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thor vs. the internet

November 25, 2013 · by · in

At work, we listen to a lot of music from the internet:  either a paid streaming service, or YouTube.  At home, I listen to lots of music from my harddrive, because I feel that buying music is important.  In addition to streaming services making very little money for musicians, I’ve always been leery of them because I’ve never had that much luck finding techno jams on them.

So, I decided to test it.  I maintain a list of music that I need to obtain.  I ran through the first 200 singles from that through the search function of a streaming music service*, and counted how many tracks the service could play for me.  The results:

Thor:  88 (44%)

Internet:  112  (56%)

Advantage internet – but not by much.  And only being able to hear 56% of the music that I want is not that great –  so I certainly won’t forgo buying music, for now.  I could, in theory, cut my music budget by streaming half of my tunes – but that is not really what I am after.

In defense of the internet, some tracks on that list are vinyl only and are not available anywhere in digital.  I was also surprised that some very rep-heavy techno labels (L.I.E.S., for example) have their catalogs up.  Once someone make a plugin that allows for DJing via streams, we’ll see a very interesting debate, for serious.

*names changed to protect the innocent

romancing the throne

November 24, 2013 · by · in

I finished a mixtape about love, for a friend’s wedding.  It is in fact the Mixtape About Love, the canonical, best one, for all time… at least for me.

In an attempt to make music scarce again, this mix is only being distributed as a wedding present (and as a post-dated wedding present) – so you can’t hear it.  You can hear all the tracks that I couldn’t fit in, over at This Is My Jam, over the next month or so.

week 71

November 24, 2013 · by · in , , ,

Things from the internet:

– blend.io is almost my dream app, in terms of being able to make my own custom mixdown of any song.

– OK, the music video for Like A Rolling Stone is actually really good.

– Science Fiction as Interface, on 99% Invisible and on the amazing scifiinterfaces.com.

week 70

November 16, 2013 · by · in , ,

Things from the internet:

Rolling Jubilee:  Important, still important.  (I also realized this week that Twitter has been a key influence in pushing me more and more to the left, especially over the last few years.  So it goes.)

The Grand Taxonomy of Rap Names.  Yes.

Soulwax slows down gabber to 115, becomes amazing.  (Look at the dancers, aiiiii!)

week 69.5: elvis by elvis

November 13, 2013 · by · in , ,

Ryan Groves and I presented a piece of music at ISMIR this year:  he sang two Elvis Costello tunes, and I synthesized the backing music from beats of Elvis Presley songs.  It was…interesting.  Ryan nailed the performance of the first song, we got a good reception, and it was a far cry from the usual po-faced academic/computer music things that get played at conferences…and then we made the cardinal sin of overstaying our welcome on the second song.  But the first song!  Ah, good times.

So how did we do it?  By combining our respective small pieces of music tech magic.  I maintain the Echo Nest Remix API, which gives us access to timing data for each beat in a song, and Ryan builds harmonizers that can pick chords and chord progressions based on vocal input.

Ryan build his side in SuperCollider and C++:  it listens to his voice, quantizes the harmonic content to the nearest note, and then picks a chord to go with it – based on both the input and the previous chord (Hidden Markov models are involved, if that sort of thing is your jam – his paper is here.).  This chord is sent to my machine as a string, over OSC.

On my  side, I went through the McGill Billboard dataset, and found audio for six Elvis songs that also had timing data for each of their chords.  I then wrote a script using Remix to segment out each beat of each song into a folder – so I ended up with g_major, g_minor, and so on.  Then, for playback, I made a controller in Python that would read OSC from Ryan, validate the chord, and then send another OSC message to ChucK, which would play back the audio.  It sounds a bit like this.

In terms of long-distance collaboration, this worked really well:  we only had one point where our systems had to meet, and that was made simple by OSC – just send or read a chord string, and let the other guy worry about the details.  No word of lie, we got it working on the second try.  (And then almost died when it came time to perform it in the main venue.  If you’re using OSC, always test your work on the network you will be performing on.)

The songs we did were Alison and Pump It Up. I ran levels on both of them, both acting as a live human compressor, and as a kind of attempt to provide rhythm that would match Ryan’s singing, as opposed to the rather…confusing rhythm of the concatenated music.   It sounded like this, and I’m pretty happy with it, really.

The technical side was a resounding success:  we did exactly what we claimed to do, and the network  stood up for the entire performance.  The artistic side could use some work:  it would be nice to follow the signer’s rhythm, take volume and timbre into account, and so on.  I also think that I am over ChucK:  I am tired of having no useful string manipulation and other things that I take for granted in Python.

Hilariously, all of my side could be done really easily in remix.js – so maybe there will be a JavaScript version soon!

week 69: ISMIR

November 12, 2013 · by · in , , ,

I went to ISMIR, and presented a paper about how DJs select and order tracks, which went pretty well.  Ryan Groves and I also ‘performed’ two Elvis Costello songs, with backing chords from Elvis Presely songs.  We probably should have cut it at one, but the first song (Alison, since you asked) was a big hit.  I’ll have a detailed post about it soon, with audio and hopefully video.

Other ISMIR / Curitiba highlights include:

  • Learning about 72-note-to-the-octave Byzantine chant.  (Maria Pantelli, U Cyprus)
  • Learning about ragtime, Andalusian, Turkish, Carnatic / Hindi, Chilean music from a data perspective.  (Anja Volk, Alastair Porter, Sertan Senturk, Monojit Choudhury, Gabriel Vigliensoni, and many more)
  • Learning about Francois Pachet’s work with “style” and for systems that encourage flow.
  • David Hauger’s Million Musical Tweet Database has potential.
  • I am over trying to machine-learn emotional music.  Just done with it.  The only possible answer is to build a constantly updating neural network for every single person in the world.
  • Some neat stuff on automashups by I-Ting Liu, also by Matthew Davies
  • The band at the reception, Caracoarco, can play.  Likewise the quasi-Celtic band we saw at a random pub.
  • Arne Eigenfeldt’s procedural techno machine is really, really good at drums and bass.  The leads are not there, but it is close
  • Cachaca is delicious and covers far more ground than I thought:  I had apple ones, smoked variations, and so on.
  • Academia is fun, but man, it moves slowly and has too many dudes in it.

 

Much more importantly, I also saw two dear friends get married in Toronto.  All the love to them.

week 68

November 1, 2013 · by · in

It was a good week for things.

– My man Nathan Friedman came up to Boston to see a concert of Chaya Czernowin pieces, including the brand new Upstream, which was especially rad.  Well done to the NEC new music group, and to Miss Czernowin.

– Dave Tompkins wrote a gorgeous article about Cybortron’s Enter.

– Trevor Jackson and Ata.

– Katie Paterson sent Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata literally to the moon.

–‘Black Midi’ – like The Black Page, but for computers.

– Where does your data go on the Internet?  Will the NSA hoover it up?  Now you can find out, with Border Check.

week 67.3333

October 29, 2013 · by · in , ,

– Went to Tufts’ Computer Science Hackathon, as an Echo Nester.  Built The Feminest, which tells you about the gender makeup of a band.  The Feminest also doesn’t have data on everyone yet, but try out Rihanna, Tom Waits, Austra, Icona Pop, Chvrches, and My Bloody Valentine to get a sense for how it works.  More data and actual audio coming soon!

– ISMIR is next week:  I am presenting a poster about how DJs pick tracks, and have a ‘performance’ of Elvis Costello songs resynthesized using Elvis Presley songs, featuring Ryan Groves on voice and chord-selection.

–

more things

October 20, 2013 · by · in ,

I survived a bachelor party in Portland:  I somehow bought neither records nor books, which is a minor miracle.  Other neat things have, however, been happening.

– CCRMA is work on source separation, and it’s not bad.

– RBMA continues to do vital work in terms of nightclub history and anthropology.

– I am flabbergasted and filled with glee by The Roaring Twenties, by Emily Thompson and Scott Mahoy

In terms of my own stuff:  many things are close, nothing is done.  More as it breaks!

many things

October 1, 2013 · by · in , ,

– I went to New York!  I only bought two records this time:  Kraftwerk and Talking Heads.  Also saw the NY Phil, who are pretty good, and saw Move D lay it down at Glasslands, which is a space that works well for a low-key-but-excellent DJ like D.  I also need to shout out the residents, who did the warmup just perfectly, especially for a late show with doors at 11.

– I also went to see the James Turell show at the Guggenheim, which was worth the wait for the main installation alone.  If you get a chance to experience the man’s work, you should do so.

– And I went to MoMA, mostly for the sound art exhibit, which was decent, but also to bask in Monet.

– Some people rebuilt England in MineCraft.

– Saw this via We Make Money, Not Art, and was impressed.

– Somehow got linked to the work of Luisa Pereria, which is rad rad rad.

– I went to Hacking Arts to present the Echo Nest API, and ended up building an interactive music system for Tetris Attack.