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Release Date: 2020-10-30Label: Carrier Records
Electronics produced in IRCAM-Centre Pompidou Studios.Excerpt from the liner notes: "This audio documentation of my interactive computer music work Rainbow Family is taken from three days of live performances that took place in May of 1984 at the Salle de Projection of the Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)." [Exact date of recording: 23, 24, 25 May, 1984]
Excerpt from the liner notes: "The 1984 IRCAM Rainbow performances featured from one to four human improvisors (contrabassist Joëlle Léandre, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, flutist and bass clarinetist Douglas Ewart, and guitarist Derek Bailey) performing with three networked Apple II computers, which performed on three of the then-new Yamaha DX-7 synthesizers. Audio input from the instrumentalists went to analog pitch- and envelope-following hardware, which generated voltage values that were converted to digital form. This input information was collected by one computer and distributed over a MIDI-like network to the others; each machine analyzed the data locally and created its own responses to what it “heard,” as well as generating and developing original material with no necessary direct relationship to the input.
Both the computer programming and the hardware hacking for Rainbow were completely my own, and the documentary film about the work that IRCAM produced in 1984 shows me working in the computer language FORTH, which I learned about from my mentor David Behrman."