I was in Wired magazine last week:

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/multimedia/2009/03/gallery_instruments?slide=22&slideView=3

Things seem to be moving forward with the music I'm working on at the moment.

http://www.gregkellum.com/media/see_you_in_the_halflight_p1-2.mp3

I had been trying to figure out how to create a low bass drone a bit like the one in NIN's "Something I Can Never Have". I was playing with some samples of rubbed glass and found that you get something really nice if you passed them through a waveshaper and then a low pass filter...

I was also experimenting with different ways to manipulate bell samples and what's worked so far for this piece has been using the spectral delay from RTCmix, the GrainStream effect from Hipno, and morphing bells together with the babbling of overlaid voices...

I've been working lately on a piece about a girl who I had recurring dreams about. The dreams went on for quite a while, and sometimes, they were blissful and at othertimes upsetting. I've been trying to capture all of the different moods of these dreams in one piece, and at the moment I'm working on a part that's supposed to sound reverential. Here's a piece of it:

http://www.gregkellum.com/media/half_light_v4_bit.mp3

There was a passage in Rilke's Elegies where he writes something along the lines of "beauty is a terror which we can still sustain because it disdains to destroy us." I've been trying to capture the mood of terror inspiring beauty in this piece. I've been concentrating on the memory of the feeling of my heart when it's beating violently in my chest and finding the music which flows naturally from this state. But it's been difficult to conjure up this feeling and the corresponding music, and everything I've done so far hasn't sounded particularly like these vague musical thoughts which come and go...

I've been experimenting with different looping algorithms for use with sinusoidal modeling synthesis. Typically, when one develops this kind of a synthesizer, one has separate sound files for the attack portion and the steady state portion of a sound, and the file for the steady state portion, i.e. the part that will be looped, is played very carefully so that it has a constant amplitude, pitch, brightness, and so on, because this makes the loop seamless. I had been hoping to get around the constraint that the sound material had to be carefully performed by analyzing the sound file and automatically identifying good loop points. So, I compared all the frames in a test sound file with the earth mover's algorithm, and I chose those frames with the smallest earth movers distance as loop points. I honestly must say though that I'm a bit disappointed with the results, because the loop points are still audible. Here's a sample:

http://www.gregkellum.com/temp/a4_multipleloops.mp3

So, I made a recording of a sound file that was generated by my synthesizer, and I uploaded it to:

http://www.gregkellum.com/temp/ebowsynth_20070730.mp3

It doesn't sound so great at the moment. I still have a lot of work to do...

I tried connecting the synthesizer this weekend to a pitch tracker. It worked but it stuttered like crazy... Somehow, I'm going to have to find a way to cut the CPU usage in half...