Vagues/Ondes (2011)

Vagues/Ondes (2011)

This piece was presented in a live performance at EMS 2011 in New York City. The audio is based on hydrophone recordings of waves washing on Duxbury Beach in Duxbury, MA, USA. The portion you see in the example presented here is an excerpt of a pre-recorded audio-video piece, which accompanied with additional live audio based on the same hydrophone recordings.

I wanted to create a video piece that reacted directly to the cyclical events of the waves heard in the hydrophone recording. I wanted to visual part of the piece to represent the rising and falling intensities of the wave events, as well as the complexity of their sound.

The visual music for this piece, as well as the other two examples, was created using VDMX, a modular platform for live video performance developed for Macintosh OS X by Vidvox. VDMX is capable of taking audio input, analyzing the frequency and intensity content of that input in realtime, and generating control data from the intensity levels of several user-determined frequency bands.

I chose to analyze 4 frequency bands for each piece (different bands for each piece), and to coordinate the resulting control data to the red (R), green (G), blue (B), and Alpha channels of a gradient video synthesizer built into VDMX. I also applied delays to the R/G/B/Alpha channels to slow their rate of change somewhat, so their changes would be rendered more visibly, if less accurately. My intentions were inspired by data visualization, though the works are not intended to be a strictly accurate representation.

Music for Dance or Movement

Music For Dance or Movement (2011) is a piece I originally developed not for dance but for modular audio/video synthesizer. The title suggested itself by the piece’s character of constant, elaborate motion, as well as by its audio source material: a recording of zills, the finger cymbals used in belly dancing and other Middle Eastern dance forms. I plan to create future versions of this piece in collaboration with one or more movement artists (possibly belly dancers).

I created the piece using a handmade analog synthesizer from Flower Electronics and a Eurorack-based modular hybrid audio/video synthesizer of my own design. I drew additional audio material from the aforementioned zills as well as a set of children’s toy handbells. The video source was a small security camera aimed out the window, down to a darkened street in Boston’s Fort Point. The audio and video processing was controlled entirely by control voltage, and the two synthesizers passed control signals between each other.

Here is a video clip of the first performance, where you can see a portion of the live video being generated.

Here is the complete audio, recorded directly from the board onto a Sony PCM-M10.

First Disappearance (excerpt) from Mild Disappearances

Mild Disappearances (2011) is a suite of two pieces created using analog synthesizer, field recordings, contrabass, and digital post-production. It was released as a CD in 2011 by Songs From Under the Floorboards. I created video for the music using VDMX and location video clips. This clip was also featured on the shadowselves website.

Score: “Intuition Triggers”

Intuition Triggers 1 for improvising solo contrabass – Performance Notes
by Mike Bullock

Each name on the score represents an artist whose solo instrumental work represents a significant influence on the composer’s own solo work. Other performers may substitute names of their own choosing prior to the performance. The names are abbreviated to keep their significance on an informal level.

The performer should allow his/her eye to move intuitively over the score, concentrating on the various connections among the names more than the specific names themselves. The drawn connections suggest varying fields of gravity exerted by the names, and the performer should allow those gravity fields to pull his/her improvisation in various directions. When the eye settles on a certain connection (real or imagined), the performer should restrict his/her playing to this area. Once this area is done, there should be a brief pause before intuitively following the next connection.

The idea is to externalize certain major influences and offload some of the mental process of structuring these influences for the sake of clarity.

The full names belong to the following composers:

John Lely
Erik Satie
Iancu Dumitrescu
Iannis Xenakis
Morton Feldman
Oren Ambarchi
Greg Kelley

contact me

michaeltbullock at gmail dot com

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Performance: instruments, engagement, practice

I perform music and visuals using a variety of analog, digital, and acoustic media. Since 1995, my performance practice has been centered around improvisation. In the sound realm, I play contrabass; modular synthesizer; software platforms including Max/MSP, Ableton Live, and SuperCollider; and variety of handmade sound objects and modified string instruments such as banjo. For live visuals, I use a hybrid video/audio modular synth and VDMX video performance software.

I have always found improvisation to be the most productive zone for me in my artistic practice; I use improvisation at various stages of the creative process, and complement it with process-oriented actions, phonographic/videographic investigations, and indeterminacy.

My long personal history of live performance informs the rest of my body of work as well, whether it be my drawings about (or made with) sounding objects, my installations with performative aspects, or my writings about non-standard performance practices.

PhD dissertation: “The Kind of Music We Play”

My doctoral dissertation, “‘The Kind of Music We Play’: A Study of Self-Idiomatic Improvised Music and Musicians in Boston,” is available on the website of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Folsom Library. Users may download and share copies with attribution in accordance with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. This version is complete and includes audio and video samples as well as graphics and images.

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