Our samples have been put into Kontakt now, Jonathan suggested that we would get more use out of this program now that Logic has done it's job. The viewing and mapping of the samples are now a lot clearer.We listened to the samples individually and deleted the ones we thought were boring because we don't need 128 for the movement range we have with the suit. Maybe if the suit was full body we could utilise them all.At the moment there are just too many per action and it's sounding confusing when the voices are overlapping and when they are just mono and playing alone, the movement does not trigger another sample so they may as well not be there.
Next we stretched our favourite samples so they would be triggered more times, although thinking about it, if the samples are going to overlap slightly we could have some blanks so the whole keyboard is not full. This way of mapping is so much easier than having to re-map the whole suit but if we get the samples down to just the best ones, we can then map the suit so we have complete control over each sample. We could have just 4 samples per action, there are 16 channels on the suit so that would give us 64 samples, which i think will be plenty for the vocal line. After stretching the samples, we had to delete them and just duplicate them instead because the pitch had changed.
There is so much we can do with our project, We have to continuously make judgments as to what will work the best. We can only do this through experimentation, which at the moment, is leading us to some good ideas. When we were in the max class on fri we heard the samples through the speakers and when they were played to overlap, we got some nice harmonies. We could use this to our advantage when choosing which samples to keep and where to place them on the suit. Some of the samples clash harmonically so we must bear that in mind too. There are a whole load of effects using max as we discovered in the class too. I had some samples triggering off my left arm and altering the way in which they were played with my right arm. This is great for live performance because the audience can see and hear what you are doing.As we won't be wearing the suit in our video this may not be as effective but we could still use the effects in other ways.
We need to choreograph the rest of the dance and see how it works with creating a tune. We can manipulate the sequence once we have a basic structure to get the best result. We are using full body movement even though the suit is upper body. By using both we will have direct and indirect instruction. The upper body is primary and the lower secondary. For example, a leg movement may finish with a hip movement ,which swings to incorporate the shoulders, thus sending the signal.
Tomorrow we need to test the dance we have so far to see what order we have the samples playing.