Matthew M. Conroy's blog

I just released a new video piece. I called it INK because there's a lot of ink in the video and "Ink" looks so small. Sounds composed with Csound using a python script I wrote to analyze the individual frames of the video. A big screen is recommended (I use the Vimeo app on an Apple TV to watch my videos on my television).

INK from Matthew Conroy on Vimeo.

I finished my EP for the RPM Challenge 2024.

I had a lot of fun with it: I think I had more time to spend on it this month than in many recent Februaries.

I put it on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. Let me know what you think!

A piece for Disquiet Junto 0607 .

My thoughts went like this.

We cannot be 40% silent at a single point in time, so we have to define the amount of silence at a point in terms of the sound that is happening around that point. I chose to define the percentage of silence at a point in time as the percentage of silence (time with zero amplitude) in a 14 second interval centered at that point in time.

Also, it seems to me that we do not actually hear silence unless it is of sufficient length (e.g., we do not hear “silence” when there is a 0.001 second gap in a sound). For this piece, I defined silence to be an interval of at least 0.5 seconds of zero amplitude. I could see an argument for requiring longer gaps than this, though, since with short “silences”, I feel that we are still hearing the sound that came before it, and not actually hearing the silence.

So then I randomly threw 25000 sound events onto a 5 minute span of silence, checking before each one that the percentage of sound at that point would not go above that required by the instructions (i.e., a linear increase from 0 to 40% sound at the midpoint and linearly back to zero for the second half).

The sound events are guitar samples I’ve made, pitched and filtered in various ways. There are many points where the samples “pile up” and make a noticeably louder occurrence; this happens because once a sound has been placed, another sound can be placed “on top” of it, with no reduction in the amount of silence.

It was fun coding this, and I’ve grown to like the result after numerous tweeks and re-listens.

More composing using recursion. There are a lot of things to try with this method!

For Disquiet Junto 601, I threw a die in my bathtub and recorded the throws with an AT822 stereo microphone (through a Zoom H5) that I bought (used) years ago but had never used (I’m not really much of a microphone person). Then, using Csound, I placed copies of each recording across about 3.5 minutes, with various densities, filtering, playback speeds and amplitudes. The rolls determined for how much of the piece each recording appears: the rolls were 3,5,6,5,6,3, so the 6 rolls appear throughout, the 5’s appear up to 5/6 of the piece and the 3’s cut off at the half-way point.

More info on Disquiet Junto 601: Disquiet Junto 0601

Trying a new approach to using recursion for composing. Here, each sound event triggers up to two additional sound events, each a function of the triggering event.

Video I made for the Edmonton Noisefest 2022.

Particles move according to various, changing rules. Each particle makes its own sound based on its circumstances.

New video made for BEAMS Western Canada Drone Day Celebration, May 28, 2022.

Particles move around, edges connect nearest neighbors (and almost nearest neighbors). Sound determined by edges, including the number of connected components of the resulting graph.