Meeting with Hugh

This morning I met with Hugh McCarthy from the Cork School of Music. We discussed my idea and he helped me a lot with the back end of the project. He introduced me to a server based software program called Flosc which will handle the sending and receiving of the drum samples/clips using the Flash XML socket function. Because I've never heard of this software before I don't understand the ins and outs of how it works. Thankfully though, Hugh is well used to it and so he can explain it very well.

After we looked at the coding side of things Hugh brought me down to the Electronic Music room. This is where they keep all their electric + MIDI instruments: drums, keyboard, guitar etc. He showed me the different resources that were available for my use and pointed out which instruments would work for each part of my project. Using digital instruments affords perfect accuracy and therefore optimum flexibility for the end user.

I'll be meeting with Hugh again at the same time next week. In the meantime, I'm going to make a start on a basic working model of the Flash interface so that we can move onto the back end code next week.

Project Proposal - Groove Culture

Intro

Music is a vital part of any culture. Wherever you see a unique and distinct culture, you are likely to find an equally unique and distinct musical style. Where language can become a barrier in cultural rapprochement, music provides us with an effective and simple way to communicate - whatever our culture.

Background

The idea of combining different world rhythms in order to highlight multiculturalism is nothing new. Drum circles are a common example of this where groups of people play layered percussion pieces together for team building or educational purposes. What I’m proposing to do is to develop an online interactive rhythm platform called Groove Culture where users can mix and play around with different world rhythms themselves allowing them to discover the different cultures through this medium. This approach does not exist already.

Aim

To highlight cultural rapprochement by making an interactive rhythmic piece which incorporates rhythms from major world cultures.

Objectives

My objectives are:

Week 4 - 8

Research and collate suitable major world rhythms.

Research and utilize the Cork School of Music’s music technology resources.

Capture/create appropriate sound clips to use in the piece.

begin to develop the Flash environment for the piece.

Week 9-12

Keep the project as interactive and as simple as possible.

Further develop the Flash structure/framework for the piece until satisfactory interactivity has been achieved.

User test the piece and make relevant adjustments

Overall

Be flexible in my approach and technique.

RhythmCulture.com

Rhythm Culture is a company that facilitates 'rhythm events for communities, organizations, youth groups, schools and businesses nationwide' using 'unifying world rhythms'. This is a good example of the many Drum circle companies that are out there that use world rhythms as team building exercises. No interactive content present as the site is simply brochureware.

Drum Circles

R+C Label

A DC based label who combine multicultural styles to make new, fresh music. No interactive content but I wasn't expecting to find any because they're a music label.

Rhythm and Culture

Meeting with Hugh from CSM

Today I met with Hugh McCarthy from the Cork School of Music in CIT. Although I didn't have long to talk to him I explained my idea to him. He asked me to email him (which I did) in order to arrange a time to meet up and develop the idea further. The technology at CSM is above and beyond what I need so I'm looking forward to getting into it. I also think that Hugh's feedback will help greatly in the construction and development of my final piece.

Seeing what's out there...

Here are some of the interactive drum loop/sampling flash programs that are out there. The level of interactivity is minimal and terribly slow and frustrating to use. I'm still trying find a modern, more media rich version of these sort of things. Apart from paid drum looping software (eg fruity loops), there is nothing of note out there that I can find. The two examples below are just a small selection. Also, none of these allow layering of beats or sounds.

There is a whole library of these flash retro drum machines, but here are two examples:
Example 1, Example 2.

Reasearch at the moment is mainly just sifting through pages and pages of terrible content but I don't want to go ahead and design something that's already out there.