Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
Last weekend I attended the Other Minds festival in San Francisco and talked to Godmother of Looping, Pauline Oliveros, and Queen of Vocal Loops, Pamela Z. I found out that in both cases these artists have replaced their stacks of dedicated looping delays with PowerBooks and Max/MSP. Pauline, as I've mentioned, has been performing with delays since the 1950s and since the '80s she's been using multiple PCM-42s and PCM-70s (four of each). Her major performances are done in octaphonic surround sound. These days both the delay processing and the sound distribution are done in the PowerBook with a MOTU 828 Firewire audio interface. She wasn't performing in this way at the festival, so I can't comment on specific sound or techniques, but in the past she performed the delays herself with a set of pedals and a Max interface for MIDI control. The reverb processing was regulated by a sound mixer/processor at the house console, and at least during one period of time the main strategy was to move among different virtual acoustic spaces. Here are some URLs: http://www.deeplistening.org/pauline/ http://www.pofinc.org/ http://www.disquiet.com/oliveros.html http://www.newalbion.com/artists/oliverosp/ http://www.pofinc.org/EIShome.html http://www.deeplistening.org/news/DLB.html Pamela Z's performance rig at one time consisted of three "classic" (low-budget) looping delays with relatively short loop times. Despite their technical limits she used these masterfully, and over time she added voice-to-MIDI control and movement control (via the BodySynth) with Max MIDI processing on a G3 PowerBook. Now all the delays are in MSP. She didn't go into great detail about this, but you can get some idea of her performance technology from her site: http://www.pamelaz.com/ http://www.pamelaz.com/gear.html BTW - Pamela Z and Rick Walker will perform jointly on April 20 and 21 at the Four-Eighteen Project in Santa Cruz <http://www.four-eighteen.org/> -- ______________________________________________________________ Richard Zvonar, PhD (818) 788-2202 http://www.zvonar.com http://RZCybernetics.com http://www.cybmotion.com/aliaszone http://www.live365.com/cgi-bin/directory.cgi?autostart=rz