The NESS Project was a European Research Council funded project (ERC-StG-2011-279068-NESS) which ran between 2012 and 2016. It was concerned with large-scale physical modeling sound synthesis. The end goal of the project was to put the synthesis tools we developed in the hands of experienced composers of electronic music. Dr. Gordon Delap, of the National University of Ireland Maynooth, was our first visitor in 2013.
Gordon used a variety of different instrument types; the piece consists of three roughly three-minute segments, which were composed consecutively, and which show our (mainly Gordon’s) progress in trying to come to grips with using these instruments, which involves building them as well as playing them.
The first part makes use of very sparse percussive sounds, generated from a modular network (we call it the zero code, as it was our preliminary attempt at a modular network). The second makes use of much richer sonic material, including very large connected plates (running on the GPU), as well as a trombone model (still in Matlab in 2013). The third part makes use of more plates, now accepting some audio input (samples of whispering), more trombones, now processed through our modular plate network, and finally, a 3D model of a bass drum, which is hybridized over GPU and multicore CPU.
The original piece was written in eight channels, so a stereo reduction can hardly do it justice! Still, for an idea of what it sounds like, here it is, in a compressed audio format.
The accompanying graphics are not part of the piece, but illustrate simulations of some of the physical modeling systems that we have employed.
NESS Project website: www.ness-music.eu
