This is part 2 of the Boston Music Tech Fest series. Check out part 1 to learn about Anthony de Ritis’s meshing of classical and DJ-based music.
Aaron Einbond (@einbond) – Harvard – CataRT
Einbond’s talk, though highly technical, had fascinating real world implications as the programs he used and created were able to take sounds from anything from nature samples to the accumulated sounds of the city of Tokyo and turn them into organic sheet music.
Einbond made use a program called CataRT (pronounced Cat-Art) as a “spectral descriptor” which mapped out sounds for a variety of uses, and as Einbond would go on to show, with a variety of results.
To start, he played the classically calming sound of rain on leaves. Then he showed us how CataRT (he had modified it heavily) can synthesize that sample and break it down into noise-based instrumental sounds. Once it is broken into synthesized sounds, the program can go on to transcribe it into a score for live players. He commented that people “would not mistake the score version for the original” but that they should instead look at it as a “cover” of the original, real-life sound. Creating scores for real life sounds is not something I was aware could be done and I’m not sure the audience was aware of either. He went on to show off a similar process for the sound of a glacier which was equally strange and a bit eerie but no less impressive.
Next he showed off “DIRTI,” a tangible music interface. His example was a dish filled with tapioca grains controlling granular synths (the irony was not lost on the audience). At the simplest level, you simply have to run your hand through the grains to create a slew of sounds – of course, with enough practice one might also be able to claim they can play their cat’s litter box as an instrument! These tangible interfaces created utterly strange sounds but, like the previous technology he showed, could also be directly recorded into score form and can even be combined with a drawing interface like a tablet.
Einbond’s presentation teases the greater possibilities of his creation. For instance, the application to film scores could be massive. Creating rain on leaves through a film score could create an unsettling version of a sound people may think they know but can’t quite put their finger on.
Check out the upcoming part 3 of the Boston Music Tech Fest series where I look into the location-based music community GroupTones.