CHOPPING

We had the laborious, yet fun task of chopping the audio up into 128 different sections ready to use in Logic. We did try to use Logic to cut the file but it didn't seem to want to import the wav file we had bounced yesterday and saved on an external hard drive. Logic is good for midi rather than audio so perhaps that's why. So failing that we tried Spark xl. This program wouldn't display the edits on the screen so we decided to use pro tools again as we did yesterday. This worked very well. It was just time consuming to choose 128 sections that sounded useful to have as our sound scale, which will be re-arranged by using the midi suit. We took random sections and listened to them just to make sure they were useful but we didn't want to be to precious about it because they're going to sound completely different with the various effects we will put on them. Also, if we had been too picky the time taken would have doubled.
Some of the sections were reversed and it was interesting how it affected the diction. Depending on the words reversed, we got German, French, Spanish/Italian sounding language as well as just sounding like English played backwards. The new files were saved on the hard drive and will have to be bounced individually.
So, the next plan of action is to make the most of the audio files by changing them with effects, such as reverb, autotune, time stretch, etc. Once this is done we can wire the midi suit up to trigger each of the128 files, by moving different parts of our bodies. When we get a good sequence, with great skill and memory.... we can remember the movement pattern, which will then become our para para dance to perform in the video! The dance will reflect the sound and vice versa and should bring an unconventional element to the pop genre ideal.
I attended 2 lectures with Jonathan in max/msp, a little hard for me to grasp after the first lecture as my brain doesn't tend to process technical info quickly! The practical class was more appealing to me; we got to mess around with the mixing desk and learn about the acoustics of the recital room, etc. The reverb and effects we applied to the sound input (from the piano) were really exciting and i'm looking forward to using them in my own work.