No Input Mixing

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I first heard of this technique two years ago, but it only surfaced in my memory again when my friend, Stephen White released an experimental EP featuring this technique among others. The idea also showed up in a blog post I was reading, spurring me on to grab the Spirit Folio desk in college and have a quick go of NIMB (No Input Mixing Board) myself. I was impressed with the depth of sound you could get, particularly the buzzy saw bass I've posted below. I'd like to get further into the technique employing some guitar effects pedals etc. The Pro Tools plug ins didn't offer much flexibility for such a tactile way of making sound.

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'No Input Mixing' is a form of composition involving plugging the outputs of a mixer boards back into the inputs of it's channels and controlling the subsequent feedback for musical purposes. While this may sound like a quick route to a migraine, the results can be surprisingly pleasant when controlled by an expert such as Toshimaru Nakamuru:


Gestures

Another great piece of software I've been using for the same composition mentioned in my previous post, is the Gestural Music Sequencer.

This little gem will take a video feed, live or pre-recorded, and generate MIDI information based on the brightest point of the image. It's very simple to use, requiring only the IAC bus to activated to route it to your DAW of choice for gestural MIDI goodness.

Scales, keys, note, note value and rest probabilities can all be programmed, and my results so far have been very musical.

One small hiccup I experience when using pre-recorded material, is that the resolution must be 640x480 for the bright point to be tracked accurately.

Indeterminacy

Currently working on an assignment in which I'm exploring themes of indeterminacy and the human body in Electro-Acoustic music.

One of my favourite discoveries so far has been the original DOS-based I Ching used by John Cage, programmed by a collaborator of his Andrew Culver.

Seeing as I'm running Mac OSX, I used the handy DOS emulator, DOSBox, which provided a fairly painless way to get the IChing.exe running on the Mac.