We put up a production of The Goodship Pride of Communipaw Flats on Saturday at DeBaun Auditorium in Hoboken, NJ as part of the Stevens Alumni Weekend 2007 Festivities.
Several sets of “old gangs” got back together to bring the show to life — it was truly an alumni show, rounded out by the presence of the “Old Guard” — members of the class of 1957. The show was campy, as intended, but the audience had a blast. Thankfully none of the attendees became ill from the droning 30Hz tone I laid down at the bottom of the sound design.
On the technical side of things, I ran all 8 audio channels of the show out a MOTU 1296 driven live from MAX/MSP. It took a little effort to get the MOTU unit working with MAX, but once I understood how to interpret the PCI Console configuration dialog box, things were smooth sailing. I think this was a successful first attempt at running ambient sound along with triggered sound effects. This is fertile ground for future experimentation — especially for synchronizing with lighting effects.
One problem we had during the show, though, was that the sound design was overwhelming the actor’s lines towards the end. As the sounds of failing steamboat’s engine grew, they drowned out some of the final lines of the show. I realized afterward that adjusting the EQ on the sound design patch so that it dropped out in the human voice range might have helped.
- the control panel of the Goodship Pride in MAX/MSP
- “behind the scenes”… it’s a little scary in there; eight audio channels, especially with automated fades can really complicated the routing. I couldn’t figure out a good way to start making subpatches out of things in the time I had to work in.
I “invented” a couple of new things for my MAX/MSP toolbox while working on the show
- Randomized wave file player
- Automated fader