ETHNO TEKH | Live at Enig’matik Vibrations 2012

After a lot of hard work we finally got to unveil Ethno Tekh Performance v.2 at Enigmatik Vibrations last week.

This version is built to fit onto a smaller screen and has been extended to 20 minutes which is broken into 2 tracks, ” Tekhnology ” and ” All Frequencies “. It was a mad rush to get it all done in time and we missed out on a few planned features for this one. There’s not quite as much visual fluidity as we had planned between instruments, but that didn’t seem to phase the crowd who seemed to absolutely love it. It was some of the most positive and vocal feedback either Brad or I have ever had for a gig before and it was very encouraging to see other people really enjoying our hard work.

ETHNO TEKH | live at Enig’matik Vibrations (Melb,Aus) 2012 from Ethno Tekh on Vimeo.

It was an honor to get a great slot in such a tight line up of top notch producers tearing the place apart with mad textural glitch, twisting psy breaks and the fat chunk that Grouch always brings. Would love to say a big thank you to Enig’matik Records, particularly Jake Rose ( Sun In Aquarius )  for supporting our ideas from the ground up and giving us the opportunity and the audience to share our creativity with.

Ethno Tekh (teaser) – TechEd 2012 (Aus) Rehearsals

Here’s a short teaser of our live A/V performance system currently under development by us (Ethno Tekh). We’ll be releasing many more videos in the near future, including more performances with much high recording quality (apologies for this one), as well as interviews with both Brad and I outlining and discussing our project and approach.

For the moment, please enjoy the very first video featuring our new system!

http://www.facebook.com/EthnoTekh

Motion-capture Music Live Set Demo @ Ultralounge 2012

Although I’ve spent literally the entire last 14 months of my life on making and performing motion capture music, with around live 30 performances I only just realised there’s very little footage online.

I’m currently in the process of updating my whole live performance system, so I most likely won’t be performing for at least a few weeks, so here’s an except of a performance I did earlier on in the year with my Kinect/foot pedal setup.

My 24 hour YouTube video remix challenge (done in 10 hours)

I’ve been wanting to remix a YouTube video for ages, but it’s something I always put off. Not a video in particular, just any random video that inspires me.

A bit of background on myself. Making my music (Synaecide) involves a lot of heavy editing to samples. There’s just something about zooming all the way into the arranger view of Cubase, cutting up, then manipulating little bits of audio into a track that gets me going. In high school I did a bit of video editing in media class, but since then I haven’t touched the visual side of things. Having said that, it’s an idea I’ve always been excited about.

To get myself motivated, the idea was to pick a video and have a finished remix in 24 hours. The video I picked was Elders React to Dubstep (Skrillex).

I ended up finishing it after about 10 hours of work. Here ’tis!

For those interested, this is the outline of the process:

1. Record the audio from the video
2. Bring the audio file into Cubase and cut out single audio samples (ones that don’t have any background music or sound that taint the sample)
3. Create a drum beat and main ‘hook’ bassline
4. Put the sounds from the video into a (very) loose order of narrative to give it some form of cohesion
5. Limit the sh*t out of the mix
6. Rip the video
7. Pop the audio and video into Premier
8. Spend hours editing the video and making it look like the people being interviewed are doing the sounds with their mouths
9. and Presto!

Carpe Zythum – Kinect controlled pipe organ (full performance)

“Carpe Zythum”, a performance with Elise Richards (Vocals) and Chris Vik (myself controlling the organ with the Kinect) along with a pre-composed piece written by both Elise and I. It was performed in November 2011 at the Melbourne Town Hall. This is the full video of the performance. If you’d like to see a video explaining how it works see last weeks video Controlling a 4-story organ with the Kinect

I’ve created my own software Kinectar, which allows the use of the Kinect to control MIDI devices, ie. playing notes through simple gestures and motion – I hooked this up to the organ.

For more information on my gesture-based music projects, see my blog I love the Future
Video produced by Unkle Nicnac Films

Controlling a 4-story pipe organ with the Kinect

In this video I briefly explain and demonstrate how I used the Kinect to control the massive Melbourne Town Hall Organ. It contains a short excerpt from our performance “Carpe Zythum” November 2011.

I’ve created my own software Kinectar, which allows the use of the Kinect to control MIDI devices, ie. playing notes through simple gestures and motion. The Melbourne Town Hall Organ got a referb in the late 90s adding the ability of MIDI messages to active the notes… this happened.

The company that provided the control system to allow the organ to be played via MIDI are Solid State Organ System.

Co-composition and Kinect performance and programming by Chris Vik
Co-composition, lyrics and vocals by Elise Richards

Video produced by Unkle Nicnac Films

Full performance out next week!

Dance Controlled Kinect Music (Part 1)

Since April 2011 I’ve been working solidly with the Microsoft Kinect, developing my software, Kinectar, to enable its use as a MIDI controller for performing music live. I’ve done a number of performances around Australia since I started the project, however, it’s safe to say that, although I would consider myself an electronic musician, I’m certainly no dancer. Enter, Paul…

Dancer, Paul Walker and I have joined forces to bring the Kinect controlled music concept into the world of contemporary dance. Recently we obtained a residency at PACT theatre (centre for emerging artists), where we spent the week developing different ways of implementing my Kinect music control system in a dance context.

My system is developed in Max and uses OpenNI drivers, OSCeleton and Ableton Live.

Kinectar – Tutorial 1 (The Basics & CC Output)

Hi all. I’ve been hard at work building a brand new build for Kinect (0.7.0) which include many new features and (hopefully) some bug fixes. It will also have… dun dududAAAN! MAC OSX support. If everything goes well I should have it out in a few days.

After the many requests for a tutorial I’ve heeded the call and started the big slog of documenting Kinectar in video tutorial format. This is the first:

Many more to come!

Video stream of my TV Kinect demo and interview

For anyone not in Aus that missed the segment featuring myself and my software “Kinectar”, you can check it out here: *type “gadgets of the future” in the search.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/today-tonight/consumer/article/-/12465136/gadgets-of-the-future/#video

Kinect Controlled Granular Scratching

Another demo of some recent mappings I’ve come up with for the Kinect. So far it’s been the most complicated setup to learn, but it’s certainly been the funnest. It’s using 8 parameters from my hands; 6 positions, and 2 speed values. Any sample works in this, however this sample was great because of the bass in the guy’s voice, which helped me get some nice bassline-sounding modulations out of it.