Tag Archives: Sensor

Gravity Pulling at Barking Legs Tonight

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I’m playing at Barking Legs in Chattanooga tonight in an event co-hosted by the Shaking Ray Levi Society. I haven’t been there since 2001 with James Keepnews, so it’ll be great to return.

Sunday October 7 7:30pm
Barking Legs Theater
1307 Dodds Avenue
Chattanooga TN

Along with playing some solo music for banjo and electronics, I’ll be collaborating with dancers and improvisers on a piece with video similar to the image above. I created the video my modeling the behavior of particles interacting with gravity using Processing. After the concert will be a short demo of my sensor-augmented banjo.

Facebook event

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Times Free Press
Chattanoogan

ASAC Videos: Pump Organ and No Mule

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Thanks to Eric Hardiman for shooting and posting videos from Saturday’s Albany Sonic Arts Collective show.

This is the premiere of a soon-to-be-titled work built around the idea of treating a fader box as a set of pump organ pedals, rather than simple position sensors. Using Cycling ’74’s Max I can control the organ sounds with a variety of gestures: “pumping” the faders makes the sounds louder, rhythmic motion creates harmonics, sudden and abrupt changes add distortion and bite. The samples that appear at 5:30 are from a 2010 recording session with choreographer Jill Sigman (previous story here).

(Start at 1:32 to skip the embarrassing banter and the hopeless yet obligatory banjo tuning…)

“No Mule” is another brand-new tune. The rhythmic chopping effect is a kind of slow-motion walk through a live sample of the banjo. I add a few more live samples beginning at about 4:00 and get into full-on Steve Reich mode by 6:00.

Science Fair Video

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Cycling ’74 has posted a new video from the Science Fair they hosted as part of the recent Expo ’74 event in Brooklyn. I show off my extended banjo instrument (along with my unashamedly geeky enthusiasm). My segment runs from 2:16-3:13, but watch the whole thing and marvel at the wonderful, strange things people do with Max (and their own geeky enthusiasms). Other videos in the series can be found here.

And a big shout out to Eric Prust who built the fine fretless banjo (minus the electronics) in the video.