foot foot

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This is just another looper.

Intended for intentionally unintentional playback systems.

You fill the system with live audio material, it plays it back, sort of.

There are six loops that range from 0 to 49 seconds in length. Each loop is constantly playing and has a chance to flip the direction the playhead is moving in. Each loop is set to a certain stereo position, and periodically these positions get shuffled.

CONTROLS

Here are the specific controls…

• E2 - rec level – indicated by brightness of track outline

• E3 - pre level – indicated by brightness of lower track portion

• K2 ——— start record – begins drawing rectangle

• K2 again — stop record – stops drawing rectangle

• K2 (long) — clear record

• K3 - switch track – indicated by outline around track

• K1 + K2 - flip play direction – play head direction changes

• K1 + K2 (long) - turn on/off auto flip

• K1 + K3 - micro loop – play head freezes

• K1 + E3 - loop length – indicated by size of blank space on track

story time

This script is the result of my efforts to implement a foot controller to allow for hands free live sampling with my various acoustic instruments. Hence the name foot foot. It is also the reason some parts of the system such as the flipping and the flopping of the sounds happen automatically and aperiodically. Along with the asymetry of the loop lengths, this creates an ever evolving bed of loops that go in and, mostly, out of phase with eachother. Rendering the simplest of phrases into a never ending, or thought of, stream of variations. Think Eliane Radigue’s feedback works, or Brian Eno’s seminal Music for Airports.

It wasn’t until I had an opportunity to give a performance here in Montreal at a very interesting cathedral space that I finally finished my work on the foot control system and gave birth to the original foot foot script, which was called aFoot. The performance taking place in an acoustically rich environment inspired me to craft a performance using a viola, since I expected it would sound beautiful in such a reverberant space. As I am fairly new to the instrument I decided to get a little help from my friend Norns to give me a little more confidence performing amongst other drone and ambient artists..

Thanks to the ease of prototyping and the built in softcut engine, I was able to audition many different configurations of accompaniment in the lead up to the performance. Things got quite complex quite quickly but didn’t sound good. It was at this point I deleted everything and I tried the simple approach presented here. Which led to what I found to be very beautiful results

This is an approach that continues to embrace my tenents of slow play and surrender. Where, as a performer, I can also, almost, experience the moment as an audience member. With this looper one can add bits here and there and sit back to listen how they behave. Then you can add a little more when/if the moment feels right, or just play alongside the goings on. Or simply listen.

This process led to the creation of my album Iuvante, which led to my performance, and now has, finally, led to the release of this script to the community.

In preperation for sharing with everyone I refactored the code to enable a very playable interface from the Norns alone, as I hope is evidenced by the performance demo video above. I have included the foot control part of the script, but I will not publicly support it. If you have a midi foot controller, and would like to use it with this script, get in touch with me and we will work it out. In fact, this could probably be a great intro to coding for Norns. And I will be more than happy to tutor and/or provide encouragement to you!

To that end, I hope you enjoy making some music with this little looper. I know I have.

Thanks

• ululo