I’m saddened to learn of the death of Richard Lainhart, the New York-based composer and artist who has been inseparable from the experimental electronic scene for many years. I knew Richard to be a gentle and imaginative soul, an inventive technologist, someone capable of dreaming up endless soundscapes and auditory worlds. He was also a great contributor to the CDM community, including playing one of the early installments of Handmade Music at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. (Photo above; full video at bottom.)

I think it’s fitting to illustrate Richard with a terrific self-portrait on Polaroid, one that illustrates his sense of humor and artistic adventurousness:

Richard’s wife Caroline posted a note with the news, which most of us found via Facebook:

Richard Lainhart February 14, 1953 – December 30, 2011

Dear friends of Richard,
It is with a heavy heart that I that I must tell you Richard Lainhart, composer, musician, technologist, filmmaker, and digital artisan died Friday, December 30, 2011.

On December 17, Richard complained of pains in his side and was admitted to the hospital for tests which showed an intestinal cancer. He was operated on on December 21. After the surgery (which showed the cancer had not spread), there were infectious complications which took his life on December 30.

He struggled valiantly to overcome his infection, but it was not to be. We are all in shock and cannot grasp the idea of his not making music, talking music, teaching, posting and playing.

Caroline Meyers
Richard Lainhart’s wife

Richard leaves behind a massive body of work and digital footprints; I’ve selected some of those below, including music, a wonderful set of images working with digital manipulation and Polaroids via Flickr, and his series on creative sound design tutorials.

Playing Messiaen:

Audiovisual work:

Richard’s most recent album, via Bandcamp:

Most recent SoundCloud contributions, including the winds after Tropical Storm Irene (that sound certainly is part of my sonic memory of 2011)

Sounds of my World – Post-Irene Winds 8-28-11 by rlainhart

200e-Continuum Percussive Study 2 by rlainhart

Sounds of my world – Rainforest V, New York Electronic Art Festival, 7-30-11 by rlainhart

I adore his photographic work:

A bio:

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker – a digital artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he’s been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them.

Lainhart studied composition and electronic music with Joel Chadabe at the State University of New York at Albany. He has composed music for film, television, CD-ROMs, interactive applications, and the Web. His compositions have been performed in the US, England, Sweden, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Recordings of his music have appeared on the Periodic Music, Vacant Lot, XI Records, Airglow Music, Tobira Records, and ExOvo labels. As an active performer, Lainhart has appeared in public approximately 2000 times. Besides performing his own work, he has worked and performed with John Cage, David Tudor, Steve Reich, Phill Niblock, David Berhman, and Jordan Rudess, among many others. He has composed over 100 electronic and acoustic works. In 2008, he was commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation to contribute a work to New York Soundscape.

Lainhart’s animations and short films have been shown at festivals in the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, and Korea, and online at ResFest, The New Venue, The Bitscreen, and Streaming Cinema 2.0. His film “A Haiku Setting” won awards in several categories at the 2002 International Festival of Cinema and Technology in Toronto. In 2009, he was awarded a Film & Media grant by the New York State Council on the Arts for “No Other Time”, full-length intermedia performance designed for a large reverberant space, combining live analog electronics with four-channel playback, and high-definition computer-animated film projection.

quotes

“Lainhart crafts sounds in a tonal, musical fashion – sustained tones, drones, melodic fragments – and electronically manipulates them into beautiful tapestries of sound.” (Waterfront Week)

[His] “music reflects the spirit of possibility that once defined electronic music, bringing with it a sense of past, present and future that transcends time, technology and cultural assumptions. The spell- binding music seemed to evoke feelings that can’t quite be named, and suggest music I might rather imagine for myself in silence than trust most composers to compose.” (The Village Voice).

“He’s evolved a singular vision as a composer, performer and engineer of darkly seductive minimalism.” (Peter Marsh, BBC)

And here is Richard’s performance for us at Handmade Music on the Buchla 200e synth and Continuum Fingerboard, from 2007:

http://www.otownmedia.com
http://www.vimeo.com/rlainhart
http://www.youtube.com/rlainhart
http://richardlainhart.bandcamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/rlainhart
http://twitter.com/rlainhart
http://www.facebook.com/rlainhart
http://www.downloadplatform.com/richard_lainhart

Graphics are good. Graphics are shiny. But when it comes to reality-bending, emotionally-immersive, perception-shifting power, look to sound and music.

At least that’s the feeling you could get after playing Dimensions. Following their reactive music tools and Inception dream states for iOS, RjDj have turned their mind-altering sonics to gameplay. As with previous releases, these tools are powered by the open source visual development environment Pure Data. Pd engineering wizardry here meetings the compositional and sound design prowess of Hans Zimmer.

You can see a bit of how the musical world works in the teaser video above, and the music sound design video below.

But we wanted quite a lot more information. So, CDM got RjDJ’s Rob, Joe, and Martin to share some detailed thoughts on how the game experience is put together and how it works.

The App

RjDj Team: Most games require your full attention when you play them. You either live your life or play the game. Dimensions is different. It’s designed to be played in parallel with your normal life.

Gameplay is intertwined deeply into your daily life. Some dimensions unlock if you are physically active and others unlock if you are quiet. The app automatically detects what you are doing and syncs the game to it making use of every possible sensor on the iPhone.

You stay immersed in the game by listening to augmented sound and the voice of Emily from Mission Control. She guides you through many exciting challenges like collecting Artifacts and avoiding the dreaded Nephilim.

With Dimensions we are very interested in creating a gameplay experience which is between the device based focus of a casual game and the passive use of listening to music. Its a game which you play by listening – a game that place in parallel to your everyday life.

The Tech: Reading Files

We built our own version of readsf, rj_readsf, in order to be able to read compressed audio and make the samples available for processing in Pd. One advantage of readsf is that possibly lengthy audio assets do not need to be loaded into memory. If memory is limited, especially when Pd may be running in the background, limiting exposure to system memory warnings helps keep the app running and the music playing. Given that compressed audio is roughly ten times smaller in size than uncompressed audio, and that audio assets make up the majority of the size of the entire app, it is a huge benefit to be able to deliver and read compressed audio assets directly, without the need to decompress in memory or onto disk. Dimensions requires that several dozen such players be open and viable at any time, and special consideration was given to concurrent behaviour. rj_readsf can loop a file when it gets to the end, and it indicates with a bang when a file has been loaded (an asynchronous operation) or the end as been reached (in the non-looping case). rj_readsf is built on iOS standard APIs and can read any file format that iOS can.

Ed.: I’m waiting to hear if rj_readsf will be open-sourced. The issue of reading files is one we’ve had around libpd recently. While their rj_readsf sounds great, my sense is the best long-term solution will be a similar object that is independent of the APIs of any one OS, so this same set of problems may need a different solution for the open source community more generally. (Building such a tool is absolutely possible, though it might require more effort.)

The Music, and How the Music Plays with You

The music of Dimensions uses various different techniques from straight sample playback to audio analysis and synthesis:

Realtime manipulation of audio input from the mic:

This is perhaps the most recognisable technique we use. We process audio from the iPhone microphone live in many different ways. It’s kinda like a feeling of being inside the music.

The key thing we do with effects is attempting to analyse the environment of the player / listener and then making appropriate things happen within the effect. For instance, the Flux Dimension features a filterbank on the mic input. We analyse the incoming audio from the players environment and make the filter frequencies change as events occur ( either due to pitch changes or onsets ) this gives the impression that objects and activity around the player is somehow “playing” the music.

In the Ghost Dimension there is an effect which records audio whenever it detects an event, then scrubs repeatedly forwards and backwards through the sample using granular techniques stretching it out in time. This manipulation accentuates the textural and pitch based qualities of the sample as it repeats and works well with the atmospheric music Hans Zimmer composed.

Dynamically-controlled stems:

All the Dimensions use stems and hits from a conventional sequencer in some way, re-arranged live on the device relative to how the player is interacting. These stems were mainly composed in Cubase and Logic.

For example, in the Kinetic Dimension we feed accelerometer data from the device into Pd and drive the music from that. The player hears more energetic beats when they go for a run, but if they stop at the lights to cross the road, the drums immediately drop away. This was achieved with a large number of hits with all the rhythmic sequencing happening in a hybrid reactive / generative way live on the device.

In the Tranquil Dimension, the music introduces more stems the longer the player is quiet. If they make too much noise the music “shrinks away” from them and becomes quieter. If they stay in a Zen like peaceful state, the music grows into a kind of crescendo of serenity.

Reactive synthesis:

We often control parts of the music by doing a frequency analysis of incoming microphone audio from the device and then using those frequencies to determine the notes synths will play within the music. The Travelling Dream in Inception the App uses this extensively. Tranquil Dimension in Dimensions also uses onset and frequency changes to trigger synth melodies in the music.

The synths we use range in complexity from very simple additive synthesis to some great synth patches from the rjlib by Frank Barknecht and Andy Farnell.

Generative approaches:

There are some sections within Dimensions which are generative. These play back prepared samples as well as triggering onboard synthesis. They also feed the results of this through various live sampling and glitching patches. They are governed by various sets of rules which have various long term parameters, like adjusting to the intensity of the audio environment of the listener, or how dense areas of music have been around the present time.

Sample triggering:

Ghost Dimension uses a simple but effective technique of triggering samples from the music on onsets in the environment. This can cause some real jump out of your skin moments. We combined this section with a randomised very short delay on the mic which acts almost like a resonator, turning the mic sounds into creepy atonal pitched noises.

Sound Design

The main hub section in Dimensions, called the Launch screen, acts as a entry point to your augmented adventures. It also displays all available Dimensions via the floating tile icons.

Visually, these represent a snapshot of your previous experience using your location at that time. Sonically we wanted them to have an aura or energy from the Dimensions themselves.

SoundCloud examples:
Dimensions Sound Design Example by rjdjme

Example of using mixture of synthesis and samples to create user feedback when interacting with Dimension icons in the game.

Map Tile Down: several recordings of a synth in Pure Data that is played when the tiles are touched. Each one is slightly different due using two detuned oscillators.

Map Tile Open Only: a sample from Logic Pro for the woosh sound when showing the information view.

Map Tile Click: a sample from Logic Pro for touch events.

Map Tile Open: recording of how it sounds when put together.

Sound is a mixture of samples and real-time synthesis. The energy sound is made using two oscillators (one detuned) to create some modulation for a glowing effect. Added to some harmonics to make it more of a beam sound and some chorus and reverb. The open tile is made in logic, when closed it’s the same sound but reversed and pitched down in Pd.

We wanted the tiles you tap on to feel like each Dimension has some sort of energy radiating out.

Here’s a sense of how the sound design works in the game:

It’s an ambitious app, and the whole cost is US$2.99. I guarantee it’ll change your world more than a latte. (Well … unless we’re talking a really crazy latte. And that might not be legal.) As sometimes-CDM contributor Jaymis Loveday notes, there are terrific choices in coloring Google Maps, and how modes change based on ambient sound and motion.

Requires an iPhone 3GS or better, or third-generation iPod Touch or better, or an iPad.

Dimensions @ iTunes Store

More reading:
Dimensions Augments Reality Purely Through Sound [Leigh Alexander, one of my favorite game writers, for Gamasutra
The Roundabout Tapes – RjDj now plans to game reality with sound [TCTV] [Techcrunch EU]

Arvo Pärt’s music is always spare and gorgeous, inspired by Medieval counterpoint and voicings, and you’d expect it to be such on any instruments. But here, you get something truly unique: a transcription of the composer’s ‘Fratres,’ normally played on string quartet, on a mixer.

The no-input performance uses exclusively tuned audio feedback to generate sound, creating an almost vocal quality to ringing timbres generates entirely in the mixer.

Details:

Camera : Jimmy Hayes
Console : Christian Carrière
Research residency, Summer 2011
OBORO, Montreal, Canada
oboro.net/

Console : Allen&Heath GL2400-40
Thanks to Claus Frostell of Erikson Pro, who lent me the console, which made this project possible. eriksonpro.com/

The project is the work of experimental musician Christian Carrier, a Montreal-based sound artist and composer.

http://christiancarriere.com/

Thanks to Gregory Taylor and Todd Reynolds, among others, from whom I found this on Facebook.

Think back to playing a simply childhood game like Musical Chairs. The actual gameplay depends only on auditory clues – something you take for granted as a kid, but something apparently lost on game engineers who insist exclusively on advanced 3D rendering engines for visuals. And because you get your body involved, the game becomes dynamic. That musical cue isn’t just off in the background: in the dizzying run around the chairs, the soundtrack can become the singular focus of your brain, an urgent score to the — DIVE, got the chair!

As the scene around game experimentation grows richer, there’s a rekindled interest in how game mechanics can play to different senses. In some cases, it can be a source of whimsy; in others, it’s the only way to design games for people who are absent one of those senses. And an ongoing exploration of music and sound as gameplay mechanic – not just gameplay accompaniment – ought to interest composers and sound designers. When you look at a conventional arcade game, tuning your reflexes to the graphics is key, even if sounds provide reward and ambience. In these games, the sound is where the play is.

Johann Sebastian Joust has a lot in common with Musical Chairs. The game input is the lovely Sony PlayStation Move motion controller, which – yep, you guessed it, is where the jousting comes in. (An earlier version used the Wiimote.) But in place of graphics, listening to the music itself tells you when to act, just as in the childhood game:

When the music plays in slow-motion, the controllers are extremely sensitive to changes in acceleration. When the music speeds up for, this threshold becomes less strict, giving the players a small window to dash at their opponents. If the player’s controller is ever moved beyond the allowable threshold, that player loses.

Little wonder that the game resembles some of those kids’ games: the designers reveal that they got the idea after improvising “folk” games with friends. Now, there is some concession to adding additional feedback – the controllers use the light-up ball on the end and rumble feedback just to make absolutely clear what’s going on; some “sound games” are more pure in their all-sonic interface. But the idea remains the same.

The game is the work of the Copenhagen Game Collective. They describe themselves as “multi-gender, multi-national, non-profit”; I would add to that “blazing hot stuff.” CGC’s games have earned some serious accolades; for one, B.U.T.T.O.N., a group party game, was the runaway hit of the Kokoromi GAMMA party in 2010, and also showed up wowing crowds again at the same Kill Screen / Museum of Modern Art Show at which we saw Pxl Pusher, covered yesterday. (CDM and myself were also involved in that Gamma party, and co-organized a one-button art show at San Francisco’s GAFFTA art space.) But the group has in no small sense put Copenhagen on the map.

The team for this title:
Douglas Wilson: concept, programming, and video
Nils Deneken: graphics and announcer voice
Nicklas “Nifflas” Nygren: music and sound

Composer Nicklas Nygren is a triple threat: game designer, coder, and composer. Check out some of his music on SoundCloud:

Latest tracks by Nifflas

There’s plenty more to say about sound games and music games and interactive music for games. I gave a presentation at the Indie Gaming Showcase in Berlin on the topic at an event hosted by arts network Platoon – see their write-up. I’ll pull those notes together; if you have any nominees of game work you’d like to see covered, let us know in comments.

But for now, I’ll leave you with the image of Johann Sebastian Joust and Musical Chairs. After all, composition and ensemble playing themselves can be seen as games with musical mechanics. They certainly can even have “win” and “fail” mechanics – ask your local orchestra player.

http://www.copenhagengamecollective.org/johann-sebastian-joust/

Hindsight normally gives perspective to history, but in the case of the 20th Century, even looking back, it’s hard to fathom the sheer magnitude of change in human thought and technology. Composers faced the twin revolutions of electronic sound — recorded, synthesized, and eventually computerized — and new systems for organizing pitch and rhythm from the early European avant garde to access to every world music culture.

One figure at the center of the academic reinvention of American music was Milton Babbitt, the experimental innovator who passed away over the weekend at the age of 94. Obituaries inevitably brought up his infamous, tragically-titled High Fidelity article “Who Cares if You Listen?” (for which the composer himself blames an editor – something I can easily believe as a writer). Much is made of the gulf between listener and composer, but perhaps that misses the point. Dig into his arguments, and you hear the struggle of a composer in the midst of revolution and turmoil, one that fragments composers from other composers, not just audiences:

…it is a result of a half-century of revolution in musical thought, a revolution whose nature and consequences can be compared only with, and in many respects are closely analogous to, those of the mid-nineteenth-century evolution in theoretical physics The immediate and profound effect has been the necessity of the informed musician to reexamine and probe the very foundations of his art. He has been obliged to recognize the possibility, and actuality, of alternatives to what were once regarded as musical absolutes. He lives no longer in a unitary musical universe of “common practice,” but in a variety of universes of diverse practice.

Original essay text

Oddly enough, he doesn’t argue in that article for absolutes – good or bad, popular or serious – but instead makes the (none-too-controversial, on the face of it) argument that some experimental music being made will be too complex for some ears. The part of the argument that seems not to hold, in a grand indication of just how revolutionary the 20th Century was, is the idea of separating radio technicians from theoretical physicists. Instead, we live in a world in which theoretical quantum physics becomes the stuff of dinner conversation and may soon power the memory in our computers. I just saw string theory advocate Brian Greene on The Colbert Report. (It’s hard to imagine Neils Bohr showing up on the Ed Sullivan Show to do an act, by comparison.) So great was the revolution of those thoughts that they seem inseparable from daily life.

Relevant to this site, part of that revolution was electronic. In an interview with Eric Chasalow in 1997, Babbitt recalls his own part in some of that history. It begins, humbly, with odd noises and early artifacts of the first electronic scores. New sounds start with tangible construction, even when programming, which required punching binary codes in paper. Eventually, one winds up at the part of the story that’s better known — the RCA Mark 1 and (radically different, says Babbitt) Mark 2 synths for which he was a consultant.

Extending the argument of “Who Cares if You Listen,” theoretical physics and radio repair are no longer independent in music, either. The experimental technologies and odd noises Babbitt and others helped develop now pound away on dance floors around the world and appear in pre-installed software on computers and phones.

To even begin to fathom what has happened, or what happens next, then, I can think of no better time to listen to the gravely voice of Milton Babbitt, to reflect on what his revolutionary, sometimes-unpopular musical radicalism could generate, and to listen again to his music. Some of the electronic sounds date poorly, but they also exhibit his sonic and rhythmic imagination and stand as a challenge to work to come.

There aren’t many people whose oeuvre begins before World War II and lasts past the second invasion of Iraq, who helped launch the academic computer music lab as American phenomenon and also tutored Stephen Sondheim. In 2001, he told New Music Box he had bleak hopes for the future of “serious” music, but also admitted he didn’t own a computer. The outpouring of support on the Web over the past few days for the composer suggests a lot of people did care, and did listen.

Milton Babbitt talks about “Philomel”

Sequenza and Synthtopia point to this new documentary by Laura Karpman, posted by NPR. I was also at that CUNY Graduate Center event, and saw Babbitt speak there, as well. As may come across in these videos, he was a warm presence, very different from the persona ascribed to his role in music and culture.

Classically trained as a pianist, musician and producer Jon Hopkins has one of the richest resumes in electronic music. He’s a frequent collaborator with Brian Eno, wand has worked with artists like Coldplay (who featured his music on their last album), Tunng, David Holmes, and Imogen Heap. He worked with director Peter Jackson, and has a sci-fi score on the way. He also has a rich set of solo releases. And we’ve seen him here recently with remix swaps with Four Tet and contributions to Eno’s upcoming Warp record.

Coming to the Electric Zoo Festival, the blowout Randall’s Island Labor Day weekend electronic party here in New York, he’s set to perform a straight-up, genuinely live set, complete with a small squadron of KAOSS Pads. You can catch him Sunday at 1pm if you’re at the event.

I got a chance to speak to Mr. Hopkins by phone from the UK, before he departed for New York and Electric Zoo. He shares here how he works live onstage and in the studio, talks about how Brian Eno got him hooked on the Kaoss Pad, and reveals his addiction to the tools he first used as a keyboard and resistance to software and hardware upgrades. I’m especially able to resonate with what he has to say about working with sound, and transitioning from a piano background to working as a producer – and I’m listening to his work from a fresh perspective after the combination.

(Don’t miss the spectacularly lo-fi film of “Insides” from Live at the ICA, London, below.)

CDM: Not having seen your live show, knowing only your studio work, I’m looking forward to seeing you at Electric Zoo. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do for live sets?

Hopkins: It’s an Ableton [Live] system at the core of it. I ran off all the separate sounds from my own studio, and kind of loaded everything up into Ableton, so I’ve got total flexibility over all the songs. Then I have separate outputs through the interface, so I can have four or five [Korg] Kaoss Pads running in sync with Ableton, where I can do sampling and looping and all kinds of crazy sounds. And then I go into a mixing desk, and I’ve got a lot of control over what’s going on. I’ve got a little MIDI keyboard up there to play stuff on and to keep things triggering. That’s kind of it, really. It’s not enormously complex, because I have to be able to travel around with it on my own.

How do you use the multiple Kaoss effects in tandem?

The card I use has 16 outputs, so I can separate sounds into different ones and have different effects running on each pad. And sometimes I put one at the end to control the master. It depends. It’s a very flexible setup that way.

In order to assemble your clips, are you simply loading stems from the tracks into Live?

Loops, stem loops, and a little bit of everything. One-shot things, longer things. It’s kind of really just about having a variety, so you can take it any way you feel. I found out recently I’m playing for an hour and half rather than an hour [at Electric Zoo], and I normally do an hour, so there may be some slightly longer pieces. I’ve got some time to prepare, so I’ll go and revisit some other songs and try to bring some new things over, as well. So it should be interesting.

Otherwise, it sounds like the live set is mostly dry; you’re doing most of the processing on the KAOSS Pads.

Yeah. Those things – the Kaoss Pad [KP3], specifically — I was working with Brian Eno over the years and he showed me the original one when it first came out, and I’ve kind of followed them as they go. And seeing from him, some of the crazy things he can do with them — I’ve just gotten really addicted to them. You can kind of make them do things they’re not supposed to do. If you record things into the delay settings, particularly the loop settings, and then speed up the tempo, the craziest effects come out. If you got that going into another one, you end up with a sound onstage that you’d never get out of a computer. It’s cool.

Let’s talk about the new single, and the work with Kieran [Hebden / Four Tet]. How did that come about?

Well, we met about three years ago, I think. We had quite a lot of mutual friends. I had been a bit of remixing for an artist on Domino called James Yorkston, who he’d worked with, as well. A year or two later, I signed to Domino.

We did a show together at the Natural History Museum in New York, and it was our first show together – a year and a half ago or something. And the mix of styles went quite well, I think. And we did a few more, and we did a remix swap recently. I did one for his last single, “Angel Echoes,” with the Caribou remix on the other side. And he did one for my new single, which is “Vessel.” And now we have this tour together in October, which I look forward to very much.

Angel Echoes (Jon Hopkins remix) by Four Tet

How do you approach working with his sound, or approach the remix as opposed to your solo work?

It was great, actually, because I love the original. I loved his last album [There Is Love in You] — it was fantastic. The first time I heard it, a guy from Domino played me some of the tracks in the car, way before it was out. And I heard that song, and I just had this idea for it, which was to take that vocal out of the chords he had it in, and write a completely new chord sequence on the piano — have a very natural piano sound, and then have those vocals and those beats flow back in on top of that, and really just try to rewrite the whole chord structure. And he had a live drum loop in there, and I found that if I really squashed it with a limiter … you heard every tiny detail of it. I added an extra few snares here and there, and turned it into a real 3/4 kind of thing, a dance track. And then the main sound — the track was called “Angel Echoes.” I’ve got an old Eventide DSP 4000, which has got a setting called Angel Echoes — which is a complete coincidence; he had never heard of it. I tried putting all the vocals through this Angel Echoes patch and then sent the pitches up an octave and down an octave, as you can with the Eventide in a quite interesting way. There’s this sort of enormous, floating delay. And I had that filtering up in the background while the dry vocals play over top. So you can hear a lot of that effect in the song, particularly in the end. So that was that track.

It seems like the combination really works naturally, that there’s some common aesthetic between the two of you.

There’s some common ground in there, yes. Also… my early albums are completely different than his. I think we’ve grown closer over the years. I think it’s a nice combination, because we have some areas in which we’re similar, and some in which we’re completely different.

What’s your studio setup look like, aside from obviously the aforementioned Eventide?

I’ve got quite a strange combination of things. The core of it is now a Logic system. But I’ve only had it for about a couple of months. Everything I’ve actually released so far was done on Cubase VST from about — I don’t know, 2001 edition; I can’t remember what number it was. And all the sounds I’ve made over the years have been on SoundForge, which is a program I’ve just always loved. I’ve been using it since I was 19; I just got so used to it. I guess it’s whatever program you know best is the best one there is, really. I don’t think there’s huge amounts of difference between one sound editor and another. I’m sure they all can do similar things. But I’ve loved the way SoundForge just has the one massive waveform on the screen, and you can just have infinite levels of undo on every spearate sound. And I have that going into Cubase, so you can have these sounds kind of open live, and be changing them all the way through the process of the song. Just recently, I worked on a film soundtrack, and I found that system finally couldn’t quite handle having any video, so it started crashing a lot. So I’ve got this new Logic system, but I just can’t make any of the more complex sounds on that, because it takes so long. So what I’ve done is hook them up together with an Ethernet cable so now I can drop certain sounds in a folder and have them open in SoundForge and then drop them back in Logic. So I’m using them both, really.

And that’s great. I didn’t want to just completely lose all that, because I think that is what has defined the sounds I’ve been making over the years. I don’t want to change everything in one go. It just seemed like a step backwards in some way.

There’s something psychological about it too, right, when you’ve done a lot of work to have it look familiar? It seems you feel differently about that tool.

You do, I think so, yeah. And particularly when I started on Logic and hooked the two up, I just felt quite bewildered as to how I would ever reach the complexity of editing levels that I was used to. I just operate directly on the waveform. And I love that what you see there on the screen is what you’re hearing, rather than it going through a bunch of live plug-ins. It’s just what I’m used to, really.

So, what don’t you do on the level of the waveform? At what point do you decide, okay, I’m done with that level of granularity with the waveforms and now I’m ready to work with effects and mixing?

I think initially, you go by instinct. In SoundForge, I’d have three or four variations of a loop, and then they would be open in Cubase, or now Logic. And you’d be able to operate on little micro-edits. And then at some point, you feel the drum track is ready, and it doesn’t need any more tweaks — it would be overworked. And I don’t like over-programmed electronic music; I think it had its time, really. Now I really think a solid groove is the way.

And it’s great, at that point you can stick it in Logic. I invested in some crazy plugins, so I’ve got quite a lot of fun things going on in there. Hopefully it will evolve to be the best of both worlds.

And you work a lot with the keyboard, coming at this as a pianist, as well?

Yeah. I didn’t mention that the only keyboard I’ve ever used is a Korg Trinity. I’m sure there aren’t many around these days, but again, like with SoundForge I don’t think it’s about what you use, it’s about how well you know it and how long you’ve been using it. And I know that machine ridiculously well. I’ve had it again since my first setup, when I was 18. And I’ve got a few hundred sounds that I’ve made over the years. Every synth sound on all three of my albums comes from that, with the exception of a couple of bass sounds from a Nord Lead that I’ve got as well.

But it just gets enormously processed. I don’t use them as they are; I stick them into SoundForge and just mess them up, and go through a lot of processes.On the new album, a lot more of the sounds that sound like synths are actually real instruments that have been mangled. A lot of the things that sound like synth pads are actually where I was playing piano through a series of pitch things into quite a deep reverb, and I was using that with a kind of gate to make a lot of the pads and the rhythmic sounds.

You do have a piano in your studio, as well, I would imagine.

It’s, like, behind me when I’m sitting at the computer, so I can swivel around on the chair I can play it. It’s hooked up to a couple of mics, [which] goes into a nice old TL Audio valve pre-amp thing, which then goes into either SoundForge or into Logic, depending on what I’m working on.

It’s the same piano I’ve had since I was a kid, so it’s nice for me, it’s in good condition.

Do you find that piano practice or piano technique are still sort of part of your musical life?

No, unfortunately not; it’s gone. (laughs) I can only play what I need for myself. I used to be a clasically-trained pianist when I was a teenager. I guess it stopped when I was 17; I realize I wasn’t interested in pursuing that, because as a career, I wanted to make my own things.

I used to play a lot of technical stuff which is unfortunately gone. But I couldn’t really justify sitting there and practicing for two hours a day, which is what I used to do. Once you work on musica all the time, music in your spare time isn’t really something you want to do.

Having faced this very issue myself, it doesn’t sound like you feel in any way limited by that. From what I hear in your music, you have far more than enough facility to allow the keyboard to be part of what you do, even if it isn’t central. (And I enjoy that playing.)

Oh yeah. It’s very much limited to the exact thing that I need, but I can still do exactly what I want to hear on what I’m recording. The thing that hasn’t gone is the dynamic range, so I can still play very quietly if I need to, or generally stay in time. It’s just anything fast — but I would never have anything like that anyway, because it’s not really what I’m into playing-wise or writing-wise.

Do you find you draw on the Classical background that you have?

Yes it is, although in a very subliminal way. I haven’t played a Classical piece on the piano since 1998, so whatever’s left — I think I’m more influenced by film scores and what appeals in them, which in turn I guess are influenced classically. But there’s certainly no conscious reference between what I used to listen to and what I used to perform and what I write now.

So what are you listening to these days?

(pauses) My mind always goes blank when that question comes up.

Me, too — or I could say, in the last 72 hours?

(laughs) Actually I think I’ve got my iPod right here. I’ve been listening to a friend of mine, Nathan Fake of Border Communities, who did the other remix of my single. Been listening to his stuff, his album Hard Islands. I do tend to listen to stuff that people I work with or who are friends of mine. I listen to a lot of Brian Eno, very specifically the ambient series. I love all of that stuff. You kind of never get bored of that, really.

But I’m also into a lot of songs and more traditional singer stuff like Arthur Russell or Jim Martin, people like that. Proper lyrics I love, as well, almost listen to more of that than electronic stuff.

Take a listen to Nathan Fake’s remix yourself…

jon hopkins – wire (nathan fake remix) by nathan fake •official•

And then you had the experience of Monsters, the sci-fi film.

That was an amazing experience. I don’t know when it comes out in the US, but it comes out in the UK 12th of November. It was the first film I’ve worked on just on my own. Ed.: Hopkins is no stranger to film scoring by way of collaboration, having scored Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones with Brian Eno. And we’re in luck here in the US – the movie arrives October 29, on demand even sooner on September 24.

And there should be a soundtrack album that comes with that. It’s very much more cinematic style, no beats, much more pure melody and atmosphere and tension. So it doesn’t sound like any of my albums, really. It’s interesting to be pushed in different directions by whatever you’re working on.

Had you had the experience of thinking about visual ideas when you worked on music before? I know it’s very different when you have someone else’s image there in front of you.

No, that was a whole new thing, because I actually don’t tend to think particularly visually. I always wanted videos to get made – but you don’t really get those kind of budgets any more. So I don’t tend to think of anything in particular when I’m writing. I just follow the instinct of the melody and where it goes. So it’s almost like having a film in there takes an enormous part of the pressure and responsibility off, because you’re not the main focus.

How slavish were you in terms of how you lined things up?

Pretty specific. I mean, it was my first time on my own, as I said, doing it. So I pretty much was feeling my way; even simple things like how to arrange the sessions on the computer for each queue — it would have been useful to know that you should have a different session for every queue, because I was trying to do it in one and thinking, wow… (laughs) Just simple organization was quite difficult.

I guess the learning curve is administrative as well as creative!

And it went really well in the end. I was working very strange working hours of 2pm to 4am every single day, and sleeping very strange hours, and not doing anything else. It was the middle of winter, and I barely saw daylight. Life is very simple when that’s all you’re doing. You just feel like for that period of time, you’re not thinking of anything else. I manage to take care of everything else that comes up and come in every day and fight through to the end, really. It was an amazing experience.

It’s starting to pick up some great momentum, so we’re really excited about it coming out.

More Information

http://www.madeevent.com/ElectricZoo/

Official site: Jon Hopkins

Monsters Film

And one more Jon Hopkins remix…

Wild Beasts – Two Dancers (Jon Hopkins Remix) by Jon Hopkins

Sometimes, the best sounds come not from synthesis, not even from electrified instruments, but from the purity of a mic and acoustic instrumentation. It remains electronic, or even digital sound, but its source is organic. And so, one of the best reasons to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie in theaters is the wonderful noises that bounce around Hans Zimmer’s score.

Behind many great film scores are great soloists as much as great composers, and Sherlock Holmes is no exception. Zimmer worked with Diego Stocco, sound designer, sound artist, inventor, and composer in his own right. To realize the inner workings of the mind of Sherlock Holmes, violin player, the pair turned to Stocco’s own creation, a kind of meta-instrument made of all string instruments, dubbed the Experibass. Looking only at its appearance, the instrument looks like a practical joke, with the bridge and neck of a violin and viola pasted onto a Double Bass. But once you hear the creation, the instrument is sheer genius, combining the Double Bass’ superior resonance with the more delicate sounds of the treble instruments.

Brilliant as this instrument may be, let’s not get entirely distracted from the really important things in life, like how to make great pasta. Watch the video interview above for insight into the sonic and culinary recipes in the duo’s kitchens.

That’s just the beginning of the inspiration to draw from Diego and other artists whose work is heard from behind the silver screen in this blockbuster cinematic month of December.

The above video alone is unlikely to sate your Diego appetite, so fortunately there are some other interviews with the artist – features that are guaranteed to inspire you to attempt inventing your own instruments around the house. (Contact mics, you are truly the world’s greatest invention.) Jacob Resneck talks to Maestro Stocco about his ideas as a player and creator:

Interview with Sound Artist Diego Stocco [Cool Hunting]

On Bandcamp, you can find short albums devoted to their sound sources, including sand, a tree, and broken instruments:

Diego Stocco @ Bandcamp

On Diego’s Vimeo account, you’ll find a series of short films that not only feature and document his inventions, but serve as lovely audiovisual vignettes. Among them is this film “Dissonant Echoes,” featuring dismantled piano, antique zithers, and chimes, as discovered at the blog Synthtopia last month.

Diego Stocco – Dissonant Echoes from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

Diego is, naturally, not the only talented collaborator on Sherlock Holmes. Tina Guo is the stellar cellist who worked on the film, and speaks about her work on the film and her experience as a cellist; you can see more of her on her YouTube channel. Ann Marie Calhoun provided violin – yes, there is violin in the score, even if Holmes himself may have actually played viola (depending on whose argument you hear).

Ultimately, though, it’s the strange and broken instruments, recorded intimately in place of the usual, overblown and overused “lamplight” symphony orchestras, that forms the sound of the movie. (Believe me, you might hate the film and still love the score.) In addition to the Experibass, Zimmer made heavy use of detuned, abused pianos, one of which was defaced in an underground parking garage. I have no idea why he talks about Kurt Weill, but the results are nonetheless fantastic, and a reminder of how much can be done with real, recorded sound. Hans Zimmer talks himself about his ideas behind the score to The Times:

Hans Zimmer: ‘The sound of Sherlock Holmes? It’s a broken piano’ [The London Times]

Zimmer also speaks to CMusicTV in a video interview:

More Behind the Scenes from Winter’s Movie Releases

For still more inspiration, Migul Isaza’s wonderful blog Designing Sound probes some of the other talented folks who worked on Hollywood’s record-breaking December films at the box office. Whether you were fans of these films or not, there’s still plenty to learn from the soundtracks. (Hey, does this mean lots of movie watching can be a tax write-off?)

"Invictus" Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Via that blog, here’s a powerful story of using real sounds for film sound design. The audio team, working with director Clint Eastwood, went to extraordinary lengths to achieve sonic realism in the picture Invictus. Not only did they research the sport of rugby, but they recorded audio in Nelson Mandela’s prison cell. Of course, those sounds might have been recreated nearly as accurately on a California soundstage, but to me, the spiritual journey to the original location is even more important. It’s an attention to detail beyond what even the listener may directly perceive. Perhaps, after all, that’s why we do field recording – not simply for the results, but for the experience and the process of being in the places in which we make the field recording.

At the other end of the spectrum, Designing Sound has an interview with Paul Ottosson, who used sound design on the movie 2012 to create imagined worlds and play directly to the audience’s reactions and emotions.

Exclusive Interview with Paul Ottosson, Sound Designer of “2012? [Designing Sound @ noisepages]

“Destroy the Earth” might seem to be the simple charge of that movie, but in practice, the work goes beyond that. For his part, Ottosson emphasizes storytelling.

But, wait – there’s more. For a sense of what the experience of being a sound designer is like, and – whatever your career – how to manage your professional and creative demands, look to Andrew Lackey, whose work with sound cuts across box office blockbusters (They) and hit games (Dead Space).

Lackey tells Designing Sound blogger Isaza about the sound tools he wishes existed but don’t, and how to survive the economic crunch and stay mentally and physically healthy.

“Heard” a movie lately that inspired you? Seen good behind-the-scenes information from the worlds of movies, television, or games? (These are all bigger-budget releases; there’s plenty happening in the “indie” scenes, too.) Let us know.

And keep recording.

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