We start the day with testing the LED display I made the day before. It is temporally taped on Mag’s hand for now. I will have to think of the better way to fix. These LEDs are going to indicate which patch she is controlling, and which of the play head (in DJ patch) is played out. I originally had the fading knob controlling values (what she is controlling on her wrists) displayed as fading LED, but she said she does not need it so I switch to just show these modes. When she switches the note or sound sample by closing her hand, it flashes to confirm.
The day turns out with extremely shitty weather… gray, dark and rainy. Perfect day to stay indoor and work.
Mag keeps rehearsing, try out different things she can do with the combined patch, field recordings and live recordings.
Ingo made a great contribution to us. Until now, to calibrate and train the machine learning algorithms of the sensor costume, I needed to control from a PD patch on my computer. One of the aim of this project is to make the setting that does not require computers. Ingo made a patch that runs on Organelle with Organelle display and interface that can run the calibration and machine learning sequences. It also shows the sensor data and mapped data as graph/slider bars. Mag tried it, and now she can train her interface herself!
One thing Mag noticed is that when recording live (for example trombone) while she is playing, the automatic record starts immediately as the microphone picks up the sound that is playing. So, if she needs to go from pressing the record button to picking up the trombone, there are some extra noise in the beginning of the sound file. This is not ideal. I decided to modify one of the foot switch she does not need and make a foot pedal for recording switch.
This pedal is originally made to switch between two inputs connected to the pedal. The switch is not a push button but state button (push once, and state is on, push again and state is off). I connect the switch directly to one of the jack socket that connects to Organelle’s pedal jack in.
Then I made some extra logic in the PD patch to trigger record sequences every time the state of the foot switch changes. I had to add a lot of bangs to find out which of the bangs in the patch is triggering record and stop. Now Mag can use foot switch to start/stop recording sequence in DJ patch Record.
After finishing for the day in the evening, we had a nice chat about music making. I do not make music myself and do not know what process goes into making songs and perform. Mag told me how her process goes, how she starts with some little parts. Then some of these parts makes into songs, some stays in storage for later use. What we are doing now in this residency is making a lot of these little blocks and ideas that can become a song… but as it is now is not a song yet. She needs then a lot of times to put them together. When one rushes to finish a song, it falls a part and it does not become a song. I can imagine this is a fragile process. I also experience in my creative process that you can not push too much to make it work. Sometimes it needs its own time to sit there, ferment and ripen in its own pace. We just have to wait for its to become something.