– I have given away 10 of my 14 crates of vinyl. Wow.
– A draft of my tune for Get Excited & Make Techno is here. It’s a weirder version of 2007-esq “deep trance.”
– I have sketches of all of TORNADO SONGS. Woooosh. I’ve edited all the songs into cleaner version too; I need to clean up the outro and interlude, and then it’s “done.”
week 17
week 16
– I finished MULTITOUCH, an exercise in having an entire string quartet play a ‘cello. I look forward to telling you all that I’ve been thrown out of the Composer’s Kitchen workshop.
– How to write a Ph.D thesis in 3 months. Because I may needed it later, but also because it has lots of appropriate workflow related things.
– I have no more books to give away. Whoa.
– I booked a flight to Montreal. Whooaaaaa.
– I got sick! Can’t recommend it.
week 15
– I finished VIII and IX of TORNADO Songs: I just need to write the interlude and a total draft is done.
– I got a decent track going for Get Excited And Make Techno: you can hear the current version here.
– We’re halfway through Get Excited And Make Techno! Woo!
– I organized all of my techno vinyl, and gave a good chunk of it away. I feel like I’m missing an arm.
– Beat Surfer is a kind of amazing iPad app. Non-linear-ish sequencers are super duper interesting to me.
– I wrote a jam called I NEVER LIKED BRAHMS, for string quartet. It’ll be worked on at Composer’s Kitchen, in August.
week 14
– Big thanks to Sub|Division for having me out to open Lucky.
– I submitted my placement exams for McGill. Gulp.
– DREAM CITY has a working but unstyled prototype. Still lots to do.
– dancer.js is another JavaScript audio library. Do we even need another programming language?
– I’ve got the vocal line and bassline for the final TORNADO SONG. Now I need to fill in the harmony and write two instrumental interludes.
– Are these amazing, or are these amazing?
week 13
So a lot of things happened. Most of them I covered in their own posts, so. Here’s some smaller things:
– I applied for a Leap devkit. If it is half as good as it looks, there’s lots of things that can be done with it.
– We just did week 2 of Get Excited & Make Techno – now the real writing begins.
– Synthesis in JavaScript. Look out.
– Matt Ogle pointed me to this: it’s about adjusting technology to the scope of us puny humans, which I think is important.
live forever
_-cropped-.jpg/220px-Ray_Bradbury_(1975)_-cropped-.jpg)
Ray Bradbury died today; he will be missed. He was born in 1920, and lived to 2012. He wrote roughly a million short stories, an authentically classic novel in FAHRENHEIT 451, and many, many other things. He was the last of those who defined science fiction: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Ray. His passing (and especially his passing at 91!) is the end of an era that was probably over before Heinlein died in 1988.
For me, Bradbury dying is a final nail in The Future as a proper noun; it is the final passage from a world where we imagine the future to a world where we live in the future, all the time. And that now-future that we live in changes all the time, in ways that we can’t fully grasp. When I was fifteen and devouring the science fiction canon, I was certain that I would live to see humans on Mars. Now, I am no longer sure if humans will make it back to the moon ever, much less within my life time. This has been coming for a long time, to be sure. Bradbury’s death makes it final.
So, the Future is over. Our dreams are smaller, less full, more adult. We’ve lost Ray Bradbury, and things will never be the same.
how to dj, really
A while back, I posted a request for DJs to tell me how they picked their next track. The exact question was: “How do you pick what track to play next?”
I got 20 responses, covering 1959 words, ranging from one sentence to full essays. Then, being me, I made some tag clouds (using tagcrowd.com), and did some n-gram analysis in Python.
So here’s the top 25 words:
It is interesting to me that TRACK has twice the frequency of CROWD.
Top 50:
Now we get things like BUILD, BPM, DANCEFLOOR, and DRUM
Top 100:
Down at the bottom: SLOT, BASS, ORDER, FUN, TEND.
After that, I did some analysis of n-grams. A “gram” is just 1 or more words in a row. “more words” is a 2-gram from the previous sentence. Tag clouds do 1-gram analysis, so I started with 2-grams. The top twenty 2-grams (and their numbers of occurences) are:
“try to”, 8
“on the”, 7
“the track”, 6
“tracks that”, 8
“want to”, 5
“so i”, 5
“of the”, 5
“i can”, 5
“i have”, 5
“a track”, 5
“the crowd”, 5
“they are”, 5
“i will”, 5
“i want”, 5
“the energy”, 4
“with the”, 4
“have something”, 5
“work with”, 5
“if i”, 4
(I’ve bolded the ones that are most interesting to me.)
3-grams got pretty useless pretty fast:
“words separated by”, 2
“a sort of”, 2
“i want to”, 2
“from 70 through”, 1
(…etc. Nothing too useful there.)
There were no 4-grams that appeared more than once. Likewise with 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10-grams. HOWEVER. When I ran 5-grams, a key line jumped out a bit:
“have something to work with”, 3
I said when I started analyzing DJ sets based on musical data that most DJ “just play what works” – I’m pleased to see the same verb show up in a text analysis.
This is nothing like a proper study, but it is all I have time for, for now, and I think it’s interesting just the same. Many thanks to James, Stephanie, Nathan, Emmett, Dustin, Emmanuel, Derek, Drew, Alan, Jesse, Christoph, Doug, Tim, David, Jared, Jordie, Quinn, JP, Laughlin, Teagan, Will, and Mike.
play the man
…such a fire.
As summer rolls in, I’m still making emo, emo sets. Get this one here.
1: xxxy – The Earth Got Round [RMBA]
2: Incyde – Axis [Hotflush]
3: Junior Boys – You’ll Improve Me (Caribou Remix) [Domion]
4: Martyn – Ghost People [Brainfeeder]
5: Sigha – Fold [Hotflush]
6: Zomby – Natalia’s Song [4AD]
7: JASE From Outta Space – Do What You Want (Infusion Remix) [Shine]
nimetime
So we went to NIME: it was pretty good.
Some concert highlights:
– Mark Applebaum’s masterful APHASIA stole the show, concert wise, with razor-sharp gestures and an amazing tape part.
– We had not one but TWO naked men on stage with EEG monitors. A good conference.
– Our own vibraphone / robot drums / likembe jam by Shawn Trail with lights & code by Gabby Odowichuk wasn’t half bad, thanks for asking.
– Some crazy people from Tokyo made a Reactable with robots: a table with these autonomous things rolling around on it that made music when they came close to one another. They pretty much won the conference, overall.
– A man played a sponge. It was pretty good, actually.
– No one sampled a pinecone….but some pieces were TERRIBLE, for me.
– A man did play a Beach Boys medly on a restored Theremin ‘Cello. So that was good.
And conference highlights:
– Some guys from LSU are working on pinning instruments to locations: potentially cool stuff.
– A dude (from Cambridge!) presented a paper on why trackers are rad.
– I got to see BORDERLANDS, the granular synth app, in person, and I can say that it is almost TOO powerful: it’s great work, on every level.
– Favorite installation: MUTATIS MUTANDIS, by Tristan and Noel from U of Kansas, which was a full-room meditation on glaciers, complete with a 300 pound block of ice.
– POCO POCO is a really classy tweak on a traditional sequences: the node hop up when they play, and the user can rotate them to alter parameters during playback. That doesn’t do it justice, so here’s a video.
– A brave man from U of Saskatchewan is working on tools for classical musicians (conductor trackers, etc): I had to tell him that his tools are great, but that classical players hate technology.
– Alexander, from UDK Berlin, had a really nicely limited skin conductive system.
– Nick from MIT has amazing machine-learning code, as does Ben from Urbana.
– Diemo made a granular synth using….grains of sand. Ten thousand points!
– Jeff Synder’s JD-1 is a gorgeous, gorgeous controller: especially the sequence controll / looper. Non-linear sequencers are really on my mind.
– Jiffer from Stanford had a really clever sequencer that could do polyrhythms and isorhythms. Sign me up.
– People are actuating rhodes and vibraphones electronmagnetically. Welcome to the future?
– A guy from…..Virginia, maybe, made a generative sequencer for planetariums in python. I didn’t get to see it running, alas.
– There was a man playing on a drum set made out of rubber balls of various sizes.
– A guy named Palle can drive modular synths using electrodes on graphite drawings. This is cooler than it sounds.
– There was a neat paper by Luke Dahl about “Wicked Problems”, which are a class of problem that you should look up.
And general thoughts:
– Difficulty! Do new instruments need to be easy to learn? Or just hard to master?
– If your piece is a “structured improvisation”, you had better be able to SHRED on your instrument.
– If your instrument is totally disconnected from the engine that creates sound, it is probably not an instrument.
– What is conciously added to your interface, and what is emergent?
– If your instrument can’t play a line of Bach, it is probably not an instrument.
– If you’ve not tested your tool on end users, you are doing it wrong.
– But if you’re the only user, that’s OK! (Dangerous, but OK.)
– You should probably practice more. And write more solid code.
– Iterate, iterate, iterate.
– Stage presence! Both in terms of papers and performances!
– If your piece is a two-minute tech demo, that’s OK! Don’t make it longer!
– Understand that your opinion about art is an OPINION.
get excited and make techno
I’d like to invite you to GET EXCITED AND MAKE TECHNO: a series of discussion, hangouts, & masterclasses happening over eight weeks in Victoria, BC. You can read more at the above link, and you can sign up here!