Oberlin Workshop Final Presentation

As part of our University Partnership Program several students & faculty from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music have been at Harvestworks for three weeks, studying interactive arts and developing their own projects. Following a performance at The Tank a day earlier, this is their final project presentation!

Wed, Jan 26, 2011, 7pm

ELI STINE: While at Harvest Works Eli will be exploring different ways performers can interact with technology, making modifications to the standard “extension” and “false dialogue” relationships that occur between performer and computer in pieces for live electronics or fixed media. Current projects include combining poetry and the vocabulary of dance and working with the iPad as an instrument for acousmatic music diffusion and performance. Eli Stine is an American composer, programmer, and sound designer currently in Oberlin Conservatory’s Technology In Music And Related Arts program. His interests include digital instrument creation, acousmatic and acoustic composition, the interaction between sound, vision, and motion, and film sound design.

GABRIEL STEWART: At Harvestworks Gabe is interested primarily in creating realtime audio interactions and processing of acoustic instruments. He wants to work primarily in Ableton Live to create a piece of music that is structured based on Ableton’s timeline but with Max for Live as its ringmaster. He’s also working on an interactive footsteps installation, where digital footprints walk towards the horizon. While much of the graphics engine has been completed, he is working on how to create the best mode of interactivity to detect the motion of real footsteps using sensors. Gabe Stewart began his composition studies in the TIMARA department. He is currently a fifth year, pursuing undergraduate degrees in Technology in Music and Related Arts and Environmental Studies. A primary interest of his is finding ways to combine his two degrees in the format of both installations and electroacoustic pieces.

MEADE BERNARD: His work at Harvestworks is based around an interactive set design for a theater piece he is working on, using Jitter to project onto 3D geometry to create an interactive set. The ultimate hope is to create an environment that the character on stage has complete control over (or at least appears to). He’s working on constructing a projection mapping environment in Jitter that allows as much control as possible, and ultimately he’d like to experiment with the kinect controller to allow the actor’s movement to provide some level of interaction. This is for a very psychologically driven play, where the audience gradually sees the world through the eyes of the deranged protagonist, and the hope is to create a world that is at once visually stunning and flexible. So far he’s been doing these things in After Effects, and the hope now is to add some interactivity and forge some real interactive theater out of it. Meade Bernard came to Max et al as a composer – he began composing for small chamber ensembles at around 15, and began writing music for instruments with Electronics in late high school. He’s currently in his fifth year at Oberlin, studying TIMARA (technology in music and the related arts) and English. His interactivity work in the past few years has been all over the place, focusing at various points on physical computing with the arduino, soft circuitry to create wearable controllers, and more straight-forward work with Max/MSP involving instruments or spoken text with live processing. Some of his most exciting recent work has been in sound design and composition for theater and dance, which has led to his current work on a play that he recently wrote, which he is composing music/sound and video for and will eventually, ostensibly, direct.

SAMUEL FISHER: During his residency at Harvestworks Samuel will be working on developing max/msp patches which sequence highly complex patterns which are difficult to create for the human composer while examining other generative techniques for more textural sonic material- working towards a highly improvisatory performance method which is an interaction between a performer and a generative music program. Samuel Fisher is a sound artist currently at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. His music finds it’s place somewhere in-between the realms of electronica and electro-acoustic music- drawing freely from elements of popular and academic art. He synthesizes a world of sound that is rich, visceral, and hypnotic- minimal and frenetic in different ways. You can hear his music and read his blog at www.samuelfisher.net.

TOM LOPEZ began working with interactive software over 20 years ago. By the late 90’s, he was working with wireless medical sensors on dancers, capturing physiological data about muscle movement, brain activity, heart rate, and so on, for live generation and manipulation of audio and video. But he lost his patience with the issues around transportability and hardware/software stability. Since then his live electronics work has focused more on effects boxes (more reliable and transportable). At this point though, he has renewed enthusiasm because it seems Max and Live software are more pervasive (partially solving the transportability problem) and software stability appears to be quite good these days…so here he is, excited to dive back into the world! Tom Lopez teaches in the Technology in Music and Related Arts Department at Oberlin Conservatory. His creative work incorporates instruments, electronics, collaboration and spice. www.tomlopez.org/