luanna is a beautiful new application out of Tokyo-based visual/sound collective Phontwerp_. Amidst a wave of audiovisual iPad toys, luanna is notable for its elegance, connecting swirling flurries of particles with gestures for manipulation. I imagine I’m not alone when I say I have various sample manipulation patches lying around, many in Pd, lacking visualization, and wonder what I might use in place of a knob or fader to manipulate them. In the case of luanna, these developers find one way of “touching” the sound.

As the developers put it:

luanna is an audio-visual application designed for the iPad
that allows you to create and control music through the manipulation of moving images.

The luanna app has been designed to be visually simple and intuitive, whilst retaining a set of rich and comprehensive functions. Through hand gestures you can touch, tap and manipulate the image, as if you were touching the sound. The image changes dynamically with your hand movements, engaging you with the iPad’s environment.

The interface is multi-modal, with gestures activating different modes. This allows you to select samples, play in reverse, swap different playback options, mute, and add a rhythm track or crashing noises. It’s sort of half-instrument, half-generative.

Phontwerp_ themselves are an interesting shop, descibed as a “unit” that will “create tangible/intangible products all related to sound.” Cleverly naming each as chord symbols, ∆7, -7, add9, and +5 handle sound art, merch, music performance / composition / sound design, and code, respectively. That nexus of four dimensions sounds a familiar one for our age.

Sadly, this particular creation is one of a growing number of applications that skips over the first-generation iPad and its lower-powered processor and less-ample RAM. Given Apple can make some hefty apps run on that hardware, though, I hope that if independent developers find success supporting the later models, they back-port some of their apps.

See the tutorial for more (including a reminder that Apple’s multitasking gestures are a no-no).

US$16.99 on the App Store. (Interested to see the higher price, as price points have been low for this sort of app – but I wonder if going higher will eventually be a trend, given that some of the audiovisual stuff we love has a more limited audience!)

Readers request Audio Copy and sample import right away. I think sample import, at least, could easily justify a higher price, by making this a more flexible tool.

Find it on our own directory, CDM Apps:
http://apps.createdigitalmusic.com/apps/luanna

http://phontwerp.jp/luanna/

Very similar in its approach is the wonderful Thicket, well worth considering:
http://apps.createdigitalmusic.com/apps/thicket

See our recent, extensive profile of that application’s development:
Thicket for iOS Thickens; Artists Describe the Growth of an Audiovisual Playground

See also, in a similar vein, Julien Bayle’s recent release US$4.99 Digital Collisions:

http://julienbayle.net/2012/04/07/digital-collisions-1-1-new-features/

http://apps.createdigitalmusic.com/apps/digital-collisions-hd

By the 1990s, the notion that computer software could be a means of delivering interactive digital art more personally was enjoying a Renaissance. This was the age of the Voyager CD-ROM, which catered to new multimedia PCs and Macs with titles from the likes of Laurie Anderson and Morton Subotnick, the decade in which Brian Eno released Generative Music as software and Monolake – before Ableton – included a Max/MSP patch with an album. But the reach of these experiments was doomed to be relatively limited.

Now, of course, things are different. First, we saw some widely-available audiovisual toys, coinciding in particular with the debut of the iTunes App Store. But now, those fairly one-dimensional experiments are beginning to blossom into something else. When these particular gadgets and app stores are forgotten, the question is whether those aesthetic adventures, the personalization of the digital art experience, will endure.

Joshue Ott, co-creator of Thicket for iOS, points to a review of that application on Apple’s App Store. “I always want to touch the masterpieces in museums,” a user says in that review. “I’ll use Thicket instead of getting arrested!”

“It’s the democratization of our own performance works,” muses Ott. “It’s a way people can play along with us,” he says. “We’re constantly creating processes to create sound and music; it’s what we’ve done for ten years or so,” chimes in Ott’s creative partner, Morgan Packard. “Now people can own the processes, not just the results.”

Ott and creative partner Packard have long each been visual and music performers, respectively. That meant what it has traditionally meant: the artist gets up in front of an audience, the real work hidden behind an onstage laptop. With Thicket, by contrast, the raw materials of that performance became embodied in the software itself, and thus in the hands of the audience, who can double as performer. At first, this software included only a simple mode or two, each with a specific sound, musical ambience, and visual look. Even in those versions, Thicket made some appearances in an occasional gallery show or performance – the app you download could also be the art.

As Thicket has added modes, though, it has evolved in a kind of platform of its own. Ott and Packard produce new works that can be distributed as in-app purchases (more on how they contend with that in a bit). The sum total of those modes has created a massive audiovisual playground, a compendium of ideas and aesthetic.

A new version released this week adds three new modes, seen in the video at top here, building atop modes added in late December. For the first time, you can use Thicket on an iPhone and not just an iPad; it’s a Universal app. Screenshot sharing is available, too. But the addition of all these modes, unveiled with a “reboot” of the app at the end of last year, represents a shift in thinking as these artists and developers reevaluated what it was they were doing.

“We found that the modes were becoming so different, so much deeper,” says Ott:

We were having such fun using it as a big sketchbook that we decided to ditch the ‘rotate to change modes’ system so that we could handle lots of modes, rather than just four or five. The modes in Thicket reboot are completely new, and each one is a lot more complex than the older modes. They’re all very different, and each have separate methodologies behind how you control them. We’re playing with different concepts in user interaction design, searching for the right intuitive feel to make a true audiovisual instrument (among quite a few other things).

In other words, if you haven’t played with Thicket lately, it’s a different animal. It’s a Long Play album to the first version’s single cut. The work is immersive, too; you can transmit video output via HDMI or VGA on the iPad, and get up to 1920×1200 HD output, with no menu intervening. (One of the many significant current drawbacks of Android for the moment for artists: the move to a soft menu on Android tablets means menu detritus that never goes away. Artists were intensely relieved this week when Apple’s new iPad kept its signature, dedicated hardware menu button.)

Morgan Packard says he has some strong feelings about why this kind of experience has value in his work:

I’d say where we both overlap is our shared interest in how abstract sound and picture, plus interactivity, all can work together. Thicket is a bit of a research sketchbook for us. There’s something very magical about just twiddling your fingers and having sound and visuals spring to life. Frankly, we don’t entirely understand this medium yet. But we like not knowing, trying to understand it in different ways.

The gestural thing is huge with us, and is at the core of what thicket is. It’s partly why I’m a bit resistant to the idea of layering features on to Thicket. Of all the different people who give us feedback, I get the most gratification from parents of special needs kids.The non-fiddly, large-motor interaction style is very accessible to a huge range of minds and hands. I want to explore this more, to give people new ways of feeling expressive and creative with movement and gesture. In my mind, that’s what’s really special about what we’re doing.

The duo did get a chance to try the app with people with different user needs. Ott explains:

Morgan and I actually toured a special needs school earlier this year and observed autistic kids using Thicket. A very special music teacher is using Thicket (among a couple of other technologies) to teach the kids music, and had found that it seemed to really empower them. He offered to let us visit and we happily agreed… really really amazing experience.

As Subotnick hoped years ago in “All My Hummingbirds Have Alibis” for Voyager, the distribution of art as software can create a new kind of “chamber” art, in which the work is personal, enjoyed by a few people. It can be a family or a couple of friends on a couch.

Of course, somewhere in all of this, these artists are looking for revenue in order to be able to devote the massive amounts of development and testing time the application demands. (Neither has quit day jobs, which means finding a way to devote resources to development.) Thicket easily climbed in download counts, but only after the application was made free. In-app purchases have been a tough mountain to climb, but have at least allowed some revenue to trickle in; the challenge was finding a way to make them appealing to users, says Ott:

I think in general people hate In-App Purchasing (IAP), because, in general, I think IAP is usually not handled so well. We have thought a lot about how to show people exactly what they are buying before they buy it, and I’m really pleased with what we’ve come up with. Every mode in the new Thicket has a pre-recorded “demo” of one of us playing the mode. Before you buy a mode you can watch this demo, learn what the mode can do, watch someone use it in an interesting way, and decide if that’s something you’re interested in or not. You can of course watch the demos even after you’ve purchased the mode (and the free Sinemorph mode also includes a demo as well). The demos are a great way for us to show users different tricks and techniques.

So the reboot is really about making Thicket a platform rather than just a single art piece. Something that we can keep adding to (with a financial structure that makes sense for us to keep adding to). Something that we can start collaborating with other artists on – we are talking to a couple of different people about releasing modes within the Thicket system. So yeah, that’s what the platform part is. We’re really excited about it, and what it will become in the future.

But these concerns aside, the developers aren’t just creating Thicket for users; they’re building something they use themselves. As Josh explains:

I’ve performed with Thicket now a couple of times, once at the excellent SONiC festival, and another at Issue Project Room in a program curated by Ryan Lott (AKA Son Lux), and have started to really feel like it has the potential to be a new form of audiovisual instrument. I want to see more stuff like it- things that generate graphics and audio intertwined, and I want to continue to explore these relationships in different ways. I’m actually pretty excited about performing with Thicket more, and I think doing so will push it even further in that direction.

“That’s really what an audiovisual instrument is to me,” says Ott. “It’s something that you can bang on and make something interesting, but you can touch it subtly, as well, to shape it, to express with it. That’s what I want to make. We’re right at the beginning of that exploration, and I think we have something that is a promising vehicle for it.”

You can try out the new Thicket now, as seen in CDM Apps:

Thicket @ CDM Apps
[Says iPad, is actually now Universal. PS - music and beauty flow from my fingers all the time - no app needed - but I'm glad now the rest of you get the chance.]

Pure Data (Pd) is already a free, convenient tool for making synths, effects, and sequencers and other musical generators. But imagine stripping away all the things that tie it to a platform – UI, specific hardware support – so it will run just about anywhere, on anything, in any context.

That’s what libpd, a free, embeddable, open source (BSD) tool for making interactive music, does. Coders can take their favorite language and their favorite platform, and just plug in the power of Pd. They don’t even have to know almost anything about Pd – they can let an intrepid Pd patcher create the interactive sound effects and dynamic music for their game and just drop a patch into their assets.

One of the most powerful applications for this is the ability to add interactive music and sound to mobile apps, on iOS and Android, without writing and testing a bunch of custom DSP code. And that has enabled the use of libpd in apps as successful as Inception: The App. With music by Hans Zimmer and a custom “dream” experience created by RjDj, that app racked up millions of downloads in under a couple of months, and then, far from sitting idle on the app launch screen, went on to clock in over a century of user “dreamtime.”

Okay, so, you’re sold. You want to see what this thing can do, and maybe try it out, and you’re wondering where to start. So, here’s some good news: there’s a new site and a new book to get you going.

The site: libpd.cc

libpd has a new home on the Web, both in the form of a new GitHub repository to organize all the code and docs and samples, and a site that brings together a showcase of what the apps does and points you to where to learn more. The single destination is now hosted here by CDM:

http://libpd.cc

I built that site, so please, if there’s anything you’d like to see or you’ve got your own work created with libpd, let me know about it.

Even just having selected a few key highlights of apps built with libpd, it’s impressive what people are already doing with this tool:

libpd Showcase

The book, and a chat with its author

A new book published by O’Reilly focuses on building mobile apps using libpd, for iOS and Android. (iPhone, iPod touch, Android phones and tablets, and yes, even that “new iPad” introduced yesterday are therefore all fair game.)

You can read a section of the book right here on CDM, for a taste of what’s in store:
How to Make a Music App for iOS, Free, with libpd: Exclusive Book Excerpt

It’s an exceptional, comprehensive look at development using libpd, covering iOS and Android, but also a complete look at the libpd API and how to use it. For Pd patchers just getting started with iOS and Android, it includes all of the basics of how to use libpd in your mobile development environment. For mobile developers new to Pd and patching, it makes clear how you’d communicate with Pd, so you can either dive into Pd yourself or properly interface with patches made by musicians, composers, and sound designers with whom you may be collaborating. It’s an ideal title for anyone interested in taking a game and giving it a more dynamic soundtrack – in sound effects, music or both – or for people building mobile musical instruments and effects, sonic toys, interactive albums, or, really, anything at all that involves sound or music. Since it walks you through the entire development experience, you can sit down with it in the course of a few evenings, and get a complete picture of how to integrate Pd with your development workflow.

Dr. Peter Brinkmann, the principal developer of libpd, is the author of the title. I asked Peter to explain a little bit about the book, who it’s for (hint: you!), and what’s in it (hint: stuff you want to read!) …

CDM: How did this book come about? And the book process really helped drive improvements to libpd, too?

Peter B.: Shawn Wallace, an editor at O’Reilly, contacted me last summer and asked whether I would be interested in writing a short book on libpd. I was interested, and so I talked to my [Google] manager (“No conflict — we all have time-consuming hobbies!”) as well as a couple of colleagues who had written books for O’Reilly. They made a token attempt to dissuade me, but it was clear that they had enjoyed writing their books, and they seemed quite proud of the result, too.

Once I had made up my mind to write a book, the next question was whether to self-publish or go with O’Reilly. Self-publishing is a viable option these days, but then I decided that I really wanted an animal on the cover. Besides, I had never written a book before, and having the support of O’Reilly’s editorial staff made the prospect seem less daunting.

The first draft was done in mid-November, but at that time it was basically science fiction because it presented libpd the way I wanted it to be, not the way it was at the time.

So, after the bulk of the writing was done, libpd needed to be revised so that it would actually be in agreement with the book. In particular, Rich Eakin and I rewrote the iOS components for better performance and usability. That delayed the book by a month or so, which turned out to be a great stroke of luck because that was when I discovered that Xcode 4.2 had changed the entire development model by introducing automatic reference counting, instantly rendering existing
texts obsolete. That included my chapter on iOS, and so I had to sit down and rewrite it.

After that, the rest happened rather quickly — getting reviews, revising the draft, going through the production process. O’Reilly’s toolchain is remarkably efficient, using asciidoc and docbook in a Subversion repository. The editorial staff is great, too. I’m amazed to see how quickly it all came together.

How did you approach writing the book?

For the first draft, I just imagined that I was teaching a class on libpd. When you’re lecturing in front of an audience, you don’t have time to polish every sentence; you just have to talk and maintain some sense of momentum. That approach helps a lot when facing a blank page. After that, it’s many, many rounds of revisions to eliminate weak or redundant sentences.

For the sample code, I picked one project that uses all major components of libpd. That provided a natural progression from idea to completion, while touching on all important points in their proper context. I’m basically providing running commentary on my thought process when making an app, including common mistakes and pitfalls. Like this, readers will know how to recognize and work around most problems.

Another trick is to write more than necessary. The first draft contained a lot of gratuitous editorializing. Those parts were never meant to make it into the finished text, but they were fun to write and they kept me going when I wasn’t quite sure what to write next.

Who it’s for?

The book explains how to patch for libpd, and how to write apps with libpd, with special emphasis on the interface between Pd patches and application code. It’s for mobile developers who want to add real-time audio synthesis to their projects, as well as sound designers who want to deploy their work on mobile devices. It’s light on prerequisites; if you know how to write a basic app for Android or iOS, you’re ready to read the book.

Ed.: I’d add to that, given that there are such great tutorials on app development for Android and iOS – even many of them free, including some very worthwhile documentation from Google and Apple — if you’ve messed with Pd, you should give the book a try. And if you haven’t messed with Pd, this could be a great excuse. This book won’t teach you Pd, but it’ll make very clear how to glue everything together. -PK

Why does a book like this matter? What do you hope will come out of it?

I hope that the book will help popularize real-time procedural audio, in games and other apps. I’m thrilled to see all the projects that use libpd, and I hope that the book will help people create even more awesomeness of this kind. One thing I only fully realized when writing the book is that libpd lets developers use DSP code like a media file: An audio developer creates a Pd patch, and the app developer just drops it into the resources of the app and loads and
triggers it as needed. I guess this was implicit in a blog post I wrote on workflow and prototyping a year ago, but I think the DSP-as-media angle is even more powerful. I hope that the book will bring this out.

The book project has already improved libpd. Whenever I faced the choice between fixing an awkward bit of code or explaining the awkwardness in the book, I chose to fix the code. That took care of all the little things that were sort of bothering me but didn’t seem significant enough to spend time on. It also gave us a deadline for a number of related things that we wanted to do, such as migrating to GitHub and launching the new website, libpd.cc. Ed.: Cough. Yes, glad that gave me that deadline – and thanks to Peter B. for the extra push! -PK

Congrats to Peter on his first animal-on-a-cover! It’s really a great book: you read it, and feel like making more new things, inventing new creations that produce sound and music. And that’s a very good thing.

There was a time when the ability to record and playback music didn’t exist – such things were magical fiction no one had seen. So, the idea of playing one channel of recorded sound, then two channels, had to be invented. Artists hadn’t created something called an “album” until there were devices that played back that monophonic and stereophonic sound; even the idea that such a strange art counted as “music” had to be constructed. It’s obvious now, but it’s easy to forget that these musical forms were produced to cater to the capabilities of what was once a new device.

Now that your music device can do more than play a couple of channels of sound, will musicians find use in those features? Or are they just distractions? Can the fact that your music player knows where you are be as important as the fact that it can play audio?

We saw the work of Bluebrain, the Washington, DC-based duo of Hays Holladay & Ryan Holladay, before. They’ve been slowly building up a repertoire of locative art, starting with the Mall in DC. Their first full-length album came to Central Park, as documented beautifully in a short film that details the creation of the music and software, and various critics responding to its significance.

The most compelling image recurring in the film may be their scrawled-upon map of the city itself. It’s clear in those images that composition and place converge: the map itself becomes a score for the music, a topography of interaction through the landmark park.

One of those people interviewed in the film, briefly, is me. You’ll see some of the answers from the interviewees don’t entirely agree with others. Rather than focus on the novelty of the thing, I chose to look at their work as rooted in history. It’s not entirely clear whether the musical card game attributed to Mozart was his work, but various aleatoric and algorithmic approaches to composition pre-date even recording, let alone GPS. That to me gives a context and a continuity to these kinds of activities.

But beyond the meaning of “disruptive” technology as one person puts it, what the film conveys most is the artists’ love of where they are. They’re not making an album that’s an app, they hasten to add. They really just want you to hear this music in this particular place, moving in these particular ways. The fact that they record an organ that is part of where they grew up is added evidence.

If you’re going to South by Southwest, you can experience this application when you’re in Austin, as covered in an article on The Creators’ Project. You should do it if you’re there, especially as you otherwise can’t hear this music without going to the National Mall or New York’s Central Park.

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure App Album Debuts At SXSW

In a way, though, that seems to me the least interesting of these applications. Perhaps I’m biased in that I have a connection in my life to Manhattan and not so much to downtown Austin. But to me, the arguably-perverse requirement that you go to a place in order to hear a work seems part of the joy of these creations. Having it switch on in a place already full of iPhone-toting Web geeks deeply in love with GPS seems to take out the fun and the challenge. It comes to its audience; the other works demand an audience come to it.

What the duo succeeded in doing in New York and DC – even though these places are landmarks – is making the ever-present software somehow more ephemeral. It works in one place, and then it’s gone. Like the generative limited edition we saw last month, it undercuts the very ubiquity that seems to be digital music’s fundamental character.

And yes, greetings, New York and New Yorkers; I love where I am, but I do miss you. Unlike in software, in the real world, we can’t be more than one place at once. We have to be alive, and we have to do what we’re doing now. We are where we are, and we’re not somewhere else. If you aren’t there when someone plays, you miss it. You have to choose.

And perhaps that’s what is sometimes missing in our music and technology.

Previously:
An Album That Can Be Heard Only in One Location, in Interactive Ode to Washington, D.C.

More:
Bluebrain’s Music, locative and non-locative alike

A free app download for iOS, for use in Austin, TX

Listen in Central Park

I love reviews. One person writes on the iTunes App Store about the Central Park app, “Weirdest music we have ever heard. Creepy, eerie noise.” You can’t please everyone.

I’m also quoted in a story in The New York Times from December:
Central Park, the Soundtrack

I believe I did the interview from Amsterdam (ironically, the old one), and apparently said:

“It’s not just that they are using this as a novel delivery mechanism. It’s part of their musical process. They are forcing you to go to a place because that place for them is musically meaningful.”

Digital: disposable, identical, infinitely reproducible. Recordings: static, unchanging.

Or … are they?

Icarus’ Fake Fish Distribution (FFD), a self-described “album in 1000 variations,” generates a one-of-a-kind download for each purchaser. Generative, parametric software takes the composition, by London-based musicians-slash-software engineers Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, and tailors the output so that each file is distinct.

If you’re the 437th purchaser of the limited-run of 1000, in other words, you get a composition that is different from 436 before you and 438 after you. The process breaks two commonly-understood notions about recordings: one, that digital files can’t be released as a “limited edition” in the way a tangible object can, and two, that recordings are identical copies of a fixed, pre-composed structure.

Happily, the music is evocative and adventurous, a meandering path through a soundworld of warm hums and clockwork-like buzzes and rattles, insistent rhythms and jazz-like flourishes of timbre and melody. It’s in turns moody and whimsical. The structure trickles over the surface like water, perfectly suited to the generative outline. At moments – particularly with the echoes of spoken word drifting through cracks in the texture – it recalls the work of Brian Eno. Eno’s shadow is certainly seen here, conceptually; his Generative Music release (and notions of so-called “ambient music” in general) easily predicted today’s generative experiments. But Eno was ahead of his time technically: software and digital distribution – both of files and apps – now makes what was once impractical almost obvious. (See also: Xenakis, whom the composers talk about below.)

You can listen to some samples, though it’s just a taste of the larger musical environment.

Fake Fish Distribution – version 500 sampler by Icarus…

12 GBP buys you your very own MP3 (320 kbps). Details:
http://www.icarus.nu/FFD/

The creators weigh in on the project for Q Magazine:
Guest column – Electronic band Icarus on whether algorithms can be artists?

The conceptual experiment is all-encompassing. Just to prove the file is “yours,” you can even use it to earn royalties – in theory. As David Abravanel, Ableton community/social manager by day and tipster on this story, writes:

“As a sort-of justification for the price, all Fake Fish Distribution owners are entitled to 50% of the royalties should the music on that specific version ever be licensed. A very unlikely outcome, but at least it’s sticking to concept.

I spoke with Ollie and Sam to share a bit about how the mechanism of this musical machine operates. Using Ableton Live and Max for Live, each rendition is “conducted” from threads and variables into a sibling of the others. The pair talk about what that means compositionally, but also how it fits into a larger landscape of music and thought. Of course, you can also go and just experience your own download (first, or exclusively) to let the music wash over you, an experience I also find successful. But if you want to dive into the deep end as far as the theory, here we go.

CDM: How is the generative software put together? What sorts of parameters are manipulated?

Ollie: The basic plan to do the album came before any decision about how to actually realise it, and we initially thought we’d approach the whole thing from a very low level, such as scripting it all in the Beads Java library that has been a pet project of mine for some time. But although we love the creative power of working at a low level, the thought of making an entire album in this way was pretty unappealing. We looked at some of the scripting APIs that are emerging in what you might call the hacker-friendy generation of audio tools like Ardour, Audacity, and Reaper, but these also seemed like a too-convoluted way to go about it.

Even though Max for Live was in hindsight the obvious choice, it wasn’t so obvious at the time, because we weren’t sure how much top-down control it provided. (As a matter of fact, one of the hardest things turned out to be managing the most top-level part of the process: setting up a process that would continuously render out all 1000 versions of each track.) Although it was quite elementary and unstable (at the time), [Max for Live] did everything we wanted to do: control the transport, control clips, device parameters, mix parameters, the tempo … you could even select and manipulate things like MIDI elements, although we didn’t attempt that. 

So we made our tracks as Live project files, as you might do for a live set (i.e., without arranging the tracks on the timeline), then set up a number of parametric controls to manipulate things in the tracks. Many of these were just effects and synth parameters, which we grouped through mappings so that one parameter might turn up the attack on a synth whilst turning down the compression attack in a compensatory way. So the parameter space was quite carefully controlled, a kind of composed object in its own right.

We also separated single tracks out into component parts so that they could be parametrically blended. For example, a kick drum pattern could be spilt into the 1 and 3 beats on the one hand, and a bunch of finer detail patterning on the other, so that you could glide between a slow steady pattern and a fast more syncopated one. So loads of the actual parameterisation of the music could actually be achieved in Live without doing any programming. Likewise, for many of the parts on the track, we made many clip variations, say about 30, such as different loops of a breakbeat. The progression through those clips — quantised in Live, of course — could also be mapped to parameters.

Finally, by parameterising track volumes and using diverse source material in our clips, we could ultimately parameterise the movement through high-level structures in the tracks. So we could do things like have a track start with completely different beginnings but end up in the same place. We did this in Two Mbiras, which is probably the track where we felt most like we were just naturally composing a single piece of music which just happened to be manifest it a multiplicity of forms. In that sense, this was the most successful track. Some of the other tracks involved more of an iterative approach where we didn’t have a clear plan for how to parameterise the track to begin with, but that fits with our natural approach to making tracks. At one point, we wondered if we could just drop a bank of 1000 different sound effects files into an Ableton track, to load as clips. To our glee, Live just crunched for a couple of seconds and then they were there, ready to be parametrically triggered. So each version of the track MD Skillz could end on a different sound effect.

The Max software consisted of a generic parametric music manager and track-specific patches that farmed out parametric control to the elements that we’d defined in Live. The manager device centred around a master “version dial”, a kind of second dimension (along with time), so you could think of the compositional process as one of composing each track in time-version space.

We used Emanuel Jourdan’s ej.function object, which is a powerful JavaScript alternative to the built-in Max breakpoint function object, and wrote some of our own custom function generators and function interpolation tools to interact with it. Using the ej.function object, we composed many alternative timelines to control the parameters, and then used the version dial to interpolate smoothly between these timelines, resulting in a very gentle transition between versions. I.e., version 245 and 246 are going to be imperceptibly different, but version 124 and 875 will be notably different (we quickly broke from our own rule and started to introduce non-smooth number sequences into some of the tracks, so for example in Colour Field two adjacent versions will actually have quite different structures). We spent some time making it well integrated into Live so that once we really got into the compositional process it would work smoothly and be generally applicable to all of the different ideas we wanted to throw at it. That said, it’s a few steps of refinement from being releasable software. 

Pictured: the master controller device, very minimal, just a version dial and a few debug controls. Double clicking on bp_gui leads to the other figure, a multitrack timeline editor, with generative tools for automatically generating timeline data using different probability distributions.

How did you approach this piece compositionally, both in terms of those elements that do get generated, and the musical conception as a whole?

Sam: Since 2005, we had been working a lot in the context of performance, not only as Icarus, but with improvising musicians through our label / collective Not Applicable. This is reflected in the records we put out both as Icarus and individually during that time, which increasingly used generative and algorithmic compositional techniques as structural catalysts for live improvisations. (As Icarus: Carnivalesque, Sylt and All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible World. Individually: Rubik Compression Vero, Five Loose Plans, Nowhere, Erase, Chaleur and The Resurfacing Of An Atavistic Trait). Our performance software was made using Max/MSP and Beads and we started by crafting various low level tools that would loop and sequence audio files in various different ways, giving us control parameters that were devised around musical seeds we were interested in exploring.

In many respects, our approach was very similar and partly inspired by Xenakis’ writings in Formalised Music, although the context is obviously very different. These low-level tools were augmented by various hand-crafted MSP processing tools which used generated trajectories and audio analysis as a method of automating the various parameters that effected the sounds themselves, the logic being that an FX unit as a manipulator of sound is in some way loosely coupled to the musical scenario it is contextualised in. In both cases above, the idea was to step back from performance ‘knob twiddling’ by using the computer to simulate specific types of behaviour that would control these processes directly (hence the reason why we have never used controllers in performance).

Our search for different methods of coupling our increasing parameter space led us to develop various higher-level control strategies at Goldsmiths and IRCAM respectively, culminating in autonomous performance systems built in the context of the Live Algorithms for Music Group at Goldsmiths College. The autonomous systems we developed used a battery of different techniques to effect control, from CTRNNs and RBNs to analysis-based sound mosaicing, psychoacoustic mapping and pattern recognition. This work resulted in us being commissioned to put together a suite of pieces for autonomous software in collaboration with improvising musicians Tom Arthurs and Lothar Ohlmeier called “Long Division” for the North Sea Jazz Festival in 2010. The challenge of putting together a 45-minute programme of autonomous music really forced us to think more strategically about how it was possible to structure musical elements within a defined software framework and how they could vary not only within each individual piece, but also from piece to piece.

The most obvious inspiration for how we might do this ultimately came from reflecting on what it is we do when we perform live as Icarus. The experience of working up entirely new live material and touring it without formulating it as specific tracks or compositions proved to be an ideal prototype not only for Long Division, but also ultimately for FFD. Here, in a similar sense to the work of John Cage, large-scale structure and form became a contextually-flexible entity, which meant that for us it became to a far greater extent derived from the idiosyncrasies of the performance software we developed and keyed in by our own specific way of listening out for certain musical structures and responding to them in either a complementary or deliberately obstructive fashion (or perhaps even not at all). Creating these two pieces (‘Long Division’ and ‘All Is For The Best In The Best Of All Possible Worlds’) gave us the conviction that we could devise musical structures that were both detailed enough and robust enough to benefit positively from some level of automated control.

Therefore, when we came to start working on FFD, the main question we had to ask ourselves was; within the music making practices we had already been working with, what were the tolerances for automation within which we were still ultimately in control of and ultimately composing the music we were creating? In the end, the framework we set up was comparatively restrained; the generative aspect of each track was always notated as a performance via a breakpoint function and therefore able to be rationalised by us, the variation between different versions of the same track was done using interpolation and is completely predictable and incremental and finally, the entire space of variation is bounded to 1000 versions, meaning that the trajectories of the variation never extend into some extreme and unrealisable space.

More notes on the album:

Web: http://www.icarus.nu
RSS: feed://www.icarus.nu/wp/feed/

Last.FM: http://www.last.fm/music/Icarus
Discogs: http://www.discogs.com/artist/Icarus+(2)

SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/icaruselectronic
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/birdy_electric

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/icaruselectronic
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Icarus/132324596558

CREDITS

Music, Software, Scripting – Icarus (Ollie Bown and Sam Britton)
Mastering – Will Worsley, Trouble Studios
Artwork – Harrison Graphic Design

Icarus gratefully thank the following for their support of the FFD project

The PRSF Foundation (UK)
STEIM (Netherlands)
Ableton (Germany)
The University of Sydney (Australia)
Emmanuel Jourdan (France)

Electronic music making has had several major epochs. There was the rise of the hardware synth, first with modular patch cords and later streamlined into encapsulated controls, in the form of knobs and switches. There was the digital synth, in code and graphical patches. And there was the two-dimensional user interface.

We may be on the cusp of a new age: the three-dimensional paradigm for music making.

AudioGL, a spectacularly-ambitious project by Toronto-based engineer and musician Jonathan Heppner, is one step closer to reality. Three years in the making, the tool is already surprisingly mature. And a crowd-sourced funding campaign promises to bring beta releases as soon as this summer. In the demo video above, you can see an overview of some of its broad capabilities:

• Synthesis, via modular connections
• Sample loading
• The ability to zoom into more conventional 2D sequences, piano roll views, and envelopes/automation
• Grouping of related nodes
• Patch sharing
• Graphical feedback for envelopes and automation, tracked across z-axis wireframes, like circuitry

All of this is presented in a mind-boggling visual display, resembling nothing more than constellations of stars.

Is it just me, or does this make anyone else want to somehow combine modular synthesis with a space strategy sim like Galactic Civilizations? Then again, that might cause some sort of nerd singularity that would tear apart the fabric of the space-time continuum – or at least ensure we never have any normal human relationships again.

Anyway, the vitals:

• It runs on a lowly Lenovo tablet right now, with integrated graphics.
• The goal is to make it run on your PC by the end of the year. (Mac users hardly need a better reason to dual boot. Why are you booting into Windows? Because I run a single application that makes it the future.)
• MIDI and ReWire are onboard, with OSC and VST coming.
• With crowd funding, you’ll get a Win32/64 release planned by the end of the year, and betas by summer (Windows) or fall/winter (Mac).

I like this quote:

Some things which have influenced the design of AudioGL:
Catia – Dassault Systèmes
AutoCAD – Autodesk
Cubase – Steinberg
Nord Modular – Clavia
The Demoscene

Indeed. And with computer software now reaching a high degree of maturity, such mash-ups could open new worlds.

Learn about the project, and contribute by the 23rd of March via the (excellent) IndieGogo:

http://audiogl.com

If you liked the generative, probability-based sequencing seen earlier this week, here’s another example – and it’s free and open source, so if you do want to pick it apart and you own a copy of Max/MSP or Max for Live, you can. Co-creator Giuseppe Sorce points us to the work:

This is a simple generative music synthesizer built in Max/MSP created by Diego Caponera, Nicolò Paternoster and Giuseppe Sorce. It involves 5 FM generators which play notes randomly based on a root key and intervals defined by the user. It’s an university project made for an exam for Sound’s Science degree ( Math Department of Roma Tor Vergata ).

The software is distributed “as is”, without any warranty, under a GPL license.

Not bad for an exam project. A heck of a lot more fun than a paper (and, believe me, I say that wholeheartedly having done a bit of university teaching).

Grab it:
http://code.google.com/p/smilesynth/

Labeled as ready for IDM or “Braindance” music, The Uncanny Sequencer could be something tasty for those tired of regular rhythms. The creation of Julien Bayle, The Uncanny Sequencer is a graphical, generative, multi-part sequencing Max for Live device built for Ableton Live. At its core, it creates polyrhythms and irregular rhythms by making the appearance of each beat probabilistic rather than determinate.

Thanks to Julien for sending this our way. (Matrixsynth and Synthtopia deserve credit for being faster.)

Features, as described by its creator:

• 8 channels (meaning 8 sequencers in one)
• from 1 to 32 steps in each channel (every number choosable)
• generates MIDI notes to any devices (inside or outside Ableton LIVE)
• based on probabilities
• unique sequences generation
• huge presets bank engine (including morphing between 2 presets)
• 10 pages documentation

€15,00, available for download.

http://designthemedia.com/products/file/13-the-uncanny-sequencer/

In a twist on generating music from dance, artist and coder João Pais sends us Pd-generated scores, transformed into twinkling sounds by music boxes. As it happens, the music boxes are the same featured in Friday’s story on Ritornell.

The piece is RISS, a “performative installation/concert” produced outdoors in Berlin, with a 30-meter score generated by Pd from movement.

João describes his work: “The patch was simple, it analysed the sounds, and made a score using data structures. then I printed the score, and spent lots of hours puncturing all the holes.”

The video documents those sounds, in a project produced by the collaboration of composer and artist Christian Graupner, dancer/choreographer Phuong Nguyen, and João Pais. (For his part, João has been utterly invaluable in helping me with some Pd patches – I need to post some abstractions based on that work soon for everyone.)

More info:
http://www.humatic.net/art/p/riss/index.html

And I know this is just the tip of the … music box iceberg. Sorry, that’s a really horrible mixed metaphor. There are lots of people using music boxes, yes.

You know you’re in for something different with an article that contains this line: “as 256 bytes is becoming the new 4K, there has been ever more need to play decent music in the 256-byte size class. ”

In just a single line of code, Finnish artist and coder countercomplex, working with other contributors, is creating “bitwise creations in a pre-apocalyptic world.” What’s stunning is to listen to the results, even if you have trouble following the code – the results are complex and organic, glitchy but with compositional direction, as though the machine itself had learned to compose in its own, strange language.

This is, naturally, the opposite of the musical coding in the previous post: in place of human-readable languages representing abstractions atop other abstractions, this is pure algorithm transformed into music. Geeky, yes, but it also says something about musical composition and thought independent of the computer. It is as compact an expression of a human musical idea as one could imagine.

I recommend reading the whole blog post (and following the blog for new developments). Embedded in this whole exercise are thoughts about musical algorithms, the history of chip and 8-bit music and the demoscene, and, most interestingly, the question of whether digital music might yet yield “new” (or at least largely unknown) discoveries:

Hasn’t this been done before?

We’ve had the technology for all this for decades. People have been building musical circuits that operate on digital logic, creating short pieces of software that output music, experimenting with chaotic audiovisual programs and trying out various algorithms for musical composition. Mathematical theory of music has a history of over two millennia. Based on this, I find it quite mind-boggling that I have never before encountered anything similar to our discoveries despite my very long interest in computing and algorithmic sound synthesis. I’ve made some Google Scholar searches for related papers but haven’t find anything. Still, I’m quite sure that at many individuals have come up with these formulas before, but, for some reason, their discoveries remained in obscurity.

Algorithmic symphonies from one line of code — how and why? [countercomplex]

But can you dance to it?

Matt Ganucheau contributed to this story from San Francisco.