JORDAN
LANGLEY
Based on the deconstruction of video games in the 1970s and their rise to popularity in the 1980s, LangLee’s piece Pixel-Aged is a sociological paradigm of how the rise of home computing and video gaming came into fruition in this decade.
LangLee
Theme
LangLee is an Irish duo consisting of musical and visual creatives Jordan Langley and Lee Davitt.
This group was formed in response to an assigned group project as part of Music Media and Performance Technology at the University of Limerick, in which students were tasked with combining visuals and audio to create an exhilarating live performance
The performance aims to bring the viewer on a journey through time, starting with the most basic singular pixelated graphics and 1-bit sonic samples, and gradually move toward a more technologically advanced and digital age.
This is done through the progressive introduction of visual movement and colour opacity, synthesizers and drum machines, fluxional graphics, colour mixing, and polyphonic voicing.
The piece aims to be minalistic in its appraoch while maintaining a strong symbolic conpect, examplifying the technological and methodological limiations of the chosen time period and exploring a nostalgic appraoch to a decade of graphical and auditory discovery and creativity
Roles
As this performance was to make use of both live visuals and audio, it was decided to split these two elements between us.
While Lee was responsible for the development and modulation of visuals, I was responsilbe for the creation and production of the music.
Audio Development
Drawing from our chosen theme, the musical aspect of this project achieves an aesthetic similar to that of an old school video game soundtrack, while maintaining a strong narrative reflective and symbolic of the growth in video game development during the 1970s and 80s.The piece serves as somewhat of a developmental timeline, opening with a simplistic loop of samples taken from one of the first computer games, ‘Pong’ and ending with a complex palette of rhythmic and melodic elements.
External samples are used throughout the piece, each selected to suit the chosen aesthetic. The drum hits are mostly samples taken from early drum machines, which were first brought into Ableton and edited before importing into Sonic Pi. Some classic effects such as gated-reverbs were added to a number of the samples as to further exemplify the common sounds and effects heard during the chosen time period. The synth elements of the performance, such as the bass and chords, were made using a software emulation of an Oberheim Matrix 6 Synthesizer, a popular synth in the mid to late 1980s. Like the drums, the samples were first recorded within Ableton, then exported to be used within Sonic Pi.
Sonic Pi is not used to simply trigger these samples however, instead its use is more akin to that of a sampler, heavily altering the samples to the point where the source material may be unrecognisable from the final output. Many of Sonic Pi’s native resources are used and explored throughout the performance, such as the bit-crusher effect, as well as the in-built synth ‘Chiplead’, both of which lent themselves well to the chosen aesthetic
Each loop created within Sonic Pi was synced to a short loop named ‘Metro’. As the name suggests, this loop served as a metronome which could be used to trigger loops on beat, using Sonic Pi's "Sync" and "Cue" functions. As previously mentioned, the piece starts off with a very basic loop, symbolising the simplicity of early video games and moves toward a more content rich and complex performance, echoing the development and increase of video game content and the growing complexities of their development.
