This Study for Violin and Electronics is heavily inspired by the eminent IDM and ‘shoegaze’ rock group “Sweet Trip”, which frequently combines simple melodic lines with incredibly dense, complex glitchy percussive textures, making heavily use of Max/MSP-style buffer manipulation and granular synthesis, beat-repeats, pitch shifting, bitcrushing, flanging, and many other effects. This particular exercise is meant to explore the use of an open-source M4L device named ‘Chopper’ (available here from Rodrigo Constanzo’s website) to process various extended violin techniques within the context of IDM. In this clip, I improvised sections of electric violin with seagull glissandos, harmonic tremolos, fast portamenti, and artificial harmonics, and ran it all through Chopper, where I performed another improvisation tweaking its different parameters, effectively creating a duet with myself. The automation data can be seen in the clip on the left side of the screen in the arrangement view of Ableton Live.