Thoughts and Insights on Engineering a Sonic Fractal Matrix: Onyx Ashanti at TEDxBerlinSalon

hi you can't even imagine how infuriating it must be to book me because they you know we had a meeting and they're like oh whoa what you gonna talk about I'm like I don't know I don't know it changes this is the state of of this kind of exploration with this system this system is something that I've been working on for a couple of years I've been doing a lot of stuff over the last few years but at first the whole purpose was to have something that was like a wind controller which is a digital version of a saxophone right so you play it like this but I wanted something where I could do my hands like this right and at the time that was what I wanted that was what I thought would be the pinnacle of what I could create musically but then over time it stopped being about the music oh there it is it stopped being about music it became about expression an expression our vectors that go out in their own directions depending on how you interact with it for instance I take off my shoes because at the time that I started doing this it just felt more comfortable I didn't understand why I just did it anyway but then I realized that that's an expression vector that has no interface yet that's one of the things I'm working on this is one of them and this expression vector this is just part of it this isn't my whole foot my foot doesn't look like this yeah but this expression vector is actually two part two parts one is the actual movement that will that will go along with it to control parameters and the fact that I have a 3d printer at home and I just got this wonderful elastic material that I didn't even know existed eight months ago and I'm able to create very strong interfaces with it so right now it's another part of the expression which is iteration everything gets iterated when I when I did my and I did my first I had my first Ted experience I won't say I did a TED talk because that's like official that's like you know Monterey or whatever I had cardboard and mouthpiece made of guitar picks and glue and it didn't work very well who knows it might not work very well today that's just part of the game isn't it but I was able but I was able to get the point across but then afterwards as soon as that show was over I was like I really need to fix this thing so my impression of myself was that I was going to go I was gonna make this thing and I was gonna go out and I was gonna go start street performing again I'm gonna start doing all this other stuff but first let me fix this one thing let me change this little thing let me do this thing and so I ended up spinning or ended up end up spending most of my time creating it and I have these wonderful opportunities to play it Hey so the latest iterations one is this this is the new head prosthesis that I've been working on the first one like I said was guitar picks and glue and an electric junction box with a really not right pressure sensor in it and it worked vaguely and then over time I was like okay let me change bah bah bah and so now this is the third version this one has I showed this last month and it kind of freaked them out because right before when I was doing the sound check it caught on fire so I'm not gonna use it but these are electrodes for transcranial direct current stimulation I figure that in this mode this this expression mode where the expression is actually the music it's actually the creation of it all of these things combined together in a way that I'm not used to so this will be a way to kind of like and I've done it before I did it at an event I did last thing I did last year but didn't have the protocol in place a transcranial direct current stimulation protocol I didn't have that in place and I ended up giving myself a very serious chemical burn so I'm going to refrain from the using it until I've gotten everything right now the reason why I'm explaining all of this to you is because it's actually another expression vector explaining how this works because you do get to chant you do get a chance to see it on the on this on this wonderfully large screen and that's a very high resolution that's looks better than my laptop but uh but it does give you a chance to kind of see exactly what's happening because there's I'm talking for myself when I say this if I see something that looks like it's a little bit too clever I'm like I'm looking at a much I don't know I can follow what you're doing so that's the reason why the talking part is one of the expression vectors now I'll give you a brief run of what this does the mouthpiece has a pressure sensor when I blow and when I inhale I have a mic that I'm supposed to have in here but I'm still building a new one for this new system so I have to use a regular mic until later on in the week when I go into the edit mode you see these lights here I see them you can see a vague outline of them but I see them and while I'm playing I'm like Oh am i in a record mode which would be this red light there red light here am i in a record mode am I am I in a record mode am I in a mute mode these types of things so that I have this was going to be a heads-up display but I decided I'm not gonna do that so each one I put it into the record mode I pick a sound I push a bunch of buttons because I'm still working on it now now these are the sounds that I'm gonna play something in a second but I want to let you know what you're hearing now I've added a couple of new things you might find interesting one I've been working on using a by neural type of panning I want it to sound like the sound is somewhere here you know somewhere around the room not just here or here so at first I was going through all of these by neural pre-made things and then I realized that since I have the gestures of the accelerometer on each hand I can always just place the sound it's not quite by neuro because it's on speakers you hear it in headphones it's really freaky and the second thing that I that I want to share it is I've been working on a way of creating chords usually when you play monophonic ly like this you can't play chords now I can play them like this [Music] it's wind it's windows so this is my latest fixation every time I'm working on something new I put it up on my desktop so right now it's orthopedics so just so you know let's see if this works so the core changes themselves are based on my hand positions but then I can also play chords just down the scale [Music] right alright so with that I'm gonna play a little bit and if it crackles well it just crackles that's just the way it goes but when you're making stuff so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] and that happens when you make your own stuff [Applause] oh well the main point being the main point being that even now before I came here today in fact between the time of the soundcheck and right now I went home and changed some stuff I really did it's all I think about 24 hours a day this is for me indicative of the world that we're coming into now I cannot rest on what happened two years ago that has kind of allowed more people to be interested in this project than just me now we have this growing internet social phenomenon this this Ted concept these social networks and sharing information seems to be increasing really fast and so now I try to see how this contextualizes how I see what's coming and what I see of what's coming is that we have the possibility there's a lot of musicians for instance who kind of dismissed the Arduinos as a professional platform because of because of just right now just like that but also because they didn't think that it would be able to keep up with what they were playing and a lot of those people that have that email me are now saying oh I see that you're able to actually you know play certain things in a way that I'm familiar with maybe I'll investigate it and I've seen some of these projects and these projects some of them are very very sophisticated so now it's the the music aspect is yeah it's it's it's still a musical but with the addition of the a lot of the 3d printing the robotics and all these things it's becoming something that kind of allows me to express myself better as we go forth okay so I got two and a half minutes let me play something real quick [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 23,542

Rating: 4.8873239 out of 5

Keywords: tedx talk, ted x, Art, ted talks, TEDxBerlin, TED Talks, tedx, Music, Beatjazz, Electronica, Electronic Music (Musical Genre), Performance, ted, TEDxBerlinSalon, TED, Live, ted talk, tedx talks, Onyx Ashanti

Id: JataQs4R5Bc

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 06 2013