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week 126

July 19, 2015 · by · in , ,

Busy times in New York City.

– My friends Peter Sobot and Matt Ogle made a dreamer.  Is it just me, or is it somewhat creepy that a “dreaming” neural network produces images straight out of Lovecraft?

– “In his house in a Google datacenter, dead Cthulhu lies dreaming.”

– Lightyear.fm is keeping track of all of our radio emissions.

– Persistent Surveillance is just that, and was tested in Ohio, but thankfully not adopted, because some people don’t like living in a police state.  Remember , “keeping us safe is a never-ending task.”

– Some of the wizards at Spotify mapped the world’s music.  An amazing, amazing thing.

– The End Of Capitalism, question mark?

week 122 / postmodern internet music

June 21, 2015 · by · in ,

Went to a Monthly Music Hack Day, reinstalled Ubuntu, worked on The Future of Music.  Also learned about Hip Hop Transcriptions, which made my day.

I’ve been thinking about music on the internet, which is sort of the area where I’ve made my living.  It feel like the high wave that began in 1999 when Napster became the killer app for the internet has finally* broken and rolled back.  We still, in 2015, have record labels.  Everyone thought that they were dead – and then they invested in Spotify, and Jimmy Iovine is fronting Apple Music, and somehow nothing has changed.

In music, the workers have long since controlled the means of production.  But distribution on The Internet requires that you own your hosting**, which is a pain even for nerds.

Is there a way to elide the hosting process (maybe through AWS?), allow people to upload their music, give them a gorgeous player, and make it embedable?  If I am paying for my hosting, no one can tell me to take it down….and AWS offers a year free, as I recall.

* Yes, I am fully aware that I’m an old and nostalgic person.

** Bandcamp may save us all. Or Drip, for that matter.

 

the semiotics of error

June 7, 2015 · by · in , ,

What’s a bug?  And is it a glitch?  Or an error?  Well.

It was Grace Hopper, who, before inventing the compiler, popularized the term “bug” (though Edison may have coined it).

When I was a callow youth testing video games for money, a “bug” was defined as something contrary to design, and we were instructed to never use the word “glitch” to refer to something going wrong with the software in question.  “Error”, as a term, never came up, and “Exception” has its own meaning.

We don’t have “bug” art, though, or “error art” – we have glitch art.  Glitch is a good German/Yiddish word, from “glitschen”  and” gletshn” – which mean “slip”, in those two fine languages.  It was, apparently, used in the US space program:  John Glenn said that  “Literally, a glitch is a spike or change in voltage in an electrical current.”

You can recover from a spike, or from a slip – whereas you may or may not recover from a bug, either in software or in your immune system.  An error, on the other hand, is generally thought of as a permanent thing, whereas a glitch comes and goes, often seemingly of its own volition.

Glitch, for whatever reason, has come to indicate a visual or sonic error:  the results of a glitch are apprehendable by the senses, and instantly recognizable as glitches.  It would be rare to refer to, say, a subtle mistake made by a video game’s AI as a “glitch”, rather than a bug.

Bugs, of course, are legion.  “There’s a bug in the system”, not “we introduced a bug into the system”, and almost never “There’s an error in our code”.  The definition I was given of a bug as being contrary to design meant that the superclass of “bug” included both critical programming errors like memory leaks, and typos that caused a character’s hat to be the wrong colour.

Neither of those problems are a glitch, perhaps because they’re both easy to repeat.  Both glitches and bugs, however, allow the programmers in question to sidestep responsibility for the errors that they introduced into the code.  I’ve put lots of things out into the world, and seen them fail in some way, and waved it off by saying “oh, there are still some bugs”, when what I am actually saying is “I didn’t write good software”.  If I see a glitch, I’ll probably be excited:  “I didn’t know it could do that!”, for example.

Finally, “bug” may exist because “error” refers to an error in user input:  sending in a credit card number that is only 12 digits, say.  That will cause an exception in the code, which will hopefully be caught.  It is thus by design that the code does something erroneous.  So, rather than say “there was an error in my error-catching code”, it’s clearer to say that there was a bug.

week 121

June 7, 2015 · by · in

– jazz.computer is a favorite thing.

– In the terrible world of humans that we live in, remember that there are whales, and that they’re beautiful.

– Google keep knocking things out of the park:  Soli appears to be the answer to many an interface designer’s wildest dreams.

– Started Warren Ellis’s INJECTION, and am excited to keep up with it.

– Read and finished Octavia E. Butler’s KINDRED, which is heartrending and amazing.

week nine billion

May 30, 2015 · by · in

Lots to catch up on.

– The US Navy once built a research boat that is designed to rotate 90 degrees into the water.

– Enclaves within enclaves, between Belgium and The Netherlands.

– Fuck the NSA – and this is funny.

– Sony hate music, may prevent Beyonce from being on Tidal.

– I’ve been a fan of Luisa Pereira for a while, but seeing her talk at a Monthly Music Hackathon only made me like her work more.

– Super nice conductive thread / wearable interfaces via Project Jacquard.

– Ableton Push Hero, via my friend / black magician Nathan.

– Saw FURY ROAD – it deserves every bit of praise it is getting.

– Destroying objects as soundscapes.

– The Segulharp is maybe a bit pat, but really nice.  As someone who knows a lot about digital interfaces for making music,  real acoustics thing are pretty good.

– Along those lines, this monster is neat:  the interface is willfully bad, which makes the performance even more impressive – look at 2:02 or so, where he rotates the pad just because he can.

– A Twine “interactive fiction” thing is finally blowing up – on the Apple Watch, no less.

– Typedrummer is the most basic thing, but works really well.  It’s a drum machine with the drum machine elided away, which is something that has been on my mind for a minute.

co.re.echo.es

May 29, 2015 · by · in , ,

I have a sort of casual fascination with infrastructure – factories, power stations, spillways, and so on.  This extends to the internet:  data centres, underwater cables, and core routers.

“Core router” is not just a perfectly Gibsonian term – they’re the routers that most data runs through when going from place to place and network to network.  And seeing this is not hard, though it is picky:  the traceroute command will tell you where you went to get to a place.

You can thus, if you really want to, trace from your computer to all (actually only most) 4,294,967,296 address, from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255.  This will mean that your computer will go through those core routers over and over and over again.

So, I made a thing that does this, and then turns those traceroutes into music, as one does.  It is called CORE ECHOES, after those routers,  and it is both pretty mellow and suspiciously good, if I do say so myself.  It will also play for something like eight thousand years.  (And!  There’s now a recorded version here.  )

In order to make a thing play for longer than the human race has had writing, I’m relying very much on AWS and Heroku, which will for sure both be around for another few thousand years.  Specifically, I have a process on AWS that is slowly sending out traces, and then logging them to a Redis queue on Heroku.  Heroku then acts as web server, returning the current trace to the JavaScript client.

There’s a timing concern, too:  there’s a second process on AWS that keeps track of how long each trace should play for, and then turns the page of the piece by removing the current trace from the queue.

This has about a million race conditions – but they’re very slow race conditions, so things will probably be OK.  In theory, a series of very short traces could run the queue out of data before a next very long trace can log…but that is a risk I am prepared to take.

core-echoes-0

All the mapping and synthesis is handled in JavaScript – really, the mapping should happen on the server side, and the client should only do the synthesis, but c’est la vie.  The synthesis is all in WebAudio – there are three sine waves, each with their own pretty-simple signal chain.  I was trying to both do something simple and backgroundy, and get a sense of bleeps and bits and ones and zeroes moving around.

Each IP generates a single pitch, a duration that it runs for, a time between notes, and the length of each note.  This gives an ever-changing minimalist sort of pulse, as the three IPs build up and vary.

The duration is deterministic:  take the sum of the digits of the first three parts of the IP, then divide by four to get a nice sort of time.  The other parameters work in the same manner.  The pitch is taken mod 24, and so on.

The mapping was initially much more complex, but it turns out that there are a lot of IPs, so making them deterministic is probably OK.  An obvious mapping improvements would be to relate the time for each IP to match the time that the trace takes – but that gets into tricky regex issues.  I’m happy with the synthesis, though I am sure that I will regret not making the server more robust.

week 119

April 30, 2015 · by · in , ,

– Glenn McDonald knocks it out of the park again with the words for each genre, and vice versa.

– “Just” being a DJ is ok.  Articulated very well by Philip Sherburne.

– Bespoke small-run vinyl, via qrates.  Super interesting, this.

– Norse is a security company that likes War-Games-esq attack visualizations…which are cheesy, but also amazing.

week 118

April 19, 2015 · by · in , ,

Early, but.

– Reynald Drouhin is a new favorite thing.

– Modular synths meet robotic instruments.  Having seen a bunch of this in academic settings, it will be neat to let it out in the wild.

– Theorizing The Web was beyond excellent.  Some highlights included Nick Seaver on recommendation systems, Natalie Kane on algorithms & haunting, Nick Douglas’ “It’s Supposed To Look Like Shit” talk, and many more.

– Finally listening to the symphonic jams of both Ellington and William Grant Still.  So much to hear, so much to learn.

week 117

April 14, 2015 · by · in ,

So many things!

– StaffPad actually has potential to drastically change how most composers write music.  It, of course, needs to get off the Surface, and allow freeform input, and they’ll be golden.

– Hopes & Fears is a new fave, and this Jonathan Lethem interview is one of the reasons why.

– Of course Ben ‘Processing’ Fry is the person behind these code maps.

– Ingrid Burrington is also a new favorite, not least for her amazing URL:  http://lifewinning.com

– Burrington also spoke at Future Everything 2015, along with Warren Ellis, etc.

– Never hurts to be reminded of Limits To Growth, as referenced from MoMa’s Uneven Growth.

week 116

April 1, 2015 · by · in , ,

Let’s talk about NI’s STEMS.

This is super interesting, not least because it is an open, backwards-compatible format.  It’s also worth noting that this idea has been around for ages – your very own Tide Pool netlabel was selling parts, oh, almost a decade ago, now, among several others.

What’s hip here is the instant integration into NI’s line of DJing controllers, and into their idea of a ‘Remix Deck’.  Suddenly, the “live remix” that people have been talking about for, oh, a decade (actually since the dawn of DJing) is ‘way easier.

This has lots of potential to be very cool – especially as that four tracks becomes eight and then 16.

This also has potential to be nasty, in a way that I’ve been trying to articulate since Sasha switched to Ableton in 2004 or so:  The danger of giving DJs full control over the music that they are playing is that it all sounds like them.

Consider myself:  I love the long mix.  I came up on John Digweed and early 2000s progressive house, and if you can hear a transition, by god, you’ve failed.  This is a noble goal, but it sure can make for boring sets.  If I had the power to loop out every tune, I’d for sure make each mix as smoooooooth as possible – probably to my detriment.

On the other hand, if I’m Just Playing Records, I am stuck with the arrangement of those records, and have to make do.  This makes me work harder, and makes my DJ sets way way way more interesting.

The future that NI is pushing is of a middle-road between “putting on records in a row” and “permuting those records in compelling ways”.  I don’t think the tools for NI’s vision are there yet (although that tool, still, might be Ableton), though I am sort of excited to see where that future goes.  But, don’t forget about the other paradigm:  David Mancuso and the idea of “letting the record speak” still have a lot of miles to go.