I composed this musique concrète piece last year for Barry Truax’s Electroacoustic Music 347 course at SFU. I entered it in the JTTP competition for young Canadian composers (but didn’t win anything).

Wear headphones for maximum experience.

http://cec.concordia.ca/jttp/2007/index.html

TMBG wrote a song about every venue on their 2004 tour.
Here’s Richards on Richards.

Apparently the internets have videos of me playing drums to a relentless cow bell click track.

Does anybody I know like They Might Be Giants? They’re playing at The Commodore on September 25th and I must be in attendance.

I was so entertained by the songs that play when trains stop at major stations that I recorded them. All I had to record was my sister’s compact digital camera in video mode, so I captured the video too. Here it is.

This is probably only interesting if you’ve been there recently.

But why settle for a ghetto recording when you can just play it on piano…

Try to sight read this. Got it? OK now try to do it using the sticking that’s marked.

Dueling Percussion is another Max/MSP Patch that I created for an electroacoustic music course instructed by Arne Eigenfeldt at SFU. (previously)

The idea is simple. Imagine having two snare drummers facing each other. One plays a bar-long rhythm, then the other responds by playing a similar but slightly embellished rhythm. They trade back and forth, continually attempting to outdo the other. Now imagine that one of the snare drummers is a computer. This MaxMSP patch listens (through a mic) to a rhythm being played, quantizes it, changes it slightly, then plays it back a bar later.

For this to work, though, both the human and the computer have to agree to a tempo, so this patch incorporates a tap-tempo metronome. To start, the human does a count-off by clicking sticks four times. The computer interprets the tempo and starts a metronome.

Download

duelingpercussion.zip

Setup

1. Press reset a few times to make sure everything’s in a known state. Max patches can be weird in this regard.
2. Set BOTH noteout objects to use your midi interface

Options

1. Set the velocities for the metronome note. There’s one for downbeat and one for the others. They’re located at the bottom of the metronome.
2. Set the note numbers for the metronome note and instrument note. I use a click for the metronome and a snare for the instrument.
3. Set the minvel for bonk low enough to hear your instrument but high enough to not pick up stray noises. (This may not be easy)

Usage

1. Hit reset again, just to be sure
2. Click (or tap the mic) 4 times to start the metronome
3. When the “listening” lights are on, play a rhythm
4. Wait a bar as it plays back a similar rhythm in response
5. Try enabling “Quantize” “Subdivide” or “Omit”

Cellular Automata is a discreet mathematic model related to fractals. I’ve chosen to use a one-dimensional cellular automata simulator as the basis for a process composition using Max/MSP. This was originally an assignment for an electroacoustic music course instructed by Arne Eigenfeldt at SFU.

Download

Cellular_Automata_Composition.zip

How to use it

1. Make sure the midi objects are configured to play through quicktime or another instrument
2. Turn on the metro object in the gray panel
3. Start the simulation by clicking one of the large checkboxes in the red panel which represent cells
4. As the simulation continues, you can continue to interact with it by turning cells on or off manually.

How it works

At every time step, each cell takes on a new value based on the values that it and its two neighbours had at the previous time step. The value is determined by the “celaut” object which I also created. This particular version of celaut uses the standard “Rule 150″ of cellular automata.

Each cell is mapped to a midi note which are divided among three channels. The programs of each of these channels change periodically to a new random value.

More info

More information about the theory of cellular automata is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_autonoma

Another example of its use in music is at:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-camusic/