Digital technology has the power to transmit information more efficiently, to make the invisible visible, and to express new things. It can also be pushed so far to the limits of actually transmitting information to be meaningless. It can push well beyond what we can even perceive in a useful way. What’s bizarre and wonderful about Johannes Kreidler’s work is that he’s not afraid of pushing toward that boundary. The results may have only a shred of remaining meaning, or be intentionally, comically meaningless. But he’s nothing if not inventive.

Compression Sound Art (2009) [“Comments on Music – Musical Zip-Files … Time is relative!”

The video above, politically speaking, is Not Safe For Anything – where else can you bring up Hitler and Britney Spears and condoms? But the only visually tantalizing information is the brief view of a condom speaker membrane and a chest with pasties.

The creations range from:

An oven pipe imported in 1972 from Alaska to New Zealand, vibrated at 574 cycles per second using a gasoline motor. Then, in 2003, this recording was manipulated and filtered on an old atari computer using hacked software.

…to:

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, played 22,000 times in one second (audible only to bats).

The controversial nods and humor aside, I think this really does say something about time and data. I could tell you, but I’d need a microsecond. Let’s just avoid any mention of datamosh.

Johannes Kreidler does know how to encode information in useful, accessible ways, too, however. He’s done just that with a terrific book on Pd (Pure Data), the open source, visual programming environment in which he created works like the one above. Can’t dance to it? You can do other things with Pd, too. You can dance to it? Then, by all means, go for it:

Be a Music Geek Ninja with Electronic Music Programming in Pd: New Book

Previous Kreidler sightings:

A song made from 70,2000 samples

The stock market declines, as a song

If you hate modern samplers with all their supposed fidelity, longing instead for the glitchy digital distortion of samplers past, a DIY project has brought you the sounds you love. “Where’s the Party At?” has been inspiring tingly sensations in digital lovers since I first wrote about it in September.

Now, the kit version is shipping. It’s a unique-looking combination of reliability and sonic unreliability, good open source design engineering and, as the creator puts it, a certain “crustiness.”

Apocryphal Feature List and General Horn-Tooting:

• 8-bit max sample depth, 1-bit minimum.
• 20kHz (or so, user adjustable) max sample rate, no minimum.
• 512k SRAM, about 26 seconds (minimum) or sample time.
• Big, versatile 6 button, 7 knob, 8 LED user interface. For Cavemen.
• Even more big and versatile full MIDI control in and out capability. Fully sequenceable. For people who use Live and general bespectacled electronic music nerds.
• Sample banking — multi-timbral recording, playback and audio processing across all banks.
• Sample multiplication, XOR, ABS, and all sorts of other weird sample processing and cross-modulation.
• Real time overdubbing.
• Preferences saved in permanent memory.
• Hackable analog clock source which can be syncronized to other synths.
• Non-Hackable crystal clock source which will always do Exactly What You Tell it.
• Programmable clock jitter, bit rate reduction, aliasing, and sample clock errors all adjustable in real time.
• All the normal backwards masking and half time and typical sampling features common to many commercial samplers.
• On-The-Fly Granular reconstruction of samples.
• Full pitch control of samples.
• Self test mode for debugging.
• 2.8Hz-357kHz frequency response (measured).
• Sub-audible noise floor.
• Looks nerdy and attracts people with stringy hair. Possibly bad skin.

Details on this kit, plus a video sampler version made for a specific party here in NYC, at creator Todd Bailey’s site:

http://narrat1ve.com/

Updated: Complete information on the kit itself, at US$75 – Some Assembly Required (read: you’d better have a soldering iron handy and know how to use it!)

Where’s the Party At, Hardware Version 1.01

I also love the bag of shiny hardware for aiding in making yours nice!

For those of you longing to mutate beats like so many promiscuous Petri Disk bacteria, programmer Bret Truchan is a kindred spirit. Bret has created a series of instant experimental classics for the Nintendo DS: glitchDS, a cellular automaton music sequencer, repeaterDS, a visual sample mangler, and cellDS, a grid-based sequencer you can script in Lua.

The Nintendo DS is portable and cute, but it’s not normally open to running software without the Nintendo Seal of Quality. (Insert snickers here.) To run Bret’s software, you need specialized hardware that fools the DS into running software. The DS isn’t entirely stable when it comes to things like timing, either, and it doesn’t have the flexibility of computers.

Enter the netbook. The netbook is nearly as portable, completely open to running whatever you like on Windows or Linux, and boasts easy USB connectivity, a big screen, and … well, you know, all the things you like about laptops. When it comes to musical productivity, much as I love the DS, the netbook has a whole lot going for it, and still has that added ultra-portability that makes you feel you can make music anywhere.

Bret recently made the jump to desktop software with Quotile, a step sequencer you can live-code for mighty morphing beats. Quotile is cool, but for many, glitchDS was the star. Now you can run glitchDS anywhere – just the job for a laptop you were going to retire, or that new netbook.

Not Sequencing, Glitch Sequencing

Glitch-sequencer is a sequencer, so it needs to either talk to a software synth or external hardware. Bret likes to hook it up to his machinedrum and monomachine. Our own Handmade Music event was the (unofficial) first public outing of the software, and included an HP netbook and the machinedrum, which makes for a sweet, mobile combination.

Despite the appearance of a grid and sequences of levels, this isn’t an app that works like a conventional sequencer. Here’s the basic breakdown:

• Cellular Automata via a seed + playback grid
• Trigger and value sequencers to determine which MIDI events the organically-generated mutations produce
• Pattern length, clock division settings for setting metric values
• Sync settings

There are two grids, a “seed” sequencer that initializes a starting pattern, and a “playback” sequencer that provides feedback and control of the pattern that plays as the software runs. These two grids operate via principles of Cellular Automata, specifically the John Horton Conway Game of Life model, a evolutionary grid “game” that has been popular in computer music for its simplicity and the way it becomes animated in time. (The Game of Life is a “zero-player game,” which I suspect is probably the only truly fun way to play Monopoly.)

The playback sequencer is just a set of cells. To determine when each cell actually trigger events, you use a neat, color-coded trigger sequencer, which, as it sounds, is what calls MIDI events. Using the value sequencers for each color-coded swatch, you determine what that message is. In fact, if you wanted, you could use glitch-sequencer to control only effects parameters or envelopes instead of notes – or visuals, or anything that can be triggered by MIDI.

As you’ve got seeded grids doing their organic, unpredictable thing, you’ll likely want a little bit of control, too, and you have mechanisms for that. There’s a pattern length grid which determines pattern length in a more conventional way, plus a clock division setting for setting the master rhythmic division. There’s also a snapshot setting, which itself is presented as a grid so you can make little glitchy song arrangements by triggering different settings.

Where all of this gets fancy is the additional trigger settings. In addition to the MIDI event values, you get:

• Gate percentage for randomized probabilities
• Clock division
• Loop length
• Quantization for pitch (none, Ionian, Phrygian)

You can also manage the color-coded swatches as layers and mix their volume independently.

My one-line version of the manual: with that many parameters, screw around a bit and you’ll get something pretty unpredictable and glitchy.

This concept is related to other attempts to do similar, Game of Life-based sequencers, particularly Lazyfish’s Newschool for Reaktor, and (applied to an effect) Audio Damage’s Automaton. Because tiny implementation details can have a big impact on the resulting sound, though, it’s always nice having a new take on this, and I think Bret’s creation is unique in its ability to tightly control the sequence or completely screw things up with a lot of parameters.

It is all built in Processing, the free, open-source Java-based coding environment. I’m hoping to get a scoop on some of the experience Bret had with timing and Java, so stay tuned. Processing coders, the MIDI library Bret used is themidibus. There’s a trick to getting MIDI working on the Mac thanks to the fact that Apple decided to stop supporting a standard Java API in their implementation (doh!), but once you hurdle that, you’ve got Mac + Windows + Linux support – and this could be ported to Android, too, with a little work.

What’s in for this season in music software? Cellular automata. You may have been exposed to a cellular automaton in the classic Game of Life; it’s basically a very simple biological simulator exposed as an intuitive, 2-dimensional grid of squares. If tic-tac-toe, Charles Darwin, and a petri dish of bacteria got together in one wild evening, you’d come up with something like this as a result. The Game of Life has been around since mathematician John Conway invented it in 1970, but lately it’s been cross-bred with music software to help patterns escape the rigid, boring repetition of traditional sequencer grids.

Cellular automata is in fine form on the beautiful, strange homebrew sequencer for the Nintendo DS, GlitchDS, which has had ongoing updates. It’s still fun as ever in Reaktor 5’s Newschool preset (old news, but enjoyable nonetheless). But in what’s so far the most anticipated plug-in release of the fall, CA takes on particularly powerful sonic possibilities in the first “experimental” release from beloved plug-in boutique Audio Damage:

Automaton [Product Page, Mac AU/VST; Windows VST]
Cost: US$49.99

Since the cellular automata grid can control anything, it’s what you hook it up to that matters — and that’s especially important, because it means instead of a set of knobs or sequence grid doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, CA “evolves” on its own, bringing much-needed change to your music. Automaton is a combination of a flexible CA sequencer with four effects:

1. Stutter (modulates a buffer, so you can combine Automaton with existing beat loops and patterns)
2. Modulate (a self-modulating ring modulator)
3. Bitcrush (which includes AD’s own “error” setting)
4. Replicate (based on their Replicant effect, which goes even further in the beat slicing realm a la Ableton’s Beat Repeat)

I’ve been playing around with the beta, and it’s just fantastic. I hope to finish off some special CDM presets and share them with you, though I’m a bit behind — let’s see if I can top the presets that come with the tool. One of the hallmarks of Audio Damage’s software in VST format is lots of MIDI learn support, and since it supports VST automation I anticipate some fun combining this with Kore. Either way, think easy tweaking and live performance control.

Now, question math geeks: any other cellular automata aside form the Game of Life that work well with music? I’m sure there are some experimental music projects out there that have used other CA, so link away.

Here are two tutorial videos of the tool in action, in case you haven’t seen them already:

Automaton Overview Pt. 1 – Sequencer… from Audio Damage on Vimeo.

Automaton Overview Pt. 2 – Effects… from Audio Damage on Vimeo.

Imagine a semi-modular box with glitchy sampler and the repurposed, Frankenbending sounds of electronic toy guts:

The instrument will consists of three main sections: two modified toys and a lo-fi sampler. The first toy is a complex modern educational toy that can be altered to produce amazing organic soundscapes, sweeping orchestral sounds and strange percussive loops. It also has a stereo output, which is rather nice. The second toy, in contrast to the mellow tones of the first, produces harsher sounding staccato blips, crunches and bleeps. This section can also make several different animal sounds. The sampler can record up to 20 seconds of audio, either as one long sound or four shorter ones. This is useful as the unpredictable nature of circuit bending can sometimes make it difficult to recall a particular sound. Last but not least: there is also a loop function.

Norman did the brief, but the hardware-constructing mad scientist is an East London-based fellow named Dave Cranmer, aka nervous squirrel. (See the interview he did with Future Music mag, and the many creative projects he’s working on on his site.)

Here’s a look at the insides, plus a video of another Nervous Squirrel Creation in action:

The following video is not the Glam Machine (I assume we’ll be getting that from Norman soon), but it’s a box along the same lines:

A rehousing of IQ Builder’s Talking Computer+Voice Changer+Unknow Baby Toy, all contained in a wondeful wood box. Live recording with aerial microphone, with the intention to explore this monster capable of creating a huge mass of textures, rhytmins, effect. Unique sound palette, real fun!
Hope U enjoy it listening as i’m doing playing!…
www.myspace.com/shivatribu
www.myspace.com/shivatribubus
nervoussquirrel.com

I noted in January that enigmatically-talented programmer Jack Dark had released the source of his misbehaved SynthEdit-made plug-ins for Windows VST. Here’s one of the fruits of that release: a glitching, stuttering sonic thing that now also syncs to your host, so your little glitchstutters hit on, um, an eighth note or whatever instead of just appearing willy-nilly. SynthEdit may be notorious for insanely unstable and sonically-destructive plug-ins, but DarkWare’s plug-ins are so beloved for their unpredictability that developers are actually worried about making them too normal: 

For those knowing and loving Shattershot Lite VST, Shattersync is essentially a host (and therefore BPM) synchronized version of its predecessor. it should be noted that the work I made to modify the creature will not make it sound any better and possibly all the voodoo magic spawned from Shattershot Lite will disappear, replaced by a tamed, ordered, boring, mechanism of nothingness.

Original DarkWare VSTs

Pluggotic and C.d.P. Page, with various free VSTs for Windows, including the Scattersync download.

Rekkerd.org: Pluggotic releases Shattersync — and, yes, I love Rekkerd.org; it’s like a nerdster filter for the barrage of 2.43.0.5 upgrade releases and eight trillion forum messages at KVR

In addition to a new GUI and MIDI implementation, there is a “new independent stuttering FX in the signal chain”, so perhaps that’ll add a little voodo back. Presumably, you’ll still be able to do the same glitching, stuttering thing as the gentlemen in the video here (aka Pluggotic & C.d.P.).

Hint: with either the synced or un-synced version, this will sound different from Ableton BeatRepeat.

Pristine digital technology — some people just can’t resist putting it in the service of recreating grungier, noisier sound-producing tech. Hot on the heels of Indirect-to-Digital – by-way-of-tape samples of the TR606 and 808, here are some digital recreations of circuit-bent noisemakers. Of course, I generally prefer to see circuit bending producing actual, DIY hardware — see our Circuit Bending Challenge — but it’s still an interesting exercise. (And it’s worth sampling some of this gear for live performance, especially when you can record sound before something, um, breaks. At least if it’s my project.)

Rekkerd.org finds not one, but two projects:

• Eric Beam releases Circuit Bent TR-505 samples, samples of a bent TR-505 “DeComposer”, captured “with pristine TC-Electronic A/D converters.” (What, no Marantz portable? The hardware in-progress pictured above.)
• de la Mancha releases Bent, a free “circuit-bent resynthesis” effect, with tempo-sync granulator effects, and jittering, morphing, and jittering morphing pitch. Windows VST.

De la Mancha’s stuff is great, and with some granular effects, you get a “bent” creation that can only exist in software. In fact, maybe “faux” is unfair in that case. Software doesn’t have the reputation of hardware circuit bending, and there’s not the immediacy of a contact point on a physical circuit. But you can certainly find just as many, if not more, strange and organically accidental “discoveries” when working with code and patches.

Ed.: Okay, this isn’t necessarily helping Live shake its reputation as just this — a wonderland for glitchers. You really can make stuff that isn’t glitchy in Live, and that new compressor and mix engine sound fantastic. But you still have to glitch it out every now and then. It’s good, clean (erm, digitally dirty) fun. 4-bit 4ever. -PK

And you thought all Max/MSP/Jitter could do was make sound and visuals. Stephen Lumenta writes in to let us know he’s created a Max patch for searching various DRM-free music stores:

i just saw the drm/other music thread. maybe i have too much time on my hand but i built a little max standalone app that will search drm-free stores (juno, bleep, 3beatdigital, emusic, othermusic). maybe useful, maybe just for fun.

Mostly interesting as a demonstration of some of Max’s more unorthodox capabilities, but fun nonetheless. You can download a free version for Mac standalone (Universal Binary), or a patch source that will work on either platform, from his Max page:

sbl – Max/MSP Code

There wasn’t a Windows standalone version, so I built one myself (no guarantees about whether this works or not):

DRM-Free for Windows (standalone)

While you’re at Stephen’s site, check out his Pluggo SBL Vintage Collection, a nice set of glitchy plug-ins, one of which earns extra points for having a face in its UI. More self-effacing description: “Some plug-ins to get that vintage glitchy sound people tend to be after. Drop them on your tracks and expect instant generic gratification. But don’t be fooled that anyone cares about your dsp efforts.”

Mac Universal Binary + Windows XP versions, free, and another demonstration of what’s possible building plug-ins with Max/MSP. Here they are, pictured in Ableton Live. Boy, there’s a lot of overlap of interest between Ableton lovers and Cycling ‘74 gurus. If only those two companies would work together on something — oh, yeah. They are.

Previously:
Berrtil, Free Circuit-Bent Modeling Plug-in. Plug-in Smash. Sound Crush.
As Other Music, Others Embrace Downloads, is Big, DRM-Laden Online Music Out?
Where Do You Get Your DRM-Free Music?

Bertill is an insanely glitchy distortion unit based on models of circuit-bent hardware, as a free VST for Windows and Mac (Universal Binary). Actually, whether you should really believe that or not, I’m not certain: I’m only vaguely sure of the relationship of the massive digital mangling this plug-in causes and the obscure Handycam shots uploaded to YouTube of a circuit-bent setup. Regardless, the thing sounds wonderfully awful. The knobs are straightforward and will demolish your sound entirely if you like; dial different “types” for a variety of different settings. Some of the higher type numbers are actually fairly subtle. Good stuff.

Shuriken: Berrtil Distortion unit

Here’s what it can sound like hooked up to a pad from Sytrus:

berrtil.mp3

Sure, theoretically you should use real circuit-bent hardware for this. But this is fun anyway.

The plug-in is the creation of a Swedish Betabugs Audio vet going by the name Shuriken, which is apparently a ninja star. (Nice domain!) Lots of other good things on the site. Here’s the circuit-bent setup, though you mostly see it rather than hear it. Use your imagination: