On Friday I played a set at the NOW now series 2007 #6: Surround sound at Lan Franchis. I played using a completely home grown patch made in Pure Data that I set up to perform using my own ambisonic field recordings, b-format surround soundfield manipulation tools, a glitch synthesiser, sound file granulation and loopers, with the interface shown in the screenshot below - with rearrangeable modular abstractions (sub patches) for each process.
These patches are an evolution of the patches I used in my electrofringe performance last october, allowing me to playback and manipulate field recordings and synthetic sound using 1st order b-format signals (4 channel, 3D ambisonic signals), which can be decoded to ANY speaker array or even 2 channel binaural signals for 3d on headphones. A b-format signal represents sounds coming from all directions at once, so it can capture a full 3d space, which is what i’ve been doing with my DIY ambisonic microphone. Another nice feature of b-format is the ability to manipulate the spatiality of the soundfield in ways other than just simple panning - eg, you can smoothly cross-fade from mono through to a fully spatial signal (in a sense, a parameter axis between just the timbre of a sound and the space it occupied), you can rotate the whole soundfield, or focus in on one direction. You can capture these signals with a microphone, or synthesise them by panning mono signals, which I incorporated in my glitcher and the granulation objects.
But enough about the patches, how about the sound?! My set began with abstracted, bassy noise field recordings, started in omni, crossfaded to reveal the spatial signals (though the room didn’t seem to reveal this as much as my loungeroom surround set-up had). I moved towards glitchier events, fed into loopers to set a rhythmic base for changing scene towards granulated recordings of chinese mandolin tuning in a shanghai music store, then morphed towards rain recordings (owned by the doors since riders on the storm, apparently), and into gamelan moments before leaving back out the rainy back door. yep. i was reasonably happy with it, though at times i felt i was spinning too many plates to keep them from wobbling excessively… and some of the hypnotic moments from practice unfortunately eluded me. but ya get that.
if anything, doing this set was most fun because it turned on that need to get more of my ideas out there - such as several that never made it to this gig like the swarming spatialised granulation thing, and physically modeled parameter control … lots of things sitting around in hard to perform proto patches waiting for another day.
nice gig though. Ben’s inner ear mashing mono bass machine was great, and also Sumu and Peter’s fenneszy guitar processed piece to video was very effective contemplation of sonic immersion. look forward to the next one!
