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William Hazard FC diaries: Friday 220610

Yesterday, I revisited an old favorite that continues to inspire. Susan Howe’s collaborations with David Grubbs are what got me interested in doing poetry with synthesizers in the first place. At the time, I thought, “This is really cool. I know a bit about music and a bit about poetry; maybe I could do something like this.”

I was in graduate school doing an MFA in poetry, and I had a MicroKorg XL+, so I started doing multimedia performances with that synthesizer, multiple speakers, and PowerPoint presentations with drum loops in them. I made the drum loops in Hydrogen. It was a far cry from what I’m doing now. But my pursuit of that interest in poetry and synthesizers was what led me first to eurorack, then to SuperCollider, then to monome, and ultimately here, to lines.

Clearly, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic today.

Tonight, some friends and I are going to hear Chuck van Zyl perform at the Chestnut Hill Skyspace. I imagine that will be pretty inspiring too.

“Every single mark that you make on paper is an acoustic mark.”

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SQUIM FC logs 6/11/22

Starting a new job in an institution that I’ve worked at for a long time. Retreating further away from the things that I love about it and sacrificing my time for security. I’m in a large desk on the top floor and don’t see many people other than meetings. There’s been a little bit of anxiety around things in my relationships shifting around. A lot of change and a lot of chaos.

Very satisfying to settle in to my tools for this performance. Coming back to some software that I used to use in live settings all the time (back when I did that sort of thing). I gave up on it some time ago because it’s advancement halted in 2013. Coming back to it now is satisfying and a little bit sad. There are just certain things it does that feel like they make sense to the way I approach electronic music.

I was going to get even more elaborate but I’m glad I’ve settled where I have. There are a lot of possibilities here and it’s easy to go overboard quickly. I have time to arrange things carefully and plan out the arc of my performance. This snapshot on the other hand is complete chaos.

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i love pieces like these that start in the middle of a thought and just evolve based on their own internal logic. i enjoy what you’re doing with the webcam. lots of really nice variety with that.

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tyleretters fc process log 220615

guitar. i am taking lessons. it is so refreshing to play an instrument that can think on it’s own.

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Week consumed, update the Thread

How:
-reviewed audio in/out on Deluge, midi learn, autoslice samples, TT ratchets, i2c chords, random, basic patterns, time, P.MAP, latest i2c2midi firmware is excellent
-Seems like Deluge can’t set a synth track’s midi channel a priori, I can only press and hold [learn] + [audition pad] and then send a midi command from TT to learn that channel. This is annoying for live coding because I have a bunch of midi messages going all the time which means I have to stop, midi learn, then start the sequencing again. I could get around this by tastefully looping audio on deluge while pause/learn/restarting the midi. Alternatively, I could lean in and have 3 or 4 midi channel sequences triggering from TT and randomly learn midi channels to X number of synth tracks on Deluge, resulting in a bunch of strange sequences. Could explore this as a performance tool. Here’s a small example of what this resulted in:

What:
-nervous thoughts of inadequately authentic self-expression
-industrial void is the current vibe
-20-30min
-start out with industrial soundscape and build from there
-The Deluge discord monthly challenge for June is “found sounds recorded with Deluge’s mic”. I took Deluge into the electronics research lab I work in and recorded a bunch of metal clangs, machinery, metal scrapes, electricity drones, wind tunnel, variable frequency drive, footsteps, ambience. Zip of all the recordings attached, free to use for any purpose. Panned and looped fence clangs sound cool. Was excited to finally find and record that background electrical drone.


Found Sounds Zip:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/131_QvREPViZWx8W7xSIajF8Yo1IdEAu9/view?usp=sharing

Will:
-involve crow more this week (TODO: more crow puns)
-freeze on learning new techniques, practice existing skills
-finish chopping up recorded samples, load into Deluge
-walkthrough live streaming setup
-practice recipe of industrial soundscape then build into something, 20 min reps starting from blank state on Deluge and TT

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These are 20 characters of great!

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ah, very nice! Downloading! Thank you for sharing.

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the license FC diaries: Friday 220617

over the week I had a few days of fairly deep exploration into some textural/melodic/synthesis ideas, which I think were partly fueled by a desire to show off what SC can do to a new friend. that energy is off for a few reasons that I don’t think I need to tediously enumerate. also they were not a good fit - not only did they not sound awesome (they were kind of cool, though), they took too much code, and too complex of code, to create. the latter is important, and that ratio is key. suffice to say, at this point I need to ascend from the rabbit holes, come up for air, and survey the surroundings.

with previous FC performances I’ve aspired to “start from scratch” and it never seems to work out that way. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that this time around, but I do hope to get closer.

my waking life is in general sorely lacking a manager, a central nervous system, a backbone. I think I want to find a way to implement that at a small scale for the sake of this little project, a sort of “productivity framework” (but something that isn’t going to make me vomit in my mouth - small scale, nameless, common sense, not requiring leaps of faith or awkward habit changes). but I think I also want to use that idea as both a central structure and concept for this thing. this is starting to sound uncomfortably high-brow for my tastes.

anyway, there is a rhythmic concept I have been simmering on which might solve both those problems (one, simplicity of implementation which can be summoned easily on-the-fly, and two, a scaffolding for the thing). spoiler: it is based on phasors :slight_smile: probably a logical extension of previous work, for anyone who’s tuned into the license channel before. I don’t know why I have been off in these side quests rather than proving this out, but the latter seems like the most reasonable next step - a good weekend project.

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late majority fc logs 220619

a lot more thinking/being rather than doing happening currently. the majority of my performance tooling/structure/framework still lives in my head, but i am starting to incorporate it into my norns script. softcut is way too much fun, which makes it hard not to implement every single feature of it.

playing with a few functions to manipulate rate and timing today, here’s a short and dirty demo of a single note being triggered repeatedly then being chewed on by norns clock and softcut pan/rate/level:

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Week gone by
Life got busy, practiced once or twice TT, did some deluge tinkering, need to learn and practice drum patterns with Crow and I2M as the only priority to have that set up. I forced myself to sit down and practice yesterday even though I didn’t really want to, funny how much I already forgot since last week. I have retained TT pattern basics, basic note + time triggering on i2m, and deluge midi stuff, but have forgotten how to use the crow functions since I haven’t touched it in a bit. I’ll do a Crow weekend.

-Fix Crow drum code, make crow cheatsheet
-Practice drum patterns, make TT cheatsheet
-Fix Deluge SD Card, create found sound sample maps

Edit: also shout-out to anyone who practices even if they don’t want to because I didn’t want to but after sitting down and hammering out some reps of the system I got into the groove of it and was having fun and getting over that wall of inertia is hard sometimes

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living here right now

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i love the tension/release dynamics. i can almost feel the various layers of envelopes.

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Struggling with having enough CPU cycles - especially for video stuff… wondering about recording snippets of live code video + audio, then live coding them back together, split-screen…

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William Hazard FC diaries: Wednesday 220629

It’s been a little while. A lot of stuff has happened. Notable among that stuff:

  • I went to that Chuck van Zyl show at the Chestnut Hill Skyspace, as I mentioned in my previous entry, and it was not only inspiring but also unexpectedly self-actualizing
  • Shortly afterwards, I took two weeks off work and spent them in the Midwest, where I grew up. Just before I left, @eblomquist and I realized we’d lived in the same suburb of Chicago when we were kids, although his childhood happened a couple decades earlier than mine. Ed mentioned that @tyleretters also grew up in this area, a little closer to when I did. Realizing that the three of us had shared this experience imbued my trip with a new layer of significance somehow
  • In Chicago and the near-suburbs, I got to spend some time with my cousin’s kids. Time with them always leaves me with a heightened sense of wonder. There is nothing quite like listening to funk with a five-year-old
  • After a week in Chicago, I headed to Michigan, where I ran into @walker. We had a couple wonderful conversations about music and family and work and life and Don Quixote, and we even got to do a little patching together, which was delightful
  • During this time in Michigan, I also had the privilege of doing a little one-on-one crow tutoring session with @vagueintl over a Google Duo video call. Teaching truly is the best way to learn, and putting together a tutorial script for Lee got me to clean up some of my own code, including the script I’ve been working on for some time and refining for this fc, which uses crow to convert lines of poetry into cv and ii commands. Previously, I had thrown the entire lattice library into the script, but that was pushing crow’s limits a bit too hard, which led to inconsistent performance and occasional crashes. Now, I’m doing something similar to what I was doing with lattice, using the existing clock library instead, and the script’s performance has been much smoother, faster, and more consistent as a result
  • I spent a lot of the time in Michigan reading on a porch or up in the dunes, mostly Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Transit
  • At the Cottage Book Shop in Glenn Arbor, I picked up a copy of Jim Harrison’s Complete Poems and wrote a piece for my poetry-to-cv-and-ii druid script based on a poem of Harrison’s. I played this piece on my little solar-powered lunchbox setup, on top of a dune overlooking Lake Michigan, which felt like something Harrison might have approved of. I tried to record it and failed, but the ephemerality also feels right, in retrospect
  • On the drive to and from Michigan, about 6 hours each way, I listened to an audiobook of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. It felt particularly and depressingly apropos on the drive back to Chicago
  • Before my flight back East, I watched Summer of Soul with my parents. We all thoroughly enjoyed it
  • On Saturday night, I returned home to my apartment in Philadelphia, and on Sunday afternoon, I played at Modular On The Spot in Blue Bell Park, which Walker had suggested when he and I spoke in Michigan. It was definitely helpful to try out performing with this script in a low-stakes environment. The text I fed the script was from the Declaration of Independence: “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.” Perhaps you can imagine why
  • On Monday, I received a tt-busboard-jr that I had ordered from @okyeron and, with some help from @license, was able to get w/ talking to crow over ii. After experimenting with w/syn for a little while, I settled on w/tape for the aforementioned script, inspired in part by Walker’s brilliant use of the Morphagene in his piece The Future Leaks Out. I’ve been experimenting with filling the tape with spoken audio (read: audiobooks) and jumping around in it and modulating the playback speed and direction with various commands determined by the same line of poetry that’s sequencing pitches, envelopes, just friends in synthesis mode, etc. This has been a lot of fun, and I think I’ll probably wind up using it in the fc performance, but I’m definitely still in the early stages of figuring it out
  • I think I have arrived at a working title for the piece I’m developing for fc: “The Power of Then”
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Spent the last week at a rental with my partner and her family. Went on an 8 mile hike along the cape to gather sea rocket for a salad to make with the kinds then back by way of a trail along the inside through brush trees and flowers. It was a gorgeous time roughly interrupted by other people, concerns about the rest of the world, anxiety about work etc… Made plans to record and do some work but instead I’m cramming over this 4th of July weekend. Made some progress with my control scheme. I picked up a guitar and started playing through the automated grinder I’d developed.

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the license FC diaries: Sunday 220703

friends, I have been bad.

I have mostly neglected my Flash Crash studies. not entirely, mind you - I spent a little time on it. but probably not enough. I could rationalize this and say things like, you know, the stress of an impending deadline motivates me. or that the day job has been stressing me out. or that my yard is full of weeds, my house is a mess, etc. none of which would be untrue, but they’re just excuses.

the truth is that I think I’ve lost interest in my original concept. it’s something I had an interest in a while back, and I already did one FC performance based on. as I spent a little time poking and prodding on it, it felt like I would just be doing a minor variation on that performance, which will probably be boring for me and and the audience. I respect artists who stick to one thing for years and hone it to perfection. I aspire to be that kind of artist someday, and I am definitely not yet.

the good news is that I have another idea. I already started on it at the end of last year before some other life things came up and I lost the time, energy, and motivation to work on it. the thread tehn started recently rekindled that flame for me, and a week later the fire thrives in my mind now. it’s just a question of now or later.

the bad news is that I have to figure out two whethers: 1) whether this is me fighting with myself, trying to weasel out of my original concept, and it’s actually wiser to just stay the course and revisit and expand upon that original concept (for example, I did have some ideas for visuals and I don’t, at all, really, for this other concept) 2) whether I actually have time to execute this other idea, because it’s going to take me out of my comfort zone a lot more - which could be very good, but will probably take more time. it’s a risk.

I’m honestly not sure which is the right choice. I see arguments in both directions - follow-through vs. follow your heart, etc. I am a bit conflicted about it and I feel like I need to figure this out basically tomorrow so that I still have a month. at the end of the day, as long as there is a license FC performance, I guess I’ve done the thing. anyway, I appreciate any suggestions. thanks for reading :slight_smile:

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Roll the dice.
Never heard you do anything boring and I’m confident that aint going to change any time soon :black_heart:

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thank you for the kind and wise words @anon78160790 and @Obakegaku.

rolling the dice and moving forward, trusting my heart as the leader.

I don’t think this is what you meant but I’m going to go ahead and agree with my own interpretation.

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(something about having a conversation rather than exacting my will. but also having to do some talking.)

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bahhh typo. meant to say: “it is so refreshing to play an instrument that cannot think on its own”

no patches, no settings, no save files…

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oh now that’s interesting! I thought you meant something about temperature, physics, resonance, never sounding the same twice, etc. I do think there’s something to that, shattering the illusion of being able to perfectly recreate a moment that you ought to just be paying full attention to while it’s happening because it ain’t coming back. that said, even in the presence of patches and persistence, I think the grey area is quite large.

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