Monthly Archives: May 2011

Entre 2 Mondes at Elektra

Installations, Minim, Processing

For the last month, I’ve been working on the audio portion of an installation for the Elektra Festival in Montréal along with Mickaël Lafontaine. The installation, designed by Mickaël, is an interactive touchscreen experience that is a meta-installation about Cycloïd-E, which is a “kinetic polyphonic installation” also being shown at Elektra. Mickaël had elementary and high school students watch video and listen to recordings of Cycloïd-E and then write short poems about it. These poems have been split into four “thematic spaces” where people can reconstruct the poems by dragging words into place. Each “thematic space” has a theme and a unique soundscape that evokes different aspects of Cycloïd-E. The soundscapes are constructed out of bits of recordings of Cycloïd-E, recordings of the kids reading their poems, and procedurally generated audio. I used the new UGen Framework in Minim to create all of the effects and do real-time mixing and parameter control, some of which is tied directly to touchscreen input.

If you are in Montréal, you can see the installation at the Elektra Festival for free. It’s currently installed in the lobby of Usine C and can be viewed starting from 5pm, through May 7. More details are available at the Elektra site: http://www.elektramontreal.ca/2011/#/program/ENTRE_2_MONDES/

Sound Byte: Granulizer Patch

Java, Minim, Processing, Sound Bytes

This Sound Byte gives you control over a reasonably complex UGen chain. The meat of it is a UGen I’ve called Granulizer, which takes sample data and, based on some parameters, randomly chooses short sections of the data to loop before jumping to a different short section. This sketch gives you mouse control over the size of the sections that are looped, as well as how many times they are looped. There are also keyboard commands for controlling some effects that the Granulizer is being patched through, such as a double delay, a resonant filter, a sample repeater, a bit crusher, and a playback rate controller. The controls are outlined on the applet page, so check it out!

I never really got into using max/msp or pd, but now that I’ve got these UGens to play around with in Minim, I’m finally discovering the joy of patching!