who I have known for many years: in fact, I know him from the period around twenty years ago where I myself was active as a gigging trumpet player! For this performance, I used a bank of sounds that I have created using purely mechanical sounds from a trumpet, the metal, valves, valve slides and so forth. It's always slightly problematic livecoding alongide an actual analog musician, as it is not easy to respond particularly rapidly to another player. However, Robert and I enjoyed playing together and managed to create some satisfying musical gestures together.

No recording made, unfortunately!

I shared an algorave spot at Sound Thought with Claire Quigley, that was streamed as part of the TOPLAP 15th anniversary stream. You can see her set here and mine is here, although I have to say not that happy with the way my performance turned out on the day. The rehearsal was better:

As you can see, combining my livecoding work with my passion for table tennis! And, in fact, this was a new technical discovery just the day before: it is possible to use Atom to livecode simultaneously in Hydra and SuperCollider, using a plugin for SC. I'm not sure this is intended behaviour, but in practice if you have Hydra running in Atom and then switch to a page of SC code, the Hydra visuals run on behind that code.

Amongst other things, Claire is a colleage of mine at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where she teaches coding to the music education students. We're hoping to do more work together in the future.