IXI QUARKS – by Thor Magnusson
IXI Quarks – A software based live production tool for generating or manipulating sound either from IXI’s preloaded sound banks of from your own sample sources. Samples/Loops can be manipulated easily slowed down, sped up, cut and reworked. Its is easy to use a IXI Quarks as an instrument using the pre-installed VST’s available.
The Quanoon VST, a string sounding instrument played simply by clicking on the lines that look like strings. Each possible note that you can play is designed, so that it will be in key with the next so effectively you cant make a mistake. The scale can be chosen at the bottom as with most of the IXI VST’s you have many to choose from. In a group composition you would make sure you are all in the same key.
IXI has an internal record feature known as Recorder, when activated it begins saving the sound you create as mp3′s.
IXI also has internal audio effects so it easy to rework sounds from external sources including the sound you create within IXI, quickly and smoothly.
Group Composition No.1 using IXI Quarks.
Looking at what the other groups performed. I was particularly excited by the fusion of such a diverse array of sounds. Some created vast open soundscapes with inspiring texture and manipulated characteristics some created short sharp sounds backed by long open pads..
I liked the way some groups used different frequencies of White Noise Hi and Low, long and short.
Our group concentrated on the notes themselves and sounds that were harmonious to one another we implemented pre-made drum samples and manipulated the tempo how we wanted.
One of the groups used a Drum sample much like ours as a platform that each musician could latch on to this was good but made the piece lose its experimental and improvised feel. What we did well and why I feel our group was better is that we manipulated the tempo and therefore the pitch of the drum loop creating an interesting metronome for the rest of the group to follow.
If we did this exercise again, I would like to start making our own interesting sounds or at least source some that don’t have any rhythmic content and manipulate them until they do, we could have created our own rhythmic feel using our own sounds like impulse clicks or short klang and bell sounds in the Gridder Vst.
Another area of Laptop musicianship that I want to look into when improvising within a group is the XY axis controlled synth sound that you can create in SuperCollider this would allow for the Mouse or even touch pads like the Iphone as a means of manipulating sound further and could have some very interesting results.
Group Composition No.2+3 using IXI Quarks.
We were asked to re-perform our IXI Quarks composition pieces in our groups using all the different things we had learnt from previous lectures i.e. knowing when to make sound and when not to, how to follow react to each other and improvise in harmony.
My group consisted of 4 members Sammy Vear, Eliot Finch, Kaleigh Luker and myself.
Myself, Sammy and Kaliegh used synthesizers and Eliot one of the IXI Samplers.
Sammy used the Scalesynth a grid type Vst where you can click on individual squares to play a sound you can also drag across the grid to play many notes one after the next smoothly but for this composition Sammy used the drone effect at the bottom which we found created an interesting atmospheric pad like sound which she used effectively to create the buildup in the piece.
Scalesynth:
Eliot used the SoundScratcher to produce short granulated sounds taken from a sample source. using the Soundscatcher he was able to select which part of the sample waveform he wanted to replay and could choose how fast it play back as well the pitch so he could attempt to fit in with the rest of the group with some kind of harmonic content.
SoundScratcher:
Kaleigh made use of a randomised synthe instrument called Predator. Predator gives you screen with a number of dots known as prey on the screen you can add as many prey as you like and as soon as you press the start button at the bottom of the synthe a number of predators come onto the screen, starting with 3, you can add as many as you like from there on. The predators move around the screen attacking the prey, each time a single note is triggered the sound of the note can be chosen at the bottom but in our case Kaleigh used the Sine wave sound. You can control how aggressive the predators are on a scale of 1-100 the closer to 100 the more notes you’ll hear triggering as the predators attack faster and faster although unfortunately you have no control over the timing so it is hard instrument to improvise with.
I made use of the Gridder synthe it works in a similar way to Predator where by it plays different pitches of sound at random but you have slightly more control over when it plays which I found was good for staying in time with the rest of the group. In the picture below you can see a Grid with one Yellow dot in it. The yellow dot moves around the grid playing a note at a time the speed can be controlled and more dots can be added like the Predator, in this case I stuck with one. In the first part of the composition I used an Impulse sound to create a clicking beat that I then used to build up the atmoshere increasing the speed at which each click triggered following the progression of Sammy’s drone sound abruptly stopping it when I reached a maximum speed. I then changed the sound to that of a Bell and triggered it at irregular but appropriate intervals adding to the compostion.
Gridder:
We each recorded our different parts using the Recorder feature, so we could easily load our different parts in a Logic composition. As seen below:
Then using Surround Sound mixing we panned each our different parts to channel 1-4 front left and right, back left and right so each our parts could be heard separately through individual speaker points in our Lecture hall.
The following image shows how logic allows us to choose the location of a sound, the blue dot represents the sound:
If we were to do this exercise again I’d like to look into more ways of using the Gridder tool to trigger a wider variety of sample sounds so that we could create more diverse soundscape and in way that allowed for constant change through out. I’d like to make the as unpredictable as possible. Pushing for a more creative improvised group exercise. I’d also like to remove the random parts, for instance Kaleigh’s Predator synthe did not have much structure and in a way ruined the flow of the piece, the random sounds didn’t follow any particular pattern and messed with the build up that Eliot and Sammy did so well to create. Beside this I felt the group worked well together and I look forward to doing more group compositions in the future.
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