Being a digital musician requires a new set of skills, a precise tack between the forces of engineering and creativity. Robert Henke aka Monolake is always someone I find thought-provoking, not only because he’s so open and articulate, but because he seems uniquely focused on balancing those two sides of his personality. As a media artist and producer, his work relies heavily on his own technological invention, but he is also able to keep true to his own aesthetic compass.

For acoustic evidence of where Robert’s mind is exploring, his full-length album Silence, released last month on his own Imbalance label, reverberates with clarity. To my own ears, its crystalline rhythms and finely-honed, always-foreground timbres and textures recall all the best of Monolake through the years, back to the early, pre-Ableton collaboration between Robert and (now Ableton CEO) Gerhard Behles. (For an eloquent review, see Fact Magazine’s take.)

As far as engineering in the sense of recording and production, Robert did a terrific interview with engineer/musician Caro Snatch for her blog; she gets some fascinating answers out of him and they even talk about his technique of avoiding compression on electronic sources. But I was interested in how engineering can work in the compositional sense: with open-ended tools like Ableton Live and Max/MSP, how do you create compositional systems? How do you wrestle with the potential of Max inside Live? Where do you draw limits?

As always, Robert has some sharp ideas – whether fodder for inspiration or disagreement, I think you’ll find things worth talking about. And indeed, while technology figures prominently, I think you’ll find some ideas that are really fundamentally about music, about compositional intent, thinking about sound, and thinking about rhythm.

PK: It seems that you’ve always had a really particular approach to timbre, and that it’s especially focused and evolved on this record. There’s a certain purity of tone to which you tend to gravitate, as I hear it. Can you talk a bit about how you approach timbral color?

RH: I can only nail it down to personal taste. I enjoy timbres with inharmonic content, and I like the contrast between very sharp transients and very lush, airy sounds.

I know that Silence, as with your other work, combines synthesized and found sounds. There is a sense that you get to an almost atomic level with each, however, that the synthesized are becoming organic and the recorded sounds are deconstructed to the point that become almost primitive and synthesized. Is there a different approach to each of these, or is that something that happens naturally?

The ambiguity of sonic events always fascinates me. That border between ‘real’ and ’synthetic’ is a quite interesting one, not only in sound design, but also in visual arts. Working with synthetic sound generation sharpens my senses for the real sounds around me, and often I am surprised by how much they can blend. We are not talking any more of sound generation with a single square wave oscillator and a lowpass filter, but methods that are capable of creating highly complex and rich timbres. Those methods’ sonic definition matches the complexity of real sounds and this is where the fun starts. I like to place a recording of a metal thing next to a physical model of a metal thing next to a processed sample next to an FM timbre and see how they become a nice ensemble of similar sounds.

What’s your workflow like now in Ableton Live? On some level, it’s a tool that does things that you have conceived or asked for, or that reworks things you’ve created. On another, of course, it’s also this commercial tool that has been adapted to a generalized audience. Are there areas of it that you tend to work in most? Are there areas or features you tend to ignore or even avoid?

I try to avoid ‘content’. I am not interested in ‘throwing beat loops together’. I do not use presets from other people when it comes to synthesis, this all is just not my way of thinking. Why should I leave that great part of composition which is coming up with interesting timbres, to someone else? I am also not using time stretching / warping as a tool to match beats. I don’t like time stretch artefacts, unless I drive it in the very extreme as a special effect. I don’t need factory groove templates, in fact I never you groove at all, if i want to achieve it, I move notes by hand.

Apart from that, I’d say I use everything Live has to offer. There is not typical workflow, it highly depends on what I want to do. The most significant difference to the old pre-Live times is to me that I can make lots of sketches without any special idea in mind, just let go, and save the result once I am bored with it. And much later I can open all those sketches, and see if anything in there is of interest. Then I grab that element and continue working on the basis of this. I have a lot of complex tree structures of fragments on my hard-disk, and this a great source of material and inspiration.

Recently, you shared some of your early, personal Max patches as Max for Live creations. Were any of these patches used on Silence?

I don’t mean to focus exclusively on the technology, but it seems that these Max patches – even more than any element of Live – really embody some of your aesthetic and taste, yes? They’re a bit like experiencing a Monolake album interactively. Do you conceive them in that way, as a sort of compositional thought formed into a tool?

The tools have a strong influence on the result. Take the Monolake PX-18 sequencer. Its way of expanding a one bar loop into something that repeats in longer cycles is based on such a rigid concept, that it enforces a quite specific rhythmical approach. Some patterns are simply not possible, some are very easy to achieve. This is exciting and this is very musical; a piano is an instrument which makes it very easy to treat all twelve notes of a well tempered scale the same. And it is an instrument which makes it impossible to play with any notes that do not fit in such a scale. This is exactly the same interesting tension between enabling and inhibiting expression as with the rhythmical limitation of the PX-18.

There is an interesting interaction going on between developing tools and achieving musical results. The whole process is far from being linear and entirely result orientated. The idea at the beginning is shaped by first results and experiences gained from playing with a simple prototype of a part of the functionality, this drives the further development of the tool, but also influences the musical idea. If I try to build a granular time freezer, and after initial tests I figure out that I need a lot of overlapping grains to get the sound I want, I can also start thinking in swarms of particles, and this might lead to musical ideas that shape how I try to improve the grain thing. Working this way often provides far more interesting results than sticking to an initial plan. As an interesting side note, this way of thinking also finds its way more and more into general software/hardware development and interface/functionality design. The tools of the future need to _feel_ right. One cannot design a multi touch screen application on a piece of paper, implement it and think it will work. It would, technically, but it might not be inspiring to use and therefor most likely not a success in a competitive market.

A few years ago, when you were in New York, you made a couple of comments that stuck with me. One was that you thought that the tech press sometimes wasn’t critical enough of technology, that, for instance, they weren’t saying critical things about Ableton Live. Another was that you felt like there was less need for Max/MSP partly because of what Live itself does. I’m curious if you have any new thoughts on either of those?

I find myself doing a lot of things in Max these days, since the integration in Live made it so easy and rewarding. When I made that Max statement in NYC, I felt that coding is a trap when it comes to actually creating music. One simply does spend to much time with non-musical problems.In many ways, Max 5 and Max for Live reduced the time needed to get results. And this makes the whole package very attractive again.

I started teaching sound design at the Berlin University of Arts a year ago. I can show my students how to create a simple two-operator FM synthesizer with an interesting random modulation within fifteen minutes and the result is a Live set including the Max for Live part, which I can save and send to the students as an email so they can open it again an continue working on it. If stuff can be done that fast, it leaves enough headroom to actually use it in a musical context. In retrospective a lot of 90s IDM music was way to much driven by exploring technology. At some point one has to step back and say: okay, now lets actually have a look at the composition and not only at the technical complexity of the algorithm.

So, what’s the role of the press in this? One experience I gain from reading the Ableton user forum and from talking with students is that there is a great amount of insecurity about which technology to use. It’s the abundance paradox. Which software sounds best? Which compressor do i need to use? Which plugins do I need for mastering housy dub music with a hint of pop and some acoustic guitar? Having the choice between 5000 compressor plugins whilst not understanding what makes a compressor really sound the way it does it pretty much my idea of hell. So often I have that impulse telling the world: hey, you can use the sidechain input of the compressor you already have in Live, and you can feed that sidechain with a slightly delayed version of the original signal. You could also apply saturation, filtering, or even reverb or again an instance of the compressor in that side chain signal to shape its timing and response to its input. This will have a result of the compression curve, and this means you can build anything from a very normal compressor up to the most exotic effect you can imagine. And you can store those structures for later re-use. You can automate every single aspect of it. You can use ten or twenty instances of it in a song. Are you guys aware that you have more power right in front of you than the best music producers and hardware designers just ten years ago would have dreamed off?

I simply do not want to read any more articles about new compressor, be it hardware or software, unless it provides insight into the amazing possibilities we already have. I don’t want to read anymore sound quality discussions that deal with the last bit of a 24-bit file in a world where people listen to mp3 over mobile phones and enjoy those artefacts.

The most exciting new music comes from young kids guys running some audio software in a bedroom, listening to the result over a shitty hi-fi and use Melodyne all the way wrong. Those folks do not read gear magazines, they could not care less about yet another mastering EQ, but create the most stunning beauty. If people talk too much about gear I usually do not expect too much good music. I am often trapped in this twilight zone between engineer and composer too, so I know what I am talking about here…

As far as your own music, do you find you need some critical distance from a tool as an artist? Or does that fall away once you’re in the process of actually making the record? (It seems, after all, we’re all a bit spoiled by the various excellent tools we have at our disposal.)

Deadlines help. If I know that a project needs to be finished, I simply stop investing time in technology at some point, and instead use what’s there. Its a question of discipline and experience too. I try to teach my students that if they are working on a technically challenging project they need to define a deadline for the technical side. If not, they might work till the very last moment on technical stuff and loose focus on the artistic part. At the end, the result counts, not the beautiful MAX patch, which could possible create a nice result.

And have you ever considered trying to return to just building something simple in, say, Max, and limiting yourself to that? Or are you able to find necessary formal limitations in the tools you have?

I am constantly limiting myself. I set up a multi-dimensional network of constraints and bounce off its walls. Exhausting but it helps getting stuff done. A typical constraint: No more patching in Max till that project is finished, or try to get all Melodyne processing done in one afternoon and use those results.

I’m particularly interested in how you conceive rhythm. It seems like some of the ideas about sequencing rhythm in ATOM are also present here. Some of these rhythms are relatively symmetrical, pulse-like. Then you have these stuttering rhythms, as though a vibration has been set in motion and is naturally playing itself out in space. How do you work rhythmically?

I contrast totally straight 16th grooves with material that itself constitutes a rhythmical quality off that grid. In ‘Silence’ obviously I often used gravity driven processes with their inherent accelerations. Or I played notes with an arpeggiator that is not synced to song time but where I control its rate with a slider. Something Gerhard already did on the very first Monolake track ‘Cyan’ in 1995. Silence offers quite a few hidden connections to Monolake history. My general approach to groove is simple: I change things in time till it feels right.

What was your compositional process like, generally, for these works? Did they start with some of those sounds? With a rhythmic motive?

There is no general rule. I often just open Live to explore an idea, and end up doing something else because I found an interesting detail along the way. Or I have to work on a highly specific project, and have to discard a lot of the results because they do not work in a given context. Instead of throwing them away, I keep them and this might form the basis for another composition.

The title, “Silence,” certainly recalls John Cage. Was that intentional? Were there other meanings here? In an album that’s not silent, what is the role of silence?

Silence is such a great concept. There is no silence, unless in a vacuum, its that great mystic world which cannot exist in our world. Also, in music the time between the musical events is as important as the events itself. But I really leave it up to the associations of the listener to make sense of the title. And of the liner notes and the photographs and the music. I think there is a lot of room for all sorts of connections and connotations.

When we talked at the end of last year, we got to reflect a bit about winter. I’m editing this as I watch a snowstorm here in Manhattan, having come from snowstorms in Stockolm. It seems that winter is again a thread on this record. How did winter play into the album?

I grew up in the Bavarian countryside. Winter there equals silence, introversion, deep thinking, and general inwards focus. I like this.

http://monolake.de/
Free Max for Live patch downloads: http://monolake.de/technology/m4l.html
Silence: http://monolake.de/releases/ml-025.html

The Harmonic Center of the Universe from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo.

This beautiful, meditative installation of choreographed lights and sound, by way of Rucyl and Saturn Never Sleeps, is the creation of Chris Harvey, Olivia Robinson, & Jesse Stiles. The Harmonic Center of the Universe evidently narrowly escaped destruction last year during a thunderstorm, but perhaps Art is as much repair as it is creation.

Artist Jesse Stiles specializes in such light shows. There’s a clear connection to the polytropes of Iannis Xenakis, with its own cascades of choreographed light – a reminder that lights can still have a place, even in an age of projection. He also writes experimental pop songs and does sound and music for IMAX films. (Yeah, Jesse, you’re someone we need to meet.)

Along similar lines, we saw the gorgeous balloon and music collaboration of Robert Henke and Christopher Bauder, ATOM, last year in Montreal. What strikes me about all these works it that the lit object and sound appear to fuse to an extent that these become either musical sculptures or a kind of sequencer in physical space. It’s remarkable that the digital can make musical structure more virtual, more invisible, or more physical – almost without consideration one way or another.

Inside a computer, digital music is entirely unseen. But translate it into the tangible world, and it can be anything you imagine – not limited by acoustic reality or practicality, music can become three-dimensional sculpture.

For artist Christopher Bauder and composer Robert Henke, ATOM’s light and sound sculpture found a three-dimensional matrix of balloons as its medium. Flashing in hypnotic patterns and moving into different configurations, accompanied by live laptop music from Henke (aka Monolake), music and visuals become an inseparable fusion.

ATOM received its North American premiere at Montreal’s MUTEK in May. That turned out to be perfect programming, as it placed ATOM in a week that featured complementary work from artists Artificiel. Henke says some of his matrix manipulations – and even the specific Max/MSP patches from ATOM – came from collaboration with Artificiel and their light bulbs. For their part, at MUTEK they unveiled a new audiovisual etude called POWEr Play involving a live-sampled Tesla Coil. The science fair ethos of ATOM and POWEr Play could have been gimmicky or overly fixated on spectacle, but in these pieces, it was anything but. Both works contemplated their subject matter so thoughtfully that balloons and electrical coils seemed perfectly natural media for the audiovisual imagination, and audiences were left marveling at phenomena in a way too rare in 2009.

Video episode at Blip.tv [includes mobile/desktop video downloads]
YouTube Part 1 and Part 2 (if you prefer YouTube for viewing)

It’s worth downloading the video above and really getting to soak up some of this piece when you have time. I also have an audio interview of a conversation with Robert and Christopher immediately following one of the performances.

You’ll hear Christopher’s voice first, followed by the unmistakable percussive enthusiasm of Robert. For me, the best part of the interview was hearing them discuss whether you should notice some of the unintentional randomness of drifting balloons or technical hiccups, and how they structured the work formally with a palette of possible balloon patterns.

Download the audio interview

For more on POWEr Play, see my Montreal flat mate Greg Smith writing for Rhizome – and stay tuned for the CDM audio interview, coming next week:
power play – artificiel at mutek [Serial Consign Blog]
Variable Frame Rate: Multimedia Performance at MUTEK 2009 [Rhizome]

More information:
Atom project Information at monolake.de
Text interview by Bertram Niessen for Digimag magazine, October 2007, also at monolake.de

Ableton co-founder and general visionary Robert Henke (also known as Monolake) gave a full-length workshop in New Zealand recently. If you’re up for 90 minutes of discussion of musical and sonic techniques in Live, plus a look at his unique Monodeck controller, the whole video is there. But that’s not the main reason the video is making its way around the Interwebs. It’s because there’s a bit of a bombshell right at the beginning of the footage:

He says, outright, you don’t need 64-bit sound to get “audio quality.” You don’t even need 16-bit all the time.

Okay, maybe that’s not such a radical thought in and of itself. Oh, yeah, except for one thing — the 64-bit summing engine he’s talking about happens to be the one in Ableton Live 7.

Video by Tom Cosm, via AudioLemon

Some people are already assuming this means Ableton has somehow betrayed them (well, in fairness, Robert does say the summing engine is just a marketing gimmick). And what about Cakewalk? Robert doesn’t mention them by name, but the only DAW that’s been trumpeting 64-bit mixing and signal processing is SONAR.

In fact, far from conflicting with Robert’s vision of sound, Ableton Live 7 really embodies it. And as for the Cakewalk thing — well, that’s complicated, because the term “64-bit” applies to a number of basically unrelated topics dealing with sound and computing. But none of that matters as much as one thing: if it sounds good, it is good.

Ableton’s Lo-Fi Voodoo — And Choice

Live 7 really does reflect Robert’s approach to sound and sound design. I say that not to try to make you go out and buy Live, but because I’ve been using Live nearly since it was released, and really enjoy the opportunity to get to use a tool that does have a point of view about sound.

Look at the other features in the program, like re-worked effects plug-ins. From the beginning, I think a lot of Live’s effects plug-ins have been badly misunderstood — a topic that came up recently on the CDM forums. The original reverb, the compressor, and some of the more recent additions are fantastic tools for coloring the sound of your work. Judge them as a conventional reverb or compressor, and frankly, they may turn you off. But forget your expectations there and look at them as timbral tools, and they’re great. (They also really do have a range — so once you know how to use them, you can make music that doesn’t necessarily sound like Monolake’s.)

Part of what Live 7 seems to be about is giving you a choice — if you need a great-sounding conventional compressor, for instance, and don’t want the pain of having to bring in a third-party plug-in, the new Live compressor is a valuable addition. But the old, odd compressor modes are there, too.

If you keep watching the video, Robert talks more about what he means — and it goes well beyond the issue of 64-bit summing. In synthesis, for instance, Robert demonstrates that using lower bit depth — bit depth below even 16-bit — can add harmonic content. A common, oft-repeated misunderstanding — one that’s been in the press a lot lately — is that lower bit depth contain “less” sound content. It’s just not true, ironically because distortion will add additional content to the sound. It’s a technique Robert uses regularly in Ableton’s Operator synth, and Ableton’s software does an excellent job of making these parts of the sonic palette available. But it goes well beyond Ableton; it’s part of why some musicians are embracing low-quality digital synths, chiptune music, and other technologies.

If you don’t feel like watching the whole video, by the way, one of Robert’s big tips is just to use this:

It’s the Spectrum tool in Live. (Naturally, there are equivalents in other programs and plug-ins.) What it gives you is a view of what’s happening in the sound itself, and couples something you can see with what you can already hear. That’s more valuable than anyone’s marketing.

What 64-bit Means

As for the 64-bit argument, we have to take at least a moment to examine what it is we’re talking about.

I’m equally dubious about just how essential having 64-bit dynamic headroom is. I’m not sure how valuable that particular feature is in Live 7; I’ll leave that to an engineer to decide. When SONAR came out with 64-bit processing, I talked to DSP engineers at AES at companies like Apogee. None could say they were really sure how useful that extra headroom is. There are a number of other sonic changes that do make the program sound “better,” so I don’t think the version 7 upgrade is snake oil, and I at least have the perspective of watching each upgrade since 1.0. And likewise, there are plenty of features in SONAR other than 64-bit mixing, so there’s no reason to get too hung up on this issue — for most people, I think it’s not even a relevant question.

But don’t write off “64-bit” yet, either. Cakewalk pushes 64-bit a lot; it’s true. But they’re actually talking about a number of different things:

• Other processing/synthesis: Cakewalk’s products now support a fully 64-bit signal chain. (Digidesign I’ve seen pitching its bit depth and rate, too, but while they’ve broken the 16-bit barrier they’re not at 64-bit, so hence the focus on Cakewalk.) Now, maybe 64-bit isn’t useful in a summing engine — that’s debatable. But there’s also the question of what it does for certain digital processes, like signal processing and synthesis, and in that case additional headroom could have potential. Live 7 only deals with the summing engine. Just as certain image processing techniques use higher-resolution colorspaces, even if you can’t see what’s going on, it’s possible some techniques will make use of this additional information digitally to produce things you can hear. That’s a discussion for another day, though.
• 64-bit memory addressing: More importantly, Cakewalk is also support 64-bit computing — something Ableton doesn’t do yet. On Windows, that means the ability to access larger amounts of RAM under Windows “x64″ or “64-bit” Vista. Totally unrelated to sound, but very, very useful for people using larger sample libraries. (It’s a non-issue on Mac OS X, because the Mac already addresses memory beyond 3-4GB without any extra effort.) I wouldn’t ding Cakewalk’s competitors for not supporting this, because the migration has been very slow for the whole Windows platform. But it is there — and it is a completely different subject.
• 64-bit processing: Running under 64-bit Windows also squeezes a little more performance out of a CPU. The gain isn’t huge, but it’s real. This isn’t yet available on Mac OS (that is, only parts of the OS currently support 64-bit processing), though it is available on Linux. (Even on Linux, though, people often choose to run 32-bit versions of the OS for compatibility.)

That’s a gross oversimplification of some of those issues, so feel free to discuss the finer points in comments, but you get the idea. There’s 64-bit in a summing engine, 64-bit in the rest of your signal chain, 64-bit as a way of getting access to more RAM, and 64-bit as a way of making use of 64-bit CPUs.

And then there’s 4-bit as a way of making blippy bleepy sounds.

Low Fidelity: Not Just For IDM

That said, the original point really isn’t marketing, new features in Live or any other program, computation, or audio theory.

It’s about a simple point: what sounds good, is good. And if you want to sound good, you need to listen. If you keep watching the video, that underlies everything Robert is saying, and I have to agree.

It’s easy to watch someone using downsampling or lower-bitrate / lower-bit depth / lower-fidelity sound sources and think, oh, sure, if you’re from Berlin and want to do IDM all the time, that’s great. But as Robert points out, some of the music we love best wasn’t even recorded and processed using 16-bit, let alone 192kHz, 64-bit digital audio.

This very issue came up as we were talking to Hank Shocklee. Part of the early hip-hop sound, the Public Enemy sound, was a function of the lower-fidelity sampling mechanisms on early digital samplers. And these sound nothing like Berlin IDM. (In fact, a lot of the electronica sound and its approach to the technology is deeply indebted to American hip-hop and African-American artists.)

That doesn’t mean less is more, either, necessarily — just that it can be part of your sonic palette, of the choices you make when making your music.

Digital technology is now old enough to have a history; it’s old enough to have classics. I’m all for exploring ways of pushing the envelope. Want to really test whether higher bit depth, higher sampling frequencies, and new technologies can make new sounds? Go for it. There’s no reason you can’t do that, and still remember the possibilities and history at the other end of the spectrum (pardon the pun).

If it sounds good, it is good. And that’s the problem with talking about “audio fidelity.” More is not always more. One thing is not always better than another. It really is about finding the sound you want to get. Engineers can build the expertise to help you realize that — but no amount of science can say one sound is superior to another, any more than it can say that G Dorian scale is “way more awesome” than C# Mixolydian.

Once you realize that, too, engineers don’t become any less useful. On the contrary, making something sound good really is an art, meaning you really do need that mixing engineer, that mastering engineer, that live sound engineer. (I sure as heck do.) And you need to spend some of your energy trying to learn more about sound, because it’s something that’s worth devoting a lifetime to understanding.

Software companies still need bullet points on marketing sheets; that’s fine. But as for the fact that sound doesn’t easily fit into bullet points? I think that’s a good thing.