Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

Teabagging

The image that pops into your head on my post title up there says a lot about where you fall on the political spectrum in the US. For those of you thinking about unsanitary practices, there was recently some discontent about taxes in the US, as there often is. And long ago, there was the Boston Tea Party, where angry revolutionaries threw cases of tea off of a boat rather than have anybody pay taxes on them. Somebody more recently was inspired by this story and organized a protest where people would throw tea into a body of water. And since loose leaf tea is uncommon, or, at the very least, more expensive than Lipton, tea bags were littered into a water way. This seemed like an idea worth copying on other places and somebody gave it the name “teabagging.” Somebody wholesome gave it that name.
These unfortunately-named parties were not originally organized by the Republican party, but they seized on it. Now if you want to see somebody holding up a sign calling Obama a Nazi, a Muslim, s Socialist or the Anti-Christ, well, here’s the venue for you. It’s too easy for us urban elites to mock these parties. They share a name with a sex act. They attract spectacularly misinformed people, some of whom are clearly racist. But I think it’s an error to dismiss them out of hand.
How many of you, when writing you check for the last tax day, thought of some of it going to a $5 million AIG bonus? Or some kind of bank or financial institution. Admit it, you felt even less good about mailing in your check than usual. What’s the point, they’re just going to give it to a hedge fund, right? This annoyance you feel could be rage. Maybe it should be rage. Houses sit empty while homelessness grows and we give our tax money to bankers!
If you ask any of the folks at these tea-tossing rallies what they think the word “socialism” means, they will start talking to you about giving away money to banks. If you say, “what if we spent it on healthcare for everybody instead?” most of them would think that was a good idea. These folks actually want a mixed-socialist economy, they just don’t know it’s called that. Thanks to Fox News Newspeak, they use all the wrong words for things. There is no word in their heads for what they want, so they express their extreme discontent and social and economic insecurity by symbolic protest (and misuse of another, less innocent term).
People are becoming radicalized by the economy and they could go either way. Obviously, I would prefer it if the left won, and so would most of the people throwing Lipton around. There used to be a quite popular flyer that listed all the stuff you could buy for the cost of a single stealth bomber. Hundreds of schools, hospitals, etc. Well, what could you buy for trillions of dollars? How many YEARS of universal healthcare? How many bridges could be rebuilt, giving people jobs and making roads safer? You see where I’m going, but instead of just listing the object that would be there at the end, also mention the means. Workers build those projects. Workers like the folks at the rallies.
The financial sector is fucked to be sure, but we didn’t get out of the Great Depression by giving money to banks, we got out of it through a massive government spending program. Rather than a devastating war, we could rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Giving these folks the security and employment they need is also the key to fixing the economy. But this plan does not widen the gap between rich and poor, so it’s not on the agenda and it won’t be until protests force it to be. This could be the germ of change. Stop snickering and start a conversation!

more performance stuff

vincent rioux is now talking about his work with sc

he improvised with an avant sort of theatre company. The video documentation was cool. I didn’t know about events like this in paris. Want to know more.

in another project, he made very simple controllers with arduino inside. He had 6 controllers. One arduino for all 6.

Tiny speakers. This is also nifty. Used it at Pixelache festival.

the next project uses a light system. Uses a hypercube thing. Which is a huge thing that the dancer stands inside. Sc controls it.

the next thing is a street performance asking folks to help clean the street. Part of festival mal au pixel. This is mental! Also, near where i used to live. Man, i miss paris sometimes.

the next ne is a crazy steam punk dinner jacket. With a wiimote thing.

dan’s installation

dan st. Clair is talking about his awesome instillation which involves speakers hangong from trees doing bird like rendition of ‘like a virgin’, which is utterly tweaking out the local mocking birds.

when he was an undergrad he did a nifty project with songs stuck in people’s heads. It was conxeptual and not musical.

when he lived in chicago he did a map of muzak in stores on state street, including genre and de;ivery .ethod. He made a tourist brochure with muzak maps and put them in visitor centers.

he’s interested in popular music in environemtnal settings

max neuhaus did an unmarked, invisible sounds installation in time square. Dan dug the sort of invisible, discovery aspect.

his bird e.ulator is solar powered. Needs no cables. Has an 8bit microcontroller. They’re cheap as hell.

he’s loaded frequncy envelopes in memory. Fixed control rate. Uses a single wavetable oscillator httP://www.myplace.nu/avr/minidds/index.htm

he made recordings of birds and extracted the partials.

he throws this up into trees. However, neighbors got annoyed and called the cops or destroyed the speakers.

he’s working on a new version which is in close proximity to houses. He’s adding a calddendar to shut it down sometimes and amplitude controls.

he has an IFF class to deal with sdif and midi files. SDIFFrames class works with these files.

there’s some cool classes for fft, like FFTPeaks

he’s written some cool guis for finding partials.

his method of morphing between bird calls and pop songs is pretty brilliant.

dan is awesome

live video

sam pluta wrote some live video software. It’s inspired by glitchbot, meapsoft

glitchbot records sequnces and loops and stutters them. Records 16 bar phrase and loops and tweaks it. I think i have seen this. It can add beats and do subloops, etc

the sample does indeed sound glitchy

probability control can be clumsy in live performance. Live control of beats is hard.

MEAPSoft does reordering.

his piece from the last symposium used a sample bank which he can interpret and record his interpretting and then do stuff with that. So there are two layers of improvisation. It has a small initial parameter space nad uses a little source to make a lot of stuff.

i remember his pice from last time

what he learned from that was that it was good, especially for noisy music. And he controlled it by hitting a lot of keys which was awesome

he wrote an acoustic oiece using sound block. Live instruments can do looping differently, you can make the same note longer.

so he wrote michel chion’s book on film and was influenced. He started finding sound moments in films. And decided to use them for source material.

sci-fi films have the best sound, he says.

playing a lot of video clips in fast succession is hard, because you need a format that renders single frames quickly. Pixlet format is good for that.

audio video synch is hard with quicktime, so he loaded audio into sc and did a bridge to video with quartz composer.

qc is efficient at rendering

he wanted to make noisy loops, like to change them. You can’t buffer video loops in the same way, so he needed to create metaloops of playback information. So looped data.

a loop contains pointers to movies clips, but starts from where he last stopped. Which sounds right

he organized the loops by category, kissing, car chases, drones,etc

this is an interesting way of organizing and might help my floundering blake piece.

he varies loop duration based on the section of the piece.

live blog : beast mulch

Scott is talking about beast mulch, which is still unreleased,
there are calsses for controllers, like hardware. There’s a plugin framework to easily extend stuff. BMPulginSpec(‘name’, {|this| etc. . . .

multichannel stuff and swarm granulation, etc.

kd tree class finds closest speaker neighbor

if you want beastmulch, get it from scott’s website

there’s speaker classes, BMSpeaker

BMInOutArray does associations.

beast mulch is a big library for everyone. Everything must be named. There are time references, like a soundflile player;

trying to be adaptible. 100 channels or 8, make it work on both. Supports jit and stems.

a usage example: can be used live. Routing table, control matrixes. Pre and post processing use plugins

i NEED to download this & use it.

http://scottwilson.ca

http://www.beast.bham.ac.uk/research/mulch.shtml

. . .

pattern stuff

More supercollider symposium live blogging

i missed the first session, alas. Too much devil liquor.

now we will hear about patterns. They speaker’s car’s registration plate says ‘rlpf . ar’

james harkins talk can be found on the internets.

patterns are about anstractions. You can write very concise cose that does things for you.

you can describe a stream’s behavior with a pattern. Some patterns can do values, others events.

pseries counts, pgeom does some multiplying.for exponential increments

there’s many random ones and some chaotic, etc

can pass these to each other, like using a patern to control step size in pseries

some list pattern things: pseq, prand, pxrand, pwrand, pshuf. Please note these should all have capital p’s, but i’m blogging from an n800.

list patterns send the message embedInStrem to everything in its array, so you can have them nested.

an event in something that understands the message play. You can write your own play function. Must check this out.

you can mess with the events innards

synthdefs must be stored. Or go into the synthdesclib

event patterns are also list patterns. We’ve got pbind, pmono, etc.

p=pbind(foo, 1).asStream; p.next(()); //must pass in an empty event when you call next and the empty paren set is an empty event.

.x is and adverb thing. T does matrix operations on lists, kinds, element by element

pkey is cool. It gives you the result of prevous event thingee

patternproxy is a part of jitlib. It lets you chanhe patterns on the fly

merging patterns, he calls pattern composition.

you can put your own function in patterms.

a magic square is like sudoku for notes

now we are being evangelized.

now ron is up to talk about some extra pattern classes.

he notes patterns are sometimes unattractive to programmers. The library is too big. Writing you own functions in it is hard.

ron haw written a class Pspawner wich lets you do stuff in a more prommer.y way. It takes a function and gets this as an argument

this cool, it’s a way to scedule paterns. I will use this. This fixes a bunch of my problems. Yay ron.

but now he’s in overly complicated example ron land.

ok, now we’re on to cvs and conductors. Cvs do constraints. They’re cool. The conductor is a dictionary and a gui. It’s got a bunch of cvs.

conductors are nifty. They can control a pattern. Cvs can now take a wndex message which treats it as a weight table.

there’s a cursor thing now.

there’s some array stuff going on in cvs

streams do next, reset, embedInStream. Patterns do asStream, embedInStream

routines have state. There’s something important in yield vs embedInStream which went by quickly.

timbral analysis

dan stowell is talking about beatboxing and machine listening

live blogging the supercollider symposium

analyze one signal and use it to control another. Pitch and amplitude are done. So let’s do timbre remapping.

extract features from sound, decorrelate and reduce dimensions, map it to a space. What features to use? Mfccs, spectral crest factors. That’s looking for peaks vs flatness.

his experiments use simulated degredation to make sure it works in performance.

voice works well with mfccs, but are not noise robust. Spectral crests are xomplimntaery and are npise robust. The two give you a lot of info.

a lot of different analysis give you useful information about perceptual differences.

now he’s talking about an 8bit chip and controlling it. Was this on boing boing or something recently?

spectral centroid 95th percentile of energy from the left ahows rolloff frequency.

he’s showing a video of the inside of his throat

timbral analysis

nick collins is talking about timbral analysis and phase vocoders, which is supercollider-ese for ffts.

i missed the first couple of minutes of this becasue there is an installarion outside of solar-powered speakers in trees, doing bird song ;ike sounds, which played madonna’s ‘like a virgin’ when i walked by and i had to fall over laughing. Hahahah

ok, back to the present AtsSynth does some cool stuff with pitch shifting.

scott wilson’s ugens do loris stuff. Which is noise modulated sine tones. Sinusoidal peak detection.

TPV ugen does pure sinsoidal stuff. Sines and phases. Takes an fft chain input and creates sine outputs with resynthesis. Finds n peaks and uses that number of sinusoids. This is cool. And is part of sc 3.3

SMS is spectral modelling synthesis. Sines plus noise. This is slightly expensive. But it preserves formants in repitching. So it sounds right with shifting speech.

good stuff!

theory continued

theory continued.

time point synthesis. Babbit wanted to serialize parameters in addition to pitch. He used durational sets, which becomes dull. And doesn’t transform well.

instead use integers to map to a table of durations. Your grid has 12 durations just cuz. Andrew Mead did some work on this.

there is a class TimePoints. Which is an array.

this a rythm lib. I should look into this.

we’re listening to ‘homily’ by babbitt, which uses these kinds of transformations.

and the code isn’t on the internets.

and now virtual gamelan graz

this is an attempt to model everything about gamelan.

tuning: well, don’t model everything, just the metalaphones. The tuning should be an ideal. This requires fieldwork and interviweing builders. Or you could just measure existing instruments and measure them.

pick one instrument. Measure root pitches. You’re good.

or do more recording like sethares. Measure more ensembles. Which partial is the root?

these guys sampled the local gamelan and went with that.

the tuning . . . Are wesure of the root pitches? Is it the instruments relative to each other, one in reference to itself, the partials in a single note?

there is an image on a grid, which is hard to see as a slide.

you can do a lot of retuning.

sumarsam is raising a point on pelog tuning. The musicologist in the group is absent so the presenters have to defer.

how to synthesize -samples or synthesis. They use sines and formlet filters.

performance modelling. Model human actors or do contextual knowledge.

they did not go with individuals.

They have an event model. Each note is an event, which hold what you need to know.

audio demo. It does tempo changes right. They use ListeningClocks to do time right. I need to look at this class. They follow each other. You can set empathy and confidence, to how much they deviate.