Tags : #music

John — the semi-conductor (Max version)

John, the semi-conductor.

John is an application meant for collective free improvisation, which was born out of the needs encountered in free improvisation practice with the Orchestre National Electroacoustique.

Namely, John was invented as a virtual companion to find stimulating answers for issues encountered in collective free improvisation, like precise timings for transitions between contrasting parts, articulations of large movements, or the proposal of unusual scores taking us off the beaten path.

It is made of two parts :

  • a score editor which can generate random scores based on constraints and probablities defined by the user
  • a real-time “conductor” displaying the score during live performance

Its name refers to both John Cage and John Doe.

John-scoreGenerator
Random score generation panel

John, conductor Max screenshot
The conductor screen, with countdown and active players

The original development was made with Max, then later reworked to a reactive web app.

107724404×8

Digital moving picture.
107724404×8 is the audiovisual rendering of a binary pdf file raw data.

The video reveals the internal structure of the file as both visual and sonic shapes. Compressed parts of the file will look and sound noisy while uncompressed parts will show redundant patterns and somewhat harmonic sound spectrum.

Original video is 10min long and 1024× 768px.
Beware of the rrrraw sound.