Monday, April 03, 2006

Signal Flow 2006 Mills College

This past weekend there was a four day festival at Mills which is called Signal Flow. I played on one piece each day of the festival and had my piece 'November' performed on Saturday night. November was written for two clarinets, bass clarinet, piano and live sampling & processing via MSP. It was a good concert on Saturday night, most of the other compositions had video along with the audio. Chris Kubick's Crowd Control was a particualr favorite of mine. The piece was based on sound files of clapping , applause and crowd reactions all triggered by Chris clapping into a microphone. Seems pretty simple but turned out to be very well constructed and performed really well in the room. I was happy with how my piece went as well - had a constructive soundcheck earlier in the dayin order to get the levels between the instruments and the computer playback. I set up my patch to be operated by Jacob Danziger, and though I could have designed it to be more automated, I feel that having someone actively controlling the processing and being able to balance the sound from the room made a huge postive impact on the performance.
Signal Flow ended on Sunday with a keg-fueled reception that involved Les Stuck and Fred Frith dancing just as goofy as the rest of us.

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