Designing Sound, as the name implies, focuses entirely on the craft of audio from film to games. While there are industry-driven sites devoted to the topic, this blog is entirely the labor of love of composer and sound designer Miguel Isaza, whose writing has also appeared on Spain’s Hispasonic and Monofónicos. (Miguel also tweets to Reaktor aficionados as reaktorlovers.) That personal perspective has imbued the site with the feeling of artists talking to artists.

http://designingsound.noisepages.com/

All week, Designing Sound has focused on Rob Bridgett, who has worked on numerous sound designs for games. Despite the massive growth of the game industry, most top artists have worked largely in obscurity – even less so in sound. There isn’t an equivalent of Ben Burtt, Randy Thom, Walter Murch, or others. (Those greats have been featured in Designing Sound specials, too.) Gaming is a young industry, to be sure, but that’s no excuse for simple ignorance.

In this week’s interviews with Isaza, Bridgett talks frankly about every last detail of what goes into sound production. He’s frank not only about what can go right in a game production – Scarface, pictured above, gets special treatment – but also what can go wrong. The brutal deadlines, fluid production parameters, and tangled production process of games can exact a toll on sound in gaming. The high point of this: Bridgett has gotten to employ the full resources of Skywalker Sound and has been at the forefront of bringing Hollywood-style sonic treatment to gaming.

I’m sure many readers here are curious about the games industry. There’s still time to forward your own questions to Miguel to pass along to Rob Bridgett.

Exclusive interview

Rob Bridgett Special

Ask your own questions

Incidentally, this is beyond what we even imagined for our fledgling noisepages.com, which we’re readying for a full launch as a community and blogging platform. Miguel created Designing Sound without prompting or assistance – it’s entirely his vision. It’s great to have people sharing information in this way. I can’t wait to see what’s ahead.

Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on.

It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really make sense. It’d be unfair to ask Ricardo Villalobos live up to some of the titans – Bob Dylan saying CDs have “no stature” and “have sound all over them,” and Elton’ John’s classic call to “tear down the Internet.” (Not to mention, in the end I think we wound up agreeing with them and turned Elton’s quote into a brand-new verb.) As with Elton John and Bob Dylan, I love and respect Villalobos’ work, no less so as he says things with which I disagree. But Ricardo Villalobos does get special credit for claiming in a recent Resident Advisor interview, among other things, that what has really hurt sound quality today is the lack of cheap drum machines from the 80s, because they were analog. Or they weren’t, but it was as if they were. Or something. (If you think this might earn some ire from Ableton loyalists, you’re right.)

No. I think the development is going in the opposite direction because everyone is making tracks in programs like Ableton, which has an OK sound engine. When I started making music 20 years ago, you had to at least buy a mixer, then some synthesizers, a drum machine—which is the best quality possible of a sampled drum. There was a pureness of the source of the music. It was analog, direct.

Ah, yes, the good old days. Back in the day, digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital-to-analog-converters were real digital samples of acoustic instruments played through digital -to-analog-converters. It was analog, direct – well, aside from the fact that it was digital and not direct, but it was real … um … analog … digital. Pulse code modulation was real, pure pulse code modulation, not like the pulse code modulation you kids have today. Not like now, when people don’t … own… mixers. It’s not like you kids today, you people who use Ableton, people like… Ricardo Villalobos. (Villalobos is, in fact, a notable Live user.)

I mean, at least it’s a novel argument. Usually, you get the “mixing in the box is bad” and “computers aren’t real” argument from crusty audio engineers with massive outboard analog mixing boards, not electronic musicians. Recently, many experienced engineers I’ve talked to have come to the side of accepting that “in-the-box” recordings in software can be just as good as their analog counterparts. So, we may have reached a real landmark, a world in which electronic musicians claim digital’s no good and turntables are the only way to listen, while engineers experienced with analog claim just the opposite.

Let’s go back in time. For the record, twenty years ago by my calculations would be 1989.

The drum machine you might have bought then could be the Alesis HR-16, or perhaps a Roland TR-707. They’re fantastic, unique-sounding instruments. But “the best quality possible” is not generally a phrase associated with instruments of this era. We love them because they aren’t 192kHz, 64-bit multisamples recorded from 30 microphones and shipped on a 100 GB hard drive, because “quality” isn’t actually everything. And if you bought a new mixer in 1989, I assume you picked up something like Mackie’s just-released LM-1602, rather than an SSL. Of course, you really could go do that now. In fact, Ableton Live recently added 64-bit processing in the signal chain; the software that does more aliasing to account for lower bitrates is actually Pro Tools.

He goes on:

The thing is, you have the limitation of the program, the limitation of the digital mixing which is happening inside the computer, you have the limitation of the sound sources of the synthesizers—the virtual synthesizers. Even the sound engine is playing a very big role in the whole sound of the product. If you have a good turntable and good speakers, you can hear it is made in Ableton. Logic, for example, is very neutral in sound but Ableton…you can hear it in two seconds.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Live does have an overused sound – but that comes from people using effects presets as-is, people not knowing how to mix, people time stretching and warping without adjusting settings or taking care to think about the impact on its sound.

The idea that you have to use a turntable to hear these things, or generally to hear quality issues in a track produced entirely digitally is… well, an interesting theory. (It’d be like testing the fidelity of your inkjet printer by first taking a Polaroid of the output.)

They have all of these virtual instruments that are calculated by a computer, and you have a certain space where you have to put everything. And when you want to leave this space, you have to live with compromises, the compromises of digital mixes and recordings.

Now, perhaps I’m wrong, but I thought that if for some reason you thought you needed to mix on an analog board and record to, say, analog reel-to-reel, you were no less able to do that with the analog outs of your MacBook Pro than with your 606.

And what exactly was in those vintage drum machines, if not a computer making  calculations? Eleven secret herbs and spices? Elves with slide rules?

But this is the beauty of interviews – you can say whatever you want. And it definitely beats boring.

There is also one statement with which I wholeheartedly agree:

People are finding it easy to publish something without any controls. And this is the problem with the internet in general. There is so much information, and no one knows if it’s true or not. It’s just there. It’s an information monster.

It’s almost as though the Internet is a place in which people can make any wild claim they wish, without anyone questioning its basis in reality or fact.

http://www.residentadvisor.net/feature.aspx?1128

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.

Richie Hawtin has been the subject of adulation and sometimes seemingly-random scorn by readers of this site — blame the passions of the Internet. But amidst that noise has been a clear signal: bring back Plastikman.

Richie is a terrifically talented DJ, but for many of us it’s his work as a producer that we love. And for all m-nus has done over the years, the handful of work that comes from Richie’s Plastikman persona remains significant. He’s announced he’s bringing Plastikman back, and has a survey to match. Don’t worry – this isn’t something like “What’s your favorite bpm,” or “specify preferred filter cutoff frequencies.” It’s more along the lines of whether you’d see a show in Santiago or Perth. But there are indications of a new live show and re-releases. (I’m not clear whether the “new project” includes a new release, but I do hope so, and it does talk about “creative process.”)

When considering the various aspects of Richie Hawtin’s persona, it seems fans reserve a special place in their hearts for Plastikman. So it’s only right that as we prepare for a new Plastikman project next year, you should have some input and control over exactly what you see and hear.

http://www.plastikman.com/survey09/

Richie Hawtin and the also-excellent Ambivalent reflected on music making with technology at DubSpot here in New York over the summer. I think they had some really good things to say, even if your own music tends in other directions or genres, so now is the ideal time to share that. Both Richie and Kevin spoke about the need to incorporate physical gestures into digital music making, whether it was drawing on the performance (for Ambivalent) or locking oneself into the studio and getting physical with the gear (for Hawtin). That made something like Maschine important to Richie’s newer work, he said. DubSpot has video of this conversation (led by an audience Q&A of Ableton users), as well as a private conversation with Richie about his work.

Videos via the DubSpot blog.

Thoughts? Care to disagree, for that matter, with their take on performance and what matters? (I think there’s plenty to discuss here in an open conversation.)

From John Cage to Radiohead, there are few people in any medium so closely tied to the explorations of experimental music’s frontiers than Cunningham. To understand why music was so important to him – and electronic music in particular – we can listen to Merce himself. He explains that part of this shift in thinking about time came from the eradication of bars and beats in electronic music:

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/aspen/mp3/cunningham1.mp3

From an interview on UbuWeb.

(Thanks to Benjamin Dauer for the tip.)

That’s just one example, though; there’s quite a lot more we could talk about. I’d like to do a timeline of Merce’s significant sound collaborations and review some of the moments in electronic music history with which he was involved. On Create Digital Motion, we’ll look back at his LifeForms software and the work he did with motion. But I need your help: please send along resources you think may be helpful, any of your own experiences of the artist and his work, and other tips and questions.

On Create Digital Motion:
Remembering Merce Cunningham, Digital Motion, and Digital Portraits

Merce Cunningham Dies [New York Times ArtBeat]
Merce Cunningham Foundation

MCF and MCD will be receiving visitors today. (See site above.)

Defining and re-imagining performance with computers and technology is an ongoing theme of this site. In a special guest column, artist Primus Luta goes deeper into that question with some of our favorite artists to look at practical and philosophical dimensions of playing electronics.

Today, the fruits of electronic musical labor can be heard in every corner of culture, from academic to niche to popular. Still, there remains a perceptual disconnect between traditional and electronic music, especially in the context of performance. With traditional instruments, performance proficiency can be measured as a physical accomplishment. Electronic performance, on the other hand, is generally understood as music made by computers. That poses a question: if the music is being made by the machines, what exactly does the musician do? To find out, I talked with some of the best electronic performers on the road, and got a glimpse of what exactly is going on behind the screen.

Live Rig: Mark de Clive-Lowe

From the Studio to the Stage

Historically, performance long preceded recorded music. Early recordings weren’t what we think of today as studio productions, but rather recordings of performances. Electronic music is a bit of an anomaly. While some early electronic compositions were created for live performance, most electronic music today begins with a recording.

Translating the high production values heard on a record into a live performance isn’t an easy task. It isn’t always possible to recreate the same aesthetic on stage, but it is important to make the connection.

“We can multi-track sounds in the studio,” explains 8 Bit Weapon, “but live, you are stuck with all the limitations the vintage computers, consoles and sound chips have to offer. So we have to trim down parts or add parts that are recorded by recreating them live.”

For Richard Devine, assembling the live performance begins in the studio with “trying to translate all the programmed MIDI data and song transitions into Ableton [Live]. Ableton is running the pieces of my tracks. I have hundreds of audio clips running in session view.” Onstage, this allows Devine to “mix and match breaks, intros, or builds for different tracks, and even manipulate how those are played if I select them. I can really do anything with the arrangement of the original track. It is now total remixing and producing on the fly.”

What this means for electronic performance is the ability to condense what could be days of production work into a performance piece of a few minutes. “It’s really similar to my studio process, on fast-forward!” says Mark de Clive-Lowe.

“We create tracks in the studio in the normal fashion,” says J Tonal of The Flying Skulls. “They get broken up in to drum and bass parts, which get played live on the MPC, melody and lead parts which get played on the MS2000, and samples and other melody parts which get broken down into [Ableton] Live clips and played from [an M-Audio] Trigger Finger.” These pieces are then used live to create what they call deconstruxions.

As Mark de Clive-Lowe explains, “the idea of reinterpreting and translating the same pieces to different audiences with different bands and setups is nothing new.” In other words, rearranging electronic music for performance contexts does have its roots in a larger musical tradition.

For some, this has resulted in working to restore the historical role of performance as the heart of a recording. “The experience of participating in a musical happening is ephemeral and never translates to a record,” says Tim Exile. “I have developed a number of paths of improvisation which you could consider scores… these are adaptive positive feedback responses to features of the musical environments I’ve been in. These features can be very local, such as the slight manufacturing error in one of the buttons on the control surfaces causing it to be slightly harder to hit to be sure of pressing it, to the very wide, such as the proliferation of a new genre changing the way audiences categorize and respond to certain musical structures.”

This interplay of the studio and performance feeds the creative loop to take a new shape each time the artist goes on stage. “Most of my studio output is mellow,” says Daedelus. “Most performances are riotous or at least dance-able. So finding relationships and movement in my own output is quite fun, and leads to disaster in the best nights.”

Is It Live Or Memorex?

When it comes to electronic music performance, is the music is being performed or played? As technology like Ableton Live evolves, the line between the two may blur to the point of irrelevance. As Tim Exile explains, “the discussion lies more in the boundaries between performance of compositions and improvisation. Most of what I see being played live these days seems of the live arrangement variation, focusing mostly on compression or expansion of set arrangements in response to the environment. This is live and adaptive and of the same genus as the style of performance exercised in DJing.”

Whatever the prepared sources, this adaptive style is undeniably a performance. “I can’t always reproduce the same exact show twice now,” says Richard Devine. “There are now so many different variables that can change or be manipulated.”

“I employ a lot of pre-made loops,” says Daedlus. “In some regards the legos are in a large box and I try to make spaceships or castles accordingly.”

“There are a lot of our songs that have a prerecorded studio version,” says J Tonal. “That gets played for about two minutes, and then we switch it up into a deconstruction and play a live remixed version of the same song.” Over top of backing tracks from their songs, Seth and Michelle of 8 Bit Weapon “play the Commodore 64 and 128 live like pianos, and use the Apple IIc as a mono synth in the same fashion. The Game Boy can do very basic live sounds and sequences.”

The Nucleus

At the center of any musical performance is the instrument. For electronic music, that instrument is the live rig. That rig can be a single laptop or an intricate hybrid of hardware and software; the possible configurations are limitless. Combining controllers, sound sources, mixing, and effects determines the breadth of available sound. The shape the rig takes becomes the defining point for the artist.

No matter how large, most rigs contain a center – a nucleus from which the soundscape is derived. For Daedelus that nucleus is the monome. “My preoccupation is with the Monome,” he explains, “especially MLR and added goodies tailored for use. I find it the most freeing from linear shackles, figuartive handcuffs, and my own preconceptions. It is improvisatory in the same way jamming in a jazz ensamble is, but with samples.”

Even if your rig is multi-faceted, the improvisational aspect is essential. As Richard Devine explains, his hybrid rig provides “maximum flexibility to change anything at any point in my show.” At the center is a MacBook Pro running Ableton Live 8 which syncs his three primary controllers. “The Monome is dedicated to doing random FM synth triggering with Max, and the MonoMachine is doing lots of synth and baselines, while the Machine Drum handles the huge analogue kick drums, and skeletal backbone percussion.”

Equally complex is the hybrid rig of 8 Bit Weapon. There’s still a laptop, but along with it they have “a Commodore 64 computer, a Commodore 128 computer, a Game Boy, a Apple IIc computer, Elektron Sid Station [containing a C64 sound chip], Nintendo Entertainment System, KORG microKORG vocoder, and a 12-channel mixer.”

While a laptop does all of the number crunching for Tim Exile, the true center of his rig is his two Behringer BCR2000’s and one BCF2000. “The 2-way control is perfectly implemented, and there are hacks around that allow you to use every single button on the surface. I’ve made my own context-sensitive control for layer switching in Reaktor. Pretty much all the state info I need is right there on the controllers.”

Mark de Clive-Lowe’s rig may look like that of a keyboardist with a Rhodes, Clavinet, and other synths. But what he calls “the heart of the show” is the MPC3000 he uses to program beats live. “The tactile interface means i can really get into playing the drum machine like an instrument.”

For The Flying Skulls, each performer takes different instrumental roles. Bringing those instruments together is the Rane Empath. “It operates like a master mixing console for several elements of the show: Snareface on the MPC, Jerome on the MS2000, and a channel from Live running on J Tonal’s laptop.” Using the Empath’s Flex-FX, they “get real-time access to over 100 effects that can be applied to any or all of the channels with touch-sensitive parameter control.”

Audience: Engaged

There is always the need to engage the audience. “This is crucial,” says Richard Devine. “You have to somehow connect with them. I usually try to play some songs that people know, and of course try to play out lots of new material that hasn’t been heard. I like to program large builds and breaks to take the audience on a roller coaster ride, if you will.”

Leading the audience through the performance is no easy task with all the variables in a complex rig, but getting the audience to link the performance to what they are hearing aurally is its own reward.

“Movement is as important as sound in this respect,” says Tim Exile. “I’ve noticed that audiences respond well when they make connections between movements and sounds which they’ve never made before. So if they can see you directly controlling a sound structure which they’d only heard devoid from its kinetic correlate before (a lot of electronic sounds) then they will have a transformative experience.”

“They are seeing a full studio production created at break-neck speed live on stage in front of them,” says Mark de Cliv-Lowe. “They go on a journey via the music – the rhythm, the harmony and the melody.”

Artists can adapt the journey by feeding off the audience. “They are the ocean currents,” says Daedelus muses. “Fighting directly against [them] is useless. I mean, you can tack the ship against the prevailing winds, but you don’t get very far. I like having a direction, but watching and listening and being willing to go elsewhere.”

This doesn’t eliminate the value of more traditional ways of audience engagement. “Definitely always have a mic to talk to yer crowd,” advises J Tonal. “We like to make sure the audience is on the same page as us,” 8 Bit Weapon shares. “We check in from time to time between songs using fun banter.” There is always room in any musical performance for fun banter, but Daedelus warns, “never let audience members try to speak to you in drug-addled states during performance. It is a careless whisper, no Wham reference.”

There Will Be FAIL

With all of the amazing things we’ve been able to do with technology, we’ve yet to perfect the anti-fail science. If only repairing a crashed hard drive were as simple as changing a guitar string.

“I’ve had MPC’s blow up and melt down right before and during gigs,” recalls Mark de Clive-Lowe. “I have played many shows,” says Richard Devine, “where my computer had crashed right before I was to play or I had some hardware sync problems.”

“We have sent the Sidstation back to Sweden for repairs 2 or 3 times,” 8 Bit Weapon recalls. “A drunk club patron tore it right off the stage and it slammed on the floor.”

Managing these inevitable situations is as much a part of the performance as anything else. “The biggest skill for a live performer,” Mark de Clive-Lowe says, “is to be able to take a mistake and flip it so it was never a mistake.” “When you have only a short amount of time to play — when something goes wrong, you have to have a back up plan, which may be having another computer ready to go on standby or another piece of hardware that you can use to play,” says Richard Devine. “There is nothing worse then flying around the world to play a show and running into technical problems.”

But perhaps the absolute worst scenario is, as Tim Exile says, “not being in the right mood. There’s very little you can do about that. There are no other mistakes.”

Primus Luta is a musician, technologist and a writer. When not working to finish his Heads Project, he’s trying to convince himself he’s got it in him to write that book he always wanted to write.

Primus Luta’s blog on noisepages, featuring computer music performance techniques, Plogue Bidule tips, and a lot more:

http://plpheads.noisepages.com/

See the companion video gallery for this story, featuring live performances from the artists interviewed. [about to be posted]

Daedelus

Richard Devine

Tim Exile

8 Bit Weapon

With the fabulous ComputeHer on visuals, using her Apple II.

Mark de Clive-Lowe