Me, Adi and Camilla teamed up this week to build a virtual interactive museum exhibition explaining techno music. First, we analyzed some musical concepts defining the genre techno:
The central rhythmic component is most often in common time (4/4), where a single measure is divided into four beats marked by a bass drum on each quarter note pulse. Each beat can be further divided, with eighth notes dividing each quarter note in half and sixteenth notes dividing each quarter note into quarters. Famously called “four-on-the-floor,” the bass drum is the automated heartbeat or metronome around which all other sounds fall into place: a backbeat played by snare or clap on the second and fourth beats of the measure, and an open hi-hat sounding every second eighth note. The tempo tends to vary between approximately 120 to 150 beats per minute (bpm), depending on the style of techno. Techno focuses more on sophisticated rhythm and repetition (cross-rhythm, syncopation) than it does on melody or chord progression. The development is gradual where many sounds are layered and altered over time. All of these characteristics together create something automatically definable as techno.
Techno is a landscape. It’s a reaction and artistic statement about the actual automated world that we live in. It’s half machine & half human! Techno’s highly repetitive and mechanic rhythmic structure against human expressivity in sampling, modulating, remixing and looping shapes its unique art form.
From here, we identified three elements of modern techno music: 1. Repetition - “four on the floor” as the basic unit 2. Instruments being layered/omitted one by one over the course of a song 3. altering/modulating a sound texture gradually over time
With the elements in mind, we think the best way to explain how Techno music works is by deconstructing an existing techno song into individual instrument layers as the building blocks. We will have users rebuild their version of the track by adding and subtracting layers and playing with different combinations on top of the 4/4 rhythmic structure and give them expressive controls over multiple parameters that control certain layers.
Inspired by Valentina’s presentation with the different musicians for the fantasy Blues band, we came up with the idea to present different options for each of the elements, to give the user in our museum some feeling of agency of being able to choose their own sounds and controllers within the constraints of a techno infrastructure.
Our interface is inspired by the popular DAW Ableton Live's session view, but without the intimidating panels and knobs, reduced to the bare minimal core of triggering and stopping clips. Each instrument (in our case: a bass drum, multiple hi-hats, clicky percussion, rim, bass, brass hooks, pad drone, and a sequence) is a column of clips represented by blocks which are clickable for enabling and disabling. Since session view is non-linear, we decided to have a visual indicator to show where in the timeline the sound is out of 4/4 -- all following the bass drum as the heart of the song. Users will be able to modulate some parameters of certain instruments over time by dragging the sliders underneath the instrument columns. Some visual guide for the interface: https://www.are.na/adi-dahiya/techno-is-a-landscape
I started off by searching for stem files of existing techno tracks available for downloads so that I could have separate files for individual instruments. And I found Solace by Pan-Pot a good example of a techno song that can be used. So I opened up the files in Ableton and reduced each instrument track into its smallest unit and exported all the clips to be mapped into buttons on P5(sketch). I uploaded all the clips onto P5 and had all the percussive instruments looped every measure with Tone.Event. However I was having some trouble with instrument clips when looping them with Tone.Event, as since instrument clips are much longer 10-30m per loop. the clips don't start or stop until the current loop has ended, i.e. if a button is pressed at a random time, instead of loop starting/stopping at the following measure, it would start/stop until the beginning of next loop, which takes a long time. So I decided not to use Tone.Event, and just have the button control the start() and stop() or the Tone.Player, however, the clips would be out of sync with the percussive clips. I did some research and found that I can sync Tone.Player to TransportTime with sync(). The clips would still start/stop at an arbitrary time at mouseClick but I fixed it by adding the transport time of the next measure to start(), so that no matter when the user turns on the clips, they will still be in place with one another. Although I found the process of splitting Tone.Transport.position to get the measure and switching back and forth between a number and a string was a little tedious, I haven't figured out a better way to achieve enabling/disabling a long looping clip at the start of next measure.
Another big challenge for this project was to figure out the best modulating parameters for the instrument track. When listening to the original clip, it was very noticeable that certain parameters of the sound (high pass filter frequency? Resonance?) have been changed over time, when I tried to recreate that modulating effect using Tone, it was hard to pinpoint which effects were being used or which parameters were being altered. It seemed a little overwhelming because there are tons of parameters that I could experiment with and tons of variables, value ranges I could test with.
Ultimately, for a museum environment, we imagine that our installation could be shown as it is now, on a screen, for the user to play with using headphones or speakers with instructions popping up from time to time to prompt users to enable or modulate clips, similar to this Jazz Computer project. This is to suggest users what could be a proper progression of a techno song, but it's up to them to follow the instruction or not. Alternatively, it could be installed in a more immersive environment, such as in a room with surround sound, featuring tactile buttons that would trigger each sound with visual feedback on the walls around the user, which would line up with the instruments they have selected and where they are in the timeline.