This update I believe is worth a second post, as it makes visible the otherwise-mysterious algorithms producing music in our previous post.
And yes, I believe this is “music,” naysayers aside. Whether it’s good music is in the ears of the listener, but if you can describe this much sound with this little code, imagine what’s really possible in computer music. Whatever it is you want to hear, it’s within the power of your imagination to describe it, on a score or in code, either one.
Thanks to none other than Stephan Schmitt for the tip.
Does CDM get a lot of email? Yes, yes, it does. Some of them are valuable and fascinating and – all apologies to all of you – manage to slip through the inbox. Some, however, are simply exceptionally strange. This is just from this morning:
Topic:
musis
Message:
i need pad
Okay. Guess you do.
Topic:
Cassette tapes
Message:
I am having a “clear out ” at home and have several music cassettes
What can I do with them.?? Includes, some Elvis, Christmas
collections,Richard Rogers musicals,Andrew LLoyd Webber
If you have some solutions you’d like to suggest to these folks, let us know and we’ll pass them on.
You know you’re in for something different with an article that contains this line: “as 256 bytes is becoming the new 4K, there has been ever more need to play decent music in the 256-byte size class. ”
In just a single line of code, Finnish artist and coder countercomplex, working with other contributors, is creating “bitwise creations in a pre-apocalyptic world.” What’s stunning is to listen to the results, even if you have trouble following the code – the results are complex and organic, glitchy but with compositional direction, as though the machine itself had learned to compose in its own, strange language.
This is, naturally, the opposite of the musical coding in the previous post: in place of human-readable languages representing abstractions atop other abstractions, this is pure algorithm transformed into music. Geeky, yes, but it also says something about musical composition and thought independent of the computer. It is as compact an expression of a human musical idea as one could imagine.
I recommend reading the whole blog post (and following the blog for new developments). Embedded in this whole exercise are thoughts about musical algorithms, the history of chip and 8-bit music and the demoscene, and, most interestingly, the question of whether digital music might yet yield “new” (or at least largely unknown) discoveries:
Hasn’t this been done before?
We’ve had the technology for all this for decades. People have been building musical circuits that operate on digital logic, creating short pieces of software that output music, experimenting with chaotic audiovisual programs and trying out various algorithms for musical composition. Mathematical theory of music has a history of over two millennia. Based on this, I find it quite mind-boggling that I have never before encountered anything similar to our discoveries despite my very long interest in computing and algorithmic sound synthesis. I’ve made some Google Scholar searches for related papers but haven’t find anything. Still, I’m quite sure that at many individuals have come up with these formulas before, but, for some reason, their discoveries remained in obscurity.
Writing code for music may still seem a remote notion to the vast majority of even geekier digital musicians, but as exemplified by the language Overtone, it looks very different than coding once did. Whereas sound code was once a type-and-render affair, new coding environments focus on live coding. They use elegant, lightweight modern languages that take up less space. And they can be surprisingly musical, coming remarkably close to just typing “play a c major chord.”
Not to say that you won’t look plenty geeky doing it — but, hey, if you can’t impress slash frighten your friends a little…
Using a brew of powerful free and open source tools, all available via GitHub and running here on the Mac (though any OS will work), contributor Sam Aaron walks through the program at top and demonstrates some musical examples. After the jump, a much longer screencast walks you through how to get up and running with the emacs text editor for live coding.
Okay, I think this may be some of the best / worst promotional marketing I’ve seen for music software. It runs something like this:
Do you want to be just like Jamie Lidell?
The answer is as close as the iTunes App Store and your portable device.
Just download Native Instruments’ iMaschine app to your iPhone, fire it up, and then …
Forget it. Really. I mean, this guy is actually lying in bed in his PJs, the sound you’re hearing is really just the crappy internal microphone on an iPhone 4 iPod touch, and what you’re hearing really is the line out, and this is really all one take. (I confirmed as much with Native Instruments’ Constantin Köhncke as we watched the final take earlier this week at their office.)
For all we talk about microphone selection and placement and such, there’s not much substitute for being able to sing. That is, iMaschine can make anyone sound like this, just so long as they are Jamie Lidell.
And, actually, maybe that means this isn’t such bad marketing after all – perhaps not for iMaschine so much as music software in general. I’m kidding, of course – once you realize you’re not Jamie Lidell, you can work out who you are. And you do have a voice of your own.
I could at this point mention the features in iMaschine, but … what’s the point? It records stuff. You can lay down beats and then sing into it. Just like you can do with other tools for your iPhone or your laptop or even a piece of used sampling gear you found on eBay, all of which can fit comfortably into a bed on a lazy weekend.
In fact, who cares about how technically-sophisticated your software is, or if you have a fancy, high-end mic handy? I hope that we’ll all get a few minutes lying in bed somewhere this weekend. (I know that’s part of my plan.) So, use the internal mic on your laptop, or phone or tape recorder or whatever, use that bicycle for the mind, and in the words of Sesame Street’s “Sing,”
“Don’t worry if it’s not good enough / for anyone else to hear / just sing / sing a song.”
I’ll have a review of iMaschine by next week, but I’m even more interested in what you make.
Montreal-based Damian Taylor, music director and engineer for Björk, is the subject of an epic interview on cycling74.com, spanning music, life in Montreal, working with Björk and what makes her special, and what patching in Max/MSP can mean compositionally and creatively.
Damian has some especially nice reflections on what having an open-ended music environment can mean.
If you’re a musician or composer, Max is an amazing tool that will really open up a completely different way of thinking about music. If you’ve been working on sequencers, looking at time lines, working on tape, or reading off musical scores, then without really realizing it you start looking at music in this very linear way and your brain gets formed into a lot of similar patterns.
But the Max environment provides this whole alternate way of thinking, a whole different flow. Suddenly your own ways of thinking about time and harmony and melodies and everything, expands completely. Music kind of changes shape, you see it from this whole different side. So it’s really, really, really, worth putting in the effort!
Touch on devices like the iPad is functional, but limited in its expression – there’s no pressure or tactile feedback. That’s why we’ve enthusiastically followed Randy Jones’ “continuous capacitive sensing” technology on the Soundplane for some time. Sensing pressure, it behaves more like an acoustic instrument might – that is, if such an acoustic instrument were possible beyond the imagination of the digital realm.
As advertised, it “transmits x, y and pressure data for every key continuously at 12 bits of resolution and about 1000 samples per second, letting players move beyond the ADSR envelope model of synthesis and articulate each note individually, as on an acoustic instrument.”
While Randy has a patent pending, he still encourages people to follow his documentation of the technology to build their own. But if you’d like one nicely built for you, the Soundplane is now available as a US$1695. There’s even a bundled version of Madrona Labs’ wonderful Aalto patchable modular software synthesizer for your computer, especially customized to work with the Soundplane. (And dig those nice three-dimensional visualizations of pressure in the video.)
There won’t be many of these first units out in the world: the first run is limited to just 30 units. Of course, if it’s successful, I’d expect to see more. And you could have something special in the first-available hardware (I’d jump if I weren’t saving my pennies!)
Our own Matt Earp is working on an interview with Randy, so here’s your opportunity – what would you like to ask Randy about his creation?
If you happen to be in California, Randy is putting together a West Coast US tour. Dates and description below.
Peter Kirn
Jaymis Loveday
James Grahame
Primus Luta
michaeluna
Kim Cascone
Ben Long
Tom Whitwell
John Jacobus
Chris Stack
Marsha Vdovin
Markus Schroeder
Matt Earp
Kristin Trethewey