NYU People, Friends, & Laptops
Live performance: 07 Jun 2005 -- 20:00
Presented by: RichardLainhart
Public: Free
Frederick Loewe Theater 35 West 4th Street (corner of W. 4th and Greene)
New York -- NY
http://www.laptopsounds.org/events/0607.nyu.html

Music with laptops, composed, performed, and improvised, by a group of musicians associated in different ways with the NYU Music Technology program, among them Dinu Ghezzo, Tom Beyer, Robert Rowe, Langdon Crawford, Benjamin Chadabe, Richard Lainhart, and Steven Miller. This concert is an event in Hip Chips, EMF's worldwide laptop festival.

Richard Lainhart will be performing "One Word," a new performance piece for the Kyma System, using external MIDI faders to control the harmonics of a just-tuned chord generated by the Kyma in realtime. The Kyma's output is furthered modified by DSP processes running on the PowerBook.

Discussion (Eyewitness reports, descriptions, discussion):

You can hear an excerpt from NYU People, Friends, and Laptops, a live performance at New York University's Frederick Loewe Theater on June 7, 2005 at http://www.otownmedia.com/one_sound.htm. Performed as one continuous set featuring Langdon Crawford on Theremin controller, Ben Chadabe on percussion, and Richard Lainhart on PowerBook and Kyma, it's actually three different pieces. At about 4 minutes, Crawford leaves the stage, and Lainhart comes on to perform Interplay with Chadabe, processing his bowed cymbals with the PowerBook. At about 11 minutes, Chadabe leaves the stage, and Lainhart continues with One Word, a new piece for PowerBook and Kyma in which external MIDI faders are used to control the harmonics of a just-tuned chord generated by Kyma in real time.

NYU concert went very well - the concert was well attended, my Kyma piece sounded great in the space, and it was well received by the audience. The photo is by Joel Chadabe.

In it, you can see the Capybara in its rack in the foreground, with a MOTU 896 HD above it. Behind me is Ben Chadabe with his cymbals and mics - we patched the mics into the MOTU for preamplification and processing in the PowerBook for our improv, from which I segued into my solo Kyma piece. The PowerBook is barely visible under my left hand; my right hand is on a J.L. Cooper CS-32 MiniDesk, which has 32 MIDI faders in a very compact form. In this piece, I use it to directly control the amplitudes of 30 sine waves which constitute the first 10 partials of 55 Hz, 82.5 Hz, and 137.5 Hz - an A Major chord in just intonation. The output of the Capybara goes back into the PowerBook for processing with delay and reverb plugins, and out from there through the MOTU. I plan to continue working with this setup and creating a number of pieces based on the same idea, but with different chords and tunings.

-- RichardLainhart - 13 Jun 2005