Author: Aaron

I did not invent Vel­cro. But I do think it’s been sore­ly under­uti­lized in the realm of elec­tron­ic music, and I make a point to evan­ge­lize its use­ful­ness at every opportunity.

I have a music stand that I’ve cov­ered with indus­tri­al strength vel­cro. If you’ve been fol­low­ing my videos, you’ve seen it in at least two of them so far. The music stand faces away from me, and I reach over it to inter­act with things.

What this allows me to do is posi­tion a bunch of small elec­tron­ics such that I can use them with decent ergonom­ics, holds them down so they don’t slide away, and ensures that an audi­ence can see what I’m doing. 

Why is that last bit impor­tant? Well, it pret­ty much estab­lish­es whether or not I have any chance of con­nect­ing with the audi­ence. Rule of thumb: If I’m not mak­ing eye con­tact and you can’t see what I’m look­ing at, you’re not engaged. In fact, you’re prob­a­bly mak­ing plans to leave early.

Any­way… I put Vel­cro on stuff. And what­ev­er else I might achieve in life, I think that’s my lega­cy. Some­one is going to rock­et to star­dom on their own Vel­cro laden music stand, and I’ll be the one who con­vinced them to try it.

All of which leads us to this bit of non­sense, for which I apol­o­gize (while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly mak­ing no apologies).

Vel­cro!! from GreaterThanZe­ro on Vimeo.

Until I come up with some­thing bet­ter, the first tool men­tioned here (in the first para­graph) is called “GTZ Habitrail”.

(the rest of that post describes a dif­fer­ent project, which has a long way to go)

Habi­trails, as I under­stand them, are a three dimen­sion­al maze that one cre­ates for their pets to live in and explore. You don’t con­trol with your pets direct­ly, but their deci­sions are guid­ed by the con­straints you’ve set forth. So, it’s a dif­fer­ent kind of interaction.

I’ve nev­er had one, so I don’t know how accu­rate that is, but it does makes a nice metaphor to describe the tool.

Any­way, it came out much bet­ter than expect­ed, and per­forms well with­in its intend­ed parameters.

But more inter­est­ing, by cloning the MIDI source over sev­er­al octaves, we get some­thing close to a melod­ic instru­ment, rem­i­nis­cent of the Suzu­ki Omni­chord.

Here’s a quick exper­i­ment with that, mapped to an XY pad on my iPhone (via Tou­chOSC).

Tou­chOSC solo from GreaterThanZe­ro on Vimeo.

The exper­i­ment was less about tech­nol­o­gy as psy­chol­o­gy. I had the com­put­er select­ing chords in a ran­dom order, and I tried to cre­ate a melody that would lead you through them, despite the fact that I had no con­trol over the pro­gres­sion, nor lit­tle idea where it was going. It’s an inter­est­ing exer­cise. It makes you stop think­ing about spe­cif­ic notes, and con­cen­trate more on the con­tours of your melod­ic line.

I think it actu­al­ly becomes lis­ten­able at about the 2 minute mark, which is some­thing I’m both proud of and hor­ri­fied by.

After mak­ing that video, I spent the fol­low­ing week­end refin­ing the con­trols. I built a ver­sion that drove three syn­the­siz­ers inde­pen­dent­ly, so you can jump between instru­ments in inter­lock­ing melodies, or let them har­mo­nize. I record­ed sev­er­al takes on a demo, but despite these advance­ments, it just was­n’t as musi­cal. These takes are now deleted.

I’m going to rethink and revis­it that idea, and per­haps a new video will come out of that. Stay tuned.

There’s an extra tool I want to build for GTZ Hydra. Con­tin­u­ing the gui­tar anal­o­gy, it would rep­re­sent the abil­i­ty to, giv­en a chord, pluck indi­vid­ual strings. There would be a per­cent­age slid­er, and the util­i­ty would look at the notes cur­rent­ly play­ing, divide them up equal­ly in an array, and find you the note clos­est to that posi­tion. This would allow you to record pat­terns that are slight­ly more melod­ic (which still trans­form to accom­mo­date the whims of the performer).

Think­ing about the lim­its of this approach, I start­ed con­tem­plat­ing a pure­ly melod­ic instru­ment that ties into this sys­tem. Some­thing a lit­tle more flu­id; less restric­tive than what I’ve got going. This notion con­sumed my brain, and a week lat­er, I’ve got some­thing fair­ly close to a proof-of-con­cept (of a pre­lim­i­nary first step). It’s not per­fect, but I’m declar­ing this mile­stone achieved.

With­out giv­ing any­thing away, it looks a lit­tle some­thin’ like this: