It's been splendid, but my residency at the FARR is officially over. Thanks to Danielle Sanderson, Serry Malik, Sophia Borowska, Emma Sise, Emma Ligntstone, and Emilie West for interacting with the display, and I'm sorry if I misspelled any of your names. The poetry that has been inspired by these people, and anyone else who interacted with the display but didn't sign the guest book will be a vital part of the performances for this project as it moves forward.
While my residency is over, my project continues. I'll be performing at the last Studio 7 this year, and I invite everyone to come and enjoy the show; there are always a ton of great performances by music, theatre, and dance students, and other emerging artists, and I will be playing the instrument I'm developing for this project. For those of you who can't make it, I will be uploading a recording of my performance shortly afterward.
Until then I will be continuing to actively develop the instrument, practicing with it, and playing with the poetry which I've written over the course of this month. Here is a demonstration of the instrument in its current form:
In this iteration of the instrument, which I consider to be very early still, I've used free VST sound effects in Ableton Live to process my voice in four stages: I record chopped up bits of my speaking which are played through a pitch shifter, a frequency shifter with delay, and a granular delay. The algorithm is very simple, and all controls are performed manually with a Launchpad and an iPad. I'm currently working to bring this basic functionality into Max MSP, at which point I will be able to program control structures based on analysis of the spoken voice, as well as controlling sound parameters manually.
At the beginning of this project, I thought that the focus would be on the performance, but I've realized this month that the design of the performance instrument is actually where the bulk of the work lies. Thanks so much to the Fine Arts Reading Room for this great opportunity to learn, and I look forward to posting once more this April with another sound recording.
