A guy I went to college with once swore there was a ghost in a practice room, tapping along as he played late one night. Augmenta might make that experience happen all the time.
Call it augmented drumming. An algorithm listens as you play, and adds wild IDM-style glitches and additions and more percussion. Simple patterns become complex – fast.
The work is the research project of CDM reader Alessandro Guerri, who completed it as the thesis for his Electronic Music Bachelor Degree at the Conservatory of Music G. Rossini in Pesaro, Italy. I’m not sure what Maestro Rossini would think, but I think it’s wild. He describes the concept:
Agumenta is a project born to discover the projectual [sic] strategies of an interactive system and the feedback relationship between musician and software.
The concept of an augmented instrument was the starting point of what has became my thesis … timbral and rhythmic features, unachievable by a human activity,could be created and managed by the interaction of the musician with the software.
Agumenta is a continuously- evolving project; its random nature gives a specific musical behaviour to the software and it opens up new possibilities of control ranging from a total randomness to sequential approach.
The system’s features can be applied to all electronic percussion instruments which are able to transmit Midi messages and Audio signal,and to all the acoustic percussions through microphones and triggers.
For more, you can reach Alessandro on Facebook.