As using sounds produced on unusual 8-bit systems and game consoles grows in popularity, some artists are appropriating the music as their own. Sometimes, as with Beck, a well-known or better-marketed artist is using lesser-known artists for purposes of novelty. That alone has riled some in the hard-core chiptune community. In some cases, though, artists are resorting to outright theft. In the most recent case, part of the problem is people misunderstanding Creative Commons licenses, even though those licenses are designed to encourage sharing.

Is Creative Commons a safe license to use, or does it encourage this kind of theft? I think CC is actually a solution, not part of the problem – and this illustrates that.

Not Just Timbaland: Fitts for Fights Syndrome

Online music piracy is well known. But ready access to music online has led to a much more serious problem: digital plagiarism.

The best known case, of course, is the infamous 2007 Timbaland Controversy, in which Timbaland apparently stole musical elements from Finnish demoscene artist Tempest in the song Do It by Nelly Furtado. (See EM411 story, Wikipedia article.) But Timbaland isn’t alone.

At least Timbaland was using a sample; some artists steal whole songs outright. The notorious Norwegian duo Fitts for Fights performed entire sets stolen from demoscene/"microscene" recordings — and kept playing the stolen tunes live.

In April of this year, Laromlab released an entire album — every last track — stolen from other recordings. After CMJ reported the story, widely discussed on chip community 8-bit collective, the "artist" was forced to admit the entire album was a "hoax." (Thanks, Peter Swimm, for the tip.)

In fact, the track record here demonstrates that, for all Timbaland’s press as the most famous figure involved, micromusical plagiarism is rampant. It’s not just geeks getting defensive; there’s something to this, fueled by the novelty and apparent obscurity of the music. (See also: an ongoing thread on Pouet.net.)

Crystal Castles and Creative Commons

The latest episode combines 8-bit musical plagiarism with an abuse of Creative Commons licenses. Crystal Castles is a Toronto-based band that’s gotten quite a lot of positive press for their use of 8-bit sounds, including a keyboard with an Atari chip. (And there’s the source of the problem: this stuff is "hot" partly because it’s novel to mainstream press.)

Unfortunately, some of Crystal Castles’ sound apparently isn’t their their own.

Few names inspire love from digital musicians quite like Elektron, makers of the Monomachine, Machinedrum, and SIDstation drum machines. So when Elektron’s founder Daniel Hansson passed away in an auto accident last summer, it came as a shock to the tightly-knit, passionate musical community who loved his work and lost him too young. (It didn’t help that it came within weeks of the loss of Argu, the ingenious discoDSP and Image-Line software developer, also in a car accident.)

Tragedies like this are doubly sad, because in that loss we miss the opportunity to celebrate people whose work we love. So I’m pleased to be able to talk about a celebration of Daniel Hansson today.

The artist community who use Elektron’s stuff have put together a really epic compilation of music in tribute to Daniel. It’s all user-driven — Elektron didn’t do the organizing; the musicians did. The lineup has some of our favorite people contributing, famed and obscure alike:

Autechre, Beautiful Planet Earth, Boom Bip, dDamage, Daedelus, Dntel, Erase, Emnine, Future Image, Honey Claws, How Dragons Disappear, John Starlight, Jon Martensson, John Tejada, Kero, Landstrumm, Material Object, Micronaut, Music International, Orsan Kart, Pelektor, Proxy, scutopus, TS3K, and The Brown Moth, Tiga, The Sea and Cake, TreD Grp, Van Basten, AEVSVS, Wanker’s United

Many of these (The Sea and Cake, Boom Bip, Tiga, Proxy, John Starlight and others) are exclusive tracks.

You get 30 songs for US$5, donated to Daniel’s favorite charity, the World Wildlife Fund. (Additional WWF donations are welcome.) You’re even entered to win a SIDstation. (Yeah, I know — some of you are still smarting from not having won a Tenori-On, just as I am from having had to give it away. At least here, you can lose for a good cause, which is what I intend to do.)

45tribute

Another 25 songs are available free — really free, licensed Creative Commons.

(25 + 30 does not add up to 45, it’s true — 45 was Daniel’s favorite number and was in the name of his C64 group, Zone 45.)

Help Spread the Word

The organizers don’t have a PR budget for this, so we’re their PR — and, hey, I’ll bet we can do a better job, anyway. So do spread the word around.

Thanks to Ryan Faubion, the project manager and curator, for putting this together and letting us know about it, and to forum member / compilation contributor Wendell Edwards aka scutopus for the heads-up.

The era of artists regularly releasing stems for remixing seems imminent. In the meantime, we see occasional examples of artists who get it. Radiohead have a new feature on their tune Nude, promoted with Apple. Purchase stems of a song (that’s by stem, so you pay US$0.99 * 5 stems + 1 full song if you want everything), and you get audio via iTunes Plus. Purchase the full set, and you can also download a GarageBand / Logic Pro-compatible project with all loop, tempo, and key information embedded, as pictured at top. (Unless I’m mistaken, that’s also the ideal way to get uncompressed audio for use in other tools.)

If you happen to prefer another tool for remixing (say, one that rhymes with Mabledon Dive and is often seen running on computers from Apple), these are just DRM-free audio files, so the choice is yours. Upload the finished results to the Web, and the band will review submissions and open them to votes. There are already a number of remixes up at the moment.

NUDE RE/MIX on iTunes

Radiohead Remix Site

Hmmm, nude remixing? Brings new meaning to “bedroom producer.” Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Radiohead does specify that you can’t use these for commercial purposes; it’s too bad they didn’t choose to apply a Creative Commons non-commercial license, which would formalize essentially what they’re saying. But this is otherwise done quite nicely, nonetheless, and I hope we see more of this.

Like remixable music? Nine Inch Nails has a whole remix site, and indie label Magnatune lets you remix all their artists’ work via a Creative Commons license (though they typically don’t offer stems). Online music outlet Dance Tracks Digital goes beyond stems with full Ableton Live-ready projects, suitable for DJs. That’s just for starters; if you have other favorite remix resources, let us know.

As mentioned last week, the OLPC project has provided some 8.5GB of Creative Commons-licensed sound. Unfortunately, in an all-too-familiar scenario, the servers didn’t stand up to its instant popularity. Good news — most of the content is available now via torrent, with additional content on the Internet Archive.

We need a Few Good Seeds, so grab that torrent and seed it! (I am…)

Official OLPC sound samples page

Internet Archive links

olpc-sound-samples on Mininova (should be on other trackers, as well)

And previously…

8.5 GB of Free, CC-Licensed Samples from the OLPC Project, and OLPC Music Tools

Oh, yeah, and no one need feel guilty about using the samples. That was kind of the idea. (Not to mention, this could be a good sample source for working on projects for the OLPC.)

“Sure, the OLPC project is supposed to do wonderful things for children of the world, but what has it done for me, lately?” Well, if you fancy yourself one of the Earth’s children, the OLPC organization has assembled 8.5 gigabytes of sample content that’s free and Creative Commons-licensed — free to acquire, and free to use.

Jacob Joaquin, who runs the terrific thumbuki blog and the Csound Blog and is part ofthe team developing Csound for the OLPC’s XO laptop, shares the news via Dr. Richard Boulanger at Berklee. (See the press release as a zipped .doc.)

Plenty of people contributed top-notch sound: the Berklee College of Music, Csound developers around the world, electronica celebrity BT (himself a former Berklee and Boulanger student, among other alums), M-Audio and Digidesign, and the Open Path Music Group.

They’re donated under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so you can “freely create, compose, mix, remix, share, distribute and redistribute these samples and use them for any purpose as long as you clearly attribute the source.” That means anyone, anywhere can make use of this library — no OLPC required.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Sound_samples

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Talk:Sound_samples

Csound, OLPC Style

Whether you like the OLPC laptop itself or not, there’s plenty going on with the project. There’s the immediate impact of the hardware and software, yes — and plenty of opportunity to praise or criticize its utility there (perhaps the mark of a good, ambitious project). But there’s also the secondary impact. The OLPC has captured imaginations in terms of what future computers might be, and what they might mean to more of the population of the planet. More importantly, perhaps, it’s building a family of open source, Linux-based (and cross platform technology-based) tools, which could ultimately outlive the hardware platform. I have my own doubts about the OLPC itself, but the ideas for open sound making are about more than just that hardware. (For instance, just testing Processing, Arduino and Java on this kind of mobile platform can improve that software.)

The sample library is only part of the story; software tools is another part. Powered by Csound, the OLPC team wants to put sound synthesis and music production in the hands of kids — we’re talking serious digital synthesis here, not just GarageBand-style looping. That goal could ultimately go well beyond just the OLPC.

Csound is a free and open source development tool for sound design, synthesis, and signal processing, with a lineage that goes back to original developer Barry Vercoe and in turn descended from the first digital synthesis tools created by Max Mathews. It is the audio/music development system for the OLPC project, with integration with Python (though I’ve heard we should also see additional Java development).

Those geeky details aside, you’ll see in many of the reviews of the OLPC writers mentioning unusual and fun music toys. Those journalists are stumbling upon some of the projects below, and the process is just getting started.

Jacob had shared some brief looks at what he’s working on on his OLPC, but here’s the full overview from Dr. Boulanger, because there’s quite a lot happening:

All Kaoss, All the Time: In a world of endless choices, what happens to the creative power of limitations? Back in November, we saw Norman Fairbanks make an album entirely on Tenori-On, Yamaha’s interactive blinking-lights button pad.

“Ah,” you said. “But that sounds suspiciously like the music of Toshio Iwai, the Tenori-On’s composer-inventor. And it costs a lot of dough. And I have to live in the UK to buy it.”

Enter our friend Gary Kibler. He’s also a huge fan of the Tenori-On — he did cover the UK launch event for us, and then lauded its innovative design. But his creation uses a decidedly more accessible instrument: the Korg Kaossilator, which can be yours for a mere US$200 street — about US$1000 less than the Tenori-On.

Here’s the surprise: the sound-packed Kaossilator can do just as much as the Tenori-On, arguably more. And Gary really didn’t need anything else. The Yellow Album is –

Produced and performed exclusively on the Korg Kaossilator. No other effects, EQ or sounds were added other than those incorporated in the original device. Audio was recorded directly off the unit and the only edits performed externally were simple volume balancing.

The Yellow Album (free MP3 album from Gary Kibler) Updated: New link from ReverbNation, to save Gary’s bandwidth!

There you go. All you need is a Kaossilator. You can now cease lusting after anything else.

Okay, that wore off fast.

All Monome, All The Time With Something Else: Meanwhile, while I got distracted by turkey and stuffing and neglected to post this back at Thanksgiving, the Monome got an album of its own. Matthew Davidson, aka Stretta, did an “all-Monome album” called Grids, and made it fully free and Creative Commons-licensed. Like Kibler, Davidson has some significant credits as a composer (Davidson did the only-ever live performance of Switched-On Bach with Wendy Carlos — that being the original and greatest “entirely made on xx” synth album.)

So, what is the sound of one Monome playing?

You got it: silence. Yes, unlike the Korg and Yamaha instruments, the Monome has no sound generation facility of its own, meaning Matthew “limited” himself to a Doepfer modular, Prophet 5, and MOTU’s MachFive 2. In other words, it’s not really an all-Monome album. But it is quite good, and the Max patches used to make it are available free. (Wait, that’s yet another thing that’s not a Monome used on this album, if you’re still bothering to count.) Matthew, to his credit, admits “the notion of an all Monome album is somewhat of a misnomer.” But he does put forward the idea of a Monomist quite effectively.

Grids - The All-Monome Album (also on Audio News Room, LadyC]

I’m waiting for someone to hack some internal sounds into the Monome. Get back to us if you have. In the meantime, yes, the whole appeal of the Monome over something like a Kaossilator is that it’s just a controller, ready to be connected to whatever you desire — even visuals, or robots, or a giant space laser that blasts pretty patterns into the moon.

Monome, Unplugged — Erm, Live: Part of the cult popularity of the Monome phenomenon can be chalked up to the fact that the talented electronic artist Daedalus was playing out with an early prototype before anyone had even heard of a Monome. Daedalus has an album of his own — live at the Low End Theory event in LA. His live show is simply fantastic, so an album version sounds great to me — and it helps bolster the cause of genuine live electronic performance. I’m very much looking forward to this one. It won’t be free, but I like paying for music. On January 22, you can pay for his music, too.

Daedelus Readies Live Album [XLR8R]

Alpha Pup Records

Eat your heart out, Microsoft Surface! Musicians are taking up interactive tables as new ways of making their creations physically accessible, so listeners can reach out and touch the work.

Etiquette is a new interactive installation at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, featuring a light box on which musical elements can be manipulated by moving around blocks. It uses the same underlying library that was developed for the ReacTable synth, currently made famous by its use on Bjork’s tour.

But what’s nice about the Etiquette is — surprise — the music. Rather than predictable electronic sounds, Etiquette echoes and vibrates with laptop-sampled acoustic timbres, such as stand-up bass, banjo, brass, flute, and even glockenspiel. It’s still digital music: fragments of music are reconceived in the digital world, overlapping into an ambient landscape. But the common criticism of installation art — that you wouldn’t want to sit and listen to the music produced — is answered here. Etiquette is available as a downloadable Creative Commons-licensed four-track album. I just sat and listened to it, and was quite happy! It’s real music played by real musicians that seems perfectly suited to its interactive counterpart; the free-flowing form of the music is ideal for rearranging in an installation. (In somewhat less interactive form, I expect I may have it on repeat here in my studio on and off for the next few days!)

Everything was produced on-location: many of the materials themselves were found on site, and recordings were made around the workshop.

The project is a collaboration between musicians and technologists: the band FOUND worked with computer scientist (and CDM reader) Simon Kirby.

Simon writes in with additional details of the setup, which features Ableton Live, Max/MSP, and the ReacTIVision library:

Splice, a site for remixing songs, can now do something no Web browser app has successfully done before: pass for a dedicated audio app.

It’s no [Pro Tools, Ableton Live, SONAR, insert app here], but Splice’s online editor is a basic, functional audio sequencer with real-time arrangement, instruments, sync, and audio effects, all built in Adobe Flash CS3 / ActionScript 3. Sure, Flash has been able to do basic audio playback and mixing for some time. But Splice actually does things that dedicated audio applications normally do exclusively, such as sophisticated audio effects. There’s still quite a lot it doesn’t do, and since many of those things (live multitrack audio recording, hardware connections, and so on) aren’t currently possible in the browser, Web apps are unlikely to usurp dedicated music creation software any time in the forseeable future. But maybe that’s not the point: musicians can keep using the tools they love for music creation, then throw up a track and let a friend mash-up a new beat, or let fans create remixes. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine dedicated apps having similar online counterparts, or hooking seamlessly into such services.

And it’s what Splice does on the Web that makes it interesting. Not only are the tracks actively remixable, even by a casual listener new to the software who just wants to mess around, but sound sources are shared, too. You can pull up open freely-licensed samples from the Freesound Project, a collaborative database of sounds recorded around the world.

Little wonder then, that the lead developer of the new Splice has already made a name founding the sample project and sharing unusual software plug-ins (the traditional, offline type) for free. Bram de Jong, CTO and lead developer of the new Splice, is known to plug-in devotees for his involvement in Smartelectronix, a collective of developers releasing powerful and sometimes downright bizarre plugs for free. I got to talk to Bram about his new day job. He shares what Splice is about, what people are using it for, and how the heck they got Flash doing real audio.