Auricle New Music Series welcomes John Bischoff for an evening of live computer music on Monday, September 29 at 7:00pm. Joining John will be Madison's own Gregory Taylor. Free admission, donations welcomed.
Program notes from John Bischoff:
In recent years I have been composing solo pieces using custom analog circuits in tandem with digital synthesis. The circuits produce audio and sub-audio pulsewaves in response to hands-on actions by the performer.
Two of the pieces I will perform—“Visibility Study" and "Tone”—have the following features in common:
- as pulsed tones come to life, they sound at the loudspeakers and often trigger digital sound at the same time
- the pulsed tones are also analyzed by the laptop for pitch content and elapsed time between events. The pitch and timing of subsequent digital synthesis generated by the laptop are driven by this performance-acquired data—no pre-performance event data is employed
- as the laptop generates sound it is open to interruption and re-animation by ongoing circuit actions The very ground of each event in this music is a physical interruption—a disturbance in a continuous tone or silence.
"Calliope" is a different case—it is a take-off on Leon Theremin’s RHYTHMICON which automatically reiterates its tones at rates corresponding to the ratios of pitches selected by a performer. Theremin’s instrument is so beautifully elegant, and sonically quirky at the same time, that I wanted to build a digital synthesis version on the same principles—but where the instrument has internal drift in all dimensions. As the pitch combinations persist, they appear to disassemble in time.
Bonus! Bischoff and Taylor will hold a conversation for the opening of the Digital Scholarship Hub at the UW-Madison on September 30, 5:00pm to 6:30pm, Memorial Library Room 224.
