jumping beans & .tape. from la bisogno on Vimeo.

What might a jar full of Mexican jumping beans sound like if composing their own ambient music? Scott Worley points us to a musical experiment by his labelmate Daniel Romero aka .tape, on netlabel yo.yo.pang!.
.tape programmed a sound environment in the free multimedia patching environment Pd (Pure Data). Contact microphones listen for the beans to jump, then use Pd’s onset detection (an analysis for transients) to trigger the sounds. Daniel reports the technique is “easy, but wholly effective.”

I’ll say – the music winds up being quite lovely, and rather than having a boring software-based random event generator, there’s something mesmerizing about watching the beans. You can download a free MP3/OGG file of the track, as well (and it sounds as though more projects may be coming):

pet-o-matic [asociación cultural la bisogno]

Descripción original en Español:

empezamos esta serie con la picante unión entre el músico Daniel Romero (aka .tape. ) y Pancho, Emiliano y Marcos, tres frijoles saltarines mexicanos

Sonidos y programación por .tape. secuenciación en directo por los 3 frijoles saltarines mexicanos micrófono de contacto + un “onset detection” en pd para disparar los sonidos. fácil pero rotundamente efectivo.

In other Pd news, the creators of the RjDj interactive/generative iPhone music app, which employs Pd patches, will be holding another sprint. This one will be located in London October 2-4.

Musicians and artists now have the power to fuse visuals, sound, and interaction, to make a spectacle, an album, and a game all at once. But with the blank canvas of three different media before you, what form should that fusion take?

Space shooters with pounding electronic beats behind them have cleared some of the way. Now it’s ambient music’s turn. In the game Osmos, you become a mysterious particle, floating amongst gravity wells in various fields of material. By carefully navigating, applying just the right vector force to move through the shifting landscape, you merge with other particles and escape to safety.

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

The move from “shoot stuff” to “move” or “eat” seems to be rising in popularity, with games like fl0w and Spore’s initial “cell stage” encouraging nonviolent navigation. To me, there’s something happening to the zeitgeist, perhaps a renewed awareness of cosmic (micro- or macroscopic) being, and of movement that draws on free-floating physics.

Even amongst a wave of games in this mode,when you actually play Osmos, you realize that it is something different and special. The design makes ingenious use of different kinds of movement and pacing through its different modes, at one point calling upon you to hurtle around a black hole, then move at nearly imperceptible speeds through a seemingly impossible-to-traverse petri dish of massive particles. No less than a shooter, it connects to the id and survival instinct. Pac-Man, the most successful arcarde game of all time, and one of the few that sucked in men and women in equal measure, was noted for its emphasis on eating as the mechanic. Consuming stuff appeals to everyone.

Of course, this is on a music site, and with good reason: what makes Osmos work is that Osmos is musical. It’s immediately beautiful and delicate, a perfect aesthetic union of the texture of the music and the on-screen arrangements of particles. More importantly, the music is woven directly into game play, providing subtle cues for dangers, and underscoring the pace of gameplay. You can only solve a level by managing speed and motion, and the music helps provide both the literal indications of speed and help your head get into the right zone to lose yourself in the world. If blips in early arcade games helped create a zone of play trance, now we have spectacular ambient soundtrack of music by Loscil, Gas/High Skies [Microscopics], Julien Neto, and Biosphere.

The music isn’t simply a beautiful soundtrack to the game. The game really feels like an extension of the world of the music. Put it all together, and something magical happens in this $10 game: you hear the music in a new way.

I spoke to the lead designer behind the game, programmer/animator Eddy Boxerman, along with musical-sonic collaborator Mat Jarvis aka Gas aka High Skies.

Peter: I found it amusing that some of the game press have stumbled around looking for a name for a new genre here, the "eat other stuff" category. To me, the basic game controls could be traced back to early titles like Asteroids. What are the games that have inspired you, either specifically or generally?

Eddy: Some people are dubbing the gameplay type as "eat ‘em up", as opposed to the classic "shoot ‘em up". But it’s true, the physics/controls have more in common with classic games such as Asteroids and Gravitar. The only "modern" game that otherwise influenced me was Katamari Damacy. It’s funny: when I sent out the first prototype to friends, I was concerned they would think the game was too similar to Katamari. That’s when I heard about flOw, which I’ve tried to steer stylistically clear of ever since. I guess it’s an archetype though, and the comparisons have been inevitable. As for Spore, Osmos was about one year into development when I saw the first preview footage of its "cell stage". On top of that, I learned that Will Wright had hired Brian Eno to do the music! I definitely had a "why should I bother?" moment at that point. But here we are, a couple years later, and I think we’ve managed to put out a unique game with a great mix of gameplay, sound, and visuals.

Peter: Ha – well, I’m glad you “bothered”! One thing that I think is really unique about Osmos is the gravitational mechanic. How did this come about?

Eddy: I was (and probably still am) a sci-fi kid. And when I read about real phenomena like colliding galaxies, retrograde planets, and the like, my mind goes to stange and wonderful places. That said, the Spacecraft Dynamics course I took during my engineering degree definitely played a large part in putting those mechanics and levels together. Thanks, Professor Misra! :)

Peter: How are the physical mechanics of the game constructed? This is essentially two-dimensional vector math, yes? Were there refinements you needed to make in order to keep performance up, or to keep the levels playable?

Eddy: That’s a big question! But yes, essentially it’s 2D vector math, though we make use of some 3D math (including quaternions) on the particle systems. The majority of the physics is quite simple though — first year bachelor’s stuff: F = ma, conservation of mass and momentum, gravitational laws, basic time integration, etc. We follow the spirit of the laws, but not always the letter. For instance, if you look at the Earth’s solar system in its entirety, you wouldn’t even see most of the planets; that doesn’t make for a very playable game though. As such, we took many liberties when it comes to scale, constants and exponents in the equations. The majority of the work was in the tweaking of those values to make the game /feel /good.

Peter: How did you prototype the game? What was the process of evolution like? Were there any failed attempts along the way?

Eddy: I put together the first prototype starting from a NeHe OpenGL tutorial. I added some basic physics, mouse controls, some highly unoptimised collision detection code, and voila, I had something to play with. After that, I immediately integrated [cross-platform 3D audio API] OpenAL, as the game was just begging for sound and music. I then hunted for some good sounds (discovering freesound.org in the process), put together a simple looping song (my first rough and humbling attempt to create digital music), and sent it out to a few friends. I’ll make that version available for free someday… when I’m feeling brave.

As for failed attempts, there were tons of shelved experiments and features that were cut. One interesting problem was the difficulty curve of the gravitational levels. In fact, the first gravity levels looked a great deal like the "Warped Chaos" levels do today: several free-floating Attractors in a sea of regular motes. I found it incredibly difficult, however, to make a "beginner" version of those levels. If the gravity was too weak, the Attractors had little apparent effect; too strong, and the level became incredibly difficult. I stuggled with this for a long time, until I hit on the idea of putting one, immobile Attractor in the center, with everything else orbiting around it. This allowed for the creation of systems with strong gravity effects, but long-term stability. It seems so obvious now, especially given the example of our solar system, but it wasn’t back then. In the end, these are some of the coolest levels in Osmos — practically its "signature" level type. Moral of the story: necessity really is the mother of invention.

Peter: What is the visual engine like? The sound engine?

Eddy: As I mentioned, I bootstrapped from a NeHe tutorial, but that’s all been replaced at this point. It’s now a homegrown engine using OpenGL. It doesn’t make any use of pixel/vertex shaders, so it runs on a wide variety of hardware. The majority of our texture work is done in Photoshop.

[The sound engine is] a wrapper we’ve built around OpenAL. At a basic level, all we ever do is mix and adjust the gain and pitch of our sounds and music. This allows us to run on generic sound hardware. But we do make extensive use of those "effects", and it’s possible to get a great deal of variety and feedback with them. In the end, it’s all about the quality of our sound sources, and the algorithms that adjust and smooth the gain and pitch of each.

Peter: For pitch shifting, were you able to do that natively in OpenAL?

Eddy: Yes, OpenAL supports pitch shifting at the software level. I ported our sound engine to use DirectSound at one point, and found that it’s pitch shift range is rather limited. We reverted back to OpenAL.

Peter: One thing that really strikes me about the game that is its use of pacing. Even without the obvious technique of allowing the user to control speed, there’s this extraordinary contrast between levels that require you to move quickly, that require you to anticipate the rate of movement along a vector of other objects, or that require you to move almost imperceptibly slowly. Was this an early goal, or something that evolved out of developing the game concepts?

Eddy: It evolved from the game concepts themselves. We tried to fully explore the fundamental controls and game space of Osmos, and converged on a number of interesting regions and structures that were fun to play with/in. Some people actually "complain" that the pacing of the game isn’t consistent across levels — some are fast, some slow — but that wasn’t our goal. In a sense, we’re merely presenting the results of a great deal of research and exploration into the space, with our sole requirement being that the levels are fun and interesting. We wanted it to be a game of concepts and understanding, not speed. The addition of time-warping allowed us to break free from that, expand our scope, and include a much larger variety of levels, as some have both fast and slow moments in them; we wanted the player to be able to control the pace and difficulty to their level of comfort.

Peter: Connecting the action to music, how important is the use of music in conveying time?

Eddy: I think pitch-shifting the music and sound effects helps players track time-warping in an inutitive way. Without these aural cues, the mental connection would be incomplete. That said, I sometimes test the game without sound, and it’s totally playable — just much less immersive.

Peter: At what stage did you involve the musical element? How was that relationship established?

Mat: Eddy first contacted me two or three years ago about using one of my tracks on Osmos (“Gas – Discovery”). He sent me a basic alpha version where the game was literally flat circles on a plain background, but even back then with the simple graphics and no sound it was compelling. I think it was at this early stage that I sent him a copy of another High Skies track, “The Shape of Things to Come,” which he also used a section from. It wasn’t too long later that he sent me a version of Osmos with most of the music that made it to the release version and it all just complimented each other beautifully.

Eddy has done a great job choosing music that compliments the game and graphics, and they also compliment the music. I think he’s done a great job overall as well, keeping his vision consistent for the look and feel of the Osmos world. Even though some of the levels are quite varied; some are quite chilled, others fast paced, nothing seems out of place. He has created a new world that’s both microscopic and macroscopic.

Peter: The musical and sound effect elements really do blend effortlessly. Mat, I know you made substitute sounds – how did this help blend the aesthetic?

Mat: I made the rebound noise when you bounce off the walls/ boundary. The original sound was quite hard and metallic with a lot of reverb, and I suggested a softer echoey sound. There was nothing wrong with the original, but it made the boundary feel quite hard and cold like being in a metal tank. I sent Eddy some analogue samples, using a [vintage Roland keyboard] Jupiter 6 with varying delays/ echoes. Because the tones are so pure and tuned, Eddy pitched them slightly to fit with the various keys of the different music.

Eddy: In general, it was a matter of searching and experimentation for the "right" set of sounds that fit well together — which can be a lengthy but rewarding process. Once integrated, minor gain and pitch adjustments helped fit it all together.

Mat provided the bounce sound, as well as the continuous absorb/being-absorbed sounds. The other sounds were created/shared on freesound by the users Elektrocell, fran_ky and Jovica. (Check out the Osmos credits in the readme.html for details.)

Peter: I recently spoke to Crystal Method, and while they’ve done some notable game scores, they actually said they wouldn’t want their music to be placed in a game context at which the speed changed, that it’d lose something. This seems like the opposite of that. Now, maybe it’s easy to take for granted with ambient music as opposed to something beat-driven like Crystal Method, but do you think there’s something special that allows this music to be adaptive in that way?

Mat: I think that in the right circumstances music with drums could work well and may even highlight the time-shifting more. Of course with the wrong game and wrong music it could sound terrible too.

Eddy: It’s a delicate issue. Out of the context of the game, I think it would seem wrong. There were also some pieces of music I tried which didn’t lend themselves well to this kind of manipulation, and which didn’t get included as a result. But with these songs, and everything working together in-game, I feel the whole experience is stronger as a result. I’m just glad Mat and the other artists agreed — or at least… didn’t object. ;-)

Peter: Hey, I think if you can write music that sounds good played at a different speed, that’s nice.

Osmos seems to me a musical experience, in that the sense of the music is transformed by the visuals and the interaction with them. Do you think it’s possible that audiovisual interfaces could go even further in terms of their impact on the music?

Mat: Yes, it almost seems as though Osmos creates a world for the music to exist.

I’ve always liked music visualisers like the Processing and Cymatics stuff, they’re quite compelling to watch how they react to the music, so it would be interesting to go the other way; by manipulating/ sculpting abstract shapes which then modify or even create sounds and music, especially using the new controllers like the Wii, [Microsoft’s] Project Natal and Sony’s Motion Controller instead of the mouse.

Eddy: I totally agree with Mat. Yes, please! More feedback between music, visuals and interactivity — in all directions. I’d love to experiment more on all of these fronts. In general, I think games such as Audiosurf and Auditorium, while great, have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible. Interactive musical "toys" such as [Nintendo/Toshio Iwai’s ]ElectroPlankton or Dub Selector are another great direction; and Rock Band Network is about to expand the market in a huge way. It’s exciting!

Peter: Along those lines, this is obviously a new take on music distribution in a way that goes well beyond what titles like Rock Band have done. Are there other cases in game history that to you have done that? Is there potential in these new outlets, outlets that are more accessible to independent developers (Steam, Direct2Drive, Xbox Live Arcade, iTunes App Store), to really change game development?

Eddy: Wow, that’s another big question. Really, I just felt the music was such an important part of the experience in Osmos that we should show the artist and track names during the game. But now that you mention it, I can’t think of another game that has done this, besides games like Rock Band where the song /is/ the game/level. That said, one way I’d love to push this evolution is to "augment" music videos with interactivity: ie. into music video-games. (The term "game" could be used rather loosely here.) Everyday Shooter does this, though Jon Mak actually created the music /for/ the game in that case — which rocks — but collaborations could lead to some really amazing things in this direction.

Peter: Eddy, Mat, thank you. Whether it’s in the form of a game or an audiovisual performance, we’ll certainly continue to explore these areas. And – hint, hint – Osmos 2, with multiplayer? Just a thought.

Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

Osmos is a glorious glimpse of the fusion of electronic sound and game design many of us anticipate. It is built around a (challenging!) physics-based gameplay style – in the same vein as float-around-the-world games like flOw (and long before that, Asteroids) with procedural design and a perfect, liquid electronic soundtrack. Osmos became available DRM-free yesterday on Valve’s terrific Steam service for US$10 (on sale for a little less this week), and you can buy worldwide from the developer on Direct2Drive. (The developer has temporarily suspended direct sales from their site. Updated: the game is available again direct from the developer. It’s worth buying direct if you want to get a free coupon for the Mac and Linux licenses when they become available. Steam and D2D are great stores that support indie developers, though, and in the case of Osmos you don’t get any DRM with either one.) There’s also a free demo available. Versions for Mac and Linux are coming soon.

The roster of artists working on the music is simply a dream, including Loscil, Gas/High Skies, Julien Neto, and Biosphere.

I’ve already lost myself in the opening levels, and can’t wait to get deeper. CDM will have an interview with the creators by next week, once they recover from the launch.

And yes, indie gaming looks like a very fertile ground for digital artists and musicians, indeed.

Now, I’m not going to say anything else, because I want some time to play the game.

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

Here’s a switcher story of a different color: from the Mac, to Linux. It’s one thing to talk about operating systems and free software in theory, or to hear from died-in-the-wool advocates of their platform of choice. In this case, we turn to Kim Cascone, an experienced and gifted musician and composer with an impressive resume of releases and a rich sens of sound. This isn’t someone advocating any platform over another: it’s an on-the-ground, in-the-trenches, real-world example of how Kim made this set of tools work in his music, in the studio and on tour. A particular thanks, as he’s given me some new ideas for how to work with Audacity and Baudline. Kim puts his current setup in the context of decades of computer work. Even if you’re not ready to leave Mac (or Windows) just yet, Kim’s workflow here could help if you’re looking to make a Linux netbook or laptop more productive in your existing rig.

Stay tuned, as I’ll have some other stories on how to make your Linux music workflow effective creatively, particularly in regards to leaping over some of the setup hurdles Kim describes. -PK

Historical Evolution

I’ve been working with computers since the 1970s. Inspired by the work of composer David Behrman, I taught myself assembly language and programmed a simple digital sequencer on a KIM-1, single-board microcomputer, controlling an Aries modular synthesizer I had built. I discovered a then-new magazine called Computer Music Journal at the local computer shop and bought every copy I could get my hands on. (I still have them, too.) Later, I helped a friend’s father, an executive at IBM, unpack and set up the first personal computer IBM made. The manuals alone took up two or three feet of bookshelf space.

Fast-forward through a couple of decades of owning Commodore 64s, Apple computers, and PCs. In 1997, I purchased my first laptop: a woefully-underpowered Compaq Presario. It wasn’t fast enough for real-time audio, so I had to render sound files to hard disk using the audio programming language Csound. I created many of the sounds this way for my CD ‘blueCube( )’. But the capacity to work anywhere was enough for me to give up ever owning another desktop computer.

Frustrated with the ‘code-compile-listen’ process of working with Csound and wanting to work in real-time, I switched to the graphical multi-media programming language Max/MSP, which necessitated a move back to Apple hardware, so I bought a PowerBook. Having Max/MSP running on a laptop was the perfect environment for me. I could build the tools I needed whenever an idea presented itself. The computer functioned as both sound design studio and stage instrument. I worked this way for ten years, faithfully following the upgrade path set forth by Apple and the various developers of the software I used. Continually upgrading required a substantial financial commitment on my part.

Apple Seeds of Discontent

When I’m on the road, I use my laptop as a music studio, performance instrument, and administration office. I don’t like surprises on the road. Having a computer fail means a loss of income, and makes for an embarrassing moment if the failure happens during a performance. If watching laptop music bores some people, watching a musician reboot is even worse. So to be safe, I stress-test all new hardware or software in my studio for at least a month before I take it on the road. Max/MSP patches run for hours, software is used for weeks, and hardware is left on for days at a time to help induce failure before I leave home. But as fate would have it, an iBook I was touring with died a few years ago. I brought the laptop into an Apple repair shop in Berlin, where a technician diagnosed the problem as a faulty logic board. The failure rate on logic boards was high for that model of iBook, and in response to public pressure, Apple instituted a logic board replacement program. Luckily, my laptop qualified and the logic board was replaced for free. But the failure and ongoing buggy behavior impacted my work schedule and added to the stress of touring.

I’ve now replaced logic boards on three computers; the other two I paid for out of pocket. The out-of-warranty cost of replacing a logic board on an Apple laptop is around six hundred dollars — cheaper than buying a brand new laptop, but still significant.

If you make your living with applications that run on OS X, there are no options if a laptop fails. You either repair expensive Apple hardware or buy new expensive Apple hardware. This is called ‘vendor lock-in.’

Then, during my 2009 spring tour, my PowerBook G4 exhibited signs of age, with missing keystrokes, intermittent backlighting, the failure of a RAM slot, and reduced performance. As an alternative to repairing the PowerBook, I investigated what a new MacBook Pro and upgrades for all my software would cost. A quick back-of-a-napkin estimate came to approximately $3,000, not including the time it would take tweaking and testing to make it work for the tour. If the netbook revolution hadn’t come along and spawn a price-wars on laptops, I might have proceeded to increase my credit card debt. But as a wise uncle once advised, “you invest either your time or your money; never both.”

Meeting Ubuntu

I had tried Linux in 2005 on PowerPC-based Mac laptops, though at the time I couldn’t get audio working, even after extensive tweaking. But I had kept an eye on Ubuntu ever since. After considering MacBook Pro prices, I checked out the new netbooks coming to market and picked up a refurbished Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Ubuntu pre-installed.

I loaded up my Dell with all a selection of Linux audio applications and brought it with me on tour as an emergency backup to my tottering PowerBook. The Mini 9 could play back four tracks of 24-bit/96 kHz audio with effects – not bad for a netbook. The solution to my financial constraint became clear, and I bought a refurbished Dell Studio 15, installed Ubuntu on it, and set it up for sound production and business administration. The total cost was around $600 for the laptop plus a donation to a software developer — a far cry from the $3000.00 price tag and weeks of my time it would have cost me to stay locked-in to Apple. After a couple of months of solid use, I have had no problems with my laptop or Ubuntu. Both have performed flawlessly, remaining stable and reliable.

Getting Past Ubuntu Audio Complexities

There are a few differences between how audio works on Mac OS X and how it works on Ubuntu Linux. OS X uses the Core Audio and Core MIDI frameworks for audio and MIDI services, respectively. All applications requiring audio services on OS X talk to Core Audio, which mixes and routes multiple audio streams to the desired locations. Core Audio is simple, monolithic, and easy to set up, and all the end-user controls are accessible from one panel. You can even create a single aggregate device from multiple sound cards if you need more inputs or outputs than one sound card can supply. To Apple’s credit, Core Audio and the applications that make use of it are the reason why you see so many laptop musicians seated behind glowing Apple logos on stage.

On Ubuntu, audio is a rather different story. Apple’s slogan ‘Think Different’ would be good advice for musicians encountering Ubuntu’s audio setup for the first time. Audio in Ubuntu can appear at first to be a confusing jumble of servers, layers, services, and terminology. Go to System->Preferences->Sound, click on the Devices tab, and check out the pulldown menu next to ‘Sound Events’ at the top of the panel. You will see various acronyms, possibly including cryptic-looking technologies like OSS, ESD, ALSA, JACK, and Pulse Audio. These acronyms represent a byzantine tangle of conflicting technologies that over time, and due to political reasons or backwards compatibility, have ended up cohabiting with one another. ‘Frankenstein’ might be an accurate metaphor here.

Thankfully, there is a simpler way, which is the combination of ALSA [a high-performance, kernel-level audio and MIDI system] and JACK [a system for creating low-latency audio, MIDI, and sync connections between applications and computers]. The battle-scarred among us have learned to ignore all the other audio cruft bolted on to Ubuntu and just use ALSA and JACK. One can think of the ALSA/JACK stack, the heart of most pro Linux studios, as the Core Audio of Linux and in my opinion Jack should be the first thing installed on any musicians laptop. I’d go so far as to suggest placing it in the Startup Applications so it’s always running.

The ALSA/JACK combination is a little more complex to set up and tweak than Apple’s Core Audio, but there’s a lot of good information online. [Ed.: ALSA, JACK, and the real-time Linux kernel also have some advantages over Mac OS X that can be worth the effort. While JACK has been ported to Mac, Linux has more JACK-aware tools, which is necessary for transport sync. Just as importantly, once configured, you can build rigs with Linux that have greater low-latency performance than may be practical on Mac or Windows. In other words, while it may require an investment of time, it can be both free and better! -PK]

Workflow

Over the past ten years, I’ve developed a workflow that has worked well in the studio and on the road. Since I created most of my tools in Max/MSP, they could shape-shift to fit any musical task I encountered. A sound mangling tool I’d written for studio use, for instance, I could then adapt for a performance with Tony Conrad. I modified parts of my performance patch for sound installations. This environment served me well over the years – until recently, when my aesthetic focus changed from using randomness in my work to taking a more deterministic approach. This happened to coincide with my change of operating systems.

I do a lot of location recording while on tour. My rig consists of an Olympus LS-10 digital recorder and an Audio Technica AT-822 single-point stereo microphone. I record at 96kHz/24-bit to a 16GB SDHC card in the LS-10. When I want to audition sound files in the field, I use my netbook’s SDHC reader, renaming sound files directly on the card. I can look at some of the files in Baudline if I need to check for low-frequency rumble or technical anomalies. I have come to use Baudline on a daily basis.

Back in the studio, using the sound editing program Audacity, I remove voice slates, trim heads and tails, adjust gain and EQ as needed, then save them to a project folder. And because I don’t like surprises in the studio, either, this folder gets backed up onto a remote network drive as well as a local USB drive.

Building my sound library takes weeks or months. During this time, I start filling a notebook with ideas, drawings, plans and marginalia, from which a score emerges. I import all my project sound files into the open-source Digital Audio Workstation Ardour, arranging them to loosely resemble the score in my notebook. Once my Ardour session is set up, I move sounds around, try different effects, create new textures by layering, then render and re-import sub-mixes until the piece starts to take shape. I use a KORG nanoKONTROL as a mixing surface. I assign faders, pans and switches assigned to the DAW allowing me to quickly play around with different mix ideas.

Once the piece sounds finished, I mix down to a stereo .WAV file at 24-bit/44.1kHz, without using compression or EQ on the mix bus. Tip: mastering engineers really appreciate getting a raw 24-bit master that hasn’t been fiddled around with by the musician. For performances, I also use Ardour and the nanoKONTROL to do an acousmatic presentation. This version of the Ardour session will have compression and/or EQ on the mix bus, since I want the material to sound more polished. As a side note: I am looking into using the mastering tool JAMin [JACK Audio Mastering Interface] for this purpose in the future.

Sayonara, Apple

After ten years of working on Apple laptops, I’ve left the fold. Not only was the expense of owning and maintaining Apple hardware a key factor in my switch, but the operating system had become a frustration to me. Details like not having a tree-view in the right hand panel of the Finder window slowed me down. Ubuntu, on the other hand, feels more like an operating system made for grown-ups. And what’s especially nice is that Ubuntu scales nicely to the expertise of the user. Your cousin the computer geek or your Grandma can install and use Ubuntu and get as deep as they like. Combine this with the recent rash of cheap, powerful laptops, and Ubuntu’s market share is bound to grow.

A Request

It’s important that kernel and audio application developers (1) ensure all audio creation software has support for JACK, (2) improve and update tools for JACK to make it easy for musicians to install, configure, and use, (3) ship distros with the realtime kernel already tested and configured for use, (4) to integrate the real-time kernel patches into the mainline kernel. [Ed.: On each of these points, distributions and kernel builds are steadily improving, partly thanks to feedback from communities like the music production community. The realtime kernel likely won't be the default, mainline kernel, but it's important to have well-maintained optional packages at the very least. That doesn't mean you have to wait for improvements to happen, though, and in future articles I'll talk a bit about how you can configure your system now to take advantage of this functionality. -PK]

Most importantly, consider paying a subscription to support developers of JACK and your favorite Linux audio software, or, if you can write code, proofread text, write a manual, do a translation, contribute graphic design, or create content; please help by contributing something to the development of the software you use.

I would like to thank Ken Restivo, Mike Rooke, Paul Davis, Philip DeTullio, Jörn Nettingsmeier and Matt Griffen at Canonical Ltd. for advice and inspiration in the writing of this article.

Kim Cascone is a composer, sound artist, touring musician, lecturer and writer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Kathleen and son Cage.

Links:
http://www.osnews.com/story/6720/Introduction_to_Linux_Audio
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page
http://ardour.org/node
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/
http://www.baudline.com/
http://jackaudio.org/
http://drobilla.net/software/patchage/
http://www.ladspa.org/
http://lv2plug.in/
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html
http://linuxaudio.org/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/
http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html
http://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.pulseaudio.org/
http://developer.apple.com/audio/overview.html

Corrections / clarifications:

Ed.: I originally claimed that JACK Transport sync is not possible on the Mac OS X port of JACK. As kindly pointed out by a reader, this is not correct. JACK Transport-aware applications on the Mac will work.

Secondly, Kim argued that you could pull out a drive without having to go to a lot of trouble unmounting it first. At least one commenter argues that risks data loss, and given that users may be using something like FUSE to access foreign file systems like NTFS or the Mac’s own HFS+, I don’t yet know what the exact details will be. As I said in comments, however, Nautilus and the command line eject function for me are quicker and more effective than similar unmounting on Windows and Mac, so I still notch this one for Linux. -PK

All this week, I’ll be talking about the artists and events at Montreal’s MUTEK audiovisual festival. There’s nowhere better to begin than at the launch evening of their a/visions series.

Natural landscapes are recurrent themes in electronic music and the metaphors we use to describe them – glaciers and jetstreams. But the Black Forest of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS, the audiovisual “experience” from the Cologne electronic legend, is an unusually potent descriptor. It’s not so much the real Black Forest’s twigs or leaves or babbling brooks that defines GAS; it’s its density. From its elaborate twirling visual forestry to the saturated sound, GAS is ambient without ever being static, and as deeply enevloping of its visitors as its subject matter.

For his part, Voigt himself was a motionless shadow through much of the piece. Occasionally, the slightest motion of his forearm suggested he was tweaking something subtly in his Ableton Live set. Otherwise he seemed only a reference of the diminuitive human scale against a sometimes blinding projection behind him.

Listening to Voigt’s music requires active effort, like holding your breath underwater. (Underwater bodies turned out to be the theme of the piece that would follow.) The bass below becomes a kind of sonic ground, though occasionally it materializes into a recognizable pulsing beat, like a distant tribal drum call. The inscrutable density of the Dark Forest is embodied mainly in a wash of sound, sometimes obscured by a relentless hiss of noise with which it is mixed. The combination seems like should overwhelm, but somehow details become clear, bouncing off the walls of Montreal’s Monument National theater. Turn your head slightly, and like sounds in the underbrush, the murky becomes clear. With the occasional digital crackle popping out of the underbrush and the shimmer of sounds that float above the mud, the effect is magical.

Oddly, though, to me it was really the visual experience that made GAS so dazzling. Built on Voigt’s own photographs, thickly layered outlines of twigs and leaves twhirled on top of one another in abstract kaleidoscopes. Particularly at the piece’s opening, they became as thick as Voigt’s soundscapes, but would pull apart in regular patterns to form crystalline structures and skeletal architectures. The fusion of this visual effect with the sound allows details of the soundscape to emerge, like shining a light onto the forest. Close your eyes, and the sound loses a whole dimension.

The visuals were derived from Voigt’s own photos, but the credit to the live visualist was missing. A woman appeared onstage, evidently the designer and performer, but no one seemed to know her identity – a real injustice to her work. I’m working to find out who she was. Updated: In fact, it was Petra Hollenbach. Incredibly, I believe she may have been the only headline artist in all of a/visions to be a woman. That makes the fact that MUTEK seemed not to know who she was and credited the piece exclusively to Mr. Voigt – even given his reputation – even more unfortunate. That’s not to suggest that MUTEK was being intentionally or even unintentionally sexist, but the simple reality was that, whatever the intention, women seemed generally invisible and nameless at the festival.

The whole evening is tightly controlled, though so much so that it sometimes seems repetitive – certain stretches of this forest are traversed in circles. For all its minimalism, though, the piece is spectacular first. Perhaps that explains why the piece explodes into an eye-numbing strobe at its conclusion. Most effective was the simple addition of a scrim at the front of the stage. The brilliant color-on-black combination turned the proscenium stage space into a three-dimensional illusion.

Getting out of the woods seems to be the piece’s one stumbling block; it seemed unable to find a structural definition that would bring the piece to a conclusion, leaving some of the final scenes feeling redundant. The appearance of the name “GAS” at the end, and an oddly-abrupt fade out of the audio, also seemed odd after such an eloquently refined performance. But to me, the sheer sonic and visual textural spectacle was irresistible. It’s hard to think of a better way to start MUTEK than with a complete, imagined world.

Wolfgang Voigt at Kompakt (of which he’s co-founder)

I’m working on finding out if we can get officially-released video documentation, but in the meantime, the original album classic is now available with a nice color book:

Gas

It’s an old piece (Christmas 2004), but if you find your ears are ringing with retailers playing Christmas tracks on endless loop for the past few weeks, I can think of no better time for this. A Singular Christmas involved sixteen processors working for two weeks to compress the essence of Christmas music into sixteen singles. The results: tracks of droning, glistening sonic ice sculptures, like an ethereal pipe organ got caught in a wormhole.

Confused? See the easy diagram below. Now, didn’t that make that make a lot more sense?

The endless drones may put you in a sleepy trance, but that could be just what you need to recover from another holiday season. (Well, that or possibly dreaming about using Processing to code up A/V-synced Christmas lights next year.)

Best of all? The titles, like “Radiant bells,” “Hail the shining star” and “Berries sleeping.”

A Singular Christmas

An interview about what it was all about

Creator Brian Whitman: current site

As it happens, Brian Whitman hasn’t been sitting idly. He took all that machine listening knowledge applied to this project and went on to found the Echo Nest, conceived as an API for all of music. I need to catch up and revisit this project soon, but here was our first look, including an interview with Brian:

Musical Brain API: An API for Music on the Web – And it Makes Pretty Pictures

So, the guitar with the Korg KAOSS Pad KP3 built-in wasn’t enough for you, huh? Here’s an axe with two iPod touch units attached. The sounds that result, with Ableton Live, the Eno/Chilvers app Bloom, and bowed guitar, are quite lovely. That shows some of the power of these apps: playing along with the generative/interactive music app Bloom is a bit like having an intelligent composition to work with. If these devices were more open and allowed easy creation of your own musical toys, you could built generative machines to play along with you. And it also demonstrates how touch and smart devices can extend the performance possibilities of a traditional instrument, in a way a rig of effects pedals and stomboxes – no matter how sophisticated – never could. (Thanks, nostromo!)

My favorite part: because Bloom uses the accelerometer, shaking the guitar clears patterns in Bloom. That demonstrates how a gesture that’s gimmicky on its own could be really useful in a particular performance situation.

Creator Brian William Green has some notes on his creation. And he cautions that this is just a quick, informal jam; it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves as he practices.

This video is a quick demonstration of my guitar with 2 itouch ipods mounted onto the body of the guitar.

The ipod closest to the guitar pick ups is running Itouch Midi’s Matrix app which I’m using to send midi to Ableton Live on my Macbook via wifi.

And the itouch near the bottom is running Bloom designed by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, Bloom is a generative music application.

Note: in this video bloom is just being run through my mixer when i play live it is run through various patches to alter it a bit.

The reason i shake the guitar is to clear bloom and start a new pattern, each time i shake it, it clears the boards and lets you start again.

Note: this video is just me messing around with a quick live set i through together just for the video its nothing real special but it shows kinda what im doing for my live sets, one thing that im not using in the video that is in my live setup is various Pd(puredata) patches.

More Videos Soon.
Thanks
-Brian Green

Other guitarists using similar rigs? Let us know!

In the midst of the US election, I missed an important announcement: the smash hit Buddha Machine, a mysterious little $25 gadget that generates its own ambient music, has a sequel. You might think of Buddha Machine 2 as Buddha Machine Pro. New features:

• A bigger sonic palette, with nine loops
• Pitch bend (which the creators describe as being “like a whammy bar for your buddha box”)
• Three colors (well, it is a consumer product of sorts!)

Expanding the sonic capabilities will be a welcome change. The packaging is wonderful, with a symbolically-appropriate lotus flower and a round hole that lets the speaker poke through. The only thing that makes me not immediately excited about the Buddha Box is that I’m really fond of open platforms, and this seems like a closed box – albeit a really beautiful one. While the RjDj project looks promising, the vision of a box that streams endless generative musical ideas to you, even on the new Mac-like iPods and iPhones, still hasn’t yet been realized. Of course, I do love the idea of a musical object that is meditative.

I haven’t gotten my hands on Son of Buddha Machine just yet, but here’s some good reading below. And at $25, it’ll be hard to resist picking one up. Check your hip indie record store or head to Cargo UK, Rough Trade (UK, which has a great write-up, too), or Forced Exposure (US).

Buddha Machine 2 released: Ambient device [Digital Tools]

Official site from FM3 collective

Hands On: Buddha Machine 2 [Gear Log, which does a real mini-review of the box]

And here it is in action. It sounds utterly fantastic – it really is a musical work of art, as an object:

"If they enter the code CreateDigitalMusic.com in the ‘Add special instructions for the Merchant‘ field in PayPal, we’ll extend the offer until July 14th.

Not getting any promotional fees for pitching this; I’m genuinely excited about my papercraft Moog and the album! (Though I think I may have Microscopics buy me a beer if I see them…)

In other news, the band have posted a lovely short video featuring an oscilloscope; you can watch it on Create Digital Motion.

We hope to catch up with the artist, Mat Jarvis (aka Gas / High Skies), soon.

Gas0095, the landmark 90s ambient release by Mat Jarvis (Gas / High Skies), is back in a remastered version. If you know the music, you’re probably already thrilled by the return of this epic sonic world; if not, even non-ambient fans are likely to get a kick out of the spacey, synthy goodness. (Best press quote: “the ideal soundtrack to an IMAX film on the history of space travel.” You had me at IMAX.)

Paul from Microscopics (the label) writes to tell us they’re sweetening the pot with a 1/8 scale Minimoog freebie for all June preorders. (Nanomoog?) It’s brilliant marketing. In Japan, rampant piracy and a general fascination with toys long ago prompted music stars to give away goodies with albums, sometimes dwarfing the size of the album itself. Oh, sure, you could grab album X off a pirate torrent stream – no toy for you. If MSN Music had given away action figures or something, I expect things would have gone differently. Next, I want to see a functioning synth bundled with an album.

Still not sold? Check out this fantastic video for the spectacular microscopic, set to “A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.” Before Google Earth, the office of Charles and Ray Eames made this poetic statement on scale macroscopic and microscopic, one of a series of short films that came out of their studio in the post-war decades. (And you thought they just made iconic chairs.) The score fits so well with the film, you’d swear they were released together in 1977. (Also seen via Synthwire.)

Gas0095 Music Page 

Album preorder for US$16 (EUR13/GBP10) gets you the Minimoog model, instant MP3 version, free shipping, and good space karma. Also available as FLAC.

Here’s the free track, microscopic:

gas-microscopic.mp3

Updated – offer extended: If you missed getting the free Minimoog model and still want it, Microscopics have extended the offer, exclusively for Create Digital Music readers. Paul writes:

"If they enter the code CreateDigitalMusic.com in the ‘Add special instructions for the Merchant‘ field in PayPal, we’ll extend the offer until July 14th.