four tiny drum machines from ALH84001 on Vimeo.

Cybernetics is poised to make a comeback. The theory is, everything from electronic circuits to plants and animals can be understood in terms of feedback loops, as organisms – mechanical or organic – respond to input from their surroundings. The father of modern cybernetics, MIT mathematician Norbert Weiner, was inspired by working on the guidance systems of missiles. His writing was picked up Louis and Bebe Barron, informing their organism-like sonic circuits, as used in the film Forbidden Planet. The word cybernetic itself comes from Plato. Plato was talking about human self-governance. But designed with cybernetic ideas in mind, technology, too, becomes self-governing and autonomous – and the sonic circuits, too.

Young designers like Eric Archer are to me the newest continuation of work like the Barrons’. Inside his lab, Eric and others are creating hardware that behaves like intelligent life. In the video at top, four tiny drum machines, equipped with insect-like brains and reflexes, network together wirelessly over infrared, responding to light by way of photocells. These tiny devices form a colonial consciousness.

Eric may be a mad scientist, but he isn’t keeping his work secret or proprietary. He’s sharing the tools, sharing his methods, and with a whole growing crew of sonic DIYers in Austin, Texas, inviting anyone to join the revolution under the banner of the Handmade Music series. (More on the upcoming event shortly.) If you’re not from Texas, a lot of this documentation is also appearing online.

Here are more of the creations, plus the simple but powerful circuit that makes it all happen.

And yes, there’s a lot of potential to wireless IR sync.

The drums have names:

Drum Machines (Eric Archer)
ASR mk I “pops”: two analog damped sine oscillators with photocell pitch control, 16 presets
ASR mk II “snappy”: analog white noise, photocell controlled filter, envelope + VCA, 16 presets
ASR mk III “twiki”: photocell tuned analog osc, photocell tuned LPF, envelope + VCA, programmable
ASR mk IV “boomer”: analog damped sine oscillator, long decay, photocell pitch envelope, programmable

But drum machines are just the beginning of what could eventually be wirelessly synced. First up, this autonomous bassline generator, created by 4ms Pedals

The Autonomous Bassline Generator creates deterministic bassline patterns in a sci-fi retro sound by generating melodies on the fly, based on a knob. It’s just an AVR (attiny44) chip doing all the work, plus an opamp to act as the filter (photocell). The blue button is Tap Tempo, or if you hold it down for 1 second, it syncs up to the pulses on the IR receiver (this lets you beat-sync multiple Andromeda Space Rocker modules). The red button lets you edit a single note in the melody. Pulse-width modulation is currently pre-set to a certain envelope, but that will become user-controllable soon!

Part of the “Andromeda Space Rockers” series of modules, see www.ericarcher.net for drum modules.

The 6-pin header board dangling to the right is an ISP header. Totally hackable!

“Ah,” you say. “But I have computers and things. I don’t just want a bunch of little drum machines running around my studio like so many electronic beetles while I furiously tap my tap tempo in Ableton. Can’t I sync thing up?”

Yes. Yes, you can. There’s already a MIDI-to-IR prototype in the works.

Four analog drum machines are synchronized with a desktop computer running Logic. Logic is playing a loop with TR808 samples. MIDI timecode from Logic is converted to IR Sync with a PIC microcontroller. The PIC flashes an infrared LED, providing wireless clock to a chain of analog drum modules. Each drum module has an onboard sequencer, analog sound generator, and IR Sync repeater. At the end of the video, the tempo is increased to almost 3000 BPM. In a separate test, the system played OK at 1000 BPM. Of course this tempo is ridiculous but it is a nice “torture test” of Nathan’s PIC code.

PIC stuff: Nathan Wooster
drum machines: Eric Archer

Our friends at Bleep Labs also have projects in the works.

Eric and 4ms have contributed the circuits at the heart of this.

This simple circuit handles infrared clock networking. (Click for the full circuit.) I’m assuming you know how to read this; we may have to put together an actual how-to tutorial for those new to electronics, too.

And 4ms has a version for interfacing with microcontrollers.

The Barrons would be proud.

For more on the Handmade Music series as it spreads around the planet, visit http://handmademusic.noisepages.com.

The song “Daisy Bell” has a special place in computer history. Max Mathews, who had by the late 50s pioneered digital synthesis using IBM 704 mainframe, arranged the tune in 1961 for vocoder-derived vocal synthesis technology on technology developed by John Larry Kelly, Jr.. Kelly himself is better known for applying number theory to investing in the markets — an unfortunate achievement in the wake of a financial collapse brought down by misuse of mathematical theory.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke happened to hear the 704 singing the Mathews/Kelly “Daisy Bell,” and the rest is (fictional) history – the HAL computer in the book and movie sings the song as he is being disconnected, as though the computer had learned this song as a “child.”

Here’s Max himself (namesake for Max, the patching language), overseeing a rendition of his arrangement:

Today, basic vocal synthesis has become part of the fabric of taken-for-granted tech, and the legendary rendition by a singing robotic voice part of our culture. These things are no longer futuristic or strange. Apple this week even launched a music player that announces its own tracks in the form of the new iPod shuffle.

But what happens when those same human beings imitate the computer? That’s the question asked by artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, crowdsourcing human input by inviting thousands of participants to contribute their voice using custom recording software built in Processing. The basic technique is something Koblin has used before: his Sheep Market massed an Internet labor market, paid two cents on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, to draw walls full of thousands of sheep. Those sheep proved at once massive in quantity and unique in individual quality, and, if you squinted at them, presented a critique of global labor practice.

Koblin has also done various seminal pieces with the Processing coding language that change our perception of data and technology, like his now oft-cited “Flight Patterns,” tracing the paths of overhead planes.

This time, the computer/human relationship is truly inverted. Each singer participant imitates a sound component from the robot singing. The humans are then combined to synthesize the robot sound instead of the other way around. The result: organic technology combined into a cyborg, online chorus. No one singer knows what it is they’re singing in whole. It’s perhaps the first mass-human synthesis of sound, and the results are truly unusual.

And strange synthesis seems to be what Koblin’s work is fundamentally about. Perhaps it’s not Mathews’ sound experiments, but Kelly’s ideas about quantifying global markets that are most relevant. (For an extra dose of irony, Google HAL – you’ll get stock ticker HAL, for Haliburton, one of the few stocks that has grown in this economy.) In our reality, the University of Illinois didn’t create a super-smart, spaceship-controlling robotic brain – but they did create the Web browser.

And after all, all of us are now living in the aftermath of many crowds of people behaving collectively without genuine larger knowledge of what they were doing. Robots were envisioned at the beginning of the 20th Century as out-of-control automatons, crushing civilization, and were often then appropriated as metaphors for fascist government. Now, the vision can be equally apocalyptic, but the meaning is inverted. It’s human beings acting as automatons – without contact with human scale – that threaten to crush the Earth. And this time, they’re capitalists.

On the other hand, the beauty of art is its ability to mean many things at once. Koblin’s sheep and now his singers never cease to be whimsical. And in their beauty, they suggest that perhaps even massed crowds of Internet-connected people can sing in harmony.

For the future of humanity, I hope so. But then, if we fail, we’ll always have the robots.

“Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?”

Bicycle Built for 2000: Info

What if all the technology you loved, everything that ran on electricity, came to life and played one epic musical performance?

That’s about as best as I can sum up the “Emergence” event happening in Ontario and in an online stream. It’s a workshop. It’s a performance. It’s Commodore 64s and surplus parts. It’s cybernetic theory. There’s a robotic singer. It’s at a computer museum. Nerdtastic.

Rod Adlers describes his own setup: “3 Commodore 64′s running Cynthcart and MSSIAH, iPod Touch using Brian Eno’s ‘Bloom’ program, Korg MS2000 and M50, and Fruity Loops.” Nice – it’s like the radio station phrase, “the greatest hits of yesterday and today.”

Valentine’s Day, indeed — if you’re dating a robot / computer / nerd (or robotic computer nerd), you know how to celebrate. There’s an online stream, happily, for all of us too unlucky to be in Ontario this weekend. If you are there, “video, photography and interviews” are all “encouraged.” Please do share with us on planet CDM. Syd Bolton writes:

You can see some newspaper coverage from today at:
http://pcmuseum.ca/files/media/ExposFeb2009EmergWeb.jpg

The show will be broadcast live the day of at:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/emergent-behaviour

Our page for it is at
http://www.pcmuseum.ca/emergence.asp

Full details:

The Personal Computer Museum proudly presents Emergence: A Cybernetic Musical Series that launches an international tour in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.

Join Dr. David Ogborn (Regina, SK) as he takes you on a musical experience with original music, robotics, and lyrics that will make you think about the future of cybernetics.

Join us for a free workshop at noon that explains how to use microcontrollers to control robotics and then see it in action during the afternoon performance.

Classic computer musicians Rob Adlers (Kitchener, ON) and Leif Bloomquist (Toronto, ON) will open for Dr. Ogborn with a musical experience like no other.

Admission to this event is by donation to the Personal Computer Museum.

DOORS OPEN AT 10:00 AM

Browse the museum to explore the rich history of computers and making music. Various programs and pieces of hardware await you on your tour.

FREE WORKSHOP AT 12:00 PM

Sound Art with Computers, Microcontrollers and Surplus Parts: Dr. David Ogborn, creator and performer of Emergence, will demonstrate the use of readily available technologies (laptop computers, Arduino and PIC microcontrollers, surplus parts) to create art objects, musical performance devices, and cybernetic performers – such as the robotic singer CESARE featured in Emergence! The workshop is for anyone interested in music, electronics and computers, and will be at an introductory level – no prior experience is assumed or required.