Workshop Videos

Whenever we're gathered at the Whimsical Raps workshop, we keep an Atrium plugged into the speakers in our showroom, inviting casual interaction throughout our days.

We've batted around the idea of fixing a camera on this scene, mimicking 24/7 wildlife livestreams (eg. CornellLab's All About Birds).And though that idea never totally came to fruition, it persists in our imagination. So we recently started keeping a camera handy, hitting 'record' whenever someone approaches.

This practice has yielded tons of footage, across all hours of the day and with different hands driving. After combing through these temporary performances, we found a handful of moments that not only sound great to our ears but capture different ways of playing that are hard to put into words alone. We'd like to share these as inspiration for your own explorations!

play, replay, reveal

Atrium's decoupling of pitch selection and articulation is instrumental to its identity, but there are plenty of techniques to toe the line between intentional composition and joyful improvisation.

At the start of this video, Souha deploys the first of Atrium's five on-board gesture recorders to capture two interactions simultaneously: her right hand articulates Atrium's five voices in unison with the sustain slider, while her left hand navigates different positions of the notes slider. After recording a few chord swells, she presses the same gesture key, which immediately begins replaying her recent interactions.

Rather than leave this loop unattended, Souha seamlessly moves into another method of articulation by using the strum touchplate to activate individual voices while the recording re-plays and continues its movement underneath. This technique provides a few unique effects:

Whenever she isolates individual voices with touch, their contour (envelope) remains active as the others recede. This puts Atrium's polyphonic capabilities on full-display.
As she keeps voices active past their originally-recorded articulations, her previously-silent notes movement is sonified. This gives her a way to selectively bring in ornamentation that would be unheard otherwise.
Her notes are spread into a chord, which means that each time she manually activates a voice she's able to pull out transpositions of the ornamentation. Sometimes she explores monophonic leading by holding the fifth voice open; other times creating dyadic movement by also opening the first voice with her thumb.

As we near the end of the clip, Souha increases the intensity of length, which articulates her quick swipes on strum with plucky envelopes. In the final movement, she begins to manipulate parameters on the stereo delays to underscore the oscillators' output with feedback-laden repetitions:

Changing the balance of delayed signal with spectre.
Re-pitching the delays by decreasing the intensity of time, creating a near-enough bass-y thrum.

There was still more to reveal...

Often, we need "tap out" to move onto other work – we have firmware to finish and shipments to pack, after all. In these moments of disengagement, we often make grand sweeping gestures with a sense of finality, only to re-enchant ourselves almost immediately. As she tried to leave the experiment above, Souha flung a finger up to loop, which cycles contour's envelope. Almost reflexively, she shifted focus to testing v1.1's improvements to gestures, but the musicality of what her sudden decision had evoked couldn't be denied.

iiimprovements

One of the improvements to v1.1 is support for the newly-released iii capability of monome's recent runs of grids and arcs. This support allows these devices to populate as MIDI devices when connected to Atrium's controller input.

During this video, we were testing this feature by running the iii version of meadowphysics, which triggers each of Atrium's voices in rhizomatic rhythms. In our early-morning haze, we added some indiscriminate mapping to infuse a bit of dynamism:

The notes modulator is mapped to step through lens and the lfo's shape, the activity of which can be seen in the first few seconds before Atrium's MIDI note allocator settles into a groove.
The lfo is mapped to sustain, but drone ensures that only voice four is affected by this modulation. Since contour / envelope articulations are inherently decoupled from pitch selection, meadowphysics continues to change the pitch of this voice while the lfo articulates it cyclically.
The contour modulator is mapped to the timbral parameters, which uses the envelope's movement to change the quality of the oscillators.
The contour modulator is also mapped to time, which creates the clicky discontinuities heard throughout the recording. You might have noticed that these artifacts are irregular; perhaps this makes you wonder why only certain note changes trigger the modulation? This is due to the fact that time represents control over only two destinations: the two delay lines. So when its mapped to a polyphonic modulator, which have five channels, only the first and fifth voice are sampled.

phase rhythm

Right before we started filming, Souha mapped lfo (in pulse) to sustain. As we drop in, she begins manipulating the lfo's phase, which offsets not only the timing of each of the voices' triggers, but also the overlap between each of the voices' envelopes. When paired with her exploratory chord spreading and timbral adjustments, we're led into new dynamics between rhythm and melody that other modalities wouldn't yield so readily.

Note her micro-movements of tone and timbre in the last seconds. Especially when notes are spread in a chord, even minutely, the form mode rewards with surprising discontinuities on certain voices. A balance between listening and play is essential.

bubbles on the water

Here, Dani experiments with hand placement, manipulating the fm mode's timbre with their thumb as they hold voices open on the strum touchplate.

By mapping the bubbles lfo shape to sustain, the voices seem to boil. By using the drone sequencer to pull voices two and four out of rotation, Dani gets a centered-stereo spread of energy underneath. This leaves voices two and four free for manual invocation, which they found naturally fit their right hand's middle and ring fingers, if oriented in parallel with stripes on the strum touchplate. For leverage, their thumb landed on the timbre slider, which creates a fun gesture out of pure happenstance – as their fingers release the voices, their weight transfers to their thumb, which can then activate changes to timbre as the envelopes decay.

Dani also makes use of clusters, which store notes, voicings, chord shapes, and octave manipulations (more info here). By devoting their right hand to voice and timbral articulation, their left hand is freed to call up different tonal shapes. Again, Atrium's natural decoupling of pitch and articulation affords moments of decisive compositional intent and free-wheeling play.

form & function

Over days of casual filming, Souha made clear her command over the form timbral mode. Though she had plenty of wonderful moments with wave and fm, her hands just know how to evoke these surprising edges of musicality out of form's three timbral sliders.

Like play, replay, reveal, she has a gesture replaying her movement of the notes and sustain sliders, which provides a bed of swelling chords. She uses the strum touchplate to solo voices one and five, sonifying the notes movement that was otherwise totally silent.

New here is her manipulations of timbre, working both along and against her notes movement. In form mode, the bottom of timbre's range carries the power of dividing the pitches of each voice: down an octave, down an octave + a fourth, down two octaves. These subharmonic pitch divisions are voiced wonderfully when chord is spread, demonstrated remarkably well by Souha's isolation of the second and fifth voice on the strum touchplate.

questions of scale

Over the past few months, we've noticed that one of the first hurdles for a new Atrium player is the idea of a scale. It's easy to map canonical ideas of scales being modal: Major, Minor, Dorian, Mixolydian, etc. For Atrium, scales are just collections (or tables) of notes. This means that a scale step could just be the three or four notes you want in a chord, and the next scale step could be those same notes transposed up a bit or given an alternate voicing. And since they get saved with your patch, there's no reason why you couldn't write full pieces using scale steps as your score.

In this post-lunch session, Souha approached each scale like a step in a sequencer, editing the first five down to only a few notes and mapping their advancement with the clock modulator. She then mapped the lfo to offset both timbral parameters and the chord spread, which methodically adds and removes voicing complexity as it cycles. This showcases a balance between timbral and compositional impulses – using the same gestures, the lfo is mapped to affect notes alongside sonic texture. Bringing the structural elements like pitch selection into the realm of synthesis parameters encourages experimentation & play across every facet of music-making.

manually automatic

We find ourselves in the middle of cybernetic discovery, as Dani triggers cascades of notes with two simple interactions: moving the notes slider and activating the third voice of the strum touchplate.

Let's dig into the recipe!

change is mapped to sustain
- When a note on any voice changes, it activates the corresponding contour. This is a great way to bypass Atrium's inherent decoupling of pitch and envelope events!
change is mapped to the lfo's shape parameter
- Since lfo's shape is a monophonic destination, change's polyphony is reduced to events that occur on the third voice. So, whenever the note on the third voice changes, the lfo's shape will also change.
lfo is mapped to the voicing touchplate
- This means the lfo will transpose a spread chord – in this video, lfo is modulating downward.

If we take stock on our cybernetic web at this point, we're in self-playing territory! As the lfo cycles, it invokes changes to the distribution of notes across the voices, which in turn triggers the contour for each voice. The depth of our chord spread and the shape of our lfo determine the distribution of rhythms and pitches, and our notes slider acts as a way to change both, since it changes the shape of the lfo.

While different lfo shapes will yield more or less busy automatic patterns, there are a few additional guardrails we can put in place to ensure organic playability:

clock is mapped to cycle drone
- This is the keystone for interrupting the cyclical nature of the lfo. As the lfo -> change -> sustain chain can only articulate voices that are active, cycling through different drone sequences can yield longer pattern unfoldment. Since clock and the lfo aren't synced, changes to tempo adjust the window during which lfo's effect can be heard.
contour is mapped to change the lfo's speed & contour mapped to positively influence the voicing touchplate
- These two mappings enable Dani's strum touchplate performance control. Since contour is a polyphonic modulator, when mapped to speed its effect is only articulated when voice three is active. Thus, the 'slot machine' is only active when Dani activates voice three with their sustain touches.

stupid little trick

One of Dani's favorite 'stupid little tricks' begins with mapping clock to push the lfo's speed control to its maximum, then dropping speed to its lowest extreme. This approximates syncing the lfo to the clock: as the clock ticks, lfo's position changes.

There are a bunch of ways to extend the effects of this trick, but here's how Dani uses it in this video:

Spread lfo's phase and map it to notes. This crawls through the current scale's pitches in a semi-deterministic way.
Couple pitch selection to envelopes by mapping change to sustain, then map the lfo to cycle through the drone sequence. This helps isolate the activity to individual voices. Don't forget you can specify which voices are active by holding drone and toggling them on and off via the strum touchplate!
Map contour to the lfo's shape, which will advance when voice three is active. Make sure to experiment with the extended shapes!