Domifare at Folklore

Even Rascob (aka BITPRINT) has been organising regular Live Code gigs are Folklore in Hackney. I played Domifare last night . . . sort of.

I’ve blogged before about pitch recognition being flaky. And it is, but usually within the first three minutes or so, the SuperCollider autocorrelation UGen does actually recognise the pitches and the piece runs.

Not last night. Instead, I spend 15 minutes playing the same four note phrase over and over and over again, in front of an audience.

What went wrong

• Normally, when I play this, I have the mic right down in the bell, and it was up slightly higher this time, which may have caused problems.

• When I practice this, I lip the pitch up or down slightly and this often works. This level of subtlety and control is extremely difficult after several minutes of failure on stage. Instead, my playing got messier and messier over the course of the set.

• As I was trying to piece out, I couldn’t decide whether to use my old mouth piece, or my new one which is slightly more difficult with greater freedom. It didn’t seem to make a difference when I was practising, so I went for the newer, freer one, which might have been a mistake.

• My sound card’s output was also extremely low, which is a problem I’ve had before with Pipe Wire. This was concerning during the tech setup, but turned out not to be an issue during the performance.

• My laptop was sat on a stool in front of me which was not a distance that worked at all with my glasses. The screen was so blurry, I couldn’t properly tell what notes were arriving.

How to fix it

• If I need consistent mic placement that’s down in the bell, I should make a mount that goes into the bell. The would be a cork-covered ring, with spokes, a mic suspended in the middle.

• Flucoma would allow me to train a neural net to recognise a series of pitches as a cue. Because the tuba spectrum is weird and the mic is most sensitive at the weird points, I would probably have to do the training on stage. Would his be more tedious of 15minutes of failed command input? No.

• Practising this piece is essentially training myself to be decipherable to the algorithm, which is subtly different than normal practice goals or technique. I did not get as much practice as I would have liked. I spent a lot of time building lip strength, with the idea it would make my notes clearer, but not as much time getting feedback from the autocorrelation algorithm. It may be more practice with the program would have helped. Or, the algorithm was confused by background noise or mic placement, perhaps it would have made no difference whatsoever.

• Taking the bus with a tuba, a laptop, an audio card, cables, a mic, a mic stand and so forth is already a bit much, but it may be the case that I also need a laptop stand so I can ensure my computer being at a height and location where I can see it. Or my old reading glasses required more and more distance. Maybe a laptop on a stool is not a good use for them.

How I dealt with everything

I think my stage presence was fine, actually, except for when I was giving up at the end. I should have launched a few minutes of solo improv starting from and around the cue phrase. I’m going to practice this a bit, not that I expect the piece to fail like this again.

This was not my first performance of this piece. It went fine when I played it in Austria, 3 years ago.

Well, at least the failure of that piece was all that went wrong

Shelly Knotts and I were also meant to play some MOO, but discovered during the sound check that most of it wasn’t working, so we cut it from the programme.

Audience Reactions

People were generally positive. Multiple people used the word “futility” but with a positive intention. Which goes to show you can’t trust nerds.

To do

• Figure out how to deal with the Pipe Wire problem.

• Incorporate Flucoma

• Play this on Serpent because it’s more portable and I really do have more freedom of pitch.