Collision (2011) at the Unruly Music Festival

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‘Collision’ is a piece that revolves around a machine conductor that directs the players and their improvisations. The conductor decides when and how to ‘collide’ the players together, forcing them to play at the same moment in the same way. This is the driving force of the piece: players can improvise in and out of the collisions, but they are never allowed to stray too far from one another.

The instrument used is Napsynth, my early research into multi-touch control that eventually became TC-11. The trackpads gather the multi-touch data using a program called Tongseng. Then Processing and Pd are used to analyze and distribute the control data for synthesis. The visuals also feed from that data, and are drawn using OpenFrameworks.

David Collins joined me for this performance at the Unruly Music Festival at Vogel Hall in 2011. Collins is a Milwaukee native, composer, and performer.

Collision (2011) at the Unruly Music Festival from Kevin Schlei on Vimeo.

Short Improvisations (For Hands)

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Seth Warren-Crow and I pair together the tabla and TC-11 to see just how similar the two musical interfaces are, in performance and sonority. These pieces were taken from an evening of exploring short-form improvisations.

Three Short Improvisations (For Hands) Part I from Kevin Schlei on Vimeo.

Three Short Improvisations (For Hands) Part II from Kevin Schlei on Vimeo.

TC-11 is finally out there

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On December 14th, my long-term project TC-11 was finally unleashed into the wild. Now it is live (alive?), and in the hands of users who will make it their own. But I wanted to take a moment to thank a few people for their support.

My colleagues in the electronic music department at UWM, Chris Burns and Jon Welstead, deserve so much credit for guiding me in synthesis and programming. Jon has always been a huge support for me. And before I met Chris, I hadn’t written a drop of audio code. You can definitely hear their voices in this app.

Jack Miller was kind enough to let me dump TC-11 builds on his iPad, and David Collins has been a great tester and pre-release performer. Many features would not be there if it weren’t for seeing them destroying my early, rickety builds.

But the most thanks goes to my wife, María Valentina, who supported me even as I disappeared into my studio for weeks at a time. She has been an incredible partner throughout the whole process. And she is a brutal beta tester!

Thanks to all my colleagues, friends, and family for your support. Now go check out TC-11 over at the Bit Shape side of this site!

tc-11

The Great Lakes Improvising Orchestra – December 18th

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On December 18th I’ll be joining a new group of Milwaukee musicians in the debut performance of the Great Lakes Improvising Orchestra. The performance will include exciting improvisation, electronics, and acoustic performance. The show is at Woodland Patter, and starts at 2:00.

The debut performance—an afternoon of open form collective improvisation—will include a cross-neighborhood gathering of composers-who-improvise and improvisers-who-compose featuring:

Linda Binder: violin
Thomas Gaudynski: guitar
Jeff Klatt: cello
Jon Mueller: percussion
Steve Nelson-Raney: reeds
Rick Ollman: guitar, reeds
Hal Rammel: musical saw
Chris Rosenau: guitar
Kevin Schlei: electronics
Jim Schoenecker: electronics
Amanda Schoofs: voice
Seth Warren-Crow: percussion

Check this post over at the Woodland Pattern website for more information.

Unruly Festival Performance – This Thursday

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David Collins and I will be performing this Thursday night, 7:30, at Vogel Hall as part of the Unruly Music Festival. We have an exciting set of pieces that use multi-touch controllers, motion sensors, and networked laptops to drive our custom synthesis code. The second half of the concert features UWM composers Chris Burns and Amanda Schoofs improvising while generating live animations.

We will be premiering a new piece of mine, Sp]|[n, which uses GyrOSC with a hacked open hard drive to create a spinning controller. The data pushes a granulated piano sample to random resting points, where it evolves into sinewy sonic waves. David and I will be improvising along side it with a new multi-touch instrument for iPad.

Purchase tickets online, or call the Marcus Center box office at (414) 273-7206.

FALL 2011 FESTIVAL
October 27-29, 2011

Thursday, October 27:
Music by Milwaukee artists making innovative use of technology in live performance. David Collins and Kevin Schlei integrate multitouch control devices, networking, and animation into their joyous grooves; “Fieldwork,” with Christopher Burns and Amanda Schoofs, pushes electric guitar and voice into new sonic territory.

Friday, October 28:
Renowned English musician John Butcher presents an evening of improvisations for solo saxophone. Butcher is celebrated for his distinctive approaches to timbre, gesture, and musical time – this is an extraordinarily rare opportunity to hear him perform live in Milwaukee.

Saturday, October 29:
Chicago ensemble Dal Niente opens their Unruly Music residency with an evening of chamber music for clarinet, saxophone, violin, cello, percussion and piano, in a program combining 20th-century classics by Anton Webern, Iannis Xenakis, and Giacinto Scelsi with new works by Aaron Einbond and Edgar Guzman.

‘Drams, Whits, Scintillas’ at the Lynden Sculpture Garden

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This Sunday, the Lynden Sculpture Garden will be presenting a collaborative work between Lynn Tomaszewski and myself titled ‘Drams, Whits, Scintillas.’ From the Lynden site:

‘Drams, Whits, Scintillas,’ a multimedia installation incorporating video, sound and drawing by Lynn Tomaszewski and Kevin Schlei, brings the garden into the gallery and spreads back out onto the grounds. Tomaszewski begins with video of visitors walking in the sculpture garden and recontextualizes it as part of a projected generative drawing in the gallery, and Schlei creates an outdoor multi-channel sound piece in dialogue with Tony Smith’s The Wandering Rocks (1967-1969). As Tomaszewski and Schlei reintroduce often overlooked elements of daily life into the gallery and sculpture garden, they reframe and reanimate these spaces, allowing us to see them anew.

The installation will run the entire month of June. You can see an excerpt of the video here.

Upcoming performance with David Collins

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This Friday David Collins and I will be performing at the Sugar Maple as part of Gallery Night. We’ve got some premiere pieces, innovative control schemes, and live video. It should be a great night! Here’s the info:

Location: Sugar Maple
Friday – June 3rd

Featuring
Collision: Directed improvisation with multi-touch synthesis + visuals
Poly Patter: Networked synthesis environment


Invisible Drum Set – for iPhone 4 and iPod Touch (4th generation)

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I’m happy to announce that my new app – Invisible Drum Set – is available on the iTunes App Store.

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Invisible Drum Set is the drumming app for iPhone 4 and iPod Touch (4th generation) that lets you play 16 drums out of thin air. Using the gyroscope sensor, it recognizes movement between different floating ‘drums’ when you point the device in a new direction. Use your iPhone 4 and iPod Touch like a drum stick – just tap in the air. With 16 unique sounds per preset, multiple included presets, and the ability to create your own preset, Invisible Drum Set is the premiere drumming app for iOS.

Check out a demo performance here:


YouTube – Invisible Drum Set Demonstration

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Octomod – USB to Control Voltage Interface

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Greg Surges has posted a video of his Octomod USB to Control Voltage Interface:


YouTube – USB-Octomod Demonstration

Definitely some creative possibilities, and a great way to breath fresh air into your voltage controlled synth. He’s got them available from fully assembled kits to bare PCB boards. Check out his product page for more info.

NIME Proceedings Online – Paper Available

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The folks at NIME have uploaded the full NIME++ 2010 proceedings. Here is the permanent link:http://www.educ.dab.uts.edu.au/nime/PROCEEDINGS/

nime2010-conference-online

The direct link to my paper is here: ‘Relationship-Based Instrument Mapping of Multi-Point Data Streams Using a Trackpad Interface.’

multi-point-paper

I’m always happy to hear comments and feedback. You can see (old) videos of the instruments described in the paper on my Vimeo page.

There were some notable presentations and projects I’d like to link to from here. Alvaro Cassinelli presented a tracking system that follows the curvature of any drawn or sensed object with a laser, as described in the paper ’scoreLight: playing with a human-sized laser pick-up.’ Demo video here.

Ajay Kapur presented his work in organizing a cross-departmental approach to building a robotic orchestra (‘A Pedagogical Paradigm for Musical Robotics’). Music and theater students work together to apply their skill sets to the creation of an ensemble where humans and machines perform together. Very inspirational.

Kris Kitani developed an analysis / performance augmenting algorithm for live percussion performance (‘ImprovGenerator: Online Grammatical Induction for On-the-Fly Improvisation Accompaniment’). If this were incorporated into the above mentioned robot orchestra, I can imagine some really exciting results.

And finally, Andrew McPherson has brought the piano to its next evolutionary phase with‘Augmenting the Acoustic Piano with Electromagnetic String Actuation and Continuous Key Position Sensing’. This one is best understood by watching a video of his elegant system in action.

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