Eliot Britton

Works

Codecs 4 x 15

April 22nd, 2008 at 11:37 am EDT

As part of my residency with the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble and the Digital Composition Studios I was commissioned to write a piece for large ensemble and Live electronics. Codecs will be conducted by Denys Boulaine, the director of the CME. Processing and spatialization are being processed in real time, via Roland V-Drums inside the percussion section of the ensemble.      

    The piece Codecs 4 x 15 is a series of compressions, transfers and reconstructions of a short musical fragment. The fragment of choice in this case happens to be of a very popular musical convention called the V-I cadence. In Codecs 4 x 15 The V-I has been sliced and refined into its smallest component parts. (A grid of 4x15 musical events) These components are encoded, decoded, scattered, looped, stretched, re-mixed and re-sequenced into a larger musical object.  There are interesting musical results when the codec changes part way though a transformation, or when it begins to interact with another unfolding process.   
    The electronic component of Codecs 4 x 15 involves the capture and processing of sounds in real time.  A similar technique as the one mentioned above slices sounds into their component parts and re sequences them from within the ensemble.

Writings

Playdio

May 28th, 2008 at 4:13 pm EDT

I was part of a combined Business/Music/Law/Information studies seminar at McGill.  Various students were picked from said faculties to pitch projects, ideas, business models and legislation that could help music in the post file sharing era.  Our goals were to create new revenue streams for musicians, as well as encourage the creation of new works. This was an interesting challenge.

Journal for Acoustic Ecology

February 5th, 2008 at 8:23 pm EST

In 2005 I had a short piece published in the Journal of Acoustic Ecology. 

TrackHue ICMC 2007

February 4th, 2008 at 11:14 pm EST

This paper discusses a new control method for live elec-
tronics which bypasses traditional haptic models through
a virtual ”landscape” of control parameters activated by a
video capture system. The performer navigates the virtual
landscape by his/her physical motion, moving through the
various sets of parameters. The paper also discusses the
interdisciplinary approach used to realize this project, in-
volving software development, performance application,
and the realization of a compositional idea. 2.1. Jamoma
The software was implemented using Jamoma [6], a
framework for developing high-level modules in the Max/
MSP/Jitter environment, encouraging a structured ap-
proach, interchangeability, flexibility and controllability.

born under a bad star

February 4th, 2008 at 11:08 pm EST

There are a variety of  parallels between the development of modern
electronic music and western art music. The composition
Szerencsétlen on the album Rossz Csillag Alatt Született (2005)
by Winnipeg artist Aaron Funk otherwise known as 'Venetian
Snares' embodies these parallels. Though a novel system of computer
assisted analysis, this complex tangle of historical, technical and
compositional  materials is unraveled. This paper proposes a model
for analyzing music of this type.