Should Something Sort Sounds?
The YouTube comments of the video 'Pro-Palestinian rally shuts down Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, Holland Tunnel' alphabetized.
Voiceover by AI text-to-speech generator. The background noise is generated by an impulse response created by importing the html file of the source video as ‘raw data’ into Audacity. Each word is matched with its first google image search result.
Scanning The Real Jazz Fakebook
The video documents me scanning the cover and first several pages of ‘The Real Book’—a storied set of jazz standards which was once printed illegally. The mechanical sounds of the scanner are accompanied by thumbnails of the scanned page and a fragment of slowed down audio generated by importing the scans as raw data into Audacity.
The web page makes my illegal reproduction of the scores contained in the Real Book available to the public in the form of the audio generated from the PDFs.
I Turn My Wheels Towards Blissville (Commuter Piece 1)
A reproduction of my commute to work on the date 12/14/2023. Audio recorded with an H1n Zoom Audio Recorder. GPS information recorded with Strava. I used a script to turn the GPX data into keyframes on Google Earth Studios to generate the visual reproduction of the commute.
Solos
"The pheno-song... covers all the phenomena, all the features which belong to the structure of the language being [performed]... everything in the performance which is in service of communication, representation, expression. The geno-song is the volume of the singing and the speaking voice, the space where significations germinate 'from within language and in its very materiality'; it forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication.... is the diction of language"
- Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice"
The geno-song was captured with two microphones, one pointed at my feet and the other at my mouth. I've removed as much tonal and musical information from the performance as possible, using a combination of AI stem separation, editing, gating, and compression. What's left behind is my breathing, involuntary utterances, the transients of my picking, and the tapping of my feet. My hope is that this presentation of these solos will center the volume of the performing body and played instrument, and the materiality of performance.
Twenty Transformations
An iconic guitar motif is presented through twenty transformations. The motif is transformed first into a another instrument using Tone Transfer, then into MIDI using Jam Origin's Midi Guitar 2 plugin. The MIDI is then played back using a guitar sampler, and the process is repeated twnety times, by which point the motif has essentially melted away.
Swinging a Radio
A radio hung from the ceiling is swung in a room with two bluetooth FM transmittors playing two competing signals on the same frequency. As the radio swings, it moves between the boundaries of both signals.
An Attempt at Exhausting...
After Georges Perec's "An Attempt at Exhausting A Place in Paris," field recordings taken in specific locations for arbitrary legnths of time are set against imagery of the same location captured on Google Earth Studios.
Synchresis Etude 1: Exterior/Interior