What an extraordinary thing an interface can be, a map to making music.

A new community-generated album from users of the now-legendary monome grid instrument yields a variety of musical outcomes. The results are instrumental and lovely, breaking off on lots of different stylistic vectors, but glued together by the notion of key and pitch. Let’s let contributor Joshua Saddler explain this – and the holiday album – as well as share some of the music. If you celebrate Orthodox Christmas or more generally the idea of “Holidays” (ahem), or if you just like good music, you can overlook the fact that the latter arrives a bit late on the Western calendar. But both albums are terrific, and I suspect the approach to the music in key, to sharing samples and field recordings, could well be an inspiration in your own music-making endeavors. Sometimes rules are liberating.

If you want to get a jump start on musical New Year’s resolutions, I can think of nothing better. Joshua writes:

The monome community has released not one, but two albums for the holidays. Both are freely available at http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com

The first, MCRPv11 (Monome Community Remix Project, volume 11), was released mid-November, five months after the MCRPv10 album (which CDM has previously covered).

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/mcrpv11-all-keyed-up-edition

As with all MCRP albums, there are guidelines and a theme. Participants submitted a field recording and a short instrumental sample in the key of G/E-minor. The participants then chose as many samples as they wished from the shared pool (though they couldn’t use their own samples), and had a couple of weeks to assemble their tracks. Sounds ranged from falling rocks to ocean waves to modular synthesizers to toy ukeleles and dogs barking. From this pool emerged fifteen startlingly diverse tracks.

Have a listen, and head to Bandcamp for downloads in any format you desire:

I appreciate the chance to see Joshua’s process in video:

I’m pretty pleased with how my contribution, “mnml autmn,” turned out:

mnml autmn by ioflow

I sequenced bits and pieces from four samples with Renoise (in some cases using single-cycle waveforms…so it still counts, even if it sounds nothing like the original!), exported sections to loops, and performed them live with rove (http://docs.monome.org/doku.php?id=app:rove) on a monome 128. I recorded and rearranged the resulting segments using Ardour3‘s timeline view. The tracker and the traditional DAW actually worked well together. As I’m the sole Linux musician on the album, composing and arranging takes much longer using free software than more common tools like Ableton Live. Things that took me hours are probably three-click operations in Live. Still, by having to strike out on my own, I learn so many new things each time I sit down to create…it’s worth the occasional frustration at not being able to do things the easy way, using the same process as everyone else.

The second release is the annual Monome Community Christmas Album volume 2, made available on December 21.

http://mcrpmusic.bandcamp.com/album/monome-community-christmas-album-volume-2

This project had much more leeway; no hard-and-fast rules about samples or themes. I ended up forgoing the monome entirely for this album, instead improvising an original acoustic piano piece:

gloria by ioflow

http://soundcloud.com/ioflow/gloria

There were fewer participants for MCXAv2, since it began immediately after MCRPv11, but the quality of the tracks is still extraordinary. Warm neo-retro-loungetronica. I’ll be listening to it year-round, not just in December.

Me, too. And perhaps you, as well:

Thanks, monome-ers!

http://monome.org

Since today is Beethoven’s 241st birthday, it seems only appropriate to inject a little conventional notation into today’s coverage. And what better way to do that than with an iPad app that promises some musician-friendly reading features.

We’ve already looked a couple of times at Avid’s Sibelius-powered Scorch iPad reader, which features nice output and score integration, and recently added PDF support.

Scorecerer has some unique features – aside from, augh, a somewhat unpronounceable name. It goes further in page turn control, MIDI integration, and DAW integration (through MIDI program changes). A desktop version aids in scanned score management.

And it has two potentially killer features: one is the ability to manage converting your conventional notation to PDF, and the other is – at last – proper markup.

Run-down of features:

• Markup: highlight or add handwritten notes (why every app doesn’t include this, standard, I have no idea – it’s a deal-breaker without it.) See the video for more.
• Meet your MIDI page turner: Load songs, change pages, from any MIDI instrument – or send page turns from a DAW’s sequence playback (via a program change message) for automated page turns.
• Total page layout control: Arrange pages in an arbitrary sequence, so, for instance, repeats and DS al Coda sections simply repeat in front of you instead of requiring you to go back.
• Desktop PDF conversion: Scan images or import PDFs, straighten out crooked scans, remove borders, create lead sheets, all in a batch-conversion desktop management tool.
• Desktop Pro software: Add on this US$39.95 desktop companion, and you additionally get to publish scanned or imported music as a set of images, PDF, Kindle DX, or MusicPad Pro. (The free iPad edition only exports to the iPad.) You can also batch convert a stack of music – like an entire fake book – by splitting it into PDFs.

The emphasis on scanning and importing PDFs is a concession to the likely reality of iPad notation users. Simply put, you’re probably not going to use an iPad for notation unless you can make it useful with all the scores you’ve already got. Now, some of this batch processing I imagine could make publishers very nervous about piracy. But I still imagine that – as we saw with the combination of digital downloads and ripped CDs, only with yet-more-expansive collections – we’ll see a bit of each. (Selling scores online I still think will be a big market for publishers.)

But I just keep coming back to this: you have to have markup. And I look forward to watching tablet apps in general work to provide features that make them more usable to musicians.

More on the app:
http://www.deskew.com/

There’s a free, “Lite” version that you can try out first.

The full version is US$9.95.

Scorcerer @ iTunes App Store

The Internet, as the subject of one Oscar-nominated film, is full of short attention spans and flirts, social dysfunction and lust. But there’s another side of the Internet. Someone interested in finding expressive inspiration, in learning the craft of music and sound, can virtually apprentice themselves to artists and engineers they love. There may be no substitute for stepping into a studio with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, or sitting face to face as Greg Russell to talk mixing. But barring that, for the aspiring sound and musical creators of the future, you have immediate access to astounding hours of collected knowledge, to the same technologies that produce the films grabbing the Oscars, and even to simulated, augmented-reality dreams on your phone.

That revelation might not make a good movie, but it’s sure a great thing. And who knows, from Indiana to India, the next studio to craft a great score could be your own.

Rounding up some of the better resources on the Internet, I’m in particular indebted to a couple of great sources, particularly on the previously-unsung craft of mixing and sound. I don’t have a statuette to give them, but I will introduce them:

Designing Sound by Miguel Isaza and Jake Riehle is a fantastic, advertising-free blog dedicated entirely to the craft of sound design in film, television, games, and other media. I’m honored to host the site on Noisepages for CDM, and equally pleased to get to sit back and just read (and not write or edit) the content. This is a perfect opportunity to cull some of the sharp, savvy analysis and exclusive interviews from that site. You might find you have something to do during ad breaks on the Oscars, film lovers.

Soundworks Collection tells the story of sound production in extended-format, high quality videos. You can watch video about just about every major release. In fact, their collections may become to those of us who are sound enthusiasts as invaluable a companion to movie-watching as popcorn.

And from the world of paper, Mix Magazine has been doing loads of coverage on the production side in film.

Forgive me for not looking at the “Best Original Song” category this year; arpeggiators everywhere lament the absence of Daft Punk’s “Derezzed,” but what can you do? (I definitely didn’t envy Daft Punk the challenge of trying to live up to Wendy Carlos’ landmark original score.)

Original Musical Scores

‘The Social Network’
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

I’ll come right out and say it: I think this is the film, out of this extraordinary bunch, that deserves the award. In a way, the score embodies the ideas of the film, emotionally and conceptually, more than the movie itself can. From the now oddly-famous small batch synth invention Swarmatron to air conditioners and pianos, Reznor and Ross concoct a sonic and compositional world. It’s relevant, topical, and now, like Facebook – but it may have greater lasting power.

Speaking of dreams and lost, The New York Times got to do what I imagine we all would love to do: step into the Reznor/Ross studio.

And long after the movie is forgotten, I expect this soundtrack will have a beloved spot on the playlists of many readers of this site.

Mashable Interviews Trent Reznor

As it happens, I wound up by coincidence in a conversation with Jeremy Peters, who does licensing for Ghostly International. His thoughts on why this score deserves special mention:

It was great to see them go a bit outside the box and hire Reznor, and I felt like it did what the score was meant to, which is tell the story that is not being told in the visuals and dialogue, and it did it really, really well, so my vote has to go to that score.

Peters also laments, as a person in the licensing business, that so many original songs “stick out like a sore thumb,” when better musical collaborations and licensing are possible. That makes it doubly nice to see fresh faces in the nominee category here.

More Swarmatron, for good measure:

‘Inception’
Hans Zimmer

It’s hard to say much about Zimmer’s stunning score for ‘Inception’ that hasn’t already been said. But it’s worth noting that, outside the film, a ground-breaking interactive app took the dream space into mobile, generative and reactive form. Built on open source technology at RjDj, Inception is the first app to use the libpd embeddable Pure Data library seen here previously. Aside from the musical achievement here, the technical advancement is that delivering interactive music to nearly any platform is no longer just a dream.

In fact, ‘Inception’ could be seen as interactive music’s first blockbuster, topping the charts on iOS. on iTunes

’127 Hours’
A.R. Rahman

Boy, it’s a tough year to compete in soundtracks – and a great year to listen. A.R. Rahman’s fluid, genre-crossing ambient soundtrack is as expansive as the film’s desert landscapes. And it’s another achievement for the connection between India’s titanic film industry and Hollywood’s. (Rahman also contributed “Slumdog Millionaire,” a process about which he spoke to Apple’s Joe Ceillini, since it was done entirely in Logic, from laptop to studio.) The first interview that follows is more specific to this film, but the second, Indian-produced interview I think is … well, better.

‘How to Train Your Dragon’
John Powell

So, the adult dialog was Scottish, the kids are American, and the music was Celtic, even as all the characters were Vikings. It was nonetheless a lovely score (though I’m sorry that last year’s animated ‘The Book of Kells,’ set in historical Ireland with Irish accents and Irish music, didn’t get more coverage, as far as Celtic scores). For more on this movie’s sound – even if Randy Thom didn’t need another nomination this year – see Designing Sound’s interview.

Composer John Powell himself comes from a Scottish background, and says he was influenced, too, by Nordic folk music. In an interview, he explains how he lent the film a lot of its character:

John Powell Goes Epic to Score ‘Dragon’ [The Wrap]

‘The King’s Speech’
Alexandre Desplat

Understated and elegant as the film it scores, Desplat (“Deathly Hallows”) has another beautiful soundtrack. The only bad news: he’s partly overshadowed by one Ludwig van Beethoven. (Desplat says that was originally a temp track. You try out-composing Beethoven.)

Interview by Scott Holleran

Sound Mixing, Sound Editing

‘Inception’
Sound Mixing: Lora Hirschberg, Gary A. Rizzo & Ed Novick
Sound Editing: Richard King

Known in particular for its use of Edith Piaf in the score, Inception is clearly our star here (and perhaps a shoe-in, as a result), a film that creates entirely different imagined worlds. Videos and interviews, via Designing Sound:

“Inception” – Exclusive Interview with Richard King

I feel it’s very important to get new sounds for each film. It’s so important to get the sounds which you feel and imagine could be there. There’s always a lot of manipulation afterward of course, but recording new raw material is so important. I’d love to record everything every time, but the most important thing is to find the sound which provides that feeling you’re looking for regardless of where it comes from.Richard King, to Designing Sound

Gary Rizzo Talks About “Inception”

Mix Magazine on the Sound of Inception

Bruce Tanis Answers Reader Questions (a foley and sound effects editor on Inception)

‘The King’s Speech’
Sound Mixing: Paul Hamblin, Martin Jensen & John Midgley

‘Salt’
Sound Mixing: Jeffrey J. Haboush, Greg P. Russell, Scott Millan & William Sarokin

Greg Russell has an astounding fourteenth nomination for ‘Salt.’

Interview: Greg P. Russell on “Salt” and Mark P. Stoeckinger on “Unstoppable”
More About the Sound of “SALT”

‘The Social Network’
Sound Mixing: Ren Klyce, David Parker, Michael Semanick & Mark Weingarten

Some of the grand achievements in sound may not be immediately noticeable – like making a loud club party scene where you can actually hear the dialog.

Ren Klyce Talks “The Social Network” Mix

‘True Grit’
Sound Mixing: Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff & Peter F. Kurland
Sound Editing: Skip Lievsay & Craig Berkey

Skip Lievsay Talks “True Grit” Mix

‘Toy Story 3′
Sound Editing: Tom Myers & Michael Silvers

Toy Story 3 may have gone unnoticed by many this year, but it required major innovations in surround sound, making the interviews below must-read. (For the opposite, low-fidelity end of the spectrum, see the exclusive interview for a fascinating story about the “futz boxes” used to make the little snippets of dialog the toys produce.)

“TOY STORY 3″ – Exclusive Interview with Tom Myers, Michael Semanick, and Al Nelson

With Gary Rydstrom we continued the conceit that when the toys are interacting with humans, (when they are inanimate objects), they should sound smaller in scale compared to the human “real” world. But when they are interacting with each other, and walking and talking, they have a larger, almost human scale to their sounds.
Tom Myers to Designing Sound

Dolby Surround 7.1, Toy Story 3 and The Future of Sound In 3D Films

‘Tron: Legacy’
Sound Editing: Gwendolyn Yates Whittle & Addison Teague

More About the Sound of “TRON: Legacy”: Score and SFX Mix

More About the Sound of “TRON: Legacy”

‘Unstoppable’
Sound Editing: Mark P. Stoeckinger

Yes, even Vanity Fair cares about sound editing.

Vanity Fair: Mark Stoeckinger Talks Unstoppable’s Sound Editing

Composer/sound designer Ben Long has a resume of work on dozens of games. Here on CDM, he shares the topic on which he recently addressed GDC China: mobile. If mobile game audio is going to rise to people’s expectations, it’ll have to get past rushed developers and hardware obstacles, including revisiting the whole mono/stereo debate. Ben lets us know his insider take on that landscape, and shares with us the process for designing sounds for virtual slots. Everyone, drone in C with the slot machines… -Ed.

When I tell people “I make music and sounds for video games,” it usually brings responses ranging from people saying “neat!” to blank stares. This is often followed by the person asking “how did you get into that?”  It’s a long story, but I usually say something along the lines of this: “I have musical ADD and video games was a perfect fit!”

For years, I slept on the floor with some makeshift “studio” crammed in the corner.  Working IT jobs during the day and live gigs at night for 10 years paved the way to working on games. My very first ‘studio’ consisted of the Roland VS-880, a digital 8-track with a 2-inch, non-backlit LCD screen.  Mixing on this was thing like brushing your teeth with a tree branch, but hey, it was digital, baby — and this was back when a CD burner was $600.

I got used to being surrounded by bleeding-edge technology and noticed that the game industry was leading the pack.  It wasn’t long before I had my first gig, creating pirate music with MIDI.

So, having worked in the game industry, where does the future lie, and how can someone be prepared to meet it? The answer is clearly mobile.

Mobile Gaming: Challenges and Opportunities

Mobile is by far the fastest-growing sector of the game industry. Never before in history have so many people been exposed to video games. Mobile developers have the ability to take huge “leaps of faith’ of which other developers would not dream. These creative choices can go horribly wrong, but in the case of games like Angry Birds, they can be hugely successful.

The growth of that market is buoyed by an explosion in hardware. New mobile devices appear almost weekly, each promising heightened user experience. Each one has its own set of limitations and capabilities for audio. It’s no surprise that consumers are expecting better audio in their mobile games. The explosion of music-based games has created an interesting phenomenon: people are listening more.

No longer can mobile game developers rely on the visual canvas alone; there is an empty void around the device that can be occupied with captivating content. If a game is performing well in the marketplace, chances are it sounds great. Making audio for games is difficult, but factor in a tiny, mono speaker with extreme hardware/OS limitations and things get hairy. Luckily, mobile phones have rapidly evolved and the days of developers requesting that I create a 4K MIDI score have disappeared. Nevertheless, creating audio content for today’s mobile gaming devices requires a unique skill set.

Today’s mobile games are typically developed at breakneck speeds. As a result, audio often becomes the last ingredient, as developers scramble just to get their game out. To save time, they sometimes buy music tracks or sound effects from an online store. With the right set of ears, this can work, but audio is usually “thrown in” without much thought or testing. Such practices prevent a good game from climbing the charts. There is a reason why film producers hire a composer, sound designer and audio engineer rather than buying canned content – they want the final product to take on a life of its own.

In Living Mono: Starting with the Hardware

When Apple released the iPhone 3, they heralded the new features – including “enhanced mono”. Soon after release, this descriptive term was deleted from the specs. (Am I the only one that noticed the quick removal of that term from their description?) Technically, the iPhone/iPad speakers are not true stereo, but mono. The silky high frequencies make up for it, though – you can lay the device down and enjoy what you are hearing.

Of course, when using headphones you hear everything across the sonic spectrum. One challenge of creating audio content for mobile is taking into account the possibility of headphone usage. The iPad allows for a bit more mid-range frequency content, so I considered this when working with Backflip Studios on their new game “Backflip Slots.”

Developing Backflip Slots

Typically, a mobile game will have a looping background ambience, background music, dialogue and UI/gameplay sounds. For the menu ambience in Backflip Slots, I visited a casino here in Colorado and brought along my Zoom H4 handheld recorder to capture the casino soundscape. Luckily, security didn’t ask any questions as I entered the building with this strange little device. After finding my way to the rows of slots machines, I sat in the middle and started playing. This location gave me a nicely-balanced ambience, so I placed the recorder on the seat next to me and started experimenting with different configurations. All this was done without headphones, so I had to use my best judgement and just go for it.

The funny thing about casinos is that every slot machine plays their jingles in the key of C. The result is a hypnotizing cacophony that keeps the players hooked. I have actually played live gigs at casinos before and been instructed to keep every song in the key of C. This is surreal, much like playing alongside a choir of robots!

Since “Backflip Slots” was getting a more traditional look, we needed the sound to follow suit. For the reel spin, I went for a looping mechanical sound with a subtle friction texture. To achieve this, I combined the sound of a tractor engine with factory machinery samples from my own sound library. The two sounds were then mixed together and combined with elements from Native Instruments’ Sonic Fiction.

Seamless looping is commonplace in games but often brings technical challenges. That can detract from the creative focus, but it’s a necessary evil, given the technical limitations of the hardware platforms. The reel landing sounds needed more of a chunky ‘click’ feel that would not be too overbearing.

Each bonus spin-character icon has an animated sequence in which they come to life and jump off the screen. These actions received everything from an 8-bit flamethrower to the sound of a samurai sword being unsheathed. One of the keys to creating sonic appeal is subtlety and this can require extensive testing. Game sounds should not grate on the nerves even after being heard hundreds of times. This usually entails experimenting with volume, EQ and pitch shifting in the studio. The end result should always be a pleasant listening experience for the development team and ultimately, the player.

The win sequences were also in sharp contrast to the reel spins and button presses. Win animations explode on the screen with coins raining down on top of an animated logo. Add pulsating lasers and lightning strikes and you now have some serious eye candy! These received a good amount of ‘bling’ on the sonic end and went through extensive revisions before completion. Even when being piled on top of each other, each audio file must be audible and clean. Since the game featured all of their IP (Paper Toss, NinJump, Graffiti Ball, etc), I took the existing sounds from other games and remixed them to work within Slots. In the case of “NinJump”, I blended the hiyaahh with a gong cymbal for the combo win. Some of the combinations are buried deep in the game and will only be heard by the top players.

It’s always a blast working with Backflip on these games so stay tuned for some big suprises in 2011.

About the Author

Ben Long is a composer, sound designer and founder of NoiseBuffet. He recently spoke at GDC China on the subject of “creating audio content for mobile games” Ben’s sonic signature can be heard on over 40 games, including the forthcoming release of LodeRunner Mobile. In addition to games, his music is aired on every major TV network and was recently used in the Stevie Wonder Biography on A&E. Ben is a lifelong gamer and has been featured in three game design textbooks. Learn more about game audio and his new ebook at gameaudio101.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the Bang on a Can / Cantaloupe store

More info:

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

The history of music and the history of music notation are closely intertwined. Now, digital languages for communicating musical ideas between devices, users, and software, and storing and reproducing those ideas, take on the role notation alone once did. Notation has always been more than just a way of telling musicians what to do. (Any composer will quickly tell you as much.) Notation is a model by which we think about music, one so ingrained that even people who can’t read music are impacted by the way scores shape musical practice.

All of this creates a special challenge. Musical notational systems had traditionally evolved over centuries. Now, we face the daunting question of how to build that language overnight.

This question has been a topic I’ve visited in a couple of talks, first here in New York at in/out fest last December, then most recently for a more general audience at RSVP, a new conversation series in Hamburg, Germany hosted by the multi-disciplinary design studio Precious Forever. (See photo at top, by which we can prove that the event happened. Check out more on the event and how the Precious gang hope this will inspire new interchange of ideas in Hamburg – something perhaps to bring to your town.)

What I’ve learned in talking to people at those events is, music notation matters. It’s more relevant to broad audiences than even those audiences might instinctively think. The most common lingua franca we have for digital music storage, MIDI, is woefully inadequate.

But perhaps most importantly: replacing MIDI’s primitive note message is far from easy. The more you try to “fix” MIDI, the more you appreciate its relative simplicity. And engineering new solutions could take re-examining assumptions Western music notation has made for centuries.

Musical notation and culture

Explaining the importance of notation to expert musicians is easy. But to convey its importance to lay people, you need look no further than the game interface developed by Harmonix for the hit titles Guitar Hero and Rock Band (and in turn descended from a similar interface paradigm used in the Japan-only Konami GuitarFreaks). These games demonstrate that, even among non-musician gamers, certain received wisdoms from Western notation endure. (In fairness, many of the designers of music games have a fair bit of musical experience, but the fact that their work is received by audiences in the way it is nonetheless speaks volumes.)

The Guitar Hero interface actually is a Western musical score, rotated 90 degrees to make it easier to see how the events on-screen are matched to game play input. (For visual effect, the “track” is also rotated away from the screen, so that events further in the future recede into the background – a bit of visual flair that helped differentiate Harmonix from flatter-looking Japanese games.)

Whatever the rotation, the assumptions of the game screen itself are rooted in notation. Pitch is displayed along lines and spaces, just as on a score. Rhythm is displayed along a metrical grid, which reads as a linear track. Not coincidentally, I believe, when Harmonix has deviated from this formula, their titles have tended to be less successful. More sophisticated interactions in titles like Amplitude and Frequency (and the iPod game Phase) were big hits among gamers, but less so among the general public, perhaps in part because they require a more abstract relationship to the music.

Games are just one example, of course. Musical scores reflect basic cultural expectations, and in turn shape the music that people in that culture produce. As with most Western languages, text flows from left to right and top to bottom. Ask people to describe pitch in any culture that uses this notational system, and they’ll use the notions of “up” and “down,” “higher” and “lower” – even though these metaphors are meaningless in terms of sound. (Indonesian culture, for instance, gets it more physically correct, by describing what we call higher pitches as “smaller” and deeper pitches as “larger,” as they are in gongs.) And music in Western cultures are also deeply rooted on a grid, on 4/4 time and equal subdivisions. It wasn’t always so: even in the West, prior to the advent of notation of these meters, metrical structures flowed more freely.

It’s little surprise, then, that some of the biggest successes in electronic musical instruments have adopted the same conventions. From the Moog sequencer to the Page R editor on the Fairlight CMI sampler to the array of buttons on Roland’s grooveboxes, rhythmic sequencers that follow the grids devised in Western music notation are often the most popular. Even if the paradigm of the interface is one degree removed from the notation, the assumptions of how rhythms are divided – and thus the kinds of patterns you produce – remain.

Nowhere is this more true than in MIDI. MIDI is itself a kind of notational system, around which nearly all interfaces in software and hardware have been based over the past two and a half decades since its introduction.

MIDI, keyboards, and piano rolls: An incomplete “standard”

The first thing to understand about MIDI is that it began life as a keyboard technology. A complete history of MIDI should wait for another day, but even as its early history is told by the MIDI Manufacturing Association, it’s a technology for connecting keyboard-based synthesizers, not a solution to the broader question of how to represent music in general.

Many of the tradeoffs in MIDI, though, were made long before the 1980s or the invention of digital technology. When the 19th Century creators of the player piano needed not only standardization but reproduce-ability – before the advent of recording, the power to recreate entire musical performances – they turned to the piano as a way of modeling musical events. Indeed, the first player pianos quite literally reproduced the process of playing a piano, using wooden, mechanical fingers to strike notes on the keys just as a human would, before that mechanism was replaced with the internal players familiar to us today. What these inventors found in the piano was an instrument that, in the name of accessibility, aligned pitch to a simple grid.

The piano is a beautiful instrument, but its great innovation – the grid of its black and white keys – is also its greatest shortcoming. That grid is an imperfect model even of Western musical pitches, let alone other cultural systems. The 12-tone equal-tempered tuning used on modern pianos makes tuning multiple keys easier, but only by way of compromises. Even a modern violinist or singer may differentiate between the inflection of a G flat and an F sharp, based on context, but to the piano, these pitches are the same. And tuning is only the beginning. Piano notes begin with a note being “switched” on and end with it being “switched” off – no bending or other events within that pitch as on most other instruments.

It’s little wonder, given MIDI’s origins as a protocol for communicating amongst keyboards, that the editing view most common in music software is the piano roll, labeled as such. The piano roll is the perfect paradigm for sequencing events played on a keyboard, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best language for describing all music. And the obligation of a digital protocol is actually greater than that of musical notation, because there’s no human being at the other end to fill in missing expression and context.

Consider what’s missing in MIDI:

• Pitch reference: By convention, MIDI note 60 is C4. However, musical practice internationally lacks a consistent standard for what the tuning of C4 is, and any number of variables can interfere, from independent tuning tables to the use of the pitch bend to the activation of an octave transpose key.
• Pitch meaning: MIDI note values use an arbitrary pitch range from 0 to 127, a hypothetical 128-key piano, which itself makes no sense. 4? 8? 15? 16? 23? 42? The numbers themselves don’t mean anything.
• Pitch resolution: Because of the 0-127 resolution constraints, to get notes in between the pitches, you need a series of separate messages like pitch bend, giving you two values with only an incidental relationship to one another. Since pitch range is kept in yet another message, the results are confusing and un-musical, far more complex than they need to be. (Why wouldn’t 60.5 be a half-tone higher than 60?)
• Real expression: Events between note on and note off are represented independently as control change values. But that causes problems, because it means there’s no standard way to represent something as simple as a musical glissando. On a synth, making an expression (like twisting a knob or turning a wheel) separate from a note (pressing a key) makes sense. But that doesn’t make musical sense, and it doesn’t match most non-keyboard instruments. Only aftertouch is currently available, and that again assumes a keyboard and doesn’t expose pitch relationships created by adding the data.
• Musical representations of tuning and mode: The MIDI Tuning extensions require that you dump tuning information in fairly unstructured System Exclusive binary dumps. The standard itself is in some flux, and at best, its reliance on byte messages means that it’s not something a human being can read. And it still must be aligned with 128 otherwise arbitrary values. It’ll work, but it only makes sense on keyboards, and even then, it’s not terribly musical. Looking at number 42 in your sequencer, you’d have no idea of the tuning behind it, or the position in a mode – something any rational musical notational system would make clear.

Ironically, it was this very set of constraints that early innovators on the Buchla and Moog synthesizers hoped to escape. They were fully aware that the very genius of the keyboard was restricting musical invention. Analog control voltage, the basic means of interconnecting equipment prior to digital tech, was more open ended than MIDI, which replaced it. But that’s not to say it was better. Standardization is an aid in communication, as is the ability to describe messages. The question is, how can you do both? How can you be open ended and descriptive at the same time?

How do you build a new system?

Deconstructing is easy; constructing is hard. We certainly have the ability to send more open-ended messages and higher-resolution data; that’s not a problem. (Even by the early 80s when MIDI was introduced, its tiny messages and slow transmission speeds were conservative.) We also have OpenSoundControl (OSC), which has some traction and popularity, including near-viral use on mobile devices and universal support in live visual applications. It’s telling that that protocol is itself not really an independent protocol in the sense that MIDI is, but built on existing standards like TCP/IP and UDP. 2010 is, after all, not 1984.

The hold-up, I think, is simply the lack of a solid proposal for how to handle musical notes. And there are plenty of distractions. It’s tempting to throw out the simplicity of MIDI’s note on and note off schema, but it’s partly necessary: with a live input, you won’t know the duration of a pressed key until that key is released. It’s equally tempting to cling to Western musical pitches, even though those pitches themselves lack solid standardization and don’t encompass musical practices in the rest of the world. (12-tone equal temperament is a recent invention even in the Western world, and one that doesn’t encompass all of our musical practice. World tunings should best be described not by majority, but plurality, anyway – have a look at the current demographics of Planet Earth.)

One solution is simply to express musical events by frequency. That’s not a bad lowest common denominator, or a way to set the frequency of an oscillator. As a musical representation, though, it’s inadequate. It’s simply not how we think musically. The numbers are also unpleasant, because we perceive pitch roughly logarithmically. Pop quiz:

Can you do logarithms in your head? Yes or no?

Can you count?

MIDI gets it half right by using numbers, but then it’s hard to see octave equivalence, another essential concept for perceiving pitch. MIDI note 72 is probably equivalent to MIDI note 60… assuming 12 steps per octave. Or it might not be.

If you need a common denominator that covers a variety of musical traditions, mode (or more loosely, pitch collection) and register aren’t a bad place to start. I don’t think a system needs to be terribly complex. It could simply be more descriptive than MIDI is – while learning from the things MIDI does effectively.

Consider a new kind of musical object, described over any protocol you choose. It would ideally contain:

• Mode/pitch collection: As with MIDI and the MIDI tuning tables, tuning would need to be defined independently, but it can be done in a musical, human-readable way. It then becomes possible even to define modes that have different inflections based on context, as with pitches that are slightly different in ascending and descending gestures (common in many musical systems).
• Relative degree: a notation like “1 1 2 3 5 6″ can work in any musical language. You simply need to know the active mode or pitch collection.
• Register: Instead of conflating register and scale degree, you could simply define an octave register and starting frequency. This retains modal identities and octave equivalence, and makes relative transposition easy to understand. (A “transposition” message could be defined as an actual message, which is more musically meaningful.)
• Standardized inflections, connected to pitch: Pitch bends and glissandi should be relative to a specific note, because notes can have pitches that bend around their relative scale degree. (Think of a singer bending just below a note and into the actual pitch. These aren’t independent events.) A trombonist would never have invented MIDI notes. They would likely have immediately turned to the question of how to universally describe bending between notes.
• Yes, frequency: There will be times when directly referring to frequency makes sense, and that should be possible, as well.
• Relative duration: Musical notation, regardless of musical culture, uses some kind of relative indication of duration. Only machines use raw clock values. The result is that it’s possible to make musically meaningful changes in tempo and have durations respond accordingly. And whereas note on and note on events make sense on input, a musical event would not logically separate these events; there’s some notion of an event with a beginning, middle, and end. If you sing an ‘A,’ that’s one event, with a duration, not an independent beginning of the note and end of the note.

Far from replacing existing standards for music notation, this kind of standard could interchange more gracefully with printed notation. If you import a standard MIDI file into notation software, you get results that are typically full of errors, because the SMF lacks musical information about the events it contains. With more of that information stored, and stored in standard ways, translating to paper would become vastly more effective.

I’m sure attempts to model this in OSC have been attempted before, but it’s worth compiling those ideas and resurrecting the discussion.

What about input?

Ah, you say, but then, let’s go back to the keyboard. None of these events makes sense on a keyboard. You don’t know when a note is pressed how long it’ll last. You don’t know the modal degree of a particular, arbitrarily-played note.

I was stuck on the same problem, until I realized what I had been taking for granted: MIDI conflates two very separate processes. It makes input and output the same. Musical notational systems have never done that. When you look at a score, it’s a set of musical ideas, given meaning and context. If you record a series of events from an input, those events don’t immediately have meaning or context. It’s confusing the mechanical with the musical. It’s the reason MIDI is not just like a player piano – it is a digital player piano.

Separate out the issue of recording mechanical input events, and you can have a system that’s more flexible. That system should fit whatever the input is. An organ, a shakuhachi, a didgeridoo, and an electric guitar aren’t the same thing. Why would they be represented with the same set of input events? That’s pretty daft.

Look at it this way: imagine if instead of being invented by synthesizer people, Aeolian Harp players had invented MIDI. (It’s not so far-fetched: the Aeolian Harp has a millenia-long history and was once quite popular.) An Aeolian Harp sequencer would feature elaborate, high-resolution data recording for wind pressure relative to different strings. It might measure, even, wind direction. In fact, it’d look a lot more like meteorological data than musical data per se. It certainly wouldn’t involve integers from 0 to 127.

This should lead to a simple conclusion with profound consequences:

Physical input and musical output should not be the same thing.

One of the advantages of a protocol like OSC (or any open, networked, self-described protocol) is that it can be open-ended and descriptive, meeting our earlier challenge. For instance, using a hierarchy of meta-data attached to the message, you could describe a set of variables relevant to wind input. If you wanted to transcribe the results in musical terms, you could then use a musical notation, as above – one that used musical identity attached to the resulting frequencies, as in relative modal pitch and rhythmic duration. But the input would be a separate problem. That’s a far piece from MIDI, which is adequate neither as a complete description of the input device, nor of any kind of resulting musical system.

But wait a minute – how is there a standard? How do you standardize something that could include an Aeolian Harp, a vuvuzela, and a bagpipe? Welcome to the problem of music. Music is by its very nature resistant to standardization, because the possibilities of the physical world are so broad. This also suggests how input protocols (and output protocols) can go beyond musically-exclusive data. Again, we can turn back to MIDI as a model. MIDI was intended with specific applications in mind, with messages that referred to MIDI notes and filter cutoff. But that didn’t stop it from being warped to accommodate tasks well outside the standard, ranging from triggering videos to controlling amusement park robotic characters (literally). This suggests to me that what defines a standard protocol of this kind is not what is most strictly standardized, but what is most flexible.

The real challenge with something like OSC, then, is to come up with standardized ways of defining non-standardized events, and using some kind of reflection or remote invocation to allow devices or software that have never communicated before to handle unexpected messages intelligently. At the very least, they should give users clear, understandable options about the data they send and receive. This independent question has been one the OSC community has raised for some time. To me, all that remains is to make some compelling implementations and let the most effective solution evolve and win out. Recent reading on the topic (though this absolutely deserves a separate post, which I’ll get to soon):
Best Practices for Open Sound Control
Minuit : Propositions for a query system over OSC

That’s a separate problem from how to make events musically meaningful. But that to me is the central revelation, and something MIDI completely misses: these are two separate problems, not one problem. Handle input events as input. If it makes sense in a sequencer to record them as musical events (like scale degree pitches), do that. If it makes sense to record them as a series of time-stamped, physical events, do that – but with actual information relative to what was recorded, so that the wind across an Aeolian Harp is recorded in a way that makes sense for that input. And when describing musical events, describe them in musical ways.

This isn’t relevant only to music communities, either: it’s relevant to anyone recording events in time. It’s part of the reason the “sound” needs to be dropped from OSC. MIDI is as specific as it is partly because the specification has messages too small to contain information describing what the events mean. We now have standard network protocols that do that, so they can include information about other kinds of events. There’s no reason someone monitoring water levels in their herb garden and someone recording a sousaphone solo couldn’t use some of the same underlying protocols. There’s also every reason they’d record different kinds of data content.

Promising venues and a call to action

There’s really no need to try to “replace” or “fix” MIDI – if MIDI has endured for a specific application, maybe it actually is well-suited to that application. I think it’s time, instead, to think about how new systems can encompass more musical meaning from our own traditions and traditions around the world, and how we can standardize broad ranges of events instead of trying to fit everything into narrow, rigid boxes.

There is every reason to believe new things can happen now, too. Whereas hardware standardization once was a slow process, requiring the involvement of major manufacturers, we now carry around programmable computers inside our pockets as “phones” and learn to write embedded code in Freshman college classes using $30 Arduino boards. If you want new hardware standards, you can literally make them yourself. We have the ability to share musical notation directly in a Web browser using standard descriptions, as covered here recently. Because browsers in general are demanding newly distributed, networked applications, communicating in standard ways – as Web APIs do naturally – is becoming imperative.

But there’s one thing that makes me especially optimistic: you. Via the Web, we have instant access to your collective knowledge and experience. That means it’s a sure thing that all of us, collectively, knows more about previous research in this area, previous ideas, and what has and hasn’t worked. We also have the opportunity to communicate with each other, to make ideas evolve, at least experimentally. That doesn’t remove the need for eventual standardization, but good standards follow practice, not the other way around – something has to work in one place before it can be a shared standard. We also have mechanisms for self-standardization that didn’t exist before. Spoken languages evolve because people collectively work to share common means of communication. You might argue that this leads to a tower of Babel, but then, I’m writing this in English and you’re reading it in the same language and (hopefully) understanding. The same is true of Mandarin, Portuguese, German, Arabic, Hindi, and so on. It’s also true of volunteer adoption on the Internet of HTML, XML, JSON, and RSS.

Music is not the result of notation or standards. It’s the other way around. Musical practice long predated any attempt to write it down. And mathematics and written language each have abilities to describe music and many other media.

To me, two questions remain:
1. What would an implementation of structured messages for pitch and duration look like, perhaps implemented via OSC? What history has been there in this area, and what do you need?
2. How can smarter implementations of a protocol like OSC allow software and hardware to better handle unfamiliar input – as musicians, as they have done since the dawn of time, invent novel physical interfaces?

I look forward to kicking off this discussion and hearing what you think.

My own President Obama is this week off making his pitch for why Chicago should host the Olympic Games. Correction. Oops. I need to read the news. Chicago was eliminated first. But look out – our friends at Antipop (slogan: “antipop music for a pop music”) are using a different tool in their arsenal: music.

Watch the video for some fun gear spotting, plus one vintage arcade cabinet. I could point out stuff I see, but that’d spoil the fun. Shout out in comments.

There’s definitely a commercial gloss on this, but it’s nicely executed, and felt so absurdly Olympic to me that I actually couldn’t help but smile listening. (In fairness, either Chicago or Madrid ought to be able to do better than New York did with 2012; I recall dignitaries in traffic while rowers paced the polluter waters of Flushing Meadows. Yipes.)

Here you go, probably the most commercial music we’ll ever run on CDM:

Makes me want to, like, train or something.

Updated: From comments, I like these alternative suggestions by safd in place of “anti” pop:

superpop, poppypop, hippop, popcore, purelypop, universapop

Popcore is something I need to work on. It was worth posting this for that word alone.

Background: “Antipop is the Antonio Escobar music production personal studio, one of the most awarded Spanish producer and composer.” [sic]

Update: Superpop or antipop, the song alone couldn’t melt the hearts of the Olympic Committee. Congrats to – Rio!

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.

In a Hollywood overrun with remakes, a new Tron has quite a daunting challenge. The original film may be a cult hit for its 80s arcade cool, but it also was a seminal moment in the evolution of computer animation, at the nexus of obsessive-compulsive optical effects that came before and digital effects that came after. (Google Perlin Noise, if you must.) But where the bits of the effects look uneven or dated alongside the brilliant, it’s nearly impossible to top the genius of Wendy Carlos’ score. Her deft blend of choirs, orchestras, organs, and rich electronics wasn’t just forward looking: it’s fresh today, an alternative to some of the signature sameness in today’s games and films.

Perhaps Tron Legacy will do what other belated sequels have not: express love for the original. With Daft Punk helming the score and a reverent, inspired crew ready to make Tron live again, the trailer last week was the real sleeper hit of Comic-Con.

If that’s not enough layers of fandom, though, head to GearSlutz for a lesson in film scoring and a recreation of the trailer in Reason, custom Reaktor patches, and Ableton Live. This is not much of an infomercial for Live: because Ableton’s arrange view doesn’t quite understand frames, scoring with Live is a bit of a beast. (Live 9, anyone?) But it’s a great example of love for the movie and its original score. And hey, everyone need a source of joy, even a film.

Ableton Live for Sound Design :Tron Legacy [GearSlutz forum]

Stripped the original audio and redid all of the sound from scratch using Reason/NI Reaktor/Ableton Live 8. An M-Audio Axiom 49 was used to perform the Lightcycle Engine Oscillations

Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, we get it. You revolutionized film scoring and electronic orchestration, and we’re all in your debt. It’s not so much that you switched on Bach or switched on Moog or even switched on Kubrick and guys in glowing skin-tight outfits. You switched on sound, and nothing has been quite the same since.

Now, we just have to hope 2010 can show us a good time, too.

“UP” Sound for Film Profile from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

Miguel Isaza has created a must-read new blog for anyone interested in sound design, and much to our delight has put it on noisepages. He’s being incredibly prolific with posts, covering creative projects to get your ideas flowing, terrific overviews of leading people in the field with links to interviews and resources for learning about their work, and tons of links for learning your craft technologically and artistically.

http://designingsound.noisepages.com/

Naturally, Pixar figures prominently, with some of the best sound design on the silver screen in recent years. I’m looking forward to finally seeing UP; Michael Coleman offers the video above. See Miguel’s site for more links and interviews and an overview of the all-star team that did sound for Pixar’s latest.

Thanks for this great resource, Miguel; I’ll certainly be reading daily.