They started with SuperCollider and have gone on from there. He’s into updates in browser technologies.
He decided to write a language first as a way to start live coding.
Uses web audio and web gl
This language is GPL2 and is on github
If you’re on Chrome, go mess with http://www.chadmckinneyaudio.com/Lich.js/Lich.html
Battery dying
He did command line scripts 2001-2004, then started working in perl, the Haskell.
slub – writing code to make music to drink beer to.
Feedback.pl – writing code to write code to make music to drink beer to
He read Laurie Spiegel’s paper on manipulations of musical patterns, so he got into pattern languages (ie HMSL, Common music, SuperCollider)
Tidal is embedded in Haskell for pattern manipulation for music. Complexity through combination of simplicity.
Structures could be trees of structures…
So he moved to functions of time. Time is an integer. Give a Pattern a time and it gives you an integer and the periodicity. This is limited because time is an integer.
Now, he thinks of time as cyclic, with repetition. So make time a floating point instead of an int. But this makes lookups hard.
So the thought of having patterns be a sequence with discrete stuff or a signal, which is indexed by a rational and is non-discrete. However, mixing analog and digital in one data type is a problem.
So he made separate types, but then this caused massive code inflation.
He’s gone back to one type again.
Haskell is intense…..
and REALLY concise
Does the system have state? No, which means he can’t even have random numbers.
Is time still a loop in the current version? Notionally, yes. But representationally, it’s a number, just in the functions, so its what you make it.
This is new stuff and it combines art and science. Plus you’ve got tons of outcomes including papers, performances, languages, theories, etc.
(thinking about music as research in terms of grant application criteria saps my will to live.)
You can do stuff based on perception – the speaker has used psychology studies as a basis for his work.
Gestalt psychology ideas he uses: grouping,continuation and closure.
He is only working on pitch and time
Pseduo-jazz fusion can be expressed through surprisingly short lisp expressions.
Gaussian probabilities do stuff around proximity, some range constraints and some directions.
Ordering of lists leads to closure.
Iteration is repetition
He wants to interact more with tech communities
Scott wants all his numbers. He’s about to publish in the CMJ.
Nick wants to know why he picked Gaussian. It’s good enough and it’s succinct. He’s being inspired by processes which are learned from modelling research.
Centro Multimedia is a space for arts research in new technologies. The have an audio workshop with a special interest in code and FLOSS (“software libre”).
The history of live code:
They had used MAX. Later, SuperCollider changed everything because of the philosophy of Open Source. It was free and legal to share. They felt a sense of ownership and it grew a community.
since 2011, they’ve organised 21 live coding events. They do collaborations with other institutions in Mexico City. This is a local scene.
At the National Autonomous University, they did a blank slate coding sessions where everybody had 9 minutes. This was especially beneficial for coding practice of participants.
There was a Vivo conference in 2012 which had more participation form overseas, with longer time slots and had some non-blank slate code, which also caused an explosion in the community.
Their audiences are very diverse with a lot of new people coming in. They are receptive to new ideas.
They are now doing a series of live coding concerts that also mix practices, so with dance, or with circuit bending, sound art, poetry, etc. There now a website hackpact.mx, which has a philosophy of live coding. These projects grow community. Sharing builds personal relationships and knowledge. People form many backgrounds are involved.
What else goes on at the centre? Lots and lots of new media stuff. They have artistic residence programs. Once specific to Germany. One for Latin Americans. There is a electronic and video festival this year with an open call.
The centre is free, so anyone can come and learn without paying. This increases diversity.
Does anybody in the US or Canada pay attention to what’s going on in Mexico? Artists from the Canada can come for residences, so there is some collaboration there. There are some collaborations with the US through other institutions, but not this one.
Do they do any teaching of coding or live coding in schools? There is not official school of electronic music in Mexico, so teaching mostly happens through workshops. Mexicans who want to do electronic music degrees go abroad. There is not a strong programme for children or teenagers during school time. They do some workshops in summer. They may expand this, but need to do some work on pedagogy. They have also been running some workshops with indigenous people who have no background at all with computers. Sometimes they learn faster because they don’t know it’s supposed to be difficult.
what’s the future of live coding in Mexico? More people, more groups. The future is bright across Mexico for live coding.
He’s build some sort of binary adding machine that plays sounds based on the current number, which adds to the total every clock cycle. IT creates patterns based on the total not including overflow. The use rprovides a 3 bit word to the counter. Te counter outputs a serial transmission to a decoder. Both of these things are connected to an Ardunio, which is connected to SuperCollider. The counter outputs 3 bits to the ardunio. the decode does one bit?
Battery dying!
Drop function – executed simultaneously for all 4 players.
They have done blank slate live coding in many environments. They also use live coding as a compositional method, so do some shows where they just use a code interface developed in rehearsals.
Delbrots and the Man also develop code live during rehearsals and use that as an interface for performance. They sync with the drummer via click track and send their chat window to him via a text-to-speech synthesiser.
If they want the audience to dance, they start with prepared stuff. They also try to think of the arc of the whole evening. In rehearsals, they would pick a random genre from Id3 tags.
Live code does not represent a score. code consists of algorithms which are specific, but a a score is interpretable in different ways. Also the text document generated by live coding it not an adequate artefact to repeat a performance
Code allows for de-heirarchicalisation of all musical parameters. Traditional composition focusses on pitch and duration, but improv allows focus on other parts. Live coding emphasises this further.
Composition creates a text – an artefact designed to enable people to create sound. It is prepared and worked out. Live coding does not necessarily generate a written composition. However, in the 21st century, improv and composition are not binary oppositions, something which also applied to live coding.
Did they publish the silent movie with their sound track? Not yet, because they’re not sure about copyright.
what’s next for the Mandelbrots? Will they make a ton of recordings? Recordings do no change their approach. They only record only their rehearsals.
do they program differently when they’re recording? No, they’ve gotten used to just recording all their rehearsals.
Will they edit their recordings? Unsure.
Will an audience expect them to sound like their records? They can’t know yet.
Do they put performances online? They’ve done that twice. Once to Mexico
Thoreau decided he’d had enough of things and moved out to the woods to escape from society. However, it turns out that Walden Pond is not a long stroll from the town he fled. He went to see his mum every weekend. With that in mind, this is what I’d like to spend a month doing this summer or in the autumn or sometime…
I want to stay in a cabin in the forest, next to hot spring, which I would go sit in for a bit at night. The nights would be very quiet and free of city lights. The cabin is stocked with a load of fresh veg and has a good library and some very comfy chairs. The bed is big and comfortable. All the rooms have nice windows. One of them has a couple of good monitor speakers a way to record and my synthesiser.
The internet is only connected between 11am – noon.
Every evening, a friend or two come around to visit and we have dinner, talk and jam or play board games or just talk.
I stay there for one month. At the end, I’m expected to have an LP.
So yes, even in my fantasy holidays, I’m still working…
The only thing I can imagine doing without working is a cycle holiday. And If I were planning one now, I’d probably try to arrange gigs along the route, alas. I’m feeling very motivated to be productive lately and also my anxiety is on the upswing and these are probably related. However, getting a lot done has been good for me in the past, but I wouldn’t mind a day or two in a hot spring or even a ot tub.
Every so often, the topic of diversity comes up in electronic music. Women definitely make up less than 50% of participants – including in the forums where this topic is discussed. Since I’ve moved to the UK, I’ve seen a few email flurries where men argue about whether or not its a problem that there are so few women participating and if so, what they can do about it. These arguments themselves are probably somewhat off-putting, as there are always at least a few vocal men who like being in a boys club and will argue that things are fine. Even if everybody started from a pro-diversity standpoint, I doubt it would be a particularly fun conversation for the few women who were on the list, lurking. This is why I think efforts like MzTech, Flossie, G-Hack and ETC are a good idea, despite all the places where they’re problematic (which is beyond the scope of this post).
Women-only events do seem to be how the UK is best able to cope with the massively huge tech gap. This gap, by the way, gets more pronounced as level of techiness rises. As far as I’ve been able to determine, there are fewer than five women who are regular SuperCollider users in the UK. This is absolutely a social problem. It seems to be the case that in Japan, women users are roughly equal in numbers or possibly greater than men. Thus there is nothing inherently woman-unfriendly in the programme.
Meanwhile, in America, there is still a gap, but it seems less bad. I don’t have solid numbers, but I’ve seen women at American conferences and they make up a fair percentage of presenters. However, sexism is also very clearly apparent. How is it that women are participating in greater numbers in what seems like it’s a more sexist environment?
Well, it might not be more sexist in the States. It might just be a more open form of sexism. Scientific American just ran an article about benevolent sexism. When sexism seems ‘friendly’, women are more likely to accept it. They gave a hypothetical example:
How might this play out in a day-to-day context? Imagine that there’s an anti-female policy being brought to a vote, like a regulation that would make it easier for local businesses to fire pregnant women once they find out that they are expecting. If you are collecting signatures for a petition or trying to gather women to protest this policy and those women were recently exposed to a group of men making comments about the policy in question, it would be significantly easier to gain their support and vote down the policy if the men were commenting that pregnant women should be fired because they were dumb for getting pregnant in the first place. However, if they instead happened to mention that women are much more compassionate than men and make better stay-at-home parents as a result, these remarks might actually lead these women to be less likely to fight an objectively sexist policy.
So it might not be that British culture (and British people) are less sexist than Americans. They’re just more polite. And the result of this politeness is not that women feel more empowered. Quite the contrary, in fact. Because the sexism is less in-your-face, it’s more effective and participation by women is thus lowered.
Indeed, if men who mean well are making a big deal about how rare it is for women to get involved in something, this can accidentally slide into benevolent sexism. Which leaves us in something of a bind. For those of us who are men and do want to increase participation by women, what can we do about it? I would argue that one step is vigilant moderation, where all sexism, benevolent or openly hostile, is banished from online discussion. And we can refuse to participate in all-male events or panels. Some effort should probably also be extended in this direction for collaborations, projects and musical groups . . . there is probably some size at which it becomes problematic if everyone involved is a man. The growing pool of G-Hack alumnae will hopefully become part of the larger scene. And hopefully more women on stage will empower the women in the audience to start producing. And hopefully those of us men who want to make a big deal about it (‘and they’re pretty too!’), will get the message that this is not the way forward.
So Thatcher died. She was like Regan, but before he was cool. All of his stuff: ruining education, breaking unions, fucking the economy, closing factories forever, laying the ground work for our current financial collapse – she did it all first. This makes her kind of unpopular with people who were negatively effected by austerity. So they went onto itunes and other fine purveyors of mp3s and bought copies of Judy Garland singing ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.’
Meanwhile at the BBC – an institution that does not have an equivalent in the US, but let’s pretend it’s like NPR . . .. Imagine if NPR played the top 40 countdown every week. And imagine if this song was being downloaded in response to Regan. Imagine the exploding heads on Fox News.
The BBC has played all the top40 tunes every week since 1967. There’s a tradition to uphold. Or something. But the Conservative party is in charge of government right now and austerity is all the rage, so no way are they playing the whole song. They’re just going to play a few seconds of it.
One difference between the US and the UK is that in the UK, the slightly-more-left party actually has a spine. And rather a lot of people spend their 99p downloading Ms. Garland and do represent some sort of voice of the people, in a late-capitalism kind of way.
So a debate rages – which 6 seconds of the song will they play??!!!
And meanwhile, as we’re all laughing at this, major cuts to poor people just came into force – city governments are predicting a tsunami of homlessness and have no idea what to do. And the privatisation of the NHS started less than two weeks ago. So while the Ding Dong thing really is hilarious, it’s like the flying monkeys have vowed to appoint a new leader and double down on the policies of the wicked witch of the west.
so, um, lol?
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to inquire as to the rules for your airport and the TSA in general in regards to what constitutes inappropriate touching. Yesterday afternoon, 7 April, I passed through security at JFK in Terminal 7 and opted out of the scanning machine. The office who patted me down touched my genitals twice through my clothes, once per leg pat. This experience left me feeling humiliated and angry. I want to determine if I what I experienced conforms to the law or if I should file a complaint of assault.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Dr. Charles Hutchins
So that happened.
I don’t want to go through the naked scanning machines partly due to concerns about radiation. The machines are not regularly calibrated or inspected and are not held to any kind of standard even approaching how medical devices are regulated. Even if they’re safe when they’re first installed the lack of maintenance is a major cause for concern.
And part of my concern with the devices is that they’re invasive without actually increasing security. That the newer machines, such as the ones installed at JFK, do not actually allow somebody to look at naked images does not allay these concerns. Operators pick a pink or a blue button depending on their guess as to the passenger’s primary and secondary sex characteristics. The machine then takes a scan and compares the passenger’s naked body with an idealised form of naked bodies. Areas of difference are then highlighted for additional scrutiny. Therefore, anyone who has a hidden disability that impacts their physical form or otherwise has an atypical body configuration must disclose this to the TSA workers.
My choices would therefore seem to be discussing my genitals with a TSA worker or having them felt by a TSA worker. Because this discussion would likely be extremely triggering, embarrassing and exposes me to the possibility of harassment, I’ve always chosen to opt out of the scanning machines, as is my right under US law. However, while the screener hopefully was not entirely aware as to the shape of my genitals, having them touched by a stranger under these circumstances also turns out to be more disturbing than I would have expected.
While I understand that not all genital touching is necessarily sexual in nature, this is a fundamentally different experience than one in a medical context. When examined by doctors, they explain what is going to happen immediately before it happens. While the TSA agent did mumble through a list of his prescribed actions, I was not warned of what was about to happen as it arose. Also, medical examinations always at least offer a chaperone or else provide one automatically. Finally, medical examinations are concerned primarily with my health and well-being, which is exactly the opposite power dynamic. Because consent is somewhat unclearly explained and is effectively coerced, this kind of invasive touching invites comparisons to sexual assault. And honestly, I don’t know if I was assaulted, as this has never happened to me before.
One of the oldest rights in the US, even before the Bill of Rights applied to individuals, is the right to travel unmolested. The TSA agent clearly violated that right and my person, so my only question is whether this is condemned or compelled by the law, as it certainly does not fall in between.
In frustration and unhappiness, I asked the agent if it would be easier if I removed my trousers. I then immediately apologised for this comment, saying he was just doing his job, which I assumed to be true at the time. He replied threatening me with arrest if I did so. Even after explaining several times that I was not intending to remove any clothes and regretted my choice of words, he kept repeating threats to escalate, advising me not to make things more difficult for myself.
I deeply regret that I’ve planned two separate trips to the US instead of combining everything into one trip. There is no question this experience will effect how often I visit home. I am a stage where I am not easily triggered by things related to being transgender, but for a lot of people, this situation, if the screener’s action was legal, would be so triggering that it would effectively ban then from air travel. Other travellers are also likely to avoid visiting the us, including tourists, which obviously has economic impact, and academics attending conferences as well as those travelling for business. This thus then increases an intellectual and economic isolation of the US.
For all the people I missed in New York who are wondering when I’ll next pass through, I’m afraid it’s not going to be for a very long while.