Participants:
Trond Engum (processing musician)
Tone Åse (vocals)
Carl Haakon Waadeland (drums and percussion)
Andreas Bergsland (video)
Thomas Henriksen (sound technician)
Video digest from session:
Session objective and focus:
The main focus in this session was to explore other analysing methods than used in earlier sessions (focus on rhythmic consonance for the drums, and spectral crest on the vocals). These analysing methods were chosen to get a wider understanding of their technical functionality, but also their possible use in musical interplay. In addition to this there was an intention to include the sample/hold function for the MIDIator plug-in. The session was also set up with a large screen in the live room to monitor the processing instrument to all participants at all times. The idea was to democratize the processing musician role during the session to open up for discussion and tuning of the system as a collective process based on a mutual understanding. This would hopefully communicate a better understanding of the functionality in the system, and how the musicians individually can navigate within it through their musical input. At the same time this also opens up for a closer dialog around choice of effects and parameter mapping during the process.
Earlier experiences and process
Following up on experiences documented through earlier sessions and previous blog posts, the session was prepared to avoid the most obvious shortcomings. First of all, separation between instruments to avoid bleeding through microphones was arranged by placing vocals and drums in separate rooms. Bleeding between microphones was earlier affecting both the analysed signals and effects. The system was prepared to be as flexible as possible beforehand containing several effects to map to, flexibility in this context meaning the possibility to do fast changes and tuning the system depending on the thoughts from the musicians. Since the group of musicians remained unchanged during the session this flexibility was also seen as a necessity to go into details and more subtle changes both in the MIDIator and the effects in play to reach common aesthetical intentions.
Due to technical problems in the studio (not connected with the cross adaptive set up or software) the session was delayed for several hours resulting in shorter time than originally planned. We therefore made a choice to concentrate only on rhythmic consonance (referred to as rhythmical regularity in the video) as analysing method for both drums and vocals. The method we used to familiarize with this analysing tool was that we started with drums trying out different playing techniques with both regular and irregular strokes while monitoring the visual feedback from the analyser plug-in without any effect. Regular strokes in this case resulting in high stable value, irregular strokes resulting in low value.
Figure 1. Consonance (regularity) visualized in the upper graph.
What became evident was that when the input stopped, the analyser stayed at the last measured value, and in that way could act as a sort of sample/hold function on the last value and in that sense stabilise a setting in an effect until an input was introduced again. Another aspect was that the analysing method worked well for regularity in rhythm, but had more unpredictable behaviour when introducing irregularity.
After learning the analyser behaviour this was further mapped to a delay plugging as an adaptive effect on the drums. The parameter controlled the time range of 14 delays resulting in larger delay time range the more regularity, and vice versa.
After fine-tuning the delay range we agreed that the connection between the analyser, MIDIator and choice of effect worked musically in the same direction. (This was changed later in the session when trying out cross-adaptive processing).
The same procedure was followed when trying vocals, but then concentrating the visual monitoring mostly on the last stage of the chain, the delay effect. This was experienced as more intuitive when all settings were mapped since the musician then could interact visually with the input during performance.
Cross-adaptive processing.
When starting the cross-adaptive recording everyone had followed the process, and tried out the chosen analysing method on own instruments. Even though the focus was mainly on the technical aspects the process had already given the musicians the possibility to rehearse and get familiar with the system.
The system we ended up with was set up in the following way:
Both drums and vocals was analysed by rhythmical consonance (regularity). The drums controlled the send volume to a convolution reverb and a pitch shifter on the vocals. The more regular drums the less of the effects, the less regular drums the more of the effects.
The vocals controlled the time range in the echo plugin on the drums. The more regular pulses from the vocal the less echo time range on the drums, the less regular pulses from the vocals the larger echo time range on the drums.
Sound example (improvisation with cross adaptive setup):
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