Hallelujah

The last performance has finally, yielded some desired effects. 

The development of this performance was actually a bit dramatic because when we were about to start to work on the materials for this performance, Ken’s computer went into an explosive hazard, and I started to be in 99 percent charge of this performance. 

In terms of the performance, I always wanted to do something about the echoes after the lecture, and therefore, the main part of the Max patch was centered around this idea. I used ten different echoes with the same distance between each of them to make the general piece sound more integrated. About the generative drum machine part, I learned the idea from David Cooper’s YouTube tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYAwtRxZiAY&t=309s. It can randomly trigger certain buffers at a certain tempo, with the help of groove and metro. Initially, I didn’t know that the buffers files would disappear after I close the Max Patch and I didn’t save them. With such experience, we saved the file. The four buffers were made completely by ourselves, recorded in the piano practice room. The four results were two human voices and two piano notes.

The patch looks like this. 

The NIME construction was actually, the most time-consuming part of this performance. When I finished soldering everything onto the PCB and managed to send the signal to my computer, it sent out significantly high electronic noises, and I have to remake the NIME as well as changing the idea of making it. My final choice was to use the breadboard and wires (not the jump wires) to finish the NIME, or at least make a prototype in this performance. The constructing jobs actually, still huge because still a lot of wires need to be soldered and heat-shrunk. 

The NIME looks like this: (Yes, I made a switch!)

The result appeared to be surprising, with only a little electronic noise. However, When sending the signal to my computer, the NIME signal was too loud because there were literally ten different sound signals combined together, we adjusted the audio input volume to let the NIME signal work well with the drum machine. 

In terms of the performance delivery, I think it was definitely better than the previous few times. When we were trying to figure out the composition, we found that using the four buffers to begin and end delivers a sense of sacredness and a religious feeling, which was part of the reason why we chose to name ourselves Hallelujah. In the middle part, where the NIMME sound came in, it actually sounded rather well-rounded with the help of ten different echoes.