Sonic Arts Network Expo:

Now in its 10th year, Expo is the hub and playground of the experimental music and sound art scene in the UK and beyond. Free and open, the event mobilises a national network of artists and engages with communities from all backgrounds – placing sonic art and the people who make it in direct contact with the public. Expo steps out from traditional venues and into spaces that lie at the heart of the community - inspiring practitioners and the public to reconsider their environments.

I have been working with the Plymouth Music Zone on a sound installation that will be featured in Expo that has been commissioned by Creative Partnerships amongst others. If you want to come and have a look here is the programme. I will be in the Devils Point area most of the day on Sunday hoping that it is not going to rain!

You can find some info about the project that I am invloved in by going to the MySpace page that has been set up here:

MySpace URL: http://www.myspace.com/plymouthdigitalhotdogs

Here are a few pieces from my A Level work. I love art and design and hope this is reflected through my work. I can also use some of my hand drawn work and use it in some of my design work which is why I particularly like graphic design as it gives me an opportunity to use existing work as well as developing my skills on the computer.

Copy of my dissertation below:
Popular Music and Online Distribution: Changing Musical Form

As I was making a music album I thought it would be a good idea to make art for the album. This way I could use the art for the CD and DVD cover for my project as well as art for the podcast I am going to put on iTunes.

Characters
We have decided as we are bringing the story ‘up to date’ to make the character indie kids as with our recent weekend at the Camden Crawl it’s all we have been seeing. This also means that little red riding hood wont have a ‘red hood’ so we are going to pick an item of clothing that the character would wear and make that red to represent her character. The main characters of this piece will be the only one is colour and with the most detail. For this reason we have had to use ourselves to create the main characters as we needed lots of different shots in order to make animations and for the closeup shots.

Music
We have come up with a song to use when red riding hood is in the nightclub. The Gossips ‘Standing In The Way of Control’. We chose the song because we thought it had an ambiguity about it because you don’t know if it’s about the boyfriend controlling the girl or if the girl is controlling him by knowing that he will go mad at her by turning up late.

The album is called knackered and emotional which is a play on words from an existing led zeppelin song called ‘Dazed and Confused’. I have shortened this down to create the logo with The KAE, which is a play on a band that were around during the late 80s and early 90s called The KLF. The KLF also happened to have a single called Justified and Ancient, which is why I thought the name ‘Knackered and Emotional’ would be a good one for this project.

I liked the iPod shuffle advert as it kind of related to my project in emphasising the idea of how music has become like an item of clothing for expressing our individuality, and how we ‘wear’ music, rather than just listen to it.

Picture taken from appleblog.com

I have managed to get a patch working that I think I am happy with. I have begun putting in numbers from the data I have collected already. An idea I was thinking of was using data fom single and multiple exercises. That way the multiple exercise data would select different instruments as it played. After having a few attempts at trying to make this sound good with Max/MSP I decided that it would be better to just use single data rather than collective.

This was because in order to make a Max patch which read the multiple data I needed to use a separate object called a datareader… i wont go into it. Anyway, it made a horrible sound everytime it pulled in new data so I decided not to use it.it

We have decided to call our film once upon a time based on the idea that our narrative is being constructed around a fairytale story.

After getting a few things working and making something that sounds remotely like music at long last I wanted to try and record a few of the ‘tracks’. I sent an email to Dr. Karlheinz Essl to see if he had any suggestions on how I might record music live from the QT-PercPlayer and QT-SndPlayer that I am using in my Max patch. He replied and suggested that I could use Soundflower or AudioHijack to write the audio output of the Mac into an audio file. This has been really helpful and I decided to use the AudioHijack. Audio Hijack can record any audio on your computer. With Audio Hijack, you can save audio from almost any application to an AIFF file. This file can then be burned to a CD, or played with any audio player, from iTunes to an iPod. It can also capture game sounds or sound bytes off DVD movies - useful huh!