Podcasts » Theatre Intangible

E014 Dracula Improv 03/28/2010

All Podcasts, Charlie Rauh, Circuit-Bending, Cody Bottoms, Craig Schenker, Film Scores, Halloween Shows, Jamison Sevits, Ken Soper, Mara Bissel, Melody Holt, pimpdaddysupreme, Post-WRVU Era, Tony Youngblood (performing) No Responses »

Mar 282010

On October 18^th, 2009, seven of us got together and created a new soundtrack to the 1931 film Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Legosi. This is one of my favorite episodes to date. The orchestration is extremely lush, and the performers were especially good at knowing when and what to play.

Before the show, we paired a performer with a character in the film and had that performer come up with a character theme. Ken Soper on keyboard provided the theme for Dracula, for example. Things really started to get interesting when the characters interacted with each other, and the performers had to find ways to mix the themes together. Aside from coming up with some themes in advance, the show was completely improvised.

You can listen to this episode in sync with the film (and I’ll tell you how in the podcast intro) or you can just listen without the visuals. If you can get a copy of the film (and the version we use is the 2004 Universal Legacy collection dvd) I highly recommend you use it. But if you can’t get the film, don’t let that stop you from listening to the show on it’s own. The improv still works great by itself.

Dracula Improv features Ken Soper on keys and Theremin; Jamison Sevits on Fender Rhodes; Craig Schenker on saxophone and flute; Charlie Rauh on electric guitar; Cody Bottoms on percussion; Melody Holt on musical saw, autoharp, and Theremin; and myself on a circuit-bent Cool Keys keyboard, musical saw, autoharp, and wind chimes. We had a small audience that also participate by making screams, etc. They were Mara Bissel, Amanda Tucker, Pimpdaddysupreme, and Deklan. I did the live mixing and post-production. Enjoy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:17:43 — 106.9MB)

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E013 All Guitars 03/14/2010

Adam Louis, All Podcasts, Anthony William Herndon, Ben Lowry, Brady Sharp, Brey McCoy, Charlie Rauh, JJ Jones, Podcasts, Post-WRVU Era, Will Floyd No Responses »

Mar 142010

Nine of us sat in my cold basement, sitting on amplifiers arranged in a circle and armed with guitars of all shapes and calibers. We had just recorded a level-check for the all guitar episode, and Charlie was uncomfortable. I shared his worry that the episode may degenerate into a cacophonous kludge of competing frequencies, each guitarist in his own little world. We solved the problem by dividing the show into mini-concepts lasting between 5 and 15 minutes each. It wasn’t long before the tape rolled and JJ sprang into action as one concept’s conductor; waving, pointing, raising and lowering his appendages, signaling players when to play and with what intensity. After an inspired smoke break, Will Floyd orchestrated the theme of a bank heist as told through guitar. Charlie played the carefree bank customer whose happy notes took a turn for the sour when the bank robbers shot up the place with distorted axes. Charlie’s departed ghost rose from the grave and played a sweet coda as the bank concept ended.

All in all we recorded an hour and seventeen minutes worth of material — some good, some bad, some golden. When I edited the show a month later, I had forgotten most of the themes, which was probably for the best. Free of our intentions, I was able to edit simply on what sounded good. The parts that didn’t work or felt too much like a jam band got thrown to the side, leaving a brisk thirty seven minutes. All Guitars stars Anthony William Herndon, Brey McCoy, Charlie Rauh, and first-time participants Ben Lowry, Brady Sharp, and Adam Louis. Each brought something unique to the table, and I look forward to having them on again. Will Floyd and JJ Jones each directed a segment. We recorded live to my Tascam 80-8 reel to reel tape recorder. I did the live mixing and editing.

We had a great time making this one, and I hope you get the same pleasure out of hearing it. All Guitars. Enjoy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:15 — 51.2MB)

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E012 Live from Podcamp Nashville 03/07/2010

All Podcasts, Chris Murray, Concerts, Craig Schenker, JJ Jones, Lawrence Crow, Melody Holt, Post-WRVU Era, Theatre Intangible LIVE, Tony Youngblood (performing) No Responses »

Mar 072010

We had a great time at Podcamp Nashville this year, and our show went off without anything disastrous happening. Apparently, planning does pay off.

If you haven’t been reading our previous posts, Podcamp Nashville is an un-conference about podcasting, blogging, and social media. We rocked the socks off of twelve or so bewildered attendees with an improv set that fed audience live tweets into a speech synthesizer. Any tweet that used the hashtag #pcn10ore was read live on air, and we had no control over the content. One guest tweeted, “Are you guys on acid?” We peppered the tweets about us with tweets featuring random keywords that the audience picked.

All in all, not a bad day’s work. Featuring Craig Schenker on saxophone, Lawrence Crow on Supercollider, Chris Murray on Casio SK1 and various effects, JJ Jones on vocals, Melody Holt on vocals, and myself on tweet-synth and SKI. I mixed the show live on my Mackie 8 channel mixer and recorded on a Marantz digital field recorder. Aside from some compression and clicks and pop removal, I did very little post-production work on this show. You’ll hear it in it’s entirety, warts and all.

While I do wish the festival was more about podcasting (as the name implies) and less about business-focused social media strategies, I’m very pleased with our experience. (Ironically, that is the strength of the Barcamp principle — it’s about what the attendees and speakers want it to be about.) The major plus is that it got us tons of free press with write-ups in the Metromix and the Tennessean. And it was a pleasure to watch some of the other sessions, highlights being David Beronja‘s Skype session, Mitch Canter‘s WordPress session, and Dave Delaney‘s talk about geo-location services such as FourSquare. Maybe we’ll incorporate Foursquare in a future improv. (Ideas anyone?)

The tweet-to-speech program was a modified version of this open-source Python program by Jayesh Salvi. While Jayesh’s program searches for tweets in the logged-in user’s timeline, our program searches tweets based on keywords. I’m a complete Python programming newbie, and I couldn’t have done the modifications without the help of Bryan Kemp. I also added some lines to filter out certain words (like our hashtag #pcn10ore) and to replace others (Festival has an annoying habit of pronouncing the symbol “&” as “ampersand,” thus I replaced the “&”‘s with “and”‘s).

You can download our modified code here. (Right click and “save as”)

If you have Python, Fetival, and Curl (if you don’t, in a Linux command line, run “sudo aptitude install python curl festival”), you can use this script in your own musical adventures. Feel free to modify it as you will. To change the keyword, replace “keyword” in the following line with the keyword of your choice.

TWITTERURL=”http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=keyword&rpp=30″

Add a “+” between words if you want to search for multiple keywords (ex. peanut+butter) and a “+OR+” if you want to search for one word or the other (ex. heaven+OR+hell). Replace “30” with the number of twitter messages you want the program to read before it ends. I left in the commented-out lines of the original program, so you can experiment. Future improvements: I’d like this program to automatically filter any tweets previously read through, and, of course, it would be nice to be able to plug in the options from the bash terminal when you run the program instead of in an editor. I’d love to see what you guys can do with this program.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:44 — 39.6MB)

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E011 Helpless 03/02/2010

84001, All Podcasts, Charlie Rauh, Jimmy Thorn, John Westberry, Paul Cain, pimpdaddysupreme, Post-WRVU Era, Tim Carey, Tony Youngblood (performing), Wess Youngblood No Responses »

Mar 022010

From left: Wess, pds, Paul, Jimmy, Charlie, & Tim. Taken by Paul.

Here’s an episode that almost never happened. It was designed as a simple photo-op for an article The Tennessean is writing wrote about local podcasts. In order to make the deadline, they had to shoot a photograph for the story by the end of the weekend. The writer Dave Paulson thought our show would make for an engaging picture. I quickly called in the troops; and we assembled last Saturday in my basement, squeezed tightly together to make for a nice picture and blindfolded because it looked cool and because . . . well . . . we’ve never done that theme before.

I’ve been working on a computer program that reads Twitter messages aurally via an open-source speech synthesizer called Festival. I’m preparing that program for next Saturday’s Podcamp Nashville. We’re doing a live improv for the conference where audience members can tweet to the hashtag #pcn10ore and hear those tweets in the mix. This little last-minute improv was a perfect vehicle to test that program.

It was a complete coincidence that last Saturday happened to be the day when all hell broke loose. Saturday was the day after the Chilean earthquake; the day of the tsunamis; and, if you searched for the keywords earthquake and tsunami in Twitter like I did, the end of the world as we knew it. I fed those two keywords into my tweet synthesizing program, and the resulting narration became the backbone of the show. Some of the tweeters posted on-the-scene updates, while others joked about the impending disasters, and others prayed for the areas affected and called out to loved ones.

The theme was being helpless in the face of tragedy. The blindfolds seemed fitting, though, I admit, they weren’t practical. Most of the performers had them off within 10 minutes (exception being Charlie Rauh whom Jimmy had to poke to make him aware the rest of us had already de-blinded).

I’m quite fond of this show. We were in the right time, the right place, with the right performers and the right technology. Helpless features John Westberry on drums; pimpdaddysupreme on records, vocals, and effects, Paul Cain on accordian, saw, and water bottle; Charlie Rauh on guitar; Jimmy Thorn on keyboard and chaos pad; Tim Carey on keyboard and mandolin; and Wess Youngblood on guitar and delay pedal. I pressed the buttons on the laptop feeding the tweets and did the live mixing. Portions of the show were edited for pacing. The show ended before the tsunami reached Hawaii, so I continued recording the tweets for about 20 minutes after the show was over and inserted the most fitting ones into the show.

Special thanks to Jayesh Salvi for writing the initial Python program Talking Twitter Client and to Bryan Kemp for helping me modify it to suit my purposes. Thanks also to the developers of Festival, to Tennessean writer Dave Paulson and to photographer Jeanne Reasonover. Thanks to Paul Cain for taking the above-photograph. A big thank you to all the performers!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 45:42 — 62.9MB)

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