Presentation performance
I brought my project to the “Music Technology Days” conference held this year at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo, and as I did not have a separate presentation or talk but only a performance slot, I decided to…
Sinfonietta piece
I was invited to contribute to a project with the Trondheim Sinfonietta, mainly with a composition workshop for schoolchildren at Rissa Skole in Sør-Trøndelag, Norway, to which I prepared a piece that was performed both as a part of the…
Instrument interface and control
I knew early that I needed a very intuitive way of controlling this complex instrument I was developing, in order to achieve any meaningful performance results. This is a common issue when designing digital musical instruments (DMI’s), and dependent on…
Ircam Forum
As my project relies heavily on the FTM and Mubu software libraries developed at the IRCAM (Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), it was nice to come to Paris and present my project at the Ircam Forum in the research…
Duo Improvisation
As part of a series of research concerts organized by the Music Department at my university (NTNU), I made a presentation and duo performance together with vocalist and fellow electronic artist Tone Åse. The event took place at Dokkhuset on…
A search for the non-specific situation
This project deals with the musical content of speech, especially the relationship between spontaneous conversations and improvised music. The focus on real life conversations rather than live readings and performances meant that I had to use recordings of such conversations…
Speech Music Symposium
With help from nyMusikk Trondheim and Norwegian University of Technology and Science (NTNU), I organized a symposium on the subject of speech and music. The event, which took place December 9 – 10, 2016 at Trondheim Kunstmuseum Gråmølna, featured performances…
Harpefoss Poetry Festival
I was very happy to be invited to Harpefoss poetry festival to perform in their musical program, this year curated by composer and performer Maja Ratkje. As a gesture to the occasion I recorded some of the poetry readings at…
Performance of solo composition
This is the first performance of a semi-improvised solo composition I made using a selectin of the ideas I have developed through improvisation earlier. Also first time with full 16 channel stage setup, organized as 12 acoustic transducer instruments hanging…
Developing a repertoire
During my first few attempts at live performances with this project I quickly experienced a few things: unlike improvising in a familiar musical setting on a traditional musical instrument, the combination of building and learning a new digital instrument and developing…
Building a transducer Orchestra
For some time now I have been working with transducer speakers mounted on acoustic instruments as a kind of hybrid electroacoustic blend that bridges the different sonic realms of the virtual and invisible wall of loudspeaker sound and the physical…
Corpus approach and Machine learning
When starting out my investigation of musicality of speech I set out analyzing, extracting and abstracting all kinds of musical structures from speech recordings. Nevertheless I thought I should keep the time aspect of speech intact, feeling that it is…
DAFx showcase set
This is a short demo improv set at a showcase concert at Rockheim, Trondheim, during the DAFx conference in December 2015. I was just trying to show some different musical possibilities and did not compose an overall form, hence the…
Rehearsing improvisation
By rehearsing improvisation I am exploring new sonic and structural possibilities as well as formal ideas, thereby gradually building a repertoar – a vocabulary if you will – for improvising with this material and setup. Some clips to illustrate different…
Summer Academy of Artistic Research (SAAR)
I took part in the Summer Academy for Artistic Research (SAAR) held in Stockholm this year. Inspiring to meet artists from other fields and discuss and work with each others project. Work formats included the use of staged experiments,…
Test performance
First real test of live performance with audience. I wanted to see if I could maintain control and perform a coherent piece of music with my current setup in a live setting. I am still working on ways to approach improvisation…
Essay on Artistic Research
This is an essay trying to reflect around the phenomenon of “artistic research”, its foundations, functions and justifications. As my project is carried out within the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, I felt it was interesting to look at how this…
Ensemble
After having spent some time exploring one instrument at a time I felt ready to combine different sound sources and explore a wider sonic palette in the role as improvising arranger and orchestrator. In the first piece, a duo of…
Organ chatter
With a full MIDI-enabled pipe organ at my disposal, I wanted to try how it would sound when controlled by my speech-to-music software. Since the organ is like an orchestra all by itself with all the manuals, pedals and registers,…
Talking Drums
Before setting up an “orchestra” consisting of several different instruments, I wanted to explore some possibilities one instrument at a time. This series of improvised studies explore the sounds produced by mounting exciter speakers onto drums and cymbals, playing back…
Piano conversations
After recording some improvisations using my current system involving the mechanical midi piano, I felt the urge to engage in a more direct musical dialogue with the material I was creating. I made these short piano duos with the mechanical…
Voice Quality
In addition to intonation (pitch), intensity (amplitude) and speech rate (rhythm, tempo), voice quality (also referred to as “phonation”) is generally considered a part of the prosodic expression. Expressed a bit simplified as a continuum from whispering through normal to pressed…
Study 7 – improv composition
This is a result of trying to find a good way to create music with the system I have developed so far. I first recorded a longer improvised stretch, and then composed a piece from the best parts, re-recording some of the original sections untilI…
Interface design
System and interface design The methods for interfacing and controlling my software became really important when I first had developed a stable minimum of functionality and started using it for improvisation. It was then clear that it needed a very clear layout with few…
First sounds
This is my very first go at improvising with a small “orchestra of speech”, consisting of a mechanical piano, my “acoustic drum machine” setup and some software synthesis played back through a transducer attached to the piano sound board. The…
Acoustic sound sources
Early on in this project I had no clear idea of which sounds or instruments would suit my conception of a speech derived music. During software development I only used very simple sonification like pure sine and noise synthesis, and…
Study 0 – Polyrythmic layers
This short clip is a very early proof of concept for how I imagined one could work musically with structures derived from speech before I really started to work on this project. Sketched back in 2008 but recreated later with…
NIME workshop
Last week I attended a workshop on Practiced Based Research at the NIME onference held at Goldsmiths in London, bringing together different researchers working with music and technology as research and discussing different challenges and views on doing research through…
Study 3 – pulse and sustain
This is a short study focusing on two features: pulse and sustain. The idea is also to move through the continuum from free flowing speech towards the more quantized quality of formalized music. The directly transcribed melody is accompanied by…
Consonants
Even though consonants are not treated as part of the prosodic expression, they can still contribute to perception of articulation and pointedness of speech. For that reason, and also to be able to have a natural percussive counterpoint to the…
Syllable prominence
Prominent syllables highlight new or important information and make up an important rhythmical feature in speech. Prominence is determined by a combination of factors including vowel length, amplitude stress, high pitch accents, vocal quality and degree of vowel articulation (unstressed…
Study 1 – pauses
This short improvised study is based on the use of pauses in speech, highlighting the rising tension and suspense that can build up when pausing in the middle of a sentence. The pauses are set against a percussive rhythm of…
Syllable detection
When I started to look at musical traits of speech and how I could go about measuring and analyzing them, I soon realized I needed to be able to quantize some kind of fundamental unit from which I could extract basic…
