Weird Fishes: Arpeggi from flight404 on Vimeo.

Plenty of bands have jumped on the "remix generation" bandwagon, releasing music to be remixed and sampled and visualized as a publicity stunt. But, then, plenty of bands aren’t Radiohead. Readers here may have been disappointed that our favorite superband didn’t embrace Creative Commons sharing when announcing their iTunes-only stems. But a number of the artists we follow came up with some brilliant work.

In Visuals: Robert Hodgin, aka Flight404, has the enviable job of exploring new visual expressions as his day gig of sorts. Working primarily in code developed in the open-source, Java-powered Processing, he develops a technique and then iterates and iterates on it until it goes from computer gimmick to refined artistry. He blogs that process, as well, pushing forward the rest of the Processing community. His video above uses abstract, generative processes to visualize Radiohead’s "Weird Fishes", but is developed enough to become organic. It’s a voyage under the sea. Via our sister site, Create Digital Motion.

In Music: A number of readers tackled the Radiohead remix contest. Here’s my favorite: our friend Alan Molina created a sparse string accompaniment that spotlights Tom Yorke’s vocal part. He explains:

Thanks for listening!  I actually recorded and mixed all the strings.  

They are all a violin (just lots of layers of me).  My profession is an orchestral violinist–this remix was an outlet to do something different!

I used Ableton Live 7 for the effects, and used  the kind of mic that clips on behind the bridge of a violin.  Done on my couch in front of my computer!

Of course, the other direction to go is stretching the tune past the point of recognizability, with strange bizarro-universe remixes pulling the tune to experimental glitch and faux-punk. Here are a few of the more unusual takes on their music:

We had a blast (ahem) Saturday night at the Yuri’s Night party at NASA Ames Research Center; stay tuned for video and more, including the results of the Futuristic Musical Design Challenge. But that’s no reason the party has to end. If you’ve listened through all 55 songs on the 45 Tribute and want still more music, Amon Tobin and Deru have kindly donated music mixes for the yuricdm.com minisite. It’s good listening to pick up your week:

Exclusive Free Mix: Amon Tobin, Back from Space

Exclusive Free Mix: Deru

And here are the direct links to listen / download:

Download the Amon Tobin Yuri’s Night mix [contains NSFW audio samples]

Download Deru’s Free Mix

Updated! If you were having problems with the links, it’s because I made a mistake generating URLs with Amazon S3, and some browsers (IE and Safari but evidently not Firefox) get picky. It should be fixed now.

For more on Amon Tobin, our friends at Current TV have this interview on the Foley Room album — not exactly news, but inspiring stuff, nonetheless. Anyone who’s a found sound sound design fan (as I know many of you are in your own work) should get a kick out of it:

Let us know what you think of the music in comments. (Truly — thoughtful criticism is welcome as well as praise.)

Troels Folmann is one of our favorite composers at CDM. The fact that he’s a game composer both incidental and essential — it’s not that he’s scoring a Tomb Raider title that matters, it’s that game composition requires a new, fluid way of thinking about form, and Dr. Folmann (he did a dissertation topic on the subject) is up to the challenge.

Digging through recent entries on Troels’ blog is definitely a source of weekend inspiration. I’m fond of found samples, but I tend to record sound making things around the house up close with a mobile recorder for a more intimate sound. Troels drags them over to a concert hall and uses the natural reverb to turn a candle light holder and Coke bottle into something that sounds like massive, tribal percussion. To keep himself disciplined, he limited himself to objects in a random photo. Here’s what it sounds like:

To add to the ambience, he uses the Timefreezer plug-in ($99 for Mac, Windows, Mac Intel, the lot). As the name implies, it “freezes” samples of sound as an effect or instrument. I’ve done some similar things as DIY patches, but it sounds like they’ve done a nice job of implementation.

This approach to sampling percussion with natural reverb, and making an art of the samples, is part of why they pay Troels the big bucks. Be sure to hear his percussion demo for more of the sounds. Little wonder that he blogs the meditation on autism that’s been making the YouTube rounds: sampling sounds requires an almost extrasensory focus on the world around us that we spend most of our time shutting out.

So there you have some fiddling with household objects. What about this “future of adaptive music” business?

Processing is an open-source coding tool, built in Java, designed specifically to be versatile for artists and friendly to non-coders. Code is elegant and simple, but can take advantage of all the potential power and performance (no, really) of Java. Java really can be fast enough to use in live performance situations, though its one Achilles’ heal is that automatic memory management — the very thing that makes coding easier, via something called a garbage collector — can make sound glitchy at lower latencies. (JavaSound seems worst on Mac OS X, as implementation of the sound API by Apple hasn’t kept pace with improvements in Java audio on other platforms. It is possible to build a real-time-ready Java implementation that performs as well as languages like C++ for audio, but right now there’s not yet a mainstream implementation of this type.)

That doesn’t mean Processing isn’t useful for musical applications. With experimentation, sound libraries like Minim can perform quite well, especially if extreme low-latency is unnecessary. (see Processing’s libraries page for more.) And you can always use Processing as a visual front end, while sound comes from elsewhere (Max, Pd, Reaktor, or even Ableton Live or a plug-in.)

There’s plenty of incentive to work with the environment as an artist. People who never coded before are able to build entire projects in Processing, not just uber-programmer-geeks. Even experienced coders can find it a fast way of experimenting with ideas — sometimes better-suited to tasks that are more difficult with patching environments. Despite all the hype around Flash/AIR/Flex and Silverlight, I find Processing easier to develop in, and you have far more robust development options, free and open source tools and libraries, and genuine OpenGL 3D capabilities.

I put out a call for people working with Processing for music, and we’ve already got a handful of interesting examples. Because of the open community around Processing, code is available for a couple of the ideas here, so you can have a peek and learn from fellow Processing coders.

nodeSeq from Jared Arave on Vimeo.

As an addendum to why trying to make computer models musically creative can be so disastrous, maybe the problem is we fail to understand what creativity is.

Scientists funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) have found that, when jazz musicians are engaged in the highly creative and spontaneous activity known as improvisation, a large region of the brain involved in monitoring one’s performance is shut down, while a small region involved in organizing self-initiated thoughts and behaviors is highly activated.

Study: Prefrontal Cortex In Jazz Musicians Winds Down When Improvising [scientificblogging]

That’s just one study, and I won’t pretend to be an expert in neuroscience. But what the scientists are describing is awfully close to the nuanced way jazz musicians will describe improv. It’s not not thinking. But it’s also not self-monitoring. It’s something else.

Some of you might be surprised to learn that people don’t just read this blog, they also make music. Digital music.

In fact, the Create Digital Noise forums have a whole active community of musicmakers, encompassing a broad range of styles, sensibilities, and production techniques. Let’s sift through some recent works by the CDM community, shall we?

Leading the pack in can-do professionalism is UK’s Creature and his new album Distant Horizon:

Creature Audio

Creature is the project of Stephen Haunts, who some of you may recognize from last year’s Circuit-Bending Challenge. Stephen is the proprietor of Haunted House records, and his album is available directly from Haunted House, or via download from iTunes, CDBaby, and a whole slew of others.

A name you may recognize in pairing with the phrase “Buchla Modular Synthesizer” or “Haaken Continuum controller” is that of Richard Lainhart.

lainheart

This track, “The Orchestra Of The Damned” is a track from Richard’s new MusicZeit release “The Beautiful Blue Sky“, a collection of electronic landscapes for the Buchla 200e and Haken Continuum. It was performed and recorded live without post-processing or editing.

Keyboard Magazine, I have a challenge for you:

I think this solo desperately wants a Keyboard transcription. You know, “Play like Sun Ra.” It may require a larger insert, but maybe it could be sponsored by Yamaha or something.

Okay, granted, Earthlings might argue that this sounds chaotic, but on Sun Ra’s native planet Jupiter, this actually borders on the pedestrian. It’s pretty conventional 83-fingered hyperlocramixydixylycradidian mode, transposed here to what is apparently a Yamaha YC-30. Sun Ra even makes a nod to the fact that the Jupiterians’ torso typically rotates at increasing speed during live performances, as an especially “grupicosmilogical” solo causes their arms to detach.

What?

You want me to do the transcription?

Due when?

SUN RA - Live - Keyboard Solo (1980) [Matrixsynth]

In all seriousness, this just happened to coincide with listening to some Sun Ra records this weekend … if you don’t know his music, take some time to listen to it. YouTube excerpts with bad sound could easily give you the wrong idea. The ability to order a certain amount of entropy into larger forms that really are connected with the jazz tradition is amazing. And for those of you running boring, equal-measured loops in Ableton, spend some time with the polyrhythms. Sun Ra does have good stuff to teach. And it makes me look forward to Yuri’s Night in April all the more — Sun Ra is the artist who really went to space, and brought us back some music. Who needs Virgin Galactic?

A massive pioneer in thought about composition and electronic music in particular, an inspiration to rock and pop figures as well as academics, and sometimes a lightning rod for controversy, Karlheinz Stockhausen died this week. (Thank you to everyone who wrote in to let us know.)

Stockhausen’s thinking about sound in all his work has had a deep impact on electronic music, particularly in his influential early works for tape and, by the 1960s, live electronics mixed with instruments. And, of course, aside from earning bonus points for showing up on the Sgt. Pepper album cover (the Beatles were big fans), you have to admire a composer who puts a string quartet in helicopters in order to combine the sound of the machinery with choreographed flybys and live video feeds. If that doesn’t make him a hero of ours, nothing will.

Stockhausen also represents the generation of experimental art that was able to escape the grip of the Nazis — an experience that claimed his mother as a victim and haunted his life. He’s part of the legacy of experimentation that Hitler once tried to silence.

I expect that Stockhausen’s death will mean his quote following September 11 will be trotted out again. Press seized upon the phrase “greatest work of art” to describe those events; Stockhausen for his part says he called them Lucifer’s greatest work of art — an enormous difference, coming from someone who survived Nazi Germany. In the years that have past since that quote, however, I personally feel, as a New Yorker there at the time, a growing sense of a day that transformed how many of us feel about art making.

But I’ll stick with Stockhausen’s one fantasy: dreams of flying. And I hope more people compose for helicopter.

Obituary: Karlheinz Stockhausen “Both a rationalist and a mystic, the composer’s influence stretched from Boulez to the Beatles” [The Guardian]

German composer Stockhausen dies “the composer rejected the idea that he was making the music of the future, writing in 1966: “What is modern today will be tradition tomorrow.” [BBC News]

You can read a strangely bitter obituary from The Times, but I prefer a more thoughtful and historically-informed obituary from Paul Griffiths at The New York Times:
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Influential Composer and Avant-Garde Guru, Dies at 79. I think it balances some of his artistic idiosyncrasies with his importance in history. (Griffiths is a fairly reliable voice when it comes to the history of new music; I may not always agree — but then, new music isn’t about agreement, is it?) He sums things up neatly:

Mr. Stockhausen had secured his place in music history by the time he was 30. He had taken a leading part in the development of electronic music, and his early instrumental compositions similarly struck out in new directions, in terms of their formal abstraction, rhythmic complexity and startling sound.

Karlheinz Stockhausen Official Site, Memorial Booklet (PDF)

Those with thoughts or memories to share, we’d love to hear them. And, as always, our condolences to his surviving family, friends, and colleagues.

Jim Aikin remains one of my heroes in music technology journalism. As a magazine writer, book author, and editor (including a long stint on staff at Keyboard), he’s contributed an immeasurable amount of the writing about evolving music tech over the past decades. I’ve also gotten to appreciate his craft and insight as a reader having had him as technical editor on my book. But the real reason I respect Jim is that he always speaks his mind, and he thinks beyond the regular stream of writing to the bigger picture — meaning actual music making. So I’m happy to give him a guest spot here on CDM to remind us about the importance of matters that don’t necessarily fit into magazine articles. -PK

Reading Peter Kirn’s articles on mix automation and microphone types in the new Electronic Musician Personal Studio Buyer’s Guide left me feeling a bit sad and tired. Don’t misunderstand: They’re very good articles, and I’m always glad to see younger colleagues getting their byline out there. That wasn’t where the sadness came from.

Part of my reaction, as it turned out, arose from the fact that these pieces are reprinted excerpts from Peter’s Real World Digital Audio, a book project for which I was the editor. So I was subliminally aware that the material was not fresh because I had actually seen it before.

But there’s a bigger issue here: I think I’ve written too many how-to and what-is-it articles over the last 30 years. Been there, done that, bought the coffee mug. A few years back I was looking for technical material on near-field monitors. I found a cover story on this precise topic in an old issue of Keyboard — and then realized I had written the cover story. I had no memory of having done so.

I know there’s still a need for features that introduce musicians to the concepts, because new musicians are always coming along. But at this point in my life, I mainly want to play music. With writers like Peter on the job, there’s no need for me to write another word. (I will make an exception when Reason 4.0 arrives on my doorstep next week. That’s one product review I’m itching to write.)

Most of the technological challenges I deal with today are not the sort that can be turned into magazine articles.

Footsteps from the abyss of total unawareness, musician and musicologist Clive Wearing has two lifelines: love and music. Suffering from an amnesia that robs him of nearly all memories beyond a few seconds, these bring him back from a waking death and become life and being itself:

“I picked up some music,” Deborah wrote, “and held it open for Clive to see. I started to sing one of the lines. He picked up the tenor lines and sang with me. A bar or so in, I suddenly realized what was happening. He could still read music. He was singing. His talk might be a jumble no one could understand but his brain was still capable of music. . . . When he got to the end of the line I hugged him and kissed him all over his face. . . . Clive could sit down at the organ and play with both hands on the keyboard, changing stops, and with his feet on the pedals, as if this were easier than riding a bicycle. Suddenly we had a place to be together, where we could create our own world away from the ward. Our friends came in to sing. I left a pile of music by the bed and visitors brought other pieces.”

Neurologist Oliver Sacks has offered insights into the mind and consciousness before; here, he gives us a glimpse from an extreme world of just how important our experience is in all our minds. And if this doesn’t make you want to practice — in fact, realize what a profound experience that practice is — nothing will.

A Neurologist’s Notebook: The Abyss - Music and amnesia. [The New Yorker]

Thanks, Wally, who adds: “music is about being in the present - that seemed to be the thrust of things, and it was beautiful to read how this man who lives only in the present, with no remembrance of what happened just moments ago, was able to build his life around that. Ironically, after reading that story, i thought to myself — I will always think of this story whenever i listen to music or work on music.”