SoundHack was also increasingly used by the academic music community.
My collaboration with Larry Polansky applied his morphological mutation functions to spectral data (Polansky and Erbe Reference Polansky and Erbe1996), and a conversation with Zack Settle led to the Spectral Extractor module – a method of separating pitched and unpitched sound. We incorporated one HRTF oriented towards accurate spatialisation, and another oriented towards better music fidelity as well as developing a method for position interpolation. The binaural filtering processor was the result of working with Durand Begault at NASA-Ames Research Center. The development of SoundHack led to a number of interesting collaborations. The focus was simply sound, synthesis and music. There were no design or research motivations to SoundHack at this point. We were far from applying ‘studio as an instrument’ techniques to the computer, but it was a start.
#Soundhack spectral shapers software#
SoundHack could fill these gaps and allow one to use multiple music software as well as hardware samplers. For example, Csound used the IRCAM file format, Sound Designer II used the SD2 format, the AIFF format had just been announced (Apple Computer 1989). At the time, the tools that we used all had their own sound file formats. There was also a very practical motivation for the development of SoundHack. Not only was I excited by the sonic possibilities of these techniques, but I was also excited at what sonic creations experimental and electronic musicians might make with them. I became aware of much of the interesting research in computer music during my time as a research assistant at the Center for Music Experiment at UC San Diego (1984–87). My main motivation for programming SoundHack was to make new computer music techniques easily available to the experimental musician community.
#Soundhack spectral shapers mac#
I bought a book on programming with Think C and the Mac Toolbox, and started work on SoundHack (Figure 1). When production moved from Oakland to NYC in the fall, and Tom Hamilton took over my role, I finally had time to create the tool I no longer needed for Improvement, but wanted regardless.
Instead, the airport was created with reverb, live equalisation and panning, and the Greek chorus modulated a gated Buchla Touché drone providing the pitched resonance. Unfortunately:, the CCM did not own an expensive Unix workstation to run the CARL software distribution (Loy Reference Loy2002), and my attempts to quickly port Mark Dolson’s convolvesf application to a Macintosh System 6 were too difficult to complete while following our 60 hour a week recording schedule. I realised that to sculpt this sound I really would have liked to use sound-file convolution for cross-synthesis. When developing the treatments for the Greek chorus and scene 2, ‘The Airline Ticket Counter’, I needed to create specific spaces and resonances that followed the score and conveyed the location, the relation of the characters and any subtext. The character Don (played by Thomas Buckner) was a tap dancer, hence a layer of Tom’s vocals containing only plosives and fricatives that I filtered and gated for more percussive effect. This represented both her constant internal dialog and her mnemonic system in ‘The Contents of Her Purse’. For instance, the protagonist Linda’s voice (played by Jacqueline Humbert) was recorded with multiple layers: spoken, sung, echoed and spatialised. With our ‘studio as an instrument’ (a Lexicon PCM70, Drawmer dynamics processor, Alesis Quadraverb, mixer, 24-track and Opcode Vision to automate parameters), David Rosenboom and I were to develop vocal treatments and backgrounds specific to each scene and to each performer. One of my main tasks was to develop unique sonic identities for each of the characters in the opera. We worked at the recording and electronic music studios of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. In the spring and summer of 1989 I was engaged as a recording engineer and electronic musician (along with David Rosenboom, Tom Hamilton and Sam Ashley) for the recording of Robert Ashley’s opera Improvement (Ashley Reference Ashley1992). Robert Ashley and the beginning of SoundHack
0 kommentar(er)
