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.

lou is a kinetic sculpture somewhat related to a mobile. he is named after lou harrison. lou (the sculpture) produces feedback through a network of steel wires which freely extend from his segments. there are two piezo discs driving this feedback. lou is held together almost entirely by his own weight, through a system of steel wires and flat washers which keep him suspended and in balance. the reason for this delicate design was to make him more relevant (along with the Calder tie-in) to the themes of the Mechanisms course, such as minimum constraint design. the application for his design is so that all his moving parts are free to vibrate in many different ways, producing many different resonant modes, and so that he is very sensitive to his environment.

lou consists of a single steel wire “spine” from which seven basswood strips extend. the top six strips bear very little weight, with only two wire “whiskers” sticking out from either side. these whiskers act as possible pathways for mechanical vibration. slight changes in the environment cause different mechanical connections to form between parts of the sculpture. additionally, these whiskers restrict the motion of the individual basswood strips in an organic looking way; each strip affects every strip below it.

the seventh (bottom) tier supports the driver circuit and two piezo discs. these are contained in a box without a top which hangs in balance from the bottom strip. the only motion that is restricted is downward; the box is free to spin and wobble, supported only by its weight. piezo discs are small devices which translate mechanical vibration into electricity and vice-versa. the top piezo disc acts as a ‘contact microphone’, listening for mechanical vibrations in the structure, while the bottom piezo disc acts as a ‘transducer’, causing the structure to vibrate. the top piezo is held in place by the weight of its own driver circuit, pinned between the washer and the seventh strip. additionally, four steel wires with weights on their ends hang down from this joint, also held in place by the weight of the driver circuit box. the bottom piezo hangs freely from the box by its own wires and from it extend two steel wires which are free to make connections with the weighted mic wires.

i promise it makes more sense when you see it.

so, after many different tries and much sweat and electrocution i have constructed this monstrosity of a mobile. somewhere in the greater philadelphia area, calder’s corpse is shrugging its shoulders and claiming non-involvement. this has been a lesson in fabrication. the theory behind it is cool too, but the majority of the heartache came from trying various ideas out and having each one end in abject failure. i have learned the following:

1.) do not expect wood that you cut against the grain to be nearly as strong, or look nearly as good as a piece you cut with the grain. this is especially true for smal strips of basswood.
2.) always have a duplicate, breadboarded copy of the circuit you are trying to solder onto perfboard. unless you like confusion.

3.) it never looks the way it does in your brain. ever.

4.) touching a bare, live piezo disc across the crystal side will electrocute you. if it is buzzing softly and running straight off of a dc circuit this is fine, but if it is heavily amplified with several gain stages and uses an inverted power transformer to do so, this is exceptionally painful.

5.) it never sounds the way it does in your brain. ever.

6.) you won’t leave enough room for the wires.

7.) the fewer constraints you put on something, the fewer chances you have to screw up.

8.) steel wire will break if it gets too gnarly.

9.) hot glue is hot. so is molten solder.

10.) if your piezo disc is not making sound and has just shocked you (see no. 4), NEVER put your ear up to it just to make sure it is malfunctioning.

i assure you, i’m ok. nothing was plugged into the wall. nor will it ever be, at the rate i’m going. i would much rather pay for batteries than go out smelling like a poorly cooked hamburger.

it’s a mobile, consisting of 7 rectangular basswood strips centered around a single 30 gauge steel wire. at the bottom hangs an open box with the custom electronics inside. off of each of the wood strips, minus the lowest one, hang two steel wire “whiskers.” the electronics consist of a home-made distortion circuit and a driver circuit for two piezo discs, one which acts as the microphone, the other as a speaker. these discs also have whiskers soldered onto them; three whiskers each. the microphone’s whiskers are the longest, and hang down with the aid of washers affixed to the ends. the speaker disc is affixed to the bottom of the components box, and amplified to the point where the entire sculpture vibrates and acts as the source of sound. the microphone is affixed to the central wire that holds the structure up. as a result it is incredibly sensitive to the microscopic movements of the system. as you might imagine, feedback ensues through the system, creating patterns of tones and creaks even while the sculpture might appear to be completely still. this concept was adapted from an earlier idea to use photocells and analogue pulse oscillators to sonify the balancing system. the photocells were scrapped because i became unsure if light was the best attribute for the system to respond to. i may eventually add some kind of motor based agitator to the system if there is time before thursday.

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.

It speaks for itself, really. Stylish, understated… Swedish.

I analyzed this think as if there were no friction in the central gears and the whole thing balanced itself perfectly, which is obviously not true. I was hoping this would be more complex, but it actually involved no trig at all, sadly.

i was supposed to be cleaning, but as soon as i found this cd player, i instinctually fired up the soldering iron and started taking it apart.  like most traditions of torture, i tried to keep the device “alive” for as long as possible, testing it with some awful funk cd i found in the player.  once that got boring, i started short-circuiting out components and separating them from the main board.  the laser was the only thing i botched, and i suspect it happened when i desoldered it wrong.  ah well.  the lcd display and two motors were consolation enough.  i’ll just have to be more careful next time.

all the components in a row…

Headhunter!!!

the display definitely still works, and i’m considering making a sculpture with it.  not too solid on how it’s going to work yet, but that will definitely be fun.

also i finally properly gutted my BBE case, and the top piece fits very nicely on a slant, allowing me access to whatever circuits i put inside.  also there are tons of perfectly sized holes for knobs and jacks and even a pretty little “on/off” switch!

it’s like a convertible!

now all it needs is a new paint job…

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.