Video coming soon...
Choreography by Blake Beckham
Performed by Haley Byrd and Justin Ringgold
Music performed by Adam Overton and Ben Davis
Commissioned by the Emory University Dance Company
Premiered on November 8th and 9th, 2002 at the Emory University Performing Arts Studio in Atlanta, Georgia.
Notes on the Music for Pocket/Change:
The music was performed live for each performance with Ben Davis on soprano saxophone and myself on computer. I made and used a SuperCollider patch which modified a prerecorded sample of Ben's soprano saxophone, although there was no live modification of Ben's saxophone sound during the performance - his signal was run directly into and out of a mixing console. The resulting sound piece is broken up into 2 parts in an ABA form with the first and third part using breath and key-clicking sounds from Ben's horn, and noisy, buzzy sounds from my computer. These buzzy sounds are actually manipulations of the sax sample, but with a very digital, unrecognizable result. For this buzzy portion of the patch I am indebted to Fredrick Olofsson who sent in some code to the SC-users list demonstrating the interesting sonic possibilities resulting from lowering the sample rate of a sound file and modifying the Synth engine's blockSize. The middle portion of the sound piece incorporated the tones of Ben's saxophone melodies as he improvised and a more recognizable looped, pitch-shifted and occasionally distorted manipulation of the sax samples in my SC patch.
Ben and I had planned to collaborate with this particular instrumentation for quite awhile and the appropriate opportunity finally presented itself when Blake approached me with this project. Blake and I had met while working on a piece called Intersections which she and Camille Dieterle choreographed together. Portions of that dance, which was mostly improvised, served as the starting point for this piece. Ben and I had performed quite a bit while studying jazz in college (sax and drums) and in our rock band Moreland Audio (guitar and drums), but we had never explored the combination of saxophone and laptop. We planned to develop some 'tunes' and improvisations while still maintaining the two individual personalities/sound-sources of a duet, as opposed to having Ben perform while I modified his sound which would be more along the lines of a solo performance with effects.
Notes on the Music for The EAAA on Live @ WREK:
mp3 [17:04]
On November 5, 2002 Ben and I did a live performance on WREK 91.1 FM Atlanta for The EAAA on Live@WREK, which was the first event of the Atlanta Electric Arts Festival 2002. The performance consisted of 2 sections, the first portion of the performance using the same elements as the clicky, buzzy portions of Pocket/Change, and the second portion a performance with various percussion items and a reverberation patch. I used the cabasa (w/ contact mic) and my table (tapping and pounding) while Ben darted between clarinet, harmonica, claves, jing-gong, and shaker. The first portion of this performance better demonstrates some of the sounds that were coming out of my computer than the video of the dance performance - the sound for the dance performance was recorded by the digital video camera and unfortunately did not have a very good bass range.
Note: I haven't included the SuperCollider patch I used here only because I had a somewhat elaborate patching setup that included multiple inputs and outputs running from my MOTU828 to a Mackie Mixer that would make it pretty time consuming and possibly confusing to set up the first time. In addition, the patch might be confusing to use since most of the operations were designed to be controlled by keyboard commands. If you're really interested in checking out this patch feel free to contact me: overtones99@hotmail.com.