Guidance | Conducting an Orchestra with Voltage and Feedback Noise

video upload by Cinematic Laboratory

"I've been experimenting a lot this week and this video will focus on feedback patching, with two twists. It's not just circuit noise, I added a delay and a reverb to the chain. But more important, I added a ring modulator, modulated by a sinewave. So the feedback path is constantly flipping, cancelling waves or amplifying them. The idea is not mine, I got it from La Synthese Humaine who got the idea from Jaap Vink (synth & sonology pioneer, NL, 1970's) , linked in the video.

OK so it's mosty sculpted noise with no VCO and no frequency or pitch. I guess we can call it an atonal spectrum, a sum of sines that doesn't harmonize or add up to a note. Then I was wondering, what if we'd use a symphony orchestra to try and align with the tone/cluster, using the noise as a guide? In the early days, one would arrange a score for the orchestra to mimic frequency sweeps, and Xenakis made it a legendary technique using graphical scores. But this is the other way around. The source is my modular feedback exploration, so the score is voltage and audio. There are no notes, no scale, no 440 Hz concert pitch, so the orchestra would need to improvise and approximate whatever pitch is perceived. Will it be messy? Or will we always gravitate to order and balance? Spoiler. We'd do both.

How did I pull this off? I can't tell you. Not yet. Not now. And there's no 'best part' in this video. It's all good. Or all bad.

00:00 Introduction
02:30 Forbidden Planets again
06:00 'Guidance'"