Custom software environment for improvising tenor saxophonist.
Real-time concatenative synthesis/machine-listening engine mosaicking a 60 minute corpus of individual samples according to a closest-input sorting algorithm. The corpus is a collection of 1-10 second extracts from over 300+ albums, spanning the entire recorded history of the tenor saxophone from 1939 to the present. Additional Wekinator-driven Language-Music identification interpolates patch presets and adjusts larger-scale relationships between live input and resynthesized output.
The piece makes audible the often-heard (& likely paraphrased) maxim: ‘to freely improvise is to play (with) everything one has ever heard’.
a vine that grew over the city and no one noticed [2020-22], 43’
Two electro-mechanically controlled banjos, homemade magnetic resonators, solenoid motors, AM radio transmitters, vintage transistor and tube radios, railroad spikes, 60Hz ground hum, mason jars, carriage bolts, field recordings, South Carolina red clay distortion unit, neural net re-synthesis of seminal old-time repertoire and Markov-driven three-finger banjo picking; various additional samples drawn from the field recordings of O. Winston Link, Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians, and miscellaneous archival tapes, cylinders, records, and wire recordings made in the Carolinas.
I. Cripple Creek/Pretty Polly
II. 10:23pm through the Saluda Grade // Moonshiner
III. interlude (Nachtmusik)
IV. "the by and by"
Samples from O. Winston Link's "Sounds of Steam Railroading" (Vol. 1 "self-titled" & 3, "Thunder on Blue Ridge") [1957] expressly used with permission from the the O. Winston Link Museum, Roanoke, VA
“the by and by” was compiled by generating predictive models using the OpenAI Jukebox engine, using the reanimated digitized voices of Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, Charley Pride, Elizabeth Cotten, Jimmie Rodgers, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Uncle Dave Macon, Willie Nelson, etc.
Re-animated voice of Roscoe Holcomb made using Google’s DDSP timbre-transfer passed through a corpus of samples made by Charlotte Mundy.
Charon guiding the weary ‘cross the Long River (or, how to care for a dying instrument) [2020-21], 18’
Commissioned and presented by Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik.
Four computer-controlled electric reed organs, rural field recordings, household lamps, telephone pickups, photodiode amplifiers, antique missionary-style pump organ, Vermont “Imperial Marble”, Sacred Harp tune “Windham”, cassette deck loaded with hydrophonic recordings of CT river transduced through slate roofing tiles, “VT Copper” coins (minted as currency of the sovereign Vermont Republic (1776-1791)), exposed speaker cones filled with debris found on CT river watershed.
Film version made in collaboration with Jack Langdon. Footage taken in the now-abandoned Freedleyville Marble Quarry; East Dorset, Vermont.