Gold Panda’s debut full-length, “Lucky Shiner,” draws upon emotional connections to friends and family to spin a pulsing, textured set of portraits, crafted from flattened sampled textures in tiny slices. It’s a journey through a series of musical screens. The artist, out on Ghostly International, has already made a name in singles and remixes, but the full-length gives him room to tell a story. He spoke to us from the road — after a failed connection as he traveled through the communications blackouts of America’s Western deserts. We got to talk about how he assembles his music, why albums still matter and how he put together the narrative, the emotional connections behind the tracks, and even why having a dog as a distraction can be a good thing. So, as you listen to the record, thank Gold Panda – but thank his friends, family, and Daisy, too.

You can hear the full album stream before you buy, so you know what we’re talking about.

CDM: We’ve known your music through remixes and EPs, so it’s great to get to know you through a complete album. How did you conceive building that longer story?

I’ve always loved albums to be albums, really. I know it’s a bit cheezy nowadays. People are just making a collection of tracks that come together as an album.

But I wanted to have a story and a narrative. I wanted a beginning, middle, and ending for the album, and the same with each song.

It was made really quickly — in three weeks, in total. I did most of it in two weeks over Christmas. I went to stay at my aunt and uncle’s house, and they live in the countryside in Essex. There’s nothing to do. It’s a little village; there’s a few pubs, and there’s a local supermarket. It’s not far from London, but when you’re there, it does feel like it’s a million miles away.

I looked after their dog over Christmas and had my whole studio set up there. I have a really short attention span, so most tracks are done in a day, and then I’m bored with them. And if they turned out good, then they’re good, and if I think that they’re not really finished or whatever, then they get rendered to the hard drive and put into iTunes and sit in there forever.

I was never really a big fan of dogs before, so I kind of had this bonding with this dog called Daisy. She’d wake up really early and wake me up, and I’d take her for a walk, come back, start making tracks. And then after an hour or so, she’d want to go for a walk again or play. Every time I was getting into it, she’d kind of stop me and we’d go for a walk. It stopped me from overworking things, and I think that’s what made it — [the album's] more simple and more direct. It was good to have a distraction while I was doing it.

It’s all about relationships that I’ve had, and people that I know, and family. They’re the most important things to me in life — for finding out what I wanted to do in life. And Lucky Shiner is my grandmother’s name.

How did you get from the idea of family and loved ones to making a track? Was it something that was in the back of your mind, or did you make some explicit connection?

There are two tracks. One’s called “Before We Talked” and one’s called “After We Talked.” They’re about a friend. They’re all made with this really bad Yamaha electric organ that I got from eBay for like a pound. There’s loads of these ones. They’re all ex-church organs, school organs. And no one wants them any more, so they stick them on eBay. And then no one can pick them up, because they’re too big. So unless you’ve got a van, no one wants them. I won it for a pound, and then I got a mate to go and pick it up with me.

It’s this old wooden thing with pedals. It looks amazing, but it’s actually pretty rubbish. I like rubbish stuff.

My friend who was making music at the time, and the guy who had the van, he passed away.

I had always been making music. Before that, I was like — I’m not very good, and it’s just a hobby. And after that, it was like, well, maybe it’s something I could do. And I just gave up trying to get jobs. I said, okay, jobs don’t make me very happy. I’ll just live with my parents for a while, make a bunch of tunes and see what happens. It worked out good. And those tracks were just made with that one organ. And all the kind of glitchy sounds — it’s filled with dust, and it makes these crackly sounds when you turn it on or change the settings. So I just turned those up really loud to make the percussion sounds. Everything.

The other tracks, it was just in the back of my head. My family’s really close. It’s quite important to me.

I started getting that feeling, and then I immersed myself in it. Because I like albums to be albums, I thought — that’s a good feeling to have and to be experiencing. And then you get lost in it and think about it quite a lot.

Hopefully the next album will be about something completely different. Then it will turn out different, but still be Gold Panda.

It must have helped to be in this retreat, and work quickly. I know sometimes if you pick up an old track, it can feel kind of foreign if you’ve let it sit for a while. It must have helped to have everything in that compressed space of time.

Yeah – for me, if I’ve made a bunch of tracks over the course of the year, then they’d sound pretty varied, which is how the EPs were. They’re all quite different. I wanted to capture a certain sound or emotion at one specific point.

If I had made it over a year, it might have been more varied or in some people’s minds even better, but I think as an album, it wouldn’t work as well.

I do get the sense of different colors on the tracks, or that there is a palette – lo-fidelity sounds, somewhat exotic samples… is it the samples that provide that impression?

I think it’s from the samples. There’s a big Asian influence, or world music influence. You can sample anything, but I guess if I’m looking for old records, then stuff from the Middle East or Far East are really interesting. They’re stuff that I’d listen to anyway, and then just through listening to those records you find samples.

The tracks are quite varied, but I think they have a similar sound throughout, and a narrative.

You lived in Japan for a time – was that what kindled the interest in Asian music?

I saw the anime Akira when I was like fifteen. And then from there on it was just — anything, just more. Computer games like Street Fighter, and spending loads of money on the imports. And then finally getting to go there and being really inspired by it all. It’s a great place, and I think – just how it looks, the topography is really inspiring for me. Sorry, my girlfriend is yawning at me on Skype saying my interview is boring.

[Laughs]

I should talk about sex, decay, and marijuana.

That’s okay, we’re all boring people, musicians and producers — this is stuff we geek out about. You certainly can talk about sex and drugs.

Well, sex and drugs — not really. I wish there was; it’d make it really interesting. I was single at that time, and I was in the middle of the countryside, so there wasn’t much sex going on. And drugs — I drink a lot of tea.

Ah — that’s the Asian influence there, large amounts of tea. So, aside from the tea, are you willing to reveal the sources of any of the samples, or do you prefer to keep them to yourself?

Maybe I’ll tell someone where my samples came from. I think at the moment, with this album the samples are so much smaller that it doesn’t really matter, because you’re not going to be able to hear them really clearly.

Well, to me some of the quasi-Asian aesthetic sense is the way you assemble the textures as much as it is the content. They become micro-sampled into a texture.

I know that you’ve said sampling is something that’s been important to you for a long time. So you had started using a sampler as a teenager — do you recall which sampler it was?

I think it was an Akai S950 — and then a 3000XL later. And then an Atari with Cubase 2 or something.

My uncle was making music. He was a producer — or he thought he was. Now he does music publishing. He set up one of the first MIDI studios in London with a friend. It was called Strong Room Studios. A lot of people record there now. It’s really funny when you get the brochure for the old place — it says state-of-the-art recording and sequencing, and then it’s just like a black and white Apple Mac computer and an Atari sitting there, and it just looks so dated now.

So he let me use his stuff, and I’d just sample all my Dad’s records, basically try to make sounds like Puff Daddy or something — really obvious loops with a drum beat.

We all go through stages like that, I think. Do you feel like there was a moment that you were past that, that you were more mature as an artist?

It’s probably just by sitting in a room and sampling. You start to realize that it doesn’t have to be this four bar loop, that you can do whatever, that what the technology can do change stuff totally.

You find you sample a lot less and make a lot more. You can take a little sound and make it something completely different. I like that. And I didn’t know any other way to make music. I don’t play an instrument.

You’re truly a samplist — or whatever we’d call that.

Yeah. And I just want to keep on doing that. I just love the sound of the vinyl crackle and buying old records, and then enjoying them, and taking them apart and putting them back together.

What’s your studio looking like now for this record?

It’s terrible. I haven’t bought anything. I’ve been doing a lot of live shows. I wanted to do it without a laptop. I had an MPC 2000, a Korg [ElecTribe] ES-1, a Line 6 pedal, a [Korg] KAOSS Pad, a mixer, and some other bits. But it was just like, I was loading every track off a Zip disk. And I’d make a lot of noise in the middle to wait for the next track to load. That was fun, but it came to, “hey, do you want to do a show overseas?” And I’d say, oh, well, I’ve got to get all this stuff there, and I don’t have a flight case, and how do I not break it?

And then I got a laptop, and put all the sounds in the laptop. All the sequences were in the MPC anyway. Now I can just trigger everything from the MPC. And I trigger a bit, and play a bit, and trigger a track and take away drums and put them back in. But it’s still really badly set up. I’m coming out of the headphone jack. I haven’t got a sound card. The main outs are coming out of the loop pedal, which is at the end of the chain. It’s just really bad.

But people seem to enjoy it. They seem to think it’s good. And that’s probably the most important thing.

I’d like to expand it. My studio’s just the same; I just sample everything into Ableton but have it MIDI synced with the MPC and the MPC does all the sequencing, and every time I push a button, it triggers the sample.

So the MPC is doing all of the sequencing, and Live is just slaved to the MPC and playing samples when it’s told to by the MPC?

Totally. It’s not like launching clips or anything; it’s triggering really small samples. And the MPC is just sending it signals to tell it when to play.

The samples are just sitting in Clips, then, in Session view?

Right, the samples are sitting in Clips. I’m really not tech savvy. I have no idea of what I’m doing. I learned with Cubase 2 on the Atari, and that was before audio. When Logic was around, I just didn’t understand what the hell was going on. I still don’t know what I’m doing.

There are certain advantages to that.

I think if I knew how to work everything, I’d just get lost. And I’d never finished a track, because there’d be so many ways to change it. I like to be limited.

I don’t have a studio. I just make it in my room, next to by bed. I really like that. I like there to be a window and light. I couldn’t work in a studio. I’d hate it, and the tracks — well, I’ve tried, and it just doesn’t work. I’m not really a person who’s into the studio thing. I like it to be a living room with a studio in the corner. I can just go and get a cup of tea or watch a bit of TV when I’m doing something.

So you’re working on these tracks, you’re getting interrupted by the dog. How did you decide these tracks were done — was it sort of, at the end of the day, that’s it?

It’s usually like, at the end of the day, you bounce it down. It’s really funny — when I first made those tracks, they didn’t sound finished. You think, I could do this, I could do that. And then you don’t do it — and a few days later, you’re like, ah, okay. And now, listening to them, they sound finished, but at the time… I think you’re just too close to it, because you’ve just made it.

Sometimes you can hear something in the arrangement, and say, that is really not right, I don’t like that bit. And so I’d come in and edit it out. But I don’t remember doing that too much.

I make sequences in the MPC, but I don’t really make a song often. I usually just press record and play through the sequences in an order. Sometimes you get the wrong sequence, but then when you listen back to it, it actually sounds good, so you leave it in there. And then that’s the track done, really. Arranging the track is really hell for me. It means sitting down, looking at the screen, and deciding, when shall this drum stop? And it’s rubbish. I hate that bit. I just make loads of sequences on the MPC and cycle through them in the order that I think will be right. And then I do some edits afterward, and maybe take away a drum or reverse the sound.

There is a sense of a song structure in these tracks, but it’s sort of playing around with the MPC until it sounds right?

Yeah, totally. That’s it.

How do you determine the order of the album?

The order was completely different at first. I was scared to put “You” first, because everyone had heard it. I was originally going for a long, drawn-out intro to the album. And then listening to that track now, I’m really glad I didn’t do that — it’s just straight in, like the sound of a disc loading. The rest just came together quite easily after that.

It’s funny, as we talk about albums, because you’ll hear people pronounce the album dead, or say they don’t listen to albums any more at all, only singles. When you think of albums that inspire you, what do you think of? What’s just one you’ve listened to lately?

One of the main ones is Manitoba — “Stop Breaking My Heart.” I just feel like that one is just brilliant, beginning to end, a cohesive album. Every track is just the same but different, the same sound or feeling. The artwork’s great… I think if I had to pick one that I can think of recently, that’d be the one for me.

The album is not dead, in other words.

Yeah, it’s not. And it won’t be for ages; I don’t think it’ll ever be.

Do you think that there’s a length albums should have, given in the age of digital it can be anything you want — 12 hours long, 12 minutes.

We had a rule when I started and I was mixing the tracks with James. We had a joke that any album longer than one side of the C90 cassette was too long. And I’ve just gone over; I’m at 47 minutes. But then we decided, oh, it’s all right — tapes…

Right, on the C90 you’d get a little bit of extra tape.

Yeah, [or] you just have to cut out the gaps when you’re dubbing it.

Well, it was just a joke we had.

I think a half hour is great, as well — half hour, forty minutes, forty-five. They’re all good. I’m just a sucker for numbers. I couldn’t have ten tracks on my album; it’d drive me insane. It would have to be nine, or eleven. Eight’s cool. I don’t know why that is; I can’t do ten.

That could be another Asian influence — the numerology is there.

Yeah. But I’m terrible at math, unfortunately. I’m just particular about some things.

Buy the album, find more here… and apologies to your girlfriend, Gold Panda; entirely my own fault, that’s a somewhat abrupt and boring way to end an interview. Perhaps I need a dog to go walk. But happily, the music is great.

http://www.luckyshiner.com/ [with a free MP3 with mailing list signup, as well, see below]

Official Gold Panda site: http://wearebrilliantlydifferent.com/goldpanda/new/

Gold Panda Live

From our own Primus Luta, here’s Gold Panda live last week at the Decibel Festival.

Gold Panda at Decibel Festival 2010 from Primus Luta on Vimeo.

Brainpipe is a psychedellic journey down the neural pathways, a long, strange trip into the minds of an unusual band of independent game designers. And while some games demand muscular graphics cards or brilliant flat panels, this is one that requires playing with headphones. The immersive sense of the descent down this brain’s pathway is entirely dependent on its sound. While even big development houses often license sound engines, the band of hard-core designers at Digital Eel also rolled their own interactive audio code to make the sounds fully seamless.

Designers and developers Iikka Keränen (the primary coder) and Rich Carlson spoke to me about their work. (They make reference to artist Bill “Phosphorous” Sears, as well.) In the process, they have a lot to say about the design process, about ambient sound design and composition, that goes well beyond just the gaming world. This isn’t just about gaming: it’s truly about digital music.

Digital Eel has won three excellence in audio awards over the past six years from the Independent Games Festival, including, most recently, a nomination for the psychedellic hit “Brainpipe” at the Game Developer Conference this spring. Incredibly, though, says Digital Eel’s Brainpipe, in that time no one has interviewed them about the sound in their games. Independent of the interview, Rich concede to me the challenge of getting people to focus on sound:

People are focused on graphics –and gameplay– and, you know, sound always gets the short shrift, even at game companies.  Sound and music are always the smallest slice of the development budget pie.

But not so at Digital Eel.  Sound and music are integral and integrated with design from the first moment we have something happening on the screen.  We feel it must be, and not just sfx but music, especially music which so often sounds like something….like dressing, something painted on, like makeup or apartment paint to help cover up the picture holes on the walls.

Brainpipe Game Page (with Mac/Windows download links – demos available so if you hate this, you’ll find out!)

Brainpipe on Steam (Windows only)

At a glance:

Engine: Custom

Favorite inspiration: demoscene, The Dig, Star Control II, Stockhausen, Varese, Morton Subotnick, Ussachevsky

Special acheivements: hiding loop points, creating a seamless acoustic descent, tapping into your subconscious

Peter: Let’s talk about the game mechanic. Some of it feels familiar – this descent through a cylindrical pipe – but there’s something quirky and unique about your take on it. How did you settle on the interaction mechanic?

Iikka: This was quite literally the first thing I programmed for Brainpipe. We were trying to come up with a new "short" game after putting another larger project on the back burner because we didn’t have enough free time to work on it. Within a few hours I had the basic control scheme and the moving pipe running on the screen. This is similar to how some of our other short games (Plasmaworm, Dr. Blob’s Organism) got started; the first prototype is something you can play with. After that there were tweaks of course, but the feel stayed much the same.

Rich: Everybody likes the "wormhole effect" you see in space shows and movies, and we do, too, so we wanted to do something like that.  Iikka got the pipe happening and we began to play with it as a prototype. Originally, we just wanted the player to fly down the pipe having a kind of zen experience as the speed slowly increased, and that’s all.  Not much of game there, though.

We were talking about music right away and how the sound, the intensity of the patterns and colors on the pipe walls, and the speed of traveling through the pipe should all work together. [We wanted] a kind of triple whammy to suck the player in deeper and deeper — a strong, cumulative effect.

We did add obstacles and specials, things to scoop up, and plenty of things to avoid that look pretty but are lethal.  But the blend of music, color and pattern complexity, and speed remained as we’d originally intended — this began very early on in the game’s development.

Making sure each obstacle has a sustained sound so you can hear it coming in the distance in front of you and then hear it pass by and recede with Doppler shift certainly adds to the audio illusion.
I think the kicker is the way the intensity ramps in the game.  It’s sort of like a rising sawtooth waveform-shaped thing.  During each level, the intensity, the speed increases, Then, between each level, the intensity drops to give you a breather before the next level begins.  Each time the intensity drops, it is still at a higher intensity level than during the previous level break, and all of this ramps upward.

It kind of coaxes you along.  You might not realize that you’re actually moving faster and faster each level for a few levels.  It’s a good training system.  Eventually you’ll get it as the game approaches its highest intensity levels and speeds.  Anyway, I still think it’s really cool.

The sensation of synesthesia is something a handful of game designers have tried to achieve. What are some of the games that have inspired you? Are there games you feel have reached that fusion of sound and visuals?

Iikka:  My personal influence is the "demoscene" that I was a part of when I was younger; it’s a subculture of programmers and artists using computers to create non-interactive but real time audio-visual experiences.

Rich:  For me, LucasArts’ adventure game, The Dig, with its seamless looping of various Wagner themes and so on. The music would morph as scenes changed.  It was an amazing piece of work. 

The music from Star Control II innovated with music and visuals, and it directly inspired the music for Strange Adventures in Infinite Space and Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.  The idea that each alien race should have their own theme music came from there (though this kind of thing is less unusual now than it was when SC2 was originally released), as did the idea to attach separate and distinctly different music to each thing, category of thing, item, window, pop up announcement –every action in the game and every flick of the interface … like a toddler’s "busy box" of sound.

Back to Brainpipe, other areas of music outside of games inspired us as well.  Aleatoric, musique concrete, avant garde — stuff Bill just naturally creates and stuff I’ve always loved since I was a kid. [I checked] out the LP’s at the library by Stockhausen, Varese, Morton Subotnick, Ussachevsky, all these wonderful pre-synthsizer electronic sound and found sound composers. And the records were awesome because they were always in pristine condition — relatively few others ever checked them out.

[It’s] mindblowing stuff to listen to while you’re listening to Steppenwolf on your Japanese transistor radio and playing John Phillips Sousa in your Junior High band.  Liberating.  Of course this stuff scares some people and some people react to it negatively –all strongly– but if you listen to it, put together by someone who pays attention to details while intuitively knowing what they’re doing, you can hear the music in the sighing of pond reeds, or on the heavy end, the music within industrial clamor and the beauty in the beast.

That seemed perfect for Brainpipe which really demanded a whole different musical approach and completely different kinds of music produced in ways that are not normal — not typical at all.

I love that you talk about sound being integral with the design process. Even for a musician, though, thinking in more than one medium can be a challenge. How do you approach this in terms of design; how do you make it part of the process in practice?

Rich:  When we make a game, music and sound are in right away.  From the first couple of hours, the basic prototype is on the screen, so they began to shape the sonic style of the game immediately.

Because sound and music are growing up at the same time as the art and programming is, all these elements influence each other pretty equally, so you don’t get music and sound that sound "separate" or tacked-on.  You get sound you can’t turn off, and you don’t want to, because it’s actually part of the game.

Sounds can also influence and inspire and change things.  You might be after a certain sound effect, but then you stumble across something else that’s much cooler, so the animation of a visual effect is changed to match the sound.

What was the compositional process like on this game? The sound design / sound score clearly fuse – with these recurrent "whooshing" sounds as an added layer. How were these assembled?

Rich:  Basically what you’re hearing is a series of loops.  Most of them are 16-second loops.

I knew right away that "music" with beats wasn’t the way to go.  The music had to create a soundscape, something that supports a mindscape, really — pun intended — rather than making you want to tap your foot.  It had to smoothly transition just as the "art" on the pipe wall and the speed of traveling through the pipe smoothly transition in the game.

I also knew that the music had to have a kind of primal power and evoke a sense of mystery about what is supposed to be going on and what is being revealed.  Bill was very much into this too.

At the same time, we wanted it to reflect the random thoughts floating through and bouncing around inside your brain.  One of the best ways to accomplish this was to leave conventional music behind, which is what Bill and I ended up doing.

It was important that the loops be seamless.  If you’re working with beats and grooves, that’s a very easy thing to do — it starts on one and ends on four.  You simply loop that, attaching the end to the beginning and it sounds fine because, for the most part, that’s how a bass/drums/guitar combo plays.

On top of that I knew we needed loops that didn’t sound like loops.  Loops gamers wouldn’t notice were loops, with no obvious "breaks" where the end of a loop would be obviously attached to the beginning, or the beginning of another.  The loops had to have no beginning or end!

The sources for the loops were varied. There are very successful loops in the game that are extremely simple, comprised of only two or three tracks or elements.  [But] some of them are monsters mapping out to 32 tracks or more.  Again, the idea was to create loops that don’t sound like loops with a range that would reach an orchestral level of density.

Finally, the soundtrack loops had to blend seamlessly with each other while increasing in intensity. One way to do this, of course, is to cross fade them, but that wasn’t going to be enough. The intensity and the components of each loop needed to be gauged so a dramatic and appropriate intensity ramp was reached.  I think we came very close to nailing it, but I want to keep experimenting with this.  We can go farther now, having only scratched the surface.

Can you talk about some of the found sounds that are collaged into the result? (I’m hearing the TARDIS materializing…)

Rich:  I don’t want to spoil the magic trick but, like most who do music and audio, I collect sounds from all kinds of sources.  I’ve been doing it for a long time, so if you listen carefully you’ll hear things from old TV shows, records, radio shows, interviews, sound effects records, and God knows what else folded in there. 

The soundtrack is meant to represent the background music of your own brain so references to "real life" should resonate –especially, we hoped, on an unconscious level.

I don’t want to list all the sources — some of them are in the credits –  because what is going on is also a sound trivia game.  It’s the Mystery Science Theater of game music, but the gamer is provoked to make guesses and speculate.

You noted that part of why you embarked on building your own sound engine was that OpenAL [a standard, open, cross-platform API for spatial audio] wound up being inadequate. What were some of the obstacles you encountered? Have you found other independent game creators dealing with the same issues?

Iikka:  We had to switch away from OpenAL because it made repeating clicking sounds on common integrated audio hardware. The lack of features is not terribly important, as you can always just use OpenAL as the output channel for your own sound mixing system. My sound code would be perfectly happy living on top of OpenAL if it was universally supported.

Sound is a rather underappreciated and underdeveloped area in games. To many game developers, especially smaller ones, it’s enough that it "makes a sound when something happens". The focus of development is very much on the visuals.

It seems like game audio lacks a functioning standard. OpenAL is promising but lacks some of the maturity of, say, the OpenGL API which game visuals can use. What’s your take on the landscape? Is there hope that a new standard or engine could address these issues, and result perhaps in better sound and music design in games?

Iikka:  I think it’s possible that OpenAL will mature to a point that it will work reliably on all common hardware some day, and at least form a standard foundation for people to base their sound engines on so they won’t need to learn a new API for each operating system they support.

As for workflow and design, I don’t view these as dependent on what is under the hood; they are the result of the mindset among the team members. Certainly one could imagine development tools that allow an audio artist to work more directly with the game, but a good first step is just making sure that everybody involved in the project is involved in designing the work flow.

Can you describe your custom sound engine? What functionality did you find you wanted to build into it? What would you want to put in the next iteration?

Iikka: I call it "eelmix". It’s a modular sound system in which sound sources, filters and mixers are arranged in a tree structure, like a scene graph of sorts. It’s analogous to musical instruments wired together, eventually converging to a master output to speakers.

The main goal was the modularity, the system makes it easy to make a "box" that takes a sound output (from any source), mangles it in some interesting way, and then feeds it to where it was originally going, without modifying either the source or the destination. We haven’t really used the full capabilities of this yet but the modular system is also useful for things like separating UI ("2d") sounds from the game ("3d") sounds that makes balancing them easier. And it eliminates the need to conform to some preset number of "channels".

There are other lesser goals, like eliminating clipping by using 32-bit precision internally and simulating a non-linear response curve when rendering the final output. This is a very simple and useful bit of code that really improves sound quality when there’s tons of sounds being played.
Going into the future, what’s left is mostly just filling in some blanks like including basic prefab filters, making sure that every kind of sound source can use every kind of sound sample, that sort of stuff.

Indie games it seems, like larger games, have struggled a bit on sound and music – perhaps because of the lack of better tools. But what are some smaller, experimental, or independent titles you feel have done good things with their soundtracks?

Rich:  A couple of indie games have had sound and music that was really special, I thought.  I loved the music from Saints & Sinners Bowling a few years ago.  Just great stuff that nestled right in there so you didn’t want to turn off, and that’s the true test.

Musaic Box which I encountered at this year’s IGF [Independent Games Festival] uses conventional music ingeniously.  You solve musical puzzles by ear, assembling melodies to reach certain goals. I think music is actually more integral to this game than it is in Brainpipe because it’s directly a part of gameplay.  You couldn’t play Musaic Box without it.

Flow stood out to me for doing something really quite gentle and tasteful and, well, flowy — even the soundtrack lived up to the game’s name.  That’s important I think, and that gets back to some of the things I’ve already said here.

Sounds to Hear

To head deeper into the strange sonic world the Digital Eels inhabit, Rich sent along some additional sonic resources:

Weird Worlds stuff
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/the_single.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/mfbtpv2_320Kbps.mp3

Misc. stuff from different games old & new:
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/voidprobe.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/blok.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/drblob.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/forest.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/plasmaworm.mp3
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/vault/haircut.mp3

An interview (Omaha Sternberg interviewing Bill, "Phosphorous") with a couple snippets of Brainpipe music in it:
http://www.digital-eel.com/files/omahaphos_intermix1_160.mp3

Enjoy. The game is really unusual, so I look forward to hearing what CDM readers think of the experience. And if you have other games (or other interactive experiences) about which you’d like to learn more or get an interview, let us know.

For many, mobile technology and developing for the iPhone and the iPod touch is a fad and a Gold Rush. Good designers, though, take a longer view of how interaction can be expressive. And there are few people with a better sense of the big picture of small devices than Dr. Ge Wang. The co-founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer of Smule has a background that goes well beyond the latest Apple platform. Along with Perry Cook at Princeton, Ge Wang is the co-originator of ChucK, a real-time programming language for synthesis so efficient some people use it live onstage. (ChucK, as an open source project, now has a terrific team of people behind it.) ChucK is the sonic engine that powers Smule’s projects. Ge Wang also teaches at Stanford, working with students and fellow researchers to explore new ways of interacting with music technology.

Ge Wang joined me for a lengthy phone conversation recently. He really contextualized why the iPhone is important in the grand scheme of things, but also how the people at Smule and Stanford (and Princeton) can approach technology for musical interaction, focusing on what devices are rather than what they’re not.

(The audio here, believe it or not, is extensively edited – Ge Wang is that easy to talk to. I hope the next time it’s over beers rather than Skype.)

The full interview can be played below, or downloaded directly.

[podcast]http://createdigitalmusic.com/files/media/podcasts/2009/07/gewang.mp3[/podcast]

Download MP3 of the interview

Thanks to KORG and the Nano Series for their support of programming on createdigitalmusic.com.

Lastly: a video of the Smule team headquarters and playing around with Leaf Trombone for a Zelda duet!

More information:
The Mule Chronicles [Smule Blog]
http://smule.com/
Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), Stanford University

Previously, for more on Ge Wang and CCRMA:
Make:TV Meets Stanford Musical Inventors, Feedback Piano

Video + Audio Subscriptions, iTunes Podcast

CDM is now launching regular audio content on the artists and inventors we cover as part of our series CDM Sounds. You can subscribe (and review the podcast) via iTunes, where you’ll also find our new video series:

cdm Sounds Podcast [audio]
cdm TV

Or using your software of choice, subscribe directly to RSS. (I like to follow podcasts with Banshee and Winamp this way.)

We’ve fixed some transcoding issues for iPod touch/iPhone on the video podcast. Please do test this and let us know if you have any issues on your software/hardware.

There really is something special about Montreal, Quebec’s metropolis just beyond the New York Adirondacks. Having shared our own conversation with Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke with video from their stunning ATOM, here’s what our friends at XLR8R Magazine were up to in May: they were on a tour of Montreal with local Ghislain Poirier.

Poirer’s Caribbean-infused electronica has made him one of Montreal’s hottest exports, but this Ninja Tune artist isn’t fleeing for Berlin (ahem). Wandering around Montreal, you really get a sense of his love for the city and what you can do to make the scene what you want – a great lesson for those of us living anywhere in the world. Poirer is currently touring the UK and Europe, having done a set at the sprawling Metropolis club during MUTEK, but he’ll get back to Montreal in time to play a Piknic Electronik in the park.

I’d love to see more artists showing us around their cities – including hamlets that don’t get so much coverage, or even big-name cities like my own home New York from a different perspective. We do have a chance to have a different view of things on the Internet. I welcome ideas about how to go about that.

Circle from Future Audio Workshop is an upcoming virtual instrument that’s gotten our attention in a big way. In terms of sound, its capabilities are familiar, if very complete. What’s different is its approach to interface design and usability, refocusing on “Flow” and ease-of-use while looking forward to new interface capabilities in touchscreens, multi-touch, and OpenSoundControl. What makes that doubly interesting is that Circle appears to embody a trend in a new generation of music software — not that it stands alone, necessarily, as much as it seems to present a glimpse via an independent developer of where things may be going.

Eoin Rossney, our new writer and contributor to the Kore minisite, got a chance to talk to FAW co-founder Gavin Burke, a fellow Irishman. We’ll have more on the instrument itself soon, but it’s an excellent, coffee-fueled discussion of instrument design in general. -PK

I had the opportunity to visit Future Audio Workshop’s office in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland to have a chat with Gavin Burke about their upcoming synth, Circle. While instrument design is a collaborative process for FAW, Gavin’s area of expertise is in Signal Processing algorithms. I wanted to talk to FAW to find out some more about how the synth came to be, the company’s ethos, and the inclusion of OSC. What I got was a fascinating insight into the world of softsynth design and a sense that a shift may be about to occur in this area. If you haven’t heard of Circle check out CDM’s preview.

Over copious amounts of coffee, Gavin told me a little bit about how FAW came to be. Having spent a long time designing synths that strive to emulate old hardware (with many of hardware’s inherent limitations creeping across into the software effort), Gavin and the guys from FAW wanted to design a synth that does away with old conventions and embraces the type of advances in usability that we have come to take for granted in interface design over the last few years.

After giving a general rundown of the instrument (for something similar, check out Sonic State’s video from Messe), Gavin took me through some of the features that make Circle unique. The main things here are in the details. Changing a modulation amount is always a horizontal mouse movement, no matter what the current value is. The LFOs include a healthy number of wave shapes, and each can be crossfaded between two waves. Each wave is variable-phase: you just click and drag the picture of the wave horizontally to change phase. There are five modulation slots, and each can contain an LFO, a sequencer or an envelope. LFO and oscillator wave shapes are represented as simple pictures which are easy to see. And there’s no right-clicking — anywhere.

FAW say they’ve tried to create a workspace that’s simple and conducive to sound design. Gavin maintains that sound design is essentially an easy practice. Watching him quickly build presets from scratch, it’s hard to disagree. He quickly built for me a “faux beatbox,” with an LFO triggering white noise as a snare, another LFO triggering an oscillator as a kick drum, and yet another modulating the rate of a sequencer, slowing down and speeding up the sequencer’s rate organically.

This isn’t to say that Circle is short on features – there are quite a number of advanced features on offer here (hard sync on wavetable oscillators, anyone?), it’s just that anything that might obstruct or distract your workflow is neatly tidied away, or at least doesn’t jump out at you. It’s clear FAW have taken a good look at what makes interface elements work well, and they’ve taken inspiration from such sources as the iPhone and… multimeters?

Interface Design

Gavin: There is a very famous book by [Apple pioneer and founding Mac team leader] Jef Raskin called ‘The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems’. The inspiration for the color-coded connections came from Raskin’s example of how a simple device such as a multimeter has very easy-to-use, color-coded cables. He describes how all of the multimeter’s functions are different. Here you’ve got these leads: one’s red and one’s grey. That’s your positive and your negative, and when you actually have color representations of things that you can connect up, that was one of the influences for Circle.

This book just goes through all those things and tells you how to do, for example, switches properly. If you look at 99% of softsynths — if not 100% of them — at the moment they haven’t done this. The reason why people like OS X, or like using a Mac, is that it’s easy to use. You never even think about all of these things, but you find that all this talk about workflow, that’s where it comes from, from this guy. [Ed.: Some of the Mac team might well dispute that, actually, as Raskin ultimately had less of an influence on the Mac interface. But if you want some radical reading on interface design, this should absolutely be on your reading list! -PK]

There’s another guy called John Maeda and he writes a book called Simplicity — ‘The Ten Rules of Simplicity‘, and that was an influence. There were other influences, ‘The Paradox of Choice’, where the more choices you have the less likely you are to make a decision about something. We took that to the level of the interface, where… if you’ve five different note-stealing algorithms, you don’t need them. You’ll only ever use one, so why have you got five? It’s like when you get a Swiss Army knife – you only ever use the knife, but it’s got a magnifying glass, a spoon, maybe three different types of bottle openers, and when you want to use the knife all these other things get in your way. We still have all the bits and pieces, but we’ve just put them down on the bottom panel or moved them out of the way so that they don’t get in the way of the basic thing, which is the sound design.

The Beginnings of FAW, and Future Frameworks

Gavin: So these were the things we were thinking about when we were starting, and we went to the guys in Germany [Christophe and Johannes] and they were also influenced by the same stuff like Maeda and Raskin. We got in contact with them, went over to Germany, spent two days with them and went for a few drinks and said we’d start up the company — the four of us just got together and did all the bits and pieces. Pierre and I moved to Ireland about a year ago and we started coding, and we had all the ideas drawn on a sheet of paper and had a think about the workflows. Then we started putting it together, and as we found that if something wasn’t working as imagined [in the workflow], we could make a change very easily.

Pierre and I were actually users as well as designing and coding [Circle] at the same time. So if we wanted to change something, we didn’t have to go through that big mechanism of making change orders and someone signing off on them. I could just say across the room, “Pierre, I don’t like this, can you change it?”

The main idea is just, you know, you’re on a computer. Why would you have a hardware panel with cables everywhere or right-clicks, all that kind of stuff? Why not show the LFO, why not put a dot on the envelope so you can see it? You know, let people see what’s actually happening rather than everything always being hidden behind the scenes. Then modulation is no longer this kind of thing that’s just ‘LFO 1 Amt’, you can actually see that the LFO’s moving.

When you can see everything on the interface, it means that you know all your options, you know what you can connect to what, and you can have ideas you wouldn’t normally have. That was another thing; keep it all on one panel. Then put the more complicated stuff down on the bottom. The other thing is to keep all the modules in drop menus as single clicks, so hopefully if there’s a touch screen around at some time, everything can be done in a very easy way.

And you start to get into it. That’s the whole idea of Flow. If you have an idea it’s very easy: you just grab the circle and drop it, rather than right-clicking and flicking between pages and that kind of thing. You’ll see some synthesizers have these modulation matrices with cryptic names like ‘KF2 to F1 in Trig.’ There should be no reason why anybody would do that in the first place. I can’t understand it. I think a lot of it has to do with the graphics frameworks, that the graphics just couldn’t do those kind of things, but now they’ve evolved to a stage where you can, and we’re taking advantage of that.

Eoin: And do you think that’s an advantage of the frameworks themselves — the languages that you’re building the software with?

Gavin: Yeah.

Eoin: Or is it that the hardware has come of age?

Gavin: It’s a bit of everything, really. If you look at a lot of the companies that started ten years ago, they’re still using all their legacy graphics frameworks, and they haven’t been thinking about all these things. We wanted to correct that a bit with what we’re doing and still be able to do sound design, because sound design isn’t complicated. It’s just that the way it’s presented makes it complicated, so we want to make it easier.

Eoin: I can’t take my eyes off that LFO…

Gavin - [laughs] Yeah, it’s hypnotizing.

Eoin: But that’s the thing about it is, it’s an engaging interface. Looking at it you just want to go in and grab it and –

Gavin: – start doing the bits and pieces. Even MIDI Learn, you know — the majority of software synthesizers at the moment, if you want to learn a control you have to go Ctrl/right-click, click through a menu, click Learn, then go over here and move that, then go back out of the learn mode. We just said — [clicks the MIDI learn button, which like Ableton Live takes just one click] — like that. That’s the way it should be, then you just turn it off again.

Extensibility & Agile Programming

Gavin - For us, because we’re using Agile development, it’s very easy for us to be responsive and to get stuff done. We don’t have to check with ten people first before we can do something. We’re [talking about] adding to Circle [over time]. So we’re maybe going to do some nice, fancy FM oscillators, and as we get feedback from people, we can make changes. During beta testing, someone wanted OSC control over the individual steps in the sequencer and to be able to use MIDI Learn with them.

Eoin: And when you talk about Agile programming, can you describe what you mean for people who aren’t familiar with it?

Gavin: It’s just a set of rules for programming. It’s quite popular at the moment, and it’s starting to gather steam. It means that people like myself, Pierre and the two guys in Germany, Kristoff and Johanne, we could do something equivalent to what a big company could just by… not having the big company there! You can actually do more. It’s not just in audio software. It’s in loads of different fields where you’ve got small groups of people who are very dedicated. With the Internet and communication, people like us can get together and start to give the big companies a run for their money in terms of features and what we can do. So that’s very interesting, and when you apply the Agile rules and whatever it starts to work.

Eoin: I saw on the website that JUCE is the platform you’re running on. [Ed.: JUCE is a C++-based class library for cross-platform audio and graphics.] What’s that about?

Gavin: JUCE is a set of controls, that’s all it is. It’s all these sliders and stuff. [He demonstrates using the mouse to program OSC program as an example.] So what Pierre uses JUCE for is he can then position knobs on the screen. There isn’t an actual editor where you can drag and drop, you have to code it in, but it’s [easy to add] a knob or panel [in code]. It just allows us to do a lot of these things, to draw a line like that (using filter indicator line as an example).

Eoin: It lets you do your job more easily?

Gavin: Exactly. All the graphics are done in Photoshop, and it also lets us do stuff like fading. We’re using vector graphics and transparency layers and [JUCE's timing features].

Eoin: So this functionality is all built into JUCE?

Gavin: Yeah, and you can do any type of program with it. There are a number of developers using this framework.

Eoin: The fact that it’s mentioned on your website, that kind of caught my eye because people don’t normally say what tools they’re using.

Gavin: Yeah, and we’ve a lot of respect for Jules [JUCE's developer], because he’s on his forum there and he maybe has, you know, 200 people there asking him questions at the same time and he’s never short with anybody.

OpenSoundControl

Gavin: We’re always thinking about what we’d like for ourselves, and personally I’ve always wanted [OSC support; see opensoundcontrol.org for more on this control protocol]. I was using this Mouse-to-OSC to test, and I was just getting the idea that it would be cool to have a single interface controlling Circles on different channels. If you want to control different plug-ins on different channels inside a host, it’s a bit complicated for the general user.

I can do it here now, I can add another Circle. Now we’ve got two Circles. But rather than having these two screens open and maybe a third one — so you’ve got three big screens open at the same time — you’ve just one screen. And you’ve got these controls assigned to the most interesting stuff on each of the synthesizers [via OSC assignments].

You’re not trying to think about MIDI and what MIDI channels you’re on and all that kind of stuff; it just keeps it nice and simple. [OSC] is where it’s heading. It’s where most people want to be; most people don’t want to [have to do MIDI mappings]. The Novation [ReMOTE SL's Automap feature] isn’t too bad, but it’s still not that easy.

Eoin:It’s something we’re interested in, because there hasn’t been a massive adoption of OSC.

Gavin: We put in OSC with the view that, once it’s in there, we can develop it more, add transmit [capability] and also be able to have the interface so that, let’s say, if you move something on the interface that it also updates on the Lemur [multi-touch controller hardware]. It’s just to keep things open.

That’s the main idea, really: to keep everything open and easy, to avoid getting crazy with the options.

Back to Basics

Gavin: If you look at the Maeda laws of simplicity, one of the laws is, do you really need it? And if you don’t really need it then don’t put it in there just because you can. I think a lot of other companies use the spec sheet. It’s like the bigger the spec sheet the better it is, but I think that just makes the thing more difficult, more complicated and more trouble, really. You know, if you’ve got a big massive spec sheet and they haven’t even bothered to do a proper MIDI learn, it’s a bit ridiculous. And they forget about the simple stuff, and for us using the software we want that stuff. We take it for granted that we’re going to have a hundred wavetables and it’s going to do oscillator hard sync.

Eoin: You don’t want it to be shouting it out from the interface.

Gavin: No, no. Because that’s not what you want to know about when you’re using it. You want to be into the circles and stay away from the big long spec sheets and five note-stealing algorithms and modulating the modulation with the modulation.

Eoin: That’s basically what you’re selling, then, is workflow. That’s your edge: you’re coming at it from a usability point of view.

Gavin: Yeah, we’ve done everything else. All the stuff that everybody else does, it does, as well. We do everything that everybody else does in terms of the sound, if not more. We have the width on the triangle oscillator there, small things like that. But the most important thing for us is to make it easy, and when you’re actually using it, it’s not the spec sheet, it’s the actual playing of [the instrument]. Adding features to get a big spec sheet doesn’t affect the end user, because it’s getting back to that thing about the Paradox of Choice. What we’re doing is concentrating on what we want ourselves, and whatever comes out of it in the workflow.

And the sound is good. We’re very happy with it, and we’ve put a lot of work into it.

Eoin: So, what’s down the road, looking at the future of the tool?

Gavin: We’re going to have a look at the iPhone SDK and see is there anything interesting in there, because that’s the next big thing. I’m not sure whether you could do a professional product on the iPhone but even for ourselves to do something cool, to give it a go.

We’re going to start using computers in a different way. There’s a bit of that in there with Circle, looking forward to the touchscreen [as an interface]. I think those things are going to change — usability, the things you get with Windows. I can’t use Windows anymore; it just drives me crazy.

Eoin: I have to say — and this isn’t trying to pay you a false compliment, but it does genuinely seem like a bit of a revolution in terms of the way that we think about music software design, that things are starting to change. The way we use things is changing, and one of the reasons I was interested is you guys seem to be forging ahead with that.

Gavin: We’re very interested in usability. I think it’s because I’m getting older <laughs>. My father, he’s 72, and he finds it hard to use the remote control for the television. After a while you get tired — not of learning new things, but putting up with things that should be fixed. You just want to make life easier for yourself when you’re using stuff. You don’t want to have to be getting involved in complicated things when you’re trying to do your music.