The session this week was focused on setting up an already existing multichannel work within the M108 space, learning how the patch bay works and how the speakers correlate to eachother, how we can send sound across each in Ableton and ect. This more practical look at engaging with the medium and finding out how it functions and where it falls short (the letup in Logic was barely functional it seemed) allows for me to think about constructing something that utilises the medium to a full enough potential without being too overambitious. Especially because I don’t have a copy of Ableton myself where a lot of these plugins for multichannel seem to be tailored to, and I am still kind of stuck with the old version of FL Studio I’ve had forever, most of the work I can see myself doing will I guess be creating things to later spacialise when it feels ready.
In this session we were also asked to diagram a kind of setup we could imagine composing for, which I found particularly difficult to engage with without much of an idea of what I would like my piece to be in any way. I think I ended up just writing Speaker somewhere on the page before losing focus, and I think for this reason I’m going to stick to the octo ring speaker setup that is already provided.
As for more inspiration as to what my piece could be, I remembered that one of the first gigs I got to see last year at Cafe Oto was a Multichannel performance by John Wall with less speakers thatn we have available, but had him sitting at the back of the room on a laptop throwing sound around the room with a kind of gleeful belligererance that had such massive power that it was amusing when the set ended with the sound playing quietly back through the laptop speakers. That kind of approach though of using every single thing immediately available to send sound to, and the kind of erratic strobing he was creating would be a good medium to explore with this setup, with something like glitch, microsound, or cut up noise if I am to be a little more self indulgent. These things are still in their infancy ideas wise, but it is helpful to start thinking about how these ideas that we are learning about can be applied ourselves.