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Looper's Delight
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At 11:19 AM -0700 5/7/03, Herb wrote: >Wonderfully terrible is how I'd describe the VP70. >The VP70 is a very ambitious mid-80's vocal processor that often fails in >very interesting ways. The pitch-to-MIDI is amusingly poor. It's fun to >hear it trying to make sense out of speech, drums or chords. This sort of behavior seems to be endemic to most, if not all, pitch trackers. I've done a bit of work with the Fairlight Voicetracker, which originally sold in the $2000+ range. It also freaks out in amusing and musically useful ways when fed complex inputs. I chose to pursue this as a compositional strategy. One of the situations that really gets a pitch tracker going is when it is part of a feedback loop. If you use the MIDI output to drive a synthesizer or sampler and then allow the pitch tracker to "hear" that signal it will begin to pick up different components of the sound, such as resonances and upper harmonics. This can be greatly enhanced (or "aggravated") by adding a lot of reverberation to the mix. I once did a piece where I initiated the pitch tracking process with a short "pop" and then walked around the room waving the microphone through the sound field of the loudspeakers. I was able to generate (and control to a reasonable extent) slow pitch glides. I did this in several passes, overdubbing into a sequencer and playing back the different tracks with a variety of timbres. The combination of sounds, with a 10 second reverb time providing a sort of "memory" for the system, resulted in fairly coherent melodic material, largely based on complex arpeggiations. Other strategies can involve acoustic instruments that are either polyphonic or that have mutable spectra. As an example of the first case, I did a performance with two percussionists playing xylophone and marima, again with a lot of reverb. They started playing sustained unisons and octaves, then introduced fifths, major thirds, and increasingly dissonant intervals. The generated melody progressed similarly from simple to complex behavior. I also got very interesting results with bassoon, and instrument which typically produces stronger overtones than fundamental pitch. The player, composer Chuck Holdeman, quickly learned to manipulate this effect and dynamically adjusted the timbre of sustained tones to cause the Voicetracker to jump merrily among the harmonics. Have fun! -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com