rondo: Final Project Proposal draft for Network Music class:

I intend to develop my live granulation platform to process our group's audio output in a meaningful, performative way. My goal is not to hijack the signals of the other performers, but rather to capture, change, and re-integrate the processed sound with the originals to augment the performance similar to the way in which Morris (2008) envisions: "Replayed material can participate in and influence new Nows and be recontextualized within the new web of connections."

My platform works by recording sound into several buffers that are then sampled to output granular impulses and textures. My goal is to be able to produce a wide variety of granular sounds from synchronous grain streams to asynchronous stochastic clouds, for example. Dense textures are already possible because of the instrument's 16 granulator units. The rate of grain playback for each granulator unit is independently controllable, however the problem of efficient and ergonomic control of grain rate remains a problem to be solved.

Aside from developing the granulation engine, I am trying to determine the best recording paradigm for the sound capture. The act of capturing sound, modifying it, and producing new material takes a certain amount of time, on the order of several milliseconds at minimum, so my instrument necessarily operates on and outputs the past. The question to answer is thus: how does the instrument present the past? Each granulator crossfades constantly between every buffer at an independent rate. Since each buffer is recorded and stored independently, this crossfading LFO translates effectively to traversing the past. The most compelling way of doing this seems to be to record 2 second windows of time constantly, although I may yet change the buffer lengths. As Fields (2012) notes: "the larger the buffer, the greater the mediational value." The goal here is in fact to modulate the mediational value or "immediacy" (Auslander, 1999), but there is a balance to be found to make immediacy a performable parameter while maintaining coherence, limited by the listener's short-term memory and the recognizability of the processed sound.

Auslander, P. (1999). Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. New York, NY: Routledge.

Fields, K. (2012). Syneme: Live. Organised Sound, 17(01), 86–95. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771811000549

Morris, J. M. (2008). Structure in the Dimension of Liveness and Mediation. Leonardo, 18, 59–61.