'Flying' cocktails :)

I'm leaving Paris this Friday picking up the kids at Gare Montparnasse from the summer camp, spending the weekend in Picardie with the grandparents. My collaborator Frédéric Bevilacqua is leaving for his summer vacation on Saturday. We have been always the last ones to leave IRCAM past midnight, in the quest of Holy Grail N.2. I even forgot to eat lunch for two days, testing, fixing, testing...

In the meantime with Nicolas Ramamimanana's Holy Grail No.1, I made my own favorite 'cocktails' that are going to be very useful musically, and what I talked about the musical 'spiral', 'rolling' or 'frisbee' I feel is getting realized, quite unexpectedly, and quite simply by extracting a very particular kind of bowing data. You don't 'follow' anything like pitch, dynamic, or beat, but you 'roll' or 'fly' with your computer :) Kind of a strange thing to say, but it is what you do when you make music with a human. You have no master/slave relationship, but you 'walk' or 'roll' together, and this is what I'm after, with the computer.

I am not a very good programmer, and as my husband (a PhD in computer science) would lament in disgust, I will do whatever to make things work with a 'dirty' or 'bulldoze' programming. So I send rudimentary questions to Norbert Schnell who is constantly on the road for conferences this summer. Poor Norbert gets these questions waiting for him at his next hotel (!) but really, something that I am just staring at for 20 minutes, he can solve in 5 seconds!

This has been undoubtedly one of the most important summers of my life, in terms of my work. And for the kids--now I'm plotting on how to keep their French after we get back to NYC....