Firebird Documentary Videos

Kaschei and his retinue 6.1mb

Final Dance 4.5mb

PLEASE NOTE: These videos are for demonstration purposes only. The music is performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Constantine, performed at the Meyerhof Symphony Hall in Baltimore on the 1st April 2006. Live visuals designed and performed by Martin Parker, dir. Cathie Boyd.

Videos encoded with Quicktime. Download the latest player here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime

Dialogues 2006 Documentary Video

DIALOGUES 2006 documentary video
created by students on the MSc in Sound Design and MSc Design and Digital Media
http://sd.caad.ed.ac.uk
http://ddm.caad.ed.ac.uk
DOWNLOAD HERE 20mb

Development log

Written by Anna Chapman

10 July
Testing functionality of the system; Martin built a very quick mock-up patch to test the basic principles of connecting drawing and sound. I was able to draw a cup of coffee to the accompaniment of white noise and we went out for a coffee.

11 July
Pressure sensitivity
Martin developed a way of drawing better (i.e. more sensitive) lines. Pressure sensitivity was mapped to point size, transparency of the line and Z dimension (or depth) in the openGL environment.

Tilt of the pen
Martin also enabled us to rotate the drawing within a 3D environment using the tilt of the tablet pen. This could be really interesting when used subtly: a static image of a place could suddenly shift slightly. The viewer’s position is then altered.

Cursor
I asked Martin for a cursor to allow for drawings where you need to locate where you are on the screen. He created a discreet spherical cursor, which is great; the only problem now is that it doesn’t always behave itself. There are spots in the drawing where the cursor doesn’t want to go, and the line has a kind of tantrum and flicks back at you again and again. It’s a bit like trying to paint with water-based medium over an oily surface – nothing adheres.

Line To command
Martin got rid of the lines that connect your movements! This is very satisfying, as now the drawings can start to be drawings that relate to your movements, rather than simply resembling a computer mapping data…

12 July
I drew the horseman monument from a postcard picked up in a junk shop downtown. We found that if we start with the viewing angle rotated through 90”, then as I draw it’s not apparent what I’m drawing. Then I can tilt the image and suddenly the mess of line turns into a horseman. We had fun making him gallop about using the rotate features of Martin’s software [see mini-clips].

We decided that starting by drawing postcard views was a good way to explore and develop our tools: it’s a connection to place at an instant level, it removes a lot of choice and it involves recognisable elements in perspective so that we can play with recognition and it’s disruption.

Martin looked into smoothing the line through some kind of anti-aliasing; this is a tough one.

We found out how to hide the menu etc. in Illustrator, making this a possible interface for performance now. The tool icons are still visible but changing between them can be done with shortcut keys, eliminating need for any tool palettes on screen.
We’ll continue to develop and use the Max interface, but knowing we can also employ Illustrator is a great second option, particularly as it may be impossible to recreate its smoothness/quality of line in the Max interface. I’m also happy because I can get going with techniques and concepts in Illustrator (working with layers) rather than having to wait for tools to be developed.

Plan for tomorrow: record some sounds. Create a bank of drawing sounds – finger on a pane of glass, stone across a rock, stylus on wood. Take drawing, sonically at least, beyond the computer and into our surroundings.

July 13

Martin worked on dividing the screen into zones so that working in different parts of the screen can result in different sound worlds.
We started playing with sound connections more – using pressure sensitivity of the stylus to increase grain (granular synthesis) or volume and looking at different relationships between speed of movement in drawing and how fast the sound changes. Martin refined the sound entry at initial contact with the tablet so that it comes in less bluntly.

I created a bank of tourism images, scanning and cropping details from Tourism board brochures. I think we could use these in different ways: together with real experienced sound recordings (gap between expectation and experience of places) and more abstractly, extracting shapes and forms from them to use in conjunction with lines in constructing drawings.

July 16-17

Over the weekend Martin developed interface ideas in three ways –
Sampling drawn gestures
Dividing the screen into boxes/zones
Spectral filtering
He has created controls for the filtering which mean that the relationship with drawing can be much less obvious, i.e. not simply moving through the sound as I draw from left to right/bottom to top.

July 18

We talked through the ideas that have come up so far and how they could be used conceptually. We came up with half a dozen potential ‘pieces’:

1
Free improv
Martin records and samples the gestures I make in drawing. As these are played back, I can interact with them, drawing over them, extending them visually, etc. We end up with the screen dense with marks.

2
Stones
A stone piece using a recorded bank of stone sounds (we will collect some stones from the shoreline tonight and record them here in the studio, out of the wind). Very simple idea: one of the sounds is randomly (or according to certain criteria) selected as I make a mark. The sounds and marks remain present, building up into quite a dense sonic and visual presence. Stopping point could be determined by the computer crashing. In drawing I could use stones as shape sources.

3
Other drawing sounds
Extend the bank of scraping sounds by recording drawing motions with different media, as discussed earlier, e.g. scissors across the desk, coat across a wall.

4
Birdsong
Martin has produced a beautiful sound sample of birdsong with spectral filtering.
As you draw, particular frequencies of it are revealed in a quite intricate and beautiful way.
I just need to come up with a visual approach for this and the piece is there.

5
Multi-knob synth
This is a complex idea for an interface M is working on using percentages of each zone (e.g. the screen divided by 64) being filled with lines. I need to wait until he has developed this further before I can imagine what implications it could have for visuals.

6
Scanner
Scanning bar piece: a static image (photograph) with point scanning it L to R and bottom to top. This produces a rhythmic ‘beep’ which is at some point interrupted by drawing which acts as an intervention in the image. Image-wise we could use an empty field, very plain, with the interruption being some unexpected mark/object in the near distance.

7
Sound Pipes
There are lots of pipes, cables and tubes lying around in the vicinity of our building. It would be nice to refer to them. I’d like to use an image of some pipes, make it a singe colour (e.g. red) then draw in that colour with semi-opacity so that the drawing is part of the image rather than sitting on top of it. So there is this static image and then a line appears as if some substance is moving through the pipe. In terms of sound we could use sounds derived from the voice (windpipe), gurgling, etc.

8
Films
Taking drawing beyond the graphics tablet into real world situations.
Drawing as moving through space, marking out territory etc.
Film a drawing event:
A woman pulling her coat across a wall over 100 yards.
A man scuffing his foot across the ground in circles from where he is sitting
(narrative implications could be developed or not)

Martin records the sound it makes; the sound may then be amplified/ enriched/ processed/ played with or added to etc;
The film and sound are combined.

9
Martin has just created a system where the line drawn reveals a film beneath.
I am very excited about this as it could be a way to get timbre into lines – using different textured films slowly moving etc.

Later
The film texture is amazing! For the first time, we are getting aesthetically pleasing results, with a feeling of depth and subtlety to the drawing.

July 25
We began by making sound recordings of drawing with stones (lava stones from the shore nearby). Martin recorded me drawing on variety of surfaces with a variety of gestures.
We can use these plain but filtering means that they can be controlled by the graphics tablet; the issue then becomes getting something that retains the organic ‘grain’ of the sounds without the throbbing of the processing.

I am imagining that we make something like 8 pieces using 8 different stones; each uses a different sound file, chosen and filtered according to the shape of the stone; the drawings respond to these qualities also so that one piece might be very slow and smooth, another loud with jagged edges, another larger and blacker, another finely detailed etc. Kind of John Cage-ish I suppose. We’ve tried black/deep greys on white, which for me feels better, and we can change the thickness of line and pressure sensitivity as appropriate.

Martin is getting some great sounds for these; I think having say 8 pieces also gives more room for him to work more interestingly (i.e. in a more composed way?) with the sounds, creating variety or progression between the pieces and within each piece having control over the filtering of particular sounds.

I’d also like to try having the sounds of each line remain, being added to rather than replaced as a new line (e.g. second outline of the shape) is drawn. As the drawn lines remain on the screen it makes sense to reflect this sonically (another option being to make the drawing temporal like the sound). The build up of visual information in parallel with sonic grain could be really interesting. Martin is now working on a looping buffer to achieve this.

…

It’s working! I think we’re both quite excited by this as now we’re starting to address the issue of time or temporality, i.e. one of the main differences between sound and drawing being that sound occurs through time whereas drawing is created in time but then remains as a complete thing.

Martin is now working on making the loop the length of the first line gesture, so that the loop or repeat is ‘scaled’ to the drawing.

Now Martin suggested what if the line draws itself again and again, as if recreated by the (looped) sound?

We’ve discovered if I do some rapid, short lines the loop is broken down and effectively we bring the piece to a close. Really useful for performance.

As well as looping, M is saving the last sonic ‘moment’ of each line so that there is a build up into a sort of chord. The stone sound files are quite limited in range of frequencies so the available notes/frequencies get exhausted relatively soon; therefore we might need to play around with changing the captured frequencies in some way to get a richer range.

Line Tones Stone_01

Progress Report 01

Progress report for line tones, Reykjavik, July 2006.

Right-click to download movie 1

Please note; film is encoded for quicktime using the h.264 encoder. It may not play correctly if you don't have the latest quicktime installed. You can get the latest quicktime here; http://www.apple.com/quicktime/.

During the early stages of the project we were concerned with the development of an intuitive drawing interface for Anna. Rather than use her usual drawing software (Adobe Illustrator), we needed to build something with a more refined "artboard" and something we have complete control over.

I decided to used Jitter's openGL functions as these offer the most computationally efficient way of rendering graphical information. Our first experiment took half an hour to put together and is shown above. I am mapping tilt information from the graphic tablet onto rotation coordinates. Pressure from the pen is related to the darkness of the image as it appears. The slight blurring between frames is created by enabling the blend function of the renderer and setting the erase_color parameter to something close to zero.

For Anna this was a problematic interface to use. It has none of the refined qualities that Illustrator allows and there is also an artefact of using lineto coordinates for drawing.

However, over the flat vector drawing offered by Illustrator, this interface does allow the creation of a 3D environment and therefore richer complexity. As more lines are drawn however, these stack up inside the computer's memory and quickly the rendering of the machine begins to slow down.

The sound is filtered white noise at a low bit depth. It is unlikely we will dwell much on sounds like this.

Progress Report 02

Please note; film is encoded for quicktime using the h.264 encoder. It may not play correctly if you don't have the latest quicktime installed. You can get the latest quicktime here; http://www.apple.com/quicktime/.

Right-click to download movie 2

Right-click to download movie 3

These two films are soundless.

I was keen to explore three dimentions of the graphics tablet and combine them with 3 drawing dimensions. It is now possible to press harder and draw deeper and thicker or to press harder and draw thicker and closer.

Our next challenge was to find a way to rotate the 3D space and then to draw flat again.

Helter Skelter

Helter Skelter was staged at the TRAMWAY, Glasgow between Tuesday 3 and Saturday 7th July 2007.
Choreography and Direction, Fleur Darkin
Design, Georgia McGuinness
Sound Design, Martin Parker
Lighting Ddesign, Paul Sorley
Sound Kenny MacLoed

Music composed by Stephen Deazley
Written by Dilys Rose

Life's Hard

Life's Hard was created for the Brewhouse band and physical theatre company

The Great Rock and Roll Swindle

A project with five Emerging bands and music at the Brewhouse. I worked closely with composer Tom Mitchel to realise the electronic elements of his piece

Thrie Heids

Thrie Heids was a successful collaboration between composer Stephen Deazley, students at Braidburn Special School and myself. We also worked with Drake Music Project, Scotland and with composer/sound designer/drummer Pete Vilk and Sound Designer/Computer operator Nick Wilsdon.

Sept-Nov 2006
I was commissioned to develop an interactive music system that would allow performers from Braidburn school to integrate with the Brewhouse band and Stephen Deazley’s fast paced music seamlessly. The collaborative nature of the project allowed Stephen’s music to be written as we developed systems. Ideas emerging from workshops were integrated into the music and we could develop material according to ideas Stephen was having as he wrote the music. However, the software suite was created in such a way as to be entirely scalable for different pieces, performers and interfaces.

Particular features of the software include a dynamic mapping system, rehearsal cues via presets and real-time sound design. Rather than fixing sounds to pre-defined synth tones and samples, we could calibrate the sounds and change them in real-time according to properties mapped onto their interfaces.

Dynamic Mapping System;
A range of interfaces are attached to various computers such a light sensors, switches and joysticks. The computers are connected to a network hub and data from the interfaces is sent to all computers simultaneously. A switch therefore can be a snare drum in one moment and the next playing a scale on a bass synth in the next.

Rehearsal Cues/Presets;
The system was built so that every setting chosen during rehearsal could be stored and defined. We could then jump from section to section easily without holding up rehearsals with the ensemble.

Realtime Sound Design;
Each element of the sound created in the computer is configurable. In only a few cases did we use specific samples every time. This meant that if particular sequences needed to be punchier in a large venue or if we decided that a particular sound was too edgy this could easily be modified in situ.

Technical details;
For the performance it was valuable to have two computer operators to manage the four computers we had on stage. The number of computers was helpful because it permitted distribution of CPU load across a number of machines and this also allowed for the possibility of crashes with zero down time. However, the piece could be run with one computer operator if necessary and two computers.
All computers need to be Macintosh, OSX and as a fast as possible with plenty of RAM.
Each computer needs a professional quality audio interface and this should also have midi onboard. PCs could be used too but these require much more setup time in the first place and tend to be less reliable with 3rd party sound cards.

In our performances in November 2006, Nick Wilsdon was the second computer operator and Pete Vilk played an essential role at workshops while software was developed. He also wrote some software that allowed one of the Braidburn performers to beatcrunch during a solo.

The piece was performed twice.
06-11-06 Edinburgh; North Edinburgh Arts Centre
08-11-06 Glasgow; Fruitmarket, City Halls, Music and the New Musicians conference;
http://www.newmusicians.org/projects/heids.html

Tribbute to Sue