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Rhythm Tree
Jason Freeman worked on the Brain Opera the summer after his freshman year. Created by acclaimed composer Tod Machover and his team at the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, the Brain Opera was a first-of-its-kind musical experience that included contributions from both on-line participants and live audiences. The Rhythm Tree, one instrument used in the Brain Opera, is a sculpture with more than 300 networked drum pads. As the player strikes them, different signals are sent ricocheting through the connected circuits, creating an ever-changing variety of sounds and images. |
STEVE REICH
"Different Trains", 1988
22 kHz (hi-fi) 8 kHz (lo-fi),
8-bit, mono sound.
Scored for string quartet and tape.
"I included a file called Reich which is a short excerpt from Steve
Reich's Different Trains. Let me give a little explanation: Steve Reich
has been very influential on me as a composer, and Different Trains was
particularly influential in my work on Poem. This piece is an artistic
response to the Holocaust -- it contrasts the composer's experience on
trains as a child in the 1940s in the U.S. with people transported on trains
to concentration camps in Germany at the same time. Reich uses a string
quartet and electronics, which include excerpts from interviews and sampled
train sounds. Like Poem, the inflections and rhythms of the speakers' voices
generate motives in the acoustic instruments. Unlike Poem, no modifications
to the voices, such as layering and pitch shifting, are made. The entire
work is about 30 minutes; this excerpt is from the middle of the last movement."
-JF
JASON FREEMAN
"Legacies", January 1995
22 kHz (hi-fi) 8 kHz (lo-fi),
8-bit, mono sound
Created with a Macintosh running a MAX patcher and playing back numerous
spoken-voice samples; three motion-detectors running into a DrumKat interface
which sent MIDI signals to the computer; a temperature probe running into
a physics-lab interface into the Mac; a Roland W-30 sampler; basic audio
mixer, amp, and speakers.
"I created a week-long sound "installation" in which 3 motion sensors,
a temperature probe, and four speakers were mounted in a public area. A
computer interpreted the signals from the sensors and the probe and also
made some random decisions in order to trigger sounds on digital samplers.
This short excerpt represents what people heard as they walked through
the area during the course of the week. Several elements are present: an
excerpt from the Pachelbel Canon played at a very slow speed, which varies
with temperature; many different everyday sounds (such as a person typing
at a computer keyboard) distorted and layered together; and fragments of
several different voices reading excerpts from different reviews of avant-garde
music concerts." -JF
JASON FREEMAN
"A Midsummer Night's Dream"
22 kHz (hi-fi) 8 kHz (lo-fi),
8-bit, mono sound
Created with a MAX patcher (to mastermind the cues), the Roland W-30
sampler and an E-mu Proteus/2 sound module.
"I wrote incidental music for a production of this play a few years
ago; it was all produced on a couple of samplers, and a computer controlled
the scene-change music so that certain sections would "vamp" as necessary.
This excerpt is one of the scene changes; it essentially repeats an idea
several times, adding another element to the dream-like texture on each
repetition." -JF