Tuesday, November 04, 2008

somba




Keti is a new music composer based in New York. She currently has
writers block in writing a new piece of music to be performed at
the Julliard School. Keta is at the stage of having a variety of
musical motifs that she is happy with, but is having trouble
putting all these pieces of music together into a unifed whole.

She first creates audiofiles of the various motifs in her score,
breaking these motifs into small one bar measures. Some of the
motifs are rhythmical, some are melodic segments and some are
environmental sounds. She then uses the SOMba system to create
three different Self-Organizing maps, one for rhythm, one for
melody, and one for the environmental sounds.

She then loads up three different instances of the SOMba GUI
browser, and starts placing the icons at different points in the
three different self organizing maps. She adjusts the volume of
each of the clips on the screen, and moves the clips around until
she finds a pleasing arrangement of sounds.

She then takes her 8 sound orbs and puts them on the floor of her
studio apartment, in roughly the places that she had on the
graphical user interface. Keti then moves around space, moving
audio clips slightly to produce exactly the timbres and
juxtapositions of music she is interested in producing.

Somewhere along this process she has the realization that she could
produce this music in real time, on stage by moving the sound orbs
herself. She develops her symphony now with this idea in mind.
When she performs it, the audience is initally shocked by the
composer moving around the stage, but soon begins to appreciate it,
and the performance ends to thunderous applause.