Liki, the 2009 creation of the PulX collective, will receive a good blow of varnish before embarking you on its journey…
Residency from November 29 till December 10
Show on December 9 and 10, at 7 pm, in The Chapel Gely (Figuerolles, Montpelier, France)

Here are some excerpts:

Pulx is now playing Liki, its new performance associating dance, photographs, and music. After o espaço do tempo in Montemor-O-Novo (Portugal) and Uzès danse (France) in June, Pulx will present Liki in Berlin very soon: the 26 August 2009, (8 pm) at the Podewil theatre, for the Tanz im August festival. A body, pictures, s0undb1ts and sounds for a travel of 30 minutes.

At La Chartreuse, for the first time s0undbits has been installed in a theatre. The webs have been spanned out under the ceiling just below the lights.

Little by little, the sound gets organized in space and time. Here is an ORTF recording of some current ideas:

The new s0undb1ts specific software is an extension of the FTM & Co Gabor library by a special s0undb1ts overlap-add module (actually overlap-bitwise-xor) allowing the assignment of each sound grain to one of the 1-bit outputs. Now, s0undb1ts sound and structure generators can be written using FTM & Co and the granular synthesis paradigms provided by Gabor.

After having discovered and further studied the amazing efficiency of particular sounds produced by birds, Norbert started to experiment with sweep generators. As a result of these experiments we managed to reproduce the essence of the gestalt of these bird sounds with pitch and timbre modulated 1-bit grains. An ad-hoc recording of a test run with the fist 48-s0undb1Its prototype installation has been uploaded here:

The rhythm of the sweeps in this example are generated by random generators using customized probability density functions.

The sweeps add a further set of timbres to the s0undb1ts sound palette (joining all kinds of noise, clicks and buzzes).

For controlling the assignment of sounds to the speaker matrix in real-time with a graphic tablet, Jean-Philippe uses an FTM & Co k-nearest neighbor (KNN) module, mnm.knn. This method allows for the flexible setup of the actual matrix geometry and  multiple subsets of speakers (above stage and audience, different types of piezos, etc.).

• #4 is made of two plates (push-pull) producing some low frequencies (300 Hz) at a decent level
• #18 is the most flat and is a good complement to #4
• #16 is sharp and tiny, and a good complement to #18
• #24 is the original with a membrane

The recordings are all in the following sequence: #24, #18, #24, #18 + #16, #24, #4, #24, #18 + #16 + #4, 24.

First we are using some paper around the two plates (#4) to whitened it and to protect the connections. When the paper is firmly attached to the plates, the resulting spectrum is wide.	Here we are putting the plates into a plastic cup, to empower the low frequencies. But this is fragile and the resonance is very present, as here on the recordings.

The sounds and spectrograms below correspond to a series of of 1-bit test sounds played through different piezos and recorded from about 1m.

Each sound is played successively through 24 different speakers (not always starting from the first, the 6th missing sometimes, but always counting to 24).

White Noise

Clicks

Sweeps

Birds

Other Birds

S0UNDB1TS was originally created in 2002 at IRCAM for a sound installation project by Robin Minard at the Inventionen festival in Berlin.

Sound installations based on S0UNDB1TS have been shown in Berlin, Paris and Geneva. 

Finally, beginning of 2009, after many years of silence we are getting back to this project driven by Jean-Philippe Lambert and Roland Cahen.

The plan is to first update the S0UNDB1TS software to Max/MSP and to revise the hardware before heading out for new S0UNDB1TS adventures…