When I Think About You I Touch My Monitor...

I was able to get back to the Continuing Saga Of Crandall’s Experiments In The Exciting World Of Touch-Screen Control this week. I realized, at some point well in to the making of version 4 of the control software (this is version 6), that I’m looking at the whole problem wrong. I was thinking about the micro-level control of individual sounds (which is why I had five or more nodes per page in the previous iterations.) However, it recently occurred to me that that was, for my purposes, wrong.

This particular video reflects my new tack, wherein I’m looking at the song as a single sculpture rather than a collection of different parts. The Max patch is essentially a synthesizer unto itself, and its sole purpose is to synthesize this one song. The Cinder app’s sole purpose is to control this one song. This method is somewhat ass-backwards from our normal way of thinking about things; the net result is that each song would be an instrument unto itself that needs to be learned on an individual basis.

This is, of course, an insanely complex way to write music. It goes far beyond just purposefully putting stumbling blocks in one’s path, and in to making work for myself simply for the purpose of making work for myself. But with that said, as I intimated in a previous post on the subject, I’m trying every idea out as it comes to me until I hit on the right combination. I do like this idea of thinking of the song as a whole, with parameters that affect it; however, I don’t believe this particular pairing is where I wanted to go with this. Once again, we shuffle back to the drawing board in mute embarrassment.

As an aside, I filmed this one with my iPad 3 and “edited” it in iMovie on the iPad and pushed it straight to YouTube. That’s a workflow I won’t ever use again. Probably the single shittiest combination of tools I’ve come across in a while, and virtually unusable for anything besides putting up clips of your baby or puppy or some other stupid shit. For what we do, to be avoided at all costs.

As a further aside, don’t ever buy an optical touchscreen, especially an HP-branded one, if you want to do this sort of thing. I can not wait until this is available. A lot of the problems I’m having are fighting with the tool itself, and that’s not helping anything. (It is roughly akin to trying to record a guitar part and the jack on the guitar keeps cutting out.)