R We Who R We
The Happy Valley Band
Alexander Dupuis

Transient Series I.2 (Cover Bands Edition) is likely the only event to conceptually link Ke$ha and Patsy Cline. But both of these inhabitants of the Great American Songbook will coexist this evening: one cut up by R We Who R We (composer-performers Philip White & Ted Hearne) and the other very carefully notated by a computer and played by the all-human Happy Valley Band — with the ghost voice of Patsy herself. And audio-visual artist Alexander Dupuis covers cellular automata with his performance of Conway’s Game of Life.

R Who We R We is a collaborative composition by Ted Hearne (voice) and Philip White (electronics). In this suite of short pieces, we deconstruct assertions of identity in pop music. We dissect songs by Michael Jackson, Ke$ha, Eminem and others, subjecting them to arbitrary processes applied to both lyrical and sonic elements. Measures are reordered, lyrics are alphabetized, the backup choir is given the solo mic; garbled lyrics become absurd poems couched in profundity, melodies from the processed text become vocal lines, those vocal lines become control voltages in a chaotic electronic feedback system; four-on-the-floor endures, autotune abounds.

The Happy Valley Band is what happens when a computer discovers the Great American Songbook, tries its best to pick out the tunes by ear, then writes down what it hears and demands that human performers try to play it. It uses and abuses machine hearing technology and automated music transcription software to re-contextualize the voice of American popular music. American pop icons — Elvis Presley, Patsy Cline, and more — sing along to microtonal computer-automated transcriptions of their original backing bands. The Happy Valley Band is Alexander Dupuis on guitar, Beau Sievers on drums, Andrew Smith on piano, Mustafa Walker on bass, and David Kant on saxophone and arrangement.

Alexander Dupuis develops real-time audiovisual feedback systems mediated by performers, sensors, musicians, matrices, bodies, scores, games, and environments. He also composes, arranges and performs sounds for guitars, liturgies, chamber groups, horse duos, microwave cookbooks, and celebrity voices, and works to bridge the gap between his waking and dreaming states through 2d and 3d animation. He graduated from Brown University’s MEME program as an undergraduate in 2010, and is now in his second year of the Digital Musics masters program at Dartmouth College.

Conway Quartet No. 2 is a live performance using a four-voice Game of Life-based audiovisual synthesis engine.  Steered by the performer, the four one-dimensional voices interactively manipulate themselves through shifting phase triggers and cellular waveshaping.

An interactive audiovisual feedback loop forms the basis of All Hail the Dawn. The instrument, built from an old computer subwoofer, contains two simple light-sensitive oscillators. A crude spectral analysis in Max/MSP is used to filter the oscillators as well as looped buffers recorded from the instrument. A matrix of the spectral analysis, interactively altered in Jitter using audio data, is projected back onto the instrument and performer as a series of shifting patterns. This setup allows both the graphics and sound to drive each other, creating an evolving audiovisual relationship sensitive to slight changes in position, sound and processing.