Through interviews with a student at
the Royal Academy of Music in Aalborg,
it was discussed that the double
bass is traditionally found in jazz,
folk and classic where it is part of the
rhythm group in a musical constellation.
The student, who became our
collaborator, wished to change this and
challenge the conservative roles through
the use of audio effects. Five effects
were chosen to give a mixture of common
effects such as reverb and delay
but they also included more electronically
inspired sounds through the combination
of the beat repeat effect, convolution
and pitch-shifting. The project resulted
in the Bass Augmentation and Enhancement
System (BAES). A controller
was created to house these and in order
to fit full parameter control into a relatively
small box, motorised faders were
used to be able to go back to a previous
fader position, thus enabling the use of
the same three faders for all five effects.
The collaborator used the second iteration
of the BAES over a long test period
(about a month and a half). During this
time, it was used for two different performances.
The last interview was made
to evaluate the BAES. In this interview,
it was made clear that our collaborator
could go beyond the traditional role of
the double bass and express himself in
new ways.