I made a different synthesizer patch every day at Ars Electronica 2004, and recorded over 2 hours of each patch to DAT every evening. Someday I may string together the best moments of all patches into something of a more official release, but until then I've decided to post random continuous excerpts from each patch here. All sound is live and made without any human intervention - what you hear is what the synthesizer patch is doing on its own. At Ars, I had a quadraphonic mix out of 4 speakers - unfortunately I only have a stereo mix, but this gives a decent impression of what was heard in the Bruckner Center. The most "musiclike" patches are those of Sept. 5 and 6 - the others tend more towards sound art, but each has its own qualities. All samples are in mp3 format.
Sound Examples from the Synthesizer at Ars Electronica 2004:
Sometime in July (7:01 - 8 MB) - Before I shipped the synth out of Cambridge, I put this noisy piecce together as an excercise. Yes, I overdrove the mixer in places, but it has a certain industrial character....
September 2 (11:28 - 13.1 MB) - This is the first patch that I put together on the synthesizer. It's a babbling piece of sound art, but has some nice moments. This is the patch that visitors to the Bruckner Center heard on the first day of the Festival, as I put it together the night before the opening.
September 3 (12:50 - 14.7 MB) - I worked on the above patch more during the day while people passed through, and evolved it into this piece, which played at the Festival's opening reception.
September 4 (7:01 - 5.5 MB) - This is the simplest piece that I did at the Festival. It was highly interactive, based on motion detected from a pair of Doppler Radars that I had brought along. As people moved past or waved their hands in front of the radars, sounds were triggered and/or modulated.
September 5 (25:48 - 29.5 MB) - I wanted to do a somewhat melodic but aggressive patch here - everything is keyed around a simple sequence. This one rocks.
September 6 (22:54 - 26.2 MB) - As this is the patch that was selected to be played on the big speakers over the Danube in the evening, I went for something still quite melodic, but dreamy and perhaps a bit wistful.
September 7 (20:09 - 23 MB) - This patch is based around the SK1 randomly taking samples from Austrian Radio (ORF, of course), and randomly playing them back as pitched loops. Each of the 4 SK1 voices was processed thorugh a different analog effects chain.
