3spds

Sorry it has been so long since my last post. It has been a really wild ride.

I find myself running full speed ahead so often, that sometimes it seems like to reflect on what I’ve been able to accomplish would result in some kind of an explosion. At the same time, my lack of reflection robs me of the perspective I need so allow myself to burst with these new skills in a satisfying way. And so, I sponged for so long, reacting and responding to ideas and growing ever readier to finally pinpoint that thing of all things, only to continue honing tangents and indulging obsessions. I feel that the time has finally come to take a step back and account for what needs accounting for.

I have started work on an ecosystem of small musical automata, each of which demonstrates a feedback system involving a ‘crossing of levels’. The first one, pictured below,

uses a photoresistor controlled clock to time a regular spasm of movement to a shaker motor. the photoresistor reacts to minute changes in light, which may either result from the movements of the light organic material attached to the weight, or from the freewheeling motion of the entire system. The periodic shakes occur faster as it gets more exposure to light, and the entire sculpture emits a squiggly drone through a resonant cavity in its base. He is particularly fond of lamps. I cannot thank Jeramie Belmay enough for his help with designing the body. This is the prototype. This is the final being.

The second item in this series is currently being designed as a light-emitting being of similar stature, essentially a converse of the first. Instead of blocking ambient light, this automaton blinks. The sounds are more complex as well. They play together nicely. Documentation to come.

I created a simple biofeedback composition using in-mouth galvanic response in conjunction with control-level feedback structures called “Loop”.
Asli Soncelly’s short film “Lenore” was an amazing project to be involved with. She has a really sick mind, a powerful asset when working on a horror film. I did the entire project in free open-source software, including some patches i made in SuperCollider for spectral granular synthesis. Also designing reverb in SuperCollider was an interesting process. I eventually chose convolution as my method of choice, and recorded reverb impulses in my bathroom. I also had some fun with the ambient noises, since much of the original sound had been damaged during filming. Contact microphones and freesound became my friends very quickly. It won “Best Senior Film” at Wesleyan, due to Asli’s bloody cinematic genius.

Mike Clemow and I have been building a linux cluster at NYU for the purposes of running sound synthesis and other high-level media production algorithms using OSC as a message-passing interface. We made an appearance at the ITP spring show to demonstrate some of its functionality in these beginning stages of production. Using Julian Rohrhuber’s Just-In-Time library for SuperCollider, I livecoded on the cluster using my laptop as a head-node, controlling streams of wavelets in realtime. I have learned much about the architecture of SuperCollider itself, and really about networks themselves, from this project. I cannot thank Mike enough for bearing with me as I wrap my head around these machines.

The Arboretum, a 12-node linux cluster workstation, has birthed two much lighter, more transparent “dev clusters”. Mike and I each own a few machines, and are building clusters to our own specifications. I named mine the “Cattri”, Pali for the “four”, as in the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism. Each of the four linux boxes is named the Pali word for a Noble Truth: Dukkha, or “The Nature of Suffering”, Samudaya, or “The Origin of Suffering”, Nirodha, or “The Cessation of Suffering”, and Marga, or “The Way Leading to the Cessation of Suffering”.

At this point I have set up a wireless network on which it is possible to livecode with these machines, which are piped through my monitors as well as through the loft’s new sound system– a pair of flat speakers and an amp we found in the trash, fixed, and mounted to the walls. Between those and the cluster itself, it’s shocking to think what people throw out! In addition to composing recursively symmetrical granular structures on the toilet, it is possible to wirelessly control the house’s music and have access to a shared music library.

I see myself currently working toward a greater capacity for spontaneity in my work as my skills get honed. Current obsessions include formal languages, networked microphones, analog electronics, wavelet analysis, improvisation and sculpture. I also see myself becoming more interested in extended vocal techniques. Of course, more musings on each of these will happen at a later point.

so the other day in class, Jeff showed us how to use the max/msp picture object to get image data and translate that into noise. he challenged the non-maxers to do the same in our respective environments. mike used osc packets to read the image in realtime, while i went the NRT route for some added flexibility and synthesis power. we both used proce55ing to load the image file, but while mikes communicated via osc into his chucK patch, mine simply spits out a .txt file with a ‘header’ of the image dimensions, and a ‘body’ of rgb values for all the pixels in the image. the ‘header’/'body’ were line separated, while their values are space separated. in sc3, i was able to come up with a simple i/o paradigm for this and a parser to generate arrays of horizontal line data, which then i used for various purposes. in these examples i am using a pattern to cycle through the array of amplitude information determined by the brightness of each pixel in a line. this produces a series of spectral snapshots along a ’sound pixel’ grid. for the first one, i just used 12tet, while for the second i used a just scale with 11 t/8va . eventually i’d like to write a patch that will look at hue and map that onto phase, like a lot of spectrographs do, but that hasn’t quite happened yet for a number of reasons. these reasons are also related to why i haven’t blogged in a while, and now that i’m somewhat being forced to take a break (im at work) i’ll be posting these little misadventures presently.

this is the picture i used for those first two. black = silence. i used it because it was small, but the picture also worked really well because of its repetitive, geometric shape and also its high contrast.  i actually inverted it so there would be more space.

I have uploaded several new compositions onto my server. They include the following:

livecoding practices in superCollider:

meditation on beat frequencies (somewhat slow at first):

livecoding 0

meditation on additive synthesis (particularly primes):

livecoding 1

meditation on just intonation (and tuning systems that reflect the timbre of the instruments playing them):

livecoding 2

meditation on modulation (and a healthy dose of feedback):

livecoding 3

meditation on chaotic maps (specifically the “gingerbread man” 2D map):

livecoding 4

scrambled data and header trickery on a sample of Wagner’s infamous “Tristan Chord”:

data scramble 0

data scramble 1

data scramble 2

data scramble 3

Data transformations include header changes, mp3 codec bending, multi-resolution substitution.

I used soundhack for header changing, iTunes (blech) for the mp3 codec, and textEdit for the substitution.

I will make a habit to continue posting / recording my livecoding improvisations because I think it’s good practice. Also that keeps me honest in terms of not screwing up and recompiling the class library mid sesh. Also it’s just good to hear yourself when you practice so you find out what you’re good at and what needs work. Personally I’m just getting started with this but I think my main problem is that it’s hard to make the first few minutes interesting if I have to start with a blank document. I think I’ll allow myself to reference other code, as long as it’s copied into that new document and altered to fit into the context of the sesh. I also really like having the improvisations be structured around an idea, formal or otherwise, because the limitation gives me something to try to work around. I hope to become adept enough with my analogue components to build electro-acoustic instruments on the fly as well.

mediate !=== immediate

media !=== immedia

media != qualia

media extend qualia

<present, ineffable moment> = immediate qualities

media are an extension of that which is lost when the split between ‘now’ and ‘not now’ does not appear. this is not because of some esoteric math, it’s because media (including conscious and subconscious languages, formal languages, and perhaps even anything anything this side of cognition) imply their negation. And from there it all explodes. Suddenly– but not immediately– we have them*n and them / n . The set makes room for the incredibly intricate, somewhat gooey (depending on your affect at the time) garden of bifurcating paths. Oops. also, this is not news. This has been happening and continues to happen, and regardless of the staggeringly large number of responses we (and everything else, including systems of this) somehow come up with, stuff in our particular band of nodes (or single node, depending on your affect at the time) to which we belong can see ‘up’ the tree. we see out and down (sometimes). many things see only down, and some seem to see not at all, and indeed some are invisible to us entirely as well. perhaps a substitution for ’see’ could be ‘to recompile the lexicon and the grammar and press “play”‘ (to ‘axiomatize’ in fewer words). i suspect this is why my friend Andy kept saying “no, it’s prickles” to Jenny’s constant “goo” onslaughts. until it would disappear from conversation. and what more is there to do but laugh at it and move on? or perhaps drift away into sleep. these are, of course, the polarity of the “robustness?” of the system we represent at a particular time, which is a collection of processes, similar in the sense they may inherit some things from us (or us from them, depending on the polarity of the “robustness?” of the system we represent at a particular time). in addition to this we have that which is mediate (d) .

every good language has an exit strategy.

actually, they all obviously have many. a staggeringly large number of them. but the best ones are both able to be really relevant but also to refresh very quickly. NLP people will call this “reframing”, I think, although I wasn’t paying very close attention when it was explained to me and actually know very little about NLP at all. but i like the word because i think its kind of poetic.

as human beings, much of what we currently call our “experience” is semiotic in nature. another way to say this is that when we construct our experience, beliefs tend to have the most effect on us. especially our own. however, a system is by its own definition self-referential. it always comes back to the root. we can’t see up. well, to be somewhat pithy, we do; but from there everything starts to branch out again.

i have run into some excellent and terrifying times with my project. i am currently mortified that we are making something that is far too complex than it needs to be. i suppose the idea is that it must be very robust, so that it can accommodate a wider spread of applications. at the same time, the idea that an environment like supercollider can already make this happen pretty much all on its own is a somewhat frightening design “achilles heel”. however, to generalize this process to the point where there is the possibility of running this off of a live-cd and have anyone using any OSC aware environment (or actually anything at all) make digital (or haptic, etc) art with it is what fuels my interest at this point. mad of it.

i am interested in building a simple osc-powered neural network with the capacity of real-time performativity. emphasis on “simple”. it will probably be the dumbest neural net in existence, but it will be way sexier than a lot of them.

one last thing about that “art” thing. our beliefs about “art” are entirely semiotic just like the rest of us. also, just like everything else, “art” or “aesthetics” is entirely self-referential. so it’s somewhat dubious when practitioners of some field, like “neuroscience”, “NLP”, “anthropology”, etc, offer smug “answers” to the “questions” (ie explain away) some other field. there is a gap implied by the act of “speaking” (perhaps even in the sense that “my soul speaks to me”) that we would have to superceed in order to resolve. since that isn’t possible, we can’t even say whether something out there already has “answered” the question of us. or what that means at all. These frameworks for understanding are best taken as dialogues, themselves being in dialogue with each other.