Transsonic

Viola Yip, and Nicola Leonard Hein

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Transsonic is a intermedia project of Viola Yip and Nicola L. Hein and aims to develop new site-specific works that communicate intermedial conceptions of music consisting of site-specific light installations, electric guitar, multichannel live electronics and relays working as oscillators. The project centers around the development of “light as musical material” and questions the ontology of music from this intermedial perspective. In light of the ongoing digital revolution we develop translational potentials of electronic and digital media to develop our working concept of music across different media. By using guitar pickups that microphone the changes in electricity used to control the flickering of the lights by placing them amongst the electricity carrying cables, introducing the sharp clicking sound of 220 Volts lighting up the lightbulbs of Viola Yip’s lightbulb instrument. These sounds are picked up and transformed by the guitar pickups instantly being sent through the line of guitar effects and live-electronics written in Max/MSP for Nicola Hein’s multichannel electronic set up thus sonically fusing both instruments. Both, the sound of the light bulbs and the electric guitar are, in real time, fed into a machine learning based Max/MSP patch which performs frequency analysis based multi channel audio spatialisation and acts as a musically autonomous agent. The software does, in real time based on mel-frequency and knn analysis, learn the playing and interaction style of guitar and light bulbs and answers/interacts with the learned audio material. On the other hand, a knn-analysis controlled, audio-corpus based synthesis process forms a site of contextual resonance, lets the sound of the light bulbs resonate in myriad grains of guitar sound and vice versa. With its 15 minute telematic performance, Transsonic explores the rich nexus between light and sound, that sees both as equally important and yet dialectical musical counterpoints that enrich our musical experience.

Citation

Viola Yip, and Nicola Leonard Hein. 2021. Transsonic. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.21428/92fbeb44.7e245eca [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2021_music_27,
 abstract = {Transsonic is a intermedia project of Viola Yip and Nicola L. Hein and aims to develop new site-specific works that communicate intermedial conceptions of music consisting of site-specific light installations, electric guitar, multichannel live electronics and relays working as oscillators. The project centers around the development of “light as musical material” and questions the ontology of music from this intermedial perspective. In light of the ongoing digital revolution we develop translational potentials of electronic and digital media to develop our working concept of music across different media. By using guitar pickups that microphone the changes in electricity used to control the flickering of the lights by placing them amongst the electricity carrying cables, introducing the sharp clicking sound of 220 Volts lighting up the lightbulbs of Viola Yip’s lightbulb instrument. These sounds are picked up and transformed by the guitar pickups instantly being sent through the line of guitar effects and live-electronics written in Max/MSP for Nicola Hein’s multichannel electronic set up thus sonically fusing both instruments. Both, the sound of the light bulbs and the electric guitar are, in real time, fed into a machine learning based Max/MSP patch which performs frequency analysis based multi channel audio spatialisation and acts as a musically autonomous agent. The software does, in real time based on mel-frequency and knn analysis, learn the playing and interaction style of guitar and light bulbs and answers/interacts with the learned audio material. On the other hand, a knn-analysis controlled, audio-corpus based synthesis process forms a site of contextual resonance, lets the sound of the light bulbs resonate in myriad grains of guitar sound and vice versa. With its 15 minute telematic performance, Transsonic explores the rich nexus between light and sound, that sees both as equally important and yet dialectical musical counterpoints that enrich our musical experience.},
 address = {Shanghai, China},
 articleno = {27},
 author = {Viola Yip and Nicola Leonard Hein},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.21428/92fbeb44.7e245eca},
 editor = {Eric Parren and Wei Chen},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {June},
 title = {Transsonic},
 track = {Music},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.7e245eca},
 year = {2021}
}