Samuel David Freeman
Interactive Sound Design
Collectivology

At least three firsts about this;
Laptop Junkie was the first concert in the the first year of Scatered Sounds, and also my first ever solo performance.

The audience were (mostly) seated on the floor within a Quadraphonic sound diffusion system.
My system for improvisation used live inputs from the laptop's built in microphone, and an electromagnet-o-meter. Three processing units in Max/MSP gave four discrete outputs each which were diffused into quad by instances 'Arena'.
'Arena' is an abstraction with a jsui based front end. It animates the placement of the four audio inputs within the quadraphonic output.

The interface:

it was a conscious decision to have all the controls in one window on this occasion

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Quite interesting but completely useless?

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Overview;
The audio output of an Etherwave Theremin is the main input to the system.
The signal is analysed by the [pitch~] object to extract basic frequency and amplitude data which is used to control parameters of the [lcd] based visualization.
Three foot pedals provide control input to set the level of the dry input signal, the level of the processed signal, and the frequency component of the processing.

Visualization;
An [lcd] object is scripted to be full screen when the system is running, adapting to different display sizes.
The four quarters of the screen area constantly scrolling outward from the centre so that when a shape is drawn about the central point it is split into four and gradually moved off the screen. The impression is analogous to the delay effect acting upon the audio signal.
The shapes that are drawn are framed squares and circles. The radius of the shapes as they are drawn is controlled by the amplitude of the audio input, and the colour is controlled by the frequency.

Audio Processing;
A four second circular buffer records the input audio signal, with added digital dirt caused by feeding the buffer back on itself.
This buffer is then played back, looping, at a number of rates, the frequency of which are harmonically related to the fundamental frequency set by the third foot pedal.
The effect is crass harmonized delay.

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The first plan was for me to do some live analogue electronics for Jodi Cave to process on his laptop, but I ended up knocking together a Max/MSP system of my own. We were using many inputs from microphones and contact pick-ups and were joined by Sin Yi Law singing into a kalimba.
To hear what it sounded like listen to Jodi's ABSENT/WALKING BACKWARDS at http://www.12k.com/1039.html

samuel _DOT freeman ^AT gmail _DOT com