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may you live in interesting times

February 20, 2008 · by · in

Video games, wooo! Specifically, a wonderfully indie bit of code called Audio Surf. The best way I can describe it is Rez plus F-Zero X plus Dr. Mario. Here’s a video, which might begin to do it justice. It generates levels from whatever audio files you give it, with what seems to be a suspiciously simple and very, very effective algorithm. I’ve tried it with everything from Shiloh to Stravinsky, and it deals with them all in stride.

Let me say that again, just in case it didn’t register: Audio Surf will procedurally generate an overwhelmingly synaesthetic level for you from your favorite piece of music. It’s all a little Tron looking, as you can see from the screenshot, but no description can do the experience justice – the game is a total mindfuck, in the best possible way.

On the more game designy side, Audio Surf has the fastest ‘zero to flow’ time of any game I’ve played since maybe Moonbase Commander, which is a very different beast. And it is by far faster than Lumines or any other music game I can think of. There is a demo here. I can’t recommend it enough.

resistance is futile

February 15, 2008 · by · in ,

First: I made a new set:

0: Garry Schyman – Bioshock: The Ocean On His Shoulders [Irrational]
1: Chloe Harris – Skooch (Oliver Lieb Remix) [Mashtronic]
2: Karmina – Wonder 21 (Mat Jonson Remix) [Opossum]
3: Boris Brejcha – White Snake [Harthouse]
// Fractal – Tritoch Wakes Up [Tide Pool]
4: Gary Beck – A590 Beats [Mezzotinto]
5: Metope – M1D1 [Areal]
6: Garry Schyman – Bioshock: Empty Houses [Irrational]

Art is from Alberich Mathews.

Now then! It’s the much-touted Facebook design post, at long last. Why does Faceborg work? Why is it so popular? Is it a Good Thing? The people at Freakonomics talked about the latter question: I’m going to talk about the first two.

The easy answer for the suspicious popularity of Facebook and MySpace is that people like to conform, although they’d never admit it. Being surrounded by a peer group is something that people have a very deeply hardwired desire for. Things like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and so on allow people to be reminded of their peer group basically constantly, both implicitly (10 of your friends did some thing!) and explicitly (You are friends with Bob!). People like this a lot, and Facebook offers about a thousand and one ways to do it – even more ways than MySpace, I’ll wager. All these reminders of friendship are very addictive. I’ll even be super cute and say that they trigger friendorphins.

Awful puns aside, people also like being news – as witness this blog. Facebook allows about a thousand ways for people to be news: the Twitter-esq status updates, the pictures, the picture tagging, and so on. Even the applications, awful as they can be, serve the same purpose. You are doing something and it’s important! Vital! Valuable! Tell the world!

The real evil genius of the site comes in the combination of these two psychological hooks. Facebook makes it obscenely easy to tell people what you’re doing: going out, talking to someone, taking pictures, posting notes, forming groups, friending people, looking for new friends, etc. The site can broadcasts your activity on it to every one you know. “Tell a Friend.” “Send to a Friend.” “Invite Friends”, and so on. Not only are your actions news, they remind your friends that you care about them, even in small, I-tagged-you-in-a-picture sort of ways.

The power of these two hooks is spoken to by what Facebook is not: It’s a lousy blog, the picture side is good but not as good as Flickr, the messaging system is the least efficient thing known to man, and it’s kind of ugly. If you told me I’d still be reading black on white with blue highlights across three columns in 2008…well, I’d have been a little depressed.

All those issues aside though, the site is popular because of the two above bits of genius and madness. Anyone making any kind of online software (which means just about any software in this day and age) should take note.

sudden flash

February 6, 2008 · by · in ,

In A Theory Of Fun, Raph Koster talks about how most video games teach simple principles of reflex and repetition. Games like CounterStrike and Double Dash get to teamwork, but that’s mostly where the learning of soft, social skills top out. Raph postulates that there must be a way to teach complex, social problem solving skills in a video game environment – and in a way that isn’t awful and unfun and didn’t we all learn a lesson today, children?

I think I might postulate really explicit idea, actually: a simple social networking site with an anonymous login, but persistent IDs for each User. Each User can post problems and solutions to other people’s problems – kind of like a distributed agony aunt. Users are then *ranked* according to the quality of their solution, by the person who posted the problem. So, for example, User 1 is ranked high at Workplace Ethics, but lousy at Sexual Ethics. User 2 is great at Family Issues, but awful at Workplace Ethics. All Users are then ranked globally, and so on.
Has this been done? It seems like something the peak Web 2.0 folks would have got to a long time ago. You could even call it Problm.com (beta).

Moving on. If anyone ever asks you for a 3-D notation system for music, do not think about it, because you will miss the obvious answer: depth is time, and notes move towards you. Pitch is left to right, volume is up and down, and note colour / shape is articulation. There. Wasn’t that easy?

Finally: Is there any teaching value in games like Guitar Hero / Rock Band? That is to say, could the dead-easy notation used by Harmonix be sl-o-o-o-wly tweaked to approach real (much harder to read) music notation? And, as a related question, is there a way to teach music (or math, etc) in a way that isn’t very very hard? If so, is it related to the Montessori theory of “learn at your own pace”? And will it produce better musicians, or will it only (only!) produce more musicians who don’t hate their teachers and themselves?

how i spend my weekends

February 3, 2008 · by · in , ,

I make things like this.  That’s phase one of Smokesound.  Phase 2 will start when I see if Processing can handle 15,000 sine waves at once.

I also posted the latest Tide Pool mix, by the Betamax Warriors.  It’s called The Sea Lion Sleeps tonight, and you can find it here.

oh, the humanity

February 1, 2008 · by · in ,


– If you wanted to be scared about the state of our civilization, take a look here, at Worldometers.  For me, the scariest thing is the tiny, tiny difference between “Energy Consumed” and “Energy Produced”.

– I have a total crush on Processing, because you can do things like this.  (From Flight404)

– I’d also like to point you to African Rhythms Radio, run by David Love Jones, owner of the mind-boggling Vinyl Records, in Vancouver.  If you have an emergency and need to get down as fast as possible, you know where to go.
– Finally, I finished THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE, by Haruki Murakami, about a week ago, and I’m pleased to say that it is a good book, and that Murakami can certainly write.  I am less sure about his ambiguity of antagonist, and the way the book goes batshit insane in the third act, but he’s good is and is worth reading / re-reading.

babyl-tron – responsibility

January 26, 2008 · by · in , ,

My friend Kenzie Clarke and I just had our track, ‘Responsibility’, released on PercTrax. You can hear a clip of it here. It’s snappy and vocal and minimalish and sassy. You’ll dig it, honest.

(The above art is from here, care of the Brazilian graffiti scene, and is pretty much amazing.)

Also: They’re Tracking You. This is brilliant shit, care of the mad scientists at Turbulence.

interface thursday

January 23, 2008 · by · in ,

It’s……Interface Thursday! Interface Wednesday Night! Whatever. It beats doing math homework. The above image is the ReacTable, which, if you’re one of the 5 people who have not seen it, can be found here. Now then:

CreateDigitalMusic brings the hyper-whitespace noise with this bubble-gum driven step sequencer. They rightly say that the really cool underlying thing is the camera that recognizes the colors of the gum balls. There are only about 1001 of places you could take that.

Analog Industries, meanwhile, has the same sort of thing, done with skittles. Let the candy wars begin.

Ariana, over at Whitechapel, posted this wonderfully throwaway comment:

“Someday, someone will build a touchpad that’s dancefloor-sized, and let the crowd’s movement make organic tracks. That will rock so hard.”‘

That, obviously, got me thinking. But I cannot, for the life of me, figure out a way to make the idea work. It’s an ancient techno / computer music cliche, but it’s the very definition of “non-trivial problem”. Anyone got any inspirations?

Finally, I had an idea for “my” interface: It involves a circle, with notes, chords, and samples sliding slowly from the inside to the outside, and a radar-style bar that rotates around and plays things, depending on their rotation. I’m kind of cribbing from Glasbead, but I think it could be a suitably separate thing. More details notes will appear as I have time to think on it more.

when music was music

January 21, 2008 · by · in ,

…whatever that means. For me, it means that I burned some tunes for my show on the 31st.
Robsounds – Nightvision [Unsigned]
Copy – Just Expect [Audio Dregs]
Copy – It’s A Little Too Late [Audio Dregs]
Robsounds – Scatterdays [Unsigned]
Mike Oldfield – Far Above The Clouds (Timewriter Remix)
Chymera – Umbrella (Funk D’Void Remix) [Ovum]
Limbo – Synch Clip 2 [Unsigned]
Ogi Gee Cash & Synchronized – Down Below [Proton]
Pole Folder – In My Mind (Lemon8 Remix) [Restart]
Russian Linesman – Bratislava Story (Avus Remix) [Undercut]
Russian Linesman – Bratislava Story (Margot Remix) [Undercut]
Noel Sanger – Natural Perfection [Dissident]
Keenan & Anderson – Runaway (Steve May Dub) [Navigation]
Gareth Emery – Outrageous (Shiloh Remix) [Baroque]
ZZT – Lower State Of Conciousness (Justice Remix) [Turbo]

I’d also like to remind any and all of you local techno-makers that there is a producer meet-up tomorrow (Tuesday, January 22nd) evening, 8 PM, at the Serious Coffee at Yates & Broad. Bring your self, samples of your music, a willingness to talk about your music and methods with other people, and a desire to drink hot beverages.

Also, I finished a ridiculous cut-up piano composition. (I will post pictures soon.) Kevin Thomson was brave enough to sight read it, and it sounded wonderful and I’m forever in his debt. I think I’m going to try to get it performed, somewhere. Will have to talk to people about the details of that though. More as it breaks.

oh god here it comes

January 15, 2008 · by · in ,

School just happened to me. Owch. So:

This is a concept guitar, by a man named Amit Zoran. Essentially, it provides a different resonating chamber for each string. I happen to think that’s a pretty mindbending idea, but that’s because I don’t usually think about acoustics and acoustic changeas a method of synthesis. Obviously, I spend too much time in front of my computer.

I went to see Oholibah and Her Lovers last night, an opera put on by a horde of people from the School of Music…but not the School of Music itself. Overheard politics aside, the “naked opera” was monumental in the very best sense of the word. The libretto was edited together from Old Testament, and the production as a whole worked out to a cross between Cecil B. DeMille and Wagner, complete with the Song of Soloman, Voice Of God, and a Cast Of Thousands. Wonderful stuff.

Finally, I’m playing at Hush on Thursday, January 31st, opening for Yoseff. You should come.

Oh oh!  Chris Reiche dropped some artistic and ontological science today when he said that “We’re not modernism or post modernism or post-post-modernism any more.  We’re at individualism now.”  I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out what he means by that Zen little koan.

geek your way to love

January 10, 2008 · by · in , ,

First things first: Come and see me opening for Shiloh at Hush, tomorrow. They’re fantastic, I’m fantastic. Simple. Now then:

Networked Music Review has a link to some gloriously otaku in-game music playing in Lord Of The Rings Online. I don’t know how much support Second Life gives to this kind of thing, and I have a feeling that the latency is still bad enough to prevent duets. However, as latency improves, online ensembles will become more and more plausible. I will, in fact, bet you money that they’ll eventually turn into their own games / interfaces / programs, etc. At the moment, MacBooks come standard with webcams. What if they came standard with mics and ‘GarageJam’ software? ‘GarageJam’ being, of course, GarageBand plus a friends list and an “Let’s Jam” button for when you’re bored and want to play / make / create music with a friend.

Damn. Now I’m all excited about that. Moving on to video games. GamaSutra did an interview with the guy who designed Elite. In it, he talks about emergent gameplay, AI-driven missions, proper “non-linear” stories in mainstream games, and so on. Meanwhile, Grand Text Auto linked to a bunch of articles about table-top gaming and how story evolved in them. Greg Costikyan’s essay is a really good read and a really good history lesson.

Those have got me thinking, mostly about quantization of narrative, to give it a high-falutin’ title. I will post more about it, later, when math is not calling my name as much, and when I can form thoughts better. Most of what I want to say is dealt with in those two linked articles. Read them!