Carson Schafer

MFA Jazz Drums ('19)

A Drum Solo Visualized

Hello, I am a Jazz Drums MFA ALUM (’19). My goal with this submission has been to find a way to make visuals that clearly represent what drummers practice –moving around the kit and using multiple limbs at once to create music. I wondered if there was a way to visualize this. I then realized that learning some basic coding could help me reach this goal!

I have placed drum triggers and piezo mics on my hi hat, ride cymbal, toms, snare drum and bass drum. I created a patch in MAX/MSP that parses the amplitude information received by each trigger. From there, it is instantly routed into a coding software called Processing where real-time visuals are created. The effect is seeing what you hear in an abstract but clearly understandable way. Thank you for checking it out! -Carson

Andrea Turk

KARMA Music Video “Karma”, a song by Andrea Turk featuring Prince Husein, is a song that throws you into the situation of unreciprocated love and how one would react to it. In this song, both sides wish the other person well but also ‘karma’, for wasting their time and effort into a one-sided relationship. The […]

Juan Antonio Rivera

Førgøtten – A Contemporary Ballet for the Soul. This art performance is about social justice in the 21st century, bringing to light the reality that our society now lives with police brutality. Many of my family members have had to have the “police” talk, “hoodie” talk, or “walking-out-late-at-night” talk with their teenagers, warning them that […]

Pierre Emmanuel Mariaca

The Net and the Self “The Net and the Self is an interactive music and dance installation mirroring our networked society. The audience enter in a room illuminated by UV blacklights where dancers and musicians interact through an amplified harp that has its strings connected with fluorescent fishing lines attached to the walls. The installation […]

Adam Zuckerman

A collection of melodies. Embedded like a small light in the corner. This piece engages themes and processes of transparency/translucence, copying/covering, and distance/absence: the traces of a thing not there. Melody fragments expand and contract. Here, melody crystallizes into harmony and harmony unfolds as melody. Like a constellation of stars; or in the direction of […]

John Tejada

Future Stars class compilation album John Tejada, a frequent guest on Touched Music compilations, hatched the idea of turning the final project for his CalArts “Advanced Electronic Music Production” class into a compilation album for the established label. John Tejada Presents Future Stars features 15 of Tejada’s students at their best, as well as an […]