Repeating Grains

Create 5 sketches which use delays or repetitions on a scale of 1 – 250 milliseconds, and 5 on the scale of 250ms – 10 seconds.

I didn’t follow this format very strictly. However, I made some ‘evocative’ sounds:

original sound

grain one

grain two

grain three (pic)

grain four

grain five

grain six

grain seven (pic)

Resembuild

Remaking an image one photo at a time.

A single image is chosen, and broken up into fragments. These fragmented images in turn printed onto cards. Participants take a card and, in exchange, are asked to recreate the image they see on the card, taking it with their camera phone, and either MMSing to an email address or uploading it on the mobile web. The submissions can be viewed online, where you can compare the original and its recreation.

Short sounds

Create 5 sketches of extremely short pitched sounds. Play with the boundary of your ability to perceive the pitch of the sounds. Create 5 more sketches of sets of multiple short sounds (use those generated in the first sketches if you like).

Some short sounds:

short one

short two

short three

short four

short five

short six

For the next part of the project, I used an external Max module (FileplayerBP). This let me play back a set of pre-existing sounds files in a random order. I used the short sounds I’d already generated, and generated multiples that way (I also altered the delay between the sounds – in the last few, it gets shortened every time).

multiple one

multiple two

multiple three

multiple four

multiple five

multiple six

“Mushroom” – Image to Audio Performance

Prepare for in-class sketch performance next week. This week you will be assigned on of the following three images to serve as your score: John Cage’s signature, a William Anastasi drawing (made on a subway trip to play chess with Cage), or this mushroom print.

The manner in which the image becomes the score is up to you, and can be automated or interpretive. Performances will be given as trios (1 player for each image). Prior to class post one sketch of a sample of your work.

For my “image analysis” performance, I was assigned the mushroom print. For my analysis, I typed out the paragraph of text from the website which describes the process of creating the print, and used the ascii values and keycodes of the text as variables in my Max patch. The ascii code was the ‘x’ value, and the keycode was the ‘y’, and those co-ordinates were used to return RGB values (to make sure I didn’t receive a limited range of values, I kept an iterated character count as I typed, and added this to the variables). These RGB values were in turn fed into “cycle~” objects, each value as a different frequency (so, basically, I did some really simple additive synthesis). Lastly, trying to add a little more variety (though I kinda regret this now, I think it ruined the, ahem, ‘conceptual purity’ of the exercise), I did FM synthesis, creating a frequency ratio using the same x and y values, and iterating the amplitude of the modulator. This made my sounds more squelchy. The effect was meant to slowly grow over time (mimicking the mushroom layers), but in practice it was noticeable a little too soon.

(image)

(patch)

Mobile Phone Art

This is the powerpoint presentation I gave as part of my Mobile Media presentation on mobile phone art. Projects I included:

Tactile Sound Garden (Marc Shepherd)

Cell Phone Disco (Informationlab)

I Like Frank (Blast Theory)

Cellphabet (AlgoMantra Labs)

Cellphone Piano/Cellphone Pedal (Joe McKay)

The Present of Music

I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE TO MAKE MUSIC

WILL CONTINUE AND INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS

Otto Leuning – Low Speed (1952)

For Low Speed, Luening made sketches on which he based his flute improvisations. He transposed the first recording an octave lower, and successive versions each a fifth higher than the initial recording. Feedback produced a kind of unearthly, ghostly counterpart of the live flute.

Burial – Forgive (2006)

“The sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h. Static between the stations. Rain. ”

WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC:

John Cage – Williams Mix (1952)

Cage’s first composition for tape recorder already goes to the limits of the medium. Commenting on his score, Cage explains: «This is a score (192 pages) for making music on magnetic tape. Each page has two systems comprising eight lines each. These eight lines are eight tracks of tape and they are pictured full-size so that the score constitutes a pattern for the cutting of tape and its splicing. All recorded sounds are placed in six categories … Approximately 600 recordings are necessary to make a version of this piece. The composing means were chance operations dervied from the I-Ching.

Akufen – In Dog We Trust (2002)

“organization of sound.”

WHEREAS, IN THE PAST, THE POINT OF DISAGREEMENT HAS BEEN BETWEEN DISSONANCE AND CONSONANCE, IT WILL BE, IN THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE, BETWEEN NOISE AND SO-CALLED MUSICAL SOUNDS.

Wishmountain (Matthew Herbert) – Golf (1998)

Disco Inferno – Starbound (1994)

“the emphasis is on the group and the integration of the individual in the group.”

Hugh Le Caine – Dripsody (1955)

Autechre – Acroyear2 (1998)

“The “frame” or fraction of a second, following established film technique, will probably be the basic unit in the measurement of time. No rhythm will be beyond the composer’s reach.”
THE PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING MUSIC, PRINCIPALLY THOSE WHICH EMPLOY HARMONY AND ITS REFERENCE TO PARTICULAR STEPS IN THE FIELD OF SOUND, WILL BE INADEQUATE FOR THE COMPOSER WHO WILL BE FACED WITH THE ENTIRE FIELD OF SOUND.

AND PRESENT METHODS OF WRITING PERCUSSION MUSIC:

Ricardo Villalobos – Ichso (2007)

“Any sound is acceptable to the composer of percussion music; he explores the academically forbidden “nonmusical” field of sound insofar as is manually possible.”

AND ANY OTHER METHODS WHICH ARE FREE FROM THE CONCEPT OF A FUNDAMENTAL TONE.

THE PRINCIPLE OF FORM WILL BE OUR ONLY CONSTANT CONNECTION WITH THE PAST.

Matmos – For Felix (and all the Rats) (2001)

AND MAN’S COMMON ABILITY TO THINK.

Noise Math 1

Find at least three unique noise sources (math, recordings, etc.). Generate 10 sketches in which you explore noise in its various forms.

1. Technique: recorded samples, then used noise algorithm (generated mathematically and using pink~ object) to play back from random places in the buffer. (math),(pink object).

samples, randomly played -

clap

whistle

ooh

crumple (using pink nose object)

2. Technique: using Java, set up a camera to record the ‘noisy’ pixels found in black space.

Movie:

camnoise 1

camnoise 2

camnoise 3

3. Technique: Noise made up of even numbers only.

(Image)

evennoise

Noise Hunt

Search for noise. Take any short sound (probably in .wav or .aif format, possibly others, but mp3 does not work well), and open it in a text editor such as BBEdit. You will see more or less garbage. Leaving aside the first hundred characters or so (which contain header information about the file) edit the file in any way you see fit. Cut and paste sections from one place to another. Rearrange lines. Reverse or sort sections of text. Munge it with a perl script. Paste in an email.

Some edits will have more interesting results than others. Many edits may have no result, or make your file unplayable – be persistent. Continue incrementally until the source material is unrecognizable.

1. Original sound/Noisified (using ‘find and replace’, a very subtle hiss was added).

2. Original sound/Noisified (yet more find/replacement, with larger areas and more random)

3. Original sound (Jeremy Irons reading ‘Lolita’)/Noisified(1), (2) (Latter using repeated symbols to ‘compose’)

4. Original sound (Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind”) /Noisified(1),(2) (First composing with text patterns, then excessive find/replace until almost completely unrecognizable

5. Original sound (Sonic Youth’s “Providence”)/Noisified (Replacing one character turned this into total sheets of unrecognizable noise)

6. Original sound (Isaac Matafwani’s “Eko Bali Mukanina Bamayo”)/Noisified (same effect, total noise).

Mobile Midterm: “Mo’Body”

For the MM midterm, Yaminie & I knocked around a few ideas (including a “moblog” that would build on an existing ‘activist’ service that would allow women in India to report on incidents of sexual harassment and an online directory of street art that would allow uploads from phones), but finally settled on something that we felt could be entirely realized in the extremely short development time. We came up with a project that ideally works as an interactive public display of some sort, that can be altered by uploading images. So, “Mo’Body“: a website that displays composite image made up of three (body) parts, all of which are individually alterable (read: replaceable) by MMSing or uploading an image from your mobile phone.

So, to get technical, this is how it works: the user takes a photo of their head, body (torso) or legs, and sends an MMS containing the photo with the appropriate subject (’head’, ‘body’ or ‘legs’) to “callmitchquick@gmail.com”. There’s a PHP script called “parseMailScript” on my ITP webspace that extracts the image, and sends it to a folder on my directory. Another part of the script resizes the image to a chosen, standard resolution, resaves it, and puts the link in a MySQL database. The actual project is a Flash movie (a .swf file) that, upon loading, runs another PHP script that queries the database for the URL of the resized image and returns the result as a variable in Flash. The Flash movie takes that variable and loads the image into an empty ‘movie clip’. Phew.

Phone 2 Blog

For week 4 of ‘Mobile Media’, we adapted the ‘ParseMail’ and ‘Upload’ scripts to allow uploading to a blog (at http://itpmobile.wordpress.com) via MMS and via an online location (accessible by net-enabled phone). The post displays the ’subject’ of the MMS as the post heading, with the embedded image below it.