Chris Vik

I'm an electronic musician, creative developer and performer at Ethno Tekh. I spend most of my time in Max/MSP/Max4Live, Cubase and Ableton Live. I make music, perform, build interactive audio systems and develop my own performance tools including Kinectar and other creative utilities. These are my stories.

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Here I've built in a test demo for using Conway's Game of Life to generate grain clouds in my granular synthesiser, Grain Plane. All programmed in Max/MSP

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ETHNO TEKH | Tekh Tonic / Grain Plane combo :: beta preview

With a vocal sample from Mr.Bill's track "Router", this is our Leap Motion software "Tekh Tonic" controlling our custom granular synthesiser "Grain Plane" ( made…

Our Leap Motion control software Tekh Tonic, controlling my custom built grainular synth, Grain Plane.

X axis is sample position, Z is frequency, and Y is the gain of the given frequency at that particular positional slice in the sample.

Because the controller uses physics modelling to drive the synth, depending on the attributes given to the spring grid, the sound can range from a huge granular pad, to a thin, almost sequenced EQ / playhead sweep through a delay.

The thing craps out at around 180-190 grains, but I'm satisfied with that for the moment. In this video I'm using a sample from Mr Bill's track "router" as the base content.

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Breaking my modular softsynth.

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Here we talk about how we overcame the limitation of having no haptic feedback in our motion-control-based interactive installation.

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Me messing about with our Leap Motion controlled motion simulator experiment.

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Some footage from the last 3 weeks of our residency for our installation "Gravitate" at Fed Square - http://www.gravitate.ethnotekh.com/

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Our generative audio/visual mangler "VEX" will be hosted at Transmission tomorrow night, south east of Melbourne ( Parkdale )

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One of my current projects using a motion simulator (#mosim) platform and sound design.

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Live movement masking and blob tracking experiments in Jitter.

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We'll be at Republika Fest ( Croatia ) later this month sharing our performance and demoing our tools along with 100 other digital experts from around the world.

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My featured picture in the Tasmanian newspaper for our performance at Dark Mofo... http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2013/06/16/381530_tasmania-news.html

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Just a quick musing of my first experiences in VR... Using the Oculus Rift VR headset for the first time, being able to look around a 3D environment, is mind blowing. The headset is so responsive, with such a tiny latency between moving your head and the scene around you shifting, it's a very convincing experience. The moment I felt the strangest was when I first jumped into the Tuscany demo that comes with the Rift and there was no sound. I could look around me, and I was so immersed visually, that it felt bizarre that there was no sound to support the visuals, but more importantly, the perspective shifts when I moved my head. Highlighting even more how important sound is for location awareness. I started plugging locational sounds into the environment and very quickly it felt right. Except I couldn't see my body, nor could I stand up and move around. I was stuck to sitting down and using the keyboard to navigate. Not really the VR experience I imagined. We hooked the Kinect up to pull in the skeleton data and rigged up a human model, which you saw in our first video. This was very satisfying. Looking in front of you it's amazing to watch your hand moving through something which is clearly a virtual world. Without touching anything, I was there, inside the computer, directly interacting with the virtual space we designed ourselves. The thing that topped it all off, was looking down and seeing my virtual body and feet. Lifting my knee seemed so surreal. The position tracking was accurate enough to fool me for a moment that this virtual leg was actually mine. I feel like this is the beginning of a future of total immersion.

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Our first Oculus Rift + Kinect audio/visual instrument experiments

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We (Ethno Tekh) are performing at Pause Fest Perth. Friday 26th. The event is free! 

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Ethno Tekh @ Dark Mofo / Sound to Light (June 2013)

I'm happy to announce that Ethno Tekh (myself and Brad Hammond) are going to be involved in Dark Mofo at Salamanca Arts Centre in Hobart. More info to come...

Artists have been paired with producers to create sound-to-light installations and performances ... traversing two locations: here at Dark Mofo, and Light in Winter Festival at Melbourne's Federation Square.

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Our installation (Austhetic Feb, 2013) at Fed Square up on the big-screen. www.ethnotekh.com