Solo Diary: Write a piece with Gibber that has three algorithmic parts: drums, bass and lead.

Goals for this week#

  1. revisit the basic synthesis & sampling concepts we covered in week 2 and week 3, this time in Gibber

  2. begin to learn what the different synthesis “building blocks” (oscillators, filters, effects, as well as new samples) sound like in a musical sound design context

  3. to be able to load in and play with recorded sounds in Gibber, including going beyond just triggering pre-recorded “one-shot” samples, to explore the compositional possibilities of manipulating pre-recorded sounds during playback

Resources#

  • Download and run Gibber from your computer: Clone the repo, open in VSCode and use the Live Server Extension (ask on Teams if you haven’t done this before).

  • Look through the Sampler tutorial: It’s in the Gibber examples dropdown or here

  • Look through the MonoSynth tutorial: The MonoSynth object is a replica of “classic” Moog synths.

  • Actually just look through all the examples in Gibber’s dropdown menu.

Creative Notes#

You might have wondered by this stage what a laptop ensemble is supposed to actually be. It’s probably a lot different from other musical ensembles you may have participated in. As background reading for this week, here’s some resources by others wondering about what laptop ensembles are and could be.

  • Shelly Knotts and Nick Collins. 2014. The Politics of Laptop Ensembles: A Survey of 160 Laptop Ensembles and their Organisational Structures. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Goldsmiths, University of London, pp. 191–194. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1178839

  • Sang Won Lee, Jason Freeman, and Andrew Collela. 2012. Real-Time Music Notation, Collaborative Improvisation, and Laptop Ensembles. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, University of Michigan. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1178315

  • Palle Dahlstedt, Per Anders Nilsson, and Gino Robair. 2015. The Bucket System — A computer mediated signalling system for group improvisation. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Louisiana State University, pp. 317–318. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1179048

  • Muhammad Hafiz Wan Rosli, Karl Yerkes, Matthew Wright, et al. 2015. Ensemble Feedback Instruments. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Louisiana State University, pp. 144–149. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1179170

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