The Racer Sessions

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As many of you may know, I am a primarily classical musician. Someday I want to be in some big orchestra playing Beethoven and Strauss and Mozart and all that stuff. Until about a two years ago, I only did that. I sometimes dabbled in straight ahead jazz, but never improvised, never composed, nothing. So the past few years of attending the Racer Sessions and going to UW have completely changed my outlook on music and how I play, how I like to play, and the music that I enjoy listening to. 

I’m writing all of this because I think it’s important to know where I’m coming from on this piece. I will be playing an unaccompanied piece for double bass which I have based off of a few motives that I think are interesting. I have focused on using these few ideas and expanding on them with different accompaniments and embellishments. As a bassist, I am often relegated to root notes and simple rhythms. I have attempted to use these techniques in my piece, writing a piece from a classical bass player’s perspective. 

Before the jams, I want everyone to think about where they have come from and how they have developed as a musician. Where did you start? Why did you keep playing? Where are you now as a musician? Take these thoughts and use them to your advantage during the improvisations. Tell a story about your journey, interact with other musicians, just as you do in daily life. Expand on other people’s journeys through music as well as your own. Or base an improvisation off of a snapshot from your past. But always make music that you would want to listen to. If you wouldn’t want listen to it, why would anyone else?

That’s a lot to think about, but I encourage you to do it, even in the week preceding. There’s no reason to keep going forward if you don’t know where you’re coming from. Cheesy, but true. See you all on Sunday.

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5-Section phase piece for 2 saxophonists and 2 percussionists

In solo music I compose on my horn, but when writing for a larger ensemble I find myself split between my horn and the piano.  I’m a terrible piano player, so I always find it odd that I choose to spend so much time writing on this instrument.  In my solo compositions/improvisations I try to create a sense of more than one instrument being played, yet I haven’t spent much time writing multi-instrumental music strictly on my horn.   To challenge myself as a performer andcomposer, I’ve written a new 5-section phase piece for 2 saxophones and 2 percussion instruments based on techniques developed in my solo playing.  To perform this piece I’m joined by saxophonist Ivan Arteaga and percussionists Greg Campbell and Tom Campbell! 

The piece uses phases of sound that create continuous loops of four sixteenth notes.  These loops are changed by using one of 3 fundamental fingerings along with one of 3 possible pitch alterations.  The pitch alterations are subtle changes in sound of one of the voices in the fingering system.  In the score the fingerings are notated as “I  2  3” and the alterations are notated as “a  b  c.”  They are executed in nine possible combinations:  1.a 1.b 1.c //  2.a. 2.b 2.c // 3.a 3.b. 3.c.  

All the phases are grouped in four sixteenth notes, except 3.a 3.b and 3.c which are grouped in eight sixteenths.  In all the phases the first and third sixteenth notes always use the same tone, played by the saxophones as a concert “D.”  The second sixteenth note is the pitch alteration with directions on how to play it, shown in the score as either being “a.” “b.” or “c,”  The fourth sixteenth note is a fingering with directions on how to play it, show in the score as either being “1.” “2.” or “3.”  These fingerings are then played in 3 possible rhythmic cycles: Slow // Medium // Fast   

Each saxophonist is paired with one percussionist playing the same phases.  The piece is divided up into 5 sections.  In some sections all four musicians are playing the tempo phase along with the same fingerings.  For example, all four musicians may be playing “Slow 1.a”, then “Fast 2.c”, then “Fast 2.b.”  In other cases there will be lengthy sections of polyrhythmic activity.  One duo pair will play “Fast 1.b” while the other pair is overlapping it with “Slow 3.c”  The 5 sections are composed to illicit certain levels of musical activity for the listener, but overall the piece is extremely dense in texture.  In Sections II and IV, all the musicians are playing the same tempo together.  However in section II everyone is playing the phase tempo and same fingering system, whereas in Section IV everyone is playing the same phase tempo, but different fingering systems.  

In this composition I’m interested in creating a landscape where musical events are balanced and density remains almost stationary.  Many of the longer, minimalist or phase-like compositions performed at the Racer Sessions generally had major musical events in them, such as wide dynamic shifts, instruments coming in or out, drones, etc.  In this piece I’d like to experiment with the omission of such events and simply rely on the technical gestures used in the composition.  

There are no recorded pieces that I could share this week that led to the creation of this new piece, so I haven’t included any musical examples in the post.  Thank you for reading and supporting the Racer Sessions, and a special thank you to Ivan, Greg and Tom for working so hard on this piece with me!

-Neil Welch

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Communication is a part of life.  People communicate.  With inventions like the internet, cell phones, Facebook, etc. communication is more implicit and more pervasive than ever before: we are always communicating with one another, and we often are unaware of it.   For example, while you may not know it, your computer is almost continuously chatting away to all the other computers it is connected to by radio signal or by a wire.  In most instances, communication between computers is implicit in the use of a computer.  The phenomenon is hardly limited to computers — when we meet someone new, we learn a great deal about them even without exchanging very many words.  The communication is implicit and continuous, and we may not know it is happening.

Implicit communication is a part of improvised music too. We communicating with one another on stage, but as with communication in life and computers, it happens implicitly, and we may be unaware of it.  However, awareness of this communication between musicians is important.  Focusing on communication between performers during the session, our composed pieces and free improvisations can be vastly improved as a result. Join us Sunday to think about the role of communication in music.

Our piece: Netcat

Throughout the piece, we will be hyper-focused on listening to what is happening, and reacting to it accordingly. We have combined computer-generated communications with the human ability to feel, plan, and react. Our primary goal in performing this piece is to highlight the difficulty and importance of communication between performers.

To do so, we are using 8 computer “performers” in our set.  Each computer generates network traffic. Custom software we’ve written translates the generated network traffic into musical sounds that the audience can hear. Some of the network traffic in our piece is carefully prepared, and some some will be completely spontaneous and out of control – much like any piece of music that involves improvisation.

On the human side of things, we will control the 8 computers we set up, and will generate network traffic improvisationally by manipulating computer hardware and software. We will also play drums and guitar, reacting to the communications generated in real-time.

Guidelines for free improvisations

We’d like to impose some constraints on the improvisations tonight, to focus on the idea of communication:

1. Be aware of what’s going on around you, and what is being communicated.

You can choose to react or not, but you have to be aware before you can make the choice.

2. Limit group size to 4.

The more participants in an improv, the harder it becomes to focus and listen. We expect smaller groups will make it easier to focus on listening and communicating.

3. No discussion/planning before each improv.

Starting with preconceived notions of what an improv should be may lead players to focus on the “plan”, rather than staying aware of their surroundings.


Implementation Details

The rest of our post details the technical aspects of what we have built.  Non-geeks can stop here.  For the rest of you, we describe the hardware setup, the software we wrote, and how to configure the software we didn’t write, if you want to replicate all or part of what we did.

The computers
We each have a machine that is running the custom software we wrote. In addition, there are 6 other machines that are generating and sending traffic to David’s computer over a wired local-area-network.

The software
All source code is available on GitHub at: https://github.com/blucia0a/Network-Music

Our software is split into 5 parts:

1) Virtual MIDI keyboards
We found out that we could easily create multiple virtual MIDI keyboards without writing a single line of extra code. To do that, we used OS X’s “Audio MIDI Setup” program.

Inside that application, under Window > MIDI Window, is an option for a thing called “IAC Driver”:

Screenshot: http://cl.ly/0H3Z143U2y1W1d2v2y3s

Once you bring that device online, you can then add as many ports as you like (we created 6), which will each correspond to one virtual MIDI keyboard:

Screenshot: http://cl.ly/2w2r3y3Z2r1T2X062D3O

Once that’s configured, you should have 6 virtual keyboards that you can map in your audio rack (Rax, MainStage, Reason, Abletone, etc):

Screenshot: http://cl.ly/280X1y2T2G1H392O293w

2) tshark
We use the tshark (v 1.6.5) program to intercept all traffic that comes over our computer’s network card. tshark is part of the Wireshark distribution, and can be installed via Homebrew on OS X, or probably as part of a binary Wireshark distribution.

https://github.com/blucia0a/Network-Music/blob/master/get_traffic.sh

3) Sift.pl

Sift.pl is a Perl script that we wrote that takes tshark output, and converts it into MIDI messages destined for one of our 6 virtual MIDI keyboards. It translates network packets into (keyboardNumber, note, duration, velocity) tuples, and outputs those in real-time.  Sift uses network packet properties to decide which MIDI command to use.  Each different host (identified by IP) has a different keyboard number.  The set of notes each host should play and the duration of a hosts notes can be defined in a configuration file.  Sift selects randomly from the specified set of notes and selects a duration within the specified range.  The velocity is a function of the TCP port of the network traffic.  

https://github.com/blucia0a/Network-Music/blob/master/Sift.pl

4) Streamy

Streamy is a multi-threaded C program that listens for output from Sift.pl, and plays our virtual MIDI keyboards in real time.

When it receives a message like:

1 60 1000000 127

It will play middle C (60) on keyboard 1, for a duration of 1000000 microseconds (1 second), and a MIDI velocity of 127 (MIDI velocity ranges from 1-127).
https://github.com/blucia0a/Network-Music/blob/master/Streamy.c

5) Rax

Rax is a program that allows us to wire up MIDI keyboards to software instrument patches. Apple’s MainStage does the same thing, as does Ableton Live, Logic Pro, etc.

Screenshot: http://cl.ly/1H2k361W3L2o43101B11

We basically just map our 6 virtual MIDI keyboards to software MIDI patches on our machine, and whenever Streamy “presses” a key on our virtual keyboards, Rax receives the MIDI message and plays a note.  Thanks, Rax!

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/rax/

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Jargon is a collective quartet focusing on original composition. On April 8th we will be presenting a set of of all original material at Cafe Racer. These compositions utilize melody, harmony, and form. Each serves as a parameter which we improvise within as soloists and as an ensemble.

Jargon is interested in exploring: 

1. The relationship between improvisation within the parameters of composition. How improvisation is dictated by the composition.
2. Improvisation occurs as a compositional tool.
3. Even when improvisation is void of harmony or meter, it still serves the composition.
4. To achieve absolute improvisational freedom within the parameter of composition.

One of our collective inclinations revolves around an affinity for the way improvisation exists over structured form. There is a unique effect when convergence and divergence occurs in improvisation over a form. ”Form,” being anything that exists as a harmonic or rhythmic structure or a composition. For the jam portion of the evening, we encourage the participants to improvise within the confinements of form or structure.

Examples of structure or form could be:

• “Note pools”- a select number of notes that create or define a composition.
• “Rhythmic structure”- Groove, an ostinato, repetition.
• “Cued structure”- cues in new chord changes, cues into altered feel changes, cues into _____
• “Foreshadowing”- Hinting at an idea or motif that will occur later.
• “Textural contrast”- Presto versus fermata, pianissimo versus fortissimo, velcro versus glue.
• A written composition (original, a standard, etc…)
• The possibilities are endless!!

Jargon::

Bryan Smith || Saxophone

Gregg Belisle- Chi || Guitar

Isaac Castillo || Bass

Max Wood || Drums

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“Cupid Boy”

By Kristian Garrard

*** Warning, get there early, the piece may or may not begin before 8pm, just so you know ;) ***

I decided not to focus on any one musical element or theme in composing this piece, rather I just went with intuition and let the elements fall into place. The piece is organized as a list of events with cues played by different members of the band, which advance the piece to the next section. Only a few of the movements are actually notated music, the rest is written out in plain english, eg: “horns swell in and out on polyphonic tones” etc etc. The rhythm section holds a single groove throughout most of the thing, until the end where, well, you’ll see what happens. 

The inspiration for the different elements of this piece are from a lot of places. I really like the sort of endless “Motorik” jams that Sonic Youth frequently does, so we’re chugging our way through the whole thing, creating sort of a rhythmic drone/trance vibe. Inspiration for the written segments of the piece come from a choral piece I’ve been really into lately, called “Apologetica”, by Daniel Lentz. It uses a beautiful system of harmonic movement that I can’t claim to understand, but I tried to sort of imitate it with the horn parts in my piece.

The band for this is:

• Ivan Arteaga - Clarinet & Alto Sax
• Andrew Swanson - Alto Sax
• Neil Welch - Tenor Sax
• Aaron Otheim - Keyboard
• Luke Bergman - Bass
• Clip Icasiano - Drums
• Kristian Garrard - Guitar
• Tape Deck - Drums