Creative Music Technology
INTERACTIVE MUSIC Friday 26 May: Basil Jones Orchestral Hall 1710QCM Interactive Music is a first year Creative Music Technogy course that introduces concepts and practices of live technologies for music and sound. It includes working with hardware controllers, associated software systems, the basics of sampling and synthesis, and communications protocols such as MIDI and OSC. Interactive contexts include solo and ensemble performance. In 2023 the lectures have been taught by Dr John Ferguson and tutorials by Matt Sorensen. 1) “Techno Tap” by Christopher James and Matt Simmons Our piece is named “Techno Tap” as our drum kit features a sound that sounds like a dripping tap. We both found this sound amusing it’s the first sound you hear. For this performance, we set out to create a work of two distinct sections, one an ethereal soundscape and the second section a technohouse hybrid. Our stylistic influences for this piece are Vangelis (more specifically his work on Bladerunner) and Aphex Twin for the soundscape section and a conglomeration of Daft Punk, Rüfüs Du Sol for the second “dancier” section. We also garnered inspiration for the overall “energy curve” of the piece from a certain Kenny Beats beat battle submission by Hellberg titled “The Choir.” When developing the musical changes, we aimed to create a unique and erratic harmonic landscape that juxtaposed the more cohesive timbral elements. This was particularly the case in the first section, connecting the mostly non-diatonic changes through chord extensions. Aesthetically, we were also interested in exploring two contrasting sections both timbrally and harmonically and we believe that we have achieved this to great effect. In the process of creating our piece, Chris focused more on the technological elements and Matt focused more on the musical elements. At the beginning of this project, Matt was relatively experienced with the Novation Launchkey however the Ableton Push and Ableton’s inner workings were very much new to him and thus required a significant amount of experimenting and explaining from Chris to understand its purpose within an interactive musical performance. Chris, being rather familiar with Ableton, helped develop most of the sounds heard in the performance. Throughout this performance, Chris is looping, manipulating, and playing sounds using the Push 2 as well as playing guitar and “singing”. Chris is recording almost every element of the performance live and is manipulating many timbral and textural elements through the Push. As Matt engages with a lot of chord-based harmony in his compositions, he elected to provide the chordal backing and some lead lines using a synth pad for most of the sections. He is adjusting the timbre of the pad through the manipulation of the LFO that is mapped to a knob on the Launchkey. Matt is also using a chain selector to cycle between different synth sounds as well at one point using the pads to trigger clips. We hope you enjoy the Techno Tap!