07 Dec 2010 - Death in Vegas Collaborator joins Fast Travel, plus songs update.

Alexis has been developing the Fast Travel saxophone score based on analyzing the pitches of humpback whale song - he has used signal processing tools to convert the whale song to alto saxophone notes.

Here is an example whale song.

Here is a simulation of the alto saxophone riff generated from it.

Saxophonist Andy Visser, who played with Death in Vegas on their album 'Dead Elvis', will be the saxophone performer on the premiere of Fast Travel on 21st Jan 2011 in Plymouth. Sam Freeman, the technologist on Fast Travel, has been working on the artificial whale school. In the picture below the simulation can be seen with 4 artificial whales (the blue dots). The four darker dots surrounded by the four whales are the 4 speakers within which the saxophonist and audience will be.

(Here is the infosheet for Fast Travel.)

28 Oct 2010 - Reagent Grade Ethanol Donated by University Chemists

Thanks to Andy Arnold, Andrew Tonkin, Prof Simon Belt,and Ian Doidge of the Centre for Chemical Science at the University of Plymouth, for donating reagent grade ethanol to the "Cloud Chamber" composition. The ethanol will be placed in the chamber and cooled by liquid nitrogen. This will cause the chamber to supersaturate and make the radioactive subatomic particles visible. The picture above is Andy Arnold decanting the ethanol.

19 Oct 2010 - Cloud Catcher Subatomic Synthesizer Prototype

Below can be seen the prototype version of the Cloud Catcher Synthesizer/Subatomic Visual Recognition System for my composition "Cloud Chamber". It is designed an implemented by Electroshop (Anna Troisi and Antonino Chiaramonte) with Eduardo Miranda. It tracks subatomic particles and uses them to drive the control "knobs" on a digital sound synthesizer, all in real time. I will use it to construct the electronically sampled part of the 15 minute composition. Currently they're using recorded video of radioactive particles (see top left of laptop screen). But to the right of my laptop you can see the actual cloud chamber to be used in the performance, in which the radioactive material will be placed, and above which will stand a live camera to pick up the particles. Seeing this running for the first time was one of the most exciting moments of the project for me so far, and has taken 2-3 months of hard work and research from Electroshop!