River

Looking forward to working with the Puppetry Class on Tuesday to start figuring out choreography! In addition to the changes that Cedric listed below, we also are adding a few more MIDI mappings with the panning/volume for the drums and melody, just to give the piece a little more life.

River Emerging

At this point, we just need to remake some of the whoosh sounds so that they can be longer. It will be no problem, the samples that we originally used are much longer anyway so all we need to do is fade them out a bit slower and maybe add a bit more delay or reverb to them. Shortening the piece overall will also be easy since the drums are all entirely looped and the melody is essentially modular. Should be no problem.

Frog Music Updates

Johanna, Ben, and I have pretty much composed all the music and created a working Max delay patch. At this point, Johanna and Ben just have to perfect their slide whistle/theremin techniques, which they will be playing live, and I have to map everything to MIDI controllers so I can do more live processing of the music. Everything is coming together nicely and we're really excited!

River Updates

Rachel, Cedric, and I worked on the river piece during the second half of class today. The piece already sounds so much more complete than last Tuesday. We transferred the drum ideas that we had from a couple of weeks before and combined them with the melody presented two days ago. During class, we were triggering different sets of drum samples and figuring out what sounds best for when the Head of the River emerges. We plan to use Cedric's samples and trigger them using Rachel's MIDI keyboard as the piece progresses, to really combine natural and synthetic elements in our piece.

Whooshes

Just working on finding some "whoosh" samples for the composition that Jennifer and Rachel are working on. Wish I could use Sonar Platinum but I'm having a hard time using any instruments in it. I can pretty much only work with existing audio which is upsetting. So instead I am searching the interwebbles for sounds that indicate water movement without it sounding too much like water samples.

Slide whistle & frog patch update

I've been practicing my slide whistle technique, and I'm planning on trading melodies with Ben's theremin during some of the frog music.

I've also adjusted the frog chorus patch to use the pitchshift~ object instead of the pfft~ object, because it preserves the "frogginess" of the percussion frogs when pitchshifting.

Hello All,

Becca just sent me a max patch for Clem, Mac, Spencer and I to use for the opening music scene. We are excited to utilize granular synthesis to augment our ever-evolving composition!

Ayal

Opening Music

I've been working on an interactive Max/MSP patch that Ayal and Clem can use in their opening piece. It applies granular synthesis to the live input from our water gongs. Additional hydrophones are on the way.

Tree/Finale Puppet Update

Hello Everyone!

It's been a while since we've spoken, but I'm here to give an update on the finale/tree puppet progress. After the break we received materials, and have since begun the assembly process. There have been some complications along the way, as with any endeavor, but fortunately we have been able to find solutions and continue working. Pictures below.

As for the finale, we have a rough idea of the puppet choreography as I'm sure our PAT counterparts are happy to hear, ad once we let the other puppet teams take a look at it, we will send it on over to you!

That's all for now!

Opening Music

Clem, Spencer, and I have been working on the music that will be playing just before the procession starts. Right now we are planning on launching and manipulating some clips of synthesized and organic sounds that we have organized in ableton on an APC. The composition will hopefully be evolving over the course of 15 minutes or so. The audience will also have the opportunity to play with the bird and cricket max patches that I showed before break using the APC as well.

Food for thought courtesy of Disney

"What I love most about rivers is
You can't step in the same river twice
The water's always changing, always flowing."

I thought this was an interesting thought as Jen and I continue to work on the track that will accompany the river's movement, as well as try to make it sound constantly changing!

River Updates

After working with Cedric this week, I'd love to do something to combine the previous ideas mentioned (flute, strings, etc) with Cedric's new, "arpeggiated" ideas. An idea mentioned was having low register chords slowly progressing with a flute almost "dancing" over it (in counterpoint, perhaps). Once the head emerges, I think we're going to try to switch from major to minor or minor to major to really make it a pivotal moment. As Cedric mentioned, we'll make the two parts of the piece modular, so that the River Puppet can take as long as it needs to. We'll be using the softer drums before the head emerges, and we'll pull out the bigger, stronger drum samples as the head emerges. I'm hoping to make it a very dramatic moment, so that the puppetry team can have a lot of flare with having the head of the river emerge. We also had an idea for transitioning from the pre-show sound effects. We discussed lowering the volume of the pre-show composition as the river piece starts and having both play at the same time. This way, the pond will have a more river-esque ambiance as the piece is playing.

Theremins!!!

We are just about DONE composing our froggin' music for this performance, but today, Professor Gurevich suggested something that is a GAME CHANGER

........

THEREMINS!

That's right...you heard it here first.

Ben Brown, Mz. Johanna Baumann, and I are going to be playing gosh darn theremins, courtesy of Professor O'Modhrain.

Me at this gig

ribbit

River Emerging Music

I have recently been helping to create the music that will accompany the revealing of the river puppet. The rhythmic portions have been created in a modular fashion in Ableton. There are different patterns in different meters that can align in poly-meter (I hope that's the right word but I think you know what I mean). We are in the process of adding a melodic element that is also modular since we do not know how long this section of the presentation will last. Today we kind of established a melody on the piano and are hoping get it into a DAW soon. We did not have access to a quick and effective way to enter MIDI today and so we will hopefully be able to get that done before Tuesday.

This is what I made during spring break that coincidentally reminds me of the finale puppet show tree scene, so... I think we may use it!

Enjoy!