Master thesis at UCSD (Jordan Morton)

Jordan Morton write about the experiences within the crossadaptive project in her master thesis at the University of California San Diego. The title of the thesis is “Composing A Creative Practice: Collaborative Methodologies and Sonic Self-Inquiry In The Expansion Of Form Through Song”. Jordan was one of the performers that took part in several sessions, experiments and productions. Her master thesis give a valuable report of how the collaboration was experienced by her, and how it contributed to some new directions of inquiry within the practical part of her master.

Full text available here:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0641v1r0

Concert presentation at the Artistic Research Forum in Bergen

We presented the project during the Artistic Reaearch Forum in Bergen on September 24th 2018. The presentation consisted of a short introduction of the concept, tools and methodologies followed by a 20 minute musical performance showing several of the crossadaptive techniques in an improvised context.  The performance was followed by a commentary by Diemo Schwarz and concluded with a plenary discussion.

Crossadaptive performance at ARF in Bergen. Left to right: Oeyvind Brandtsegg, Carl Haakon Waadeland, Trond Engum and Tone Åse. Photo by Stian Westerhus.

Concert at Dokkhuset, May 2018

The project held a concert at Dokkhuset on May 26th. This concert was made as a presentation of the artistic outcome,  towards the end of the project. Assuming there is no “final result” of an artistic process, but still representing an image of where we got to during this process. To give some insight into different types of outcome, I decided to have three different ensembles, and also to use one presentation of a student production.

The program for the evening was:

Michael Duch – double bass
Oeyvind Brandtsegg – live convolver

Kim Henry Ortveit – electronics and percussion
Maja Ratkje – vocals, electronics
Oeyvind Brandtsegg – crossadaptive processing, Marimba Lumina

Ada Mathea Hoel – presentation of crossadaptive video and audio production

Trond Engum – crossdaptive processing, guitar
Carl Haakon Waadeland – percussion
Tone Åse – vocals, electronics
Oeyvind Brandtsegg – crossadaptive processing, Marimba Lumina

The whole event was recorded, and the video can be found here:
https://vimeo.com/292993129/589519efcb
Since this was a local concert, the verbal presentation is in Norwegian.

Session with Kim Henry Ortveit

Kim Henry is currently a master student at NTNU music technology, and as part of his master project he has designed a new hybrid instrument. The instrument allows close interactions between what is played on a keyboard (or rather a Seaboard) and some drum pads. Modulations and patterns played on one part of the instrument will determine how other components of the instrument actually sound out. This is combined with some intricate layering, looping, and quantization techniques that allows shaping of the musical continuum in novel ways. Since the instrument in itself is crossadaptive between its consituent parts (and simply also because we think it sounds great), we wanted to experiment with it within the crossadaptive project too.


Kim Henry’s instrument

The session was done as an interplay between Kim Henry on his instrument and Øyvind Brandtsegg on vocals and crossadaptive processing. It was conducted as an initial exploration of just “seeing what would happen” and trying out various ways of making crossadaptive connections here and there. The two audio examples here are excerpts of longer takes.


Take 1,


Take 2, Kim Henry Ortveit and Øyvind Brandtsegg

Session with David Moss in Berlin

Thursday February 1st, we had an enjoyable session at the Universität der Kunste in Berlin. This was at the Grunewaldstraße campus and generously hosted by professor Alberto De Campo. This was a nice opportunity to follow up on earlier collaboration with David Moss, as we have learned so much about performance, improvisation and music in general from him on earlier occations.
Earlier the same week I had presented the crossadaptive project for prof. De Campo’s students of computational art and performance with complex systems. This environment of arts and media studies at UdK was particularly conductive to our research, and we had some very interesting discussions.

David Moss – vocals
Øyvind Brandtsegg – crossadaptive processing, vocals
Alberto De Campo – observer
Marija Mickevica – observer, and vocals on one take

More details on these tracks will follow, currently I just upload them here so that the involved parties might get access.


Initial exploration, the (becoming) classic reverb+delay crossadaptive situation
Test session, exploring one effect only
Test session, exploring one effect only  (2)
First take
Second take
Third take

Then we did some explorations of David telling stories, live convolving with Øyvind’s impulse responses.


Story 1
Story 2

And we were lucky that student Marija Mickevica wanted to try recording live impulse responses while David was telling stories. Here’s an example:


Story with Marija’s impulse responses

And a final take with David and Øyvind, where all previously tested effects and crossadaptive mappings were enabled. Selective mix of effects and modulations was controlled manually by Øyvind during the take.


Final combined take