Archive for April, 2010

Moment of Clarity

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

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This piece was created for the 2010 Linux Audio Conference composition competition. The theme is 150 years of recording sound, to mark the anniversary of the oldest reproduced sound fragment “Au Claire de la Lune” dated from 1860:

The original 150-year old “Au Claire de la Lune” sample, found at www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php can be used as a starting point… For the composition process the use of Linux and/or open source applications is strongly encouraged and appreciated.

The composition must be accompanied by a (short) description of the work and the use of software technology.

In Moment of Clarity, I sample the 150 year old recording and create a composition based on the narrative of experimentation, exploration and discovery.

Initially hearing the sample I thought to remove the noise, at which point I realized that the noise is an essential aspect of the recording, giving it history and character.  In the piece I explore reframing the noise of the sample, i.e. as a percussive sound, or a texture.

The manipulations of the sample were written in Super Collider, and the mixing was done in Audacity.  Both pieces of software are available for free download and are open source. I thought about what compositional tools were available with the open source software that would be much more difficult to achieve, with as much freedom, in commercial software.  I found this an exciting opportunity to explore open source music apps, and push myself to learn something new.

I followed a similar stereo sound particle theme that I explored with virtual hardware in emergence_voice and live analog synths the guests/ a vision/ to this river .  In this case I was able to execute the randomness and repetition of the particles through code, rather than twisting knobs live through software or hardware.  This allowed me to slice up the sample and collage it on a larger scale, and immediately feel what differences slight parameter shifts made.

The 2010 Linux Audio Conference will be held in Utrecht from May 1st through 4th.

update: Moment of Clarity was awarded first prize in the Linux Audio Conference composition competition.  The following is an except from what the jury from FirstSounds.org (who provided the audio sample) had to say

“I’m impressed with the distinctively percussive use the composition by Kawandeep Virdee makes of the source material. It is quite effective, and very different from the strategies found in other creative works I’ve heard using phonautogram samples, so it rates highly in terms of originality. Despite the thorough transformation of the sample, it still retains enough of its original timbral character — the “noisiness” — for the source to be recognizable and meaningful.”

Posted on April 28th, 2010 under Moment of Clarity, Music, Projects. Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

soup night boston

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Soup night can occur wherever there is a willing host, preferably spreading to new parts of the city. Participants can bring friends or food if they wish.  We find a theme, based on relevant news or pop culture, or whatever and make the soup based on that.

Friends tell their buddies about it, and we see familiar faces from one soup night to another.  Between soup nights I actively seek people from disciplines, or with different hobbies, which haven’t been represented in previous soup nights to add to the mix of people, and see what sorts of conversation and ideas bubble up.  The meaning and enjoyment people can feel collectively is greater than I can provide alone, so instead I create an environment to cultivate that collective joy.  How can we design a space where you can go and have great conversations and meaningful connections?  This is relational art to grow a community.

‘soup night boston’ is inspired by the great soup nights I went to in Portland, hosted by PDX Soup Night. It began in March 2010.

Posted on April 18th, 2010 under Projects, soup night boston.

imm la ti on: argue/eusocial

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

The electronic composition was created in 2008 for an assignment to create a piece in response to “Come Out” by Steve Reich.  I used an ARP 2600 and a vocal recording.  I was initially inspired by a passage in the book Shantaram that described so perfectly a moment during an argument between lovers.  It is a phase transition that occurs when one lover speaks words that convey exhaustion and defeat but not caring, and the other lover shifts from anger to an apologetic sadness.  I was thinking of those words,  and more importantly how they are spoken.

The film piece was created after.  In choosing the visuals I imagined forms which give a sense of movement and energy, yet are contained.  For me, those are the forms which many of the sounds in this piece evoked. I used old documentary footage from the Prelinger Archives.

imm la ti on: argue/eusocial from Kawandeep Virdee on Vimeo.

The electronic composition was featured in the GW Hatchet, and the video piece was featured in the GW Art Gala on March 28th 2008 in the E-Street City View Room.

Posted on April 17th, 2010 under imm la ti on, Projects. Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The guests did not…/a vision of…/to this river…

Saturday, April 17th, 2010

Full Title: the guests did not care anyway/ a vision of ultimate cunt and come/ to this river, to this song of a thousand voices


This three part electronic composition was created as a multi-speaker installation and interactive performance for Electronic and Computer Music in 2008.  The piece contains eight unique simultaneous tracks, and the following is a mix onto stereo left and right.

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With respect to content,  I wanted to make it a retrospective piece, as it was my final performance in university.  The title comes from quotes from three books that coincided with phases and experiences in my development while at school.  The first part is from The Fountainhead, the second is from Howl, and the third is from Siddharta.

The composition is made up of eight tracks to be played simultaneously from different sources.  Form wise, I wanted to make a piece of music that one could actively explore in a space.  I wanted people to wander through a room and hear something different wherever they are. This piece was created for eight speakers, which were placed around the Dorothy Betts theater in GWU, surrounding the audience.

Performance

It was the last performance of the evening and the audience was invited to get up and wander around.  From behind the stage metal was struck during the first part and a red light filled the auditorium.  In the second part, the lights turned blue and an acoustic guitar player sat among the audience seating.  Glowsticks were handed out in a previous performance during the night, and they glowed as audience members wanders the aisles, the stage, or the seats.  For the drum part a synthesizer was played live alongside the speakers. In the final part a group of audience members settled sitting facing each other in a circle in the center of the stage.

Thanks

I am very grateful to those who collaborated and provided support during the piece

Recorded Performers: Karinne’ Hovnanian, Kiran Sarabu, Roshini Mahtani, William Gibb

Live Acoustic Guitar: Jeff Lamoureux

Speakers, setup, and guidance: Steve Hilmy

This was performed on May 1st 2008 as the final piece in the 2008 Electronic and Computer Music Concert in the Dorothy Betts Marvin Theatre in Washington D.C.

Posted on April 17th, 2010 under guests_vision_river, Projects. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

bio econ

Sunday, April 4th, 2010

BioEcon: Design an economic system inspired by the sensitivity and resilience of biological systems, ex. metabolic networks, self-repairing skin

Posted on April 4th, 2010 under Idea Box. Tags: , , , , , ,

HEXAGON

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

HEXAGON was a collaborative performance piece which sought to use the ideas of non-hierarchies,  interactivity, and emergence to create and perform music.

We want to create the experience a music performance as a non-hierarchy.  Performances now create the image of a DJ or Rock-god, elevated on a stage, with the focus of an entire room upon them.  We will invert this, placing the audience at the center, and surrounding them with musicians on the same level.  It will be a fluid environment, the audience is free to move around the space, and look upon the musicians as well as each other.

In designing the performance space we imagine a system where the performers respond in music to each other as well as the audience, and is for the most part fixed.  The sound spreads dependent on the location of the musician, so the experience of an audience member changes as they move through the space.  There will be no chairs to allow them to move around freely.  For these performances acoustic guitars will be used, but the future performances can potentially include voice, or local amplifiers.

The music is made inspired from the dynamics of cellular automata.  For each update there is a simple rule that determines the output given the input of the neighboring states.  To abstract this concept and apply it to the performance of multiple musicians, we create simple scripts, a concept from improvisational acting.  Scripts include playing only one one note with random rhythms, playing one note with the same rhythm, playing any note with the same rhythm, sliding upward in rhythm, etc.  In the rehearsals the performers sit in a circle facing the center, to easily see one another, and scripts are listed.  The scripts are performed once or a few times,  and reflections are written to consider what the effects are in terms of the degree to which the script promotes musician interaction, how fluid it feels, and any other emotions it brings up.   These scripts  are metaphorically equivalent to the cellular automata update rules, in that the musicians would use the other musicians as input and the rule to determine what to play.  The reflections written are a record of the emergent properties of the scripts carried out by each of the musicians.

For the first performances we will use acoustic guitars because they are portable and do not require speakers.  A composition will be made from considering the reflections from the scripts and this will be performed live.  Since the music is generative, no two performances will be the same, but all of the patterns will be fixed.

The performances were carried out in Spring 2009 at Milepost 5 and Coffee Break.

Posted on April 1st, 2010 under HEXAGON, Projects. Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

Fairy Tales

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

meme : fairy tales

1. a fairy is born

2. the straw, the coal, and the bean

Based on the German fairy tale documented by the Brother’s Grimm

3. father frost

Based on the Russian fairy tale included in Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book

4. the enchanted canary

Based on the French fairy tale included in Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book

5. the water demon

Based on one of the Czech fairy tales about Vodnik.

6. the rose

Based on the German fairy tale documented by the Brother’s Grimm.

7. the snake prince

Based on the Punjabi folk tale included in Andrew Lang’s Olive Fairy Book

8. the gold spinners

Based on the Estonian fairy tale included in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book

9. the fairy grotto

Based on the Chinese fairy tale documented by Wolfram Eberhard in Folk Tales of China.

About:

I devoted much of the summer of 2008 on researching fairy tales, writing lyrics and music, and compiling this album.  The initial inspiration came from the thought that some part of every interaction and conversation is imagined.  Each one of my friends and acquaintances is represented in my mind in some way, and to an extent my imagination extends who they are whether or not I am aware of this.  It is most evident in passionate relationships where a lover could be aggrandized to evoke the sense of a god or  demon far beyond their actual capabilities or intentions.

What if you just increased the degree of imagination you instilled in your reality?  In the people and things and experiences around you? What does it mean to do this?

Reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Anias Nin’s Children of the Albatross I kept thinking about the many deep realities that were created, rich in metaphor and detail–> rich in imagination. Months earlier I had read Die Rose (track 6 is based on this) in the Brothers Grimm and was struck by how such a short fairy tale could be so powerful yet enigmatic.  There was something more to this fairy tale for sure, there was some way to make sense of it.  Fairy tales seemed like a good route to explore as they present characters as simply good an evil.  The complexities of beings in reality removed to create simpler symbolic characters.

Having access to an electronic studio I began creating sonic environments for these fairy tales, and wrote lyrics based on folk tales from around the world.  I focused on using simple sounds created through subtractive synthesis using a cs-15 and arp 2600, as well as the Subtractor in Reason.

The thought occurred, what if these stories were actually real in our minds?  As in they provided the metaphors and symbols to understand interactions and experiences in a deeper and more meaningful way.  I wrote the first track as an introduction to frame the listeners experience, in the form of an invocation to these characters which exist only in thought, but could be real.  Traveling around India and New Mexico, I found places around the world where folk stories are very real to the local communities, the magic and imagination in them is instilled in the environment.

By the end of the summer I was recommended Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell and many ideas began to come together.  He describes the invariant characteristics of folk tales and mythologies from all around the world, and considers how the stories could be so similar in form if the regions are disconnected geographically.  He was a student of Jung, and includes many elements of Jungian framework of the unconscious in analyzing folk tales, connecting them to human growth and development, as well as providing collective meaning for a society.  In some part I found what I was looking for: in all of the examples people were understanding reality and experiences by actively creating meaning with imagination through the use of symbols and narrative.

Posted on April 1st, 2010 under Fairy Tales, Music, Projects. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Generative Method for Infrastructure Emergence

Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Social systems are becoming more complex from technological advancements and increased connectivity. Individuals are further empowered with the capability to augment their memory and communication through computers, the internet, and cell phones. Every society has structures which influence collective behavior, and with all of the possible configurations of people in a population, the question emerges for designers of how to implement a method to use the collective information and create a successful design solution [1].

Cities have been shown to have fractal geometry. In this paper we show how the fractal shape can emerge from a generative process that takes information on the scale of individuals or groups, and uses it to design a permanent infrastructure on the scale of a city. In this sense, we grow cities consisting of individuals and roads, starting from just individuals. [from introduction of paper, see PDF for rest]

A Generative Method for Infrastructure Emergence from Kawandeep Virdee on Vimeo.

A Generative Method for Infrastructure Emergence

View more presentations from whichlight.

Posted on April 1st, 2010 under Articles, Infrastructure Emergence. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,