For this year's "Forskernatt" we traveled to the year of 2072, to get a taste of what's to come in 50 years. The event was led by a TIAGo robot, there was a panel, consisting of a physicist/computer scientists, molecular biologist and a philosopher, and some of the music was made or accompanied by artificial intelligence. This last part is where the Self-Playing Guitars came in, as they accompanied the protest musician Halden Electric, in performing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War".
For this iteration I used all six guitars which played different samples, whereas five of them sounds like guitars and one of them produces a more atmospheric type-of sound. Some of these samples are the same as I used for the Sonic Design Installation, back in May. Similar to that iteration, at Forskernatt the guitars also played different intervals in a pitch randomly selected between four predetermined pitches, which this time changed every 3 or 6 seconds. The chords used in "Masters of War" are D minor, C major and G major, and I wanted the Self-Playing Guitars to work within that tonality, as not to take too much attention away from the performance. To do this I had to tailor-make every patch specifically for each guitar-- so here's what I did:
The name at the top reflects the interval pitch, in which the guitars play. I.e. "G3" meaning minor third, "G4" meaning perfect fourth, and so on. "Gtxt" plays a sound with a bell-like texture, which plays a five-note arpeggio. The data in the chart reflects the four predetermined pitches that each guitar can play. The predetermined pitches are chosen to always, somewhat, fit together with the chord progression of "Masters of War". The guitar samples used are composed by Sebastian Fongen Langslet, and the textural bell-sounding sample is recorded by ?a?r? Erdem and produced and manipulated by Sebastian. The code, written in Pure Data, is written by Sebastian Fongen Langslet.