the fever dream
blue moon triptych 2 / 22
My latest BMT performance. It came at the end of a week with the flu. I had other plans for my time, but in the end had just enough energy to drift away in the clouds.
The performance utilizes a synth I have been developing. My initial inspiration comes from cicadas. While that isn't wholly obvious in this performance, it will become more so in future endeavors. In this case I use it to lift my spirits after a horrible week.
The synth engine is called _awed. It is written in supercollider and currently installed on my norns for performance purposes. At it's heart is a classic Saw wave oscillator with a high Q bandpass filter on it. The interface has two modes, rhythmic and sustained.
Pitches are selected based on a root frequency raised to a power as high as 36. This is an interface for the harmonic series. The player is able to select any number of harmonics that can be pulled from randomly when a synth is deployed.
To deploy a synth, one presses a key in an array of 72. In sustained mode, the keys correspond to volume enevelopes, all of which are long, but have varying attack to release ratios. In rhythmic mode the envelopes are similar, but the frequency is also adjusted, from slow whole notes every second, all the way up to rapid fire ticks that reach into the fusion of discreet events into a sustained tone.
As things develop with _awed I will post again about it. Some things on the horizon are to release it to the norns community soon, once I clean up some show specific parts of the code. And to develop a series of concerts for public spaces, where I will deploy multiple speakers and perform, guerilla style, as if the cicadas themselves were singing to us. Until then, I hope you enjoy the music. Merci!
