It’s Flash 909, and Amiga Flash.

Code wizard Andre Michelle has already made a name hacking audio capabilities into Adobe Flash and ActionScript 3. We got to see his work in the form of real-time audio effects processing in the GarageBand-like online sample-and-compose interface for Splice:

Interview: How Splice.com Has Taken Music Real Audio Processing to the Web

Well, there’s more, well into the “Things Adobe Wouldn’t Normally Expect People to Do With Flash” category. There’s 8BitBoy (warning: link autoplays music), a Flash-based player for Amiga MOD tracker tunes. There’s a 909 emulation (cutely named FL-909). There’s open ActionScript 3 source called popforge [@ Google Code] with all the Flash-hacking tricks needed to do audio.

Now, the most tantalizing bit yet: Andre has a new music environment coming, and to tease its arrival, he’s put up a little application with Roland emulations and stompboxes — and it’s all part of the Rich Internet Application of the Future:

Ed.: Circuit bending too destructive for you? Don’t let that scare you away from this year’s Bent Festival, in NYC, LA, and Minneapolis. Key pioneering circuit benders like founding artist Reed Ghazala are quick to argue that bending is a creative, not a destructive act — though some more radical benders might disagree. You say creation, she says destruction — let’s call the whole thing off: this year, handmade instruments and art of all kinds are welcome, say conference organizers, who are…

… continuing to open the Bent Festival to performers and artists that create their own electronics as well as to those who hack, bend, modify and destroy them

Full details:

The Tank is currently accepting proposals for Bent 2008: The Fifth Annual Circuit Bending Festival:

CDM World Tour: catch up with Mike and Liz in Chicago, and Peter and Jaymis in Perth and Brisbane (Australia)!

Dorkbot Chicago

Any CDM-ers in the Chicagoland area are most warmly invited to this months Dorkbot at Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton Ave., on Wednesday at 8pm for food, drink, and brain-swelling information regarding micro-sampling and alternative musical controllers like QWERTY keyboards, game joysticks, and bicycles.

This week’s presenters will be Liz McLean-Knight and Michael Una, contributors to CDM.

See you there!

ByteMe, Perth; CDM Me, Brisbane

Australia is CDM’s second home, land of crazy creative contributors and designers, and birthplace of the CDM logo and graphic identity. And now I get to go there.

First up is an epic visualist festival in Perth, 11/30 - 12/9. (Jaymis and I arrive 12/2.)

ByteMe Festival

Okay, odds are, you aren’t anywhere near Perth, as it’s supposedly the most isolated city on the face of the Earth. But on the off chance that you are in/near Perth, you’ll definitely want to come out for this one. Visualists like Artificial Eyes and Jean Poole, not to mention festival organizers VJZoo, join a convergence of visual artists from game development to experimental film and motion graphics and special effects. I’m on a panel Wednesday night, but mostly Jaymis and I will be hanging around covering the festival and chatting with cool people. And we get to see whether our first in-person meetup creates a geek matter-antimatter temporal singularity.

12/10 - 12/14 we return to Brisbane, and odds are far likelier that you live there. There’s talk of doing some kind of music event in Brisbane. If you’re interested in helping us organize even a casual meet-up, Brisbanites, let me know. -PK

Promoting yourself with a demo can mean all kinds things, from selecting a couple of tracks to help connect with a collaborator to getting yourself a composing gig or record deal. Producer/musician Quantazelle herself has seen plenty of demo discs and has assembled some tips for how to make them work. If you’ve got ideas or questions of your own, be sure to sound off in comments. But the best idea of all may be getting people together for an in-person event to share music and visual reels. -Ed.

A demo is short for “demonstration,” and its purpose is to show others what you can do, musically. In the past, a band with major-label aspirations would scrape together a bit of cash for a few hours in a studio and crank out a few copies of their best songs on a tape or a record and then send it off to various A&R departments, hoping for a record deal and a contract with a fat advance. These days, technology has made the concept of a demo and its applications somewhat different, but we’ll always need to share what we’re capable of with others.

If you’re in Chicago this Tuesday… During my time at Modsquare a few years back, I organized a Demo Swap at a club in Chicago, where guests would get in free if they showed up with a stack of 10 or more or their demos on CDR. Not only did I discover talented local acts who I featured on our free online compilations, I met artists that I would later book at events, and learned that fellow attendees who had met at the night ended up collaborating on projects. Since I had so many people asking me to do another one, we’ve reincarnated the night at Ramp Chicago. So if you’re close to Chicago, show up at Sonotheque on Tuesday, July 17, 2007 at 9pm with a stack of demos or promotional material, get in for a reduced cover, and start meeting your fellow musicians and industry types (Peter Kirn of CDM will be there!). Read more about it here: Demo Swap July 17 at Ramp Chicago.

Where’s it going?

Figure out your intentions with the demo. Is it to get signed to a label? To book gigs? To find like-minded potential collaborators? To get work scoring a film? Similarly, determine the audience. Is it the A & R people at a label? The talent buyer at a club? Other musicians? Each of these requires a different approach.

Nat “funnelbc”, creator of the CDM logo and graphic appearance, took on a project the rest of us at Team CDM thought was completely insane: make 28 gig posters, in 28 days, for free.

Miraculously, Nat has escaped alive, and the results are fantastic. Good luck paying a designer to give you gig posters like this. These two warm my heart because of their digital music create-i-ness:

Day 27, Tsuki

28×28 Day 17 - Moulinex + Xinobi

For the complete set, see the lineup on onetonnemusic:

Gig Posters Archives

Have a gig coming up? Need a rocking poster to publicise said gig to the wider community? You should check out Nat’s 28 Posters in 28 Days Poster Challenge! You know you’re going to get a great result, because Nat designed this here website, and CDMo, and the forums. You should get in quick, however, because he doesn’t seem to be starting out in the most positive frame of mind:

They said I couldn’t do it! My girlfriend said I couldn’t do it. I don’t think I can do it… Let me preface this by saying that I have a sneaking suspicion that this isn’t one of my brightest ideas. Good? Clear? Okay.

For the month of February, I am going to attempt to do 1 FREE gig poster per day.

That means I need details for 28 gigs and bands who want posters done. Starting tomorrow, the 1st of February. 

Imagine a massively multiplayer music studio, connected worldwide over the Internet. Log in, and everyone sees a set of synths, effects, sequencers, or other custom patches. Everyone’s looking at essentially the same screen, and can add beats, trip out effects, slide the bpm up and down, and reprogram synths — all at once. That’s the basic idea of netpd.

Last night I attended New York’s first “Patching Circle” at Brooklyn Polytechnic, a chance for NYC area patchers to come and work in a communal environment, whether on Max, Pd, Processing, whatever. Pd superstar Moritz Wettstein was there, in town for a few months while in residency at Harvestworks, a music technology center in Soho. He booted up his kubuntu-running Linux laptop and fired up a complex set of synths and beats. Soon, we were listening to beats being reprogrammed in Switzerland via the same software as someone across the table changed a synth line. The magic all comes from netpd, build in Max/MSP’s open source cousin Pd, and it can run entirely free on Mac, Windows, or Linux:

netpd

There’s more. The patches can be entirely redesigned by anyone accessing the server. If someone in Barcelona decides to add extra features to a synth, the new patch will be downloaded for everyone simultaneously on login so everyone has the same patches. Moritz told me that the core group of developers regularly holds all-development sessions where they patch collaboratively, so not only can you make music together, you can develop the software, together, too. (Think extreme programming.) You can listen to some results on the netpd site. The music has to be loop-oriented and sequenced so that latency doesn’t become an issue, but theoretically a wide variety of music could be possible, depending entirely on the users developing on the platform and what they choose to produce.

Thanks to GEM, visuals are possible, too, although not anything involving sampled files — sampled audio and video are out, because every user would have to download the files. Generative visuals in 2D or 3D are definitely game, and while it sounds like there’s less interest in this area, there’s lots of potential because of the power of the GEM add-on for Pd.

Enough of the technical details, though. I know what you’re asking: could I dress up in funny costumes, and answer phone lines and control netpd while in a cage? I get that question all the time. The answer, says Moritz, is yes. While I don’t entirely understand this process, he and some colleagues did a piece of performance art in a cage with various inputs (joysticks and such) controlling a custom netpd patch and a series of phone lines routing in calls from the public, courtesy a sophisticated open source phone switching solution (really!) called Asterisk.

See Moritz’s site for photos. His domain is down and there are some other problems, so I’ve included samples here.

Any netpd users out there? Sounds like we should have a CDM group.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative, aka “that $100 laptop” though it will initially cost more like $140, just got its first leg up. Nigeria has ordered one million of the custom Linux laptops. Now the big challenge will be whether the OLPC developers can deliver the machines on-budget and on time, given its wildly ambitious feature set. Interestingly, Intel and Microsoft, after publicly blasting the project as misguided, have each launched their own competing initiatives at significantly higher prices.

Nigeria Orders First Million OLPC Laptops at vnunet.com, which also has two videos of working prototypes; via worldchanging

For more background on the project, see The Laptop Crusade, from this month’s Wired.

See also our previous story, Creative, Networked Music Making on $100 One Laptop Per Child, which brought some interesting debate on all sides of this issue.

Beyond the idea of giving millions of children new access to computing, there’s a separate mission that’s come up: how to create useful music software for children. As covered in that previous article, a team of developers is working on new music software called TamTam that will have two lives: one, as creative musical software for the OLPC hardware, and a second, as open source software anyone can run. That means that even if you don’t agree with OLPC’s aims and implementation, TamTam could still have potential running on used laptops here in the US. (Given the problems of toxic computer waste, I’m just as interested in how we can recycle computers without short-shrifting children that receive them.)

Reader Nat Lécaudé, who initially brought TamTam to our attention, talks about working on the project:

Negroponte’s $100 One Laptop Per Child will include creative music making tools for children. Our friend Nathanael Lecaude writes us:

Just wanted to let you know what I was working on during the summer, we’re doing a sequencer/algorithmic music generator for the OLPC project. We did all the protoyping in Max and are now porting it to Python/GTK using Csound as the sound engine.

TamTam, music app on the OLPC Wiki

TamTam is intended both as an instrument in itself and an environment for learning music. It has basic sequencing and synthesis capabilities, presented in a child-friendly format. It’s also networked so children can play together. The sounds themselves will be influenced by the countries in which the OLPC will be distributed, with instruments of various kinds from Brazil, China, India, Thailand, and Nigeria. (I’m not sure how they’ll deal with tunings, but then, early in the Dutch occupation of what is now Indonesia, Javanese composers experimented with mixing the Pelog- and Slendro-tuned gamelan with Western marching band, an experiment my Javanese teacher later applied to Scottish bagpipes and gamelan. Anything is possible.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this evolves, as I could see it being useful internationally or other efforts being modeled on similar ideas.

For more technical background: Python is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language that’s unusually easy to learn. CSound is the powerful, free sound synthesis platform that’s shown up everywhere from experimental compositions to the guts of at least one karaoke machine (really).

See also:
Brad Fuller’s O’Reilly blog, which has a running commentary on OLPC (as well as insight on why operating systems are meaningless!)

MIT’s OLPC site and (importantly) OLPC wiki, which responds to at least some of the “why” questions discussed in comments on this story. Whether the OLPC initiative itself winds up living up to its goals, it seems to me that a cheap, accessible, open source sequencer for kids should be valuable regardless.

More on this issue: See our follow-up story, TamTam, Music Software for Kids, to be Fully Open Source; One Million OLPCs in Nigeria

Going beyond the mix tape now, here’s a new community for creative types to meet up and collaborate, all while sharing work under a Creative Commons license, as created by Marco Raaphorst of Melodiefabriek:

Any Creative Commons creator can join for free. So if you’re a composer, a filmmaker, a podcaster, a writer, you name it, please join! As far as I know this is the first community which is so broadly oriented and Creative Commons based. Sure, I love to talk with other composers and remixers about music, but wouldn’t it also be nice to communicate directly with the new generation of filmmakers for example? Connecting filmmakers and composers.

At ccCreators we can have discussions about all sorts of things, share photo’s with each others, add events to the calender and start new collaborations. It could become a killer website. So please join! No sneaky commercial reasons, just a way to connect to creators, artists using Creative Commons.

Sounds good to me. If you do join up, send us a link to your page on our Share Your Work forum and let us know how it goes.

ccNoise

Creative Commons site; CDM on Creative Commons