Richard Eigner getting into the many sounds at a busy intersection in Hanoi

I’m starting to get into the swing of things, body clock is still very confused but the vibe of the city is such that it carries you along on it’s noisy, smoky, hyper-alive wake.  I spent several hours walking around recording and taking photographs with Richard today. And when stepping off the street and into the calm of my hotel I keep noticing that my body is actually vibrating such is the excitement of the city.

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Afterwards I headed to the Goethe Institut to give a workshop on my Light controlled music hard/software which was really good fun especially when the audience started getting involved with playing the interface. I learned a lot.

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As you can see there is no fear of experimentation here. The players made fine use of a steel bin, instrument cases for percussion and tubes to sing down. Their timing was impeccably good and they also laughed a lot too which is no bad thing.

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Later on after a little afternoon nap I was picked up by the excellent Cuong on his moped for a tour of Hanoi by night. Cuong is rightly obsessed by fruit and we went on culinary tour which left my tastebuds in a state of complete ecstasy! In the video he points out Vietnam’s most CONTROVERSIAL fruit while skilfully whizzing along the streets of the old town.

Hanoi - Soundstuff Festival - Workshops and Concert - 9th-13th April

Tape to Zero - Oslo - 19th April

Operation Ton - Talk - 16:15h - 17:00h - 27th April & Golden Pudel - Concert - PM - 27th April

See you there, special prize if you attend all three.

J x.

This is the solution I came up with in Max/MSP, Have a look at Mr Matrix in action…

Lots of fun, I really wish I could do this in Logic Pro!

Download the patch

If you don’t have Max/MSP you can still play with Mr Matrix by installing Max/MSP runtime. Just make sure you put the Mr Matrix folder within the runtime patches folder!

Mr Matrix by Leafcutter John is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://cycling74.com/toolbox/mr-matrix-draggable-fx-routing-system/.

CMOS Synth I’m in the process of designing and building at the moment.

J x.

All the sounds you hear are being triggered and modulated by a downward facing LED which I rigged onto a little quadcopter. The light is picked up by the LDR’s from my light controlled music system which uses and an Arduino to send control data to Max/MSP where the sound is produced… I need to improve my flying skills if this is to go any further!

If you want to know more about the light controlled music system I’m doing a talk and concert at Brunel uni on Feb 27th and a talk an workshop at University of Wales Newport, City Campus on March 14th.

J x.