Can you approach a symphony orchestra as though it’s an analog synth? That’s a question composers have asked since the first time they heard electronic sounds. It’s impossible to hear the 20th-century technology alongside the 19th-century technology without the one reframing your view of the other. Now, it will be tackled by the new album from composer/singer/violinist Owen Pallett, with an interesting cast of characters onboard, plus one imaginary ultra-violent farmer.

Pallett, who performs confusingly under the band name best known as a Japanese video game, Final Fantasy, is something really different in the artist scene right now. For years, the “new music” or “art music” landscape had begun incorporating elements of rock and pop songwriting, but his work seems to find an ease and intimacy that’s entirely his own. He’s also evidently a Max/MSP fan – see the site:

http://www.finalfantasyeternal.com/

Final Fantasy gets filed clumsily under that catch-all “indie,” but the artist’s work is heavily influenced by contemporary chamber music and classical gestures. I imagine some people may actually find they hate the results, in asymmetrical combinations of ideas and wordy streams of lyrics. To me, though, those quirks can grow on you, carried by utterly gorgeous string writing. “He Poos Clouds,” with piano and string quartet, is an imaginative operetta inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. Then there’s his video single from the beginning of this year, “Horsefail Feathers,” seen below. It epitomizes Pallett’s unusual tastes, mixing quasi-surrealist lyrics, lush, movie musical-style arrangement, and a dose of self-aware awkwardness that could upset everything else but instead becomes charming.

It certainly made me wonder what would come next. At a time when many of us eliminate instrumentalists altogether, the upcoming “Heartland” will be 45 minutes of orchestra music, courtesy the Czech Symphony. To me, the relevance to this site is thinking about how to construct music, whether for instruments electronic or acoustic. In today’s announcement, Pallett says:

The album was compositionally modeled upon the principles of electronic music. The principles of analog synthesis informing symphonic writing, like an inversion of a Tomita record. These songs, too, were designed to be as dense with polyphony as the Final Fantasy live shows can become. While writing it, I kept an image in my head of putting so many notes on the page that the paper turned black.

The first album for Domino, Heartland has an unusual subject matter: the lyrics are sung from the perspective of “a young, ultra-violent farmer, speaking to his creator” in the fictional realm of Spectrum. There are some fascinating collaborators, too: ongoing collaboration with Arcade Fire’s drummer Jeremy Gara, a guest appearance by composer Nico Muhly (whose new music is strongly influenced by his work with Philip Glass, without being derivative), mixing by Animal Collective producer Rusty Santos, and a number of others.

After our extended discussion in comments about what constitutes an appropriate artist for CDM, Final Fantasy is not really digital music. But it does promise an interesting interview on the “creation” side, and – given that many brilliant artists find it tough to be articulate in interviews – I know that’s what matters when I have my choice.

The new album is due in January.

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

Given the passion of the debate, it’s easy to forget that Propellerheads’ Record has been firing up discussion from many people who haven’t actually seen it. Record is to audio recording, mixing, and mastering what Reason is to synthesized sound, and for Reason lovers, it finally delivers that holy grail – multiple racks. Record is a bit like Reason Studio, taking those instruments and giving them a full production context.

Since its release, Propellerhead has amplified polarized opinions about this tool. It doesn’t support plug-ins (though you can use other ReWire clients), it doesn’t do things like film scoring, and thus its singular focus on recording means I think it’s fair for Propellerhead to say it’s not a DAW. Of course, going so far as tell blogs they can’t label it as such is going a bit far, and it only made some people protest more. And the focus on those features hasn’t pleased users who want everything and a kitchen sink on their feature list. Users were divided over the Ignition Key and online authorization scheme (see full explanation), of course.

But it is something about which everyone seems to have an opinion, and for that alone, I love it. That’d be a little more fair if you’ve actually gotten to use it, however. So, now’s your chance to try Record for yourself:

http://www.propellerheads.se/products/record/

The beta is a full-featured, open-and-save-capable version, through its expiration date on September 9.

If you’re impatient, we can get you the beta key right now. Just leave a comment, say something intelligent, say “+1 beta,” and be sure to leave your real email address. (Emails are not published on the site; I’ll just see them in my inbox.) If you’d like to be on the CDM Notes mailing list (no other marketing or spam), say “+1 email.”

All out! Thanks to everyone; hopefully we’ve gotten everyone a code who wanted one. Follow comments for some little glitches with their Website…

Once you’ve got a reply from me, download Record by entering your code at http://recordyou.com. You’ll also get two codes to pass along to friends.

Update on registration: I talked to Propellerhead’s web developer – when you get the confirmation email for recordyou.com, go ahead and log in! You’ll be confirmed automatically. Some people saw this login page following the confirmation email and thought something was wrong. Don’t worry, log in, and everything will be fine.

We’ll give out keys until we run out. Propellerhead shared some with us, but then composer Josh Mobley, whose work is featured in Record and has been an advocate of the software from the beginning, reached out. Josh gave us half his stash of keys to share with CDM readers, because he’s devoted to Propellerhead’s stuff. How devoted? He has a Reason tattoo. And it’s nice to hear that Record is pleasing a Reason fan, as that to me remains the big test. Josh has done some significant commercial work, ranging from NBC’s The Office to Ford Motors to the US Department of Defense, with scoring, music, sound design, remix, and environmental projects.

http://www.joshmobley.com/

And he’s a superfan in the best way. I asked him why Record matters in his work:

I love me some Reason. In fact, I love it so much, I got a tattoo on my wrist of the Reason logo. Most people thought I was out of my mind but I love it. Why? Things really didn’t start taking off for me until I started using Reason. I took one look at the program and thought, they made this for me. I started busting out tunes faster than I ever had before. And people were snatching them right up. It dawned on me right then and there that this self-contained environment had freed me up and allowed me to be creative without scrolling through a bunch of plug-ins and whatnot. The distractions of making music were gone. A limited tool set that can be routed and combined in an infinite number of ways. One needs only to look at the patches and music that [Reason user] peff is making to see that reason is the most powerful music instrument in the world.

And now, we have Record: Audio+Reason+SSL Mixer. Having used it since the early alphas, I can honestly say that Record is every bit as musical and easy to use as Reason. The time stretching is, frankly, jaw-dropping. The new mixer sounds like the SSL at my old studio. You can easily do a whole song in Record without any other software. However, Record+Reason is a lethal Combination.

I could go on and on, but at the end of the day, you really need to spend some time with this program and see what’s possible. I can almost certainly guarantee that you will be making music faster than you ever did.

Now, a superfan is not a fanboy. Fanboys, as we know, are the folks who get defensive even in the face of some obvious shortcoming, who spend lots of their time talking down other people’s choices. The superfans I’m guessing are generally too busy actually using their software – in this case, making music.

And if you do find software you love enough to tattoo on your wrist (see also our friend Jo with Reaktor), you don’t need any reviewer or forum commenter or expert or anyone else to tell you what to think. You’ll know.

Do tell us what you think of Record as you use it, and good luck snagging a code.

Previously:
Propellerhead Record In-Depth Preview: Recording, Reason-Style; Beta Test Now
Propellerhead Record: New Getting Started Video Tutorial, Blog
How Propellerhead’s New “Ignition Key” Authorization for Record Works

Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christopher Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Henke says some of his matrix manipulations – and even the specific Max/MSP patches from ATOM – came from collaboration with Artificiel and their light bulbs. For their part, at MUTEK they unveiled a new audiovisual etude called POWEr Play involving a live-sampled Tesla Coil. The science fair ethos of ATOM and POWEr Play could have been gimmicky or overly fixated on spectacle, but in these pieces, it was anything but. Both works contemplated their subject matter so thoughtfully that balloons and electrical coils seemed perfectly natural media for the audiovisual imagination, and audiences were left marveling at phenomena in a way too rare in 2009.

Video episode at Blip.tv [includes mobile/desktop video downloads]
YouTube Part 1 and Part 2 (if you prefer YouTube for viewing)

It’s worth downloading the video above and really getting to soak up some of this piece when you have time. I also have an audio interview of a conversation with Robert and Christopher immediately following one of the performances.

You’ll hear Christopher’s voice first, followed by the unmistakable percussive enthusiasm of Robert. For me, the best part of the interview was hearing them discuss whether you should notice some of the unintentional randomness of drifting balloons or technical hiccups, and how they structured the work formally with a palette of possible balloon patterns.

Download the audio interview

For more on POWEr Play, see my Montreal flat mate Greg Smith writing for Rhizome – and stay tuned for the CDM audio interview, coming next week:
power play – artificiel at mutek [Serial Consign Blog]
Variable Frame Rate: Multimedia Performance at MUTEK 2009 [Rhizome]

More information:
Atom project Information at monolake.de
Text interview by Bertram Niessen for Digimag magazine, October 2007, also at monolake.de

140 / curtis + thumb piano from m~fischer on Vimeo.

Synthesis geeks are creating some fun sonic toys for the iPhone. There’s no reason you couldn’t plug in an iPod touch or your phone into a mixer and use them in live or studio creations for a little variety. And as mobile platforms grow in capabilities, other platforms should be close behind. (Not to mention, you can always rescue an entire iPod or PDA and run Pd, often for just the few dollars an app costs!)

At top, the granular sampling app Curtis captures sound from a thumb piano. Curtis costs justs a dollar, but allows you to sample, then visually manipulate recorded sound, using granular techniques. A “smooth” synthesis engine is upcoming, but I rather like the lo-fi sound — hope you’ll allow us to switch engines with a toggle. As seen at Synthtopia.

the strange agency [makers of Curtis, other apps]

The app is named for Curtis Roads, who did much of the seminal research into making granular techniques a technical reality. See his book Microsound
for an excellent overview of compositional, historical, acoustical, theoretical, musical, and, well, every possible aspect of this influential sonic practice. Have a look at the documentary on Roads and granular music we saw last month.

Segue – one early practitioner of granular music was Iannis Xenakis!

iGendyn is a new, free mobile application built around the GENeral DYNamic stochastic synthesis approach of Xenakis: “Imagine a set of control points (CPs) which together define the shape of a time domain waveform; with each new cycle through this waveform, their relative positions are updated using probabilistic distributions.” And yes, that’s GENDYN as in General Dynamic – not, in fact, a character from The Lord of the Rings.

Got that? In the default algorithm, X is amplitude, Y determines how quickly you scan through control points to produce the sound, and tilt changes probability. In other words, whether you understand the underlying approach or not (and hearing is always better, anyway), you can tilt your iPhone around and explore networks of probabilistic sounds.

iGendyn Homepage
iTunes App Store Link

Author Dr. Nick Collins is co-editor of The SuperCollider Book, upcoming from MIT Press, as well as The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music. Thanks to Raub Roy for the tip!

Meanwhile, mother of all synth-geeky iPhone apps finally got its 1.1 update approved, so have a go with Jasuto 1.1 for a really terrific look at what modular synthesis could be. Jasuto also has a desktop VST version and the two will be able to integrate, so you have lots of possibilities here.

Sometimes, looking back at pioneers can be nostalgic. “Back in my day,” goes the story, “electronic composers were real electronic composers.” But then you hear from someone like Curtis Roads, and his mind-blowing ideas are coupled with a belief that we’re only now reaching the Golden Age of electronic sounds. Rory Ahearn writes to share the latest episode of the show Motherboard on VBS TV, which talks to composer Curtis Roads. Roads was ground-breaking in his early granular synthesis work in the 1970s as he continues to be today.

Motherboard: Curtis Roads – Think Granular

Rory writes:

There are two divergent streams in 20th century electronic music: The one most people are familiar with starts out with goofballs like Jean-Jacques Perrey and Vangelis noodling around on synthesizers and eventually devolves into Kaja Googoo. Curtis Roads is part of the other path, the one that follows insane geniuses like Stockhausen and Morton Subotnik and uses whatever-period-it-happens-to-be’s state-of-the-art computer technology to produce compositions that completely defy conventional music logic and sometimes sound more like a freaked-out ATM than tunes you put on and listen to.

Even having heard him say it before, I never get tired of hearing Roads speak about working with music “below the note level,” and even below the surface level, to sounds that are only perceived when you hear the resulting, total composition. He describes going beyond just notes in the interview:

Electronic music extends the domain of composition from a closed, homogenous set of notes … to an open universe of heterogeneous sound objects … All of a sudden, we’re working with any sound possible. And that really changes the game.

There’s also a rather poetic comment on why synthetic sounds can be wonderful – a notion that always bears repeating:

Natural sounds are beautiful … but the virtual sound world is also beautiful, the world of sine waves, of impulses, of electronically-generated tones. That’s a vast space… Voila!

As seen, as well, on Synthtopia.

Via YouTube Doubler, a twisted online YouTube mash-up tool created by digital artist and Emergency Broadcast Network veteran Brian Kane, comes a strange new … orchestral composition. (EBN, for those not in the know, should translate as "video mash-ups before you knew what video mash-ups were.") Charlie Rose interviews Charlie Rose. "Google…" Just watch. (The video is embedded after the break, as it’s essential that both clips start up at the same time. Video will therefore naturally autoplay.)

We’ve got two layers of mashing-up going on: the first layer of this mashed … cake is a new composition by Tan Dun.

ThruYou / Kutiman already showed us what happens when an elaborate video mix pieces together imaginative songs from tiny clips of YouTube uploads – a potentially gimmicky concept, but brilliant when done right. Noted composer Tan Dun has gone that route, as well, with his Internet Symphony.

Using thousands of submissions to http://youtube.com/symphony, the resulting composition is entitled “Internet Symphony, Eroica.” See top.

But all this gets much better when the mash-up is squared in YouTube Doubler. In addition to the Tan Dun composition, a short film has Charlie Rose interviewing Charlie Rose about the Internet. Rose appears as the spoken word narrator on top of Tan Dun’s score, and what results is an odd, reflective commentary on our times, adding a certain nervous uncertainty to Tan Dun’s Internet optimism.

Enjoy.

YouTube Doubler

If you don’t like Charlie Rose, well, there’s always John Cage. [YouTube Doubler autoplay]

Award-winning composer Troels Folmann has made a name as a video game composer on the likes of the Tomb Raider series, as well as espousing new ideas about adaptive music for games like his “micro-scoring” methodology. But speaking to a roomful of composers and sound designers at the recent Game Developer Conference, he turned to the topic of reinvention. Even having perfected signature sounds that keep him in demand on jobs like blockbuster feature trailer soundtracks, Troels challenged attendees to get out of their usual habits and comfort zones.

And that means torturing some instruments. No, really torturing them: breaking sticks, destroying drums, warping instruments, and boiling waterphones (putting the whole instrument on a stove).

Human beings, of course, shouldn’t be tortured – to get the best sound of them, you want to get them drunk. (I want the Drunken Eastern European Choir sample library, Troels!)

Speaking excitedly in run-on sentences that clipped one another – a bit like sample in and out points were set wrong – Troels revealed some of his latest sampling explorations and sonic secrets. It was, truly, one of the best talks I saw at GDC – and unquestionably the highest idea and inspiration – to – time ratio, even if you weren’t into sound. Here are some of the gems from that conversation, along with some of the lists of bizarrely-combined sampled instruments in recent compositions.

I was looking over my notes and wondering if I should polish them. But then, I realized that I had transcribed all the things Troels said that interested me. If I put them all in a jar, I could take any one idea out on a day when my musical reserves were dry and be inspired. So I’ll share them with you in exactly that form.

The Right Wrong

Pipe organ, kalimba, baby toys, didgeridoo, conga, claps, IKEA stopwatch, church bell, vocals, ambience

One of the things I’m playing with is trying to do the right thing wrong — I call it the right wrong.

Some of these instruments [I sample] suffered through [the sampling process]. When you sample, you have to take it one step further. When it gets into the computer, it dies a bit. I don’t know what it is, there’s a translation issue. You have to push it further.

tonehammer_lakeside_organ_demo_4_dressed.mp3

Naked Ear

Kalimba, hang-drum, IKEA flower vase, Coke Bottle, public domain vocals – girl’s choir

We have certain ways we get stuck as composers — certain harmonic progressions and so forth. What I’m trying to do is more of a naked ear. I disregard any kind of theory. If it sounds right, it is right.

It’s an awesome practice, because it allows you to step out of theory.

This is a $19 kalimba. I don’t buy the most expensive instrument — I get 90% out of this instrument. And I can torture it through sampling. IKEA is the best music store; I don’t know if you know that.

Sometimes we get super caught in [the idea that ] it needs to be pristine, it needs to be high quality — it doesn’t matter. You get it in the mix, you can totally make something wonderful out of it.

I never have anything 24-bit …. It doesn’t really matter.

tonehammer_kalimba_demo_1.mp3

No Fear

Propane drum, flower vase, Coke bottle, kalimba, monkey balls, harmonica, vocals

[On eBay], I found this wonderful drum. I have a hang drum, this super-expensive crazy drum. This one was way better, and it’s like $300.

tonehammer_propanium_demo_1_dressed.mp3

Twist and Tweak

Didgeridoo, soda tabs, water cooler ensemble, hang drum

[On working with a Dr. Pepper soda.] You can … tap it to become percussion, you can also talk into it, sing into it … I multisampled [the taps] into an entire instrument.

tonehammer_didge_demo_1_dressed.mp3

It Doesn’t Matter

Things don’t matter so much. I was playing a 7-string guitar, and it wasn’t nasty enough. I took all the strings and drop tuned them to the same note … so it didn’t make a sound any more. I got this nasty sound to it. I’m starting more and more to let go of these conventions …how it should be.

I took a 5 string bass and again I couldn’t get it nasty enough — I’m not a great musician by any means. Put it down on the table, let the surgery begin. I put towels down to mute the sound. I played it with drumsticks, and got this tight sound that I was looking for.

Especially in the low frequencies of instruments, you get these … amazing, fat sounds. There’s so much you can do.

Sampling a Restroom

One of the best songs — I went to a restroom. I always use the handicapped restroom because there’s more space and you can be alone. I hate American restrooms – European restrooms are closed, you can’t see in to see what people are doing.

[On the result -- multi-sampling the metal bar next to the toilet in a handicapped restroom.] You expand your palette when you do that. There are so many sounds out there.

Boiled [and timestretched) Waterphone

There's so much you can do in terms of torture to get more out of it. Of course you can strum it, you can play it sort of percussively. But then you can boil it.

It was totally ruined in the end. But at least someone has boiled a waterphone.

We recorded it at different temperatures. It started spinning, as well, as you got to higher temperatures.

[In a separate experiment, timestretching:] As you know, the waterphone is impossible to control tonally. [I tried] timestretching a single note — [Native Instruments’ sampler] Kontakt has a harmonizer — putting some other notes on top of it to make a more strange, otherworldly sound to it.

Hybrid [Stacked] Orchestras

Unfortunately game composers are asked to do epic scores all the time. The main elements in it — it’s really about stacking. It needs several different libraries; you can’t stack the same library or it starts phasing. I like to stack until it starts phasing. You can also stack until it starts clipping.

There is no less — there’s only more.

I have synths for the bases, I have drones that line underneath the basses. Arpeggiators are almost mandatory for strings, so when you have stacatto notes — which is also stacked, at least two or three libraries — you also have arpeggiators under that.

It’s the art of adding, epic music.

tbf_epic_orchestral_demo_2009.mp3

The Future of Music

i think the future of music is partly all of us exploring more textures. We all want to do epic music and trailers …. and everyone is sounding a lot alike now. Especially in games; I never hear things that sound all that unique. We have to find ways to differentiate ourselves.

I’m a super commercial composer … I force myself to step out of that.

There are many many ways that we can stand apart. The best thing ever is the Zoom [H4 portable digital] recorder. I use it for everything, for the handicapped recording. There are sounds all over. You can break the convention, break the theory.

Successfully Sampling Choirs

The sampling is incredibly demoralizing. So you have to actually have them play a melody. If you get a performance that is not emotional, it totally dies.

We got an entire Eastern European orchestra drunk. It was a huge help. …They were half drunk, so they could still play.

Successfully Sampling Drums

Percussion is its own science. It’s important when you do recording sessions to dent the drums. If you don’t dent the drum …it won’t work. A mistake a lot of people make is …they only use one stick. Always use two sticks. The sound may flange .. it doesn’t matter. And those sticks need to break, if you want “triple-X” percussion.

Favorite Tools

Timefreezer is just incredible — you have to sculpt it in realtime, don’t just make a drone. Put it in multisamplers, map to velocity and really sculpt that tone. Put them in a sampler and assign it to a mod wheel — anything you have to do to get more control.

LA Scoring Strings is coming out — it’s the first library that’s really nailed legato. [with legato for different tempi] …solo instruments, divisi, full section.

The Wizoo W2 reverb plug-in…[now distributed through M-Audio / part of the Advanced Instruments Research group at Digidesign]

Compositional Process

Daily Exercises:

1. Watch YouTube

2. Chat and forums

3. Listen

4. Network

5. Talent = time = fun

I listen more than I compose these days. I listen two or three hours a day consciously. For me the process of listening is as important as composing.

Troels also listed some of his own inspirations, which included YouTube videos seen on this site:

Video Mashed Kutiman Funk: What if All of YouTube Played a Song?

Depressing Project of the Day: Stock Market, Set to Music with Microsoft Songsmith

What’s interesting about this is that he took these not simply as worktime distractions but inspiration for his own work – to try to analyze the thought process behind the videos and do something similar in his own work.

Here’s an example of his own: what’s the sound of one hand clapping? Well, here’s one hand clapping, made into an entire composition:

One sound composition

For more on Troels’ own sample house:

tonehammer

And everything on Troels himself:

http://www.troelsfolmann.com/

Previously, right here on CDM:

Weekend Inspiration: Coke Bottle as Tribal Percussion, and the Future of Adaptive Music

CDM Interview: Tomb Raider: Legend Composer Troels Brun Folmann on Adaptive “Micro-Scoring”

There’s plenty to process here, so I hope we’ll talk to Troels again soon.

The Nintendo mobile is a solo instrument no more. Lovers of the Korg DS-10 cartridge for the Nintendo DS handheld are making their own ensembles. And one such trio is a selection of who’s who in Japanese game music.

The Korg DS Trio performed a celebrity concert after the Tokyo Game Show. GameSetWatch has an extensive interview with the three. Nobuyoshi Sano (composer, Ridge Racer series) and Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Cross and Chrono Trigger) are two familiar names, joined by Michio Okamiya of Final Fantasy hard rock cover band The Black Mages. All three had input into the creation of the DS-10; two connected over drinks. (That’s one of my favorite places to have product meetings, coincidentally.) As a trio, they have the unique opportunity to cover their own music.

It’s interesting me, this aesthetic interest in miniaturizing and making the DS into this sort of musical device. It’s an interest that has been particularly strong traditionally in Japan, it seems. They have a lot to say about DS-10 and game music:

GameSetInterview: Korg DS Trio Talk App Creation, EXTRA Concert

Of course, part of the vision of DS-10 was to create a democratic tool for music creation, not just a toy for some of Japan’s leading game composers. (Hey, they do need to unwind, too!)

ThisIsNot shares his own DS-10 jam, this one a four-way jam in Melbourne, above. (Thanks for sending us the tip! You may have seen the jam blogged elsewhere, but I think some of the sites missed the video, which gives you some idea what they were up to.) He writes:

I was invited by Jed to join a korg ds-10 jam at More Bass recently as part of 13 years of IF records
there was Jed, Enclave, one others and myself playing. We didn’t sync the DS’s over wi-fi or anything and had no pre planned approach , so this was purely improvisation and jamming along.

4 way nintendo ds jam with korg ds-10 [Acid Box Blues]

Audio:

Lastly, our friends over at Boing Boing’s Offworld gaming blog have been all about the DS-10 lately. Receptors, aka 8-bit Operators curator Jeremy Colosine, has an exclusively DS-10 album. (Okay, the novelty is wearing off a bit after the all-Tenori-On and all-Kaossilator album and whatnot, but if it’s musically satisfying for the maker and the music’s good, I’m game!) It’s free for download from last.fm, so the music-per-dollar equation is off the charts.

If you haven’t yet seen it, you should definitely check out the DS-10-as-talkbox video demo, but the man who created it – Jetdaisuke – now puts together everything mobile we’ve been talking about for the last six months and plays, all at once, Bloom (iPhone / iPod touch), Mokugyo (with Cat) (iPhone / iPod touch), ElektroPlankton (DS, by Tenori-On creator Toshio Iwai), and Korg DS-10 (DS), plus a Korg Kaossilator. Impressive, but it is missing a Game Boy running Nanoloop and LSDJ, a PSP running PSPSEQ and PSP Rhythm, a Palm, a Windows Mobile device, a Nokia, rjdj, LPDJ, a SIDstation – the battle is on.

For those of you who are sick of mobile music, watch this video and see how high your blood pressure can go!

In fact, now, with the Game Developer Conference coming up, I think we need a DS Boys’ Choir with one hundred of these things playing at once, like a swarm of so many digital bees. Anyone know a good party to crash?

Perhaps it’s a sign of the times that, as far as the conference calendar for 2009 goes, some of the most interesting discussions about audio, composition, and technology are happening at a game developer conference.

The terrific GameSetWatch “alt.video game” blog has a nice overview of the goodies at GDC in March for audio lovers:

Previewing GDC 2009: Inside The Audio Track [GameSetWatch]

But even that doesn’t cover all the goodness. Check out the full Audio Track schedule:

Audio Track, GDC @cmpevents.com

I imagine for someone looking to get started or develop in game audio and music, there’s tons of value here, especially if you’re near San Francisco in the spring. Here are some highlights for me – and a general critique of why really experimental, bleeding-edge tech seems to be sidelined.

Challenges for designers and composers:

• Composer Challenge: this yearly challenge gets both established and emerging composers to do a single, 60-second cue, reality TV-style. (Top Composer?) For the sound designers, there’s the similar…
• G.A.N.G. Sound Design Demo Derby, a yearly critique of 60 attendee sound design work. (Game Sound Idol?) From the Game Audio Network Guild, which is also beefing up its community.

Technical discussions:

• Reflections on real-time DSP design from Guy Whitmore of Microsoft Game Studios. (I initially misread this as being about the use of GPU shaders for audio processing, but it’s something equally important: explaining to visual people why real-time audio matters, too!)
• SOCOM Confrontation developers on doing online audio for 32 players (32-player online music collaboration, anyone?)
• High Dynamic Range Audio from Battlefield: Bad Company takes a new approach to mixing with “real-world” sound levels – something that I would expect could be interesting far beyond the realm of game audio design.
• Why going beyond the physics models of the vehicles helped racing game Pure sound good
• Simon Carlile on research into virtual environments and 3D sound design

And on the creative side:

• Legendary game composer Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy, etc.)
• Musical storytelling ideas, with Garry Schyman (Bioshock, which had a great vintage-sounding score). Garry also has a session on keeping orchestration on budget.
• Kenneth Young on sound design in Little Big Planet

Some terrific stuff, but I also can’t help notice what’s missing – not the fault of GDC, but the direction of audio and music in games. There’s a clear bias for big scores, discussions of orchestras and chorus, and linear, non-interactive, Hollywood-style musical narrative. With the explosion in experimental game design, indie games, online game distribution for the PC, PSP, Wii, Xbox360, PS3, and soon the DS, and lots of terrific ideas about new ways of designing game mechanics, where’s music? Indie game music doesn’t make an appearance in the conference at all. (Note that they do appear elsewhere in the conference, which to me is telling.) And generally, the game music scene of late has tended to be either Hollywood-style film scores or retro, 8-bit soundtracks. With the exception of Spore, whose musical engine was a topic at GDC 08, there’s been very little real progress in generative and truly interactive musical scores. That’s sad, given the promise next-gen consoles had for even things like live synthesis.

Directly related to this, I’m equally surprised that mobile music and audio isn’t getting more attention as those consoles evolve. But then, that again requires a shift of compositional paradigm, to assume that you might actually innovate more with a truly interactive score for a mobile device than you might for a lush, orchestral soundtrack on an A-list PS3/Xbox360 title.

Don’t get me wrong: I think some of the orchestral-style scores for games have been quite wonderful. But it seems like part of the potential spectrum is getting left out, and I can’t say that musical innovation has kept pace with everything that’s happening in experimental game design.

My suggestion: get a group of GDC attendees together at a bar, bring some blank napkins, and think about the future there.

(Note that there is an experimental gameplay session call. It’d be great to see some music entries, huh? See also the project site, experimental-gameplay.org)

If you’re going to GDC, do let us know!

http://www.gdconf.com/