A few decades is a short time in the history of instruments. But something magical is happening: the electronic instrument, the computer, is finally easily shifting into performance scenarios, into improvisation, and into bands. (The performance features Livid’s Ohm64 and Ableton Live, with sax, guitar, and drums, at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge. See a note on the rig at Livid’s blog.)

Look no further than Nicolas Jaar. In an insightful performance and conversation for MTV Hive, he reveals how he thinks about music – and puts his chops where his mouth is. Excerpt:

“I think honesty and electronic music weren’t really tied together for a while … it was more about forgetting and partying. And now everything is coming together.”

That notion of “honesty” appears to cover finding his voice, finding a performance technique, and finding musical ideas.

In my dream world, this is what MTV looks like when you turn on your television, before reality killed the video star.

We’ve had some reports of difficulty playing the video. We will hopefully get to do our own interview with Mr. Jaar soon, which we’ll make available to all.

And yes, while I enjoy watching the video, I’m very unclear what Nico means by “honesty.” It seems to be a personal take on what he’s doing in his own work, and I’d like to know more, as to me, it’s unclear. Some reader comments, rather than wanting to know more or questioning what he’s saying, instead decide to say that so much as posting this video on CDM takes away from the site’s integrity or suggest that he’s a bad person or that I don’t know that people have used sequencers in live bands before 2011. So, yes, that’s a … perspective. Carry on. I’ll continue trying to do actual research. Nico’s on tour; we’re waiting for him to get back to the US to do a proper interview, for those with more open-minded attitudes.

Before diving into the litany of gripes from artists regarding Apple’s Ping social service, it’s worth saying: some critics say they expected better. Many artists want a smarter, more social iTunes. That’s the only reason anyone is spending time talking about the service’s perceived flaws.

Cellist and laptop musician Zoë Keating, an independent artist with collaborations from Imogen Heap to DJ Shadow, reminded me of that via Twitter. Even amidst her own criticisms, she was quick to add:

“But it’s Apple, so good or bad we all want to be invited to the party!”

That sums up not only the most disappointing aspects of Ping, but also why anyone would care in the first place. This isn’t the age of the hit parade, of Ed Sullivan, or even MTV. It’s the era of the Web, and people expect music media to be genuinely participatory. Because of the popularity of iTunes, the introduction of Ping seemed to artists like an opportunity.

Apple has responded to criticism, addressing some user concerns: Forbes’ Philip Elmer-DeWitt, asking “Can Ping be Saved?” last week, updated his article to reflect that issues with spam and forward and back navigation were fixed over the weekend.

The problem is that the fundamental complaints – and those of artists – run deeper. They may or may not be fixable.

Every artist I talked to said the same thing: the problem with Ping is that you’re not invited to the party. Missing from the guest list: independent (or, indeed, almost any) artists, alternative music stores, iTunes listening data, musical genres, and, above all, the World Wide Web.

Artists can’t make their own pages; Apple invites artists. In May, I criticized analysts for describing the iTunes App Store as being curated, a term I felt didn’t fit. This, on the other hand, really is curation: Apple invites a small number of artists at their discretion, which is why Ping makes some curious recommendations. As Keating puts it, “I’ve never bought Lady Gaga or anything remotely similar, but she is the #1 recommendation and I have to see her everytime I log on. That goes for Katy Perry too…I’ve created a world where I can pretend she doesn’t exist, but Apple really wants me to listen to her.”

Here, there’s a perfect contrast between Apple design and Apple curation. Apple design is beloved in the musical community, for the reliability and attention to detail of their hardware, operating system, and software. But Apple as curator, as tastemaker, is another matter. Apple’s (or Jobs’) obsession with artists like John Mayer had been a punchline, not a source of inspiration. For that matter, why should your computer vendor be responsible for musical taste? Would you ask Microsoft what clothes to wear today?

Apple ignores other music sources. When iTunes is criticized for promoting “lock-in” to Apple’s music store, listeners often respond that they rely on other sources for music. Apple may command big statistics when it comes to online sales, but that’s an aggregate of all music styles. For independent artists, everything from free distribution to specialized online stores – and physical CDs, which still rake in billions of dollars in sales annually – can matter more than iTunes.

Here, Apple runs into the tension between iTunes the player and iTunes the store. Ping as an add-on to iTunes the store makes some sense. As a modest feature that tells you what other iTunes shoppers are buying, it’d be unremarkable but also reasonably uncontroversial, at least before Apple hyped it as a new social network.

But iTunes the player demands higher expectations. iTunes is, for many, the virtual jukebox that the tool was when it began its life, before the debut of the integrated music store or even the iPod. I’ve even talked to frequent iTunes users, people who buy a lot of music, who have only purchased tracks from Apple a couple of times. For nearly anyone, iTunes – and by extension, Ping – must catalog all their musical activities, not just stuff they bought from Apple.

Ping is dumber about iTunes data than non-Apple services. Leaving other music stores out of the picture is perhaps unsurprising. But leaving out iTunes itself is more of a puzzler. The beauty of services like Last.fm is their ability to collect data about yourself that you can use. Sharing that data should obviously be a choice, but as Last.fm has demonstrated, the information can be useful to yourself, to fellow listeners, and to artists. It can make sure you see a favorite artist live or discover musicians based on human interactions, without violating privacy. But Ping is an inferior tool for iTunes data, compared to a third-party service like Last.fm. Wiley Wiggins, an Austin-based visual artist, has an extended complaint about Ping.

The killer insight: Ping is “store-centric,” not “user-centric,” says Wiggins. Flaws in genre handling and awkward mechanisms for tracking music and friends “make Ping seem like it is currently designed for users who 1) do not listen to much music, and 2) do not have many friends.”

Ping Feedback Form [Wiley Wiggins Blog]

Apple’s curatorial tendencies don’t make for a social network. Keating argues some of the tension here is philosophical: “Good social networking is chaotic and grassroots,” she says. “Apple is all about top-down control. Not sure this blend of the two works.”

And then there are … the genres. Aside from limiting you, comically, to choosing three genres you like, Apple seems to have lifted its genre categories from a BMG Music Club sign-up form.

It’s all too broken to be social. User interface trainwrecks, hidden “like” buttons, a “lonely” scene devoid of users or artist pages, and a laborious process to add friends made worse by Apple’s row with Facebook mean that getting anything social going is a waste of time. Mario Anima, who has led community efforts for Current and Community Speak Up! sums up the problems in an excellent post. Even with some navigational tweaks, there just isn’t much in the design that works. Even with Apple’s user base, I that could spell doom for the service. If users don’t spend time, the whole thing becomes pretty useless to artists, who are already fatigued by the amount of heavy lifting they have to do to get noticed online as it is. (See more on that below.)

Apple ignores the Web. Wired Magazine infamously ran an inflammatory cover this summer claiming The Web is Dead. That article could have been written about Ping. Ping isn’t visible on a browser; click on a link to a Ping profile, and it looks for an iTunes 10 client. Ping isn’t searchable. Ping is completely disconnected, at least for now, from the rest of the world – no integration with other services, and no public API. (One developer source told me an API is coming, with extensions to be approved by Apple, but I can’t yet confirm that, and that’d still fall short of making this a Web app.)

Ping is more than a walled garden: it’s a room with no windows or doors. It’s a tomb.

If Ping were the future, the Web might be dead – but early indications are that the reality is just the opposite. (Among many retorts to Wired’s “Web is Dead” thesis, The New York Observer is spot-on, and Boing Boing negates the graph they use to open the story, which turns out to say the opposite of what they claim.)

In fact, if anything, the negative reaction to Ping proves that the Web is more important now than ever before. People expect open participation, they expect browser-based interfaces (at least as an option), and they expect open interoperability and data portability in some form.

Browsers and links matter. Even Twitter and Facebook are popular partly as ways of linking back to other sites – I know this personally, because they’re two of this site’s biggest referrers. The Web make these services publicly searchable, connected, and accessible anywhere. They are the Web, and they also make the rest of the Web even more popular. Apple’s iPad and iPhone may focus more on “apps” than the “browser,” for now, but that singular example hasn’t yet been proven elsewhere. Meanwhile, competing browser-based music services have done just fine without an iTunes client.

Oh, yeah – and don’t forget that the lack of an open API also means hackers are shut out. This past weekend, Music Hackday – which I’ll cover separately – again gathered hordes of geeks to create new musical tools. That included things you’ll never see on Ping, like MixCloud on iPad.

Best of all: Brian Whitman of The Echo Nest had a pithy answer to how recommendation services should work. He created The Future of Music, which tells you which music you shouldn’t listen to. And that brings us to the last point:

In the end, maybe recommendation services aren’t everything. Whitman has a strong argument as he describes his tool:

I have a strong aversion to music recommenders and music similarity services. I especially deal with a lot of cognitive dissonance as the company I co-founded makes a lot of $$$$$ (that is 5 dollar signs) selling ordered lists of artists to multinational music streaming conglomerates.
Nonetheless, we recently completed our first live recommender system (to be announced near the Boston Music Hack day in October) and to perhaps get myself more comfortable with a future in which children will no longer ask their cooler older dope-smoking brothers what to listen to in lieu of some HTML table in a UL, I decided to really sign up wholesale to this movement. If we rely on these computer programs to learn about music, well we might as well rely on them to fix the sins of our past and delete the crap we are obviously not meant to listen to anymore.

“Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin.

I don’t think Future of Music will have one million users any time soon. But it does raise the most important point: the actual music has to come first.

Whether or not the general public is fatigued of social networks promising to revolutionize music, you can bet musicians are. Oliver Chesler is the blogger behind “wire to the ear” and, as The Horrorist,” an electronic musician who has topped German charts. He sums it up best:

As a musician the word to describe how I feel about the new Apple Ping social network is: exhausted. Musicians have become the tech industries guinea pigs. Why not? We try anything and work cheap right? After creating and curating profiles on MySpace, Last.fm, Imeem, Facebook and then Facebook Fan Pages and on and on now it’s time for Ping.

For his part, Chesler says he’ll make his own Ping page and promote it, even as “the Lady Gaga’s get all the love.”

Remember why we were all excited about the Internet for music in the first place? It’s a chaotic, level playing field. That can be scary, but given the miraculous, mind-boggling diversity of musical output and taste on planet Earth, it’s perfectly natural. And any business model around music must be built around that reality.

Don’t believe me? Ping may have one million members, but the fastest-growing musical sensation right now is a guy who came to his sister’s aid in an attempted rape and was AutoTuned into… actually, that’s a long story, told neatly by the New York Times. (I couldn’t wrap my head around it at first, either.)

Take a look at his fans. The guy is, literally, a rockstar. How did he get big? He spread on the Web – not on apps, not in any “curated,” walled garden vertically integrated experience. Not in any way, frankly, that makes any logical sense at all. (AttemptedYou know … on the Web.

My guess is, you’ll know Ping (or a competing service) has been fixed when you find Antoine Dodson’s profile. Antoine, if you have music recommendations, we’d love to hear them.

Magic Bonus Addendum!

Broken Social Scene references that fit iTunes Ping! (thanks to the story above)

“Broken Social Scene”
“You Forgot It In People” (or, at least, you forgot people in it)
“Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” (Katy Perry? Lady Gaga? Even Coldplay?)

Handmade Music is a community get-together, Science Fair, noise-making happening, and party for people making things that make music. We return to NYC on Sunday, August 29 at 7p. Our new Manhattan home is Culturefix, a new electronics boutique, gallery, and tapas bar on the Lower East Side.

This month, we welcome a classically-trained guitar duo using their instruments to play games, an original string-modeling instrument, a sonic dodecahedron sculpture (really), artists using game chips, and more. Last-minute creations are always welcome.

If you’re in New York, we definitely hope to see you Sunday night. And wherever you are, it’s my pleasure to introduce some of the artists we have involved.

Presented with our friends at Make Magazine, Etsy.com, and XLR8R.

THIS SUNDAY, August 29, 7:00 PM – 10:00 PM (come at the beginning, or miss stuff!)
In Manhattan, at 9 Clinton St
COMPLETELY FREE
(cash bar/food… and you might decide to buy some designer headphones, just be forewarned)

Facebook page

That’s right. “Look at this ****ing nerdster…”

Modal Kombat: Guitarists Playing Games

David Hindman and Evan Drummond describe their act, coupling classical guitar training with a love of games:

Guitar Hero Is Dead: Guitarists Use Real Guitars to Control Video Games in a hybrid concert / public video game battle

Forget about using a plastic guitar to mimic your favorite band. What if you could use a real guitar just like any other video game joystick — and thrash your opponent while you create original music?

Two classically-trained New York City guitarists calling themselves “Modal Kombat” have hacked into classic video games Pong, Tetris, Mortal Kombat and Mario Kart. This month at The Boulder International Fringe Festival, they’ll make their characters move — and battle against each other — with a flurry of guitar-plucking.

The show is a video-game battle/performance-art hybrid that’s open to the public. The goal is to demonstrate that real guitars — or other musical instruments — can be viable video game controllers.

About Modal Kombat:
Modal Kombat is a NYC-based performance group consisting of Yale School of Music alumni David Hindman and Evan Drummond. For the past five years, they’ve performed public guitar-controlled video game battles at various venues in Europe, New York City, and around the U.S.

Before the game Guitar Hero was released, Hindman was an NYU grad student, developing hardware and software that allowed real musical instruments to control various types of existing console video games. In 2004, he created the system that became the basis for Modal Kombat shows. At each show, various musical pitches, volume levels, and other musical parameters are programmed to trigger each character’s movement, such as Left, Right, Punch or Jump.

http://www.modalkombat.com/

Smomid: Original String-Modeling Instrument

Nick Demopoulos has devised his own instrument from custom hardware and software:

The Smomid is a homemade midi controller. It’s name is an acronym for “String Modeling Midi Device.” It is made with the use of several membrane potentiometers, knobs and switches.

http://www.nickdemopoulos.com/smomidelements/smomid2.html

Neurohedron: Nonlinear Sequencer, Dodecahedronal Sculpture

Handmade Music favorite Ted Hayes brings a novel modal hardware/software combination, part original application, part original sculpture, as presented at the NIME research conference:

Traditional music sequencers are designed fundamentally around predictability and repetition, and these are powerful elements that make them so ubiquitous. More modern approaches to algorithmic composition heavily involve unpredictability and randomness that is then (sometimes) tamed and manipulated by the composer, resulting in a nonlinear compositional and performative process.

The Neurohedron is a novel music instrument and modal software controller that I conceived of as a nonlinear sequencer. The simplest traditional sequencers may employ eight steps that return to the first step after reaching the last step; in contrast, the Neurohedron is a three dimensional sequencer with twelve nodes arranged as a dodecahedron. With this structure, there is no clear or de facto path that the progression from one node to the next may take, unlike the linear and prescribed nature of a traditional sequencer.

Neurohedron: First working video!! from Tedb0t on Vimeo.

Lots and lots of additional information (including more videos, documentation explaining the process and software design, and the NIME research paper):
http://log.liminastudio.com/projects/neurohedron

Presented by Pulsewave: Chip Music Open Mic

For some of you, I imagine that a world that has tasty New York beers, organic tapas, and chip music playing is pretty close to heaven. The good folks of New York’s famed Pulsewave series team up with us to provide us handheld chip music.

Thanks to the awesome Peter Swimm for making this happen.

Featured:

Square Wail: Square Wail is Matthew and Rebecca Kenall running an assortment of handhelds. They like fat beats with old timey melodies and try to infuse their music with such. Hailing from Seattle they are coming to the East Coast for the first time (except for once when Rebecca had a layover at JFK).

2010 Aug 10 – OMG Franz – Brooklyn – Dapantz from EM Dash on Vimeo.

Walking Like We Were Shot Through Our Heads by DaPantz

DaPantz (seen in video, heard in SoundCloud above, and with his own free EP):

Uptown New York’s satirically named DaPantz has been known to shout “BX HOLLA BACK” with reckless abandon. Often eschewing structure in favor of mood, he creates chaotic industrial, hip-hop and Latin flavored dance-punk on the Nintendo Game Boy. Using the homebrew cartridge LSDJ, DaPantz fuses heavy beats and a dissonant use of melody with the more unsettling side of the human psyche, creating the soundtracks to your nightmares (but reminding you that it’s okay to dance to them).

January 2010 – Kris Keyser at Bar Matchless from EM Dash on Vimeo.

Kris Keyser is just another guy with a Game Boy. Having hopped from instrument to instrument in his over 10 years of music making, Kris has finally found his perfect match in the portable powerhouse known as Little Sound DJ. In his relatively short time in the chip scene, Kris has jumped from relative unknown to relative known,playing chipscene institutions I/O and Pulsewave and making countless feet move and brains melt. Kris looks forward to a 2010 release on Cheese’N'Beer.

AdamGetsAwesome has been spreading beer-fueled mayhem across the world since 2008. Using the LSDJ program on the Nintendo Game Boy, Adam creates melodies ranging from the sickeningly sweet to the hauntingly atmospheric, always bringing a healthy dose of PARTY to every performance. His debut EP “AGA” is not only the inaugural CNB release, but also an exercise in actions befitting his namesake. Party.”

Website/free EP download: http://adamgetsawesome.com/album/aga

Phototheremin Chorus

Registration is now closed for the workshop, but we’ll be inviting creators of our phototheremin kit, designed by Eric Archer after an original design by Forrest Mims, to come play their instruments – boys, girls, adults, and kids.

Check out the kit.

The Party

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Sunday August 29
7:00 – 10:00 PM (come early)
Culturefix details

Yes, it’s free.

Yes, kids are allowed. (just not at the bar)

RSVP on Facebook.

The Electro Wars Final Trailer from Stephen Alex Vasquez on Vimeo.

The Electro Wars Final Trailer from Stephen Alex Vasquez on Vimeo.

Can a documentary finally tell the story of the electronic music scene? Primus Luta has become a scholar of electronic sounds himself, and joins us in a guest post to examine a film that, like the music itself, is a work in progress. Electro Wars premieres in its current form in New York Friday, but you can get a first glimpse at the movie and the state of music in the Internet – whether wishful thinking might imagine the Web’s age is over or not. -Ed.

Electronic music has always had a love hate relationship with popularity.  Back in the old days of the ‘big five’  setting the music trends for the masses with million dollar marketing budgets, it was an unwritten rule that there could only be one popular electronic act per five years, and they could only be publicly referred to as dance artists.  Those days are of course long over.  The big five aren’t five any more, and by comparison don’t seem that big either.  As for setting trends, they are still a factor, but hardly the necessity they once were.  When you look at the Billboard charts you still see their artists, but now they share space with a wide assortment of niche artists who achieved just as much on shoestring budgets.

The internet has had no small role to play in this.  With album sales down across the board and music industry ‘sales events’ being fewer and further between, popularity has become more about buzz than sales.  Today that buzz is measured in realtime with all of the fancy social networking analytic algorithms, but a mere three years ago blogs were all the rage.  During that time a meme started by internet celebrity Carles of The Hipster Runoff started a buzz that provided inspiration for the latest documentary film on electronic music and its flirtations with popularity.

“[Carles] kept bringing up these different indie bands and these electro bands,” says Stephen Vasquez, the filmmaker behind The Electro Wars as we sit in a Queens Dunkin Donuts, a few blocks from where he was born. “He’s talking about how they are fighting this war to stay relevant.  That’s when I got the idea.  There is a transitional period going on, right now.”  The transition he speaks of is the one which made it viable for small artists with no major label support to break out of their niche.  Through the internet smaller scenes had the means of vying for media attention.  Among those given voice was the tongue in cheek electronic sub-genre which attracted Vasquez – bloghouse.  The niche sound of electro styled house made its way from bedrooms to local clubs, but came alive as the sound traveled via the internet.

“I go to these clubs,” Vasquez says.  ”Nobody is really taking this music seriously.”  It’s been the fate for club music since the end of disco, the club aspect overshadowing the music.  Even with, bloghouse, its embrace of the internet never denied its place in the club where it is generally understood that the music helps set the scene, not necessarily that the scene is the music.  Still, the music is often the introductory point for many club goers to search for deeper musical appreciation, as was the case with Vasquez.

“I always listened to house music but I never understood that house, techno, drum and bass, grime, all these things are different sub-genres of electronic music.  They are not all the same thing.  It was ignorance on my part that I wanted to clarify for myself, so I started researching.  Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Bambatta, Kraftwerk and I’m like ‘damn, this thing’s been going on for years.’”

Yet what has happened with it over the past few years has transformed the scope of the music.  The internet has allowed it to break out of the club, or alternately sprout up new club scenes where there were none previously.  ”It’s really going all over the world,” Vasquez explains.   “It’s not just in Europe anymore.  It’s affecting small countries.   Kids around here are listening to that music now,” he says of his immigrant Queens community, “which was unheard of ten years ago.  You had the hip-hop heads, the sneaker heads, then the kids listening to spanish music. Now even the off the boat kids are like, ‘yeah man I’m going to see Tiesto!’”

All of these things led Vasquez to take on the task of documenting what he was seeing.  ”I’m a filmmaker first and foremost.  I DJ as a hobby but film is my passion.  I was just going to do the documentary for myself. If it went somewhere fine, but at least I’d have it as the memories of the scene and what it was, because this scene may not be here in five years.

“The first pinnacle moment for the whole thing was when Steve Aoki agreed to do the interview.  Once he did, that launched a series of other interviews.  At the same time though, I was reaching out to even bigger people.  Gaga and Kanye.”  Gaga was well on her way to the top of the pops, but at the time was  still  just an up and coming artists.    For Vasquez, her rise to stardom and Kanye giving up rapping for autotune over sonic textures pulled from the scene he was most familiar with, was an indication of the heights that sound could achieve.  ”Of course they denied the interviews.  At least Kanye responded to me though.  He said, I’m really busy and don’t have time right now.  But it’s a dope concept and I want to see it when you finish.’”

It is still a work in progress and a lot has changed since he first began work over two years ago.  ”Bloghouse came in really quickly then all of a sudden started dying off just as quickly.  A lot of the artists now are breaking into the mainstream.”  It’s the trend that took Gaga to the top of the pop charts, while earning  her Grammy’s in Electronic/Dance categories.  It’s also the trend that took Vasquez to Costa Rica to screen the film for the growing scene down there.  ”The kids over there (Costa Rica) they mimic our scene, the LA scene.   I find it interesting because it’s that international.”

He credits the LA club scene with a lot.  ”LA was pivotal,” he explains.  ”It kind of started the whole thing.  I say ‘kind of’ because it’s not fair to say it started it.  It came from different parts of the world.  If Justice never came or the canadians with MSTRKRFT, Boys Noize in Germany, if they never came there would have been no scene.  It kind of revived the whole rave culture.  Cobra Snake started the whole photographer frenzy.  Glamorizing it, making you feel like you are the most important person at the party.  It’s always been around but it took off for this scene in LA.”

Despite the modern focus of the film, Vasquez is well aware of the notion that there is nothing new under the sun.  ”I would go as far back as the seventies,” he says.  ”Seventies disco, that whole scene is where I feel it’s going now.  Especially with A-Trak, Armand van Helden, they are doing the new wave disco style.  That sound is big right now because it has a very friendly atmosphere.  People go to a small club, again its a small scene.  They go and they chill and they have a good time.  It’s not about going and looking at a DJ with visuals because a lot of the artists can’t afford all of that.  It’s about listening and dancing to the music.”  Despite the global impact, the relative smallness of the local scenes themselves play into maintaining the feel good aesthetic.  ”In the seventies you had parties in a loft.  You’re seeing that these days.  Especially in Brooklyn.  It’s like I’m living in an era I wished that I had lived in.”

Bridging the history of the new scenes with the broader history of electronic dance music is a motivator for Vasquez.  It isn’t the focal point of the film, but he makes a concerted effort to acknowledge the past.  ”I want to educate people that were in my position a few years back.  A lot of the kids that listen to the music, they have no idea where it came from.  If I can present that history in a nice little timeline and keep it quick for the MTV generation, my generation and the new kids who have even a shorter attention span.  Keep it real quick, and hopefully they’ll take something with them.”  Presented in between interviews from artists ranging from Moby, Aoki and DJ Premier, Vasquez leaves all the context clues needed to broaden perspectives.

As for the electro war itself, perhaps a truce has been reached.  ”Now the indie bands are getting remixed and getting exposed to this sub culture.  Indie and electro really compliment each other but I can see it working for a lot of hip-hop too. Drake and Kudi.  Spank Rock is like the hipster Nas.

“The scene  keeps changing so quickly.  I heard Tiesto made a song with Diplo and David Guetta is working with LMFAO and Fergie on a track.  Now Aoki and all the guys of the electro house scene, are working with big house dj’s like Tiesto and Apple Jack.”  And then there is dubstep.  ”I just got off the phone with Rusko.  He was excited to be in the movie.  I hung up and I’m like how am I going to take this documentary on electro house music into dubstep?  But it needs to be mentioned.”

Indeed Vasquez is still shooting and editing.  Since beginning work on the film, buzz has spread about it and support for it keeps coming in.  While he won’t provide any details, there’s a confidence in his smile that the future for The Electro Wars is bright.

As a way to bring it all back home, Vasquez will be screening the film in its current state with the community that raised him.  On Friday July 9th there will be a special screening at the Jackson Triplex in Queens, NY, 7pm, with music, dance and a one-off opportunity to see The Electro Wars before its next incarnation.

There’s the music player, the device in your home or your pocket on which you listen to the album. And there’s the concert experience, where you have a couple of longnecks and get sweaty and dance with your friends to live musicians.

But wait a minute – now the musicians are using computers and music players to perform. What if that music player became part of the interaction at a live gig?

Richie Hawtin is going live with a new show via his Plastikman persona – great news to those of us who love his original work. Part of the new tour is an experiment with an iPhone app called SYNK, developed under Richie’s watchful eye with Minus’ Bryan McDade and TouchOSC developer RJ Fischer (hexler.net). I tried to get more details on how the app will work, but apparently they’re trying to keep some of it under wraps until the first show in Mannheim this weekend. (If you are making the Mannheim show, I’d love to get your coverage – it looks like the East Coast of the US didn’t make the cut.)

We do know a little, though, and that already raises questions – and likely some skepticism, too, I imagine – about how mobile devices could be integrated with performance. There’s a very jumpy “teaser” video, below, too:

Watching closely, I see

• Numbers running behind the stage and on the iPhone, some pattern of rects on the iPhone
• Visualist collective Derivative’s modular, visual-making software TouchDesigner
• An Ableton Live set with an obscene number of effects (12!) sends, for reasons that are unclear to me
• A Max for Live patch that uses the Live API (and is sending OSC via IP address, presumably to interface with the iPhone)

The application itself includes modules that allow the audience to reorganize word samples (a bit like playing with magnetic poetry), a live video stream of the performance from the inside out, visuals that appear on your iPhone/iPod touch that are synchronized with the onstage LED wall and music, and real-time performance information (apparently synchronous with handheld software that’s used for the performance itself).

The most interesting part of all of this is that it’s location-based: it’s designed only to work when you’re live at the show. Between shows, however, there is a mode that includes a self-contained audiovisual experience.

While part of the appeal to me of live performance is getting away from all my own technology and listening, it is encouraging to see creative experimentation, and mobile software that’s about more than just the artists promoting themselves.

More on the modules (including some special information passed along to CDM from the Plastikman crew):

The official description:

LOGIKAL
Based upon earlier “Lodgikal Nonsense” and “Vokx” voice tracks, this state invites the audience to re-organize the word samples using a user interface of 20 touch buttons. In this state the centre of performance control is moved from the stage and into the audience.

KAMERA
This state is accessible throughout the show and gives users a live video stream of an internal perspective of the performance.

SYNKOTIK
This state explores the synkronicity of realtime-generated percussion patterns and their visual counterparts, integrating the stage LED wall and the built in displays on each SYNK activated iPhone/iPod Touch.

KONSOLE
This state is active during the entire show with realtime performance information. At specific moments an extended Konsole state becomes activated, allowing further insight into the realtime programming of the performance’s drum and percussive elements, while also providing visual feedback of musical and effect parameters. A simplified remote Konsole is available to all SYNK users worldwide and will be activated during all Plastikman Live performances.

Participants should connect to the Plastikman Wi-Fi network at each performance and will be notified of the activation of the different states by their iPhone/iPod Touch at specific moments during the show.

The SYNK experience will not be limited to viewers of the live show. In between the performances the SYNK application will be in sleeper mode and function as a Plastikman atmospheric location shifter. By using visualizations inspired by Derivative, combined with the iPhone’s built-in microphone and accelerometer, users are immersed in a Plastikman environment. For best results, please use headphones.

The “sleeper mode” confused a number of people, so I inquired further. Minus helped us out a bit.

Bryan McDade tells CDM:

“[Sleeper mode] is the visualization which takes place as the default interface into the app when there is not a functioning show. The app uses some visuals inspired by design from the people at Derivative and the microphone picks up audio and plays it back through the speaker while warping the audio with the use of the accelerometer. The audio function has been compared to RJDJ by others in the online community.”

Richie Hawtin adds:

The idea of the sleeper mode is to give users the feeling of bring immersed in their own personal Consumed type environment modulated by their movements and the ambient sounds around them.

Sounds great to me; I’d love to see apps beyond just RjDj that run with this idea. It’s such a great idea, in fact, that I wonder how performances could cater to multiple phone platforms, not just iPhone.

I’m excited to hear more about the tour and about the development of Synk, and I have to hope they add more dates or I find some way to cross paths. Stay tuned for more details.

The tour:

27.03. Time Warp – Mannheim, Germany
18.04. Coachella – Indio, USA
08.05. WeLoveArt – Paris, France
21.05. Dissonanze – Rome, Italy
29.05. Movement – Detroit, USA
18.06. Sonar – Barcelona, Spain
11.07. T in the Park – Balado, Scotland
06.08. Sonne, Mond & Sterne – Saalburg, Germany
07.08. AudioRiver – Plock, Poland
21.08. Lowlands – Biddinghuizen, Netherlands
10.09. Sunday Best presents Bestival – Isle of Wight, UK

SYNK @ iTunes

SYNK @ hexler

plastikman.com

I have actually grown to appreciate year-end reviews.

In grade school and high school, I was on different occasions both a yearbook guy and a newspaper guy (when not focusing energies on how to be as profoundly uncool as possible). There was a tension between the people who did the work of covering the information of the moment and the stuff you were supposed to save and cherish.

If you’re addicted to content as a lot of us are, you want both today’s headlines and the bigger picture. The end of the year is an arbitrary milestone, but it’s a chance to transform the former into the latter.

So, let’s look back: what are your top albums of 2009? (And how do you stay organized and decide on picks?)

The first question will naturally be, were you keeping track? The terrific blog for the NPR [US public radio] program All Songs Considered considers techniques for doing that:

How Do You Make Your Year-End List? [All Songs Considered]

The staff use Google Docs – something I hope to try when January 1 rolls around. NPR’s readers try iTunes tracking techniques, playlists, stickie notes, and other filing techniques. I talked about the topic to Iain Catling of dancetracks last week; he uses the digital music store’s newsletters as a chronologically-organized set of reminders. I’m curious to hear your techniques as I compile my lists and try to get better organized for 2010.

The second question is, which albums are relevant to a site with “Digital Music” in its title? That’s an especially tough question, now that even people releasing vinyl-only likely mixed inside a computer.

Here on CDM, I’ve found readers cross all genres. But let’s broadly define “electronic” to mean “anybody using technology in interesting ways.” Others can determine who’s making the best music; here, at least, we can celebrate the use of electricity and bits of data in music production. In some cases, that may mean including music that’s decidedly not electronica. (This year had quite a few folk-tinged albums that also had exquisite production values.)

Lastly, which were the albums that made a big impact? I certainly know which albums got the most attention on release. Beloved duo Telefon Tel Aviv’s Immolate Yourself would have topped lists regardless, and all the more so with the tragic loss of Charles Cooper the week of its release; it has become a way of remembering his gifts to the music scene. Moderat’s combination of Apparat and Modselektor doubled its appeal (insert “double, double doublemint” tune here). And Imogen Heap’s hotly-anticipated Ellipse also marked the appearance of the monome on Letterman. But anticipation is one thing; for many of us, it’s what survives playing on repeat. Obscure and overlooked choices welcome, too.

So, readers – take it away. I’ll reveal my own choices and some other expert picks later this month.

Be sure to include some notes on why you’ve chosen the records you’ve picked.

Musicians and artists now have the power to fuse visuals, sound, and interaction, to make a spectacle, an album, and a game all at once. But with the blank canvas of three different media before you, what form should that fusion take?

Space shooters with pounding electronic beats behind them have cleared some of the way. Now it’s ambient music’s turn. In the game Osmos, you become a mysterious particle, floating amongst gravity wells in various fields of material. By carefully navigating, applying just the right vector force to move through the shifting landscape, you merge with other particles and escape to safety.

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

The move from “shoot stuff” to “move” or “eat” seems to be rising in popularity, with games like fl0w and Spore’s initial “cell stage” encouraging nonviolent navigation. To me, there’s something happening to the zeitgeist, perhaps a renewed awareness of cosmic (micro- or macroscopic) being, and of movement that draws on free-floating physics.

Even amongst a wave of games in this mode,when you actually play Osmos, you realize that it is something different and special. The design makes ingenious use of different kinds of movement and pacing through its different modes, at one point calling upon you to hurtle around a black hole, then move at nearly imperceptible speeds through a seemingly impossible-to-traverse petri dish of massive particles. No less than a shooter, it connects to the id and survival instinct. Pac-Man, the most successful arcarde game of all time, and one of the few that sucked in men and women in equal measure, was noted for its emphasis on eating as the mechanic. Consuming stuff appeals to everyone.

Of course, this is on a music site, and with good reason: what makes Osmos work is that Osmos is musical. It’s immediately beautiful and delicate, a perfect aesthetic union of the texture of the music and the on-screen arrangements of particles. More importantly, the music is woven directly into game play, providing subtle cues for dangers, and underscoring the pace of gameplay. You can only solve a level by managing speed and motion, and the music helps provide both the literal indications of speed and help your head get into the right zone to lose yourself in the world. If blips in early arcade games helped create a zone of play trance, now we have spectacular ambient soundtrack of music by Loscil, Gas/High Skies [Microscopics], Julien Neto, and Biosphere.

The music isn’t simply a beautiful soundtrack to the game. The game really feels like an extension of the world of the music. Put it all together, and something magical happens in this $10 game: you hear the music in a new way.

I spoke to the lead designer behind the game, programmer/animator Eddy Boxerman, along with musical-sonic collaborator Mat Jarvis aka Gas aka High Skies.

Peter: I found it amusing that some of the game press have stumbled around looking for a name for a new genre here, the "eat other stuff" category. To me, the basic game controls could be traced back to early titles like Asteroids. What are the games that have inspired you, either specifically or generally?

Eddy: Some people are dubbing the gameplay type as "eat ‘em up", as opposed to the classic "shoot ‘em up". But it’s true, the physics/controls have more in common with classic games such as Asteroids and Gravitar. The only "modern" game that otherwise influenced me was Katamari Damacy. It’s funny: when I sent out the first prototype to friends, I was concerned they would think the game was too similar to Katamari. That’s when I heard about flOw, which I’ve tried to steer stylistically clear of ever since. I guess it’s an archetype though, and the comparisons have been inevitable. As for Spore, Osmos was about one year into development when I saw the first preview footage of its "cell stage". On top of that, I learned that Will Wright had hired Brian Eno to do the music! I definitely had a "why should I bother?" moment at that point. But here we are, a couple years later, and I think we’ve managed to put out a unique game with a great mix of gameplay, sound, and visuals.

Peter: Ha – well, I’m glad you “bothered”! One thing that I think is really unique about Osmos is the gravitational mechanic. How did this come about?

Eddy: I was (and probably still am) a sci-fi kid. And when I read about real phenomena like colliding galaxies, retrograde planets, and the like, my mind goes to stange and wonderful places. That said, the Spacecraft Dynamics course I took during my engineering degree definitely played a large part in putting those mechanics and levels together. Thanks, Professor Misra!

Peter: How are the physical mechanics of the game constructed? This is essentially two-dimensional vector math, yes? Were there refinements you needed to make in order to keep performance up, or to keep the levels playable?

Eddy: That’s a big question! But yes, essentially it’s 2D vector math, though we make use of some 3D math (including quaternions) on the particle systems. The majority of the physics is quite simple though — first year bachelor’s stuff: F = ma, conservation of mass and momentum, gravitational laws, basic time integration, etc. We follow the spirit of the laws, but not always the letter. For instance, if you look at the Earth’s solar system in its entirety, you wouldn’t even see most of the planets; that doesn’t make for a very playable game though. As such, we took many liberties when it comes to scale, constants and exponents in the equations. The majority of the work was in the tweaking of those values to make the game /feel /good.

Peter: How did you prototype the game? What was the process of evolution like? Were there any failed attempts along the way?

Eddy: I put together the first prototype starting from a NeHe OpenGL tutorial. I added some basic physics, mouse controls, some highly unoptimised collision detection code, and voila, I had something to play with. After that, I immediately integrated [cross-platform 3D audio API] OpenAL, as the game was just begging for sound and music. I then hunted for some good sounds (discovering freesound.org in the process), put together a simple looping song (my first rough and humbling attempt to create digital music), and sent it out to a few friends. I’ll make that version available for free someday… when I’m feeling brave.

As for failed attempts, there were tons of shelved experiments and features that were cut. One interesting problem was the difficulty curve of the gravitational levels. In fact, the first gravity levels looked a great deal like the "Warped Chaos" levels do today: several free-floating Attractors in a sea of regular motes. I found it incredibly difficult, however, to make a "beginner" version of those levels. If the gravity was too weak, the Attractors had little apparent effect; too strong, and the level became incredibly difficult. I stuggled with this for a long time, until I hit on the idea of putting one, immobile Attractor in the center, with everything else orbiting around it. This allowed for the creation of systems with strong gravity effects, but long-term stability. It seems so obvious now, especially given the example of our solar system, but it wasn’t back then. In the end, these are some of the coolest levels in Osmos — practically its "signature" level type. Moral of the story: necessity really is the mother of invention.

Peter: What is the visual engine like? The sound engine?

Eddy: As I mentioned, I bootstrapped from a NeHe tutorial, but that’s all been replaced at this point. It’s now a homegrown engine using OpenGL. It doesn’t make any use of pixel/vertex shaders, so it runs on a wide variety of hardware. The majority of our texture work is done in Photoshop.

[The sound engine is] a wrapper we’ve built around OpenAL. At a basic level, all we ever do is mix and adjust the gain and pitch of our sounds and music. This allows us to run on generic sound hardware. But we do make extensive use of those "effects", and it’s possible to get a great deal of variety and feedback with them. In the end, it’s all about the quality of our sound sources, and the algorithms that adjust and smooth the gain and pitch of each.

Peter: For pitch shifting, were you able to do that natively in OpenAL?

Eddy: Yes, OpenAL supports pitch shifting at the software level. I ported our sound engine to use DirectSound at one point, and found that it’s pitch shift range is rather limited. We reverted back to OpenAL.

Peter: One thing that really strikes me about the game that is its use of pacing. Even without the obvious technique of allowing the user to control speed, there’s this extraordinary contrast between levels that require you to move quickly, that require you to anticipate the rate of movement along a vector of other objects, or that require you to move almost imperceptibly slowly. Was this an early goal, or something that evolved out of developing the game concepts?

Eddy: It evolved from the game concepts themselves. We tried to fully explore the fundamental controls and game space of Osmos, and converged on a number of interesting regions and structures that were fun to play with/in. Some people actually "complain" that the pacing of the game isn’t consistent across levels — some are fast, some slow — but that wasn’t our goal. In a sense, we’re merely presenting the results of a great deal of research and exploration into the space, with our sole requirement being that the levels are fun and interesting. We wanted it to be a game of concepts and understanding, not speed. The addition of time-warping allowed us to break free from that, expand our scope, and include a much larger variety of levels, as some have both fast and slow moments in them; we wanted the player to be able to control the pace and difficulty to their level of comfort.

Peter: Connecting the action to music, how important is the use of music in conveying time?

Eddy: I think pitch-shifting the music and sound effects helps players track time-warping in an inutitive way. Without these aural cues, the mental connection would be incomplete. That said, I sometimes test the game without sound, and it’s totally playable — just much less immersive.

Peter: At what stage did you involve the musical element? How was that relationship established?

Mat: Eddy first contacted me two or three years ago about using one of my tracks on Osmos (“Gas – Discovery”). He sent me a basic alpha version where the game was literally flat circles on a plain background, but even back then with the simple graphics and no sound it was compelling. I think it was at this early stage that I sent him a copy of another High Skies track, “The Shape of Things to Come,” which he also used a section from. It wasn’t too long later that he sent me a version of Osmos with most of the music that made it to the release version and it all just complimented each other beautifully.

Eddy has done a great job choosing music that compliments the game and graphics, and they also compliment the music. I think he’s done a great job overall as well, keeping his vision consistent for the look and feel of the Osmos world. Even though some of the levels are quite varied; some are quite chilled, others fast paced, nothing seems out of place. He has created a new world that’s both microscopic and macroscopic.

Peter: The musical and sound effect elements really do blend effortlessly. Mat, I know you made substitute sounds – how did this help blend the aesthetic?

Mat: I made the rebound noise when you bounce off the walls/ boundary. The original sound was quite hard and metallic with a lot of reverb, and I suggested a softer echoey sound. There was nothing wrong with the original, but it made the boundary feel quite hard and cold like being in a metal tank. I sent Eddy some analogue samples, using a [vintage Roland keyboard] Jupiter 6 with varying delays/ echoes. Because the tones are so pure and tuned, Eddy pitched them slightly to fit with the various keys of the different music.

Eddy: In general, it was a matter of searching and experimentation for the "right" set of sounds that fit well together — which can be a lengthy but rewarding process. Once integrated, minor gain and pitch adjustments helped fit it all together.

Mat provided the bounce sound, as well as the continuous absorb/being-absorbed sounds. The other sounds were created/shared on freesound by the users Elektrocell, fran_ky and Jovica. (Check out the Osmos credits in the readme.html for details.)

Peter: I recently spoke to Crystal Method, and while they’ve done some notable game scores, they actually said they wouldn’t want their music to be placed in a game context at which the speed changed, that it’d lose something. This seems like the opposite of that. Now, maybe it’s easy to take for granted with ambient music as opposed to something beat-driven like Crystal Method, but do you think there’s something special that allows this music to be adaptive in that way?

Mat: I think that in the right circumstances music with drums could work well and may even highlight the time-shifting more. Of course with the wrong game and wrong music it could sound terrible too.

Eddy: It’s a delicate issue. Out of the context of the game, I think it would seem wrong. There were also some pieces of music I tried which didn’t lend themselves well to this kind of manipulation, and which didn’t get included as a result. But with these songs, and everything working together in-game, I feel the whole experience is stronger as a result. I’m just glad Mat and the other artists agreed — or at least… didn’t object.

Peter: Hey, I think if you can write music that sounds good played at a different speed, that’s nice.

Osmos seems to me a musical experience, in that the sense of the music is transformed by the visuals and the interaction with them. Do you think it’s possible that audiovisual interfaces could go even further in terms of their impact on the music?

Mat: Yes, it almost seems as though Osmos creates a world for the music to exist.

I’ve always liked music visualisers like the Processing and Cymatics stuff, they’re quite compelling to watch how they react to the music, so it would be interesting to go the other way; by manipulating/ sculpting abstract shapes which then modify or even create sounds and music, especially using the new controllers like the Wii, [Microsoft’s] Project Natal and Sony’s Motion Controller instead of the mouse.

Eddy: I totally agree with Mat. Yes, please! More feedback between music, visuals and interactivity — in all directions. I’d love to experiment more on all of these fronts. In general, I think games such as Audiosurf and Auditorium, while great, have only begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible. Interactive musical "toys" such as [Nintendo/Toshio Iwai’s ]ElectroPlankton or Dub Selector are another great direction; and Rock Band Network is about to expand the market in a huge way. It’s exciting!

Peter: Along those lines, this is obviously a new take on music distribution in a way that goes well beyond what titles like Rock Band have done. Are there other cases in game history that to you have done that? Is there potential in these new outlets, outlets that are more accessible to independent developers (Steam, Direct2Drive, Xbox Live Arcade, iTunes App Store), to really change game development?

Eddy: Wow, that’s another big question. Really, I just felt the music was such an important part of the experience in Osmos that we should show the artist and track names during the game. But now that you mention it, I can’t think of another game that has done this, besides games like Rock Band where the song /is/ the game/level. That said, one way I’d love to push this evolution is to "augment" music videos with interactivity: ie. into music video-games. (The term "game" could be used rather loosely here.) Everyday Shooter does this, though Jon Mak actually created the music /for/ the game in that case — which rocks — but collaborations could lead to some really amazing things in this direction.

Peter: Eddy, Mat, thank you. Whether it’s in the form of a game or an audiovisual performance, we’ll certainly continue to explore these areas. And – hint, hint – Osmos 2, with multiplayer? Just a thought.

Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

I’ve never been big on idol worship or celebrity; it’s my feeling you can draw inspiration from any musician as a fellow artist – it’s really the point of music. But that works both ways; for all that can be said of him, and for all that people may be suffering from Michael Jackson fatigue, the man’s talent can still be stunning.

My editor at Keyboard, Steve Fortner (via Twitter), sends along this trailer for an upcoming Michael Jackson documentary. It features some of the rehearsal footage prior to the artist’s death. You can also spot keyboardist Michael Bearden, Friend of Keyboard Magazine – who has, in turn, been featured on Keyboard TV. Check out his incredible bio. And on the same note, it’s often these lesser-known artists, the people playing next to all the famous artists everyone has heard of, who can be equally inspiring. Their sounds and musical imagination is woven into a lot of the popular music of the last half century, even if their names may not be as imprinted on people’s brains. They also typically have to have the ability to quickly sit in with artists of radically varying styles and “make it work.”

I think it’s possible to be a champion of the lesser-known or obscure without being allergic to the well-known. To do anything else would deprive you of the experience of some great musicians. And the documentary looks like it could be terrific.

Here’s a switcher story of a different color: from the Mac, to Linux. It’s one thing to talk about operating systems and free software in theory, or to hear from died-in-the-wool advocates of their platform of choice. In this case, we turn to Kim Cascone, an experienced and gifted musician and composer with an impressive resume of releases and a rich sens of sound. This isn’t someone advocating any platform over another: it’s an on-the-ground, in-the-trenches, real-world example of how Kim made this set of tools work in his music, in the studio and on tour. A particular thanks, as he’s given me some new ideas for how to work with Audacity and Baudline. Kim puts his current setup in the context of decades of computer work. Even if you’re not ready to leave Mac (or Windows) just yet, Kim’s workflow here could help if you’re looking to make a Linux netbook or laptop more productive in your existing rig.

Stay tuned, as I’ll have some other stories on how to make your Linux music workflow effective creatively, particularly in regards to leaping over some of the setup hurdles Kim describes. -PK

Historical Evolution

I’ve been working with computers since the 1970s. Inspired by the work of composer David Behrman, I taught myself assembly language and programmed a simple digital sequencer on a KIM-1, single-board microcomputer, controlling an Aries modular synthesizer I had built. I discovered a then-new magazine called Computer Music Journal at the local computer shop and bought every copy I could get my hands on. (I still have them, too.) Later, I helped a friend’s father, an executive at IBM, unpack and set up the first personal computer IBM made. The manuals alone took up two or three feet of bookshelf space.

Fast-forward through a couple of decades of owning Commodore 64s, Apple computers, and PCs. In 1997, I purchased my first laptop: a woefully-underpowered Compaq Presario. It wasn’t fast enough for real-time audio, so I had to render sound files to hard disk using the audio programming language Csound. I created many of the sounds this way for my CD ‘blueCube( )’. But the capacity to work anywhere was enough for me to give up ever owning another desktop computer.

Frustrated with the ‘code-compile-listen’ process of working with Csound and wanting to work in real-time, I switched to the graphical multi-media programming language Max/MSP, which necessitated a move back to Apple hardware, so I bought a PowerBook. Having Max/MSP running on a laptop was the perfect environment for me. I could build the tools I needed whenever an idea presented itself. The computer functioned as both sound design studio and stage instrument. I worked this way for ten years, faithfully following the upgrade path set forth by Apple and the various developers of the software I used. Continually upgrading required a substantial financial commitment on my part.

Apple Seeds of Discontent

When I’m on the road, I use my laptop as a music studio, performance instrument, and administration office. I don’t like surprises on the road. Having a computer fail means a loss of income, and makes for an embarrassing moment if the failure happens during a performance. If watching laptop music bores some people, watching a musician reboot is even worse. So to be safe, I stress-test all new hardware or software in my studio for at least a month before I take it on the road. Max/MSP patches run for hours, software is used for weeks, and hardware is left on for days at a time to help induce failure before I leave home. But as fate would have it, an iBook I was touring with died a few years ago. I brought the laptop into an Apple repair shop in Berlin, where a technician diagnosed the problem as a faulty logic board. The failure rate on logic boards was high for that model of iBook, and in response to public pressure, Apple instituted a logic board replacement program. Luckily, my laptop qualified and the logic board was replaced for free. But the failure and ongoing buggy behavior impacted my work schedule and added to the stress of touring.

I’ve now replaced logic boards on three computers; the other two I paid for out of pocket. The out-of-warranty cost of replacing a logic board on an Apple laptop is around six hundred dollars — cheaper than buying a brand new laptop, but still significant.

If you make your living with applications that run on OS X, there are no options if a laptop fails. You either repair expensive Apple hardware or buy new expensive Apple hardware. This is called ‘vendor lock-in.’

Then, during my 2009 spring tour, my PowerBook G4 exhibited signs of age, with missing keystrokes, intermittent backlighting, the failure of a RAM slot, and reduced performance. As an alternative to repairing the PowerBook, I investigated what a new MacBook Pro and upgrades for all my software would cost. A quick back-of-a-napkin estimate came to approximately $3,000, not including the time it would take tweaking and testing to make it work for the tour. If the netbook revolution hadn’t come along and spawn a price-wars on laptops, I might have proceeded to increase my credit card debt. But as a wise uncle once advised, “you invest either your time or your money; never both.”

Meeting Ubuntu

I had tried Linux in 2005 on PowerPC-based Mac laptops, though at the time I couldn’t get audio working, even after extensive tweaking. But I had kept an eye on Ubuntu ever since. After considering MacBook Pro prices, I checked out the new netbooks coming to market and picked up a refurbished Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with Ubuntu pre-installed.

I loaded up my Dell with all a selection of Linux audio applications and brought it with me on tour as an emergency backup to my tottering PowerBook. The Mini 9 could play back four tracks of 24-bit/96 kHz audio with effects – not bad for a netbook. The solution to my financial constraint became clear, and I bought a refurbished Dell Studio 15, installed Ubuntu on it, and set it up for sound production and business administration. The total cost was around $600 for the laptop plus a donation to a software developer — a far cry from the $3000.00 price tag and weeks of my time it would have cost me to stay locked-in to Apple. After a couple of months of solid use, I have had no problems with my laptop or Ubuntu. Both have performed flawlessly, remaining stable and reliable.

Getting Past Ubuntu Audio Complexities

There are a few differences between how audio works on Mac OS X and how it works on Ubuntu Linux. OS X uses the Core Audio and Core MIDI frameworks for audio and MIDI services, respectively. All applications requiring audio services on OS X talk to Core Audio, which mixes and routes multiple audio streams to the desired locations. Core Audio is simple, monolithic, and easy to set up, and all the end-user controls are accessible from one panel. You can even create a single aggregate device from multiple sound cards if you need more inputs or outputs than one sound card can supply. To Apple’s credit, Core Audio and the applications that make use of it are the reason why you see so many laptop musicians seated behind glowing Apple logos on stage.

On Ubuntu, audio is a rather different story. Apple’s slogan ‘Think Different’ would be good advice for musicians encountering Ubuntu’s audio setup for the first time. Audio in Ubuntu can appear at first to be a confusing jumble of servers, layers, services, and terminology. Go to System->Preferences->Sound, click on the Devices tab, and check out the pulldown menu next to ‘Sound Events’ at the top of the panel. You will see various acronyms, possibly including cryptic-looking technologies like OSS, ESD, ALSA, JACK, and Pulse Audio. These acronyms represent a byzantine tangle of conflicting technologies that over time, and due to political reasons or backwards compatibility, have ended up cohabiting with one another. ‘Frankenstein’ might be an accurate metaphor here.

Thankfully, there is a simpler way, which is the combination of ALSA [a high-performance, kernel-level audio and MIDI system] and JACK [a system for creating low-latency audio, MIDI, and sync connections between applications and computers]. The battle-scarred among us have learned to ignore all the other audio cruft bolted on to Ubuntu and just use ALSA and JACK. One can think of the ALSA/JACK stack, the heart of most pro Linux studios, as the Core Audio of Linux and in my opinion Jack should be the first thing installed on any musicians laptop. I’d go so far as to suggest placing it in the Startup Applications so it’s always running.

The ALSA/JACK combination is a little more complex to set up and tweak than Apple’s Core Audio, but there’s a lot of good information online. [Ed.: ALSA, JACK, and the real-time Linux kernel also have some advantages over Mac OS X that can be worth the effort. While JACK has been ported to Mac, Linux has more JACK-aware tools, which is necessary for transport sync. Just as importantly, once configured, you can build rigs with Linux that have greater low-latency performance than may be practical on Mac or Windows. In other words, while it may require an investment of time, it can be both free and better! -PK]

Workflow

Over the past ten years, I’ve developed a workflow that has worked well in the studio and on the road. Since I created most of my tools in Max/MSP, they could shape-shift to fit any musical task I encountered. A sound mangling tool I’d written for studio use, for instance, I could then adapt for a performance with Tony Conrad. I modified parts of my performance patch for sound installations. This environment served me well over the years – until recently, when my aesthetic focus changed from using randomness in my work to taking a more deterministic approach. This happened to coincide with my change of operating systems.

I do a lot of location recording while on tour. My rig consists of an Olympus LS-10 digital recorder and an Audio Technica AT-822 single-point stereo microphone. I record at 96kHz/24-bit to a 16GB SDHC card in the LS-10. When I want to audition sound files in the field, I use my netbook’s SDHC reader, renaming sound files directly on the card. I can look at some of the files in Baudline if I need to check for low-frequency rumble or technical anomalies. I have come to use Baudline on a daily basis.

Back in the studio, using the sound editing program Audacity, I remove voice slates, trim heads and tails, adjust gain and EQ as needed, then save them to a project folder. And because I don’t like surprises in the studio, either, this folder gets backed up onto a remote network drive as well as a local USB drive.

Building my sound library takes weeks or months. During this time, I start filling a notebook with ideas, drawings, plans and marginalia, from which a score emerges. I import all my project sound files into the open-source Digital Audio Workstation Ardour, arranging them to loosely resemble the score in my notebook. Once my Ardour session is set up, I move sounds around, try different effects, create new textures by layering, then render and re-import sub-mixes until the piece starts to take shape. I use a KORG nanoKONTROL as a mixing surface. I assign faders, pans and switches assigned to the DAW allowing me to quickly play around with different mix ideas.

Once the piece sounds finished, I mix down to a stereo .WAV file at 24-bit/44.1kHz, without using compression or EQ on the mix bus. Tip: mastering engineers really appreciate getting a raw 24-bit master that hasn’t been fiddled around with by the musician. For performances, I also use Ardour and the nanoKONTROL to do an acousmatic presentation. This version of the Ardour session will have compression and/or EQ on the mix bus, since I want the material to sound more polished. As a side note: I am looking into using the mastering tool JAMin [JACK Audio Mastering Interface] for this purpose in the future.

Sayonara, Apple

After ten years of working on Apple laptops, I’ve left the fold. Not only was the expense of owning and maintaining Apple hardware a key factor in my switch, but the operating system had become a frustration to me. Details like not having a tree-view in the right hand panel of the Finder window slowed me down. Ubuntu, on the other hand, feels more like an operating system made for grown-ups. And what’s especially nice is that Ubuntu scales nicely to the expertise of the user. Your cousin the computer geek or your Grandma can install and use Ubuntu and get as deep as they like. Combine this with the recent rash of cheap, powerful laptops, and Ubuntu’s market share is bound to grow.

A Request

It’s important that kernel and audio application developers (1) ensure all audio creation software has support for JACK, (2) improve and update tools for JACK to make it easy for musicians to install, configure, and use, (3) ship distros with the realtime kernel already tested and configured for use, (4) to integrate the real-time kernel patches into the mainline kernel. [Ed.: On each of these points, distributions and kernel builds are steadily improving, partly thanks to feedback from communities like the music production community. The realtime kernel likely won't be the default, mainline kernel, but it's important to have well-maintained optional packages at the very least. That doesn't mean you have to wait for improvements to happen, though, and in future articles I'll talk a bit about how you can configure your system now to take advantage of this functionality. -PK]

Most importantly, consider paying a subscription to support developers of JACK and your favorite Linux audio software, or, if you can write code, proofread text, write a manual, do a translation, contribute graphic design, or create content; please help by contributing something to the development of the software you use.

I would like to thank Ken Restivo, Mike Rooke, Paul Davis, Philip DeTullio, Jörn Nettingsmeier and Matt Griffen at Canonical Ltd. for advice and inspiration in the writing of this article.

Kim Cascone is a composer, sound artist, touring musician, lecturer and writer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Kathleen and son Cage.

Links:
http://www.osnews.com/story/6720/Introduction_to_Linux_Audio
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Main_Page
http://ardour.org/node
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
http://www.kokkinizita.net/linuxaudio/
http://www.baudline.com/
http://jackaudio.org/
http://drobilla.net/software/patchage/
http://www.ladspa.org/
http://lv2plug.in/
http://dssi.sourceforge.net/
http://jamin.sourceforge.net/en/about.html
http://linuxaudio.org/
http://www.ubuntu.com/
http://code.goto10.org/projects/puredyne/
http://www.bandshed.net/AVLinux.html
http://rt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.pulseaudio.org/
http://developer.apple.com/audio/overview.html

Corrections / clarifications:

Ed.: I originally claimed that JACK Transport sync is not possible on the Mac OS X port of JACK. As kindly pointed out by a reader, this is not correct. JACK Transport-aware applications on the Mac will work.

Secondly, Kim argued that you could pull out a drive without having to go to a lot of trouble unmounting it first. At least one commenter argues that risks data loss, and given that users may be using something like FUSE to access foreign file systems like NTFS or the Mac’s own HFS+, I don’t yet know what the exact details will be. As I said in comments, however, Nautilus and the command line eject function for me are quicker and more effective than similar unmounting on Windows and Mac, so I still notch this one for Linux. -PK

Enough of all this nonsense about how the Western Empire is crumbling. In our new “world” in which Mumbai is as powerful a cultural compass as Berlin or New York, one thing is guaranteed: it’s going to be a great party.

One stalwart Western-based advocate of a more pluralist electronica scene are the folks at Indian Electronica. Pumping out regular live events, podcasts, radio streams, and festivals, the crew is keeping music south Asian-flavored and eclectic. They’re truly inclusive: previous festivals spotlighted the likes of DJ Spooky, artists who are not connected to India by birth but love the music. It’s “Indian” in a loose sense, covering the thread of musical influence instead of just the geography.

The good news is, the excellent Indian Electronica Festival is returning with dates in New York, Toronto, and Vancouver. (Sadly, Mumbai didn’t make the list this time, but North America gets a good dose of great music.) They’re looking for artists to sign up, too, and possibly even other sessions.

http://www.indianelectronica.com/
http://www.indianelectronica.com/festival

Part of why I still like the term “electronica” is that the history of electronic music is by its very nature trans-cultural, eclectic, and global. Those are buzzwords, I know, but in this case I think they’re backed up by actual reality – by music spreading instantly across thousands of miles to the other side of the planet. It’s odd to me that people malign Berlin’s scene and history for being somehow restrictively bound in Germanness. It was Berlin’s pioneers who were smart enough to bring over artists from North and South America, from Detroit and Sao Paolo, and to arrange cultural intersections that changed the course of music.

But anyway – back to the music. The video quality is poor, but here’s the kind of highlight of their previous festivals, from Mumbai in 2007. Tablatronic Violence is the duo of Amsterdam-based tabla player Heiko Dijker and Sharat Srivastava, Hindustani musician who plays both strictly classical music and rock, as well as teaching Indian Violin in Glasgow. It doesn’t get much more international than this.