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Looper's Delight
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Uh, not to be too self promoting, but I did an entirely acapella live looping CD and also did voice only performances for a full year of my life in 2005 and still do a fair amount of acapella vocal work in my current shows (though I'm also doing a Dayglo Orange Plastic show currently as well). I've been on this kick (starting that year) to, once a year, take the thing that I want to do to grow that scares me more than anything and forcing myself to do it. that year I had the desire to hit the stage and only use my voice. I had been working really hard on several invented and traditional extended vocal techniques for a while (different kinds of overtone singing, trill singing, uvulal singing, percussive body manipulations of the chest cavity to control the timbre, yodelling, hum whistling, whistle humming (yes, they are different!), faux industrial beat box and then a whole slew of attempts to replicate electronics instruments vocally. I booked myself into the Woodstockhausen festival that year and did an entire 15 minute piece using only my mic, my loopers and some sound effects. this led to a 30 minute performance at Y2K5 and then I worked myself up to doing several different shows, increasing the length of time on stage until by the end of that year I did a series of vocal only performances that lasted an hour and more. I put out recording called FAUX VOIX at the end of that experience (which included a few vocal performances from my '03 European/UK tour). I also had a bunch of experments that were prompted by my frienship and correspondance with Cara Quinn (aka Goddess at the time). One day I was typing to her, talking about something and I said, "Well , you see what I mean, don't you" and she replied, "No , I don't see what you mean" I thought she was being contentious so I said "why don't you see what I mean" and she replied, "Because I'm blind" "Blind?" I replied, "then how are you chatting with me in real time?" And she said, "because I'm using a text to voice editor" It interprets your words and then speaks them to me in a computer voice." Well, that just totally fascinated me. We talked more and she sent me this software program that she uses (or used to use, it's been a while since I"ve talked to her about it). Anway, recognizing that all vowel sounds are just comb filter manipulations of the sound our voice boxes put out, I started typing in some experimental 'compositions' just using vowels and sending them to Cara. She did the same. It was a really exciting experiment. this particular program allowed the use of different languages (quite a few, actually) and every language pronounces vowel sounds with slightly different timbral emphasis. One of them , Korean, obviously has some rule that says that if a long vowel sound ends a word then the person speaking drops off the pitch at the end of the word. By using Korean , I could fake out the computer by typing a sequence like 'oooooooooooooooooo' after a certain time, the vowels' pitch would drop and it would keep dropping periodically. In this way I was able to get different pitches in phrases. I typed hundreds of expereiments and then assemble these short snippets inside of a sample program (Fruity Loops) and triggered them to create phrases and melodies. There are a couple of these experiments on FAUX VOIX (and one on my website under the FAUX VOIX link). I also found a website that if you typed in a word, it would find that word sung in a popular commercially released song and just play only that sample. In this way, you could write lyrics and the program would play the results back in a very amusing and unusual way. Anyway, that was what that record was about. Some fans of mine think it's their favorite recording I've made as a solo artist. It's certainly the strangest and it definitely sold a big fat hardly any copies when I released it.............lol.........I'm proud of it, though. If you want to increase this starving artists' coffers around the Holidays, it's available for $10 by paypalling me.............nudge, nudge, hint, hint., wink, wink. okay, self promotion over................whew! <he listens to the entire digest list sighing heavily> --