Benga’s latest video was released early last month and made the blog rounds, but it’s worth considering as we continue our ongoing thread on visual music and how sound can go from invisible to tangible. A stunning video whets fans appetite for the upcoming Benga full-length Chapter 2, constructing a wave shape in physical form as a series of vinyl records. Using some 960 hand-cut vinyl records, the track’s waveform materializes in stop motion-filmed animation.

Physical as it may be, the inspiration, say the creative team, was SoundCloud. UK-based creative team Us, consisting of Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor, explain:

When we were asked to pitch on the promo they sent us the track as a ‘Soundcloud’ link, we usually get it sent as an MP3. For the first time we were not just listening to the track we were also watching it. There was something mesmerising about this in its simplicity. This ignited the idea to create a real life three dimensional waveform. We started to think about the fact that a vast amount of our music is consumed online and has lost a sense of physicality this lead us to the idea of using vinyl records. We also loved the way it related to Benga as an artist who’s background comes from using records as a DJ or producer.

The maths worked we would need 960 records to create 1 minute and 20 seconds worth of wave form. Each one had to be individually cut to a specific size, hand labeled, hand numbered and then finally polished. This prep took 7 full working days and then the animation process took around 30 hours.

No 3D printers here: the process of making the individual, differently-sized records sounds painstaking. Us tells Creative Review:

To animate the wave form, we built it and then carefully removed each individual record. This had to be done very gently as any shift in the position of the sculpture would result in the failure of the animation and as we had to literally destroy each piece of vinyl to get it off, there was only one chance to get it right. Once the sculpture was finally built, the animation process took about 30 hours.

As you can see in the behind-the-scenes photos, actually working those records onto the pipe involved removing the far end, making this still more challenging (though adding a great deal to the impact of the effect).

This is all quite similar to another radial, sample-by-sample waveform made of physical circles we saw earlier this year:
Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

Making a waveform view in the digital realm is dead-simple. But something about going to physical media makes that decision more than just afterthought, as though these creators really are touching frozen sound.

Having Benga as your soundtrack doesn’t hurt, either. You can grab this single on iTunes.

Full credits:

Directors – Us
Producer – Liz Kessler
Line Producer – Connor Hollman
DoP – Matt Fox
Gaffer – Ben Fordesman
Editor – Vid Price
Grade – Mark Horrobin
Animation – Alice Dupre
Structural consultant – Jorge Betancor
Runners – Tayo Rapoport, Paul Mckelvie, Chaelyn Allcock
Production Company – A+
Commissioner – Dan Millar
Management – Phil Hutcheon / Andrew Foggin

Behind-the-scenes photos courtesy Us.

See the full project page for lots of additional images and details:

http://www.weareus.co.uk/projects/benga-i-will-never-change

Thanks, Andrew Cavette!

Delicate and dense, melodies and sounds from church contexts, found sounds of bells and voices, are set against crisp, sharply-solid, forward-driving electronic beats. And then, there are the visuals: an archaic architecture of mystical symbols and three-dimensional, evolving forms interpret the music in visual form.

Swedish-born artist and technologist Eric Wahlforss, in other words, has been busy. As the artist Forss, his album is an app, appropriately for someone who is the co-founder and CTO of SoundCloud. Eric showed me an early build over cheeseburgers. It’s reactive, perhaps, more than interactive, but there’s still a chance to use your hands to rotate both visuals and music, a bit like picking up a sculpture and viewing it from different angles – though with the added element of sound. What you get is a sense of an interwoven visual and musical world, and an aesthetic vision that Wahlforss has pulled together.

From the man who built the world’s largest online recording business, it’s little surprise that recording features prominently, in two threads:

Recordings of strings, choirs, organs and ambient noise from church concerts which have been cut up into fragments and rearranged into a new mosaic of music, and recordings of wooden, stone and metal objects which make up the beats and percussion. These are the plosive, rhythmical noises that provide the link between the traditional to modern electronica.

That musical combination sounds to me familiar, though also clearly comfortable to Mr. Wahlforss. The collaboration is especially intriguing, though, as a Viennese graphic designer (Leonard Lass) and German computer graphics artist (Marcel Schobel, Untouch) collaborate to produce an audiovisual experience. Berghain, that cavernous church of techno (and occasionally more experimental sounds), seems an appropriate setting in the city that also played home to SoundCloud’s founding. (The fact that the former power station has the acoustics of a church doesn’t hurt, either – even if it’s ill-suited to denser music for the same reason.) Ecclesia will get its launch across media: live show in Berlin, app on iPad, album. For now, you can hear the tracks streamed via – of course – SoundCloud, even shared directly from Ableton Live.

The live show premieres May 2 in Berlin at Berghain/Panorama Bar, with the app out the same day. The album itself releases on June 12.

http://forssmusic.com/

Visuals come from Untouch (Marcel Schobel):
http://www.untouch.fm/
…and Leonard Lass:
http://depart.at

Imagine working with sound design by painting with spectra, then applying those spectra to instruments you can play in real-time, and you’ve got the basic notion of iZotope Iris. The dream of combining graphics tools, a la Photoshop, with sonic ones has been in the minds of creative computer users for some time. Iris is a major landmark, though: instead of just being an editing tool, it turns sonic selection into something you can use in a synth. It lets you do your creative sound editing, but then play those sounds live, transforming the technique into an instrument.

In fact, Iris looks like just what I dreamed of having back in the 90s when I first played with U&I Software’s graphic sound manipulation tool MetaSynth. (Developer Eric Wenger, alongside his former colleague Kai Krause, was an advocate of novel graphical interfaces in place of the run-of-the-mill, cut-and-paste UI. MetaSynth remains an amazing tool, and since Iris can import sounds, using the two together could be mind-blowing.) Since MetaSynth, we’ve seen other efforts, like selection tools in Adobe’s own Soundbooth. iZotope bested those efforts with the most powerful graphical editing tool I’ve seen yet, in their RX product. Now, at last, you can use those same tools to create new sounds, not just restore old ones, and then jam with the results.

Here’s what you get:

• Extra spectra from a graphical view of the sound, using familiar graphical selection tools (even a handy Magic Wand)
• Layer spectra together
• Play the sounds from a MIDI controller
• Use standard synth tools: tuning, amplitude envelope, LFO, modulation.
• Send effects: distortion (tube, clipping, scream, etc.), chorus, delay, reverb.
• Multimode filters.
• Import your own sounds, or use one from a 4 GB library of sounds – either as the basis of your own sound designs, or using an existing preset. (iZotope promises recordings of insects, animals, machines, vintage synthesizers, musical instruments and so on. Of course, nice as those are, some of the fun will be using this tool as an excuse to go out field recording.)
• Key mapping, so you can set up a performance multi with various presets – ideal for live performance and experimentation.

For more high-quality sound libraries with accompanying preset content that uses them, iZotope will sell you add-on libraries beyond the 4 GB already in the tool, entitled Glass and Wood, at US$49 and US$29, respectively. (I’ll let you figure out what sound content those cover.)

In fact, the only thing missing here, really, is the ability to manipulate the spectral stuff itself live. The selection is mainly still an editing process, but once you do have your spectra selected, everything else is playable in real-time.

Iris available now. It’ll eventually cost US$249, or $299 with the Glass and Wood libraries bundled, but for now, those are reduced to $149 and $199 until May 4.

This video provides the best explanation of how the interface works:

And here are some of the sounds you might make:

I’m excited to begin working with this one; it looks like something really unique, entirely distinct from the various work-alike instruments out there. You could almost make a whole album with this one tool … and a lot of (very enjoyable) time. More on working with Iris hands-on soon.

A demo is available – including ten days unlimited use, followed by a demo mode.

Iris runs standalone, or as a VST, AU (on Mac), or RTAS on Mac/Windows.

http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/iris/

Compare the complex model of what a computer can use to control sound and musical pattern in real-time to the visualization. You see knobs, you see faders that resemble mixers, you see grids, you see – bizarrely – representations of old piano rolls. The accumulated ephemera of old hardware, while useful, can be quickly overwhelmed by a complex musical creation, or visually can fail to show the musical ideas that form a larger piece. You can employ notation, derived originally from instructions for plainsong chant and scrawled for individual musicians – and quickly discover how inadequate it is for the language of sound shaping in the computer.

Or, you can enter a wild, three-dimensional world of exploded geometries, navigated with hand gestures.

Welcome to the sci fi-made-real universe of Portland-based Christian Bannister’s subcycle. Combining sophisticated, beautiful visualizations, elegant mode shifts that move from timbre to musical pattern, and two-dimensional and three-dimensional interactions, it’s a complete visualization and interface for live re-composition. A hand gesture can step from one musical section to another, or copy a pattern. Some familiar idioms are here: the grid of notes, a la piano roll, and the light-up array of buttons of the monome. But other ideas are exploded into spatial geometry, so that you can fly through a sound or make a sweeping rectangle or circle represent a filter.

Ingredients, coupling free and open source software with familiar, musician-friendly tools:

• Two projectors
• A monome
• Processing, the elegant and artist-savvy free software for visual code
• Ableton Live and Cycling ’74′s Max for Live, acting as the interactive glue with the sound world
• Drumaxx, Image-Line’s tasty physical-modeled drum synth
• Native Instruments Battery, the sampled drum engine
• Eclipse, the free IDE, for Java coding in this case
• Community Core Vision and reacTIVision (based on our previous info, at least), free and open source community-based projects for making the interfaces you see in movies happen in real life.

Another terrific video, which gets into generating a pattern:

Now, I could say more, but perhaps it’s best to watch the videos. Normally, when you see a demo video with 10 or 11 minutes on the timeline, you might tune out. Here, I predict you’ll be too busy trying to get your jaw off the floor to skip ahead in the timeline.

At the same time, to me this kind of visualization of music opens a very, very wide door to new audiovisual exploration. Christian’s eye-popping work is the result of countless decisions – which visualization to use, which sound to use, which interaction to devise, which combination of interfaces, of instruments – and, most importantly, what kind of music. Any one of those decisions represents a branch that could lead elsewhere. If I’m right – and I dearly hope I am – we’re seeing the first future echoes of a vast, expanding audiovisual universe yet unseen.

Previously:
Subcycle: Multitouch Sound Crunching with Gestures, 3D Waveforms

And lots more info on the blog for the project:
http://www.subcycle.org/

Let’s get straight to it: Ozone has already established itself as a do-everything mastering tool. It’s a suite of interconnected modules handling frequency and dynamics, designed to work together in an integrated interface. It does so much, in fact, that it’s hard for an upgrade to do more, but Ozone 5 promises new sound and visual feedback that could further entrench this popular tool.

And that could explain how Ozone 5 stole the Audio Engineering Society trade show in New York. AES is a flurry of knobs, dials, and faders, but some of the major buzz we heard was just this single upgrade to the software. (CDM’s Marsha Vdovin was out on the floor, and the word “Ozone” kept cropping up.)

Ozone is eminently visual software, so a lot of what’s new you can glean just by looking through the screenshots. But there are sound improvements, as well, both in the standard Ozone and the spendier “Advanced” edition.

What’s new:

• Updated modules. iZotope says they’ve “refined” their DSP algorithms. (Let’s see, carry the one…) The idea is, existing modules should sound better. There’s a detailed list on the iZotope site – aside from more subtle changes, you’ll find very specific adjustments to how parameters are controlled and how they impact the sound. To give one example, there’s a …
• New Limiter. The latest version of iZotope’s “psychoacoustics-based” limiter in the Advanced edition has a new stereo link control for handling left and right separately or together, and new intelligent transient handling algorithms, among other improvements.
• Enhanced EQ. Analog-matching EQ models analog shelf modes and frequency response, matching is easier than before, as with other modules, you can use left/right separately, and now zoom and display stereo info in your spectrum. There’s also new variable-phase functionality.
• New Reverb. Yes, sometimes you use reverb when mastering. (A little light reverb can do wonders.) A new modeled reverb algorithm adds new models and spaces and gives you unique early reflection control, as well as “cross-mix” for stereo imaging.
• New UI, workflow. I’ll let you just see what this looks like, but suffice to say parameters and labels are better-organized to be friendlier to advanced and beginning users alike. Past versions of Ozone were sometimes pretty-but-counterintuitive; this looks a bit clearer. Of course, you might not notice while dazzled by the…
• Slick visual feedback. In the standard version, metering has been enhanced. In the Advanced version, you get slick 2D and 3D plots of your sound spectrum for the Meter Bridge and Meter Taps modules. They look awesome, yes, but I also think these kind of “alien world mountainscape” views can help you better visualize what’s happening in a sound, so there is a practical use, too.

And, of course, all of this means you can easily wow clients when mastering by showing them visualizations that look like Geordi LaForge is studying abnormal quasar activity from the deck of the Enterprise. Just try to avoid opening up a cosmic string-related time wrinkle while mastering.

(And yes, when you’re all alone and no one is looking over your shoulder, you can do something useful with it.)

Pricing: US$249 (€195); US$999 (€799) Advanced.

Why is Advanced so expensive? Well, each module is also an independent plug-in you can use in your host. With that in mind, this starts to look like a better deal – some terrific reverb, EQ, and dynamics you can use anywhere. You also get the Meter Bridge and Meter Tap for analysis, fancier 2D and 3D spectrographs, and more advanced loudness meters. On the other hand, the basic version will also work with your host and gives you the sound-processing functionality minus all those more sophisticated meters you might need.

This month, there’s also steeply discounted intro pricing: US$599 for Advanced, US$199 for the standard edition. Expires December 1.

Ozone 5 was announced last month, but is now shipping. An OpenGL 2-capable video card is required for the 3D visualizations, but nearly all machines now provide that (including most integrated chipsets, too).

Ozone 5 Product Page @iZotope

For a look at what this tool can do, here’s our friend and experienced mastering and mix engineer Danny Wyatt, talking about how he works with limiting. The new UI and meters are actually a lot clearer than what you see in the video, and offer some nice, new functionality. I can tell you, Danny is a fully-converted Ozone lover, having worked with him in the studio as he mastered my own album. He’s got a big toolset of other stuff, but Ozone is very often what the real work comes down to, and — I think I can say this, Danny — he’ll be happy to evangelize the tool if you talk to him.

This isn’t a review, mind – in fact, my only significant reservation is that Ozone is so slick, it could distract from the reality that good mastering probably doesn’t need it. A great mastering engineer can do wonders with a fairly simple tool and their ear – no wild visualizations required. (“Great mastering engineer,” also known as, “not me.”) But that same person may well appreciate the level of precision iZotope, working with algorithms they’ve developed entirely in-house, can provide.

We want your feedback, as always. Ozone users – what do you think?

Users of rival products – what’s your all-in-one mastering tool of choice, and why?

Even from the birds-eye view of larger genres, the interrelations and ongoing transformation of music is dynamic, complex, and inter-connected. That’s the view in The Evolution of Western Dance Music, a map of musical styles in five-year chunks across the 19th and 20th Centuries, through Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The project is the work of London/Seattle/New York Web agency Distilled, pulling genre births from Bass Culture, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life,The All Music Guide to Electronica, and Wikipedia.

Having just edited a book entitled The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music, I find it extremely interesting to watch in this visualization the way in which European synth pop and Jamaican dub can become, at once, vessels for a lot of these other musical idioms, just in terms of their ability to carry musical ideas across geography.

What is peculiar: this is more a selection of a few threads than it is any kind of comprehensive history, and many of those threads in turn trace backwards from a few modern styles more than they do forwards over those 200 years. If you accept that, though, there’s still something interesting to watch. Even hand-picking a few genres shows some fascinating connections.

But before I say any more, I think any methodology here will raise questions, and I’m as interested in reader questions as I am commenting myself. Mark Johnstone of Distilled has offered to answer questions, so from the intricacies of how the data visualization and mapping work to thoughts on how one untangles this musical history, I’d love to start a conversation.

Specifics of the genres aside, I think it’s the geographical connections that are in many ways the most interesting – all the more so as we can inexpensively get on trains and planes, cross increasingly-open borders (with some admitted major caveats), and be somewhere altogether different – or do the same from the comfort of our chair. Appropriately, I now see Thomson are a travel/vacation agency.

Discuss.

How Music Travels – The Evolution of Western Dance Music [Thomson blog]

Interactive Music Map [Thomson]

Alexander Chen, he of Kinect hacks and subways turned to strings, is back with another string visualization. Built in the browser (an interactive version is available), this work makes a visual accompaniment to Bach’s First Prelude from the Cello Suites. If you read music notation fluently, you may find the score itself suffices, but even so, the math to make this work – and the dance of circles across strings – is compelling. Alex, whose day job is with Google’s Creative Lab, talks to us a bit about the mathematics and process. First, his description:

baroque.me visualizes the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites. Using the math behind string length and pitch, it came from a simple idea: what if all the notes were drawn as strings? Instead of a stream of classical notation on a page, this interactive project highlights the music’s underlying structure and subtle shifts.

Built in: HTML5 Canvas, Javascript, SoundManager
Made while a resident at Eyebeam

CDM: How did you settle on this particular visualization of this famous work? And how did you work out the maths, that is, why this specific number of dots, the distance from the strings, and the length of the strings themselves?

Alex: When I listened to the opening of the Bach, where it repeats the same bar twice, it made me think of a call and response. So I immediately pictured two wheels that echo each other, instead of just one wheel with four dots.

Figuring out the symbolic string lengths in pixels was a fun research project. I wanted explore the simple math behind string length. I learned that you can derive an entire chromatic scale just by using two fractions: 2/3 and 1/2. These correspond to the fifth and octave intervals. It’s called Pythagorean tuning. I stumbled onto this great little worksheet [PDF link] which seems to be intended for students.

Were there other things you tried, any failed experiments?

There were important learnings. It used to begin playing the piece right away. I started the opening tuning animation as an afterthought while I was preloading the strings. But that sequence became really critical.

What’s your sense of the music now having done this? Did it change your hearing of the piece

A lot of music visualization these days is linear, like reading a score. Logic’s editor, or even games like Guitar Hero, all follow that structure. And there’s a reason for that, as it’s convenient, for both computers and humans, since we can read it (and edit it) like a book. But I wanted to try something different. I think some of the magic of watching a performer is seeing such subtle, intricate finger movements produce such moving sounds. When I watch these strings morph, it feels more like the computer is performing, not just checking off notes one by one.

Seeing the Bach Prelude in groups of 8 notes gives me a bigger picture view of the piece. Instead of focusing on the individual notes, you can see each bar as a group. The strings start shifting very subtly, but as the piece builds, the strings seem to be panicking to me, shifting more rapidly. The computer is not expressive. All notes are played at equal volume. But the notes themselves, the data of the song, is inherently expressive.

http://blog.chenalexander.com/
http://twitter.com/alexanderchen
http://www.baroque.me/ [interactive - grab the ... circles ("grab the balls" doesn't sound quite right)]

This update I believe is worth a second post, as it makes visible the otherwise-mysterious algorithms producing music in our previous post.

And yes, I believe this is “music,” naysayers aside. Whether it’s good music is in the ears of the listener, but if you can describe this much sound with this little code, imagine what’s really possible in computer music. Whatever it is you want to hear, it’s within the power of your imagination to describe it, on a score or in code, either one.

Thanks to none other than Stephan Schmitt for the tip.

If you’ve got a whole bunch of colored lights, it seems only right to do something with them. Cacheflow sends a fun little hack with a Novation Launchpad. Of course, turning a Launchpad into a live EQ display means you can’t simultaneously use its lights to, like, play the Launchpad, but provided you have another controller, this could be a fun way to liven up your stage setup.

We looked at a free e-book on Processing last week; if you’re playing with Processing, you can now use a handy, free library to integrate this simple and elegant coding tool with your Launchpad.

The ingredients:

Music: unreleased Yo Soy Sauce tune.
plasticsoundsupply.com/​release/​yo_soy_sauce_-_juke_box/​

Built with the following components:
processing.org
tree-axis.com/​Ess/​
rngtng.github.com/​launchpad/

By the way, I’ve noticed a lot of great GitHub use for music projects. Music Hack Day Montreal even did their event planning on it. I wonder, is there a way – using GitHub itself or a hack with the GitHub API – for us all to build a little CDM community there? Git gurus, I’d love to hear from you about what you might like.

Can editing sounds be as easy as editing pixels in a tool like Photoshop? That’s the question asked yet again by an audio editor, in the announcement of a new tool called Spectral Layers, seen in a new teaser.

Visualizing sound is not a simple problem, but you can do worse than the spectral view. Mapping frequency over time rather than just amplitude, the graphic spectrum illuminates components of a sound as we hear it, showing sonic energy of different frequencies in brightness and color. And audio editors have routinely made use of these views, whether as displays in various audio editors (some editable, some non-editable views), or in graphical tools like the ground-breaking MetaSynth. In fact, even Adobe themselves have weighed in on the “Photoshop for sound” notion with their own Soundbooth app, which, naturally, copies the toolset verbatim from the company’s flagship Photoshop image editor. See also: Photosounder, which perhaps comes closest to this tool, and SPEAR, which is available free on Mac and Windows and has some fascinating resynthesis features. (Spectral sound design probably deserves its own post, later on!)

Spectral Layers nonetheless looks to potentially break new ground by focusing entirely on the idea. Whereas many audio editing tools that use spectral views have had modest editing facilities, here, it’s the entire program — and with some nice twists. On-the-fly selection previewing means that you’re constantly listening to your audio, not just looking at it. Advanced selection brushes make honing in on certain parts of your sound more precise, including by essential harmonic editing tools. (We hear harmonic relationships intuitively, so editing wave spectra at the literal frequency, rather than in the logarithmic proportions with which we hear, doesn’t work nearly as well.)

Spectral Layers also works with visualizing spectra in more compelling ways than just the typical, two-dimensional frequency vs. time view. Three-dimensional visualizations make seeing details in the sound easier.

Then you get into the actual editing. The developers are promising some powerful features, from extraction to independent pitch and time transformations, all moving this well beyond eye candy to the realm of deep sound editing. (The UI shows other features as well.)

There’s a new UI tutorial, but some of the features in brief:

• Cross-platform Mac and Windows compatibility
• Non-destructive layers for editing, plus compositing audio either by adding or subtracting a selection from a sound. (The latter sounds fascinating for sound design.)
• A multi-pane UI, similar to tools from Apple and Adobe and familiar to people with a graphic software background.
• 32-bit float spectrum.
• Surround project support.
• Pattern matching algorithms for still more-sophisticated selection and editing.
• An “open project format” (presumably something XML-based or the like).
• SDK for file formats, devices, tools, and filters.

In other words, the whole thing sounds mind-blowing and gives us everything we’d want … on paper. Presently described as “alpha stage 2,” the tool is still in development. But we’ll be watching.

DIVIDE FRAME, the developer, is a Paris-based house led by engineer Robin Lobel. Unrelated to the music side of this site, they also have a GPU-based video decoder, but no trial of the audio software – yet. Stay tuned.

Spectral Layers

Updated: while this is just a teaser, lead developer Robin responds with some more details for CDM:

There are 4 categories of tools: info (to get extensive info on the spectrum), extract (brush, frequency, harmonics, multichannel, noise (wip), time (wip), and others incoming), modify (so far only erase/amplify, but much more coming to transform the sound, like blur and other graphical modifications), draw (any tool to directly draw sound, as frequencies, harmonics, noise, etc).

Available Q4 2011, no price range yet (expect it to be the high, but there will probably be a light, affordable version too)

3D visualisation can display both amplitude or phase velocity using the GPU (OpenGL), it is seamlessly integrated with the 2D view (right clic+drag to make it 3D as you want, double right clic reset to 2D)

I do independent R&D in audio/video for several years now, have worked in some French [post production] companies as R&D developer and [graphics artist], wanted to start my own business (first with GPU Decoder as a small project, then came Spectral Layers). Spectral Layers came from the need to get clean voice tracks when shooting movies (as I do short movies too), then I thought of extending the concept to a general purpose, Photoshop-like tool. iZotope RX and Adobe Audition were not enough for my needs — I found the spectral editing pretty limited — so I decided to do my own.

Thanks, Fahad, for the tip!