Last night, I saw Nathaniel Bartlett perform at the Overture Center in Madison, WI. Armed with a marimba and a computer full of custom PD programs, Bartlett explores a free form style of music through sounds moving around a 3D space. The performance was an extended work called "Blueshift". Bartlett introduced the piece by asking the audience to listen more for the timbral and spatial aspects of the music rather than traditional pitch and rhythm. The room was shortly filled with sparse marimba notes and the splashes of reverb laden cymbals. The cymbal tones appeared to "move" around the room, an element that Bartlett seems to concentrate heavily on.
The 3D listening space is provided by a so-called "cuboid" arrangement of speakers. It consists of eight pieces, four on the floor laid out in a square around the audience and four twelve feet off the ground. A bass speaker off to the side provides the low frequencies whose location are more difficult to detect.
The role of the computer in this work is to play samples and move the perceived source of the sound around the listening space. The marimba controls this via floor mics and serves to trigger the samples as well as alter their movement trajectory within the listening space. Bartlett has integrated a few MIDI pedals to enhance control of the computer generated sounds. Many qualities of the samples were being modulated, from pitch shifting of rain sticks to short echoes and delays akin to modern experimental electronic music.
I spoke with Bartlett after the performance and he elaborated on some details of how the sounds are controlled. The marimba notes are analyzed by the computer for both pitch and loudness. The interesting part is that these not only control one possible change in the sound, but a set of possible changes. How the choice is made wasn't exactly clear; whether it is random or not. He also mentioned that neural networks were involved in some of these decisions, but again, the details were not clear. This is an interesting style of music aided by a unique use of computers. I'm looking forward to hearing more of Bartlett's music as well as checking out some of the capabilities of PD.
Also see "Nathaniel Bartlett: Solo Marimba + Computer-Generated Sound Projection" published in Percussive Notes Aug/Sept 2009.
