3spds

so i’ve taken a break from sleeping / drinking porter / eating cheese to put this video out there. a video of tubby in full operation will be coming soon as well.

so sassu was really cute and organic looking.

that’s great and all, but iannis is not. iannis is mean and smells like chemicals.

iannis, like sasu, uses a visually rendered Lindenmayer system to generate quasi-granular note events. GESUNDHEIT!

in english: iannis is a self-similar, 3 dimensional structure that grows according to rules first applied in biology, but also found in linguistics and mathematics. the rules are applied sequentially, like a cookbook, but much simpler, more like driving directions. “Take I-90 for 45.6 miles and get off on exit 38-b toward Hellertown.” That is an event. Actually, it’s two. You have the event “Take I-90 for 45.6 mi” and the event “exit 38-b twd Hellertown”. (note: Hellertown as I understand is not anywhere particularly close to I-90. I have no idea what exit it would be, either, I just made that up.) Which Hellertown, you might ask? Exactly.

so right there we have two levels of orientation. i like to think of them as degrees of magnification. we have the single event and the whole structure, which is made of many events. visually speaking, since this structure grows (and slowly rotates :-0), we see it predominantly in terms of its entire timescale, or about 5 minutes as i recall. In the beginning we have nothing and at the end we have a very large, complex thing that resembles a wire sculpture. actually it disappears at the end I think. perhaps I should work on that. Curtis Roads, in his beautiful introduction to Microsounds, calls this time scale or magnification “Meso Structure”. It encompasses the entire composition from start to finish. thus, there is a persistent element– “How I get to Hellertown”– and a transient element “turn left to get on the ramp (DON’T DRIVE LIKE THAT YOU’LL GET US KILLED!!) “.

the events, however, happen much faster. also there are many more of them. yes, this time i did not write a piece of music with just one note. that was an earlier version, when it would crash immediately and i smelled harsh synthetic vapor coming out of my macBook. jk.

side note: Roads is careful to let us know that one year ≈ 0.000000031 Hz.

i would classify the events in this case to reside comfortably within the “Micro” time scale, right between taking long enough to be able to distinguish each one like a musical ‘note’ or a ’sound object’, to happing rapidly enough that they blend and become a texture, either noisy or pitched, or some wonderful combination of the two.

between these two poles i have set up (which indeed are just two landmarks on a continuum), there resides the world of the phrase and the world of the sound object. the beauty of iannis is perhaps most easily found in the structure of message-passing that makes up his syntactic skeleton, precisely because it begins with a ’sentence’ or string of instructions and moves through the time scales until it reaches the micro-event, at which point it comes full circle.

in the beginning, the entire instruction set that will form the song is figured out ahead of time. then, the instructions are followed one by one in a manner similar to sasu and my previous experiments with the L-Systems class in Proce55ing. Actually without further blathering let me take this moment to thank Patrick Dwyer for making such an elegant and easily extensible class. as this part of iannis’ visual component follows these instructions, it passes messages to another program, superCollider, which handles the sound.

if this were sasu, superCollider would make some notes that correspond to the event data. iannis is way too badass for that. so, iannis instead takes these events and, after classifying them, selectively determines which ones are phrase events and which ones describe the phrase event that is about to occur. it’s as if “going forward” is the phrase event, and turning one way or the other describes what “going forward” means or how the phrase event will sound. iannis then generates patterns of messages with counters and ID numbers to keep track of them so I don’t have to.

after this, the message is passed back to superCollider (from superCollider) for further mischief. each phrase event triggers a pattern of micro events that perhaps we can think of as notes, although they too are very densely layered and coalesced. which is part of the fun of doing all this anyway, right? i mean the better the fidelity of the record, the cooler it will sound after you pop it in the microwave for a minute or two. there’s more to subvert.

these note events, as i said, trigger individual micro events– at this point small copies of the same sample which is much less than a second long. it’s a kick drum i made a while ago to sound like some of Pan Sonic’s work. (perhaps the next one will be called mika or ilpo.)

ok so one last trick happens when superCollider actually gets to make the micro kick events which i’m particularly happy about. the synth has imbedded in it a message to be passed back to proce55ing, which jiggles the entire visual structure as though the sound is being played through it.

so iannis as an audiovisual entity displays sensitivity to each level of magnification intrinsic to the rules that make him up. ok enough i have to get back to him and make sure he didn’t explode; you know how those Greeks are… ;-0

ps here’s a picture of the kick drum sample’s waveform. the whole waveform is one second. only the initial transient is used, however.

since the duration of the microsound (kicklet?) is inversely proportional to its pitch, and there are only a few discrete pitches in the constellation, i can tell you that at most it lasts for 0.1454545454545… seconds, and at least it lasts for 0.018181818181818… the micro-pitches that make up a note event are, relative to one: 0.25, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1.25, 2. these are fibonacci numbers. also i fixed the end state so the picture stays. it was easy.

pps- no WAY am I posting a screenshot of this guy.  not until after tomorrow…

Medium = Message. This is a ‘type’ identity. The message or content of a particular piece of media is always another medium. A corollary to this could be that we are always extending our extensions, since McLuhan also defines “media” to be an extension of ourselves.

Language = Medium. Also a ‘type’ identity. This statement I see as an elaboration on McLuhan’s discussion of light. Language, grooming, and fire I believe are some very early human media. I think if we were to really get down to it, I would say that we ourselves are extensions or physio-linguistic legacies and prosthetes of each other.

Hot media: a chimpanzee grooms her daughter.

Cold media: her daughter grunts, coos and swats back at her mother.

I’m pretty sure McLuhan mentions the fact that media cools and heats up depending on the generation or individual that re-interprets it. The temperature changes because strategies for appropriate interaction with the world changes. Actually both of those statements are different ways of saying the same thing.

Ultimately I am of the mind that this process of prosthetics and amputation of our extensions is the essence of human drama. Also, I would say that the reincarnation/samsara story is a metaphor or explanation (redundant?) for this process. (of course it’s redundant; you’ve done this a squillion times already!)

I would also go on to say that these extensions of ourselves are exactly the antithesis of material pleasure, because if you are extending something you’re not experiencing it. So:

Medium != Present

Reality, as we tend to think about it, being a phenomenon (albeit an immersive one) described or defined by its emergent properties and its overarching stories/metaphors/”Laws” is just a concept. Actually it’s a very abstract, sophisticated concept. Composite reality in terms of “what-is-happening” is in truth immediate. (note the etymological presence of the very word “MEDIA” in that one!) Another way to put it is that it is ineffable, unable to be uttered. Unable to be extended.

However, human culture is incredibly good at extending itself. To quote Mr. Watts “we are menu eaters, we eat the menu instead of the food”.

here are some current re-workings of that infamous undead cat.

cat3

cat2

cat1 <—– CommLab Final

(

i have posted this under phys-comp not in error, but because i’m going to interface this application with tubby and my performance on thursday. i think it would be only fair to start by tuning/playing tubby and then moving on from there, so that it’s apparent who does what.

)

i am writing this post to set down that a breakthrough has occurred. i have written a patch that achieves a level of machine listening and autonomy of note event selection hitherto unattained in any of my previous work with computer music. this is the culmination of 2 years of struggling with conceptual limitations and hacks.

allow me to explain (or try minimally and fail). sorta how tubby now knows how to speak, i have given similar autonomy to shrod. a large part of it is his improved filterbanks. now he’s got 539 analysis bands, localized in time and frequency. he also has 3 stages of amplitude resolution, and the microsounds he triggers can be scaled accordingly or be completely different depending on these stages. I guess that’s what I mean in terms of autonomy. The data coming in to this puppy gets categorized and analyzed in ways that have come out of the study of psychoacoustics. for example his analysis bands are logarithmically spaced (at least for now) at 50 bands/octave. what shrod does with these osc messages is entirely up to me as well, so i can do realtime transforms which range from attempts at reconstructing the data (a venture whose success hinges upon what the material is and how it relates to the reconstructing ‘vocabulary’) to pattern detection and counterpattern deployment (realtime software automata that can realize any number of strategies such as tone clusters, counterpoint, rhythmic motifs, etc). this thing has a view from within the sound and is able to not just change the stimulus but produce strategic responses. Eventually, he will use a bank not of constant-q filters, but of cq driven phase vocoders arranged to do multiresolution analysis across multiple time/frequency scales. although at that point each octave will be divided linearly, over each octave the stimulus will be analysed with an appropriate window and provide identically scaled time/frequency resolution. The phase vocoders will similarly not be driving cosine summation oscillators but triggering note events, so the strategy will be similarly variable. This will also give us data about the phase structure of the stimulus, making wavelet and matching pursuit operations extremely straightforward. at this moment i have attempted a few tricks with him, including reproducing him with a live updating wavelet shape derived from an envelope function and the current stimulus, transposed across the spectrum. i have also tested out assigning different wavelet shapes to each of the 3 levels of dynamic resolution. also i have used a few synthetic wavelet shapes such as banded whitenoise with a formant (always a favorite) and straight sinusoid tone pips with a von hann envelope.

I hope to use this patch as an automaton to trio with tubby and me, since tubby i see as his hardware hacker, physical computing, evil jamaican twin.

I am also experimenting with the idea of remixing (or something) this album I recorded in 2004 on a beautiful, impeccably mic’ed concert grand. It was called “Animals Should Wear Clothes”, and it is largely solo piano with some hand percussion and bowing the strings, etc. I have already produced a few starting points, using shrod. there’s actually a piece on the album called “Schroedinger’s Cat” which I have started working with. It was unconscious I swear! One of these remixes was my CommLab final because I was so excited about this thing for the past few waking cycles. I’ll post links to the music when I upload it in some fashion or another.

in other news, i’ve lost my mind.

these are from alan’s casio keyboard we killed while bending. if you like your gear, don’t bend drunk. that’s all i’m gonna say about THAT one.

a speaker! oh how lovely. this entire keyboard cost about a dollar. plus i stole it. how much do people usually pay for small speakers like this???

yet another kind of amp IC! apparently it’s designed for cassette players. OR HACKED METROCARD READERS?!?!?!

also everytime i look at a clock it’s freakin 4:33!  help!

It’s the dub spring champion versus the great wavelet hope.

Ok that wasn’t very funny.

There’s a new piezo oscillator on tubby, so one spring is doubled up. It’s a crazy loud piezo that has three leads instead of two. Weird. It’s also super fat.

Also in the video note my new workspace. I sprawl out on the floor to do my electronics stuff, so this way I can have my computer and soldering iron elevated and at a safe distance from one another. Also the giant magnet in the back of my amp is a comfortable distance from my computer now.

Schrod is a thing I’m working on that decomposes incoming sound into note events via a 165 node constant-q filterbank. The current note events are microsounds derived from banded noise and 16 cycles of a sinewave, tuned to the same frequency, with an expodec envelope. I might use some of the audio from this bout for reverb/feedback convolution purposes later. His name is Schrod because of the cat.

My initial intention was to make both units autonomous and separate. I think I will still aim for that, although that’s not what just happened. What just happened? …Oh yeah I made that video.

So in the video (note the tasteful ‘merlot’ colored velour jogging suit) I am sending Tubby vibrations with a three piezo oscillator. That’s the circuit board with the three knobs and the disks that are all up in Tubby’s dreads. The smaller circuit board whose power bus is connected to the oscillators’ is the driver circuit for the fourth feedback piezo, whose input is an aux send from the mixer. This is basically the same as before but with a third oscillator.

Schrod simply analyses the sound coming from Tubby and tries to re-create it with his arsenal of microsounds. “Tries” is the operative word. He’s really not very sophisticated right now (he ignores amplitude) but in terms of time and frequency domain accuracy he’s better than anything I’ve ever coded. I’m also stoked that I am getting individual note events out of him, and that he’s not a note event in and of himself. That’s a conceptual thing that’s taken me a really long time to arrive at. Expect to see more of Schrod, or at least some of his kin. He’s the prototype for the first generation of cluster patches. Enough about that.

I also have SChrod runing thru the mixer with Tubby. This gives me more freedom to control their relative levels, but additionally gave me the unexpected option of sending SChrod thru Tubby. Which I did. So in the first little bit of the video where I’m tapping the springs I’m trying to get that feedback coefficient just right.

Supercollider crashes a little before the end of the match, so I guess Tubby wins… THIS TIME. He’s a tough motherfucker though; I don’t see how mere software is supposed to outlast FULL POWER TUBBER-WAREZZ!!!

ps– we were pretty loud.  you were warned.

so i gave my tub some luvin today. i’m making him talk. the hex schmitts IC i put in did the trick. I initially had made a three oscillator piezo instrument with pots for each frequency but I got way more out of it when I put one of the piezos on a driver circuit coming out of an aux send on my mixer. now there are two pulse oscillator piezos, one for each of tubby’s medium springs, and one feedback channel piezo on his largest spring. now he can talk just fine, and listen as well. I use the pots (my black metal bbe knob heads on a smoother pot) to change the frequency of the pulses, and when I find a sweetspot the feedback piezo goes nuts and tubby talks back. It is very much like a conversation and much less like an instrument or a sound effect. I think an interesting idea would be to use my newfound automaton as a model for a supercollider patch. This way, there would be three performers, where only one of them is human. Supercollider could make neat visualizations happen, too, if I chose to go there… at this juncture anyway. I have to remember this must be done in a week. Could happen tho.

I am suddenly ok with the reintroduction of a computer because I am thinking of the sculpture as a single entity, just as the computer would be, and just as schmitt and I are. It would be totally sweet if the mixer didn’t have to be used, but I think it’s the best way to keep noise in the system manageable. otherwise we’d have a repeat of the set at Jake’s. Not that I didn’t enjoy the feedback self-oscillating and not acting like a filter at all, but it would have been nice to have some say in the matter. anyway, that’s where the idea came from, so whatever. that’s what it’s about, I guess.

It departs from Tudor and looks at Behrman. There are also several helpings of Nick Collins. I would like the computer element to perhaps comment on Roads or Xenakis. It would be nice if the visuals were some kind of A-Lifey fractal thing, but that might be pushing it for next week.

I like this process much better than how I’ve been going about things in the past. It all springs from trying shit out, not just arm-chairing it. It’s sort of like user-testing, in a way, but I think the whole framework of design has a tendency to bleed out the poetry and anarchy. I would rather think of it as a deep listening / friendly experiencer / shut-the-f*ck-up-and-try-it kind of user-testing.

tubby and i took a shower

here’s the hot liquid glory

the narcissist I would define as a specific subset of the modern condition wherein the individual is driven by the will to find herself to be the essential building block of matter. she expects that, hiding behind the particulars, within and among them, and among their categorization and behaviours, even the mere act of experiencing them is constructed from things within the self. the universe is made of selves just like you and me. the narcissist, to be consistent, must be able to find patterns in all phenomena that lead her back to herself. this is an incredibly narcissistic idea, hence the name.  i’m pretty unhappy with it as a name, but i can’t seem to find anything better at the moment. if one were to look at it linguistically, the self is an axiom. we look at any method of description of stuff and find ourselves to be the central building block. the narcissist is a twin. there is an implicit dualism in the very act of describing something because you are using words to describe something to me. or to yourself. bah its no use i keep saying the same thing!

im going to make tubby autonomous. i want to use a 74C14 (or perhaps several), possibly in conjunction with some kind of variable resistor for added autonomy. i want to be able to converse with tubby. or perhaps for tubby to converse with other tubbies. i think this was the initial driving force behind the music box thing and i forgot why i liked it so much. i think some unpredictable, autonomous behavior is essential to the idea of this guy. a music box is not as interesting if it is itunes, unless the visualizer is on and you’re into staring at a screen for a really long time (ahem). a music box is cool because of all the little gears inside it. it was like a clock, the antebellum model for the universe (and thus mind). now we have other things like the idea that a) there is a conscious, b) there is the negation of consciousness (the other, space, the unconscious), and c) that both of these things are shaped like languages. the computer is our clock. the binary is this unconscious, almost naughty little drive or desire. to quote Robert Ashley:

“The fantasy is the distance, the reluctance, the reticence, the otherness.”

of course, he was talking about masturbation. but i would say that all language is massage, and so either your pulling bugs out of other people’s fur, or you’re preening yourself. you’re either talking or thinking. you’re either thinking or doing. that is also a narcissistic statement. so there’s the binary between that which you are doing or aren’t, but there’s also that which did or will do. there’s also what you hope to do and what you hope not to do, what you wish you had done and what you regret. or perhaps there’s also what you thought you would do or wouldn’t do, and what you remember or don’t remember. i think once we get to that level the bifurcations are way to many to hope to account for. but they are bifurcations.

what is the role of glossolalia in all this?

glossolalia i would define as language stripped of causality, or perhaps with causality relegated to the realm of the metaphysical. it’s the unmoved mover. is it axiom? what happens when it is?

we get things like the universal word or intonement. from logos to om. we get all of indian classical music and we also get shakespeare and also freud. we get chompsky, we get pythagoras. of course there are problems. how good of a write off is glossolalia? what’s the signal to noise? if too much shit is discarded as noise, we’ve got blinders on. words are media, words are extensions of ourselves. thus words imply a binary between the client and server.

wow. ok. enough.

goodnight.

Stereo carnage porn shots:

my bbe rack unit died the other day.  it took me this long to tear it apart.  i think i just forgot it broke honestly.

again there’s a ton more stuff i got out of the unit but these are some highlights.

look at that knob!  that long thing is a sweet button that clicks.  the boxy thing on the right of the photo is a 1/4″ telephone jack!  i have three now.  i’ll start making pedals, um… IMMEDIATELY.  who wants one??

yarrr!  check out these IC’s i got out of the board too!  on the left are all quad amps.  (!!!!!) on the right are some weird things i can’t seem to find any info on that isn’t entirely in Korean.  two of them say BBE Aiwa on them, so i assume those are sweet filter circuits.  the bottom one is some kind of memory circuit from what i gathered from the data sheet.  i believe it has a microcontroller in it.  not sure.

those amp ics are gonna be useful for my final, perhaps in conjunction with tubby.  who would have thought this thing would be so useful when i got it for $20 ?  it had been thrown out and re-appropriated once before that.  it’s crazy that people just throw this stuff away when we can still make cool instruments and things out of them!