Tag: music

On etsy / getting royal / advertising

While I work my way through the eBay appeals process, I’ve moved my eCommerce to Etsy. I exchanged a few emails with them before setting up shop, and they’re totally cool with hosting music commissions. Their fees are also less than eBay, but there’s no chance of anybody bidding up the price.

I’ve got 22 opportunities for commissions remaining. Well, 21, because I really want to get one from Queen Beatrix. To show my appreciation for her allowing my use of the Royal Conservatory, I will wave my fee. It’s the least I can do. And, of course, I’ll use her equipment to make the piece.
Since I attend the Royal Conservatory, there actually is some connection to the queen. She regularly exchanges letters with the head of my school. So, to reach the queen, I have to convince his secretary that I’m worth his time, and then him that I’m worth the queen’s time and then the queen herself. I’ve heard that she likes ballet and goes to the ballet performances at school, so I could wait for one of those and attempt to approach her. And/or, I can try going through the three filter approach. I really am quite fond of Stravinsky, so I think I will aim for something like Stravinsky-meets-IDM-meets-noise, with emphasis on the Stravinsky. There’s now some documentation to use the OSC->CV converters at school, so I can get the kind of tuning I need to make a (micro)tonal piece.
I’m not sure entirely how to pitch this. I mean, I really want to write something that she’ll like. And all my pieces are really short. If I write something a minute long and she doesn’t like it, at least I haven’t taken up too much of her time. I think I’ll leave that last bit as unspoken, since it’s not really compelling.
Anyway, if any of you, dear readers, has some connection to the Queen of the Netherlands (or, you know, any royalty, but other monarchs will need to pay the $14), please let me know.
Of course, there are still the other 21 unpurchased commissions. Apparently, it’s possible to buy metro ads in Rotterdam for 17,50€ / week. According to an ad I saw. I haven’t contacted them to see if I can really just get one. I haven’t put any effort into buying banner ads on the web yet, but I think I’ll approach some New Music blogs. I’m not sure what to put in a print ad. a picture of myself? A cool closeup of some synthesizer knobs? A picture of myself in front of some close-up synthesizer knobs?
Yesterday, I discovered a pocket notebook that I got in 2003 to jot down my musical ideas. This morning, I went to read it. What half-forgotten ideas could I return to and realize? The sole idea that I wrote down starts with, “Patron system: possibility of running a commission service” and continues like a Marketting Requirements Document. Ha ha ha. Awesome.
Composers, of course, have something called cultural capital. They help forge identities for their communities. American composers bolster the American identity. Gay composers bolster the gay identity. And so on. Many composers are slightly outside of the mainstream of their culture. By writing music, they gain additional access to the shared culture, while having a hand in forming it. The problem for the last several years has been how to turn cultural capital into monetary capital.
But I see the commissioning/gift economy as something more than just a capital-based solution. One of the huge problems of the current broken copyright system is that people do not own their own culture. Our shared myths don’t belong to us, they belong to corporations! The gift economy of music puts our culture back into our own hands. Furthermore, commissioning directly involves the community. Commissioners have a say in the formation of their culture. They share cultural capital with the composer. They directly participate in society and culture. Commissioners are catylists for cultural creation and change. They help build a shared identity and strengthen their culture. Commissioning music is the patriotic thing to do.
What is a country? Is it just a land mass? Is it a particular government? Is it a collection of people who happen to live within certain geographical borders? No, a nation is an identity. A country arises from the people. When somebody loves a country, they love the people, they love the art, they love the history, they love the culture. And if you love something, you don’t passively watch it, you participate. You vote. You hike. You create community and participate in institutions. Art is patriotic.
I, like most folks, have many different identity affiliations. I’m American. I’m queer. I’m Californian. I’m a student. I’m a composer. I live and learn in Holland. (I’m a manly man.) I have an exerimental asthetic. etc etc etc. When I make music, I am all of those identites making music.
So how do you concisely, pictorally represent the possibility of expanding cultural capital on the basis of music and identity and sounds? Maybe a screen shot of Ardour?

New Phone Number

Today I learned that if you lose a prepaid phone, you also lose your phone number. My new number is +31 (0)6 42 83 1440

Also, losing a phone means losing all your phone numbers. Please email me back with your number or send me an SMS, if you think you will want to chat with me.

My old phone is someplace in Birmingham. Alas. I hope somebody gets some use out of it.
In other news, Polly (who is awesome) took a sign up sheet with her to the 21 Grand thing last night and got 4 more names! Hooray. Only 22 to go.
I posted to friendster and Craig’s List and haven’t gotten anything from that. I feel like I’ve lost a lot of cachet by leaving eBay. I need to start looking at banner ads or adwords with google.
I think next week, I will start going to school again. I’ve been sorta, um, not going except to lab hours. I dunno about bea 5 (the giant room of analog synth of doom). It would take me years to master it. I’m totally into the bank of sixteen oscillators (16!! 16!!! It’s obscene!) and the sequencer and the VOSIM and the third octave filter and something called the VTQ and anything that does the same thing as a module I own in my own synth. But the other things – there are just so many of them and it’s going to take a lot of experimentation to use them in a non-cliched way. Like the plate reverb is super awesome, but it only gets like one sound and that sound is full of a lot of hiss. If I want to do something really interesting with the plate, I’m going to need to de-ess it and then either do some sort of feedbacky tape delay or pitch shifting because the sound of that plate does not change ever – it’s always the same pitch. So I think I’m going to concentrate on the things I already understand and see what kind of sounds I can tease out of them. Because playing with the new thing or the splashy thing or the 200 kilo thing is a lot of fun, but the resulting recordings are really hard to work with. It’s possible to pull out a good minute from the exploratory noodling, but it’s easier and better to do something immediately interesting and record that.
Also, I want to think more about post-processing. I’ve got 178461978461 Audacity plugins and I thin I’d like to subtly apply the same fx to all my recordings, so they sound like they go together. All my MOTM recordings mostly sound right together and the bea 5 ones have their own sound, but some signature should unify them. Like if I just got the perfect impulse response to convolve everything with. The IR of the gods.

Whoah

I take back what I said about bidding wars. Color me astonished.

Two strangers (well, maybe) are in a competition on who can devote the most resources into giving away music. There’s something really moving about that.
Some of you might note that when I talk about “the future of music,” I’m not usually talking about sounds, but rather economics, copyrights and delivery formats. This is because I take a sort of a Marshall McLuhan approach. Two hundred years ago, music was something of a luxury. If you were hearing it, you or somebody else was exerting the effort of actually playing it. (There were also mechanical devices, but let’s leave those aside.) Music production was a skill – an investment of both time and physical resources in the form of an instrument.
Gradually, music has gotten more and more accessible. You have music boxes, player pianos (which could also function as a MIDI-like recording device providing higher fidelity recordings of some important pianists than surviving audio recordings), then mechanical recordings like records, then analog magnetic and now digital. It used to be that one physical object held up to 3 minutes. Now we can carry around days of music in our pockets and listen constantly. The availability of music has caused it’s value to change. It’s caused the way we listen to change.
Musical skill is not as valued in the general public as it once was. Simply: not as many middle class kids get piano lessons. They get ipods instead. Music has moved from being participatory to spectator / consumer. The ability to carry around days of tunes at a time has created a very strong demand for those same tunes and raised the amount of resources allocated to music in general. But the amount allocated to each tune individually has declined a great deal. We value music in general more, but each individual piece of it less. (In general. I know you’re crazy for your copy of Bleach by Nirvana or the Gould recording of the Goldberg Variations, but you’re not crazy for every thing in your collection, probably.)
Given the incredible changes in music and listening that delivery mechanisms and economics, etc have brought about, it seems obvious to me that such concepts are integral to conceiving of the future of music. It might be impure, but there’s a strong case to be made that recording technology has been the most influential force for change in music production and performance over the last hundred years. It set the length of pop tunes. It introduced vibrato to the violin. Even the concept of virtuosity – the height of musical purity – was directly informed by recording technology and distribution systems.
So I don’t see the business side in binary opposition to the creative/art side. They inform and direct each other and work in harmony (ideally) like yin and yang. Also, there’s already a lot of discourse about sounds. There are a lot of people with many different ideas about what sounds to make and how to make them. I couldn’t pick one and say “that’s the future.” I can add to that discussion, but not so well with words. Although, if I had to pick something, I think I’d go with the Long String Instrument. Man, that’s something special that ought to be getting more exposure and more gigs.

New Auction / the Future of Music

Since my first two auctions are done tomorrow, I just put up number 3. I’m trying to figure out how to stagger them. It’s a new and different phenomenon for me to think a week ahead. I don’t know how to add a “buy it now” button. I suspect it costs extra. Using eBay actually adds a fair bit of overhead in cost and time. Also, it adds some overhead for the commissioner in that they need an account and then they wait. I’m weighing my options in whether I should move to a shopping cart model instead. Given the low cost, I think this time overhead is probably a large disincentive. It seems like a $14 commission is an impulse buy for most. Also, I’m unlikely to gather a biding war or anything.

The future of music, of course, is not a one-size-fits all model. Other options include things like the Buddha Machine (Is there really a little Buddha inside? I should take mine apart.) The music is inherently in an object, thus making it something other than being (only) data. The Women Take Back the Noise compilation is also, similarly, the music of the future. The packaging includes a little crackle box, in the shape of a flower. The music inside is Creative Commons licensed. The goal of the project is greater exposure for the artists participating, and I think their design achieves that goal well. the crackle box makes the object itself something tangible to buy. However, the data on the disks is still shareable. This gets the widest distribution possible, since people who want something they can hold get such a thing, and they also get something they can share. The more people have the disks, the wider the likely sharing of the data encoded on them. Very smart.
It’s also taking a subversive look at femininity. The packaging is all bright colors and there are flowers on the CD, but the contents is noise. This subversiveness both challenges and reinforces a gender binary in that it defies expectations by containing noise, but supports the binary by encoding the gender of it’s participants with flowers. I think it’s really great and I wish the participants the very best of luck. I’m also really glad I’m not on it, because of the flowers. Traditional, even if subversive, symbols of femininity make me very very nervous. There’s a group of women in the San Francisco Bay Area who don Betty Page wigs and wedding dresses for all their gigs. Some of these women are really punk rock. It’s a really smart way to make comments on the expectation of gender. But for myself, I can’t embrace it even ironically. There is absolutely no way I could stand in front of people in long hair with a dress. That’s my own issue. But I often feel kind of left out. I don’t get any sort of male privilege as far as I know, but I feel really uncomfortable participating in actions designed to raise the status of women as anything other than a consumer or spectator. A group called Fresh Meat has just issued a Call For Work by gender variant artists. I hope they want sound installations too.
In other news, the little woman in off in California chopping down trees (it’s like anti-arbor day there) and I lost my cell phone, so theoretically I should be getting lots of things done, like my new Michael Savage piece and my super nifty code for HID and wii in SuperCollider, but um, yeah.

Ebay!

The Gift Economy and Sustainable Music

Daniel Wolf of Renewable Music reported that I was the first person trying to market commissions as e-commerce. There may be some disagreement on that, but I’m pretty sure that I’m the first person who has tried to market a commission on ebay. (Auction 1, Auction 2)

There are a few reasons you should care about this. One is that you might be the first person (or in the first group of 30, since that’s how many I’m putting up in this project) to commission a piece of music via ebay. The other is that this is a proof of concept for the viability of music in the internet age.
What is music but data? Data wants to be free. People love to share. On the one hand, we have the RIAA fighting the future (and the present) by suing all their customers. That business model is not sustainable and has numerous other problems. On the other hand, we have the sharers – people who love music and post their favorite pieces on the internet, via a website or p2p or whatever. And in the middle we have artists – me and others like me. The RIAA hasn’t done much for me lately, but neither has p2p, really. When musicians ask me how they’re supposed to cover the costs of recording if their music gets traded for free online, all I can say is what the blogosphere has been saying. Fans will buy merch. Fans will paypal you donations, like a tip jar. The fans will come through, somehow. But how, really? Merch is a logo on a piece of material. A logo is data. The logos, like the tunes they stand for, want to be free. So all we really have is the virtual tip jar.
Some of us do give virtual tips, but most don’t. Freeing mp3s to your fans isn’t like busking. There’s no eye contact. There’s no presence. This model is not sustainable, either. How many of us actually go and paypal every artist who we’ve downloaded and like? And what do the fans get in return? A moral satisfaction, sure, but not enough to make the model work. In practice, the fans get very little for their efforts.
Artists are left with the problem of how to distribute their music such that it makes it to their fans and they cover their costs and can live. Moreover, the manner of distribution and monetary compensation should capture the zeitgeist of sharing and direct involvement. The fans must get something tangible in return, in a time when tangibility itself is becoming slippery.
I think commissioning is the answer to this dilemma. The commission amount covers costs. The fans get something real in return – their name attached to the work – a credit as an integral part of the creation. Because as the RIAA knows and fears, the fans have been integral all along. This is one answer to the question of how smaller artists can thrive in a direct-to-consumer, sharing sort of environment. The gift economy! The commissioner gives money to the artist who gives music to hir fans. Like other gift economies, the value of the gifts grow as it spreads to more and more people. Instead of fighting the internet economies of data, this model requires it.
I think Ebay is a natural fit for this project. The auction aspect means that minimal costs are covered and the value of the fan’s gift is in proportion to the value in which other fans hold it. In any case, some sort of discrete transaction method is required. A popular artist could get more commissions than s/he could hope to fill otherwise.
If somebody gets this concept to work in practice, then we have the new model. So here’s my trial seeking a proof of concept. Music can be free and artists and fans can cooperate and thrive without leech-like corporations persecuting both.

Edit

See http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/podcast/?page_id=60 for more information

Subliminals, Timbre and Convolution

Recently, in Boing Boing, there was a post about a company marketing a subliminal message to gamers. They would hear the message 10000 – 20000 times a second. That’s 10 kHz – 20 kHz. Those repetitions are almost too high to be in the audio range! I can’t hear 20 kHz all that well. Also, what about scaling? To keep from peaking, the maximum amplitude of
each message would have to be between 0.00005 – 0.0001 of the total amplitude range. That’s pretty subliminal, all right.

I went to work trying to play a short aiff file over and over at that rate. My processor crapped out really fast. That’s a lot of addition. As I was falling asleep that night, I calculated that on a CD, each new message would start every 4 – 10 bytes! Why at that rate, it’s practically convolution.
Indeed, it is more than “practically” convolution, it is convolution and as such it doesn’t need to be done via real-time additions, but can be done via free software like SoundHack. The first step is getting a series of impulses. To try to create a “subliminal” message, you need a series of positive impulses that vary randomly between 10000 – 20000 times per second. I wrote a short SuperCollider program to produce such impulses.

SynthDef("subliminal-impulse", {arg out = 0;

 var white, ir;
 white = WhiteNoise.kr;
 white = white.abs;
 white = white * 10000;
 white = white + 10000;
 ir = Dust.ar(white);
 Out.ar(out, ir);
 
}).play

The WhiteNoise.kr produces random values between -1 and 1. We take the absolute value of that to just get numbers between 0 – 1. Then we multiply, to make them numbers between 0 – 10000 and add to put them in the range 10k – 20k.
Dust makes impulses at random intervals. The impulses are between 0 – 1. The argument is the average number of impulses per second. So Dust makes 10k – 20k impulses per second. Record the output of that to disk and you’ve got some noise, but it’s noise with some important characteristics – all the impulses are positive and they have zeros between them. This is what we need if we’re going to be subliminal at gamers.
Ok, so I’m going to take that file and open it SoundHack and save a copy of it as a 16bit file, rather and a 32 bit file. Then I’ll split the copy into separate mono files. (This is all under the file menu.) then, to save disk space, I’ll throw away the 32 bit file and the silent right channel. So now I have a 16bit mono file full of impulses open in SoundHack
Under the Hack menu, there’s an option called “Convolution.” Pick that. Check the box that says “Normalize” (that will handle the amplitude for you so the result is neither too quiet or too loud) and then hit the button that says “Pick Impulse.” This will be our recording of spoken text that we want made subliminal. (Fortunately, I had such a message at hand.) In actuality, it doesn’t matter which file is the one with the clicks and which is the one with the text. Convolution treats both files as equal partners. Then it asks us to name the output file. Then it goes, then we’re done. Here’s my result.
If you suddenly feel like forming a militia or running in fear, then it worked. If not, well, the sonic result is still kind of interesting. The timbres are all totally present but the actual sound events are unintelligible (at least to the conscious mind). For every one of our little impulses created by Dust.ar, we’ve got a new copy of Jessica plotting revolution. (The text is actually from Lesbian Philosophy: Explorations by Jeffner Allen (Palo Alto: Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1987) and the piece I originally made with it is here.)
This is actually a lot like granular synthesis, if you think about it. Imagine that instead of convolving the whole audio file, we just did 50ms bits of it. Every impulse would start a new copy of the 50 ms grain, but instead of with additions, with FFTs, which are faster – we can have many, many more grains. And they could be smaller and still be meaningful. Heck, they could be the size of the FFT window.
The FFT version of a convolution involves taking a window of the impulse and another of the IR (our subliminal message – normally known as an impulse response). You add the phases together and multiply the amplitudes. The amplitudes multiplications give us the right pitch and the phase addition gives us the right timing – almost. Some additions will be too big for the window and wrap around to the beginning. You can avoid that by adding zero padding. You double the size of the window, but only put input in the first half. Then none of your phases will wrap around.
We can get some very granular like processes, but with nicer sound and better efficiency. For example, time stretching. We could only update the IR half as often as the impulse stream and do window-by window convolutions. There are other applications here. I need to spend time thinking of what to do with this. Aside from sublimating revolution.

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Jobs I want

I want to be that guy. OMG, it would be so awesome to work for the BBC on Dr Who music. That video is so awesome. Also, check out his kewl old keyboards. That Arp Odyssey is sweet! He says the BBC never throws anything away, so those are all lurking around there someplace.
The new series does not have incidental music that is as killer as the original series, alas. This is why they need me.
Also, they point out that the teme song is about a minute long. The guy spent 5 weeks on it and used like 16 tracks or more. I spend like an hour for a one minute piece and use around 4 tracks. I feel like such a slacker in comparison.
I think I’ll add some complexity to the three pieces in my queue now.

On the radio in 5.6 hours

Hello, I will be live on the radio tonight at midnight in The Hague. That’s 16:00 for Californians and I don’t know about other time zones, as something very odd is going on with daylight savings or something in the US. There is a live stream on the web and information about archives also here.

I will be playing some laptop and probably some tape pieces including one not yet posted to my podcast and one that is not done yet, but will be by then.
In other news, I’ve got 3 commissions so far and have been mentioned in a few blogs (w00t), so in good capitalist style, I’m going to raise my rates – on Friday. If you want the lower price, act fast. A commissioned minute of noise can make a thoughtful birthday gift, commemorate a special occasion or just show off your impeccably good taste. And it might lead to international fame of some kind – the folks so far will get their names mentioned on 90.2 FM Den Haag in a few hours.

Edit

See http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/news.html for commission information.

Commission a short piece

Ok, so I live in the “center” of The Hague. This is a lot like an outdoor shopping mall. Everyday, I walk past mannequins. They used to freak me out, but no more. One of them is wearing a suit which I like. I pass it every day. Every day I like it a little bit more. I want to buy this suit.

Ok, so now that we’re clear that my motives are totally shallow, I’ve decided to start a commissioning thingee. I’m working on an album of pieces around 1 minute in length. I expect it to be done in two or three months. It is possible for you (yes, you!) to commission a piece on the album for the low price of 7€ ($10ish USD). You as the commissioner get to name the piece. Your role as titler and commissioner will be mentioned in the program notes for the piece whenever it is presented in any form. You will get a copy of the pice emailed to you in the audio format of your choice (MP3, AIFF, WAV, Apple Lossless, AAC) and have 5 days in which to come up with a title (I reserve the right to nix titles that I deem offensive). I retain copyright, but will release the piece under a share music licence, which thus grants you the rights to make copies for your friends and share it via your website or whatever.
The first commissioned piece is up on my podcast already. You could be next!

Edit

See http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/news.html for commission information.

Idea: Am I Trumpet or Not?

Jean-Calude Risset, while he was at Bell Labs, derived the overtone structure for trumpet attack timbres. Then, he made a catalog of available synthesized trumpet sounds. This was in the 60’s I think. There were already hundreds of computer models for trumpets. The number has undoubtedly grown. His catalog is a tape of him saying the number, followed by the sound. But this is a problem. Some of those trumpet sounds are subjectively better than others. But who has time to listen to the thousands of sounds available just to pick one?

The solution: an internet ratings site! People hear a trumpet sound and give it a score. (Or, it could be a contest where two trumpet sounds are pitted against each other.) Soon, one rises to the top of the heap. This is the best trumpet sound! Hooray!
The site should also offer the synthesis algorithm and sample code in C sound or whatever the sound is coded in. Risset’s catalog thus becomes useful to synthesis geeks.
I’m too lazy to do this, but I think it’s a good idea. Also, I can host it.