Diaspora is an attempt to build a social network that contrasts with the locked-garden vision of Facebook, one built on open source software, open exchange of information, and distributed – rather than centralized – communication. I already let slip that we’ll be rebooting our own social endeavor, Create Digital Noise, in the new year. But it’s also telling to see the first noises emerge on Diaspora.

If you wrote off this service when it was in early testing, perhaps overwhelmed by its ambition and crowd-sourced nature, you may be pleasantly surprised. As users gain invites, the service is surprisingly stable and usable – at times, indeed, more so than the offerings of giants Google and Facebook. Most notably, features like tagging make it possible to actually focus on a task. (Compare what would happen on the rivals: even Google’s Circles can be more a chore than a useful feature, and Facebook still tends to dump everything in giant, overcrowded buckets of chatter.)

I’m game for any excuse to get together and make music with people, whether at a website, a studio, or in someone’s kitchen. So, here’s this experiment – Jóhannes Gunnar Þorsteinsson kicked off the first Diaspora sound project:

Here is the initial foundation track for the #diasporanoise2011 open collaboration project. Initially the rules are the following, Once you comment in this thread and ask to join you will be assigned into a queue according to the number of your comment. Apart from that, the rules are completely freeform. You can add a layer of sound to the original recording, or you can completely remix it, cut it up or even destroy it. When you are done you upload the bounced track to your upload service of choice with the same naming scheme as the link below. (yournumber_yourname_diasporanoise2011.wav), if you decide to upload more than one tracks for some reason, zip them together but use the same naming scheme.

There is no actual time limit, (at least not for now) but try to stick to max 1-3 days per person. Recordings and work at this nature is usually done improvised (and that’s usually where the magic happens) so more time shouldn’t be needed. Of course if more time is needed for some reasons then just let us know and I am sure we’ll understand.

I refer affectionately to many kinds of music as “noise,” but this certainly fits the bill – some experimental soundscapes going on, like this one (I enjoy it!):
04_juredimec_diasporanoise2011 by sundrdisko

Diaspora users can find the whole thread – and lots of tracks to hear – at:
https://joindiaspora.com/tags/diasporanoise2011

If you’re really, really desperate for an invite, explain why in comments and perhaps one of us can hook you up.

You’ll find in this thread that what happens for many musicians is various places to host sound, from Dropbox to self-hosted files to the increasingly-ubiquitous SoundCloud. Diaspora itself lacks audio upload features, but on the other hand, there are some limitations to what even a sound-focused service like SoundCloud offers in collaboration features. (For instance, I recently ran up against the inability to run private groups or easily download bunches of stems on SoundCloud, which makes even a simple remix collaborative easier on other services. More on that soon.)

The developer-friendly crowd also talk about how to roll your own player, taking on the primary advantage of services like SoundCloud. For instance, one contributor hosts their own files and uses a JavaScript-based solution (with HTML5 and Flash) on which some projects on other services are themselves based.

http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

I’ll be continuing this conversation with readers over coming weeks and in more formal ways, but why not kick it off now: what would you want in a social website, or in collaboration? Leaving out fancy real-time collaborative environments, how would you most want to come together with fellow music lovers and geeks and make some stuff? Having used online communities since the days of BBSes, CompuService, and GEnie, I find often it’s basic, elemental communication that makes things work, so if you had only a select feature or two, what would they be?

(thanks, jure, for the tip!)

Music Hack Day is an event that’s been gaining lots of steam. Packing engineering experimentation into a marathon session of collaborative, improvised work, followed by lots of sharing, the event tends to focus largely on Web services but also includes novel musical instruments and other inventions. The events have grown in depth, quality, and attendance – the New York event I attended was just massive. (See the intro video below.) And now, for the first time, there’s an event in Canada, in the tech-rich Quebec hub of Montreal. Since we’re talking Canada events, the timing is perfect to mention it. I very much hope one of our Montreal-based CDM readers makes it out and tells us how it goes — and since Dac Chartrand of Renoise is out there, it’d be really brilliant to see some Renoise hacks this weekend! Take photos, take videos, make stuff, and document the stuff you’ve made for global fame on CDM! Ahem.

Dac tells us a little more about the event, as well as work to do return Hack Day to Boston and London, below.

Dac writes:

# MHD-MTL:

There have been 15 MHD worldwide so far. This is the first in Canada.

http://montreal.musichackday.org/2011/

The organizing team consists of myself (of Renoise) and 6 post-graduate students at CIRMMT (http://www.cirmmt.mcgill.ca/ ). e.g. Alastair Porter (also of EchoNest), Mahtab Ghamsari, Corey Kereliuk, Trevor Knight, Mark Zadel, and Brian Hamilton. We also have support from local startups, some people at the SAT, local universities, and a variety of other orgs and locals who have been following our Google Group in the last few months (http://groups.google.com/group/mhdmtl )

We’re updating the MHD-MTL page every other day now. Lot’s of action for the organizers to say the least. A good place to start is with the French and English fact sheets on the page; bilingual PDFs trying to represent Montreal, of course. We also have a poster that people can put up to help out, DIY style.

# MHD-MTL Location:

The event will be held at Eastern Bloc. (http://easternbloc.ca/index-en.php ) Eastern Bloc is an exhibition and arts production centre dedicated to New Media and interdisciplinary art. The vision at Eastern Bloc is to explore and push the creative boundaries in digital and electronic arts, audio/video installation, multimedia performance and other emerging practices.

# MHD News:

According to Dave Haynes, there are upcoming events in London and Boston. No dates yet but definitely soon. Keep watching the MHD front page or the Twitter feed. (http://musichackday.org/ , http://twitter.com/#!/musichackday )

From Roel and Johan who organized the May 2011 Berlin event: “As a first attempt to open source an event, we (@roelven, @freenerd) put a retrospekt of our learnings on Github, inspired by @arrelid from Spotify. We also shared the docs we used to give to sponsors and locations, this could be of help for you guys along the way. Have a peek here: https://github.com/musichackday/organizing-a-music-hack-day ” The Montreal team intends to commit their experiences to this repository after our event, as well.

Good stuff. Seriously, hope someone can make it out there and tell us how it goes.

I remain interested in the idea of doing a virtual hack day for CDM readers. Face-to-face is great and irreplaceable, but it could be a chance to bring together people from across geography, too.

Israeli funk musician and producer Kutiman, creator of the famed Thru-You, is back with an encore. Once again, he’s mixing the best performances of YouTube into a single video. Calling it a “mash-up” is perhaps unfair: this is really mix and remix. It’s no different than laying down multiple tracks in a studio, except that the players were working independently in different parts of the world. “My Favorite Color” is a jazzy, soulful number, particularly carried by those incredible vocals on the original song “Green.” The rest is really arrangement, and it works pretty darned-near perfectly. (An occasional ragged rhythmic edge seems only fitting to the form.)

This raises a question. I don’t think anyone would question that the ability to work musically in the same room, to pick up on physical gestures, eye contact, and inhabit the same space together is the ideal for collaboration. But there’s no reason that shouldn’t stop musical expression from taking place in less-than-ideal circumstances, too. You could think of it less as a poor substitute for playing together in a room, and more an improvement upon lonely solo production, a chance to add collaborative musical experiences to, say, time late at night after a long day of work. It could the ability to share something with someone who would otherwise be separated by geography – as imperfect as a letter from a pen-pal, but also as intimate.

As the above video hits my inbox this week, so, too, does a new video from the creators of Ohm Studio. Among other ambitions, they hope their software production workstation, now in progress, will be Internet-connected and collaborative. In its execution, it represents nearly the opposite of the YouTube video above: whereas a tool for simple YouTube sharing is mixed together by hand, an accidental session, this software is engineered with intricate connections of workflow. On the other hand, they both represent the same idea: cloud-connected creation, across geography, between human beings.

Software workstations have traditionally not only emulated studio hardware, but assumed one person in front of one computer working in isolation. So part of what the Ohm crew have to do is to answer how one piece of software can be used by more than one person across the Internet. They make an effort to do that in this video; it’s best to watch. (Thanks to Cid Andrade from Ohm for sending this our way.)

They write:

Ok, the Ohm Studio brings real-time music collaboration. But when two people are working together in the same project, how exactly does it look like?”

We’ve just put online a sneak peek of it, a video capture of two people starting a track from scratch. We see both screens, listen to both audios, and understand how artists will be able to compose/produce as if they were together.

I still think there’s value in solo creation, but that doesn’t have to exclude collaboration. I’m curious – YouTube upload or sophisticated DAW, does any of this look practical to you? How have you collaborated online, if at all? (Or is it back to a rehearsal room or studio to work face-to-face?)

Surprise! Plug-in developer Ohm Force, known for their plug-ins (like effects Ohm Boys and Frohmage), today tease an upcoming collaborative host. It looks like the sort of thing Apple could have done, but hasn’t. There’s a GarageBand-style MIDI and audio editing pane, plus semi-modular routing of plug-ins on a pretty, graphical surface that resembles the “cheese grater” perforated aluminum of a Mac tower, and pop-up window palettes that resemble those we’ve seen on the “flattened UI” of the iPad.

The real feature here, though, is collaborative editing in the “cloud”: sessions are uploaded to a server, which in turn keeps track of versioning. (Actually, it’s quite unclear how that works collaboratively – this means you can “undo” from one version to another, but I can’t tell whether collaborators can try different “forks,” or if it’s all one set of linear changes.) The changes are “real-time,” though usually the trick to allowing international collaboration over the Internet is to make things delayed enough that everyone stays in sync.

There’s also an accompanying Web community for connecting with collaborators. Everything else about the product, however – more features, pricing, and specifics of how it all fits together – is as yet unknown. Mac and Windows are both supported, though – something Apple would not have done, most likely.

It’s an interesting idea, one I think we’ll see more frequently as connected applications grow in popularity. Among other options, Ableton had promised something like this with Share and then fell off the radar. Image-Line had a collaborative tool called Collab for its FL Studio, then abandoned it. The most significant competition comes from tools like Indaba. Indaba’s edge: by being powered by Web tech, you can do all your editing right in the browser; serious users can then keep using their host of choice and just bounce out audio. But while Indaba has an offline editor, too, the addition of plug-ins in Ohm Studio is a big change.

I do wonder with all of this, though: are we consigned to collaboration existing only in proprietary, integrated app-website combinations? Isn’t the whole lesson of the Web about open standards and platform-agnostic communication? Having said that, what would a more open tool look like – and what do people really want to do? (For instance, I wonder how hard it’d be to build a system that allowed open chat and transport control, with standards-based versioning and sharing, using the open-source DAW Ardour? See the post I’m … about to write … for the OSC end of this.) On the other hand, is the kind of integration Ohm Studio is offering necessary to make it all work together? (That last question we should be able to answer once this is in our hands and ready to try.)

I don’t wish to pre-judge Ohm Studio – on the contrary, I think this is a provocative product teaser that immediately raises some of these fundamental questions. So bravo, Ohm, for starting that conversation; I can’t wait to see what you’ve cooked up. And anything that gets artists collaborating is potentially a very good thing.

In the meantime, readers, it seems the most important question falls to you. Do you even want to collaborate with other artists? What would an ideal system look like for doing so? What features would you want? How would you want to work? Is real-time important, or do you prefer some time to sit back and think about how elements combine? When you collaborate now, how do you go about it?

Updated: Your closest bet at the moment is NINJAM, which is integrated with Reaper – a host various folks are using already – or on its own. Using compressed audio streams and latency compensation, it allows the exchange of any audio, and it works on Windows and Mac. But it doesn’t exchange MIDI data. (The site refers vaguely to this happening some time in the future, but I’m unsure of their progress.) And it doesn’t have integration with the Web community, though as readers note, you may want to work with people you get to know a bit first, anyway. Thanks to “PooPoo the Korruptah!” for the tip. (Hmm, no way for me to say that and not sound silly.)

More importantly – anyone out there using it? Or is it just easier to send files back and forth?

http://ninjam.com/

David Byrne is, of course, a legendary name. But part of what I love about music is, for all the hero worship that sometimes accompanies music writing and fandom, there’s always something to learn from musicians whose work you enjoy – whether famous or obscure.

David Byrne has been singularly open in talking about his work and process. In an extensive post this week, he shares how collaborations with other artists are born, evolve, and unfold:

03.15.10: Collaborations

And, boy, are the collaborations coming now. The new Here Lies Love is a project with Fatboy Slim. In the post above, he works with the fantastically-talented St. Vincent – Annie (who in turn enlists Bon Iver and Bryce D). In the video at top, there’s a terrific fusion of Byrne’s idiosyncratic songwriting with the quirky, sultry, original Santigold – a fusion you might think doesn’t work, then blows you away. (The work itself is politically poignant, the tale of Imelda taking political matters into her own hands and “handbag,” a telling message in today’s politically-delicate era. See the separate post on the video.)

But it’s not as simple as “I’m awesome, you’re awesome, the song is done.” In fact, David Byrne’s own revelation about how to make collaborations work may seem surprisingly familiar. Learning how to leave alone the other person’s work is a significant part of the process:

The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is.

This presents some musical challenges, of course, but the benefits generally outweigh them. The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go. This restriction on one’s freedom — that some creative decisions have already been made — turns out to be a great blessing. Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon.

(I could practically quote the whole article; go read the whole thing.)

Also, for any time any of us has said, if only I had time to build that new studio, if only I had time to clean this studio, if only I had elaborate soundproofing … enough already. David Byrne’s studio is in a warehouse with concrete floors and sheetrock walls (that apparently kinda sorta work as sound baffling) and some industrial carpet. And it’s messy. And he’s David Byrne. So there’s no reason not to make something work in the corner of your room, today.

Of course, I know all of this not because I’m a privileged music journo or celebrity, but because the artist is sharing – a wonderful gift of our age, for those who so choose. Enjoy.

journal.davidbyrne.com

Kongregate is a bit like public access, only on steroids and for games. The idea is this: get indie game makers in one place contributing games, then get lots of people playing those games, then support the system with ad revenue shared with the game makers. The model has grown rapidly, with millions of users and over 15,000 original games.

The newest project from Kongregate looks to connect artistic talent on projects, including musicians, composers, and sound designers wanting to work on game projects. The Collabs section will see artists and sound and music creators uploading their work to find collaborators. Initially, there’s a contest on, with competition for attention, cash, and studio prizes.

http://www.kongregate.com/collabs

The competition aside, this could be the beginning of a successful community for collaboration in the indie Flash gaming world. Assets are often uploaded under a Creative Commons license, and I see one of the top sounds draws on samples from Freesound.org. While career success is an obvious goal, the contributors so far appear to see sharing as a way to get there – in stark contrast to the model in the mainstream, big-business game industry. Quality is, of course, variable, but ask anyone in the game industry how to become successful and the answer is always make as much as you can. Getting work out there, even primitive, can be part of a learning process. So I’m eager to see what transpires as these kinds of communities grow.

There is an invariable comparison to Deviant Art – and you’ll see they’ve already begun to invade.

Oh yeah, and I quite like these glassy tendrils, rendered in Cinema 4D. Image (CC) Chaodeath. Now, make that run real-time. Or, erm, imagine those are virtual renderings of artists … collaborating.

Indaba Music, a community and suite of online tools for musicians, announced today they’ve revamped their online recording and production tool using Java and JavaFX. The result: a platform-agnostic, online interface that allows you to record music “directly to the Internet.” And the band Weezer is excited enough about it that they’re giving their official endorsement.

Indaba, along with some others, already had an online music production tool. The new version expands on that idea, allowing you to record audio signal directly online, and beefing up tools for mixing, editing, and looping. Just like tools like GarageBand, a pre-built set of loops is ready for people to quickly mock up songs.

With some help from Sun’s JavaFX technology, the browser/desktop barrier isn’t as noticeable. You get a graphical-looking interface that works the same anywhere, plus the ability to drag audio files to and from your desktop.

indabamusic.com

javafx.com

Interestingly, Weezer’s endorsement focuses on the fact that they don’t know how to use other music software. I have to admit some skepticism here – a lot of musicians I think are savvy enough to get to use creative new music software, and a lot of the basic functions of the Indaba software itself are straight out of tools like ACID and GarageBand. Nor do you have to worry about any JavaFX tool blowing away your REAPER, Logic, Live, Pro Tools… well, you know.

On the other hand, while this is basically just an ACID-style audio production station in the browser, I’m curious about what new applications might take advantage of in-browser collaboration that don’t look like existing audio tools. Maybe we’ll have specialized tools for working out specific ideas or sharing snippets in-progress. And there’s no question that building some tools in the browser makes sharing more immediate.

I’ll be talking to the Indaba folks and the JavaFX team a little bit about the technology, and with Sun in particular I’ll be sure to ask about some of the future potential here for other tools. If you have questions, let me know.

Assuming you haven’t already hit Ableton overload with all the news announced this week, Ableton has posted a set of videos that do a pretty nice job of demonstrating the features. I’ve assembled them into a playlist here. (Stumbled on these videos thanks to Synthtopia.)

There are four videos in the playlist, covering Live 8, APC, Max for Live, and Share.

In particular, one video shows how the Share collaboration feature will work, with the ability to easily upload sets and share them either publicly or privately. (There’s a long introduction, but skip halfway through and it starts to talk about the actual solution.)

To me, the big question there is how much it’ll cost. It is nice to see an embeddable widget. Even better would be to have an open API – any chance of that, Ableton? That’d allow web developers (cough) hook into these features for other tools. Imagine if SoundCloud, for instance, which offers audio sharing and commenting, could also link more easily to projects uploaded for Live. Now, Ableton could keep control over Share and work with SoundCloud individually, but then they might miss Bandcamp or some other service they didn’t see coming — you get the idea.

Note that Live isn’t the first to ponder online sharing features, either. FL Studio has its own Collab feature, which nicely enough offers its own chat client – something I wrote about for Keyboard Magazine. I can imagine a world in which the Live Share option is just one of a number of similar features — making an open API all the more interesting. (I can’t actually find that Keyboard article, but I know I wrote it!)

More on Ableton at NAMM here on CDM:

Akai APC40 Video from Ableton; More Controllers Coming

Ableton’s Upgrade Options: Easier to Understand than a Large Hadron Collider

Ableton Live 8, Now with Grooves: The Top 8 New Features

What Makes the APC40 Special: Interactive Clip, Device Control, Dedicated Buttons

Ableton: You’ll Be Able to Customize Akai’s APC40 Using Max for Live

Akai APC40 Ableton Live Controller, in Detail: Plug-and-Play Live Control For Everyone?

Updated: It seems that Collab is no more?

And Key of Grey has a nice story wondering about alternatives to this kind of integrated tool:

Collaborating on a music project online

Guitar Rig Hero is a huge contest with some big prizes. Native Instruments notes that users were already, without prompting, posting Guitar Rig videos to YouTube. So, they’ve put together a jury to properly judge the best possible contributions, with jurors including the likes of the Deftones, Dweezil Zappa (yes, the offspring of Frank Zappa), and (one of my personal favorites) Mogwai. Prizes: a quad-core Fujitsu-Siemens laptop, NI software, and (non-software) guitars from Gibson.

NI says participants are “asked to capture a video of their most original and spectacular performance using GUITAR RIG 3, without any sonic or artistic limitations applying.” What’s interesting is that not all the entries are using guitars — there’s already an interesting experimental entry with violin and Guitar Rig, and I suspect if we unleash some of the CDM community on this contest, there will be more.

You don’t have to own Guitar Rig 3 to participate; the demo version will work (and then you can try to, you know, win the full version). The contest ends September 30.

I’ve run synths, keyboards, and even sitar through Guitar Rig, so I’m interested to hear what other not-guitars you can come up with.

Guitar Rig Hero Contest Page @ NI

Guitar Rig Contest YouTube Channel (with various videos up already)

Matthew Dear, performing as Audion, is coming to Minitek in New York this weekend, and we know from reader feedback that you’d like us to talk to him. (Yes, some of the endless minimal entries in Minitek, true to the festival’s name, start to blur together, but Matthew to me is someone really musically special.)

As it happens, among Beatport’s regular contests, there’s an Audion remix contest for “Billy Says Go.” Downloads started this week, and you can submit through the end of the month. This is public voting as opposed to juried voting, but since I know there are some Audion fans out there, let us know if you do something nice. Prizes: Traktor Scratch, $100 Beatport gift card, and a grab bag of Beatport swag. Those of you trash talking Richie Hawtin, maybe this is your chance to show us your skills.

Audion Remix Competition @ Beatportal

Sonoma’s RiffWorks software and accompanying community is apparently popular among readers here, so it seems worth passing this along. The RiffWorks site is awarding RiffWorld.com community members IK Multimedia software and other downloads and goodies. That in itself isn’t that interesting, but what is a bit different about this particular competition is that you can collaborate on entries; if you decide not to go solo, you can invite up to three other people to work with you. I still prefer collaborating in person rather than online, but I’ll be interested to hear how collaboration is working out for people. (Naturally, the reason they’re emphasizing this is to promote the collaboration features of the site — but you’re the best judge of how that works.)

RiffRumble 12

Seriously, do let us know if you choose to participate in these contests, or if there are other online communities you’re working on; we’d love to know. I imagine running this means a dozen PR folks will be breathing down my neck tomorrow with other contests, but these do seem up the CDM alley and … well, for the rest, that’s what the “mute conversation” feature in Gmail is for. Enjoy!

Even with the success of beginner-targeted software like GarageBand, computer music production is still something a lot of musicians have only started to explore. And while there are computer-savvy players of every instrument, there’s no question guitars are underrepresented for the size of the market versus, say, keyboards.

Sonoma’s RiffWorks has been one software entry trying to change that, by combining guitar-centric features (amps and effects) with loops, multi-track recording, and collaboration features. As with GarageBand and Steinberg’s Sequel, loops, machines, and effects assist in quick song creation. But unlike those products, Sonoma also emphasizes collaboration, and is targeted directly at guitarists.

Now, they’ve introduced a free version of the software called RiffWorks T4. While it’s free, it does quite a lot – presumably to try to get hooked on online collaboration on song making.

• 4-layer song production
• Basic effects (Wah, Multi-band Compression & Distortion, Modulation, Delay, Reverb, Compression, and British Style EQ), plus IK Multimedia’s AmpliTube LE guitar amp/effects and Gallo Engineering’s Studio Devil BVC amp model
• An “InstantDrummer” drum machine/accompaniment tool with intensity, variation
• Online collaboration and online song sharing community

Online collaboration has always been a challenge because the physical size of the planet Earth actually means that true real-time collaboration is basically impossible with music. The solution is simply to provide music that’s synced, if not in real-time. Sonoma describes their solution: “As a track is recorded, it streams to other players and is perfectly in sync.” (In other words, it’s better to be a bar behind but in sync than a fraction of a second off.)  [Update] To clarify: unlike many online music collaboration services, you can work simultaneously on a song recording – see reader discussion in comments. This is a step behind eSession-style near-real-time collaboration, in that you hear full riffs at once. (eSession is synced to a metronome, though it can’t do “true” real-time, either, in the sense that you can on a local computer.) It is a number of steps ahead of most other online tools, however – and the real draw is the software editing and effects anyway, as combined with these community features.

That said, I think online collaboration could be fun, if Sonoma can get a healthy community going. Many musicians still prefer in-person collaboration for other (non-technical) reasons. But then, the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, especially in our online-connected world. Sonoma tells CDM that over 1,000 people per day are signing up; now it just remains – as with other communities – to see how many get really involved.

Even if the online side doesn’t take off, perhaps the production tools will. Guitarists, if you do give this a try – or if you’re already a user of RiffWorks – we’d love to hear from you.

RiffWorks T4 [Free software, Mac, Windows]