Reflections
So. Just a few notes again from Sicily. Angela and I are working today towards our performance on Friday. The Mexicans arrived yesterday, and we’ve been exchanging a few dialogues. They are thinking of doing another festival with Cadmium next year in Mexico City, and would like to do a concert at Chop of alternative musics, as part of it. Personally I’d love to go to Mexico and perform, and I really like their style. It’s a kind of dancefloor mixup, made with traditional instruments – flutes, ocarinas, saxophones, etc.
I have finally got a good improvisation going with Live and some control routed through Max. Angela is happy with it too – there are some good sounds coming out, but I have the feeling that it sounds like ‘Live’. There’s a particular sound that the Session time stretcher has – both the granulator and the fft, which doesn’t make it ideal for live performance, but then Max is so convoluted that to do some of the most basic things that Live does would take months to program in Max, and even then it would be very unstable. I think a lot of people just end up rewriting some of the basic features of Live in Max without realising it, but then there is this element of direct control over sound that Max/MSP has over Live. If one could get all the interwoven signal processing features of Max, i.e. let every element be able to control another then it would be perfect. The problem is making a system which is not too difficult for the average user, yet powerful enough to satisfy the needs of the complex musician. There is a compromise between the two, that one can pass audio and MIDI between them, make plugins for DSP in Max and control what you will, but as always there are barriers to overcome.
One cannot always create all the sounds they would like to use in real time, a lot of preparation in terms of sound making must be done before the process starts. Preprocessed sounds are infinitely better to listen to that real-time processed ones, especially in the live instrument processing domain. As soon as you introduce a computer into the equation, the sound quality dramatically reduces. Like João Pedro was saying, he has to create all his sounds in the studio before trying to do it live. He has not heard a solution for live processing that works, and I trust his opinion. However, in that domain one is comparing studio created work performed on stage to live work created on stage, and there is a fundamental difference there.
Evening:
It’s very loud and busy here at the moment. Kukultech (the Mexicans) are working on some material, practising and performing. Andres has discovered his camera, the one he uses for everything, is completely broken and is going to cost a lot of money to repair. It’s extremely hot and humid, difficult to work in circumstances like these, and my computer is complaining a lot – not overheating but struggling to keep cool.
I start to think that it would be easier to live somewhere that’s not England in order to do workshops, but then there are so many barriers in the way that it would make the difficulties in Britain seem trivial. But, saying that, Tullis is moving to Barcelona and leaving (almost) everything he has established in Britain behind.
Tags: Live, Ninnananna, Sicily