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tide pool walks into a bar…

March 23, 2008 · by · in

..and says “I gotta mix for youse.” Specifically, we’ve got a wonderful new mix from Limbo, called Swimming Tide Pool. The tracklisting is as follows:

01. Limbo – My Song [Proton Music]
02. Lawrence – Laid One [Dial]
03. Sid Le Rock – Naked (DJ Koze Remix) [Cereal/Killers]
04. Dave Aju – Xibalbanasazi [Circus Company]
05. Syclops – Monkeypuss [DFA]
06. Tim Track – The Release [Abyss]
07. H-Man – 51 Poland Street (Extrawelt Tool) [Giant Wheel]
08. Reynold – Persian Indigo (Stewart Walker Remix) [Persona]
09. Sennh – Warm Frequencies [Traum]
10. Deadbeat – Mecca Drum Jack [Wagon Repair]
11. Alt Fenster – Sur Cette Feuille [Maripoza]
12. Adam Johnson – South Of Mel [Narita]
13. L’usine – Flat (L’usine Remix) [Ghostly International]
14. Bloc Party – Where Is Home? (Burial Remix) [Wichita]
15. Jichael Mackson – Used [Phictiv]
16. Fairmont – I Need Medicine [Border Community]
17. Aphex Twin – Fingerbib [Warp]
18. Paul Kalkbrenner – Page 1, 2, 3 (Agoria Remix) [Bpitch Control]
19. Apparat – Arcadia (Telefon Tel Aviv Version) [Infiné]

We’ve *also* got a new release from the Betmax Warriors, a four track EP to be exact. You can find out more about that here.

Finally, Arthur C. Clarke died. I think my favorite remembrance so far has been Michael Moorcock’s, which you can read here. I would add to Moorcock’s delightfully personal account that Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama is the single purest sci-fi book ever written, and you should all read it, or else. We’ll miss you, Arthur.

‘for martin arnold’, by Hollas Longton

March 21, 2008 · by · in

I had the pleasure of ‘performing’, a piece by Hollas Longton a few weeks ago, and I got his permission to post the recording of it:  For Martin Arnold.

There’s something of a trap in it:  I’ll leave it to you, the listener to figure out what it is, and how we did the recording.

no tech is good tech

March 16, 2008 · by · in ,

R. Murray Schafer came by UVic on Friday, to talk about his string quartets, about soundscapes and sonic ecology, and about his approaches to composition in general.  I was right with him on just about everything he said, until he was asked about why he still composes in longhand when programs like Silbelius and Finale exist.  (Easy answer:  he has lovely penmanship.)

Instead of giving that easy answer, alas, he said something along the lines (I wish I could remember what he said verbatim) of “technology tends to produce music that sounds dated in 10 years”.

This, obviously, got me twitching a little, and I couldn’t articulate why it did or why I disagreed with him until the next day.  Let me show you a picture that will help make my point:

It’s a kitty!  Yay!

Well, yes, but more importantly it’s a piano. Which was only invented ’round about 1700.  Is that not “technology”, just because it’s three hundred years old?  Likewise, Schafer’s passion for recording and archiving sounds isn’t possible without technology from the past 100 years.

Now, I agree with him that slavishly embracing the latest tech can produce music that will sound slavishly dated – as witness all the (awful) Max/MSP distortion + improvisation things I’ve seen this year.  But that’s not Max/MSP’s fault, just like it’s not a piano’s fault if people write boring I – IV – V – I progressions on it.

Or, to paraphrase the NRA:  Technology doesn’t write shitty music.  People write shitty music.

each according to his worth

March 10, 2008 · by · in , ,

I finished a new miniset:

Download here. Art is care of William Blake, the sound is epic, boss-battle progbreaks.

1: Royal Assassin – Turn Of Twilight [Pacific Front]
2: Lostep – Villain [GU]
3: Hybrid – Sleepwalking [Distinctive]
4: Dustin H – Recieve The Light (His Boy Elroy Remix) [Pacific Front]
5: Hy Bound – Mark Of The Beatsmith [Overclocked]

I also got my mind blown by the City Generator that Introversion are working on for their next game. (Introversion being the people who brought you Defcon.) That, combined with going to see the UVic Orchestra and then going to see the brutal, Germanic vocal patterns of Chris Reiche’s grad piece, Living German, gave me an idea for generative music.
Take a word. Play it back over itself, several times, just slightly out of phase. You could get the same effect by having 3-6 people repeat it a few times. You’ll start to hear a rhythm and a tempo in the word. Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain, for example, has some really strong 3/4 sections. Make a note of that rhythm, or rhythms: we’ll need them soon.

Now, take that same repeated word, and spectralize it: pull out the strongest fundamental pitches, and make a note of them. Then map them to our boring old 12-tone scale. (An optional step, but it will makes things easier.) Then, map those notes to the aforementioned rhythm. Bingo – an instant motive. Combine that with the standard graph of western tonal harmony, and you can generate pretty much whatever you want. Call it Symphony On A Word, if you like.

don’t fuck with stravinsky

March 8, 2008 · by · in ,

No, seriously, don’t fuck with Stravinsky.  I mean, just look at him.  He’ll cut you.

I just got in from seeing and hearing the UVic Orchestra hurl themselves through Stravinskys’ Firebird and Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony.  Both were fantastic.  I think I prefer Stravinsky to Pyotr Ilyich, but it’s a near thing.  I did like, however, the positively sepulchral final movement of the Tchaikovsky.  More large scale works need traps like that.

On the subject of fantastic music, the results of “Best Music You Heard Today” project are in for the basement of the UVic Music Department.  They are as follows:
54 Total Pieces:
37% classical
28% rock
9% indie
5% jazz
5% soul
5% ambience
3% pop
3% folk
1% electro
(Please note that my genres are very, very, very broad.)

The most listed musician was Bach, followed by a tie for second place:  The Shaggs, Broken Social Scene, and Stravinsky.  (see?  Don’t fuck with Stravinsky)  Even more interestingly, a single person managed to skew the results towards rock and indie by about ten percent.  This is, of course, the Music Department, so these results are not surprising…but I’d be interested in seeing what I’d get if I wrote down “Favorite Music” instead of “Best Music”.  Maybe I’ll do that next year.  Or maybe do both at once.
The original plan was to contrast the Music Department answers with the answers from, say,  the Computer Science Building.  However, the CSC students have only managed to put down something like six items.  I can tell you, however, that there’s nothing even remotely classical about those six items.  This is not a surprising piece of data, but I feel it is an important one.

I would turn this into my post on music and memetics, but this is long as is.  Soon, I promise.

failed save vs. death ray

March 4, 2008 · by · in ,

We’ll miss you, Gary:

so indie that my shoes don’t fit

February 24, 2008 · by · in ,

First, some music.  As you can see, Proton’s been doing some good stuff.
Pole Folder – Mona Kea [Proton Music]
Benz & MD – Signals (AFK’s Ogopogo Remix) [Proton Music]
Benz & MD – Signals (AFK’s Dragon Dub) [Proton Music]
Sam Fraser – Little White Lies [Proton Music]
King Con – Jemidepemig [Bellarine]

Now, on to video games.  I hate to get even MORE indie here, but Passage is really quite good.  It is tricky, heartfelt, overly pixilated, deeply affecting, has sappy 8-bit music, and is filled with wonder and wisdom.  It is also free from the above link and takes five minutes too play.  You should try it.

Now, with that glowing recommendation behind me, let’s start splitting hairs.  I’m not sure if Passage is a game as much as it is interactive art.  One of the other indie darlings at the moment, The Marriage, is absolutely a game.  It has a distinct goal, actions you can take that affect the goal, actions from the game engine that affect your actions, and so on.  (It’s also amazingly frustrating and overwhelmingly cryptic – which might be the point.)

But anyways, Passage has no set goal, and an arbitrary ending condition.  It is, as Sid Meier said, a series of interesting choices…but those choices barely impact the game world at all.  What they do impact is the player.  That is to say, you.  “Art” is about as ill-defined as “game” and “fun”, but if Passage isn’t art, then art is poorer for it.

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?