A Recent Piece performance “Hui-Mo-Ri” for a new instrument+Live Electronics

By JyKang in Ji's, [EA]ComputerMusic 0 Comment

I haven’t taken care so much for few months of my blog, but I am happy to come back with this new video recording of my new piece, “Hui-Mo-Ri.”

The instrument was built by a friend of mine Wenchin. She’s a performer/artist, and this is the first instrument she has  ever built. Due to its complications that all the woods should have holes and metal strings/motors should be attached to them, and so on, it is quite fragile, but it worked at the performance. 🙂

The instrument itself should vibrate itself by the motor, but the connection was not strongly attached enough to do so. So the live electronics was quite essential. There are two microphones attached (a DPA and a Piezo) underneath the spinning wooden plates, and under the metal plate in the middles, there is a transducer that is supposed to create a feedback with the body.

I gave some additions to this: two sticks with the contact microphone attached. Those two sticks include metal pins and iron strings too that can interact well with the feedback.

Mainly you cannot hear the original ‘instrument’ sound there. I gave all additional processing with electronics. All are realtime processing programmed on SuperCollider(of course).

I was quite happy with the sound results and the structure. There is no very detailed score, but the entire structure that I composed.

In this première of the piece, I am playing with the percussionist MeiYi Lee, my dearest friend and we make a number of performance together as a duo.

Oh, and ‘Hui-Mo-Ri’ is one of the traditional Korean Rhythm structure, that is supposedly the fastest in tempo. It also means ‘blowing all together’ as a strong wind would possibly do.

I hope you enjoy.

**people who is around Utrecht in the Netherlands at 8th of Feb, This piece will be played by Sonolab Duo at RASA. Here’s the info.

Recording of ‘Jing’ for Jing and Computer

By JyKang in Ji's, SuperCollider 0 Comment

Here I would like to share one of my pieces called ‘Jing.’

This was composed in 2010, quite challenged piece, and I worked together with the percussionist ‘Mei-Yi Lee.’

Everything was written on score (sample below) and the live electronics was done with SuperCollider.

The recording was made with two microphones, (Thanks to Kassen and Rob) and it was very challenging due to the characteristics of the instruments and how the composition itself was aimed. More specifically, the range of the dynamic goes from Zero to .. I don’t know.. easily up to 120 db. I was having a hard time when I was right beside the instrument in order not to change my facial expression because it was just really really loud.

We needed to record several times because of this, avoiding clipping, and very small editing was involved because of the soft parts.

Of course live music should be heard in live for sure. But it was a happy moment when we finally managed to finish this recording, and now I can share with many more people.

Oh, by the way, Jing is a Korean percussion that is used in many other occasions especially in rituals. It has both a very gentle warm, embracing base sound to very hard crazy complex noise. So that I wanted to show all the character, and the percussionist is shown as he/she is communicating and triggering it. So in the piece, Jing is answering, expressing, angry, and so on. It has its own personality. Electronics is used for this conversation and also help to create what moods it is going to be.

I hope anyone who reads this can enjoy the piece. Thanks!

Adios 2011 !

By JyKang in Ji's 0 Comment

After finishing my final concert of the year 2 weeks ago, I finally had some time to organize my computer, configure the working enviroment, renew my blog. and study many different things!

The first thing that I wanted to study is VIM in order to get used to it more and more and be comfortable when programming. My final goal will probably be to make my osx Lion into Linux. But so far there are too many issues to solve in order to do that, such as to find a nice soundcard that I can work on both systems.

Well, anyway, I was not so close to terminal for instance. Few years ago, when my friend was telling me that some of the people are checking their email on terminal, I was baffled by it. Who knew if I would do that.. So, I was digging into the possibility and found ‘Mutt.’

Mutt

It took a while to configure everything. The main issue was to use both Gmail and Hotmail, and to make it possible to read RSS feed. Due to many helps in google search, anyway, I am now using it.

Another big change is to use Midnight Commander instead of Finder as the window manager.Midnight Commander

The main issue for me on Lion was of course its usage of memory, but above all, I dislike this closed format that I cannot change anything, cannot watch the hidden files well, and without mouse, is hard to be flexible in use, and the amount of finder windows that I need to deal with.

Of course at the beginning, I was very much struggling with all shortcuts. But the best way to get used to it is to use lots and lots. and now, I feel pretty much comfortable.

 In order not to use finder (turn it off), I turn on ‘Path Finder’ when I log in to my system. Path finder has an option to ‘kill’ the finder without any harm on system. Then I turn it off, and turn on iTerm2, the replacement for osx Ternimal.

The black background, together with this new blog design, is due to the condition of my eyes. According to what doctor says, I have a brighter sight than others. So that I feel tired easily. Black background feels always comfortable to me. Also, in finder this is totally impossible.

Well, then I fixed this blog. I was using ‘Textyle,’ one of the blog environments from Korea, and it was way to slow. I really wanted to change it into WordPress but didn’t want to blow away the whole posts that I have written for 10 years. Yes!! Next year will be 10 years birthday of my blog. That became a motivation, and at the same time, I found a nice converter that a Korean programmer developed. Thanks to him, here I am.

Yes. time goes by. I am quite surprised that I have been running this blog for 10 years. But quite embarrassed by the content. Since I am developing myself, as I have been aiming to share what I have and think, I would like to make more efforts on running the blog. To post nice contents, first I need to study more though. 🙂

Happy that some of the missions have done. Personally I had a difficult year; finishing my study, hit by motorbike, and trying to stay in the Netherlands, etc etc.

But this moment that I am saying good bye to the year 2011, I am sure that next year it will be very much fruitful, and I go for it.

I never knew how much people are actually enjoying my posts. But whoever reads this, Merry christmas and Happy new year!

oh, and someday, I will get back to the subject of configuring Mutt and MC.