Kevin McGuire

I guess a good measure of the fun of the conference is that I’ve not had a chance to post until now, the end of the conference.

I presented my paper yesteday, which was very well received. A miracle, considering how sick I felt.

I was out for a few drinks the night before, really just a few, and was absolutely sick by the time I got to my hotel. I didn’t understand quite how this could happen, but then in speaking with others, I’ve learned that you need to be very careful when ordering mixed drinks here because the bars will give you some kind of wierd alchohol if you don’t specify a brand (as I was told, “they put evil shit in it”). So I was basically poisoned, which now at least makes a bit more sense. I was rather green as morning came around. Add to that that I made the mistake of taxing a taxi to save time, which took nearly one hour instead of the 15 minutes by metro (Milan traffic can be unbelievable)… Well I screamed into the conference room literaly as the person speaking before me finished up. Luck of th Irish I guess!

It was a rough start, but its amazing how you can line all (remaining) neurons up for the task, and pretty soon I had my groove. I went through the slides then played some phrases I had generated, showing the grammar, and the music really spoke for itself. With a bit more time I would’ve showed the authoring process and how changing the grammar changed the result, but with the limited time I think I was already over.

Some really “got” the bigger picture of what I was trying to say (about the importance of structure and approaches which embue our work with that but also leave us in control as authors). Some just liked the approach, and others just liked the music. That’s great! I’ve received many requests for the software which I will need to post here when I am back and organized
In the evening there were performances. Due to a few people being unable to make it, there turned out to be free space in the performance schedule so I thought, why not perform?! I played my “Atmosphere” piece in Ableton which I just happened to have on my laptop (thank god for replication to my ftp site!). Its almost all generated from my grammars, except one chord sequence and one percussion loop. It worked out just great and people really enjoyed it! My first public performance! A really friendly crowd so no worries at all.

Tonight, the last night of the conference, I was asked by a few who had missed it the previous night if I could again perform it. Since its Ableton loops I thought it interesting that yes I could, but it would be different — it is every time. And tonight’s was different, with a longer buildup and different emphasis. I thought it was actually better. If I were smart I would’ve recorded it in Ableton, but I’m not.

There have been some fantastic performances at this conference. One particularly great one was by a (new!) friend Brigid, an amazing clarinet player, who did these fantastic moody interpretive clarinet songs to her prerecorded video and background noise/music. She had five pieces, each rich with tone and changeable in mood. Tonight was a Korean lady, Ge-Suk, who did what must’ve been one the most incredible live performances I’ve ever seen. I heard she’s an opera singer. With the help of a sampler which provided looping, delay, and reverb, she built up these long moody vocalized sound phrases that intertwined and evolved, with prerecoded video and atmospheric sounds backing her up. Absolutely mind blowing.

In total, many excellent conversations, meeting some truly wonderful and warm people, lots of food for thought, lots of food (!), and Milan … it just doesn’t get any better than this!

This entry was posted Friday, December 15th, 2006 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Generative Art. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.