Starring: Anja Gnjatovic
Sound: Svetlana Maras

It was the first time I learned Processing so the project had to be simple. Using the OSC, I connected Processing script with Pure data, and it worked in the following way:

As you click anywhere on the screen, squares of different sizes and colors appear around the cursor, leaving a trace (a line made of small squares) that slowly goes to the bottom of the screen. The whole process very obviously I think resembles the dripping technique most notably used by Jackson Pollock. So, dripping and pouring. There was also the sound coming from PD, that was triggered with every square that appeared. The sound was glitchy and dry and as I can see from my very simple and the messiest patch ever (my PD patches are btw extremely!! neat nowadays), so I can see from here there were different sounds for pouring and dripping squares and a special sound for a YELLOW square that appeared very rarely. 

(due to messiness of the patch I wont let you see the bigger photo;))

Now when it comes to dripping and pouring and SOUND in combination with that, I remembered a piece by George Brecht and I named my small audio-visual exercise by his piece - Drip Music No.2. The plan was, I remember, to use Wiimote for the interaction to make the whole thing more fun, but I guess I didn't have time to go back to this project after the course ended and so I left it at this basic stage. And it looked/ worked like this:

Anyway, what I found now is a processing patch that I will upload and you are free to try it out. Unfortunately it will be mute, but you can very simply make the visual - sound interaction work yourself since the Processing patch sends the OSC messages.

Oh yeah, and I used the rectangles instead of the circles because I wanted the whole thing to look more lo-fi, cheap and oldsckool, and so was the sound, distorted and glitchy..I guess that's my interpretation of Pollock's and Brecht's works through a contemporary, new media perspective...Have fun!:)

The software was called Voyetra orchestrator plus btw, a very non-practical to use, but still the best I could get in the time when you could hardly buy normal food in Serbia let alone musical software, so my dad bought it for me in Greece..Anyway, since the experiments with MIDI composition at my early age, one of my biggest personal breakthroughs in music happened when I started to think about connecting music and drawing - a field that I would later discover to be called visual music. Since the composition lessons at the Belgrade University of Art didn't fulfill my demands for experimentation or obviously not in the way that was interesting for me, I turned my little apartment into a laboratory where I was daily trying out things using my modest equipment..which was just good enough to begin with though. Basically what I needed was not more than a pen, paper and a solid microphone.  

At the time I was improvising with musicians from Belgrade gathered under the name Addlimb, a very talented group of people interested in free improvisation. In one of our sessions, I wanted to use the interface that I found very much interesting (see the photo above). First thing that amazed me when I was listening to the drawing sounds, was this similarity between the shapes on the paper and the musical form. When I was drawing a circle repeatedly, the sound I was getting was continuous just as the circle is, and when I was drawing a line, repeating the same move from left to right, what I got was a short "rhythmical" model that had beginning and the end the same way the line has it. Then this process got another dimension when I incorporated the Kaoss pad into the setup (sound effect processor with a touchpad). Paralleling the moves of the pen, with those on a touchpad that I made with another hand, I realized that adding the color to the sound (when I added distortion for example to the drawing sound, and moved my hand on the touchpad on X and Y axis changing the characteristics of the sound effect), it was as if the surface of the paper had certain acoustic properties that my pencil (by  moving through it), was discovering and making audible. As I liked very much the sonic outcome of the combination of shapes I was drawing and the sound effects added to them, I was thinking of the way to notate this in order to be able to repeat it later (in a session or recording). Here is an unfinished example of the score that I used:

Very soon I realized that only if I exchange paper for an existing digital interface that I had, and that was a graphic pad, I could combine the touchpad of the Kaoss effect processor with it and wont have to simulate the movement of one hand with another, simply one surface and one pen would work much better. Although MIDI and OSC interfaces of this kind were widely known and used at this time, I didn't have the right source of information at my disposal and instead of using my graphic pad as a MIDI controller that would play a VST instrument and whatever sound affect I need, changing the properties of it as the stylus moves over the pad's surface, instead I did something more primitive. But now I actually think it was cute how I thought of it:))

What I did was - I dismantled my brand new Kaoss pad and glued its touchpad to the surface of a graphic tablet. So now, when I started drawing in a software that came along with my cheap grahpic pad, at the same time I would have the amplified sound that goes straight to an effect, which makes it more audible, and the sound would follow the graphical representation in realtime. And the new interface looked like this:

As a result, I was able to have a small realtime audio-visual experiment, I was able record it and to observe my newest finding by watching and listening:

This experimentation of mine led me to learn about amazing works from the past, and as a biggest influence appeared the UPIC by Xenakis. Following that line of thinking, I also tried using the Iannix software, graphical realtime sequencer. I read a lot about the combinations of music and animation and I was fascinated with the work by Fischinger, but as the most interesting thing of it all appeared the early experiments by the Russians. I heard more about this in the lectures by Andrey Smirnov at Sibelius Center for Computer Music and Technology some years later during my graduate studies. Then came the Oramics etc. etc. etc.

Taking in regards all this, it is no wonder that I made what I made at my first ever Pure data class (that was also my first class at all at the Media Lab in a Master program Sound in New Media that I enrolled in 2008). No wonder that the first interactive thing that I ever actually made was a realtime sound and graphic patch that was controlled with the use of a graphic tablet:). A very short excerpt from my presentation:

First one is my experiment from some time ago about which I wrote on this blog - Searching, finding, abandoning. While wearing a blindfold, I was playing with objects randomly distributed on the table. At the same time I was exploring the shape of objects and recognizing them through the use of sound, but I also used them in musical way, concentrating on the aesthetic quality of the sound being produced. These amplified sounds I recorded and arranged later, composed a short piece of music out of them. 
The new piece Bourgeois, is based on the similar concept - by wearing the blindfold, musical material is produced on the spot, but not by me but by other people and in this case the sampling and composing process happens LIVE. So, while other people (6 of them), are sitting at the dining table and playing the objects while wearing the blindfolds, I am mixing these sounds live with the use of the PD patch that I made for this occasion. 
When I was invited to do a piece for this specific event called Cyber dinner, which consists of culinary, music and other performances that take place during an actual dinner at a fancy 5 star restaurant in Rovinj, my idea for this piece started widening up and becoming more complex.
Thinking of a dining table, objects at the table, sounds in relation to other senses, blindfolds as blindness in a wider sense, somehow to my mind came the situation from Bunuel's film The discreet charm of bourgeoisie, where the 3 couples always meet in a dining situation without ever actually sitting down to have lunch or dinner. There is always some interruption, something immensely weird or banal which stops them from sitting down. Like in a dream scene for example, where they realize that the dining table is on the stage and they are part of a play - there is always an aura of something FAKE and STAGED that surrounds these people.
Merging the two mentioned concepts, I came to the idea to create the similar situation - while people with blindfolds at a dining table will be producing sounds, they themselves will be the only ones to hear those sounds as they are originally (through the headphones). On the other hand, I will be mixing these sounds live, and sending different combinations of them to the audience. One small detail is that the audience will be listening through their own dining tables which I will (by the use of transducer speakers), turn into loudspeakers. So, all in all, this complex situation is weird as much as it can be, the same way like the scenes from Bunuel's movie. The following graph should explain how the system works:

To make an actual realization of this, I went to a company in Belgrade which produces the transducer speakers, also called exciters. These speakers transmit vibration to any surface where they're put, and the sound quality depends on the material, size of the surface etc. After doing some tests, we realized that in order to use them with dining tables which are most probably wooden and very thick, we would loose a lot of sound and a lot of frequency ranges. Therefore, in consultations with sound engineers and technicians, we decided to place exciters to another surface (a styrofoam plate), which will be attached to the tables from downside, so that it remains invisible to audience where the sound is coming from.

I am still in the process of collecting the objects and props for the table, which will also be important for the overall performance, and to do this, I am thinking about both the visual and sounding aspect of the artifacts that will be placed on a dining table. The situation should more or less resemble that from movie scenes I have mentioned, so I am carefully studying them through this print.

That's about it so far, the performance is next week and there is still a lot of things to do (perfect the PD patch, arrange the equipment, get the props etc.)Good video of the performance coming hopefully soon after 21st. Stayed tuned and wish me luck!:)

Watch the video excerpts from our performance here:https://vimeo.com/38903643

Sound improvisation with amplified objects, randomly distributed on a table, wearing a blindfold - recorded, edited, composed

Experiment description

There is a table. Large number of small objects are distributed randomly on it. There is a microphone which highly amplifies the sounds on the table. I am wearing a blindfold and headphones through which I can hear the sounds amplified by the microphone. I am searching for and grabbing the objects without being able to see them, and I listen to the sounding outcomes of their interaction with one another. I appreciate the sounding quality of these objects without knowing their original purpose. Sometimes I realize what kind of object it is by its shape and size. I’m using the sounds in musical way, I am playing (music) with objects.

Experiment duration: approximately 1 hour

- setting up, 20 minutes
- recording in 3 phases, 10 minutes each
- documentation / recordings: audio, photo, video

Discovering the physical space by touching - playing with the sounds of objects

Initial idea for this experiment came from the thought that properties of physical space can be discovered in our interaction with objects and through a sounding outcome of that interaction only. Further on, I was interested in a fact that functional meaning of the sounds of objects which are being discovered by touching, can be converted into musical meaning. The question which emerged from this experiment and I chose to answer, was: How complex the musical meaning and how flexible the performance can be when playing an instrument of non-defined structure, in the context of free improvisation?

1. I have succeeded to define one (musical) process which one goes through when playing a “randomized” and structurally undefined instrument:

The stages of searching for the sound that meets some aesthetic criteria of the one who plays, finding the sound that one likes and abandoning the sound in order to search for a new one, are always possible in exactly the same order, and musical meaning can arise from any of these stages.

The experiment has shown that just by playing the objects in this setting, musical possibilities are quite limited and monotonous, but the quality of the sound material that I produced that way was interesting, so inspired by the same three processes (of searching, finding and abandoning), I have composed this 3-minute section of sound.