No, this is not about the song, you are thinking about. Last Christmas I presented myself with the GRM tool bundle named “Creative” and advertised on the INA GRM webpage as to be the thing “For musicians !”.

I was curious about these tools mainly because of INA GRM’s close historical connection with musique concrète. It was founded originally in 1951 as the  Concrete Music Research Group (Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète – GRMC in French) by Pierre Schaeffer. In 1958 the word “concrète” was dropped from the name, thus becoming GRM. In 1975 the INA (National Audiovisual Institute) was created, in which the GRM is integrated as a music research and composition department. Out of their musique concrète approach paired with early invetigation into computer music they have developed a bunch of tools for sound manipulation and sound design over the years. Given this history in Schaefferian musique concrète and asousmatic music, the GRM is the counterpart of the famous and much more elitist IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) founded by Pierre Boulez, which opend in 1977 and where the real-time audio processing graphical programming environment “Max” was originally developed.

When I decided to buy myself the “Creative” bundle for Christmas, I was especially interested in the complex sampling tool “Evolution”, which can be used to obtain continuous evolution of timbre by frequential sampling of the input signal. The timbre of the input signal is sampled at more or less regular intervals. The output signal is obtained by interpolation between the sampled timbres.

After some experimentation it turned out that Evolution will become a tool I frequently use in live performance. It can be integrated into Ableton live as a plugin and I did this and started to use it combined with Ableton’s looper. Usually I set up two or three channels with a looper each and different setups of Evolution, so that I can create complex evolving textures out of simple sounds. I like to use this setup with sounds from objects, but also have used it with the flute and the piano with satisfying results.

In my performance for the “experimental art meeting” Under Szubcult online, which will be broadcasted on Saturday, December 12th on YouTube and Facebook, I used the Ableton Looper – INA GRM Evolution setup with percussive sounds derived from various trivial objects I have collected over time to establish a contrast between these percussive sounds and the pad like textures I transform them with the tool. Further modulation of these textures I achieve using several of Ableton’s delays and reverbs.

If you got curious now, then tune in on Saturday, I will start at 21:45 on YouTube and Facebook, or even better you listen to all the contributions of the “meeting”, because the whole event will be fun. 

Event link.