Tag: celesteh

Dissertation Draft: Solo Live Electronic Pieces

Phreaking

When
the local 2600 group, started organising BrumCon 2007, which took
place on 3 May 2008, I asked if I could present a musical set. They
had never done such a thing before, but they agreed. 2600 is a
hacker group (“2600 Meetings”) with roots in phone phreaking
(Trigaux), so I decided to reference that in a piece written for the
gig.

As
noted in The Complete Hacker’s Handbook, “Phone phreaking”
refers to the practice hacking phone systems in order to get free
calls or just explore the workings of the system. Phone systems used
to be controlled by in-band signalling, that is, audible tones that a
user could reproduce in order to gain unauthorised control. For
example, 2600 Hz was a useful tone to “seize” control of a line.
Other such sounds commonly found in telephony are Dual Tone Multi
Frequency [DTMF] sounds, which are the ones produced by a landline
keypad. (Dr. K.)

I
looked up red box phreaking on Wikipedia and also DTMF signals and
used those tones as the heart of the piece. It starts with a dial
tone, then does coin dropping sounds, followed by the sound of
dialling and then a ring back sound, followed by a 2600 Hz tone.
After that introduction, it plays dialling signals and then a beat.
The beat is made up of patterns of sampled drums. The programme
picks random beats to be accented, which will always have a drum
sound on them and then scatters drum sounds on some of the other
beats also. The loop is repeated between 8-10 times and then a new
pattern is created, retaining the same accents for the duration of
the piece. If the randomly generated drum pattern seems too sparse
or too full of beats, the performer can intervene by pressing a
joystick button to add some drum beats or another to remove them. The
idea for randomly accenting beats comes a lecture by Paul Berg at
Sonology in the Hague where he noted that accenting random beats
seems like it had a deliberate rhythm when it’s heard by audiences.
This is related to Trevor Wishart’s discussion of Clarence Barlow’s
“indispensability factor,” where Wishart notes that changing
accents of a steady beat can alter the listener’s perception between
time signatures. (Wishart p 64) It seems that greater randomness in
picking accents leads listeners to perceive more complex rhythms.

After
the beats, a busy signal comes in occasionally. There are also bass
frequencies which are DTMF sine tones transposed by octaves.
Finally, there are samples of operator messages that are used in the
American phone system. These are glitched and stuttered, the degree
of which is controlled with a joystick. Thus, this piece is partly a
live-realisation, self-running piece and partly controlled by a
performer.

At
the time, I was interested in making computer pieces that necessarily
had to be computer pieces and could not be realised with live
instruments or with an analogue synthesiser. Extremely exact tunings
and sample processing are both examples of things that are
computer-dependant. I was also interested to have more live control
and more visible gesture, in order to, as Paine describes in his
paper on gesture in laptop performance, “inject
a sense of the now, an engagement with audience in an effort to
reclaim the authenticity associated with ‘live’ performance.”
(Paine p 4) I thought having physical motions would engage the
audience more than a live realisation. Conversely and relatedly, I
was also interested in the aesthetics of computer failure, within the
glitches I was creating. Cascone writes, “'[Failure]’ has become a
prominent aesthetic in many of the arts in the late 20th century,
reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion, and
revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient
as the humans who build them. “ (Cascone) I thought this
intentional highlighting of imperfection would especially resonate
with an audience that largely worked in a highly technical and
professional capacity with computers.

I
also find glitches to be aesthetically appealing and have been
influenced by the extremely glitchy work of Ryoji Ikeda, especially
works like Data.Matrix,
which is a sonification of data. (“Datamatics”) Similarly,
in-band signalling is literally a sonic encoding of data, designed
for computer usage.

When
I performed the piece at BrumCon, their sound system did not have an
even frequency response. Some sine waves sounded way louder than
others and I did not have a way to adjust. I suspect this problem is
much more pronounced for sine tones than it is for richer
frequencies. Another problem I encountered was that I was using
sounds with strong semantic meanings for the audience. Many of them
had been phreakers and the sounds already had a specific meaning and
context that I was not accurately reproducing. Listeners without
this background have generally been more positive about the piece.
One blogger wrote the piece sounded like a “demonic
homage to Gaga’s Telephone,”
(Lao) although he did note that my piece was written earlier.

Blake’s
9

The
music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been a major influence on
my music for a long time. The incidental music and sound effects of
Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years was especially
formative. I found time in 2008 to watch every episode of Blakes
7 and found the sound effects to be equally compelling. I spent
some time with my analogue synthsiser and tried to create sounds like
the ones used in the series. I liked the sounds I got, but they were
a bit too complex to layer into a collage for making a piece that
way, but not complex enough to stand on their own. I wrote a
SuperCollider programme to process them through granular synthesis
and other means and to create a piece using the effects as source
material, mixed with other computer generated sounds.

The
timing on a micro, “beat,” and loop level are all in groups of
nine or multiples of nine, which is why I changed the number in the
piece title. I was influenced to use this number by a London poet,
Mendoza, who had a project called ninerrors
which ze*
describes as, “a
sequence of poems constricted by configurations of 9: connected &
dis-connected by self-imposed constraint. each has 9 lines
or multiples of 9, some have 9 words or syllables per line, others
are divisible by 9.  ninerrors is presented
as a series of 9 pamphlets containing 9 pages of poetry.”
(“ninerrors”) I adopted a use of nines not only in the timings,
but also in shifting the playback rate of buffers, which are played
at rates of 27/25,
9/7, 7/9 or 25/27. The
tone clusters frequencies also are related to each other by tuning
ratios that are similarly based on nine. I was in contact with
Mendoza while writing this piece and one of the poems in hir

ninerrors
cycle, an
obsessive compulsive disorder,
mentions part of the creation of this piece in it’s first line,
“washing machine spin cycle drowns out synth drones.” (“an
obsessive compulsive disorder”)

While
ratios based on nines gave me the internal tunings of the tone
cluster, I used Dissonance Curves, as described by William Sethares,
to generate the tuning and scale for the base frequencies of the
clusters. The clusters should therefore sound as consonant as
possible and provide a contrast to the rest of the piece, which is
rather glitchy. The glitches come partly from the analogue material,
but also from sudden cuts in the playback of buffers. For some parts
of the piece, the programme records it’s own output and then uses
that as source material, something that may stutter, especially if
the buffer is recording it’s own output. I used this effect because,
as mentioned above, I want to use a computer to do things which only
it can do. When writing about glitches, Vanhanen writes that their
sounds “are
sounds of the . . . technology itself.” (p 47) He notes that “if
phonography is essentially acousmatic, then the ultimate phonographic
music would consist of sounds that have no acoustic origin,” (p
49) thus asserting that skips and “deliberate mistakes” (ibid)
are the essential sound of “phonographic styles of music.” (ibid)
Similarly, “glitch is the digital equivalent of the phonographic
metasound.” (p 50) It is necessarily digital and thus is
inherently tied to my use of a computer. While my use of glitch is
oppositional to the dominant style of BEAST, according to Vanhanen,
it is also the logical extension of acousmatic music.

Indeed,
the piece was written with the BEAST system in mind. The code was
written to allow N-channel realisations. Some gestures are designed
with rings of 8 in mind, but others, notably at the very start, are
designed to be front speakers only. Some of the “recycled”
buffers, playing back the pieces own recordings were originally
intended to be sent to distant speakers, not pointed at the audience,
thus give some distance between the audience and those glitches when
they are first introduced. I chose to do it this way partly in order
to automate the use of spatial gesture. In his paper on gesture,
Paine notes that moving a sound in space is a from of gesture,
specifically mentioning the BEAST system. (p 11) I think that because
this gesture is already physical, it does not need to necessarily
rely on the physical gesture of a performer moving faders. Removing
my own physical input from the spatialisation process allowed me more
control over the physical placement of the sound, without diminishing
the audience’s experience of the piece as authentic. It also gives
me greater separation between sounds, since the stems are generated
separately and lets me use more speakers at once, thus increasing the
immersive aspect (p 13) of the performance.

Although
this piece is entirely non-interactive, it is a live realisation
which makes extensive use of randomisations and can vary
significantly between performances. In case I get a additional
chances to perform it on a large speaker system, I would like the
audience to have a fresh experience every time it is played.

Synthesiser
Improvisation

When
I was a student at Wesleyan, I had my MOTM analogue modular
synthesier mounted into a 6 foot tall free-standing rack that was
intended for use in server rooms. It was not very giggable, but it
was visually quite striking. When my colleagues saw it, they
launched a campaign that I should do a live-patching concert. I was
initially resistant to their encouragement, as it seemed like a
terrible idea, but eventually I gave in and spent several days
practicing getting sounds quickly and then refining them. In
performance, as with other types of improvisation, I would find
exciting and interesting sounds that I had not previously stumbled on
in the studio. Some of my best patches have been live.

I’ve
been deeply interested in the music of other composers who do live
analogue electronics, especially in the American experimental
tradition of the 1960s and 70s. Bye
Bye Butterfly

by Pauline Oliveros is one such piece, although she realised it in a
studio. (Bernstein p 30) This piece and others that I find
interesting are based on discovering the parameters and limits of a
sound phenomenon. Bernstein writes that “She discovered that a
beautiful low difference tone would sound” when her oscillators
were tuned in a particular way. (ibid) Live patching also seems to
be music built on discovery, but perhaps a step more radical for it’s
being performed live.

Even
more radical than live patching is Runthrough
by David Behrman, which is realised live with DIY electronics. The
programme notes for that piece state, “No
special skills or training are helpful in turning knobs or shining
flashlights, so whatever music can emerge from the equipment is as
available to non-musicians as to musicians . . .. Things
are going well when all the players have the sensation they are
riding a sound they like in harmony together, and when each is
appreciative of what the others are doing.”
(“Sonic Arts Union”) The piece is based entirely on discovery and
has no set plan or written score. (ibid) The piece-ness relies on
the equipment. This is different than live-patching because a
modular synthesiser is designed to be a more general purpose tool and
its use does not imply a particular piece. Understanding the
interaction between synthesiser modules is also a specialist skill
and does imply that expertise is possible. However, the idea of
finding a sound and following it is similar.

Recently,
I have been investigating ways to merge my synthesiser performance
with my laptop performance. The first obvious avenue of exploration
was via live sampling. This works well with a small modular, like the
Evenfall Mini Modular, which is small enough to put into a rucksack
and has many normalised connections. It has enough flexibility to
make interesting and somewhat unexpected music, but is small and
simple enough that I can divide my attention between it and a laptop.
Unfortunately, mine was damaged in a bike accident in Amsterdam in
2008 and has not yet been repaired.

My
MOTM synthesiser, however, is too large and too complex to divide my
attention between it and a laptop screen. I experimented with using
gamepad control of a live sampler, such that I did not look at the
computer screen at all, but relied on being able to hear the state of
the programme and a memory of what the different buttons did. I
tried this once in concert at Noise = Noise #19 in April 2010. As is
often the case in small concerts, I could not fully hear both monitor
speakers, which made it difficult to monitor the programme.
Furthermore, as my patch grew in complexity, the computer-added
complexity became difficult to perceive and I stopped being able to
tell if it was still working correctly or at all. A few minutes into
the performance, I stopped the computer programme entirely and
switched to all analogue sounds. While the programme did not perform
in the manner I had intended, the set was a success and the recording
also came out quite well and is included in my portfolio. One
blogger compared the track to Jimi Hendrix, (Weidenbaum) which was
certainly unexpected.

It
is unusual for me to have a live recording come out well. This is
because of the live, exploratory aspect to the music. If I discover
that the I can make the subwoofers shake the room or make the stage
rattle, or discover another acoustic phenomenon in the space, I will
push the music in that direction. While this is exciting to play, and
hopefully to hear, it doesn’t tend to come out well on recordings. I
also have a persistent problem with panning. On stage, it’s often
difficult to hear both monitors and judging the relative amplitudes
between them requires a certain concentration that I find difficult
to do while simultaneously patching and altering timbres. In order
to solve this problem, I’ve written a small programme in
SuperCollider which monitors the stereo inputs of the computer and
pans them to output according to their amplitude. If one is much
louder than the other, it is panned to centre and the other output
slowly oscillated between left and right. If the two inputs are
close in amplitude, the inputs are panned left and right, with some
overlap. I think this is the right answer for how to integrate a
computer with my synthesiser. Rather than giving me more things to
think about, this silently fixes a problem, thus removing a
responsibility. An example of playing with the autopanner, from a
small living room concert in 2011, is included in my portfolio.

For
future exploration, I am thinking of returning to the idea of live
sampling, but similarly without my interaction. I would tell the
computer when the set starts and it would help me build up a texture
through live sampling. Then, as my inputted sound became more complex
(or after a set period of time), the computer interventions would
fade out, leaving me entirely analogue. This could help me get
something interesting going more quickly, although it may violate the
“blank canvas” convention of live coding and live patching. In
February 2011, there was a very brief discussion on the TopLap email
list as to whether live patching was an analogue form of live coding
(Rohrhuber). I do not see that much commonality between them, partly
because a synthsiser patch is more like a chainsaw than it is like an
idea, (“ManifestoDraft”) and partly because patching is much more
tactile than coding is. However, some of the same conventions do seem
to apply to both.

Bibliography

“2600
Meetings.” 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Web. 8 September
2011. <http://www.2600.com/meetings/>

Behrman,
David. “Runthrough.” 1971. Web. 15 September 2011.
<http://www.ubu.com/sound/sau.html>

Bernstein, David. “The San Francisco Tape Music Center: Emering Art Forms and the American Counterculture, 1961 – 1966.” The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Ed. David Bernstein. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Blakes
7. BBC. BBC One, UK. 2 January
1978 – 21 December 1981. Television.

Cascone,
Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in
Contemporary Computer Music.” rseonancias. 2002. Web. 8
September 2011.
<http://www.ccapitalia.net/reso/articulos/cascone/aesthetics_failure.htm>

Cascone,
Kim. “The Microsound Scene: An Interview with Kim Cascone.”
Interview with Jeremy Turner. Ctheory.net. 12 April 2001. Web.
11 September 2011. <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=322>

“Datamatics.”
ryoji ikeda. Web. 12 September 2011.
<http://www.ryojiikeda.com/project/datamatics/>

Doctor
Who. BBC. BBC One, UK. 23
November 1963 – 6 December 1989. Television.

Dr.
K. “Chapter 9: Phone Phreaking in the US & UK.” Complete
Hacker’s Handbook.
Web. 5 September 2011.
<http://www.telefonica.net/web2/vailankanni/HHB/HHB_CH09.htm>

Hutchins,
Charles Céleste. “Gig report: Edgetone Summit.” Les
said, the better.
6 August 2008. Web. 5 September 2011.
<http://celesteh.blogspot.com/2008/08/gig-report-edgetone-summit.html>

Ikeda,
Ryoji, “Data.Matrix” 2005. Web. 12 September 2011.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5hhFMSAuf4>

Knapp
and Bortz. “Mobilemuse:
Integral music control goes mobile.”
2011 NIME. University of Oslo, Norway. 31 May 2011.

Kuivila,
Ron. “David Tutor: Live Electonic Music.” Leonardo
Music Journal.
December 2004. 106-107. Web. 12Sepetember 2011.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1513516>

Lao,
Linus. “The
music of Charles Celeste Hutchins.”
Pringle’s
Hardware Store.
17 June 2010. Web. 8 September 2011.

<http://thelinusblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/the-music-of-charles-celeste-hutchins/>

“ManifestoDraft.”
TopLap.
14 November 2010. Web. 12 September 2011.
<http://toplap.org/index.php/ManifestoDraft>

Mendoza.
“an obsessive compulsive disorder” ninerrors.
2009. Web. 9 September 2011.

<http://ninerrors.blogspot.com/2009/10/ninerrors-2.html>

Mendoza.
“ninerrors: Poetry Series.” Web. 9 September 2011.
<http://ninerrors.blogspot.com/>

Moller,
Polly. “Pre-concert Q&A Session.” Edgetone New Music Summit.
San Francisco Community Music Center, San Francisco, California, USA.
23 July 2008.

Olewnick,
Brian. “Live Electronic Music.”
AllMusic.
Web. 12 September 2011.
<http://www.allmusic.com/album/live-electronic-music-w95765/review>

Oliveros,
Pauline. “Bye Bye Butterfly.” 1965. Web. 12 September 2011.
<http://open.spotify.com/track/3sqvayIhGIvWcYG6G1pf8m>

Paine,
Garth. “Gesture and Morphology in Laptop Music Performance.”
2008. Web. 8 September 2011.
<http://www.activatedspace.com/papers/files/gesture-and-morphology-in-laptop-performance.pdf>

“Red
box (phreaking).” Wikipedia.
Web. 5 September 2011.
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Red_box_%28phreaking%29>

Rohruber,
Julian. “[livecode]
analogue live coding?”
Email to livecode list. 19 February 2011. <

http://lists.lurk.org/mailman/private/livecode/2011-February/001176.html>

Schloss,
W. Andrew. “Using Contemporary Technology in Live Performance: The
Dilemma of the Performer.” Journal of New Music Research.
2002. Web. 11 September 2011.
<http://people.finearts.uvic.ca/~aschloss/publications/JNMR02_Dilemma_of_the_Performer.pdf>

Sethares,
William. “Relating Tuning and Timbre.” Web. 11 September 2011.
<http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html>

“Sonic
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<http://www.ubu.com/sound/sau.html>

Trigaux,
Robert. “The bible of the phreaking faithful.” St
Petersburg Times.
15 June 1998. Web. 5 September 2011.
<http://www.sptimes.com/Hackers/monhackside.html>

“The
Transparent Tape Music Festival.” SF
Sound.
Web. 12 September 2011. <http://sfsound.org/tape/oliveros.html>

“The
Truth About Lie Detectors (aka Polygraph Tests)” American
Psychological Association.

5 August 2004. Web. 5 September 2011.
<http://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph.aspx>

United
States v. Scheffer , 523 U.S. 303. Supreme Court of the US, 1998.
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<http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/96-1133.ZS.html>

Vanhanen,
Janne. “Virtual Sound: Examining Glitch and Production.”
Contemporary
Music Review 22:4
(2003) 45-52. Web. 11 September 2011.

<http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0749446032000156946>

Weidenbaum,
Mark. “In London, Noise = Noise.” Disquiet.
7 May 2010. Web. 12 September 2011.
<http://disquiet.com/2010/05/07/charles-celeste-hutchins/>

Wishart,
Trevor. Audible
Design.
Orpheus the Pantomime Ltd, 1994. Print.

*“ze”
and “hir” are gender neutral pronouns

Remembering

We all remember exactly where we were ten years ago today, so I’ll skip that part. Some of you lost family members, friends, jobs or became injured when terrorists attacked the US and I’m very sorry for your loss.For the rest of us, and most of the people watching TV coverage or reading endless news editorials or otherwise paying attention to this anniversary, it was something that happened in a remote location, a far away city, with no personal effect at all, aside from the shock and horror that we all felt. And today, the TV and editorials and whatever are asking us to rekindle that shock and horror and revel in it as if it were yesterday and not ten years ago. I don’t think that’s useful, helpful or remotely reasonable.No other successful foreign terrorist attack has happened in the US since 2001. The ones foiled by the FBI turn out to have been half-hearted and poorly planned at best. We don’t need to react to this memory with fear. Instead, I think we should stop and ask how it has changed us as a country, as a culture and as a people. Is this who we wanted to become? Is this the country we want to have? Have the changes we’ve made caused us to be better or worse than before? It’s true we can never go back in time, but we’re not on a fixed course forever either. We can reassess and change.The creation of the Department of Homeland Security removed union rights from a large number of government workers. Do we still want it to be like that? The Patriot Act allowed warrantless wiretapping and all kind of domestic spying, temporarily, but it’s still ongoing. Do we want to renew that? A lot of people will be talking about the wars we’re now waging abroad, the secret prisions, the renditions, the predator drones, and that bears reflection as well. Do we want to do all that to other people? But also, what do we want to do to ourselves? Does a terrorist attack in NYC mean that we need to reconfigure emergency services such that we cannot respond to a hurricane in New Orleans? Does it mean we need to attack unions? Does it mean we need to bleed all spending on social programmes out of our economy so we can afford more bombs?In the days after 9/11, we talked a lot about reflection and taking stock. Now might be time to do that again. Are we better than we were before, or have we made ourselves worse? What should we do now in the next ten years?

Live blogging stallman

Stallman is speaking in Brum
He says that proprietary softwre is a tool that the owner uses to control the users.
closed source software may contain malicious code used to harm or spy on the user. As does windows and the iphone. (And andriod, which is open source).
Free software develops solutions but proprietary programmes create dependance. Writing free software is a contribution to society. Proprietary software harms society, he says. Good features in a proprietary programme are bait in a trap. The users are suckered in and made less free.
To what extent do the 4 freedoms apply outside of software?
If you buy an object, does it carry restrictions on using it as you wish? (Freedom 0)
Freedom 1 is the freedom to study and change the source code. Do you have that freedom to modify an object? Depends on the object. This point is kind of lame.
Freedom 2 allows people to make copies. Does not apply to physical objects because he has apparently never heard of a 3d priter. Shiny future technology will solve the problems it causes.
Has he heard of the arduino?
Now he’s brining up copyright, which is apparently the main topic of his speech.
What should copyright say about what you can do with published works. Copyright developed in responce to technology, however the morals of these laws are not based on technology, however the context can change, thus effecting the utilitarian evaluation of moral choices.
in the ancient world, copies were made by hand and does not scale. There was no copyright, but copying was very difficult. There was censorship, however.
then the printing press came along and mass production copying much more efficient, but did not speed up making one-off copies. It was purely an economy of scale. Printing presses were expensive and required special skills. Copy making was highly centralised. Many copies were still made by hand. Poor people would hand copy thing because they had time but no money.
in 1553, copyright was introduced to england to censor protestant texts. You had to apply to print something and one printet would be granted a monopoly in perpetuity. In 1680, a new system came in where authors were granted a monopoly for 14 years.
The US consitution was going to have copyright in it, but instead it grants congress the power to create laws granting a monopoly for a limitted time, in order to benefit the public. Copyright laws only applied to publishers, not to hand copying. It was solely an industrial regulation. Copyright was arguably beneficial, was easy to enforce.
in the 1800s, printing got a lot cheaper. Paperbacks were invented. Hand copying dropped way off in responce to cheaper media.
the computers came along and made one off copying much much cheaper. This has completely transformed the effect of copyright law. It is no longer an industrial regulation. Copyright law has become difficult to enforce, has become controversial. It is no longer beneficial, he claims.
a proper democracy, he says, would restore a freedom to copy to the public. He says the increase of copyright power is an indictment of a non functional democracy.
retroactively increasing copyright does not encourage the production of new works in the past. Increasing copyright for future works could create an incentive for current artists, except that nobody plans for income 50-70 years after their death.
he claims that the extension of corporate copyright law in the us was done to protect mickey mouse. He says disney purchased the law. Stallman is seriously incensed.
he says film companies want perpetual copyright, which is theoretically allowable in the uk. If disney keeps this up, there will be perpetual copyright in the us, granted 20 years at a time, he claims.
he is encouraging us to fight the copyright extension of audio recordings, saying we must fight every batlle, no matter how minor.
he says publishers want to seize total power over content, making a pay-per-view uiverse via DRM. Our media players, etc will control us, instead of vice versa. He is using dvd region codes as an example. Some smart person wrote free software to let people play dvds. So the us made this illegal with the digital millenium copyright act. The eu also passed a similar law, except in finland. In france, posession of copies can be punished with a prison sentence.
Stallman is so ideologically pure, he doesn’t play dvds. And we shouldn’t either, he says.
aacs was a new form of encryption, which was sort of broken. Blue ray disks have new encryption every few months. Which is kind of mental. Drm on video is undefeated.
10 years ago, non-compliant cds were for sale.
(stallman is so damn free, he can’t do anything….)
apple did drmed music and sony installed a rootkit on its cds, which is highly malicious software, akin to a virus. Seriously a trojan horse, this was extremely illegal. They also plagarised the code in their programme, which is illegal under copyright law.
there is drm in the playstation. Somebody put linux on it, and then sony put out an upgrade that killed linux. People have been arrested for putting free software on playstations!
DRM is mostly dead for music because of some weird contract dispute with apple. He is encouraging everyone to boycott itunes, so we can be free.
spotify is designed to restrict users, because it won’t let you save streams. So nobody should use spotify. They don’t actually pay labels or artists at any kind of reasonable rate, so um…
books are now facing the pressure of drm, thanks to ebooks. He thinks ebooks are a plot.
in order to be free, he has to say no a lot. The free software foundation is against facebook and are not on it and if i were smart, i wouldn’t be either.
he really hates ebook readers! The amazon “swindle!” Kindle users cannot anonymously buy ebooks with cash. Amazon knows what you’re reading and keeps a list. This has a large potential for human rights abuses. Ebook ownsers do not actually own their books. They cannot give it away or lend it out. They don’t even get to keep a book as long as they want, only as long as amazon lets you. They remotely deleted a bunch of bought and paid for copies of “1984” off of people’s kindles.
amazon promised to never do mass censorship again unless ordered to by the state. Which is not actually comforting.
now he syays we have to boycott harry potter. And puppies, i’m sure. And ice cream. “There are loys of other books that are fun to read.”
i don’t think i could handle this much freedom….
one company by itself could not set up drm. They have to “conspire to restrict the public’s access to technology.” These conspiracies are trade organisations.
“of course, you should never use a product that conspires to take away you freedom.” We must organise against drm. There is a website “defective by design.”
i’m not sure that boycotts are actually a useful way to deal with this.
he says copyright should last for 10 years after being published. (I’d make it a bit longer, but maybe i’m brainwashed by publish companies.) He is making a good point about how god-like devotion for composers is used abusively by publishing companies.
publishers sometimes let stuff go out of print but will prevent others from publishing.
those of us who aren’t making money are uncorrupted, we still have the purity of the dueling 19th century ideas of the artist, in contrats to being godlike.
what sort of copyrights are there for content? Recipies, software, how to stuff, textbooks, etc is kind 1. He says this kind of works have to be free. “Freedom is having control of your own life.”
type 2 is works that state people’s views: essays, memoirs, academic works. These should not be allowed to be modified. Modification is distortion. Non-commercial redistribution of unmodified copies must be allowed because sharing is good. He says. Copyright is intolerable because of the “war on sharing.” Attacking sharing is attacking society. This is EVIL, he says.
type 3 is works of art and entertainment. Should people be allowed to modiy? Modifying something may destroy its artistic integrity. But most artistic works contain remixed elements from past works. People could wait for the copyright term before allowing remixes. But, people must be free to share.
i don’t see a future for for-profit publication if sharing is allowed? I allow my stuff to get shared, but i mean, if i could get lady gaga for free and it was allowed, i wouldn’t pay for it
he just said something about remixing, but i was thinking about lady gaga.
peer to peer file sharing will not hurt musicians because record companies have already stolen everything. It is true that corrupt accounting is a problem for musicans on major labels.
he won’t do ecommerce….
he says that musicians make money off of concerts, so sharing recorded music actually helps musicians. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, sorry.
he says only record companies lose money with music sharing record companies and they’re evil and deserve it. Minor record companies are ok, of course, but let’s not talk about them.
could movies still make money under stallman’s capitalistic paradise? He says yes, but if we have to stop making movies, well, we’ll all be more free.
he says hollywood makes shit movies on purpose, through their system. Censorship is wrong, so we must protect their right to make shit.
how to support the arts: use state funds, he says. We must be efficient in these grants. Only give it to artist, not publishers. Give away money by popularity, using polling, he says. Linear distribution is not a good plan, he says. Take the cube root of popularity he says, getting very detailed. He may think too much, but i can’t really argue his point.
artists then have incentive to share.
now he’s on with the virtual tip jar, which has never worked in practice, but he wants to have this government regulated? He claims that thw virtual tip jar is working for musicians, but what he’s talking about is merch. He says it’s not merch. Heh, I wonder if he’s considered commissions. I guess all free software could come with a donation button in Stalltopia.
he seems to be taking credit for linux? Oh no wait, torvalis doesn’t deserve credit. Jesus!
schools (and unis) should only use free sotware, in order to make them citizens of a free society. Now he’s comparing software companies to playground drug dealers!
now he’s talking about people learning to code. Only free software properly teaches coding. Closed sources are contrary to the goals of education.
students should be compelled to share their source code.
we should all campaign against MAX/MSP in education, as an ethical issue. Constantly recruit others to the cause!
Antonio is attacking his art funding proposals. Stallman is claiming that crowd funding works, which is complete bullocks. And he doesn’t know the term “crowd funding,” which does somewhat impunge his credibility on the issue. Then he says that WPA is the way forward, which I don’t disagree with. Now he says that you can’t say arts funding is too low or too high because it’s inagruable, which seems dubious.
i’m pondering irritating him with android questions.
oooh ranting on “open source” in respince to another question, so no point in asking android question.
I really need dinner as his twattishness is starting to annoy me.
i’m not sure a purely software guy is really the best guy to talk about arts copyright. Especially somebody who says all closed source software developers should quit their jobs. If he doesn’t want his own tribe to prosper, he’s not going to be overly concerned about artists.

Dissertation Draft: Copyright, Social Networking and Commissioning Music

When I started at Birmingham, I was in
the midst of a project where in I was soliciting commissions of
pieces of music around one minute in length. My plan was originally
to compose 45 of these in total and release an album at the end. I
intend to pick up where I left off and finish the project after
graduating.

This project was an attempt to get a
bit of attention and to address some economic and political issues of
music distribution. The amount of music available to listeners only
continues to rise. Every day, somebody records something and makes
it available in a digital format. The cost of providing copies to
consumers is practically nil. Any composer can upload an mp3 to
last.fm or bandcamp at no cost. (“Bandcamp Pricing”)

Because copying and distribution is so
cheap and easy, consumers often share files without paying for them.
The Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA] struck back
against this by suing fans (“For Students Doing Reports”), an
idea which seemed poorly thought out and which has made them
extremely unpopular. (Reisinger) At the same time, the duration of
copyright keeps being extended, seemingly so that Mickey Mouse will
never fall into the public domain. (Springman) What used to be a
system to make sure that creators got their fair share is
increasingly perceived as a way for big companies to control culture.
(Lessig 61) Rather than adapt to new conditions, media companies are
lobbying for new laws to force the genie back in the bottle. (Lessig
48) Some of these, like the Digital Economy Act are fairly draconian
in that households may have their internet switched off if only one
member of the household breaks copyright law. (Digital Economy Act s.
10) Despite the severity of this crackdown, many are skeptical it
will make any difference. (“Q&A: The Digital Economy bill”)
Rather than adapt to changing conditions, powerful,
politically-connected media companies are abusing state power. Their
position is morally bankrupt and their claims of victimhood are
laughably overstated. The RIAA tells students that sharing an mp3 is
worse than maritime hostage-taking: “It’s commonly known as
‘piracy,’ but that’s too benign of a term to adequately describe
the toll that music theft takes . . ..” (“For Students Doing
Reports”)

It seems clear that copyright is in
crisis and in need of a major reform. However, the crisis of
copyright does not diminish the notion of authorship. Those engaged
in online music sharing still are deeply invested in who

created the work they’re copying. Artists that chose to
participate in Open Culture models, such as Creative Commons are not
ceding their work to the public domain, but instead protecting the
rights of their fans. (“Frequently Asked Questions”) An artist
choosing this model may be potentially sacrificing some forms of
revenue, but for most emerging artists, getting heard is far more
important than protecting rights which may
one day generate income. Even for successful artists like Bob
Ostertag, this income has failed to materialise. He writes,
“[S]elling recordings in whatever format has been a break-even
proposition at best.” (Ostertag)

However, artists
still need to eat and pay rent. Sustainability is a major concern,
but, economic support for non-mainstream composers will not be coming
from record labels. Indeed, they have historically worked against
the interests of composers. In 2001, composer Judy Dunaway wrote:

Of course, the recording industry does not care at all about
contemporary and experimental music. The sales figures on such CDs
are miniscule compared to popular music. In the words of Foster Reed
at the New Albion label, "The corporate recording industry lives
in a completely different world, of commodity and markets, than the
independents do, who make and publish work that is near and dear to
them." But accessibility to innovative music on the internet may
be blocked by the record industry’s rush to protect and maintain
total control of its own high-profit intellectual property.
(Dunaway)

Composers are thus
left to their own devices when it comes to both generating revenue
and attracting listeners. Without a budget for publicity, one of the
best ways to gather attention is by word of mouth “buzz.” Social
networking is one venue where this can happen, which has the
advantage of the possibility of fast transmission and direct links to
online content. I suspect people may be motivated to share music they
like or find interesting because it gains them cultural capital. They
would thus take on a curatorial role and hope to gain the respect of
their friends and social contacts. A musician interested in using
this as a path to wider recognition would need to create music that
works in an online context. For example he or she might want to
include video content, so it can be uploaded to YouTube or create
music that the sharer will identify with in some way. They may also
produce music with the goal of having it sound good in stereo mp3
format out of home speakers. The music should be engineered for the
playback environment in which it is expected to be heard. The music
created must also be accessible in some way, although, obviously an
artist wishes to remain interesting.


In my case, I chose
duration as my most accessible component. All of my pieces in this
project are around one minute long. I strongly suspect that if you
ask most people to listen to ten minutes of noise music, they would
refuse unless they were already fans of the genre or the composer.
However, in my experience, people are much more willing to sacrifice
a minute of their time. Many more people are going to be willing to
listen to very short pieces. However, just because people will
listen to something does not mean they will share it. I thought
sharing would be more likely to occur if listeners felt connected to
the music in some way. One way to get that feeling of connection was
to get a listener to commission me.

The commissioner
gets their name attached to a short piece of music, which becomes
integrally linked to them. The piece of music would not exist if it
were not for their financial involvement. This, in return gives them
cultural capital. They are the proprietor of a new piece of music.
This also solves the dilemma of sustainability. The commissioning
amount should cover costs, at least. The commissioner would be
motivated to share their new piece of music as far and wide as they
can, as every re-sharing increases their own cultural capital.
Instead of fighting the online sharing that people seem inclined to
do, this model requires it and does not require coercive action on
the part of the state.

I started by using
eBay as my sales platform. This allowed me to control how many
commissions I might sell at a time, handle the monetary transaction
and the platform itself made the commissioners feel engaged and
interested some music press. (“Music Commissioning on eBay”)
Much to my surprise, a bidding war erupted on one of my early
offerings, despite the promise of many more to come. However, before
that bidding war could conclude, eBay terminated my account, banning
me from the service. They refused to tell me why they had done this,
so I don’t know if it was because they suspected fraud or because
they objected to my business model. I moved to Etsy, a much less
exciting web store where users sell craft items and resumed.

During
the course of my project, several people did share their short pieces
via their blogs, facebook or another online medium. One person used
her piece as her ringtone. In 2008, I approached a popular blogger,
Josh Fruhlinger of The Comics Curmudgeon
and asked if he would trade me advertising space for a free
commission. His blog had been ranked #13 by PC Magazine’s “100
Favorite Blogs for 2007” (Heater) and won a Webby Award in 2008 for
Best Humor Blog. (“Best Humor Blog”) His blog was also popular
with composers and was mentioned on Kyle Gann’s blog (Gann) and
others. Fruhlinger agreed to this plan and I composed a short piece
related the the American comic strip Gil Thorp. In order to cope
with the expected server traffic, I created a very simple video of
the face of the titular character slowly zooming in with the piece as
soundtrack and uploaded it to YouTube.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p__XzqnLDCQ) My small advertisement
ran for a week and then Fruhlinger made a post specifically about the
piece. He was very positive, using words like “stunning” and
“masterpiece.” (Fruhlinger) The video got 4000 views in a very
short period of time. However, despite how happy Fruhlinger was and
some positive comments from his readers such as, “I stand amazed,”
(commodorejohn) this got me no new
commissions.

Does this mean that
the model fails? I had predicted that I would get some new
commissions out of such a high profile endorsement, but didn’t.
There are a few possible explanations. Consumers may be unused to the
idea of commissioning a composer. In my brief stint in marketing, I
was told that consumers do not absorb an idea until they encounter it
multiple times. This was just one post. Or, conversely, it could have
been their lack of familiarity with me. A better known composer may
have fared better. It may also have been the economy, which was not
doing well at the time and has since gotten worse. Commissioning
music is a luxury and one that might seem eccentric and easy to
forego.

Marketing this
project is actually quite difficult. I found I could do three
commissions in a week. There is no way I could cope with the volume
that mass-market success would imply. Therefore, going after
high-profile general subject bloggers is not the way to draw in new
customers, as success could be as much a disaster as failure.
However, it is a way to draw in new listeners. Most of the visitors
to the blog would not have heard my piece otherwise. My attempts at
an accessible duration did pay off, even if social media buzz didn’t
gain me new customers. Making a piece for one person motivates that
one person to share it, but it does not motivate his or her friends
to share it also.

Musically, I was
interested in very short pieces because of the 60×60 Project, in
which I had participated. I found it very frustrating to make a pice
so short. While my piece Clocker had been accepted, I did not
feel happy with it. I started listening to very short pieces, for
example, tracks from the albums Haikus Urbanis and Snakes
and Ladders, to get into the right mindset.


When constructing
my very short pieces, I’ve found that it’s best to have three closely
related ideas, and three overdubbed mono tracks. A minute is too long
to only have one idea, but too short to go through a lot of material.
There is also not a lot of time for major density changes, unless
that is the focus of the piece. As I worked on this project, I found
that a minute began to seem longer and longer. A composer could
easily fit over a hundred discrete events in a minute.

In my portfolio, I
have included several of these pieces, listed here with their
programme notes:

Shorts #29: Raining Up

Commissioned
and titled by Autumn Looijen

This piece was created using a MOTM
synthesiser and mixed in Ardour.
There were several false starts. I had been doing field recordings of
storms and for a while, every artificial sound I made seemed to also
sound like weather. The title Autumn chose seems to indicate that I
didn’t quite get away from weather-related sounds.

Shorts #28: Untitled
Commissioned
by Cecile Moochnek

I wasn’t looking for a
commission when I walked into the Cecile
Moochnek Gallery on 4th Street in Berkeley, California. I was
looking to do Christmas shopping. But I got talking to the gallery
owner about art and music and she asked me to write her a short
piece. This was in December of 2007. I wrote the piece in 2008.

I made this piece with a Evenfall MiniModular Synthesiser. This
was an all-in-one box modular synthesiser from the 1990′s. It’s a
great little synth.

Shorts #27:
Gil Thorp
Commissioned
and titled by Josh Fruhlinger

Josh gave me the title before I
started the piece. Gil Thorp is the name of a surreal American
newspaper comic which is supposed to be about high school sports.
Josh runs a blog discussing newspaper comics, called the Comics
Curmudgeon.
I recorded (British) football from my TV, which included my
housemate clapping after a goal. Then, I decided to use white noise,
because it’s very similar to crowd sounds. I filtered it a lot to
make sort of screetchy sounds. The football announcers didn’t
exactly have the accent that I would expect Marty Moon to have, so I
kept them in the background. My girlfriend said that it struck her as
very Mark Trail-like, so I raised the volume of the background at the
end, to make the sports connection clearer.

Bird-like sounds remind me of high school sports, but that’s
probably because my high school had a terrible seagull infestation.

Shorts #26: Ecstatic Rivulet
Commissioned
and titled by Clyde Nielsen

For this piece, I wanted to use a
field recording that I made while camping over the summer. Visually,
the campground looked like it would make a suitable set for a horror
movie. The animals were correspondingly loud and screetchy at night
and so I made a recording with my cell phone.
I listened to the recording a few times and it made me think of
GrainPic,
a project that I had intended to abandon. Everything I do with this
always sounds kind of rough and unpolished, which is why I stopped
working with it. But it seems to fit well with my memory of that
campground.


Shorts #25: Untitled
Commissioned
by Scott Wilson

When
approached for a title for this piece, Scott
noted that the piece has a “flatulent quality,” but it would be
better to resist referencing that in a title.
To make this piece, I recorded myself playing a bovine signaling
horn and a didjeridu, both of which I ran through a Sherman
filterbank to use as FX. There’s also a little bit of feedback,
especially the very last sounds. Processing a didgeridu turns out to
be much more straightforward and easy than processing a cow horn.


Shorts #24: College Promo

Commissioned
and titled by Jean Sirius

I
wanted to something that started out serious, but got more playful
further in. The opening is square waves, which are pulse-width
modulated and slightly frequency modulated. While I was recording
them, my dog was sleeping nearby. She started barking in her sleep.
The almost never barks when she’s awake, but when she’s asleep,
she barks quiet, air, high pitched barks which cause her snout to
slightly inflate, since she doesn’t open her mouth. Maybe she’s
actually dreaming of chasing pigeons? The sleep-barking sounded
really great with the music! I couldn’t record my dog without
accidentally waking her, so instead I tried to mimic the sound with a
Sherman filterbank. I failed miserably, but I like the sounds that I
got. Every time I use this instrument, I have a little more fun with
it and like it a little bit more. It’s frustrating at first, but
the effort is paying off.

Shorts #23: Gamut
Commissioned
and titled by Devin Hurd

This
piece was made with a MOTM analogue synthesiser.


Bibliography:

“Bandcamp Pricing.” Bandcamp.
Web. 12 August 2011. <https://bandcamp.com/pricing>

“Best Humor Blog.” The 2008
Weblog Awards. 31 December 2008.
Web. 11 August 2011.

<http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-humor-blog/>

commodorejohn.
comment on “Metapost: I sing the body beefy.” The
Comics Curmudgeon. 15 April
2008. Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://joshreads.com/?p=1519#comment-480008>

Digital Economy Act 2010 s. 10. UK.
Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/24/section/10?view=plain>

Dunaway, Judy. “The MP3 Phenomena and
Innovative Music.” ZKM. 9
April 2001. Web. 11 August 2001.

<http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/Institute/Musik/texte/MP3>

“For Students Doing Reports.” RIAA-
Recording Industry Association of America.
Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.riaa.com/faq.php>

“Frequently
Asked Questions.” Creative Commons. 28
July 2011. Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions>


Fruhlinger, Josh.
“Metapost: I sing the body beefy.” The Comics Curmudgeon.
15 April 2008. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://joshreads.com/?p=1519>

Gann,
Kyle. “Seriously Off-Topic.” PostClassical: Kyle Gann
on music after the fact. Arts
Journal. 29 April 2007. Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2007/04/seriously_offtopic.html>

Haikus Ubranis.
Cavel2Disks, 1997. CD.


Heater,
Brain. “Our 100 Favorite Blogs.” PC Magazine.
15 October 2007. Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2195379,00.asp>

Lessig,
Lawrence. “Free Culture – How Big Media Uses Technology and the
Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.” SiSU
information Structuring Universe.
University of Oslo: The Faculty of Law. 2004. Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig/doc.html>

“Music
Commissioning on eBay.” PodComplex.

14 April 2007. Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://www.podcomplex.com/blog/music-commissioning-on-ebay/>

Ostertag, Bob. “The
Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician.”
QuestionCopyright.org. 9 April 2007. Web. 11 August 2001.
<http://questioncopyright.org/bob_ostertag_speaks>

“Q&A:
The Digital Economy bill.” BBC News.

9 April 2010. Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8604602.stm>

Reisinger,
Don. “The RIAA speaks – and it gets worse.” Cnet.
14 January 2008. Web. 11 August 2011.
<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-9849441-17.html?tag=more>

Rubin, Neal and Whigham, Rod. Gil
Thorp. GoComics.com. Web. 11
August 2011. <http://www.gocomics.com/gilthorp/>


Slaw. Snakes and Ladders.
Doubtful Palace, 2002. CD.

Springman, Chris. “The Mouse that Ate
the Public Domain: Disney, The Copyright Term Extension Act, and
Eldred v. Ashcroft.”
FindLaw. 5 March 2002.
Web. 11 August 2001.
<http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html>

Dissertation Draft: BiLE Bibliography

Bibliography:

“About.”
Kinect for Windows: SDK
beta. 2011. Microsoft
Research. 8 August 2011.
<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/about.aspx>

All
Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.
By Curtis, Richard. BBC. BBC Two. 23 May 2011


Angwin,
Julia and Valentino-Devries, Jennifer. “Apple, Google Collect User
Data.” The Wall
Street Journal. 22
April 2011. Web. 8 August 2011.
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703983704576277101723453610.html>

Brautigan,
Richard. “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” Red
House Books. Web. 10
August 2010.
<http://www.redhousebooks.com/galleries/freePoems/allWatchedOver.htm>

Brown,
Chris. “Indigenous to the Net ~ Early Network Music Band in the San
Francisco Bay Area.” Crossfade.
8 September 2002. Web. 8 August 2011.
<http://crossfade.walkerart.org/brownbischoff/index.html>

Cardew,
Cornelius. Treatise. Buffalo: The Gallery Upstairs Press,
1967.

Dugan,
Patrick. “Apple closes the iTunes store for iPhone users who don’t
want to share their location” Google
Buzz. 23 June 2010.
Web. 24 June 2010.

<http://www.google.com/buzz/106577349578207351822/FunaUuPBmzD/lameApple-closes-the-iTunes-store-for-iPhone-users>

“FAQ.”
I, Norton: an Opera in
Real-Time by Gino Robair.
Web. 10 August 2011. <http://www.ginorobair.com/inorton/faq.html>

Frommer,
Dan. “Here’s the Amazing ‘Word Lens’ iPhone App Everyone is Talking
About This Morning (AAPL).” The
San Francisco Chronicle.
17 December 2010. Web. 10 August 2011.
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/12/17/businessinsider-word-lens-2010-12.DTL>


Hewitt,
Scott, et al. “HELO: The Laptop Ensemble as an Incubator for
Individual Laptop Performance Practices.” Huddersfield
Experimental Laptop Orchestra.
June 2010. Web. 9 August 2011.
<http://helo.ablelemon.co.uk/lib/exe/fetch.php/materials/helo-laptop-ensemble-incubator.pdf>

Judson,
Thom. “OpenNI to Max/MSP vis OSC.” Thom
Judson: music and media.
12 January 2011. Web. 8 August 2011. <http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30>

Kyriadkis,
Yannis. “Scam Spam.” [“LabO III Scam Spam.m4v.”] Perf. Tako
Hyakutome. YouTube.
4 April 2011. Web. 10 August 2011.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMRQOeA_Rk0>

“NITE
Middleware.” PrimeSense.
2010. Web. 8 August 2011. <http://www.primesense.com/?p=515>

No
More Twist. “Nice to See You.” Perf. Charles Céleste Hutchins,
Polly Moller. Music by
Charles Céleste Hutchins.
18 July 2008. Web. 11 August 2011.

<http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/podcast/?p=100>

Olivarez-Giles,
Nathan. “Microsoft releases Kinect for Windows SDK.” Los
Angeles Times. 16 June
2011. Web. 8 August 2011.
<http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/microsoft-releases-kinect-for-windows-sdk.html>

Oliveros,
Pauline. “Exchanges.” Deep Listening Pieces. Kingston:
Deep Listening Publications, 1990

Oliveros,
Pauline. “Give Sound/Receive Sound.” Deep Listening Pieces.
Kingston: Deep Listening Publications, 1990

Posner,
Eric and Vermeule, Adrian. “Obama Should Raise the Debt Ceiling on
His Own.” New York
Times. 22 July 2011.
Web. 10 August 2011.
<https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22posner.html?_r=1>


Schlegel,
Andreas. “Darwiinosc – darwiin remote with OSC extension for OS
X.” Google Code.
Web. 9 August 2011. <https://code.google.com/p/darwiinosc/>


Stockhausen,
Karlheinz, “Right Durations”

“TouchOSC.”
hexler.net.
Web. 8 August 2011. <http://hexler.net/software/touchosc>

Tsotsis,
Alexia. “Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really.”
Tech Crunch.
16 December 2010. Web. 10 August 2011.

<http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/world-lens-translates-words-inside-of-images-yes-really/>

Viner,
Katharine. “Adam Curtis: Have computers taken away our power?.”
The Guardian.
6 May 2011. Web. 10 August 2011.
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/06/adam-curtis-computers-documentary>

Dissertation Draft: BiLE – The Death of Stockhausen

My
next piece for BiLE is a large-scale piece called The Death of
Stockhausen, which will be approximately an hour long. I’m
calling the piece a “laptopera,” although there are not currently
any singers. Although this may stretch the opera genre a bit, it’s
not unprecedented, as Gino Robair’s opera in real time, I, Norton,
lists singers as an optional part: “A
performance can be done without actors, singers, or even musicians.”
(“FAQ”)


The
inspiration for my opera largely comes from the Adam Curtis
documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,
which discusses how individuals stopped feeling like we are in
control of society or the future. A review of the series in the
Guardian describes the premise as,


[W]ithout
realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive
dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers –
seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is
to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, “The
underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has
happened – and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of
politics to change the world.” (Viner)

Curtis
lays much of the blame for the current state of affairs at the feet
of computers, or at least the mythology of stable systems which was
inspired by computer science. (All Watched Over by Machines of
Loving Grace) I thought it would be interesting to do a
computer-based piece that addressed his documentary. While I don’t
believe that computers or anything else are a neutral platform, I
think a large part of the problem comes from the way in which we are
using computers and allowing ourselves to be used by technology
companies. Any solution will certainly have to involve computers, so
it seems useful to think about how to deploy them positively rather
than under a politics of invisible corporate control.

The
Curtis documentary is also appealing because he addressed some issues
that had been coming up in conversations I have been having with
friends. When we think of the future, we think only of better
gadgets, not a better world. For example, when describing a new
iPhone app Word Lens, techCrunch breathlessly stated, “This
is what the future, literally, looks like.”
(Tsotsis)
They were not alone in this pronouncement, which was widely echoed
through major media outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle
who imagined a consumer reaction of, "holy cow, this is the
future." (Frommer)


Our
envisioned future is thus one of hypercapitalism. More and more
things to buy while at the same time, less and less money with which
to buy it. Consumers economise on food, but still buy expensive
iPhone contracts, presumably because they want to own a piece of the
future. Meanwhile, they have less and less control of even that as
Apple’s curatorial role prevents most consumers from being able to
install apps not approved by the corporation. Smart phones
disempower their users further by collecting their private
information. (Angwin and Valentino-Devries) The future is passive
consumers under greater control from the state and from corporations,
such as Google, Apple and Facebook, who win us over with appealing
gadgets. An online contact described this as a "totalitarian
pleasure regime." (Dugan) Thus we envision Huxley’s Brave New
World for those who can afford it and Orwell’s 1984 for
those who can’t.


The
left seems to have no widely articulated alternative idea of what a
better world would even look like. The Guardian quotes Curtis on
2011 protests, “’Even
the “march against the cuts”,’ he says, referring to the
TUC march in London in March,
‘it was a noble thing, but it was still a managerial approach. We
mustn’t cut this, we can’t cut that. Not, “There is another way.”’”
(Viner)
Curtis does not hand us a vision for what this other way might be,
but calls on us to imagine one.


This
opera will restate the problem outlined by Curtis and go on to link
the end of the future with the current apocalyptic concerns.
Originally, I want to focus mostly on the American preoccupation with
the Apocalypse and Rapture. If all the future will be just like now,
but with better gadgets, then we are only waiting for the end of the
world, which might as well come sooner rather than later. However,
various recent secular events seem to also bear inclusion. The New
York Times described a possible outcome of the US debt crisis as a
“Götterdämmerung,” describing a far right wing hope for a
“purifying” fire. (Posner and Vermeule) As the stock market
tumbled, looters set fire to high streets in the UK. Zoe Williams,
writing in the Guardian, noted that the consumer-oriented nature of
the riots is something “we’ve never seen before.” (Williams)
Rather than battle with the police, looters focused on gathering
consumer goods. Williams quotes Alex Hiller, “Consumer
society relies on your ability to participate in it.”
(Williams) Even their ability to be passive consumers was thwarted.
They had minimal access to what we’ve deemed to be the future.
However, setting large, destructive fires seems to imply that there
is more than just this going on. All of these things from religious
beliefs, to economic disaster to civil unrest share a sense of
hopelessness and feeling of things ending.


However,
rather than end on a negative note of yearning for oblivion, and the
end of the avant-garde, I do want listeners to consider a better
world. All of us have agency that can be expressed in ways other
than acquiring consumer goods. I do not present a view of what a
better world might look like, but do hope to remind them that one is
possible. There is another way.


I’ve
broken the opera up into four acts with connecting transition
sections. The durations are based on the fibonacci series. The
structure will be as follows:


8
min: Act 1 – The
Promise: Cooperative Cybernetics

2
min: Transition 1
21
min: Act 2 – The
Reality: The Rise of the Machines / Hypercapitlaism

3
min: Transition 2
13
min: Act 3 – The
Apocalypse

1
min: Transition 3
5
min: Act 4 – A
Better World is Possible: Ascension to Sirius


The
durations will probably vary slightly from performance to performance
and may evolve with our practice.


Act
1 explores the idealistic ideas of self-organising networks. Every
player in BiLE, as is normal, will create their own sound generation
code which will take no more than five shared parameters plus
amplitude to control their sounds. These parameters may be:
granular, sparse, resonant, pitched. Each player would have a slider
going from zero to one where zero means not at all and one means
entirely. Players will not control their sliders directly, but
instead vote for a value to increase or decrease. Their sound will
thus change in response to their own votes and votes of other
players. They can control their own amplitude at will. There is
also another slider, individual to every player, which controls how
anti-social they are. A value of zero will follow the group
decisions entirely and as the value increases, they will deviate more
and more from the group. A value of one should be actively
disruptive. All players should start with anti-social values of zero
and increase that number in a non-linear fashion until at the end the
group is, in general, very anti-social. The idea of group following
in this piece is also present in my earlier piece Partially
Percussive
but the users have much less agency in carrying it out in this act.


The
opera will be accompanied by video projections from Antonio Roberts.
I would like the start of this section to visually reference Richard
Brautigan’s poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”
from which the curtis documentary takes it’s name. The second stanza
is


I
like to think
   (right now, please!)
of a
cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer
stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with
spinning blossoms.
(Brautigan)


From
there, I would like there to be archival images of advertising and
assembly lines. As anti-social disorder increases, I’d like to see
more archival images of rioting and property destruction.


This
act will not begin rehearsals until October 2011.


Act
2 is included in my portfolio. It is the most operatic of all the
acts in that it includes live vocals. Players sample themselves first
reading common subject lines of spam emails, then common lines from
within spam emails and finally start reading an example of “spoetry”
– machine generated text that is sometimes used in an attempt to fool
spam filters. The players manipulate these samples to create a live
piece of text-sound poetry. In order to get material, I mined the
spam folder of my email account. I broke the material into sections
and assigned every line a number. (See attached)


Other
composers, such as Yannis Kyriakides in his piece “Scam Spam”
have used spam emails as source material. However, Kyraikides does
not include a vocal line in his piece. In 2008, composer/performer
Polly Moller approached me to improvise live on KFJC radio in
California. She played flute and pitched noisemakers and read a
“spoem” called “Nice to See You” and I did live
sampling/looping of her sounds and vocals. (No More Twist) I felt
satisfied with the results of this improvisation. Afterwards, I was
interested to keep working with spoetry and to look at doing more
structured text-sound pieces with a greater live component than I had
previously.


This
act builds on my experiences with Moller, using a larger ensemble,
and asking every member of BiLE to develop programmes specifically
for the manipulation of text sounds. They also manipulate artificial
sounds, which are recordings of my analog syntheiser. The score is
expressed as rules:


Rules
for playing:


Intro:

Start
immediately with the artificial sounds. You may play these throughout
the piece.

A:

Then
start recording and playing from the A section. These can go
throughout the piece.


B:

Then
go on to the B section. These can also go throughout the piece, but
should be used more sparingly once this section is passed.

C:

The
C section takes up the largest section of the piece. You do not need
to get to the end of all the lines provided.

Players
should announce what line they are recording via the chat.

Once
a line is recorded, other players may record that line (or fragments
of it) again, but cannot backtrack to a previous line. Players can
also choose to advance to the next line, but, again, backtracking is
not allowed.

When
a player is picking a soundfile to process, she can pick from any
section. If she picks from section C, it should be normally a recent
line, however you can break this rule if you have a good reason, ie.
you feel a really strong attachment to a previous line or think it
can exist as a counterpoint / commentary to the current line.

Blank
lines in the text should be interpreted as pauses in making new
recordings.




I
have not yet thought about videos for this section.


Act
3 will also have text sound, but as a collage on top of other
material. I was originally planning to have this section concentrate
solely on people’s religious or spiritual beliefs surrounding the
rapture, the apocalypse or 2012. I’m hoping to do telephone
interviews of Americans who believe the end is neigh. I’m hoping the
promise of being able to witness to new audiences will be enticing
enough to persuade them to participate. I have not yet found any
rapture believers to record, but as we are not going to start working
on this until October or November of 2011, it’s not yet urgent.


In
addition to rapture believers, I hope to do in-person recordings of
people who have New Age beliefs about the winter solstice of 2012. So
far I have interviewed one person and another has agreed to
participate also. I plan to have the piece organised so that the
rapture believers come first in the piece and the 2012 believers, but
as I have not yet acquired much material, this is subject to change.


I
plan to ask interviewees about current events, like rioting, economic
turmoil and climate change and include those things in the text by
how they correlate to religious and spiritual beliefs. The collage
will also be made up of samples referencing these also, such as fire
sounds, windows breaking, sirens, etc. This does present a risk of
being overly dramatic, but appropriate use of heavy processing will
turn the sounds into references that are more indirect. Also drama is
not inappropriate to the medium. The collage should become less and
less alarming towards the end, as the text switches to the generally
more hopeful New Age respondents.

Act
4 will have a graphic score, in the style of Cornelius Cardew’s
Treatise. I recently participated in the first all-vocal
performance of that piece, at the South London Gallery on 16
September 2011. The group I sang with did not have a lot of
experience with free improvisation, and it was interesting to see how
exposure to such open material challenged and inspired them. I hope
that similarly, BiLE will go places we would not have otherwise
without the graphic score.


I
do want it to move from a spiritual hope of the previous act to
something more inclusive. My hope is that the audience will leave
not with a sense that the apocalypse is coming in one form or
another, but that it is possible to avert disaster.

Dissertation Draft: BiLE, XYZ and gesture tracking

My colleague Shelly Knotts wrote a piece that uses the network features much more fully. Her piece, XYZ, uses gestural data and state-based OSC messages as well, to create a game system where players “fight” for control of sounds. Because BiLE does not follow the composer-programmer model of most LOrks, it ended up that I wrote most of the non-sound producing code for the SuperCollider implementation of Knotts’s piece. This involved tracking who is “fighting” for a particular value, picking a winner from among them, and specifying the OSC messages that would be used for the piece. I also created the GUI for SuperCollider users. All of this relied heavily on my BileTools classes, especially NetAPI and SharedResource.

Her piece specifically stipulated the use of gestural controllers. Other players used Wiimotes and iPhones, but I was assigned the Microsoft Kinect. There exists an OSC skeleton tracking application, but I was having problems with it segfaulting. Also, full-body tracking sends many more OSC messages than I needed and requires a calibration pose be held while it waits to recognise a user. (http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30 ) This seemed like overkill, so I decided it would be best to write an application to track one hand only.

Microsoft had not released official drivers yet when I started this and, as far as I know, their only drivers so far are windows-only. (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/about.aspx) I had to use several third-party, open source driver and middleware layers. (http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30) I did most of my coding around the level of the PrimesenseNITE (http://www.primesense.com/?p=515) middleware. There is a NITE sample application called PointViewer that tracks one hand. (http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30) I modified the programme’s source code so that in addition to tracking the user’s hand, it sends an OSC message with the hand’s x, y and z coordinates. This allows a user to generate gesture data from hand position with a Kinect.

In future versions of my Kinect application, I would like to create a “Touch-lessOSC,” similar to the TouchOSC iPhone app, but with dual hand tracking. One hand would simply send it’s z,y,z, coordinates, but the other would move within pre-defined regions to send it’s location within a particular square, move a slider, or “press” a button. This will require me to create a way for users to define shapes and actions as well as recognise gestures related to button pressing. I expect to release an alpha version of this around January 2012.

For the SuperCollider side of things, I wrote some classes, OSCHID and OscSlot (see attached), that mimmic the Human Interface Device (HID) classes, but for HIDs that communicate via OSC via third-party applications such as the one I wrote. They also work with DarwiinOSC (http://code.google.com/p/darwiinosc/) and TouchOSC (http://hexler.net/software/touchosc) on the iPhone. As they have the same structure and methods as regular HID classes, they should be relatively easy for programmers and the wiimote subclass, WiiOSCClient (see attached), in particular, is drop-in-place compatible with the pre-existing supercollider wiimote class, which, unfortunately, is currently not working.

All of my BiLE-related class libraries have been posted to SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/biletools/) and will be released as a SuperCollider quark. My Kinect code has been posted to my blog only, (http://www.celesteh.com/blog/2011/05/23/xyz-with-kinec/) but I’ve gotten email indicating that at least a few people are using the programme.

Dissertation Draft: BiLE – Partially Percussive

I wrote a gui class called BileChat in order to provide a chat interface, to allow typed communication during concerts and BileClock for a shared stopwatch. We use these tools in every piece that we play.

We played our first gig very shortly after forming and while we were able to meet the technical challenges, the musical result was not entirely compelling. Our major problems were not looking at each other and not listening to each other, which was exacerbated by the networking tools, especially the chat, but still the standard problems new ensembles tend to have.

Several years ago, when I was running an ensemble of amateur percussionists, I used Deep Listening pieces by Pauline Oliveros to help focus the group and encourage greater listening. Most of those exercises are very physical, asking the participants to use body percussion or to sing. This worked well for percussionists, but did not seem well suited to a laptop band. Almost all of the members of BiLE have previous experience playing in ensembles. While every group can benefit from listening exercises, we were not starting from scratch and the exercises we use should be ones that are compatible with networked laptop music. In other words, we needed listening skills within the context in which we were trying to perform.

I wrote a piece called Partially Percussive in order to implement Deep Listening-like ideas in a laptop context. I wrote the score on a studio white board as a list of rules:

Rules:

To start playing, sample the object.
Listen to other players. Are they playing:

  • Percussive vs Sustained
  • Sparse vs Dense
  • Loud vs Soft
  • Pointalistic vs Flowing

Follow the group until you decide to change.
If you hear a change, follow it.
Lay out whenever you want, for how long you want.
Sample the object to come in again.

The score stayed on the white board for two or three weeks. I took a photo of it for my records, however, the score for this piece has never been distributed via paper or email. I do not know what notes, if any, my colleagues took on the score. When describing the score to them, I said that they should drop out (“lay out”) when they “feel it” and return similarly.

I specified live sampling to add transparency to our performance, so audiences can have an idea of where our sounds are coming from. I picked percussion in particular after a IM conversation with Charles Amirkhanian, in which he encouraged me to write for percussion. We originally had a haphazard collection of various metal objects, however, we forgot to bring any of them for one of our gigs, so I went to Poundland and purchased a collection of very cheap but resonant kitchen objects and wooden spoons to play them with. We also use a fire bell. Because it has a long ringing tail on it’s sound, which is quite nice, we use it to start and end the piece. Finally, one of the ensemble members owns some cowbells, which we often also use. Each player usually has a single metal object, but is free to borrow objects from each other. In the case where someone is borrowing the cow bell, they typically allow the bell to ring while carrying it.

While the rules, especially in regards to ‘laying out,’ are influenced by Oliveros, our practice of the piece draws heavily on the performance practice of the anthony Braxton ensemble, which I played in 2004-5. In this piece, as well as in Braxton’s ensemble, players form spontaneous duos or trios and begin trading gestures. This depends on both eye contact and listening and thus requires us to develop both those skills.

When we started playing this piece, I was controlling my own patch with a wireless gamepad, with two analog sticks and several buttons. This gave me the ability to make physical motions and control my patch while away from my computer, for example, while getting an object from another player. Over time, more BiLE members have incorporated even more gestural controllers, such as iPhones running TouchOSC. Thus, when trading gestures, players will mimmic sound quality and physical movement. I believe this aids both our performance practice and audience understanding of the piece.

The technology of this piece does not require more than the chat and the shared stopwatch, but it appeals to audiences and we play it frequently.

Dissertation: BiLE Networking White Paper

This document describes the networking
infrastructure in use by BiLE.

The goal of the infrastructure design
has been flexibility for real time changes in sharing network data
and calling remote methods for users of languages like supercollider.
While this flexibility is somewhat lost to users of inflexible
languages like MAX, they, nevertheless, can benefit from having a
structure for data sharing.


Network
Models

If there is a good reason, for
example, a remote user, we support OSCGroups as a means of sharing
data.

If all users are located together on
the same subnet, then we use broadcast on port 57120.

OSC
Prefix

By convention, all OSC messages start
with ‘/bile/’

Data
Restrictions

Strings must all be ASCII. Non ASCII
characters will be ignored.

Establishing
Communication
Identity
ID
Upon joining the network, users
should announce their identity:

/bile/API/ID
nickname ipaddress port

nicknames must be ASCII only.

Example:

/bile/API/ID
Nick 192.168.1.66 57120

Note that because broadcast
echoes back, users may see their own ID arrive as an announcement.

IDQuery

Users should also send out their
ID in response to an IDQuery:

/bile/API/IDQery

Users can send this message at
any time, in order to compile a list of everyone on the network.

API
Query
Users can enquire what methods
they can remotely invoke and what data they can request.

/bile/API/Query

In
reply to this, users should send /bile/API/Key and /bile/API/Shared
(see below)

Key
Keys represent remote methods.
The user should report their accessible methods in response to a
Query

/bile/API/Key
symbol desc nickname

The symbol is an OSC message
that the user is listening for.
The desc is a text based
description of what this message does. It should include a usage
example.
The nickname is the name of the
user that accepts this message.

Example

/bile/API/Key
/bile/msg "For chatting. Usage: msg, nick, text" Nick
Shared
Shared represents available
data streams. Sources may include input devices, control data sent
to running audio processes or analysis. The user should report their
shared data response to a Query
/bile/API/Shared
symbol desc
The symbol is an OSC message
that the user sends with. The format of this should be

/bile/nickname/symbol
The desc is a text based
description of the data. If the range is not between 0-1, it should
mention this.
The nickname is the name of the
user that accepts this message.

Example
/bile/API/Shared
/bile/Nick/freq "Frequency. Not scaled."

Listening
RegisterListener
Shared data will not be sent out if no one has requested
it and it may be sent either directly to interested users or to the
entire group, at the sender’s discretion. In order to ensure
receiving the data stream, a user must register as a listener.
/bile/API/registerListener
symbol nickname ip port
The symbol is an OSC message
that the user will listening for. It should correspond with a
previously advertised shared item. If the receiver of this message
recognises their own nickname in in the symbol (which is formatted
/bile/nickname/symbol),
they should return an error:
/bileAPI/Error/noSuchSymbol

The nickname is the name of the
user that will accept the symbol as a message.
The ip is the ip address of the
user that will accept the symbol as a message.
The port is the port of the
user that will accept the symbol as a message.
Example
/bile/API/registerListener
/bile/Nick/freq Shelly 192.168.1.67 57120

Error

noSuchSymbol
In the case that a user receives a request to register a
listener or to remove a listener for data that they are not sharing,
they can reply with

/bile/API/Error/noSuchSymbol
OSCsymbol
The symbol is an OSC message
that the user tried to start or stop listening to. It is formatted
/bile/nickname/symbol.
Users should not reply with an error unless they recognise their own
nickname as the middle element of the OSC message. This message may
be sent directly to the confused user.

Example

/bile/API/Error/noSuchSymbol
/bile/Nick/freq
De-listening
RemoveListener
To announce an intention to ignore subsequent data, a
user can ask to be removed.
/bile/API/removeListener
symbol nickname ip
The symbol is an OSC message
that the user will no longer be listening for. If the receiver of
this message sees their nickname in the symbol which is formatted

/bile/nickname/symbol),
they can reply with /bile/API/Error/noSuchSymbol
symbol
The nickname is the name of the
user that will no longer accept the symbol as a message.
The ip is the ip address of the
user that will no longer accept the symbol as a message.
Example
/bile/API/removeListener
/bile/Nick/freq Shelly 192.168.1.67
RemoveAll

Users who are quitting the network can asked to be
removed from everything that they were listening to.
/bile/API/removeAll
nickname ip

The nickname is the name of the
user that will no longer accept any shared data.
The ip is the ip address of the
user that will no longer accept any shared data.
Example
/bile/API/removeAll
Nick 192.168.1.66

Commonly
Used Messages
Chatting
Msg
This is used for chatting.
/bile/msg
nickname text
The nickname is the name of the
user who is sending the message.
The text is the text that the
user wishes to send to the group.

Clock
This is for a shared stopwatch and not for serious
timing applications
Clock start or
stop
/bile/clock/clock
symbol
The symbol is either start or
stop.
Reset

Reset the clock to zero.
/bile/clock/reset
Set
Set the clock time
/bile/clock/set
minutes seconds
Minutes is the number of minutes past zero.

Seconds is the number of seconds past zero.


Proposed
Additions
Because users can silently join, leave
and re-join the network, it could be a good idea to have users time
out after a period of silence, maybe around 30 seconds or so. To
stay active, they would need to send I’m-still-here messages.

There should possibly also be a way
for a user to announce that they have just arrived, so, for example,
if a SuperCollider user recompiles, her connection will think of
itself as new and other users will need to delete or recreate
connections depending on that user.

Dissertation Draft: BLE Tech

In January 2011, five of my colleagues in BEAST and I founded BiLE, the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble. All of the founding members are electroacoustic composers, most of whom have at least some experience with an audio programming language, either SuperCollider or MAX. We decided that our sound would be strongest if every player took responsibility for their own sound and did his or her own audio programming. This is similar to the model used by the Huddersfield Experimental Laptop Orchestra (HELO) who describe their approach as a “Do-It-Yourself (DIY) laptop instrument design paradigm.” (Hewitt p 1 http://helo.ablelemon.co.uk/lib/exe/fetch.php/materials/helo-laptop-ensemble-incubator.pdf) Hewitt et al write that they “[embrace] a lack of hardware uniformity as a strength” and implies their software diversity is similarly a strength and grants them greater musical, (rather than technical) focus. (ibid) BiLE started with similar goals – focus on the music and empower the user, and has had similar positive results.

My inspiration, however, was largely drawn from The Hub, the first laptop band, some members of which were my teachers at Mills College in Oakland California. I saw them perform in the mid 1990s, while I was still an undergrad and had an opportunity then to speak with them about their music. I remember John Bischoff telling me that they did their own sound creation patches, although for complicated network infrastructure, like the Points of Presence Concert in 1987, Chris Brown wrote the networking code. (Cite comments from class?)

One of the first pieces in BiLE’s repertoire was a Hub piece, Stucknote by Scott Gresham Lancaster. This piece not only requires every user to create their own sound, but also has several network interactions including a shared stopwatch, sending chat messages and the sharing of gestural data for every sound. In Bischoff and Brown’s paper, the score for Stucknote is described as follows:

“Stuck Note” was designed to be easy to implement for everyone, and became a favorite of the late Hub repertoire. The basic idea was that every player can only play one “note”, meaning one continuous sound, at a time. There are only two allowable controls for changing that sound as it plays: a volume control, and an “x-factor”, which is a controller that in some way changes the timbral character or continuity of the instrument. Every player’s two controls are always available to be played remotely by any other player in the group. Players would send streams of MIDI controller messages through the hub to other players’ computer synthesizers, taking over their sounds with two simple control streams. Like in “Wheelies”, this created an ensemble situation in which all players are together shaping the whole sound of the group. An interesting social and sonic situation developed when more than one player would contest over the same controller, resulting in rapid fluctuations between the values of parameters sent by each. The sound of “Stuck Note” was a large complex drone that evolved gradually, even though it was woven from individual strands of sound that might be changing in character very rapidly. (http://crossfade.walkerart.org/brownbischoff/hub_texts/stucknote.html)

Because BiLE was a mostly inexperienced group, even the “easy to implement for everyone” Stucknote presented some serious technical hurdles. We were all able to create the sounds needed for the piece, but the networking required was a challenge. Because we have software diversity, there was no pre-existing SuperCollider Quark or MAX external to solve our networking problems. Instead, we decided to use the more generic music networking protocol Open Sound Control (OSC). I created a template for our OSC messages. In addition to the gestural data for amplitude and x-factor, specified in the score, I thought there was a lot of potential for remote method invocation and wanted a structure that could work with live coding, should that situation ever arise. I wrote a white paper (see attached) which specifies message formatting and messages for users to identify themselves on the network and advertise remotely invokable functions and shared data.

When a user first joins the network, she advertises her existence with her username, her IP address and the port she is using. Then, she asks for other users to identify themselves, so they broadcast the same kind of message. Thus, every user should be aware of every other user. However, there is currently no structure for users to quit the network. There is an assumption, instead, that the network only lasts as long as each piece. SuperCollider users, for example, tend to re-compile between pieces.

Users can also register a function on the network, specifying a OSC message that will invoke it. They advertise these functions to other users. In addition, they can share data with the network. For example, with Stucknote, everyone is sharing amplitude values such that they are controllable by anyone, including two people at the same time. The person who is using the amplitude data to control sound can be thought of as the owner of the data, however, they or anyone else can broadcast a new value for their amplitude. Typically, this kind of shared data is gestural and used to control sound creation directly. There may be cases where different users are in disagreement about the current value or packets may get lost. This does not tend to cause a problem. With gestural data, not every packet is important and packet loss is not a serious issue.

When a user puts shared data on the network, she also advertises it. Users can request to be told of all advertised data and functions. Typically, a user would request functions and shared data after asking for ids, upon joining the network. She may ask again at any time. Interested users can register as listeners of shared data. The possibility exists, (currently unused), for the owner of the data to send its value out on to registered users instead of the network as a whole.

In order to implement the network protocol, I created a SuperCollider class called NetAPI (see attached code and help file). It handles OSC communications and the infrastructure of advertising and requesting ids, shared functions and shared data. In order to handle notifications for shared data changes, I wrote a class called SharedResource. When writing the code for Stucknote, I had problems with infinite loops with change notifications. The SharedResource class has listeners and actions, but the value setting method also takes an additional argument specifying what is setting it. The setting object will not have it’s action called. So, for example, if the change came from the GUI, the SharedResource will notify all listeners except for the GUI. When SharedResources “mount” the NetAPI class, they become shared gestural data, as described above.