Fabulous robots exhibition @ScienceMuseum this month. Does electronic wind player (EWP) work as a research topic?
I know Harry is technically an EBP but still...
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Two of my research worlds (Remote Music Tuition and Saxophones) collided in the recent BBC Virtual Orchestra project, as part of the 2016 BBC Proms. Over 1,200 music lovers from all over the UK signed up to the scheme, uploading video clips of themselves playing a single three minute piece of music - the Toreador Song from Bizet’s opera Carmen, conducted by Marin Alsop. This seems to have really inspired amateur players. Teaching friends have shared their pride at their students being featured in the performance screened at the Last Night of the Proms, Proms in the Park. Amateur orchestra groups share how the associated BBCGetPlaying initiative has "reached out in a truly wonderful way."
I hope the excellent additional content around the performance will help to ensure a lasting impact. Getting well known players to record playing tips and advice for each instrument is a very nice touch, for example Courtney Pine's short film for new saxophone players is helpful, accessible and friendly. For me though, the greatest part of all this is that it uses video-mediated technology to promote playing an instrument with other people, and share the experience with a wider audience. I have my reservations about current models of online and video-mediated one-to-one music tuition, but this seems to be particularly well thought out - a key part being the infrastructure that goes alongside it. Well done to everyone involved in making it happen. Great stuff with loops and filters from the 19 year old BBC Young Musician Jazz Award winner, Alexander Bone.
https://twitter.com/AlexanderBone/status/761109442922328065 https://www.facebook.com/AlexanderBone/ http://www.alexanderbone.com/ A great person to interview on his personal choices to digitise and manipulate his sound. One of the things I love about playing the saxophone is the sound. Articulation, vibrato, dynamics, technique, instrument, reed, mouthpiece, fingering and register all influence the sound yet the character of the instrument is unmistakable. A Bach sonata or a blues lick can be played with equally appropriate expression. Individual players have their own 'sound' which is due in no small part to their relationship with the reed and mouthpiece. So it's fair to say I was sceptical when I opened the box for my EWI and found a list of 99 sounds, all of which could be edited in case that wasn't enough. The names didn't inspire confidence either. What exactly is the difference between 'Raunchy Lead 3' and 'Raunchy Lead 1'? When would 'Ducky' be appropriate? Just what makes someone name a sound for a wind controller 'Pinball Wizard'? How am I supposed to interpret that? Playing the sounds confirmed my worst fears, on the whole they all sounded ghastly. Responses to a thread posted by a professional from Akai Akai-announces-new-EWI-5000s-WIRELESS! on the forum 'Sax on the Web' revealed I was not alone.
So far I have largely been playing through headphones but this was getting pretty dispiriting. So I decided to try a little experiment. My Fender Pro Junior guitar amp was sitting behind the sofa (I aspire to play a Fender Telecaster, so far with limited success). So I ran the line out of the EWI into the amp and started to experiment. Using the programmed sound 'Jazz flute', with maximised breath and bite sensitivity and tone cranked up on the amp gave me something... almost quite... nice. However this leads to a serious design consideration. Why load an instrument modelled on an expressive acoustic wind instrument with lots of barely distinguishable cheesy sounds? This seems like a step back from earlier models where a separate sound back was required. The pursuit of wireless (requiring pre-loaded sounds) has in fact led to a serious problem. I suspect part of the answer is going to lie in the problems with the mouthpiece and lack of articulation, more on that later. However I think the sheer volume of choice is also a problem. Each acoustic instrument has a distinctive sound. Part of the skill and joy of learning to play is being able to shape that sound for expressive use. So rather than lots of sounds, perhaps an electronic saxophone needs just one mode of sound production that can be shaped. This take me back to one of the reasons I love the Varitone, it manipulated the saxophone player's own acoustic sound. I didn't buy the EWI because I had a hankering to play jazz flute but anything I do play has to sound good. So for now, when I want to make an acceptable sound I will treat myself to an amplified blow out. The Fender amp makes a handy stand for the EWI too, so at least that solves another problem. I still need to use headphones a lot of the time (I have several neighbours) so the next experiment is going to using an iRig 2 and the sound modelling on my iPad. I might then be able to play along with my iReal jazz improvisation app at the same time. Talking to friends, we seem to agree that the octave rollers are one of the biggest barriers to transferring the fluency we have achieved on our saxes to a EWI. From the manual: "Place your left thumb between any two octave rollers (and over the grounding plate) on the EWI5000's back panel. Slide your thumb up or down across the octave rollers to shift its octave range up or down. While playing, keep your left thumb in contact with the octave rollers. The position between the two knurled octave rollers indicates the standard pitch." On a sax you have an octave key at the back of the instrument. For the first standard octave of semi-tones (D1 to C#1) you don't engage it. When you need to progress to the second octave you press it and hold it down along with the fingered notes (D2 to C#2). To extend the range further, you have palm keys at the top of the instrument to play a further partial octave of higher semi-tones (D3 to F#3) and tables played with the little fingers of the right and left hand to play down a lower partial octave (Db0 to Bb0*). Hence on most instruments you can achieve a range of approximately two and half octaves from Bb0 to F#3.
In theory the octave rollers sound pretty easy to manage but in reality they are very different, and in the beginning, impossible. The textured rollers are useful to ground your middle octave, but moving away from these, it is very hard to know if you are approaching super- or sub-sonic from touch alone (apart from the sound, which of course your audience also hears...). An added complication is a 'glide' strip alongside the rollers. Even when you have mastered moving to the smooth rollers above and below the textured ones, it is very difficult not to accidentally touch the glide strip, leading to the sound uncontrollably leaping up and down like an over-excited Theremin. When you play C#1 on a sax, you lift off all fingers (with no active key). When you accidentally do this on the EWI is assumes 'no rollers = lowest pitch" and again you get sub-sonic squelch. There are very few melodies which stay within the textured roller range of D1 to C#1 and this unpredictability, especially when jumping between octaves quickly for successive notes, is frustrating to the point of hysteria. This means going back to basics and lots of exercises and studies utilising octave hops. For an experienced sax player who has ceased to even think about how to finger different notes this is phenomenological breakdown at it's most extreme. Suddenly every note has to be reconsidered, this then discombobulates you when returning to the home comfort of your acoustic sax. Suddenly nothing works anywhere and you feel like you have musical amnesia. BUT...here's a thing. A digital instrument should be able to offer new opportunities. Being able to play 7 octaves rather than 2 1/2 does represent such an opportunity. Being able to use the same mechanism to move between each one does make the palm keys and many of the tables played with the little fingers redundant, simplifying the options considerably. The complications of fingering on the acoustic sax are largely driven by the need to open and close tone holes that lie at very precise positions along a tube, to change the way that sound waves generated by the reed bounce up and down the tube. On a digital instrument there are no such constraints. So, roller frustration aside, when looking at alternative designs for an electronic saxophone we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. *A0 on a baritone with an additional key I have only ever played the saxophone. When I wanted to learn an instrument at school, the visiting woodwind teacher had lots of clarinet and flute students. He was an eccentric big-band jazzer and when I turned up as a teenager, asking if he had any slots free to teach a late starter, willing to empty my post office savings account to buy my own instrument, he said "why don't you play the saxophone instead?".
It was South Yorkshire in the mid-1990's and the exam boards had only just got around to writing graded exams for 'new' instruments like saxophones. There certainly weren't instrumental jazz exams available. So I started having lessons and took grade 3 when the exam boards caught up. I ended up with grade 8 performance in classical saxophone, focussing on impressionistic French repertoire and Bach. I loved it, but somehow jazz passed me by. More on this later... Anyway, this makes me slightly unusual as a woodwind player in that I didn't start on clarinet and then pick up sax as an addition, the saxophone is all I have even known. So I value my woodwind friends with wider experience very highly. This weekend, one of them reminded me my I love my network so much. During an advanced saxophone techniques class, we were discussing alternative fingerings for smooth performance of scalic passages. Somehow talk got around the the concept of open tone holes and 'popping'. The saxophone does't have open tone holes (literally a hole in the instrument body that you cover with your finger, you might remember this from playing a recorder). All saxophone keys are attached to pads, which you depress over a cupped tone hole. This is why you need the magnificent metalwork that flows down the body of an oboe, clarinet or saxophone - to ergonomically connect keys that you can reach with your fingers and palms, with pads and tone holes that sit further away, along the instrument. Popping? It turns out that if you don't seat your fingers correctly over open tone holes, then you get a quiet popping sound between notes. This could be a key difference between saxophone and other woodwind players getting used to the touch capacitance keys of the EWI. I am trained to keep my fingers and palms as close as possible to the keys at all times. I can rest on them without depressing them, which makes for smoother playing. On the EWI I can't rest on anything! I wonder if this is less strange for a player used to open tone holes? This is something I need to keep in mind as I look into how different experienced instrumentalists adapt to the EWI. Luckily the Akai Pro forum is responsive, helpful and largely friendly (apart from some shouty caps and underlining), so I think I am getting closer to understanding what is going on here now. So, for the benefit of other new EWI players:
OK - so I have advanced to actually making a sound with the EWI. I can get playback through the headphone 1/8" jack but nothing through the wireless receiver. So close and yet so far!
I am good at reading manuals and have tried everything. I can connect to the wireless receiver (I have a steady red light on the receiver and the instrument). The receiver is plugged into my Mac via the provided usb cable. I have checked system preferences and made sure that sound input is coming from the new option "EWI 5000 Wireless Receiver". When I blow into the EWI I can see the input levels changing in response, so a signal is making it to the Mac sound input. However there is no sound. I have tried with my usual external speakers, and with the Mac built in output. I can get sound from playing a track in iTunes. I try with the EWI and I still can't hear anything, despite the input levels showing a variable signal input that reflects my blowing. I tried opening the EWI 5000 sound editor software. It just says no EWI is connected, I am not sure what this software is for yet (!) but it isn't solving the problem. Checking various forums I am not the only person that has hit this early obstacle. So day 2 and I am already registered on the Akai Pro support forum. OK, so it's arrived! Except that getting started feels quite daunting. I have unpacked everything, downloaded the software and manuals, and then not felt like I had the time to dive in. Why?
After a few days I finally have a spare 30 mins so decide to investigate. First step is to install the rechargeable battery. This is fiddly and relies on my having a Philips screwdriver handy, luckily I do, but I can imagine others don't. The screw is tight, the plug to attach inside the space is tiny, and it is hard to fit the battery and wire in flush and screw the cover back on again. I am pretty technical but I can see that this is less than ideal, and I am still nowhere near actually playing. A statement in the manual, under 'important' says "Always touch the grounding plate and octave rollers when playing. These are sensors which use the performer's body as the ground". This is pretty interesting. I know what this means, but again, others probably don't. Not the most reassuring statement at the beginning of your journey... Anyway, USB connected, dots flashing, EWI charging. Pressing two random buttons tells me the battery came with a 74% charge, nice. Will I remember to press these specific two buttons again (press and hold the Level Button and then press and hold the FX Button) to find out battery level at a later date? Doubtful. So, thats my 30 minutes up. Not very intuitive. Not achieved much. Oh well, tomorrow's another day.
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March 2017
AuthorI am a researcher and saxophonist. My work examines the interaction between musicians in different contexts such as performance, education and social music making; the impact that can be achieved through music in a community; and how technology can be used to transform these interactions. In particular, how musicians use their tools, their bodies and their space to communicate what they do. This is the starting point for designing technology for musicians that supports naturalistic interaction with their instrument and each other, whilst offering new and exciting opportunities. |