here are some current re-workings of that infamous undead cat.
cat1 <—– CommLab Final
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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.
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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!
i played a set on sunday in brooklyn.
it was largely through composed material made in supercollider, as my previous sets have been. the style reflected a lot of the aggression my music has been building up over the years. i don’t think it likes me very much, or you for that matter.
anyway the sound went through a mixer before going to the final mixer and my buddy’s sound system, and on this pre-mixer was an aux channel linked to the sculpture thing i’m holding in the picture. on the bottom inside of that tupperware base is a contact microphone, which i hooked into a channel in my pre-mixer. the aux send went out through a hand held piezo driver and disk, which i would touch to the springs at different locations, playing the sound through the sculpture in different ways. it’s kind of like spring reverb (kinda like dub), at least not when its on stage subject to a large PA. most of the sound i got was feedback, shaped by the springs. which was cool, but clearly this thing can handle more. i would like to try with it again sometime soon, possibly solidifying the construction and giving it a name of some kind. at this point im kind of into Tubby as a name, after the King, of course…
the unofficial title of my p-comp final with Natacha.
we are still playing with ideas, which feels good for this project. since this is a prototype for a much larger extracurricular project, i don’t feel as worried about not having This-One-Thing that we’re looking into and just executing. instead of power-walking, we dèrive. sorry, that was cheesy. ANYWAY– the point is that we’re improvising with several different design concepts for the construction of this project.
at this point we are very interested in magnetic tape as a medium. i was drawn to this not just for the frail physical nature of the form but also because it might free us from using the computer to generate sounds in realtime. also the sculptural element would be neat and might involve big clunky gears, which we also like. we are also interested in how sounds of non-synthetic origin work once transduced through our piezo situation. all this is not to mention the fact that if this thing could stand-alone we might sell it and its siblings after the show… i really like the idea of using a balloon with some beads in it as our first object, but the idea of slashed-up distorted little paper speakers also seems kind of cool.
either way this is what we’ve got in terms of building blocks: a working driver circuit and several piezos that definitely work with it. a few dismantled tape heads, one of which might still work although i still have to hack it. several ideas for superCollider code that would still seem cool for playing through objects. a source for boxes, pre-fab.
it seems like we just need to keep playing with our materials until we get something we like. i hope that doesn’t take long, since i need something to demo on thursday. at the same time, i understand that this project (as many of my projects end up) exists outside of the classroom to a large extent, and while my classes inform me with techniques, theory and criticism, the timeline and restrictions that really count are imposed on me from the world outside.
that being said i’d rather not fail physcomp. so demo by thursday it is!
oh here’s a driver circuit if anyone’s interested. they’re crazy easy to make.
or alternatively (if the photo is hard to decipher):
also while im at it, the coolest things happen when you dismantle a stereo…
a tape head. the other one didn’t turn out as pretty. i definitely felt like a turn-of-the-century dentist.
or a barber, i guess.
also there were some other cool looking components i managed to desolder and rip out of that box.
an incomplete picture of the booty. YARRR!
just to give you a sense of proportion for that HUGE-ASS knob (it has both a motor and an led on it!), and also those MAMOTH capacitors, i have made their adjectives in caps. also very stoked about the rca ports… mmmm…
Sorry I haven’t had the time to post about this project.
The basis for the idea came from thinking about Muzak, specifically in terms of John Sterne’s “The Non-Aggressive Music Deterrent”. To summarize his critique, Muzak is a threat to community ethos because it represents a corporate agenda through the sound of spaces. How can Muzak be different? How can we change the concept of “public music” to represent a community’s emotional/psychic state?
Another starting point was photography. We wanted to look into photographic techniques to find ways of photographing Auras, for representations of the psychic profile of a person. Eventually, these two ideas merged to form something altogether bizarre. What if there were a public fixture that represented the aura of its community through light and sound?
We started with ITP as our test community. ITP is extremely well blog-ed and otherwise documented on the internet. So we wrote a text filter that would read the RSS feeds of all the blogs and listserves and come up with a psychic distribution between the seven chakras. This filter would run passively every 24 hours, looking only at new information.
The distribution file would be picked up by a Proce55ing applet which interprets the distribution file into color and sound information. The colors were at first represented on the screen, and eventually sent to serial as RGB values for 1 watt leds to interpret. The sound is generated in SuperCollider, which Proce55ing sends OSC messages to.
At the time of this post, we have an orb-like fixture whose color changes based on the distributions and sound that comes through the computer running the applets.
More documentation will happen once we present the prototype in approximately 20 minutes.
ps
For those who are so inclined, here is the synthDef file for SuperCollider to interpret the OSC messages with. It should provide some information about what kinds of sounds this thing will be making. (For those less inclined to SC3, it will be producing binaural drones with difference tones of 2- 5 hz (theta range) related to the harmonic series. each chakra is correlated to a different harmonic. A ringing filter emphasizes the harmonic related to the color being shown. Also some upper harmonic material is generated by running white noise thru a resonant filter bank with coefficients corresponding to each of the 7 greek modes. these modes are also related to each of the 7 chakra-states. I coded the modes in just temperament to reduce beating unrelated to the binaural effects we were shooting for.)
SynthDef(”chakraDrone”, {|out = 0, f0, f1, f2, f3, f4, f5, f6, amp = 1, fund = 32, nlvl = 0.1, color = 3, chVol = 0.0625|
var signal, signal0, noise, lvl, diff, harm, modes, chorus;
lvl = [f0, f1, f2, f3, f4, f5, f6];
diff = [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8];
modes = [
[1, 1.125, 1.25, 1.422, 1.5, 1.667, 1.875], //lydian
[1, 1.125, 1.25, 1.333, 1.5, 1.667, 1.875], //ionian
[1, 1.125, 1.25, 1.333, 1.5, 1.667, 1.8], //myxolydian
[1, 1.125, 1.2, 1.333, 1.5, 1.667, 1.8], //dorian
[1, 1.125, 1.2, 1.333, 1.5, 1.6, 1.8], //aeolian
[1, 1.067, 1.2, 1.333, 1.5, 1.6, 1.8], //phrygian
[1, 1.067, 1.2, 1.333, 1.422, 1.6, 1.8] //locrian
];
chorus = DynKlank.ar(`[Select.kr(color, modes)*fund*8, nil, (0..6).collect{7}], WhiteNoise.ar(chVol));
signal = (0..6).collect{|i|
FSinOsc.ar([fund*(2*(i+1)), fund*(2*(i+1))+diff[i]], 0, lvl[i]);
};
noise = PinkNoise.ar(1)*nlvl;
noise = noise.dup;
signal0 = signal;
signal = Mix.ar(signal ++ noise);
harm = Ringz.ar(signal, Lag.kr((color+1)*fund, 16), 0.1);
signal = Mix.ar([harm, signal0, chorus.dup]);
signal = Limiter.ar(signal, 0.98, 0.01);
Out.ar(out, signal*amp)
}).store;