On Jun 22, 2011, at 10:09 AM, Onyx Ashanti wrote:
Thanks, it's a great pleasure to have you here.
cheers.
Every single note you hear, is being played, as in one at a time, as
a horn player does, into a looper which I use to layer everything very
quickly into an arrangement then deconstruct and reconstruct on a musically
relevant trajectory. There was nothing pre recorded or preconceived. Simply a controller, a database of synthesizers and a looper with effects. I am playing every single solitary note. If that sounds like it is hard
to do, you're right.I'm sure about it and I can imagine the training you needed to
undertake, possibly in the same way other complex gestural control
require. But, that's not a constrain, right? Things don't need to be difficult to be relevant (?)things "can be" very easy. but easy was never a goal. my goal was
to create a system to express "myself" the way i express myself. i
love movement, i love sound. blending the two was eventually going
to happen but now i am getting into the mechanics of it and learning
as i go. so its not easy but the difficult parts are not something
i would shy away from either.I would like an elaboration on how the system is "clunky" if you
don't mind. First off, I feel that it is pretty streamlined for a first
prototype made of cardboard that is only 3 months old. Two wireless hand units and
a mouth unit. If you have suggestions as to how I might improve it at this
stage, before my next stage or dev, I would love to hear it.Sure. First, I think the video and its text on TED are misleading. I understood that the work was a finished one and you were
demonstrating it. It's important to know it's only three months prototype.About the clunkyness. I'm also designing a wearable biosensor so I'm happy to share my
vision (strictly subjective though).Imho, the box connected to the mouthpiece which presently is hanging
from the front side, could be placed on your belt. Increase the lenght of the cable, put the cable under your shirt and
you're done.two reasons that not optimal. first being that i have a distinct
dislike of belt packs. the internals of the box around my neck are
to be included in a carbon fiber helmet which will also house the
mic, various sensors and the actual heads up display that the iphone
is standing in for. and two, the length of the breath tube would be
inefficient at that length. the shorter the better because the tube
must also be vented.As for the phone as headup display. Something that works very good is haptic feedback. You can have the Pd system send small pulses to a tiny speaker stuck
to your skin. These could represent key points in a timeline, pattern changes,
instrument changes, behaviour of your sensor, or even the bpm. Pulses can also have different lenghts so that you can have an array
of signals.there are haptics in the the app i use in the phone. TouchOSC
responds to a [vibrate< message. the units use lilypad buzzers but
i must reprogram my firmata to react more quickly. my haptics are
mainly used for transposition points, accelerometer positioning and
functions and a wonderful "wrap-it-up" button that allows the
promoter at my gigs, to click it and it metronomically buzzes my
iphone so that i know that its time to "wrap it up" and can end my
set in a musically satisfying manner. they love that! i get emails
because of that button!
Along these lines, I could see a long term solution being a fast
Android or iPhone on your arm that actually runs the Pd patches,
connects to the Arduinos, and displays on the screen. Then you can
use a standard wireless mic to transmit the sound wirelessly. Those
are very reliable and low latency, as opposed to wireless networking,
bluetooth, etc. But that could take a far amount of working, so I
think it makes a lot of sense to iron out what the instrument should
be first. And the longer you want, the cheaper and easier the phones
will be to use
.hc
That would be invisible, and reliable.
invisible is a definite no no. people need to see things. and
besides. to me, that reactive touchOSC display is HOT! its my
favorite part of the aesthetic. i'll tell you a secret. I dont
even need it most of the time! I've got all of my functions
memorized so far. i just love the way it looks. thats my sci fi
geek coming out. and there are WAAAY more superfluous aethetically
usefully yet not neccessary fourishes coming.@marco, how would you make this concept more "beautiful" or "efficient"? I am always a
willing student in these regards.see what I meant above.
Do you have any examples of said efficiency? Being an instructor, I would have expected that you would have seen the
blog link on the Ted profile and researched your position before simply
asserting that my concept has no value.Oh wait, nobody said your work had no value :) No time to fire it up.
I expressed my respect for your work since the first post, and I
kept doing it in later posts too. I only said that I couldn't agree with the bold claims "we make the
future" and making the music of the future. Now, of course, you have to promote yourself, but I felt that was
not coherent.what do you see as the future? have you ever thought about it? is
anyone doing it, it being your particular idea of the future? then
you have an opportunity to do so. in the future i see, i envision
musicians like super heroes/jazz giant hybrids. one guy is an
unbelievable tap-dancer like musician...another is stands completely
still and uses his muscle twitches to control a performing android
in realtime. and i can see a thousand more. so that is the
trajectory toward the future that i decided to take and if i can
make it happen beyond just myself, i will make it my lifes work. if
someone thinks they can do this better than me, all of my notes are
online, the project is in Make Mag in Oct. and i wll answer any
questions. show me! come to one of my shows and teach me a lesson!
i am not joking or being confrontational...it is a dream for someone
to do this better than me. that doesnt mean i'm gonna sit here and
be "the old guy" and let someone show me up at my own show, but i
find this type of musical debate invigorating. the type of thing
that makes one get up in the morning and practice. but with sensor
networks and computer augmentation, its almost to exciting for these
words to adequately describe!I argue about the innovative character of the work (please note, I
refer to the whole work not to the system only). And I also do not mean that it is not innovative at all. It's a great system, but it lacks of directness, as Andy pointed out
in a beautiful way. And I believe that, if you are interested in this topic, your
performance would greatly benefit of a more direct performative
outcome.how much more direct does it need to be? i press a note, a sound
comes out. i move my hand, somethng changes. you want to know what
sound i might be playing, watch the, noteably underpowered, lights
( i have some other high powered LEDs that require a different power
supply and transistors. v2). then, as if that is not enough, the
goal is to create a narrative that combines motion and all of the
above. sorry, but that is about as direct as my limited cognitive
abilites can muster at this point. please show me a better one.The audience will clap their hands anyway after your show. However, if they don't need to ask themselves "what the heck he's
doing?" because your interaction with the system is transparent,
their overall perception of your work would be ten times greater. A successful performance is something to be achieved in two:
performer and audience.A performer alone (or isolated in his own world) is only rehearsing.
the audience at TED actually stood. so they werent simply being
nice to me. and my presentation had about 60% more slides that they
removed from the online video so people could concentrate on the
performance. when you come to one of my shows, you know what i am
doing because i spend a minute at the beginning just making noises
with each instrument so as to calibrate the AUDIENCE (ie., i show
that red=drums and play drums, blue=bass and play bass, etc). this
is a language that is being constructed that currently, using
language as a metaphor, only has about 3-4 phenomes. check with me
in 6 months ;-)As someone said already, a violin player do not need to demonstrate
transparency because instrumental musical performance is something
intrinsic in our culture. We, as creators of new instruments or systems, still struggle to
prove that we can control machines in a creative way. Perhaps, this happen because the technological knowledge of the
majority of people is still very basic. Although children today play with iPhones, they have no idea how
that thing works. And most of them will never know it. They just
assume it does work, somehow. This is the capitalistic approach to tech culture. A general consumer do not need to know too much, otherwise she/he
can start producing.I have no problem playing badly. i love it. a welcome change from
playing systems that make it hard to screw up. in fact my best sets
ever have been after a mistake of some sort where the loops were off
or i just didnt like the groove. i just stop. i tell the audience
that i'm gonna go in a new direction and thats when they are like
"whoa...he's actually playing" and then they give you leeway to go
where you are going and come with you. at that point it becomes
important to take them on a fullfilling sonic journey and to
remember that YOU are the artist, not them so dont be afraid to go
somewhere they havent gone. people who come to see me, know this.
if they want house music or dubstep in its purity, there are better
places to get it. this is beatjazz.on the iphone reference. kids today should definitely know how
their technology works or they risk being a tool of the machine
rather than the other way around. hence this being an open source
project as well as (hopefully soon) a commercial venture.One thing that I and other alternative controller artists are
realizing is that we must be in the audience. Otherwise people can not see that
you are actually playing. That is why when I play clubs I play from the
dance floor and currently monitor with the club sound system which is hard but
allows a flow of ideas that doesn't come from separating ones self from the
audience. And from there people can see your fingers and gestures carve the
sound.I have to disagree. I would suggest to consider that a gestural controller in a dance
party has a very different scope than one in an experimental
performance. Secondly, there are many other ways to make the people understand
that you're playing. We come back to the directness of a system. We could see in your video all the buttons you were pushing, but
half of people who wrote was not aware of what you were doing anyway. Specially because the wider gesture of your body (like "dancing",
keeping the rhythm as a dj does) were not affecting the music
directly.Well, i actually play from the room now and it works amazingly.
people come up and dance with me. and every once in a while I shake
my hand and start swirling a big distorted delayed mnoster sound
then BOOM! drop into some crazy beat that even i wasnt expecting to
cook up. i think more people than you think are way way WAY more
than ready to have their dance and their experimental at the same
time. like i said above, in the future i see, i see no
distinction. i see an ecosystem of musical perspectives, all
enhanced by technology. as many genres as there are artists, the
the point that genres no longer apply and you can only describe an
artists music by his/her name.This form of performance blends my desire to connect with my space
my music and my movements as intimately but, it should be noted as well, this
is a 3 month old prototype so that people are discussing it and I have even
moved from beta stage yet, is encouraging.Indeed, such discussion prove that your work is very interesting. That's why I'm arguing so much about it :)
And as Andy said, please, I would love to know in detail how your
system works as I'm working on a similar, yet very different,
gestural control system based on biophysical sensors. If you still don't hate me :P, I would love to write you in pv and
share our experience.i dont want you to get the idea that i hate you or anyone that
doesnt like some aspect of my concept. if i were so thin skinned,
i'd be playing RnB on sax like i did 20 years ago. i chose this
path and in amongst critiques are sometime valuable information that
i, have and will, continue to incorporate. definitely lets chat!cheers to you,
Onyx
www.onyx-ashanti.ning.com www.beatjazz.blogspot.com onyxashanti.bandcamp.com twitter.com/onyxashanti facebook.com/onyxashanti Germany+49 176 3543 7859
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