gestural sound composition for chef & enchanted kitchenette - 2015
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keywords:
perSonification, audio-mosaicing, dirty-tangible interfaces(1), material-computation, haptic-acoustic transcoding, indeterminacy, distributed agency

instrumentation:
- eggplant, onion, carrot, knife, cutting board - audio-mosaicing on signals from contact mic

scene description:
Carrot is chopped and audio-mosaicked with drum and - synth snippets.

notes on audio-mosaicing:
By audio-mosaicing signals from a contact mic it is possible to detect various haptic-acoustic gestural nuances such as scratching, touching, banging, rubbing and then finely map these nuances to any sonic palate in a continuous manner. For example, when a cutting board is mapped to speech, scratches on the board could result in a sweep through noisy consonants while softer touches on the board result in vowels. It is therefore possible to use any found object and freely orchestrate it. In a way the composer’s software score takes on a material form (as orchestrated computational matter transmuted gesturally) and can be enacted with the performers’ contingent nuance. 

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1- Dirty Tangible Interfaces (DIRTI) are a new concept in interaction design that forgoes the dogma of repeatability in favor of a richer and more complex experience, constantly evolving, irreversible & infinitely modifiable.

1.2 Chop

This synaesthetic texture etude uses a concatenative synthesis technique known as audio-mosaicing to organize a multitude of microsounds into an evolving immersive soundscape. The textural tableau morphs the simple sound of sizzling oil into a thunderstorm leading to a downpour of bartok pizzicati and a tornado of known and ghostly sound objects gently colliding and shattering around the audience.

~ gestural sound composition for chef and enchanted kitchenette

keywords:
smell, rain, thunder, pizzicato, temporal texture, immersive soundscape, acousmatic, string quartet, synaesthesia

instrumentation:
- hot oil, smell, sauces and chicken
- utensils and pans as percussive nuance
- audio-mosaicing (sizzling sounds mapped to a massive library of pizzicato like sounds, starting from raindrops to pizzicati, Bartok-pizzicati, percussions, synthetic snippets and etc.)

8 Fry | gRain

gestural sound composition for chef and enchanted kitchenette
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keywords:
smell, microsound, minimal noise, textur etude, texture synthesis

instrumentation:
- onion and garlic in sizzling oil
- audio-mosaicing (texture synthesis: live sizzling mapped to various micro - sounds)
- real-time granular processing

scene:
gentle sizzling sounds of unions and garlic develop into an immersive atmosphere of sculpted noise from microsounds.
all action stops, the chef enjoys his drink of conic while the audience is softly immersed in silky noise.

9 Sizzle

keywords
Plunderphonics, Wagner, Symphonic Mash, Musical Gestures

instrumentation:
plunderphones, musical gestures

notes:
￼During this section I revisit older paradigms of gesture-sound synchronization. [ie. Charlie Chaplin’s barber scene where the barber is applying shaving cream with small rapid back and forth hand movements similar to the rapid short up and down bow strokes in the music.]

From a bed of transmission noises Richard Wagner’s first symphony surfaces as the chef starts serving the dish on a canvas. The symphony is deconstructed and plundered with many other Cmajor symphonies, and is eventually mashed against smooth jazz, reggae, techno-pop, and field recordings.
Using plunderphonic compositional techniques I was able to treat the chef’s ordinary gestures as a tempo-dynamic score and compose musical gestures for them leading to scenarios where the music unnaturally “follows” culinary gestures. For example, while pieces of the chicken are being placed on the canvas, each plundered orchestral hit is time stretched to synchronize with the length of each movement trajectory from the pan to the canvas (instead of asking the chef to speed up his actions to synchronize with each orchestral hit). So in a way the music was choreographed to Chef’s movements instead of the reverse which is usually the case.

11 serve | WagnerPhonics

Gestural Sound Composition for Chef and Enchanted Kitchenette
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keywords:
glitch, noise, music concrete, videomusic, infra sounds, synaesthesia

instrumentation:
- computationally augmented tools, appliances and ingredients 
- gesturally modulated audio-visual textures

scene:
as the chef mixes the last of the ingredients, seductive aromas immerse the audience. Computationally enriched ingredients fuse together to form a meal while glitches, atmospheres, drones, clicks and tones clash and develop into a thick immersive noise field.

10 gLitch

2016 - 12 - tokyoFog

2016 - 12 - tokyoFog - Akihabara Remix

2016 - 12 - HorizonFog - Akihabara Remix - Str

2016 - 12 - postMantraFog -calmMix- Str

horizogFog-melodicHole-test

2016 - 12 - ParticleFog - TEST2 - JP - NYE

Coat Cooke :: Saxophones
Rainer Wiens :: Prepared Guitar + Mbira
Navid Navab :: Real-time sound instruments (Max/MSP)

The fourth piece of the Insekt series; an improvised and spacious soundscape.

Electroacoustic Improvisation
Recorded Dec 6 2012 @ Matralab, Montreal
Post Production by NavidNavab.net

About the Insekt Series:
An ongoing series of pieces, Insekt is born out of the composer's aesthetic fascination with cognitive relations between density, sleep, thresholds of musical perception and background noise. Densely layered, and subtly crafted, these compositions offer simply too many details to one's perception and therefore result in fluid states of perception that undulate between deep listening and unconscious background noise subtraction. While creatively engaging with many sound events and extracting form from the dense wall of sound our cognition has a lazy tendency to simply shot itself off.

Cooke/Weins/Navab VII.ii insekt

Navid Navab is a Montreal based alkemist, composer/improvisor, programmer, and sound designer. A graduate of Ontario Royal Conservatory of Music, Concordia University’s Electroacoustics and Computational Arts program, and McGill Music Technology, he has been working for the past several years creating deeply expressive media instruments synthesizing research at IRCAM, CRIMMT, CNMAT, Topological Media Lab and Matralab. 

Interested in the poetics of gesture, and embodiment, his work explores the social lives of objects and the enrichment of their embedded performative qualities. Navid uses gestures, rhythms and vibrations from everyday life as basis for real-time sound generation, resulting in augmented acoustical-poetry that enchants improvisational and pedestrian movements. 

Navid has collaborated with many great improvisers and artists including Jean Derome, Constantinople Ensemble, Lori Freedman, Vinny Golia, Pierre Tanguay, Coat Cooke, Rainer Weins, Rohan de Saram, Mei Han, Lan Tung , Zata Omm Dance Project. His investigations, which range from compositions to responsive architecture, urban interventions, theatrical interactive installations, and improv-based performances, have been presented at various festivals and events in Vancouver, Austria, Canada, UK, California, Paris, Romania, Paris, New York, Houston, and Chicago. 

Navid

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