Today is our last day of residency. Today, we are concentrating on using what we developed so far, so Mag can get used to using them in her music and see what she can do with it.
Just to place the kinesiology tape sensors on body by taping them is not easy when you do it yourself. Mag makes some practice to see how she can do it herself.
Then she goes through the calibration and training process using the Organelle patch Ingo made yesterday. She is getting a hang of it quickly. Now the sensors are calibrated and trained to control knobs.
Then again we have the sync problem! As Mag uses loops in her music making very often, it is important that her instruments are synced so all the loops starts at the same time. With USB Midi cable, we can see that it gets the sync clock signal, but somehow it is slightly slower than actual beat and you can hear that it is slowly getting delayed… In the video, I am triggering one note from Organelle every time clock comes in (the low beep sound in the video) and you can hear the delay compare to the drum loop from the looper. This will make the whole music sounds awful! after some hours of struggle, Mag decides to go without sync, and manually synchronize the timing when she creates the loop. This is much more difficult, and she can not play the loop for longer period… but we can not loose more time on this, so we drop the idea to sync the Organelle. This will be our homework to solve until the next working sessions.
For the rest of the afternoon to evening, we spent much of the time for Mag to experiment. She tried fragments of the new song she is working on with this new instrument. She is also trying out field recordings she made in this period, and I am very curious how the song comes out, and what she sings with it.
She has also tried to play some of her older songs with the organelle+sensor setting. Her songs are usually very complicated as she has many instruments and loops to switch. It looks to me that she is a whole band alone! and with complexity of costume added to it, it is almost impossible to play. I am amazed how she manages to remember all the timings and switch between loops. She said she needs to get used to it and find the ways to play together.
At the end, she played one of her old song “You shouldn’t done that” with my request. This became the subtitle of this documentation as this is often what I say in my mind when I am making something (and and something went wrong but I do not know what exactly…)
Overall we are very happy with the outcome of this residency. It was little more than 2 weeks, and we manage to get the Organelle connected to the sensor interface and come to the point that Mag can actually play it as her instrument. There are still a lot to be done and some things needs to be fixed (for example, the LED display is completely confused, programming mistake!) but the basic structure is there. The next step for me is to actually design the “costume” and not the tapes. So far the idea is to make a pair of gloves that looks like some kind of animals/ wild bores/ monsters.
The rehearsal went until late in the evening. Then we had a nice glass of wine to end the residency. We hope to finish this project in the next months and bring the show to Ljubljana when we can meet, gather and party again.