You may have heard about Pure Data (Pd), the open-source cousin to Max/MSP and a powerful tool for visual programming or “patching” music and multimedia. Pd has even appeared in the iPhone app RjDj and creating generative music for EA’s hit game Spore. But actually learning how to use the thing? Or learning some of the more advanced possible techniques in sound synthesis and processing? That’s another matter.

Johannes Kreidler writes to let us know about his new book for people wanting to learn Pd. It starts at the beginning and teaches you not only the ins and outs of the Pd environment, but all of the advanced music processing techniques, as well. (Given the similarity of Pd and Max/MSP, that should make this just about as useful for Max devotees, too.)

The book is available for reading free online, or in paperback format from Wolke Publishing House. It’s available in both English and German. Johannes writes:

This tutorial is designed for self-study, principally for composers. It begins with explanations of basic programming and acoustic principles then gradually builds up to the most advanced electronic music processing techniques. The book’s teaching approach is focused primarily on hearing, which we consider a faster and more enjoyable way to absorb new concepts than through abstract formulas.

The patches described are available for download.

He notes that because Pd is free and open source rather than commercial software, there isn’t a company behind it that can focus on documentation for new users. That’s been a common complaint about Pd, and this book does a lot to fill it — as well as a lot to fill the need for better documentation of sound techniques, as well, for users of any environment. Some of the juicy topics covered:

• Additive, subtractive synthesis
• Sampling
• Waveshaping, modulation synthesis
• Granular synthesis (something I try to eat a bowl of every day, seriously)
• Fourier analysis
• Sequencers
• Connecting to hardware, network transmission and OSC
• Basics of visuals

It’s a really elegantly-organized set of topics, and absolutely of interest to users of Max/MSP and other environments, as well. With this and a new SuperCollider book coming out this spring, we’re really getting some wonderful resources for learning greater ninja skills. Stay tuned, as I hope to create a forum for folks working on learning this stuff.

Resources

Book site, including downloadable patches and online reading:

http://www.pd-tutorial.com

Direct link to downloading all the patches as one zip (thanks, mic, in comments!):

http://www.kreidler-net.de/pd/patches/patches.zip

More info, including the paperback version:

http://www.wolke-verlag.de/musik_u_t/loadbang.html

http://www.buecher-zur-musik.de/assets/s2dmain.html?http://www.buecher-zur-musik.de/53108697370a2cb3f/5310869bc400a7a02.html

Author’s site:
www.kreidler-net.de

The authorship of the book was aided by a grant by the Music University of Freiburg / Germany.

Previous appearances by the author:

A song made from 70,2000 samples

The stock market declines, as a song

More Pd Books

bang | pure data Free, online

Creator Miller Puckette’s own The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music, free online in various formats and also in print

News may filter through Boing Boing, Slashdot, and Reddit – and certainly, this story already has. But oddly, I learned of this item when I happened to meet up with the blog item’s author in Somerville, Massachusetts. He has digital analysis he believes may prove that a track was recorded to a click track.

Paul Lamere is a developer at Echo Nest, a brainy think-tank of music geeks developing new ways of processing musical metadata in the cloud. Whereas services like Last.fm focus mainly on content and community, Echo Nest’s API wants to make the computers in the cloud smarter about how they listen to your music. We’ve had a look at their work twice before:

All Christmas Music, Boiled Down to Sixteen Droning Singles
Musical Brain API: An API for Music on the Web – And it Makes Pretty Pictures

The Remix API crunches data about rhythmic information at a number of levels. Since we first saw it, that API has led to an SDK (read: something you can program more directly), all assembled in Python. The Python-based SDK is now capable of creating the world’s most unlistenable mash-ups, among other things – some oddly compelling. On Friday, I got to listen to tunes with every other eighth note removed and Michael Jackson crossed with tunes – that is, until the programmers in the office started to complain because they were about to lose their mind. (Echo Nest uses a Sonos system to pipe music office-wide. I hope we can give you a preview of those clips soon.)

Remix SDK (currently Python)

But perhaps the most interesting thing this team has done so far is Paul’s work on plotting rhythmic analysis. Plots of tempo deviation, measured in beat durations, yield two interesting revelations:

In search of the click track [Music Machinery]

1. Much of the music you know has a lot of rhythmic variation. (Dizzy Miss Lizzie by the Beatles, anyone? No Ringo Starr jokes, please.)

2. A lot of the other music has disturbingly little rhythmic variation.

Yes, indeed, the use of click tracks (and, I suspect, metronomes, drum machines, quantized loops, and the whole lot) seems to be sucking some of the rhythmic spice out of music. You’ve already heard complaints about the “loudness wars” that have quantized out dynamic range. But, after decades of drum machines and digital tech, there’s surprisingly little complaint about quantized rhythmic values. Okay, perhaps I should scratch that – some people complain an awful lot. What we haven’t had until now is a visual representation of what’s going on.

Note/update: Just for the record, I’m not opposed to quantized beats. We’re very big fans of techno around here. The post Paul wrote begins, “Sometime in the last 10 or 20 years, rock drumming has changed.” Note, rock drumming. I think there are all sorts of rhythmic possibilities in different musical expressions.

I could go on, but I’m not having a very smart day. (The evening pot of coffee is on; I have high hopes.) Instead, I’m curious what people think of Paul’s methodology. This was just a programmer working along a line of thought with some experimental code, so I’m sure he doesn’t claim this to be an entirely scientific method. But that said, do you think his conclusions are correct? Is there more to be said about this subject?

For that matter, would there be a way to do more scientific work along these lines?

As for the engine that powered this: the Remix API and SDK from Echo Nest should be capable of quite a lot more, from gorgeous animated visualizations like the album art for Matmos we saw last year to unusual, new collaborative Web remix apps. The one catch is the analysis must be performed on their servers, so it’s not something you can apply without sending your content to the cloud – but you do get the metadata back, so I still think some sort of self-remixing applications might be possible, too. I’m eager to see a Java version of the SDK and not just Python, because that’d make it easier to add 3D elements or work with tools like Processing. Can I get an amen?

Well worth checking out Paul’s blog for lots of commentary on a variety of musical enthusiast topics:
Music Machinery

I’ve had some amazing meetings here in Berlin, with plenty to share with you over the coming weeks and months. I’m now headed to Dublin tomorrow for the amazing-looking DEAF festival. If you’re in or near Dublin, you may want to just clear the next few days for live music lineups, parties, film screenings, gallery events, and generally a dream lineup of electronic music events.

I’ll be part of a series of talks Saturday. I’ll be talking generally about how we can think about music visually, and how those visual metaphors in software impact music, with some new examples built in Processing (among examples of other work). I’m really excited about every one my fellow speakers, as well. Gavin from Future Audio Workshop (creators of Circle) will be talking about sound generally, complementing what I’m covering, and we have a number of terrific figures to chat. The film Totally Wired covers the scene around synth building and the modular renaissance as found at Schneider’s Bureau … well, you can see the lineup for yourself.

For the rest of the world not in Ireland, believe me, I’ll be sure to bring you as much back from this event as possible, even if I’m catching up through the end of 2008.

Saturday 25th October at The Digital Hub:

1.00pm – 1.40pm FAW [Future Audio Workshop]
1.40pm – 1.50pm Break
1.50pm – 2.30pm Peter Kirn [Create Digital Music]
2.30pm – 2.50pm Break
2.50pm – 4.10pm Totally Wired Film [Dir. Niamh Ahern]
4.10pm – 5.10pm Andreas Schneider [Schneider’s Bureau]
5.10pm – 5.30pm Break
5.30pm – 6.30pm Dave Vorhaus & Mark Jenkins [White Noise / BBC Radiophonic Workshop]
6.30pm – 7.00pm Break
7.00pm – 8.00pm Diffusion Concert / Soundings
8.00pm – 9.00pm Spatial Music Collective Concert

More details on Saturday’s lineup, at the DEAF Ireland Blog

DEAF live events

Here’s the trailer for “Totally Wired,” which also features a terrific original score:

Trailer for ‘Totally Wired’ from niamhahern on Vimeo.

The vocal input goes well, and illustrates the number of different inputs beyond the mouse you can expect in The Future. Here’s the problem: harmony is extraordinarily difficult to model on a computer because of the number of variables, the amount that’s driven by instinct and art. And let’s be blunt: it doesn’t work right.

In short: if you’re planning to build a Jerome Kern robot, the technology may not be there just yet.

If you’ve got a strong stomach, you can watch the application lay waste to “The Way You Look Tonight.” Speaking of tears: composer Kern actually drove the lyricist, Dorothy Field, to tears with the original. MySong might make you cry … in a different way. It chooses chords that fit a key and fit the melody, but completely unravels when it comes to making chords work horizontally with each other with the melody — which, when you think about it, isn’t all that easy even for experienced musician. The funny thing is, the harmonic structure of the song isn’t that complex (well, until MySong gets cranked to its avant-post-bop setting later in the demo). Harmony is perhaps just harder than the technologists may realize.

The researchers do compare their tool to Band-in-a-Box’s automatic harmony selection module, and this works better than that — but that’s not saying much.

I also have to admit, I’m getting a little fatigued of all these tools that want to dumb down music, as if somehow it’s music’s obligation to be push-button easy. Do we build giant robotic armatures so people can play basketball without practicing? Isn’t it the struggle that makes it fun? The researchers in this point seem to have missed the point: all those hours you spend sitting with an instrument working out chords are perhaps what music is about. There’s not some musical secret the experts are keeping from everyone else. The songwriter with the guitar very likely received very little training. All of that tweaking of melody and harmony is part of the process that eventually yields things like, well, “The Way You Look Tonight.” Jerome Kern and Cole Porter and Richard Rogers did it very quickly; amateurs may do it more slowly. But it may not be possible to reduce to rules in a way that the current generation of computing intelligence can even understand — and even if it does, it may require more than one or two sliders to adjust.

The best part of the video is the editable parameters: sliders for Jazz factor and Happy factor settings. (Theory fans: the approach seems to be for Happy factor to lobotomize to major I/V chords and Jazz factor to eventually turn everything into sus13.) I’d like to suggest a few additional settings for reproducing a broader variety of music:

• Emo angst factor
• Tone deaf factor
• Pretentious techno chords factor
• Stoned factor
• Saccharine-sweet triteness factor
• Community theater audition accompanist factor
• Went to a liberal arts college where everyone on my floor played Ani DiFranco way too much factor

It’s well worth watching the demo. And, of course, this is the reason to tackle artificial intelligence — even if you’re unsuccessful, you’re learning. My guess is, we’ll need genuine AI before we can successfully harmonize melodies.

MySong, from Microsoft Research, makes your singing sound a lot better than it really does  [istartedsomething]

MySong: Automatic Accompaniment for Vocal Melodies [Explanation, Demos, Academic Paper]

What is the sound of an invisible hand playing a MIDI controller?

Yes, in the latest evidence that the Interwebs really are Douglas Adams’ imagined Infinite Improbability Drive, a conversation from CDM’s humble forums about the economics of Radio Shack and MIDI jacks has led to a blog response from a non-musician defending the true legacy of Adam Smith.

I’m serious. I’m not just, you know, dumbing down CDM and pandering to the economist audience to pick up cute economist girls.

The blogger also feels our forum poster say “dude” too much. Like, whatever. Don’t have a cow, man.

It started with a thread about the ridiculous price of electronics. (Personally, I wouldn’t try to extrapolate any kind of larger economic theory from a chain run as badly as Radio Shack has been under recent management, but our posters did, and I digress.)

UK economic blogger Gavin Kennedy fires back:

The myths about the invisible hand are widespread and deep. It has been switched from supporting an argument of Adam Smith about risk-avoiding merchants contemplating the risks of foreign trade into an all purpose guide to individuals in markets …

The real wonder about markets is that there is no central direction; there are no invisible hands, feet, or disembodied parts, guiding anybody. There does not need to be! The relative prices of whatever is exchanged are the only guides needed. It’s called the price system. That’s what Adam Smith actually said.

And he compares the myth of the invisible hand to the myth of Santa Clau– hey, stop crying, Suzie. I’m only joking. The invisible guiding direction of market economics is real, and it’s going to bring you a MicroKORG next Christmas, but that’s not until December and your birthday isn’t even until October.

Ahem.

Of course, Gavin is right.

Image credits: gravestone of Adam Smith, Duncan; gravestone of Radio Shack, Куртис Перри.

Here’s what Adam Smith actually said, without paraphrasing, via a Wikipedia article on invisible hands (which needs quality cleanup, if there are any Wikipedian economists out there … maybe you can add a disambiguation page for other forms of invisible hands, too).

But the annual revenue of every society is always precisely equal to the exchangeable value of the whole annual wasteman produce of its industry, or rather is precisely the same thing with that exchangeable value. As every individual, therefore, endeavors as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

If Adam Smith were alive today, I’m sure he’d also say, the individual consumer in a society acting in his own self-interest won’t direct the product of his industry at Rat Shack, because they cost way too much. But he is talking about merchants, not consumers, and not in any way that can explain why Radio Shack still thinks you want a cellphone when all you need is a set of batteries and a minijack-to-TRS 1/4″ adapter.

Then again, I’m not a real economist. So, seriously, if someone who does know both their MIDI jacks and economics theory wants to chime in, by all means, go for it.

On Midi Jacks and Adam Smith [Adam Smith's Lost Legacy Blog]