2018 – Paul’s Project

implementing recording of video in my software, simultaneous with start and stop of audio recording in Ableton Live by sending control changes
researching on manipulation of video and audio in (Apple) Final Cut, video has to be adjusted. This is a tedious process.
so as a result Final Cut is abandoned. Now I use basic software called ffmpeg, and with some old fashioned Applescript I can synchronize audio and video easy and exactly.
implementing some new detection algorithms thanks to the website of Satya Mallick that can trace rectangular parts of an image in the realtime video. So now I can trace my eyes, glasses, hands… Also simultaneously in more than one region on the screen. This is a great step forward because it reduces the amount of noise in the detection, especially in motion detection. Some randomness is nice but under bad lighting conditions it is not desirable.
I experiment and study all the possibilities of the Ableton Sampler instrument. It has many nice and useful features that all can be adjusted from my software.
Ableton sampler settings…
less visible, I clean and comment my own software, so I hope it stays usable in the future.
not to forget: building this site. I want to show some video’s and explanations here and there.

I’m getting aware of what sounds are appropriate to use. First I thought only small clips were good, but now, after experimenting a lot with all the possibilities, I change(d) my mind and use longer recordings, to about one minute or more. So I discover, what Murray Schafer wrote in his impressive book “The soundscape, the tuning of the world”, that e.g. wind sounds and ocean sounds (the word “sea” is too small here…) are very similar and can be misinterpreted very easily. I think that’s where musicality comes into play. Maybe also sounds from insects (bees) are usable too. To be continued next summer…
still reading and analyzing the book of Murray Schafer, it’s very actual these days.
more reading: Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia, and in a broader sense Merlin Donald.

I made contact with a dutch composer H. who creates musical scores on the basis of natural sounds. He uses, as a first step, the software called Spear to analyze sounds with advanced Fourier analysis. I had a look at that and it might be very useful for isolating soft sounds in the middle of a lot of noise, quite different from what audio filters do.
on a warm afternoon in November I meet Pedro Montesinos live at the beach in La Restinga, together with his mic with a large “dead cat” on it. It really is a pleasure to meet him in person. Two years ago we made e-mail contact and Pedro invited me to contribute to his archive of sounds “Paisaje Sonoro El Hierro”.
Pedro at work…
in december Sixto Sánchez Perera presents the second edition of his book about the Mudada on El Hierro in a noisy setting. I only had a b/w copy of the book but now I’m happy with the real book.
Sixto’s book