Benga’s latest video was released early last month and made the blog rounds, but it’s worth considering as we continue our ongoing thread on visual music and how sound can go from invisible to tangible. A stunning video whets fans appetite for the upcoming Benga full-length Chapter 2, constructing a wave shape in physical form as a series of vinyl records. Using some 960 hand-cut vinyl records, the track’s waveform materializes in stop motion-filmed animation.

Physical as it may be, the inspiration, say the creative team, was SoundCloud. UK-based creative team Us, consisting of Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor, explain:

When we were asked to pitch on the promo they sent us the track as a ‘Soundcloud’ link, we usually get it sent as an MP3. For the first time we were not just listening to the track we were also watching it. There was something mesmerising about this in its simplicity. This ignited the idea to create a real life three dimensional waveform. We started to think about the fact that a vast amount of our music is consumed online and has lost a sense of physicality this lead us to the idea of using vinyl records. We also loved the way it related to Benga as an artist who’s background comes from using records as a DJ or producer.

The maths worked we would need 960 records to create 1 minute and 20 seconds worth of wave form. Each one had to be individually cut to a specific size, hand labeled, hand numbered and then finally polished. This prep took 7 full working days and then the animation process took around 30 hours.

No 3D printers here: the process of making the individual, differently-sized records sounds painstaking. Us tells Creative Review:

To animate the wave form, we built it and then carefully removed each individual record. This had to be done very gently as any shift in the position of the sculpture would result in the failure of the animation and as we had to literally destroy each piece of vinyl to get it off, there was only one chance to get it right. Once the sculpture was finally built, the animation process took about 30 hours.

As you can see in the behind-the-scenes photos, actually working those records onto the pipe involved removing the far end, making this still more challenging (though adding a great deal to the impact of the effect).

This is all quite similar to another radial, sample-by-sample waveform made of physical circles we saw earlier this year:
Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

Making a waveform view in the digital realm is dead-simple. But something about going to physical media makes that decision more than just afterthought, as though these creators really are touching frozen sound.

Having Benga as your soundtrack doesn’t hurt, either. You can grab this single on iTunes.

Full credits:

Directors – Us
Producer – Liz Kessler
Line Producer – Connor Hollman
DoP – Matt Fox
Gaffer – Ben Fordesman
Editor – Vid Price
Grade – Mark Horrobin
Animation – Alice Dupre
Structural consultant – Jorge Betancor
Runners – Tayo Rapoport, Paul Mckelvie, Chaelyn Allcock
Production Company – A+
Commissioner – Dan Millar
Management – Phil Hutcheon / Andrew Foggin

Behind-the-scenes photos courtesy Us.

See the full project page for lots of additional images and details:

http://www.weareus.co.uk/projects/benga-i-will-never-change

Thanks, Andrew Cavette!

The content we watch on the Internet is, ultimately, just data. We view that data in fairly narrow, conventional ways, but there’s no reason that has to be the limit. In one of the more novel applications of the API for audio-storing service SoundCloud, one 3D printer is happily turning your music tracks and recordings into custom iPhone cases, each uniquely based on the waveform of your sounds.

This week in Austin at South by Southwest, SoundCloud was attracting attention with that notion, as partner manager Caroline Drucker showed off a custom case built from the sound of her walking across a train platform a pair of signature high heels. (It’s the U6 U-Bahnhof Schwartzkopffstraße, if you must know, specifically. The USA Today featured the footwear and the case. “Must’ve been the shoes.”)

It’s primarily for fun, of course, but it does illustrate a point. Just having a smartphone along is enough to capture sound in all kinds of situations – don’t overlook the built-in mic. (Just make sure you’ve got ample focus on whatever you’re trying to record, since these mics are very vulnerable to background and ambient noise, and use an app that lets you record in a lossless format, making it more useful for musical sampling.) Odds are you’ve been in the situation Caroline was and – if you’re paying attention to your environment – got a great sound just walking around.

Here’s that original sound, as recorded with the iPhone SoundCloud app (equivalents are available for other platforms, too, so finally put that mic to use for something other than just calls):

And if you do want to sport your sounds on an iPhone case, check out the cool Shapeways app. (And this might just give you other 3D printing or laser-cutting ideas, so go for it.)

http://www.shapeways.com/creator/thevibe

More on some of the other SoundCloud news soon.

You can visit CDM’s editor on SoundCloud, of course. Lots of people send tracks, so if you share your work, send a note to go with it, please!

In this age of the 24-hour news cycle and instant publication of stories, sometimes it’s good to slow down and wait. And thus, while for whatever reason I didn’t get around to mentioning the extreme audio stretching of a certain Justin Bieber track (see Synthtopia), I can’t let an ethereal, ambient reworking of 1998 Internet hit Hamsterdance go unnoticed, here shared on SoundCloud.

As it happens, while folks have taken notice of one of the tools, this strange Web meme opens a door on a lot of free and open source sound software goodness.

HamsterDance Stretched to 800% by Stefan Anion

Thanks to creator Stefan Anion aka Stefan Weise for sending his work our way.

The technique is catching on; now we get to play the game of spotting which producers slip this software into tracks coming out in the next 12-24 months. You can thank free and open source software: Paul Nasca aka Nasca Octavian PAUL has released two tools that use the magic of FFTs, a mathematical process by which it’s possible to transform time and frequency information quickly. HyperMammut (another cool tool that does huge, single-window FFTs on sound and image) and Paul’s Extreme Stretch (the tool used on Justin’s track) are GPLv2-licensed. Lifehacker even did their own how-to on the topic.

http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/ Documentation and software page
http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypermammut/ SourceForge home of both Extreme Stretch and HyperMammut (Windows binary, Linux source)
Paulstretch Mac Port for PPC/Intel – your mileage may vary, as this is an unofficial port; let us know how it goes for you in comments, Mac users

Note that Paul is also the author of the terrific ZynAddSubFX open-source soft synth. (Look closely, closely at the title and guess at the feature set and synthesis technique.)

See also the software Mammut on which HyperMammut was based; the former is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Via Anders in comments:

I would like to mention that hypermammut is based on NOTAM ´s (Norwegian Center for technology in music and the arts) Mammut programmed by Øivind Hammer and Kjetil Matheussen

Download: http://www.notam02.no/index.php?/eng/Technology-and-text/Software/Mammut

I’d love to see some of the basic notions of this technique adapted to similar real-time patches. (Pd, ho!) Ideas, sonic wizards?

After I was first introduced to the program in the early 90s at a program at Oberlin’s TIMARA electronic tech center, I spent much of that decade addicted to convolution in Tom Erbe’s strange and wonderful SoundHack, another free sound-shaping tool for the Mac. I watched as the convolution process evolved from something I let run overnight (literally) to something that took an hour or so to something that became near-instantaneous, corresponding to the extraordinary forward march of processing speed.

It’s clear that some of these more obscure processes are going mainstream. It’s likewise evident that, as this audio has gone viral, SoundCloud really has become the “Flickr of audio” I predicted it might when it was launched back in 2008. So, I guess we’ll have to go and find some new sound design secret. We’d better just not tell the rest of you. I know I’m good at keeping lots of secr… doh!

Austrian Composer Peter Ablinger has transformed a child speaking so that it can be played as MIDI events on a mechanically-controlled piano, making the piano a kind of speech speaker. Via Matrixsynth, the readers at Hack a Day get fairly involved with how this may be working.

It seems not quite accurate to describe this as vocoding in the strictest sense, so much as a simple transformation to a (much) lower frequency resolution – that is, the 88 keys of the piano. Ablinger, for his part, describes the events as “pixels.” It’s pretty extraordinary that without a bandpass filter, you get something approximating the noisy sibilance of the speech, but this seems to be the result of having lots of events (that is, lots of resolution in terms of time). Edit: Listening again, the short answer to how you can hear so much of the voice through the piano seems to be, you can’t; the original is almost certainly mixed in. It’s nonetheless an interesting effect, and I’d like to hear the piano on its own. In other words, the basic process is, 1) convert the sound spectrum of the recorded voice to a series of MIDI events, and 2) play back the translated MIDI file. You can see that the MIDI playback is accomplished with Pd (Pure Data) running on a Windows Linux/KDE netbook, though it’s not clear what was used to do the original conversion. (The screen shot with side-by-side audio and MIDI appears as though it may be for demonstration purposes, only.)

Correction: The work is absolutely done in custom software developed by the composer in Pd (Pure Data). It’s an ideal tool for the job, and free and open source. I wouldn’t dare try to replicate the results here, but this is fantastic inspiration for playing with sound in Pd.

One Windows tool that’s capable of the job is TS Audiotomidi, as observed by Hack a Day spacecoyote. Whether or not that’s what’s at work here – and it may well be – that utility is itself interesting. Edit: Yeah, far more likely the whole thing was done in Pd. And Pd should be up to the task.

TS-AudioToMIDI

Of course, this is to say nothing of the lovely work done on the mechanical piano. It’s a beautiful piece. Here’s hoping some government bureaucrats got the message of the declaration. Now, we just need a chorus of something really loud – say a thousand trumpets – shouting out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Sonic scientist Peter Neubäcker of Melodyne has been wowing Internet audiences for some time with the automagical powers of the company’s Direct Note Access (DNA). The vision: manipulate individual pitches as easily as MIDI notes, even in polyphonic passages of a single instrument. At NAMM last month, the company showed the first product, Melodyne editor, due to ship in the spring for US/EUR 349.

There’s just one little catch: a solo developer has beaten them to the punch, at least prior to them shipping their DNA flagship editor tool. And if you want it right now, it’s yours for 25 Euros. (The final version will cost 99 Euros.)

Jonathan Schmid-Burgk, sole developer and a student at Harvard, announces:

The time has come to announce the release of the world’s first published polyphonic tone manipulation software. The dream of musicians to isolate single notes out of chords and so to manipulate most forms of recorded audio has come true on the 20th of January 2009.

Shell out EUR25, and you get a Mac VST plug-in that can manipulate audio easily. With monophonic audio, you can create polyphonic harmonizations. You can isolate and manipulate individual harmonics – meaning not only can you do pitch manipulations, but presumably sound design, as well. You can change individual notes or chords in recorded audio, to fix mistakes or (more interesting) actively recompose audio.

I feel about this the same way I do about Celemony: this gets really interesting when you use it for sound design. For some inspiration, skip this post and head straight for the sound samples on the site:

VisualVox polyphonic 0.9 [improvisator.de]

Via the awesome rekkerd.org

Also check out his Harmony Improvisator which creatively generates harmonies from MIDI input – an interesting thing to mess around with even for those of us who know / have taught (ahem) classical harmonic theory

Now, VisualVox Polyphonic isn’t without some catches, as you’d expect from the solo-student cheap alternative:

• It’s Mac-only and VST-only for now. (Just keep in mind, though, that means not only Cubase works but things like Ableton Live on the Mac, as well.)
• Jonathan warns that there are still some bugs, there are big temporary files, there are occasional glitches in the algorithm, and it doesn’t quite sync properly with hosts, requiring exports.
• The interface isn’t as slick or fancy as Celemony, and may be slightly less convenient for editing.
• Update – people are having some significant hosting issues with this. (Your mileage may vary, though the fact that this was tested in Cubase tells me those folks may have better luck.) So stay away if you don’t like bugs – this isn’t a final release. We’ll have more as this evolves, okay?

But here’s why I’m anxious to test it, nonetheless:

• It’s cheap – meaning it might be more open to people just curious to experiment. (I actually wonder if he shouldn’t keep the EUR25 price and make up for it on volume.)
• No iLok dongle, as required for Celemony. Correction: Celemony also allows challenge/response — so you have a choice.
• There are some interesting fine-tuning options for the algorithm and manipulation parameters. That could make this more interesting for sound design – and something even Celemony users might want to run alongside the more polished tool.

In other words, none of this is likely to dampen enthusiasm for Celemony, but that’s a good thing: more is more better. Could this mean the floodgates are about to open for creative sound design tools that mess with audio in new ways? Hey, I hope so.

If anyone tests this, we’d love your report – and sound examples.

Looks can be a powerful agent for changing how we think about sound. Pairing liquid, organic speakers with equally fluid and dynamic visualizations, the launch of Muon last month in Italy made this principle readily apparent. I’m all about lo-fi, cheap gear here on CDM, but if you absolutely must launch luxurious aluminum speakers with spectacular animated visuals at a posh party in an Italian salon, I sure won’t complain. Pass the prosecco, please?

Muon Project Page, documentation videos at chrisoshea.org
See coverage at ze | d | esign, toxi’s project blog, MoCo Loco, elsewhere. (Yeah, CDM’s motto is: cover things last. Was a bit busy with Maker Faire!)
Created by Moving Brands

Details on the installation and how it was done:

Liquid-y Speakers: The speakers themselves were beautiful enough. Designed by UK speaker research center KEF Audio and Ross Lovegrove, a champion of organic, 21st Century design and one of the most respected designers on the planet, the key to the design is super-formed aluminum. The process does for metal something like what vacuum forming does for plastic: you heat sheets of aluminum so they can be molded into unique forms. The speakers themselves are formed out of single, 6-foot pieces of metal, into an acoustically-conceived, flowing form. I haven’t heard them, but we’ve already discussed (at a radically lower price point) why speakers really don’t have to be — or even shouldn’t be — rectangular.

Liquid-y Visualization: And that’s just the speakers. Part of the beauty of digital media is that they can make the invisible and the impossible visible in a dynamic way. So Muon creators employed London’s responsive media firm Moving Brands, who in turn brought in two of our favorite people — responsive media guru Chris O’Shea (see his blog Pixelsumo, and artist and Processing ninja Toxi (aka Karsten Schmidt). Working with creative director David Eveleigh-Evans, the team created a dynamic animation on a huge LED screen that could visualize the sound coming from the speakers and reflect in motion what the speakers do in product design.

How They Did It

The animation isn’t just a pretty visualization; it organically reflects what’s happening with the sound. Performing a spectral analysis of the sound (via a Fast Fourier Transform or FFT), the software uses amplitude levels in different zones of frequencies to produce particle objects, which spring and bob based on polarity, turning the peaks in amplitude in sound into a pulsating pool of fluid. The model itself is actually 3D, but it’s squashed into 2D space (or you can imagine looking at the 3D space from above). The other essential element is that the software looks at a history of amplitudes over time, so that overall changes can be adjusted (a bit like the simple “peak” meter on a consumer stereo EQ).

If you imagine an EQ meter using a pool of mercury instead of simple bars, that’s the basic idea.

The implementation is, as I’d expect from this team, simple and elegant — a few basic elements are tweaked to produce a maximal effect. Here’s the gear (software and hardware) used to pull it off:

Processing, the open-source, Java-based, simple coding environment for graphics and multimedia. (Trust me. You can code in it. Even a 10-line sketch can often be interesting, though sound-related stuff tends to get a lot more involved fast.)

Ess, which is one of a few competing sound libraries for Processing based on the Java sound API. (See also the JSyn-based Sonia, though there seem to be some compatibility issues with that one, and the newer, tongue-twisting Mimin.)
traer.physics, a wonderful and easy-to-use physics library. (I’ve used it in a few projects — a must-download.)

Toxi’s own libraries.

ControlP5 for debugging, a library that places on-screen controls in your sketch. (I imagine it’d also be hugely useful for performance, and can’t believe I haven’t tried it before!)

And don’t forget the ginormous LED screen from Creative Technology, “containing 73,728 full colour LEDs over a 10 x 5 metre floor, using the Barco MiTrix system.” Yum. 73,000 LEDs.

More stuff from Chris on the way. If you’ve got a Processing project for sound, we’d love to hear about it. It’s better-known on the visual side (and a regular subject on Create Digital Motion), but there are still MIDI and audio tasks at which it excels, even if you have access to tools like Max/MSP/Jitter. Right tool for the right job, and whatnot.