55

Yesterday (Friday June 11, 2008) the final performance finally took place.

After 5 days of hard work we finally put together 55 minutes of interactive sound and video and presented it to roughly 70 people watching and listening in the “Alte Aula” of Folkwang Hochschule. Neil gave an excellent example of his art of Sax-Playing, holding the tension throuout the piece with expressions ranging from delicate soft breathings to the most vivid, hectic solos in other parts. He accompanied himself with some fine-tuned effects from his laptop (a few from mine as well :-) ), while Anthony and Spencer took care for the musical textures that were less sax-oriented.

The visual layer finally turned out to be made of three parts. There was video based on Material generated and heavily processed by Dietrich and Claudius, Interactiv Vector-Based Graphics by Stefan (Kainbacher) and last not least black and white swarms, flocks and particles by Stefan (Kreitmayer).

Though being quite exaustive with around 10 hours of work together every day plus additional individual work during the nights (especially by Neil and Claudius generating Video), there was always an athmosphere of excitement about what could be achieved in only five days, and everyone was eager to give his best into this work.

I want to thank everybody who took part in this joyful experience and who helped to make it happen. I’d like to say a very special Thank You to Neil, Anthony and Spencer for crossing half the planet to participate, and to Claudius who initiated this idea.

In our house I want also to thank Martin Preu for his support concerning the audio equipment and our stage crew for setting up and lighting the stage.

For the impatient: I put a rough mixdown of the final performance as an mp3 to this 55-Site: mixdown.mp3 (76 mb)

Have a nice time and take care,

Thomas

Dietrich’s video is really beautiful. The video trails, extreme slowdown and stretching work very very well.

I look forward to seeing a short test of Claudiu’s elaborations.

Regarding form, where can I find the latest outline. I suggest that we leave time/flexiblilty to fine-tune the form as rehearsals. Good?

I just did a 45 minute sax/electronic sound/video/dance piece in Napoli. After one run through we had a very good idea of how to fine-tune and succeeded in making a very good piece in about 3 days.

I also just completed a 10 hour sound installation in Italy with the same students from Berklee that will join us in Germany. I suggest that we get them involved as sound designers. I can upload sax samples for all (I know that I am past due on uploading more!) and we can come with some pre-prepared material to process even further live. We can also select which parts of this are actually going to work once we get together. So in short, I suggest that the Boston gang prepare about 60 minutes of processed sax sound as raw material to match the video material that you are working on. Sound good?

Basically, I would like to make sure that the Boston folks have some input regarding the generation of electronic sound and this might be a useful way. Any suggestions?

Regarding sax material, I can now bounce about 45 minutes of solo sax tracks from my Timaeus CD to .aif files (44khz, 16 bit). I can then post several large files to the Berklee server for us to play with. I think that I could do this tomorrow.

In any event, I look forward to the final preproduction stages. I am quite available for the next two weeks, so lets keep the ideas flowing.

Best, Neil

We (Dietrich, Stefan Kreitmayer and me) discussed a possible setup. Which I then transformed into a drawing.

It is also available in the download area as “setup1” in SVG and PNG formats for those who want to edit ist.

Here is how it looks like:

I put some of Dietrichs Video examples into the download section. They are to be projected via two beamers giving a picture in an 8:3 (2× 4:3) format. In the examples these videos are put together into one more or less cinemascopic view.

I’m thinking of an acoustic equivalent beyond simple timestretching, which these videos have as well, besides the X/Y stretching.

Neil: Can I have some samples to check if these ideas of mine work with your stuff?

Yesterday the 3 Germans met to discuss the state of the project.
Dietrich worked on some very nice video material which consisted basically of a video of dance which was extremely slowed down and (also extremely) stretched either horizontally or vertically, which made for some very nice changing colour planes.

Claudius took a copy of that material to work with Stefan on it during next week.
The first idea was to have him work in a more graphical, contour-orientad way so as to contrast Dietrichs works. He’ll also send a copy to Neil, possibly together with Stefan’s work.

(I’ll see if I find some space on the server here to upload the examples here as well)

We also did some minor corrections to the overall form, like putting a tutti at min. 32-34. We need to decide, if the form as such is OK for everyone. Questions yesterday were e.g. wether it is nice to have 5 times both layers of video simultaneously. Similar considerations must be done soundwise.

Another good idea was to have a video mixer and have Claudius do the mixing and distribution of the different videosignals to the projection planes. This would be a nice thing to do with the sound as well, which lead to the following suggestion:

We considered to have (besides the sax of course) only one generic laptop sound layer plus the one that makes the realtime processing, both done by Neil’s students, while I would do the mixing and some computer controlled spatialisation.

Once we have that fixed, I’ll make a new score in a format which will also incorporating Neil’s suggestions and is open to everyone to put in theirs.

OK, break was long enough for many different reasons, but it would be nice to get going again.