117934~ Live Granular Engine

117934~ is an experiment to extract new sounds from a classical upright piano via sound manipulation. The audience is presented with a composition of familiar listening habits and newly created sounds. The sound of the piano is picked up by a self-built 32-pin single-coil pick-up and two microphones. The hole audio manipulation process via granular-synthesis is done in a especially developed piece of Max software.

The work is focused on the development of this software to edit live-recorded sound material in real-time. The Max-based program allows the access of the latest 12 seconds of played audio. With the help of a gesture recognition sensor it is possible to choose any sector of this sequence and let it repeat endlessly. The chosen sector gets buffered and can be manipulated by granular-synthesis in real-time. The program flow and parametrization of the granular-synthesis is visualized by a Graphical User Interface developed in Max and is controlled by a foot-controller.