a blog of algorithmic art

Enso v 5 from Aaron McLeran
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My good friend, Robin Sloan, had a fantastic book reading event at the end of last year for this book. I had the honor of performing some real-time controlled generative music behind his reading as a kind of modern day version of that drummer and bass player behind a beat-poetry reading. I told Robin I’d “master” the recording I made and send him a link. Well, I finally got around to finishing it (sorry for the delay Robin!).

Here is the recording of the performance of Robin reading with my music:
Annabel Scheme (reading)

And at Robin’s suggestion, here is the music itself:
Annabel Scheme (music)

During the recording of Robin, there was a CPU spike in my computer for some unknown reason (maybe the OS was doing an auto-update or something) and the recording started glitching. Though it recovered quickly, there is a blemish in the recording. I tried to remove it, but it didn’t sound natural. So I kept it in. Part of the risk of “live” performance.

For those interested, the generative music was made using a set of interlinked Max for Live objects I made that generated midi events to control Live instruments. It was my first Max for Live project. Also, the various algorithms were controlled in real-time using OSC messages from a bunch of buttons from an iPhone OSC app, OSCemote.

A piece using a resonator and a physical model of a hammered string.

Bouncing

Made an ambient video of my new kitty the other night. She has really gorgeous eyes. I noticed that in the right like you can see her retina! So I grabbed my iPhone and recorded her while she patiently stared at me. Then put some gen. ambient music to it (supercollider).

Those generative studies I posted about ages ago eventually turned into a series of works which I called “Enso”. This has seen a bunch of iterations, one of which was displayed in MAT’s Allosphere. This is an update of the Enso code. I rewrote the generative synthesis engine: cleaned it up, made it more predictable, easier to control, etc. And also revisited the graphics code. Now the images aren’t so symmetrical and flat. I’ve also introduced some simple shaders to give it some depth. Color-wise, I’m still sticking to minimal gray-scale for a lot of reasons, most of them truly artistic, though the contrast is more stark.

I also added an interface for OSC control. This video was a live screen-cap of an iPhone performance using the $5 app oscemote.

I am posting up here a few pieces of recent “sound design” type work.

The first here is a piece made from a recording from an interview of my advisor, Curtis Roads. The core sample is a segment from an interview he had recently that is now up on YouTube here. After hearing the interview, I wanted to do a piece with it, but keep his poetic words about computer music composition (and sound design) mostly audible.

Curtis Roads

I also made a piece recently which features metalic resonances. I used some vintage synthesis samples, ran them through a network of detuned resonators and various spatialization and granulation techniques.

Giant Metal Robot Spiders

Also, is an early sketch of a track from a new album I am working on:

Metropolis

For the biko show on Saturday I had prepared a couple of different generative states and decided last night to do another performance in a single-take to see what this system can do.

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One more post for today. This is another collaborative performance with Pehr Hovey.

Pehr just posted a video of the last few minutes of our show:

Last night I had a performance (with Pehr doing visuals with me) at BIKO house in Isla Vista.

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Some music notes:

The music was created using a new generative music system (in Max/MSP) I’ve been working on while collaborating with Pehr. I mentioned a few posts earlier about it (see here).

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A lullaby I made for my mother yesterday — it’s a piece which employs generative chords and melody. I hope you like it mom!

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Digital Poesis is a blog by Aaron McLeran, who is currently a PhD student at Media Arts and Technology, UC Santa Barbara. Aaron has a formal background in physics from the University of Notre Dame and physics and music from Kalamazoo College. He worked with composer and producer Brian Eno and Audio Director/Composer Kent Jolly on the generative music for Electronic Art’s SPORE.  In 2008, he gave a presentation with Kent Jolly at the Game Developers Conference on the generative music in Spore. Read about it here.

He is currently studying with composer and computer music theorist, Curtis Roads. While working on a NSF grant to study dictionary-based methods of atomic decomposition, Aaron began development on a prototype interface, Scatter, which decomposes sound into a granular-synthesis model and allows for unique transformations and visualizations of sound.

His PhD work, beginning in summer of 2009, will focus on the areas of integrating structural generative music and synthesis and will hope to work on developing a general theory of micro-aesthetics and perception-based generative music (or so he thinks so now).

Recently he has begun exploring generative visual art and has begun to combine real-time generative graphics and visualizations, synthesis, and music for real-time performance.