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Laptop looping
Last weekend I attended the Other Minds festival in San Francisco and
talked to Godmother of Looping, Pauline Oliveros, and Queen of Vocal
Loops, Pamela Z. I found out that in both cases these artists have
replaced their stacks of dedicated looping delays with PowerBooks and
Max/MSP.
Pauline, as I've mentioned, has been performing with delays since the
1950s and since the '80s she's been using multiple PCM-42s and
PCM-70s (four of each). Her major performances are done in octaphonic
surround sound. These days both the delay processing and the sound
distribution are done in the PowerBook with a MOTU 828 Firewire audio
interface. She wasn't performing in this way at the festival, so I
can't comment on specific sound or techniques, but in the past she
performed the delays herself with a set of pedals and a Max interface
for MIDI control. The reverb processing was regulated by a sound
mixer/processor at the house console, and at least during one period
of time the main strategy was to move among different virtual
acoustic spaces. Here are some URLs:
http://www.deeplistening.org/pauline/
http://www.pofinc.org/
http://www.disquiet.com/oliveros.html
http://www.newalbion.com/artists/oliverosp/
http://www.pofinc.org/EIShome.html
http://www.deeplistening.org/news/DLB.html
Pamela Z's performance rig at one time consisted of three "classic"
(low-budget) looping delays with relatively short loop times. Despite
their technical limits she used these masterfully, and over time she
added voice-to-MIDI control and movement control (via the BodySynth)
with Max MIDI processing on a G3 PowerBook. Now all the delays are in
MSP. She didn't go into great detail about this, but you can get some
idea of her performance technology from her site:
http://www.pamelaz.com/
http://www.pamelaz.com/gear.html
BTW - Pamela Z and Rick Walker will perform jointly on April 20 and
21 at the Four-Eighteen Project in Santa Cruz
<http://www.four-eighteen.org/>
--
______________________________________________________________
Richard Zvonar, PhD
(818) 788-2202
http://www.zvonar.com
http://RZCybernetics.com
http://www.cybmotion.com/aliaszone
http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=rz