Project présentation
Description:
This project aims at creating a soundbank of Maloya’s instruments freely available thanks to a Creative Commons Licence.
They will be organised into samples (loops and individual notes), proposed in a wide range of formats (wav, Apple loop, rex, etc.) in order to be usable according to musicians needs.
The bank will be available through a version of virtual instrument Kontakt Player to be used with Digital Audio
Workstations and/or standalone for live purpose.
In parallel a pedagogical booklet will be published (PDF). It will feature a section presenting Maloya (history, instruments, artists and styles, special features), and another one being a
manual that explain how to use Kontakt player instrument.
This pedagogical booklet will be available both in French and English.
Finally, a video tutorial will be posted on Youtube
Preamble
This project is based on "Runloop" recordings performed by JP. Jansen, F. Mariapin, O. Sébastien and S. Thomas in the frame of the Computer-assisted Music Classroom of Reunion Island C.R.R. (Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régionale de musique - Regional Music Conservatory).
Goal
Maloya Roots Percussions aims at widely offering, notably all musicians, the traditional musical heritage of Reunion Island.
The project thus gives musicians the opportunity to use these traditional sounds to produce modern tracks.
Maloya is currently totally absent from most famous sound editors (Timespace, Loopmasters, or Big Fish Audio) product lineup, this project therefore propose a solution.
Instrumental reunionese cultural heritage
Maloya was recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO on the 1 st october 2009. Reunionese music is made particular by original specifities such as ternary rhythms with binary accents and a wide range of tempos. Maloya is a musical style inherited from slaves and indentured labourers (link to...), and transmitted orally, until today. Nowadays, lots of
musicians wordwide integrate samples from traditional world music thanks to soundbanks.
Hence the need to consolidate this oral culture in today’s music, giving it a wider access thanks to Internet.
Soundbanks
A soundbank is a collection of digital sound recordings, known as samples, dedicated towards composers, arrangers, performers and music producers. Soundfiles are loaded in a sampler, either hardware or software , then used to create music. Typical libraries can have various forms: Musical tempo-based phrase which can be looped (repeated according to arrangement rhythm), or edited via copy/paste. One-shot" one single sound or note, which can be used by a digital sampler, a technique known as multi-sampling. This sample playback method consists in building an instrument which can be played or emulated from a sampler or a computer. It can also be used without tempo information as asound effect. Thanks to today’s technology in this domain, it is possible to have high quality recordings and processings enabling an optimal reproduction of source material.
Methodology
To create a loop, two steps are required: recording of the artist then processing of the acquired raw content. As evoked in previous paragraph, each sound must be recorded separately in order to avoid mixing. The performer plays with a headphone playing a click to have a known and common time reference. If his/her instrument is melodic, it is tuned to the tuning fork as well (except for particular situations). This step is particularly important regarding result’s quality. That’s why hardware conditions must be optimal. Processing step comes next: each type of sound is cut into segments so that its end matches the beginning of the next one hence allowing a flawless repetition. Two identical segments put together must be heard as a unique segment without feeling any break! Each segment is processed to make it more efficient and to ease its insertion in a project with other sounds. Finally, it is exported into most common loop file formats of the market. During this process, metadata are added. Final result is a computer file that can be downloaded freely on Internet according to Creative Commons Licence.
La suite est en cours de rédaction, merci de patienter
