First Augmented Reality Music CD :: Latrama :: Love & Projects :: from musikame on Vimeo.

Want the CD as object to come alive again? Here’s yet another approach: make it into an input for webcam-based augmented reality.

The album “Love & Projects” by Latrama uses the packaging to trigger augmented reality “DJing” of the playlist. Put the CD in front of your webcam, head to a browser-based tool, and you get turntable controls for playing the album live, complete with scratching, pitch, delay, filter, and volume controls. There are more downloads available, as well.

Of course, this raises the question of why you actually need the CD, given the experience is online – but then, it’s the problems with this concept that are to me interesting, themselves; working out the tension between the old (CD) and new (Web, webcam augmented reality) is where a number of opportunities lie.

The “augmented reality CDj” was developed by Madrid-based interactive shop Musikame. Musikame has been busy, re-imagining a clock face as a DJ tool and building a browser-based tool for DJing with SoundCloud tracks:

Clock DJ from musikame on Vimeo.

For SoundCloud DJing and mixing (via Sonic State, over the summer):

http://soundcloud.musikame.com/

And here’s a project that mapped Facebook faces to a wall of photos for a festival. (Take that, new Facebook profile page!)

musikame @ REC Madrid 2010 from musikame on Vimeo.

Updated: Via comments, here’s what Theo den Brinker (SoundCloud) did with that player app:

While Mac blog TUAW calls on Apple to kill optical drives (does Apple need that kind of encouragement?), the shiny digital compact disc and the album in general still have their devotees. Sure, album sales are down. Sure, digital downloads are in. But look beyond business or practicality for a moment at these exotic hand-constructed musical objects, and what you see is sheer love. A hand-constructed CD or vinyl album is a gesture of making music for someone, not for the ether.

I raised the issue early last month, and readers responded with lots of examples of handmade records, which I round up here. (And yes, practical, it’s not – a number of you complained that hand-construction is a lot of work. It’s clearly best kept to small runs, but then, I think that’s part of the point.)

Also, last month at NYC’s wonderful Culturefix, a handful of us got together and constructed some handmade discs. It’s definitely something you could do at an album swap meet with other artists and DJs in an afternoon or evening, and it makes the swap feel more meaningful. Pics at top; I hope we do more of these.

If this is the way the CD goes out, I think it’ll go out with style. And whatever the trends in the larger world, who’s to deny you your tangible album, really?

(About the end of the CD – I can tell you that demos, album reviews, music bought at shows, and the like are still very much tangible. Until flash memory is cheaper than CDs, I expect that’ll remain the case.)

First off, a vinyl album – but the process of hand-making these vinyl jackets is already lovely. moni writes:

We hand sprayed album covers for Ruoho Ruotsi’s Hmmm … album (De’fchild Productions release 003) Different colors were used to make each one a little bit different. Hard work, but rewarding. These came out nicely!

The electro-pop band Miaoux Miaoux did a custom run of 100 hand-knitted CDs to benefit Cancer Research and Maggie’s, available for a donation. They also included full-color artwork:

http://miaouxmiaoux.com/album/knitted

My favorite of the round-up is the work of Atlanta-based artist magicicada, who makes handmade boxes full of “surprises” – exquisite photography and unspecified collections of nine songs, packaged in a box made of mud. He also performs music live. (Thanks for the tip, tender vittles!) More images on his site:

http://magicicada.com/

Mugison makes his own CDs, as viewed in this lovely timelapse. (Thanks, Derrida! I assume not that Derrida, but…)

Hey, they’re flat, they’re round, they’re absurdly cheap, they store a good hour of lossless audio, and you can actually hand them to someone. There’s something to be said for that. Now I hope someone takes on the idea of using generative algorithms to make one-of-a-kind album covers en masse.

Previously: Reclaim the Album’s Soul: Tips for Handmade CD Artwork, Make One Sunday

Tristan Perich releases music entirely as electronics, with his 1-bit Symphony, coming out next week. But before we get hung up on the novelty of the thing, take note: there’s some real musical, compositional goodness inside that jewel case frame, locked up in the circuits. To begin the conversation about that music, Primus Luta, aka David Dodson, talks to the artist for CDM.

If you are familiar with Tristan Perich’s previous work 1-Bit Music, the packaging for 1-Bit Symphony will look familiar.  Housed in a standard jewel case, the CD is replaced by a series of circuits wired to a headphone jack from which the secrets of the case can be revealed.  But there are visible differences between 1-Bit Music and 1-Bit Symphony, and it is not just the colors of the wires.

“The first one had a lot to do with the transparency of the circuit,” Tristan explains.  ”It was meant to be very clearly laid out.  The different colors represent different functions of the wire.  There were the different volume knobs for left and right.  A big microchip.  This time I took the aesthetic decision to throw all of that out.  I made everything black, used a smaller micro-chip because I didn’t need all of the extra functionality of the bigger one.  Used a stereo volume knob.  All of this allows me to highlight a different aspect of the circuit, which is going from left to right: the battery to the power switch to the chip on to the headphone jack.”

Tristan Perich: 1-Bit Symphony (Part 1: Overview) from Tristan Perich on Vimeo.

After plugging in headphones, a simple flip of the switch begins the journey.  If you have heard 1-Bit Music, you are likely prepared for the sonic palate, but the depth and density of this new work takes the foundations laid in Music much further.   It is all a result of the musical journey Tristan has been on for now over half a decade.  “I never really wanted to work with electronics for music.  I took programming, so there was an interest in that and also the foundations of physics and quantum mechanics.  But my background is as a classical composer, working with more physical instruments. When I first started working with 1-bit sound, I fell in love with the raw, primitive, electric tonings that I could get.  This very, very basic electronic sound.  It provided an interesting and intricate structural framework.

“I think of this project as being very much inspired and coming out of the techniques that I have developed and learned scoring classical music.  But learning to score and write music in the 21st century is already a primitive thing.  Electronics have been a part of it for a while with many composers.  I grew up listening to Philip Glass and The Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, Steve Reich using tape loops in his pieces. In a way the definition of orchestration has different standards already.  At the same time, with the first project and this one, it’s music written for stereo headphones or a stereo speaker system.”

This is a realization of what Brian Eno describes as a music that  ”doesn’t exist outside of the recording,” both projects taking the notion a step further in that the music itself is not a recording.  ”[Symphony] is a contrast to the music I’ve been working on for the past two years where I’ve been writing for instruments on stage with 1-bit electronics.  These have one speaker on stage per channel and the speakers act like musicians.  In these two albums I’m working polyphonically in this really limited medium.  So in that sense it is written for the hardware.”

It’s an interesting trajectory in which, perhaps to Eno’s chagrin, performance has played an integral role in the development of this performance-less compositional format.  ”1-Bit Music was my first time working with one bit sound.  Only after that did I start writing pieces for 1-bit sound and instruments.  I learned a lot about the character of classical instruments and electronic sound over the past few years.  Returning to working with just electronic sounds has a whole different feeling than when I did it the first time.  Now it’s really about just focusing on working with the electronics as a self contained system.”

When working with electronics, particularly in the manner by which Tristan approaches them, the non-musical aspect of developing a system for composition is essential.  ”This was basically my first real piece of software in the Assembly language.  I built it up piece by piece. First you have the code that generates a tone.  Then you set up another piece of code that can change that tone every once in a while.  Set up different tracks.  Of course Assembly is a really sneaky language.  You have to keep track of  how much space the code is using, how much space the music is using up.  I had to confront issues where I wanted some abilities but couldn’t implement because I literally ran out of memory.  But if I deleted two elements I saved twenty bytes and could fit it on the chip,” he laughs.  “That was a real retro coding experience and unusual way for me in writing music.”

With the writing of the music itself, Tristan takes compositional cues from his work with instruments.  ”Sequences form melodies, and melodies get stitched together into sectional compositions.  Repetition is a very core part of my music. The way that I write for instruments is very similar to how I write for electronics.  So the code that I wrote mimics the structure.  It’s a way for me to write sectional music that also doesn’t take up much memory on the chip, because it is so limited.

“The things that are different between writing for instruments and writing for electronics are similar to things that are idiomatic to different instruments.  Wind instruments need to breathe every once in a while.  Electronics have characteristics like you can’t have too much polyphony and there’s no attack, decay or any real shape to these sound waves”  If it sounds limiting, you surely would not know by listening.  In the same way that you rarely think about the breath limitations of the wind section of a symphonic orchestra, listening to 1-Bit Symphony, you never think of the sound waves lacking shape.  The limitations of the medium never makes themselves apparent, instead one is left wondering how such a detailed composition is even possible from the circuits in your hand.

By his own admission the work is not performable so do not expect any live renditions of the music contained on the chip.  But at the listening party this Friday Tristan will attempt to present another aspect of the project.  ”The whole project is about how speakers are instruments specifically designed to translate electricity into sound waves. The whole 1-Bit Symphony really is turning on and off electricity and moving a speaker membrane.  That’s what I really want to capture at the release party.”

The release party will be held at Roulette in New York, on Friday August 20th.  The project itself will be released August 24th on Cantaloupe Music.

At the Bang on a Can / Cantaloupe store

More info:

Cantaloupe Music: cantaloupemusic.com
1-Bit Symphony: 1bitsymphony.com
Tristan Perich: tristanperich.com

If anyone had listened to the predictions, albums would be irrelevant by now. Instead, finding a way to weave music into a coherent narrative of tracks, and imbuing the object with meaning and value, matters more than ever. Finding time and resources is as much a challenge as ever, but there are some new tools for funding and finding music, even in the age of exploding global population and output.

Auditory Canvas’ record “Fabric of Life” is one of the many gems out there to discover. It’s a sparkling, delicate dreamscape of music, noted by our friend stretta (known for his own lovely music in the monome community). I’m not as fond of the final cuts on the album, personally; the spoken political narrative for me isn’t nearly as evocative as the opening numbers. (It’s nonetheless nice to hear music injected with such a point of view.) But there is a strong sense that creator David of Summer Rain Recordings is traversing a varied and personal musical terrain. It’s the kind of music that could bring you some spring inspiration.

Just as significant, Auditory Canvas made the album possible by crowdsourcing “kickstarter” funding at kickstarter.com. And lest such projects become selfish, by purchasing the album, you generate revenue to go back into the kickstarter system. Album production, after all, is far cheaper than it once was, but it isn’t free. “Fabric of Life” demonstrates what could happen to musical ecology if this kind of micro-lending invested in good, new work. And your purchase becomes a way to turn David into an investor himself in the system, keeping the cycle going.

To make that purchase worthwhile, Auditory Canvas put some thought into the lovely presentation; the limited edition has an almost theatrical approach to packaging, and even comes with a papercraft KORG synth (which I can add to my paper Minimoog from GAS). David writes with a number of talking points:

• Funded via a kickstarter project ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/auditorycanvas/be-a-part-of-the-fabric-of-life-album-release-0)
• $1000 from sales going back into other people’s kickstarter projects.
• 10% of sales going to charity (NextAid.org)
• CD packaging produced using recycled plastic, recycled paper, and soy inks
• Released on my own label, Summer Rain Recordings (all artists donate a portion of their royalties to charity, the label matches their donation)
• Limited edition and standard CD and digital available here: http://auditorycanvas.net/store
• Available on all digital retailers 17 May
• More info at: http://auditorycanvas.net or http://summerrainrecordings.net

The interesting thing about the release strategy is, while it does make the album available through digital channels, it provides some big incentives to go straight to the artist. And that kind of self-motivated album release may increasingly become essential. For a stunning visualization of why, look no further than the lovely blog Information is Beautiful. Using data and analysis from The Cynical Musician, it paints a sobering portrait of the harsh realities of digital distribution. Artists would have to get 1.5+ million plays on Last.fm’s streaming service just to make a month’s living wage.

It’s certainly a glass half-empty / half-full situation, though: you’d only need to sell 143 self-pressed CDs. And that should be optimistic: online tools, even those that sell music, are great promotional tools; boutique sales of physical objects (or even of downloads, in situations where the artist gets a bigger cut) are where the revenue is. And even if that doesn’t help you quit your day job, that could be essential in being able to invest in your next record and keep artists productive. (This is also, it seems to me, a great argument for the potential value of torrents and Creative Commons licensing. If the online file is a promotional tool, best to get it far and try to leverage the things that do bring in money than try to get a few extra nickels and dimes.)

It also pretty clearly makes the challenges facing the business of music about format and economies of scale, not piracy (or, at the very least, not piracy alone – not by a long shot, if the “legal” services aren’t generating measurable revenue, either).

HOW MUCH DO MUSIC ARTISTS EARN ONLINE?

Thanks to David for sharing his lovely music. And I expect, whether you’re a great fan of the album or not, this should get some wheels turning about that album you’ve been trying to finish.

There’s a massive misconception of digital formats, that somehow if something’s digital it’ll last forever in a pristine state. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth: because digital formats are so intolerant of any error, they’re actually more susceptible to physical harm than analog formats. (If you don’t believe me, compare a vinyl LP with some scratches on it to a CD with a single scratch.)

Now, the question is, how dedicated are you to proper care and feeding of your discs? Enough to care whether you’re handling your CDs and Blu-ray discs according to an internationally-recognized standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (better known as ISO … not IOS)? Got 108 Swiss francs burning a hole in your pocket and want some unusually dry bedside reading?

ISO 18938:2008 addresses the issues of physical integrity of the medium necessary to preserve access to the recorded data. These include:

• use and handling environments, including pollutants, temperature and humidity and light exposure
• contamination concerns
• inspection
• cleaning and maintenance, including cleaning methods and frequency
• transportation
• disasters, including water, fire, construction and post-disaster procedures
• staff training

I kid, of course – I imagine there could be some utility to this document for people who depend on optical storage and want this sort of official document. I will say, though, ISO – any thought of releasing a free executive summary for everyone else?

New ISO standard gives recommendations for care of optical discs [iso.org]

Proper care and handling isn’t the only challenge facing optically-stored digital information. The materials from which discs are made don’t last forever. (They don’t bio-degrade, either, but what they will do is fatigue and age to the point that you can’t read the information on them or return them to the Earth, ashes to ashes style.)

So, I’m curious, optical experts out there? What do you recommend for care of optical discs? And for long-term archiving, what sort of options do people have?