Super happy to be made an Ableton Certified Trainer, and join a wonderful international community of artist-educator-technologists from 56 countries. Just 8 of us from the UK were selected since 2013, so it’s a real privilege. I am of course a technophile (=nerd), but I have a particular love for Ableton Live (and Push) which – now with Max for Live – is incredibly open, flexible, and linked to diverse forms of historical and contemporary music making in composition, performance, production, and programming. I genuinely love Live and Ableton and relate to their musical ethos deeply.
The wonderful New Zealand classical guitarist and professor Matthew Marshall is touring Insighted in his 12-date tour around NZ and Australia (July-August 2021) in a super eclectic programme. Sounds great in rehearsals, what fun. Score now available.
A presentation on the ‘December Hollow’ collaborative project with Peter Zinovieff & Anne-Marie Curran-Cundy at the 30th Anniversary conference of Electronic Visualisation & the Arts (EVA) London 2020. Papers available: J. Weinel, J.P. Bowen, G. Diprose, and N. Lambert (eds.) EVA London 2020: Electronic Visualisation & the Arts. Proceedings of a conference to be held online in November. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, 2020. ISBN 978-1-78017-538-6. Papers online. Published online via ScienceOpen by the BCS: The Chartered Institute for IT, in the series: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC) Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2020). DOI 10.14236/ewic/EVA2020.0– see also DBLP access.
A cute little Arvo Part machine, for creating tintinnabuli voices (Demo, background, tutorial and free download below)
Latest version available on Max4Live.com or Download here if you want v1.3 in a live set, free to use, but please leave a comment, rate kindly and credit Milton Mermikides (miltonline.com). Do let me know here about any published or exciting work you are doing with it 🙂
A max/msp/Ableton Live tool I’m building to aid my hidden music projects. So many possibilities, these are literally first-go unpolished demos. Images by Bridget Riley.
Bridget and Milton Mermikides will be performing their classical guitar and live electronic project, Tension Blue at Canterbury Christ Church University, preceded by a talk on Milton’s Hidden Music series. Wednesday 24th January 2018, St Gregory’s Centre for Music (Talk 11.45am, Concert 1.10-2pm), Free Entry.
Translation of pendulum waves to music using a simple pitch translation system on a 5-limit Yo scale. Watch the right hand edge and all will make sense! This little experiment turned out so well, I think it deserves a whole project. My head and ears are spinning.
A real pleasure to appear with my sister Alex to talk about the Bloodlines project (and data sonification in general) on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek on Wednesday 28th October hosted by the quite brilliant Libby Purves. Fellow guests included the delightful and inspirational Peggy Seeger and Amati’s James Buchanan.
Digital animator (with a PhD in Chemistry) Anna Tanczos has set my composition ‘The Escher Café’ to video for live performances. Here’s an extract with animated tessellating lizards no less.
Bridget and I will be performing at 1.30pm Sunday March 30th (University of Surrey) at the launch of the International Guitar Research Centre (IGRC) run by Steve Goss and me. We’ll be performing 7 new works for classical guitar and electronics. Not the usual guitar rep. Tickets are £2 for students and £10 for the rest of us. Would be lovely to have some friends (of ours and new music) there.
Delighted to learn that the film version of Bloodlines will be featured in the Fabrica Vitae touring exhibition.
Fabrica Vitae is inspired by Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) and explores art and anatomy through the work of contemporary artists, scientists and thinkers. It will feature work from artists and scientists who are working together to re-imagine and extend the understanding of the human body.
More details will be available after Feb. 27th on www.fabrica-vitae.com.
The first Fabrica Vitae exhibition will take place in Zakynthos, Greece in May 2014.
Dr. Simon Park (my serial bio-art collaborator (like this) and creator of the amazing exploring the invisible site along with sound guru Professor Tony Myatt and I, have been exploring the interaction of sound/music and the Pyrocystis fusiformis bioluminescent algae. As you do. Here’s a sneaky pilot.
Bloodlines is a performance that traces the microscopic drama that plays out between a serious disease and medical treatment in the human body. It draws on its makers’ personal experience of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (which I developed in 2004) and its treatment through intensive chemotherapy, radiotherapy and a bone marrow transplant (donated by his sister Alex Mermikides, who is directing the performance). Also collaborating in the performance is Ann Van de Velde, a clinical haematologist involved in the care and treatment of blood disorders such as Leukaemia, and Anna Tanczos, a digital artist specialising in science communication.
‘…is the human body a soul-less, self-less object at the mercy of automatic internal processes…or is it a precious vessel containing a unique individual…?’
Sian Ede Art & Science. London and New York: Taurus Books, 2010. p.145
Bloodlines premiered at the Dana Centre on 18 July 2013. Future performances will be announced on the Events page.
On the 14th October 2013, I’ll be joining the eminent musician and fellow Wodehouse character Peter Gregson at the Luton Music Club to max out on Minimalism. Details to follow, but on the programme is Terry Riley’s seminal work In C in all its heterophonic and generative gorgeousness.
Rather than play it (on my guitar) traditionally with the ensemble, I thought it fun (and more interesting) to use Ableton Live (and Push) to rebuild it so it ran generatively. I’ve done a very simple version which adopt most of the instructions, any errors kindly forgive me and my future generations.
Here’s a screenshot of the resultant tapestry:
And here’s the WIP for your to download in the spirit of musical democracy.
Hit scene 1 and they’ll tumble through, I’ve weighted the follow actions to have on average more repeats on shorter phrases which makes sense musically. You can intervene, urging on any stragglers and holding back any clips forging too far ahead. Actually I may need to consult a statistician as the deviation in fall rates seems (in my fallible intuition) to suggest something’s a bit skewy with the randomising process. But oh well, the variation in performances is intriguing (I’m on listen number 6 and still very happy). You can of course ride volumes, edit instruments and send out effects to your ears’ content. You can always set clip 53 to – rather than stop – return to clip 1 so the piece lasts forever, with clips lapping each other – adding another dimension to the work. If Follow Actions in Live were more sophisticated or I had time to render in Max the clips could behave more intelligently by grouping together, dropping out and changing velocity more responsively as per score instructions, but it actually works quite beautifully as is, which is a testament to the power of Riley’s concept.
Incidentally if you’d like to tweak the ‘fall rate’ – and hence the resulting approximate duration – change this number on the clips (you can select multiple), but remember that you may want longer clips with lower numbers. Again I wish there was more sophistication with follow actions, which would also allow the pulse to stop after all other clips are finished, but I await Ableton Live 1011 17
Thanks to user Jeepee on the Ableton forum, whose patch I discovered when googling this idea, I’ve kept many of Jeepee’s clips as I like how he/she played them, but am also thinking of doing it PROPERLY in Max and crowdsourcing midi and audio clips from the interwebs when the Earth slows and there’s enough hours in the day for such mischief.
For those sensible people not in to Ableton or this sort of thing, you can hear a rendered version from this patch here:
(If that doesn’t buffer or you are a suffering iPad browser) -> In C Live
A rehearsal of the fab (& lovely) livingroominlondon ensemble playing my piece for quintet and electronics The Escher Café, A musical representation of a set of M.C. Escher engravings.
Monday 23rd January 8pm, King’s Place. The fabulous Living Room In London Ensemble with Manu Delago of Björk fame, perform a great concert – including a London Premiere of new piece ‘The Escher Café’ blending classical, jazz and live electronics. http://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on-book-tickets/music/manu-delago-living-room-in-london?tid=16
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, Microcosmos is a sound installation project in collaboration with microbiologist Dr. Simon Park and Cameraman Steve Downer (Blue Planet, Life on Earth etc.). The DNA codes, colour & shape of microbacterial colonies are translated into sound design using a complex automated mapping system. The resulting soundscape reveals the hidden music of this spectacularly tiny world. Microcosmos has been performed internationally including the Science Museum, Royal Academy of Music, Art Researches Science Belgium and disseminated in international conferences. Here is an extract of the piece:
Some images from the installation below as well as a representation of the mapping system employed (from the hidden music liner notes)
