Chris Weaver

Noise=Noise Performance

chrisweaver — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:25:16 +0000

I’ve now put up the audio from last fortnights Noise=Noise gig at the Foundry. It was a very varied night featurning various acts that come under a “noise” well electronic catagory. Highlights for me was the instrument made and performed by Berit Greinke, whereby rough fabic is strentched across a frame and played via LDR controlled osciallators – very striking, as well the visuals by Dan Tombs

Solo performance at Noise=Noise

Noise=Noise

chrisweaver — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:14:16 +0000

Ryan Jordan (one of the performers from the Rainforest IV performance) has organised several nights of electronic music to be held at the The Foundry, London on the 5th, 12th, 19th and 26th of August 2009

I’m playing a solo set of matrixed electronics on the 5th alongside many others, the nights looks excellent and entry is free!

Handmade Electronic Music – Second Edition

chrisweaver — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:03:10 +0000

My group, Oscillatorial Binnage, have a video in Nic Collins new edition of his book, Handmade Electronic Music. The first time this came out I read it cover to cover and still use it as an invaluable reference. Highly recommended (click on the book image to get it from Amazon)

Oh, and the video is OB’s “realisation” of David Tudors “Rainforest IV” at the Pestival way back in 2006. Link to the video on youtube or see the video in the Leonardo post.

David Tudor’s Rainforest IV

chrisweaver — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:00:39 +0000

View of the Area10 Installation

I’m currently involved putting on a realisation of David Tudor’s “Rainforest IV” at Area10 project space in Peckham. There will be two performances each from 2pm until 11pm on the 3rd and 4th of July.

I’m using an old drum kit as the resonate objects and a large piece of corrugated iron (hanging in the image above). The performance poses quite a few technical (and artists problems not too mention group improvisation)

Tudor has this to say about the piece:

In 1973 I made “Rainforest IV” where the objects that the sounds are sent through are very large so that they have their own presence in space. I mean, they actually sound locally in the space where they are hanging as well as being supplemented by a loudspeaker system. The idea is that if you send sound through materials, the resonant nodes of the materials are released and those can be picked up by contact microphones or phono cartridges and those have a different kind of sound than the object does when you listen to it very close where it’s hanging. It becomes like a reflection and it makes, I thought, quite a harmonious and beautiful atmosphere, because wherever you move in the room, you have reminiscences of something you have heard at some other point in the space. It’s (can be) a large group piece actually, any number of people can participate in it. It’s important that each person makes their own sculpture, decides how to program it, and performs it themselves. Very little instruction is necessary for the piece. I’ve found it to be almost self-teaching because you discover how to program the devices by seeing what they like to accept. Its been a very rewarding type of activity for me. It’s been done by as large a group as 14 people. So that was how our Rainforest was done.”

PERFORMANCE & INSTALLATION

3rd & 4th of July – from 2pm to 23pm

£10 (online booking http://www.wegottickets.com)

£12 (on the door)

at AREA10 PROJECT SPACE
Eagle Wharf
Peckham Hill Street
London – SE15 5JT
(White building behind the Library)

Buses: 12, 36, 37, 63, 78, 436, 345, 177, 312, 343 Train: Peckham Rye Station

See a10lab.info for more information.

Light-to-Sound converters

chrisweaver — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:25:00 +0000

About a month ago I finished building a number of boxes that appear to make light audible, for the experimental film maker Lynn Loo. The design was the classic example from the Forest Mimms Engineers Notebook, plus a couple of modifications to control the sound (very similar to the ones I built for the Self Cancellation event). These circuits are fun but they aren’t really making light audible merely making the intensity. Hence you can hear the scanning of an LCD screen or the mains hum of lightbulb, as the LDR in the circuit can “see” the light source switching on and off. Lynn plans to use them wth film where she has recorded various light sources on to a 16mm colour film.

A theoritical version would pitch shift the light spectrum into the audio frequency range. So that you could hear the difference between the colours.

The question to ask is “is it possible to detect colour?” The problem I think is that the The natural extention of this kind of thing would be to use

Solo at Scaledown

chrisweaver — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:56:59 +0000

Obligatory pose of the electronics player - neck at right angles and hunched over!

On the 27th of March I played solo for the first time in probably about two years. It was at Scaledown, the King and Queen pub in London.

I played an electronics set-up based around a matrix mixer (an American Mackie headphone mixer) and various home-built amplifiers and filters. The results sound, to my ears anyway, quite David Tudor-ish, in the sense of repetitive organic sounding phrases.

The audio (currently only as a WAV) is here

Solo Performance at Scaledown

Windows Icons in WINE

chrisweaver — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:41:12 +0000

Using WINE apps under the menu is OK with that weird spring “Launcher” icon but it’s good to have old icons you are familiar with.

I found a post on the excellent Ubuntu forums dealing with problem:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6915531#post6915531

Coincidently, the output of wrestool -x –output=. -t14 ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/MSN\ Messenger/msnmsgr.exe …leaves you with a .ico file which you will then have to convert to a SVG (vector based format) to use in Ubuntu’s menu

I went a slightly different route by using http://wineicons.sourceforge.net/ to extract the icon from the exe as a PNG Bear in mind that the “Change Icon” dialog will not show the icons in the directory that you navigate to. Click OK and then the dialog will ask you to select from the compatible files it find in the directory (confused me for about an hour!)

Wine continued

chrisweaver — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:04:23 +0000

We have many volunteers here and I want using Ubuntu to be easy to switch over to. Most of their time will be spent using Mp3direct cut running in WINE. The GNU/Linux filesystem will be alien to them, therefore I wanted the directories they need to access mapped to Drive letters so they called simply navigate to “My Computer”.

Unfortunately there is a problem with the WINE configuration utility that means that it is not able to write the user-defined labels to the mapped drives (labeling is under the “Show Advance” option under the Drives tab).

You can easily get around this by simply placing a text file called .windows-label in the root of the drives/directories you wish to label, with just your alpahnumeric label in it.

Corked Wine – Moving the Studio Over

chrisweaver — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:04:04 +0000

I’m currently moving the Resonance computers over to Ubuntu. We have a variety of elderly P.Cs and this is throwing up a fair amount of annoying but not insurmountable problems.

Today it’s the turn of Wine. Wine is a compatibility layer for running Windows applications on Linux (as quoted in the Add/Remove dialog). I’m only really installing it for one application, the excellent Mp3directcut (I’ve yet to find a similar replacement for GNU/Linux)

The problem I’m having is that Wine’s fonts are completely garbled even in the native program itself! Fortunately the very active Ubuntu forums have an anwser:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=6530843

A longer discussion of the problem can be found on Launchpad:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-96/+bug/300476

Wellcome Trust Concert

chrisweaver — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:43:43 +0000

This Friday Oscillatorial Binnage will be playing a gig at the Wellcome