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)

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.

Tuning sketches

Drawing on your additive synthesis work from the last class, experiment with different just intonation or equal temperament intervals and scales.

A major third (using three sine waves, at 150, 200 and 300hz) played first in just intonation, then in equal temperament. (listen)

0-5 scale in 12 tone equal temperament. (listen)

0-5 scale (using major third) in 6 tone equal temperament. (listen)

same, in 24 tone. (listen)

My patches:

Tonechanger.

Toneadder.

From JHNO: “Lattice” – (patch)(source page)

The Serial + Code Bits

“Pathways” uses Processing to receive the serial values sent by the Arduino microcontroller, and uses those values to switch between a number of pre-rendered images. There are two images that related to every point on the map/body, and inserting the needle displays one of the these two images (using a randomly chosen number that is generated as you poke). Programming-wise, “Pathways” is ‘just’ a dynamic image gallery, though perhaps in use it often seems more complex than it really is. Because these images (rendered in Flash and further treated in Photoshop) contain so much information specific to your action (ie. the location on the map where you’ve inserted the needle, the name and image associated with that same point), it seems that the separate interface components are being calculated and ‘drawn’ on-the-fly, rather than just selecting one of a range of pre-existing images.

Though our solution isn’t especially object-oriented (ie. versatile, easily extended, modular), it really seemed like our best option. Initially, we planned to animated the line connecting the points – in Processing, this would have involved either hard-coding a number of interstitial points, and writing some code to draw lines between those points, or running some kind of colour/blob detection to work out the shape of the map lines (which would probably have fairly limited accuracy). This drove us to Flash, and while we didnt end up animating, Flash really allowed us to build the kind of textured, visually rich interface that we wanted.

Finally, the code is available here.

AP: themes, designs

Aram brought his acupuncture doll to the floor on Thursday, which opened up some new ideas – one of the things that Aram had expressed earlier was the visual connection between the multiple ‘nodes’ on the doll (connected by colour-coded lines) and the NYC subway map. This seemed an apt metaphor for the acupuncture process – the subway lines as veins or energy ‘meridians’, the flow of people through the city like a bloodstream. Acupuncture, as Aram explained, is about balance – in a simplified way, it’s about locating ‘congested’ areas on the body, places where there is an uneven distribution of resources. In this way, it’s a lot like a microcosm of a public transport system.

We’ve got our reservations about the correlation between the two systems coming off as a little too ‘cute’, but for now, it still seems like a potentially rich relationship to explore.

Final midterm thoughts, and possible futures

This is a placeholder post for now – will return to it shortly. Thanks for your patience.

Code Marriage

One more Processing stumble: I was instantiating the Serial object twice, without noticing it – for some reasons JMyron didn’t mind this, but Processing’s video library did (and for good reason) – took me a long time and an eventual mail to Shiffman before I resolved the problem.

After that, it took a relatively fast (but extremely stressful) session of code integration before we could make sure that all our separate work (my video-tracking, Sandra’s work on getting in both sonar inputs, and Tom’s game code) would actually mesh into one game. Cleaning up the code essentially became Thomas’s goal – with Sandra and I rather annoying looking over his shoulder and insisting that we only had time for a copy-and-paste job, rather than Thomas’s much smarter (and ultimately essential) code packaging. Too many minor issues here to even list (and none of them particularly novel or unique), but we eventually got everything talking to everything else.

Video tracking annoyances, or: iSight begone!

Came up against a major stumble in tracking towards the end of the project – I was using J Nimoy’s “webcamxtra” (because I felt I was getting more consistent blob-tracking results with it), right up until the point when I had to plug in two webcams. Turns out that Apple can’t conceive of any situation where you’d want another USB webcam attached to your Macbook Pro, what with the little one they built in for you – there is no way to natively disable the iSight without removing your ability to get video input altogether. And “webcamxtra”, at time of writing, doesn’t seem to let you select your video sources – you just have to go with the one it first detects. I *did* find a hack-y way around this: if you’ve got Quicktime Pro, you can open a “New Movie Recording”, keeping the iSight occupied so that webcamxtra automatically detects the next one in line. Why I didn’t like this solution: I think it slowed down performance, and a couple times it froze one or both of the cameras, forcing a restart. No good.

In the end I resorted to using the standard Processing video library, and implementing Dan O’Sullivan’s rectangle-making, blob-tracking code (available here). After some tweaking, it worked just fine, and offered greater low-level control.

Documentation of ‘kick’ tracking

This video is missing from my computer. I suspect my teammate Thomas Chan has it. I hope to provide it someday.