Stop Making Sense – The voice: Synthesis and sampling (plus a little intro to TouchOSC)

Join this 1-day workshop with Kaj Duncan David at Sound Art Lab in Struer. Here, Kaj will share some of the background of his current work, with a focus on vocal performance with sampled, synthesized and live-produced synthetic voices (talkbox and vocoder). Together we will look at his setup and talk about some basic techniques, both contemporary and historical, for playing with synthetic voices.

In the second half of the workshop you will get the opportunity to make some small compositions/performances using sampled and synthetic voices and self-built software MIDI controllers. These we will make in TouchOSC, a nice small piece of modular software that runs on phones, tablets and computers and can communicate over WiFI with other devices on the network. It’s cheap and offers exciting ways of creating custom interactive interfaces and controllers that can help streamline your workflow and to create elegant ways of controlling your setup during a performance.

Kaj Duncan David is a composer and performer of electronic music living in Berlin. His varied compositional practice is rooted in computer music production techniques. Many of his scored pieces are minimalist explorations of gestalt relations between sound and light in concert settings, involving musical interconnection between instrumental performance and light/video. In larger theatre/music projects he explores themes at the meeting point between speculative philosophies and science fiction. He also makes music and designs sound for dance performances. Sometimes elements from all these undertakings end up in an album like ‘All Culture is Dissolving’. For more info: www.kajduncandavid.com

The workshop is a part of the project Sounds of The Future, which is supported by Region Midtjylland’s Cultural Development Pool, a collaboration between Sound Art Lab and SPOR Festival.