Improvised performance using piano and the iPad application Samplr. Merging technologies from different centuries, composer and sound artist Mikronesia creates a real-time soundscape of sampled and live piano tones.
Camera and lighting: Dan Tabor
Performance and Editing: Mikronesia
More about the App: samplr.net
Sound art installation piece presented at Little Berlin Gallery in Feb 2014. Capsule was part of the show Never Like Like It Is Now which featured pieces relating to ice. For my piece I created a sound capturing device (using an iPod Touch and a custom iOS and Pure Data App) that would record and freeze the audio spoken into an attached microphone inside the cooler. The result was a frozen mass of sound documenting whatever sounds the attached microphone picked up. Below is a demonstration video of someone trying Capsule out.
Edge of Nostalgia or EON is an interactive album application that I worked on for much of 2012 and 2013. It’s essentially an app that uses the microphone on your iPhone to process the sound world around you in a musical way. It’s a seven track ambient music album that blends the sounds around you into the music. A train rides by, kids playing across the street, the ambient sounds of your office all filter through your microphone and blend in with the music, a new musical creation is born. It’s been very well reviewed (including a feature in Create Digital Music). You can download it from the Apps Store for 99 cents.
Edge of Nostalgia from Michael McDermott on Vimeo.
Here’s one of the tracks (without the processed realtime world of the listener)
For The Fidget Fall Experimental Music Festival Nora Gibson and myself were asked to create a music and dance work. We decided to show a work-in-progress for a large media project Antarctica. Antarctica is the story of the end of human data, the end of history, the end of information. It was presented as a 20 minute film projected on three translucent floating screen and with singing by Steve Quaranta.
Below is an excerpt from the film:
ANTARCTICA Development Preview from Michael McDermott on Vimeo.
Live piano and iPad set from Community College of Philadelphia.
Recording below:
Piece for Disklavier and electronics. Performed live at thefidget space for the Experimental Music Festival.
Ghost Tones (Excerpts) from Michael McDermott on Vimeo.
Flute Quartet by Michael McDermott entitled Tomas. Performed by Danielle Brosious, Bob Carpency Heather Fortune, Jacquelyn Howell on flutes and Michael McDermott on electronics. This was part of a performance at Nexus Gallery, ParaphraseNexus and made possible by a grant from the Argosy Foundation.
Below a live recording of the piece:
As part of the 2008 Bath Music Festival prolific pianist and composer Harold Budd put out a call for people to create videos of themselves recording his composition “Midnight Leaves of London”.
Filmmaker Derek Moench and I did a few variations for this project including a cool David Lynch inspiried reverse performance. We also did this more glitchy one below:
For the POST (Philadelphia Open Studios Tour) in October of 2007 I did a four hour long piano + electronics improvisations at Art@Sophi. Our friends and frequent collaborators Monica Turtle and Mike Murray invited me to create a living soundscape in the foyer of Art@Sophi. It was a fun and challenging night to play for four hours straight!
Don Brewer taped some of my performance and posted an 8:00 compilation which you can view below:
Iris or Comfortable Too was my second album for Gears of Sand. For this record I limited my sound source to a grand piano which I recorded late one night my brother’s restaurant. The sounds are glitchy and frigid, but there are points of warmth and stillness deep inside.
Available from bandcamp