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Looper's Delight
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On 23 feb 2007, at 07.44, Qua Veda wrote:
> While there are such beautiful threads right now, I thought it
> might be a
> good time to ask about this. Like many of you, I'm fascinated by
> sound, and
> also by 'music'. One experience I'd like to create in live
> performance -
> either in my home studio/music room, or small venue, is a sense
> of being
> "immersed in the sound". I'm not really referring to 'surround
> sound' ,
> but a multi-channel system may be required.
>
> Maybe a rear channel with a little delay added (reminiscent of the old
> quadraphonic "ambient" speaker idea).
>
> What do you think?
> -Qua
I share your interest for immersive sound! That trick you're
describing, a rear channel with a little delay added, is indeed very
powerful! I have used it on surround DVD soundtrack recordings. But
I have never had a chance to try it live, which I would really like
to do some day.
A couple of years back I suggested an annual Swedish/Danish
electronic music festival to put me up for a surround concert, my
idea was that the venue should provide at minimum two stereo PA
systems and that I should simply assign different looping tracks in
Mobius for different speaker locations. This never happened though,
but in 2005 I was lucky to be in the audience at the looping festival
in Zürich to hear flutist Stefan Keller. Stefan had brought his own
little PA for the rear stereo position - attacking the audience from
behind. He was using an EDP, two repeaters and a TC Electronics
FireworX and he simply cabled one stereo output from a Repeater to
the rear PA system (i.e. the same simple solution I had been
suggesting the other festival). I think everyone that was in Zürich
listening to Stefan's, concert will chime in with me that those
sparse "loops from behind" did a lot. I think this concept, with
particular "rear loops", is better for a live application compared to
the concept you mentioned; feeding the rear stereo pair with the same
audio as the front, but a little delayed (if you're not particularly
interested in creating a fake room that appears to be bigger than the
actual physical room). You could expand that setting a lot more than
Stefan did in Zürich, like for example recording into many loops at
the same time - both front and rear loops - and then eventually delay
the rear ("slip" on repeater and Mobius). There are lots of stuff
that would be fun to test out on such a system; reversing the rear
loop or pitch transposing it, just to name a few.
Well, one year later I got called in for that particular festival I
had suggested to build a round stage with multi channel PA's
surrounding the audience and they put me up to play in a concrete
underground room that was managed by the Danish artist collective
http://ambiunix.komponent.dk. And that was truly awesome! These guys
had 18 audio channels covering left, right, front, rear, and the
ceiling. Then they had written their own PD patches to distribute a
simple stereo feed over this system. While I played some usual live
looping over a stereo output, another guy was manipulating the
surround system from a laptop running that certain PD patch. The
experience, both on stage and at the audience position, was being
inside the sound, freely floating in a three dimensional sound
universe. I won't waste more list bandwidth by describing their
system, but anyone interested can find pretty detailed information at
their web site.
Greetings from Sweden
Per Boysen
www.boysen.se (Swedish)
www.looproom.com (international)
http://tinyurl.com/2kek7h (latest music release)