waves of the week!

i have a very crazy schedule and never have time to listen to music qualitatively during the week. but every weekend i borrow five to ten cds from stanford music library and take time to listen to them and some times analyzing them. if you do the same thing could be great to start some listening discussions on this blog.

one of the cds i have got for this week is voices 1900/2000 a choral journey through the twentieth century. very beautiful sounds. 

another set of waves i listened to this week were tons of gyoergy ligeti's music. having lived in vienna in the last decade of my life, i didn't hear as much ligeti music there as in the last week. but some of his masterpieces were performed in wien-modern (a yearly music festival in vienna on 20th century music.) my favourite ligeti's orchestral piece is atmospheres. this piece has such a thick texture with a huge variety of timbres. you might have heard it in the stanley kubrik's 2001, a space odyssey. enjoy listening to it while looking at the scores. the score is visually as rich and thick as the sound.

why wavelounge?

this blog is devoted to computer music. generating, listening, reading and discussing about electroacoustic music. 

feel free to discuss and add comments and suggestions.
i take part in composing, coding and performance with slork (stanford lap top orchestra). we had a performance a couple of weeks ago at macworld. here a video to warm up this blog.
slork at macworld

who's visda?

i am currently a music, science and technology student at ccrma (centre for computer research in music and acoustics) at stanford university.
i was born in tehran, emigrated to austria/vienna in the second decade of my life, then re-emigrated to california/ san francisco in the third decade of my life. next i am planning to emigrate to saturn to fulfill my childhood dreams.
my passion for astronomy and outer space led me to study physics in undergrad., then the fascination of computer science and new technologies led me to continue my education in computer science. i have always had a passion for music and played piano since childhood. while i improved my knowledge in computer technology, i learnt to use it as a musical instrument to express my passions. in order to get deeper in connecting music and technology i am studying at ccrma.
i also have a personal blog writing about my trips and culture shocks i am dealing with moving around the world: http://twoday.tuwien.ac.at/sfd/

sounds

• 2012 Tweetup

2012-tweetup by visda

2012 Tweetup is a pluderphonics tape piece made of the sonification of Twitter data. Data of the Twitter followers of the people or events that have been trendy in 2012 demonstrates the development and popularity of the events on social media. The sonic interpretation of this development is created by mapping the twitter data to the parameters that modulate(using granular synthesis) the audio recordings related to each specific trend. Using simple granulation techniques on the data, a variety of interesting timbres and textures are obtained. Gap size, grain size, amplitude, and the random spread of the grains are controlled by the data. Where the number of followers are higher, the samples are played back as recognizable parts of the recorded tracks.
The trends are chronologically ordered in the piece as the twitter data. The piece includes the following tweets:
- Tweets from Mars: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory live-tweeted as the Mars rover, Curiosity, made its descent onto the Red Planet. The world received Twitter updates directly from the shuttle’s command center. @MarsCuriosity has more than 1.2 million followers.
- Farewell to Whitney Houston: the day the R&B superstar died, tweets about her death peaked at 73,3662 per minute. Nearly 2 million tweets were sent during her televised funeral on Feb. 19.
- The U.S. presidential elections: The first presidential debate between President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney generated 10 million tweets.
- Superstorm Sandy from space: The International Space Station (ISS) captured live images of the storm as it tore its way up the East Coast. The astronauts tweeted live images to the world.
- When Felix Baumgartner made his record-breaking skydive from space, people all over the world took to Twitter to witness the event unfold.
- President Obama’s simple election night message: “Four more years.”

• junkmail

junkman is an installation in the listening room. this room is very special to me because i can take advantage of 16 speakers. speakers are in octagonal setup 92 inches apart in three vertical spaces around the room, above the room and under the room. i had a a mixed media piece for 16 channels audio + text-based visuals + paper junkmail covering the hallway. my installation was called "junkmail" as a reaction to the fact that "it takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in american mailboxes each year.” this fact and a lot more on this topic can be found on forest ethics.

• shootingstars

shootingstars by visda

this piece is composed for an open air concert 'Transitions:' an evening of computer music outdoors by CCRMA in the Knoll courtyard. We have had an 8 channel surround system and projections, and space for the audience to lay out on their blankets.

• rumismash

this piece is written for stanford laptop orchestra (slork) with two types of instruments and live vocals. one is smashing instrument that works by smashing on the laptop which uses the sensors of macbook as input to manipulate the drum sounds. the second one is a granulator that can change the length of the grains, pitch and their randomness which is used on vocal sounds. the piece is based on a poem by rumi (a persian sufi poet.) details about the instruments could be found on slork's website, a video of the performance is available on youtube.

• chuckucello

chuckucello by visda

this is an electroacoustic piece composed for cello and laptop. the code for laptop is written in chuck and performed in real time. thanks to "broer oatis" for performing the cello part. this recording of the piece is from an IPL concert in spring 2009.

• thumbs of fire

this piece is originally written for 8 channels and performed at ccrma stage where 8 channels were available. here is a stereo version of it. the fire sounds are originally fire and the sound of burning, the rest is extracted from kurdish music.

• generative clouds

for this assignment we were supposed to create a live generative music system; i built three types of instruments. one has a drones sound, the second one sounds like particles with very sharp sound created by random numbers in a specific scale. another one is rendering drum buffers. the challenge in this project was to make my instruments work with computer's keyboard. for this S.M.E.L.T website has the best examples for chuck. here is my chuck code.

• computer music of changes

this week in ge's class (compositional algorithms) we explored different filters and timbre escapes using fm synthesis. for our assignment we had to make a music of changes, just like john cage.

in my music of changes, the sound are somewhat random, but not so much to interrupt the flow of the piece. it starts with drones sound made by fm synthesis, followed by quarks sounds that i randomly generate and add a rhythmic features to it using shakers from chuck. for related chuck files, check out the website.

• welcome to ccrma

this composition is generated by computer generated sounds welcoming people to ccrma in different languages. this piece is originally in 16 channels and is presented in ccrma's listening room. the goal was to pan voices from different parts of the world so that the listening room works as a simulation of the surrounding world.

• chachachouchou

this sound is composed by using some real sounds of caltrain from san francisco to palo alto and some ambient sounds in both places. the sounds are recorded by homebrew microphone then synthesized by chuck files partly inspired by steve reich's piano phase.

• rhythm + arhythmia

this composition is generated by two chuck files, one generating a rhythmic and the other one an arythmic sound. the combination is supposed to give the listener a spacey sound space.

projects

• gestonic: sonification of hand gestures for real-time timbre control

this project/instrument is still a work in progress as part of 220b and 220c project. my paper for this project has been accepted for HCI 2009.

• fosotomo: sonification of gesture and motion

master thesis at vienna university of technology, research group for human computer interaction. available on tuwien library's website.

• peddo: steps to a healthy life style

this paper is published in chi 2006 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems.

• visuals

this project was a cooperation between me and my colleagues at tu wien and akademie der bildende kuenste in vienna. i implemented the audio components of this project using c++ and bass library. analyzing the sound samples with fft, sending massages to video components to control the visuals.

• humanoid

256 final project: simulation of human movement using opengl and sonification of the simulation using rtaudio.

• f.a.c.e.: facially articulated controller for expression

250a final project: used max/msp's jitter to determine the location and motion of eyes, nose, and mouth, controlled news tracks through granular synthesis, and mapped facial movement parameters to grain parameters using silence detection and large grains.