Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Bang 'Metro'

I've come up with my midterm proposal:

The dance project this MAX/MSP patch will interface with utilizes content from a New York Metro newspaper from one day. It will feature separate banks of spoken word or phrase samples. Each bank of samples will comprise a particular story from the newspaper, read by multiple voices. The words will be heard in the order they appear in each story, chosen from different voices at random. Different story banks will be "loadable" from an interface within the patch. I also plan to allow for different playback speeds, and I may explore different uses for separate audio in the left and right channels.

The idea is to de-contextualize the news stories, to isolate them from their original use/functions as banal, semi-journalistic interpretations of daily events, and reinvent them through the use of multiple voices in a completely unplanned order (which will be different upon every playback). New meanings will be derived from the news as imagined by a cacophony of voices ranging from children to the elderly.

It is ultimately my goal to use sensors as control inputs to MAX to allow a dancer to manipulate the sound with envelope filters, sample retriggers/delays, and other effects. At this point, however, my budget and scope have to be limited, so this patch will serve as a dry run toward that goal, more of an installation to accompany a dance than a program that interacts with the dancer as of yet.

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Now: gotta learn how to do it, and get some voiceover tracking sessions in!

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