Nick Collins
His laptop is signed by Stockhausen.
He wrote a techno generator 10 years ago, which was silly. So he’s trying it again, but with synthpop. The new project is called Infno.
When you press play, you want something that’s different every time in a significant way. (This sounds like old school video game music.)
Whoah, it really is different everytime! Still video-gamey, though. This has garnered applause from the audience.
The lines all know about each other and share data. The order of generation matters.
This is really cool.
Also, he has the idea of generative karaoke! Ooh, now there is audience participation. More applause.
This is the coolest thing ever.
There is a computer-written pop song from 1956. Kako will be singing the lyrics from that song. The melody here is not known in advance.
This sounds like jpop. Also like drunken karaoke. Wow, a lovely disaster. I am in love with everything about this. The singer is muddling through. Wow, now she’s getting it, sorta.
Applause and cheering.
Now he’s playing techno.
More applause.
Algorithmic lyric generation is next!
A paper will be forthcoming.
Loris: a supercollider implementation
Scott Wilson
Loris is an additive sound modelling method.
A sines plus noise approach. Noise is assigned to partials, modulating partials with a filtered noise source. This is a lossy process but is perceptually accurate.
Loris is a class library which can do some interesting things with partials. The python api is very good.
Data is exportable in several formats. Spear, a piece of free software, is nice for editing some of these file types. Also the command line tools are good.
Loris was not developed for real time use. It’s not fast to compute this kind of analysis. Sometimes, you must change params to get a good analysis, which can be a problem for real time. Also, in real time might not want to listen to every partial, but that’s also computationally expensive.
Analysis yields a partial list with envelopes for freq, amp, bandwidth, phase, etc.
Scott sticks analysis results in an sc object. There are 4 classes. Some ugens, data-holding classes, an oscillator.
The oscillator does all the partials. Can do some spectral difusion.
Can stretch stuff, mess with bandwidth, do funny things with different partials to move them around. This may work with prevois topic.
New release forthcoming. This is cool.
Dissonance curves
Jaaun Sebastian Lach
Roughness or beating is equal to hz difference betwwen two sounds. Has to do with physical properties of the ear and the critical bandwidth- which is the width of hearing of discrete sounds. You can only hear one sine wave per critical bandwidth. The bark scale climbs the critical band.
Disonance is perceived from bark scale and also cultural factors. Bark scale also applies to partials and overtones. Helmholtz held that acceptable amounts of roughness are cultural.
This speaker has a Disonance class, which looks to be very interesting. Also has method barkToHerz
Tenney thought that consonance and dissonance meant diferent things in different contexts. The terms have a functiona; usage depending on how music is composed: hisorical systems.
Barlow has some fancy-sounding theories. He imagines a consonance-disonance axis.
The Dissonance class can be used to derive scales. I must have this class!!
Sethares holds that tunings are related to timbres of instruments. Scales are derived according to roughness of partials present in the instruments used.
Computer composers can use a tmbral grammar. The presenter has some real-time analysis. He’s been doing this stuff while i’ve been navel gazing about it. Awesome.
Sc symposium
Jason Dixon – controlling group laptop improvisation
Problems often stem from performers not listening to each other. Huge cacophony of noise, competitive, lost players. Then things drag on much too long. There is a sameness. People don’t look at each other and miss cues. Also, lack of visual element. Entire frequenc spectrum used by every player makes it impossible to pick out lnes or anything.
Sonic example 1: improv gone wrong (have any of us here not heard this at least once?) And the example does indeed sound like a whole lotta noise.
Keys to success: force people to play qiuetly. Small amps, speakers located very close to the performers.
Alain Renaud developed a good system: www.alainrenaud.net The Frequencyliator
Frequency spectrum divided among players, like instruments. Filters used to enforce this!
Presenter has an idea for a genetic algorithm to instruct players.
Live!! From the supercollider symposium
16:30
Cadavre ezquisite!
Need to grab my mac!
Site gets slow when everbody in the room tries to download from it.
Public class send actual code across the network. Yikes. There’s a message called ‘avoid the worst’ which keeps folks from executing unix commands. Sorta.
It’s polite in gamelan to not play on each other’s beats, so speed changes are lagged. This clock system sort of models that.
There is a collective class that discovers folks and keeps track of their ip addresed. Broadcasting makes this possible, i think.
Sc con live blogging
16:00
Thom & Voldemars present about sonic quantums.
How do you deal with many, many control parameters? Understanding, controlling, but not being able to touch them individually.
1 method is parameter reduction. However, they seek to be as direct as possible.
They have a matrix at the center of their system. Which deals with all their data. A multidemensonal data structre.
They have a visual representation. (How do they pick parameters and adjust them?)
The matrix projection has 3d clouds that look sorta chaos based. These clouds can rotate, move along, expand and contract. Also can warp from a plane to a surface.
They use things like speed of movement as control values for things like amplitude. The matrix may relate to spatialization? They are not using statistical controls for their grains. Makes parameters and relationshps clear. This gui is built in gtk, not supercollider.
They will use this as an installation. Now working on trajectory mapping, maybe with envelopes. The visualization is done in jitter.
They worked on a controller at steim, but then moved to mathematical controls.
Oops, it IS statistical. Oh, and they do use randomness and parameter reduction. I’m confused, except that there are white dots forming 3d states swooping around on the screen. Woosh! Swoop!
They are not sharing their code as of yet. Too shy.
Live bloggig the supercollider symposium
15:13
GUIs for live improv
Musical software imimitating physical instruments is silly. Screens are 2d, so interfaces should be 2d.
Www.ixi-audio.net
sound scratcher tool allows some mousy ways to modify sound file playback with loopongs, granulation, scratching, etc. X,y axis is file selection and pitch.
Live patching. Predators is awesome game-like algorithmic players which can have live coding synths and other aspects. Many playful, expressive, imaginative interfaces. Polyrhythm player.
Very interesting environment. Also suggests evolutionary strategies for algorithnic composition.
Success
I just signed a rental contract. It was the first place that i looked at. It’s near a park, close to school and the rent is right in the normal range. I will have 3 housemates. Two are brother and sister – postgrads from africa. The third room is unrented. The house comes furnished, has bike parking and a backyard. So it’s acceptable.
I hate shoppimg for things and will always grab the first adequate thing. But i think it’s ok in this case, since my internet search turned up nothing.
I fiund the apartment by walking into a ‘letting agent’ and announcing that i was looking for a houseshare. I let them say they only had one spot before i told them that i had an adorable, small, quiet, adult dog.
It may have been the first house, but it wasn’t the first letting agent. I had been in the offices of every single other agent on the street. It’s the main shopping street near campus, so this was not a small number of agents. You’d think that nobody in the history of student-dom ever had a dog before. Sheesh.
No, i can’t just leave her at home! I’m over 30, not 17. There is no adult figure waiting in the wings to come rescue me should i fall on my first feeble attempts to leave the nest. Well, ok, somebody would probably come rescue me and it wouldn’r be hard to find a permanent home for xena. But it would be permanent.
Anyway, i’m too old to be a student. I need to grow up and join real life. Again.
After signing the contract and emptying my bank account to pay the deposit, i called the airline to ask if i could fly back today. No dice. It’s a weekend in birmingham. Where everybody speaks english – not that you can tell by overhearing.
I should have put some mp3s on my little, travel computer.
Flying to Birmingham
I’ll be in Birmingham tomorrow (Saturday) and back in The Hague on Sunday night for my last week here. My plan for this weekend is to find a flat and over the next week, I plan to put my things in boxes and lug them to the post office. And also go to the SuperCollider con in The Hague.
I am visualizing what I want: It’s £300 / month or less including utilities. It’s 8 km or less from school along a reasonable bike route. The folks who live there like dogs. They’re easygoing with a nice vibe. There may be more than one of them. They are relaxed. The room is big enough to hold me, my dog and my gear. There is internet in the house. My room has a window. It has wood floors or other hard material. The house is in good repair, especially the plumbing. The ‘fridge works. There is a good place to park my bikes.
I can be flexible about some of these points. Do you live in Birmingham? Are you looking for a flatmate? Send me email, quick!
I spent hours of my life yesterday looking at flat ads on a service that i’ve subscribed to and sending email to the folks listed there and I’ve gotten exactly one response – a no.
I guess I can just mail everything to school and deal with it later, in case of disaster.
Godless
“Le pape Benoît XVI a déclaré samedi qu’un monde sans Dieu qui ‘ne sait plus distinguer entre le bien et le mal’ était soumis à la ‘terrible menace de la destruction’ . . .” (http://www.tv5.org/TV5Site/info/afp_article.php?idrub=2&xml=070908102101.5mq6e2lp.xml) Roughly translated by me: Pope Benedict XVI declared Saturday that a world without god ‘can no longer distinguish between good and evil’ and is in ‘terrible risk of destruction.’
Well, goodness, just the morning I bit the head off of several live kittens and since I’m an atheist, I felt no guilt about it whatsoever. This afternoon, I intent to stomp on tiny, adorable puppies and then climb up to a high place and shoot passersby with a sniper rifle. then, I think I’ll take a sledge hammer to bicycles parked on my street and smash them. Just because.
Ugh, this cold I’ve got has put me in a horrible mood. Not bad enough to smash bicycles, though. I still love bicycles. But anyway, I don’t think I have the energy to operate a sniper rifle, even if I knew how. I’d get up the first set of stairs on the bell tower and then need to stop for a nap and realize I forgot my handkerchief and then pout while I trudged homeward. Anyway, at no point, while smashing bikes, or trudging along dragging a loaded rifle on the ground behind me, or snatching puppies from children and stomping on them, at no point would I face arrest. Because the Netherlands is a secular state and as such has no idea whatsoever about good or evil actions. So wanton destruction of the beloved pets of kindergartners is totally within the law.
Meanwhile, over in Iraq, where an evangelical christian american army faces secular insurgents, there is terrible bloodshed, but not when it faces religious foes. For further example, in another part of the world, the extremely religious Osama bin Ladin just made a videotape proclaiming his entirely peaceful feelings towards the secular-in-name-only American government. And for my final example very godly american congress person (I’m too sick and lazy to look up whom) recently suggested that the American military response to another terrorist attack should be to bomb Mecca. This good and holy action would certainly not increase the chances of world war three.
And that’s the news from Bizzaro World. Meanwhile on Earth . . . is the pope even on Earth? What is wrong with this guy? How fucking arrogant is he to say that atheists have no moral basis! I’m sure god whispers directly into his ear (even while Bush weeps on his shoulder) and he’s got some sort of insider information that using condoms to prevent AIDS in Africa would be a terrible sin and invading Middle East countries right and left is a great idea.
I’ve known people who believed deeply in God and whose spirituality is/was exemplary and whose deeds and faith were good. None of those people believed themselves to better than anybody else. But the Pope does. Clearly, he’s following the model of Jesus who drove tax collectors and prostitutes from his midst and said of people who claimed to follow him, “by their words, you shall know them.”(*) Just as clearly: forcibly trying to convert everybody to Christianity as a path to peace is a really, really fucking great idea. You get right on that. I’ll be here, digging a bomb shelter.
(Since not all of you went to Catholic school or bible study or whatever, Jesus was criticized during his life for hanging around with tax collectors – who were agents of foreign occupation, and prostitutes. Also, the quote is “by their FRUITS, you shall know them.” In other words, if somebody says they’re for go(o)d, but causes all sorts of death and destruction, they’re not actually for go(o)d and are not the kind of folks you would want to, say, give leadership over high profile religions or extremely armed governments.)