CONDENSING

The first thing to do today was to change the values on the 16 channels of midi on the max patch. Max is so annoying though, when we opened it up and moved the suit it decided to play the samples with loads of delay which we hadn't programmed!!! We shut it down a re-booted and it worked fine. This has happened plenty of times where it just freezes and has to be shut down. The channels previously had 8 samples on each one but we halved that so there is now 64 in total as oppopsed to 128. Also, after checking the patch that tells us what actions the midi suit is picking up, i thought we may as well delete channels 7,8,15 and 16. We now have 12 channels. 16 wasn't actually picking up anything and the other 3 were not needed so by narrowing them down we can gain more control over our output. The wrist actions: flex and twist, get a bit muddled so we have not put any samples to be triggered by the twist action. We chose 12 of our favourite samples and placed them: 2 on the flex of each wrist (down and up), 2 on each elbow for x and y movement, 2 on each shoulder, also for x and y.
These were then tested wearing the suit, with the dance we made last week. As we had expected, the same samples were activated (most times) with each full sequence. So as i was dancing i could sing what was coming next. We were extremely pleased with this and the thought of having 128 samples now for the vocal line seems ridiculous!! The samples that we had mapped and were not picked up with the dance will be taken into consideration for the 2nd part of the dance. We have just repeated the dance on the other side of our body for now and hopefully this will activate the other samples. I wanted to keep the sequence simple and re-use the material where possible so repeating it with a slight change fits in with what we have done with our audio. If the samples are not activated then we can change the movement to do so. The first part of the dance came first and determined the audio, (within limit as we had narrowed down the options) and the second part will be choreographed to trigger certain samples. The dance has created the vocal and the layout of the samples will now create the movement.
The samples we are not using will be utilised in other ways. Nicola and i discussed the programs: spear and soundhack, which are great for messing around with our samples and creating weird stuff for our backing track. We spoke about taking sections and working on them individually to see what we come up with.
So, to summarise for today, we have narrowed down our samples to our favourites, which has also eliminated wastage. Previously, we had 128 and as we were playing them in mono, 1 voice only, the ones that would have been triggered if the sample could have been interrupted, were lost, so may as well not have been there. More samples are needed when working in poly with more than one voice and they overlap. We may use these in part of the song but for the actual vocal line our 12 samples are plenty. The dance and the suit are now starting to work really well for us and doing almost exactly what we had anticipated. It's only through using Kontakt i feel we have really started to get somewhere now. We have come a long way to get here but having our samples in Kontakt and being able to manipulate them easily has really started to bring the project on. I'm feeling really positive about today.
Tomorrow we are testing the second half of the dance with the suit. When this is complete and we are happy with our control, the next event is to record the vocal line. We may re-record the vocal again once we have the structure. This is to make sure that the vocal is one take as opposed to 12 separate samples and to get them all in the same key, tone, etc. We can also double the track up by using both of our voices.