Fauxharmonic Orchestra | The Ultimate One-Man Band

Nov 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Paul D. Lehrman

           
 

PAUL HENRY SMITH'S FAUXHARMONIC ORCHESTRA TAKES SYMPHONIC SAMPLE-PLAYBACK TO A NEW LEVEL

“Orchestras are having a hard time,” Smith says. “I don’t necessarily love them as institutions, but as musical instruments they still can’t be beat.”

Photo: Bruce Gilbert

The conductor lifts his hands and nods to the others on the stage. He lowers his right hand, and at the bottom of its arc, the orchestra begins to play the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 1. The sound is lush and lovely. The blend between the first violins on the left, the cellos on the right and the winds upstage and in the center is perfect. The conductor is wearing an embroidered formal jacket that would not look out of place on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's. He is softly lit from beneath, giving him a bit of a mad-scientist aura. As he swings his arms and leans to the left and right, the tempo changes, the balances shift and the music comes to life.

Bonus Material

The Conductor in Real Life

Related Link: Fauxharmonic Website

Read Vienna Symphonic Library's coverage of the Fauxharmonic Orchestra's premiere performance and download a recording.

But there is no orchestra — no violins, cellos or winds. The conductor is alone on the stage except for a computer operator, a computer display and five Bang & Olufsen BeoLab 5 towers arranged in a rectangle with one in the center. The sounds originate from a quad-core Mac Pro running Apple's Logic Pro, which is selecting from more than a million samples from Vienna Symphonic Library's Vienna Instruments. The conductor is wielding not a baton, but a copper-painted Nintendo Wii Remote (or Wiimote). Another Nintendo controller, a Balance Board, is picking up his body's movements.

Curtain Call

I'm at the world-premiere concert of the Fauxharmonic Orchestra, a six-year-old project by Paul Henry Smith, a conductor, composer and expert in MIDI orchestration (for more about Smith, read it here at emusician.com/online_exclusive/fauxharmonic_bonus_material). Along with about 150 other curious audience members, I'm in the huge Holy Name Church in a residential section of Boston. The reverberation would be overpowering for any acoustic instrument louder than a lute, but it happens to work very well tonight.

Before the Beethoven symphony, Smith and his machines do a short demonstration of how the computer responds to the Wiimote by playing a trifle by Johann II and Josef Strauss, the “Pizzicato Polka.” The music follows his motions, speeding up and slowing down as real orchestral players would. We hear a loud pop before the music starts, and the flutes emit a few strange peeps during pauses. Hindemith's Trauermusik with violinist Noralee Walker is next, followed by two arias from a modern opera and another from a Handel oratorio, each featuring mezzo-soprano Tynan Davis. The blend between the live and sampled sound sources is quite convincing.

The Beethoven opens with the music stopping and starting again several times. In the last movement, the orchestra decides to skip a few bars. Smith is understandably a bit rattled but forges ahead, and the rest of the movement goes fine. Even if the orchestra and the conductor lose each other, the virtual musicians are always perfectly in sync with one another — which any conductor will tell you is a definite advantage over a real orchestra.

A lot is going on here, and not just inside the Mac. In an age of dwindling resources for arts organizations, is the Fauxharmonic a harbinger of the future? Will virtual-instrument technology supplant the real thing in live performance the way it has revolutionized recording? And is simulating a 19th-century musical institution the best use we can make of the brilliant and cheap new technologies that interactive games are making available to us?

Nuts and Bolts

On a technical level, what Smith is doing is relatively straightforward. He uses a shareware program called OSCulator (see the March 2009 EM for more on using this software with the Wiimote) to interpret the Wiimote's accelerometer data and button presses. Information about how quickly he changes the Wiimote's direction is sent directly to Logic Pro's Tempo fader, which controls the sequence he has constructed for each movement or piece. “OSCulator also lets you send application control data, like to move the cursor to the beginning of the file or a specific marker,” he says.

Another way to use the Wiimote is to perform beat detection using Cycling '74 Max and an object called aka.wiimote to generate MIDI timing clocks. Smith did not do that in this concert, however. “In the latest version, Logic no longer responds to external tempo changes through MIDI clocks,” he says. “So the only way to get it to change tempo in real time is through that fader.”

The Balance Board that Smith stands on has four pressure sensors that send data reflecting the amount of force on each one. The data changes when Smith moves his feet or shifts his weight by leaning, for example. “This also goes through OSCulator. I assign the sensors to Transformer functions in Logic and scale them,” he says, “and then use them to control velocity values in different sections of the orchestra.

“Sometimes the hall has too much bass resonance so you lean toward the first violins to increase them. But I have to scale the response differently for different sections, so that leaning toward the violins might affect them to one degree while leaning toward the basses affects them differently. And each piece has to be set up differently. I start with a good balance that doesn't need much input, and then I tweak the numbers for each instrument section and each piece to give me just the right amount of flexibility.”