http://www.markleford.com/
http://www.TenCrazy.com/
http://www.TenCrazy.com/contact/ (email form)
I grew up being able to make a musical instrument out of just about anything. My music education extended through high school to the university level, where I was an Audio Engineering student with a performance area of jazz piano and trombone. When the program was abruptly terminated due to lack of funding, I changed my major and eventually graduated with a degree in Computer Science. After participating in progressive-pop and industrial-metal bands after college, I finally settled back into solo pursuit of my musical goals. I’ve extended my instrumental talents to guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, and brass as my mainstay. Finally, my sights turned to creating music software as a personalized instrument, a pursuit that has been ultimately satisfying in forging my own creative identity.
To paraphrase a favorite aphorism about “discipline”, I believe that algorithmic composition shouldn’t be an end in itself, only a means to an end. While I can appreciate most “chin stroking” audio experiments (and sport an appropriate goatee for the task), I think that the best results come from gestural systems that include some amount of application (and moderation) of human aesthetic.
Custom-coded MFX plug-ins, SONAR 3, Reason 2.5, pHATmatikPRO
A large part of my music relies upon algorithmic, generative, and gestural techniques. To this end, I have developed an extensive suite of MFX plug-ins (under the label of TenCrazy.com) representing numerous semi-atomic functions on MIDI data streams that are intended to be chained together in a modular fashion. These chains are generative, often creating the entirety of the piece by following the rules provided in parametric form, without human hands ever touching a keyboard instrument. Moreover, gestural control can be exerted over the system by drawing MIDI envelopes in the sequencer to describe the “contour” of the performance without specifying the notes themselves.
I often refer to these chains of plugins as “players” or “improvisers”, suggesting an almost intelligent autonomy to their role. In fact, I often play live instruments along with their generative output, creating a sort of hybrid computer-human band. However, while I respect their creations as a “fellow artist”, I also reserve the right to edit their performance as the director of our musical collaboration. As such, I’m able to capture an improvised performance and edit it in hindsight if I particularly like a momentary inspiration or otherwise need to reign in some of the randomness, arranging by cut and paste after the fact.
Finally, I do take care to design my sample-sets to bring out a realistic “human” preformance in my automated improvisers. Due to having multi-instrumental talent, I’m experienced enough to be able to collect and model the sounds of a sampler to approximate the idioms of the instrument in question, even to the extent of playing the instrument myself and “slicing” the audio data into individual notes for algorithmic resequencing. This goes far in helping the generative system realise a convincing performance.
Album: Selected Quirks
License: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike
Info: This is a collection of various pieces from the past two years featuring my suite of gestural/generative MFX plug-ins as the focus of composition. The only part created entirely by human hands is the guitar solo on “Unreal Vegas Gig” (which is a musical palindrome: same backwards as forwards).
01 Swagger
02 pHATcell
03 Unreal Vegas Gig
04 Fugue-Hop
05 Two of Twelve
06 Zappish
07 Horse Funk
08 Madcap Vegas Caper
09 One pHAT Minute