Networked Byte Organ update
I added about fifteen minutes of audio recorded from the Networked Byte Organ during the ITP show. Download them here (under "Sample output") and feel free to forward them to any record label executives you know!
May 10, 2007
May 04, 2007
Audio Art Final: Networked Byte Organ
Now we have an official-ish page up about the Networked Byte Organ, with photos and sound samples. Click here.
April 13, 2007
Audio Art: Sutartinės
Notes and links for my presentation today:
- A Concise History of Lithuanian Minimalism argues for an explicit link between Lithuanian minimalist composers and sutartinės
- More information about sutartinės, including sound samples
- Wikipedia on the music of Lithuania
Oh, and here's a bunch of sutartinės MP3s (for a limited time only.)
March 08, 2007
Audio Art: Week 8 Omnibus
Impressions of Times Square
It's beautiful, first of all. Unexpected. I've walked past or through that part of Times Square a hundred times without noticing it, or maybe noticing it but not finding it unusual.
Having the secret knowledge of its presence is magical. I stood over the sound for a while, with a bit of bliss in my expression, and passers-by gave me a strange look: the kind of look, I think, that you'd give to a shaman, or someone on hallucinogens. Someone who is able to perceive something that you can't.
Some people seemed to make the connection between my behavior (and the behavior of several others that were obviously there specifically to enjoy the piece) and the sound. The connection, I imagine, took one of two forms. They must have thought either (a) that I had found this sound of the natural urban environment so compelling that I had decided to stop going about my everyday business in order to experience it or (b) that the sound was intentionally placed there for public to enjoy. In either case, I felt like I was showing a friend a secret level in a video game. A warp zone. Something hidden and wonderful.
Tuning Space
Times Square is also commentary on its environment. LaBelle draws a parallel between Neuhaus' work (Times Square in particular) and the overtly architectural work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Both "[surprise] architecture with an altogether different order, one based on an appropriation and subsequent reworking of form" (p. 161). It's an apt comparison, I think, and it draws attention to the politics of Times Square. In the process of augmenting the public space of Times Square, Neuhaus draws attention to the site's status quo, and implicitly argues that things could be different from the way they currently are. (Another point of reference is Wodiczko’s building projections.)
Dream House
Times Square is about as site-specific as you can get, and to me the piece is more about space, architecture and the city than it is about sound. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House is the polar opposite of this. Let me explain.
I had been wanting to go to Dream House for some time, and this week's assignment provided the perfect opportunity. I expected a strange experience and my expectations were filled, and then some. Here's how it works. You're conducted into the room by a volunteer who petitions you to remove your shoes; the room is thickly carpeted. There are light filters over the windows that let only magenta light pass through. There are pillows on the floor. There are 35 pure sine tones loudly booming from speakers in the corners.
The sine tones are designed to combine in complex ways, and the tones you perceive are quite different depending on where you're standing in the room. (Here's an accessible description of the technical details of the piece.) In this sense, there is an engagement with the concept of space, and I spent a lot of time moving around the room to experience the effects of proximity to the different speakers, the walls, the narrow space of the hallway, and so forth. (Although the presence of pillows encourage you to lie down, I found that the carpet significantly deadened the sound when your ears were close to it.)
But then I discovered that even more dramatic effects could be obtained simply by holding my hands close to my ears: the resulting resonance chamber even enabled me to "play" simple melodies (audible, of course, only to me). It was then that I realized that the Dream House isn't about space at all: it's about the perception of sound. It experiments with the boundary between the physical apparatus of auditory perception and the conventional expectations for "music." The space is there purely to provide a sterile environment for this experimentation.
So even though the sound of Dream House and Times Square are superficially similar—sustained, pure drones—the content, and politics, are very different. Neuhaus uses sound to augment space; Young uses space to augment sound.
Dream House isn't as accessible as Times Square, but it has its own kind of beauty. Several of my House-mates were blissfully spread-eagled on the floor in meditation. I, however, found it to be an unforgiving and brutal experience. It made me very much aware of the fact that I am little more than a bipedal sack of watery guts. After a while I couldn't hear music anymore; I could only hear the sound of taut skin and tiny bones frantically vibrating in my inner ear. That's when I decided to leave.
February 23, 2007
Audio Art Week 5: Expressive Potential of Pseudorandom Numbers
This week's Max/MSP patch. Click on the image for a larger screenshot. I'll post the patch itself later.
Computers are algorithmic machines. So, by definition, they can't generate true random numbers. There are, however, various ways of generating numbers that appear random—pseudorandom numbers. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), like a number of its contemporary computer systems, used a very simple device called a linear feedback shift register. In pursuit of an exploration of the expressive potential of pseudorandom noise, I implemented such a system in Max/MSP for my assignment this week.
Here's how it works: A shift register with some number of bits is initialized to a value, and shifted to the left. The values of two of the bits (stored before the shift) are XORed together and put in the slot left empty by the shift. One or more bits are then fed into a buffer (in order to generate bytes or words) or directly into a DAC. The process repeats indefinitely. An example (from my Max/MSP patch) is below.
Study #1 - 32kbit from buffer: Basic noise generated by a 15-bit linear feedback shift register. (Download)
Linear feedback shift registers are easy to implement (especially in hardware) and give numbers impressively similar to real randomness. They're not truly random, however, as they eventually produce repeating sequences. The number of bits before a sequence repeats is determined by the number of bits in the register and the precise bits XORed back into the register. The NES, for example, has two modes: one to produce a sequence that repeats every 32,767 bits, and another to produce a sequence that repeats every 93 bits.
The 93 bit mode, as you can imagine, produces a tone when played back at full speed. Example below.
Study #2 - 93 bit from buffer: Bits fed back into the shift register produce a repeating pattern of 93 bytes. (Download)
More after the jump, including my quick attempt to make a NES-like song.
Continue reading "Audio Art Week 5: Expressive Potential of Pseudorandom Numbers" »
February 15, 2007
Audio Art Week 4: Lovecraft, Mega Man, Vowels
The assignment for this week was to create an instrument in Max/MSP that can be controlled with the keyboard, applying the principles we learned so far in class. My first experiment was with a keyboard-controlled vowel synthesizer (see later in the entry for more information). The screenshot above is a spectrogram that came from audio generated by the second patch I did this week, which I call the BYTE ORGAN. (Okay, Mega Man wasn't in the original spectrogram.)
Click the image above for a larger screenshot of the patch, or here for the patch itself.
The Byte Organ is an additive synthesis instrument. It takes incoming binary data, breaks it up into bytes, and toggles on and off oscillators tuned to multiples of a fundamental frequency, based on the bits set in the byte.
For example, take the byte with the decimal value 97 (ASCII a). That byte has bits 0, 5, and 6 set (20 = 1; 25 = 32; 26 = 64; 1 + 32 + 64 = 97). Given this input, the byte organ would create three sine waves: one at the fundamental frequency, one at the fifth overtone, and one at the sixth overtone.
When fed a series of bytes in succession (either from the keyboard or from a file), this instrument has the potential to make audible the structure of the underlying data. I've put a few examples below, along with spectrograms of some of the sounds.
Study #1 - Alphabet: This is just me using the instrument's keyboard input to type out the alphabet (in a vague approximation of the regular alphabet song). The spectrogram above is made from this audio. (Download)
Study #2 - Madness: Yours truly at the keyboard again, this time typing the first few sentences from H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. Added delay makes it kind of spooky. (Download)
More madness after the cut.
Continue reading "Audio Art Week 4: Lovecraft, Mega Man, Vowels" »
February 10, 2007
The Nature of Code/Audio Art Week 3
I combined this week's assignment for Audio Art and the Nature of Code. I took one of Daniel's attraction examples, modified it slightly, and hooked it up to some sound synthesis patches in Max/MSP.
Click screen shot above to see the applet. All of the sound stuff was done in Max/MSP, so the applet on its own isn't very interesting.
The idea was to make the motion audible. Processing sends the X and Y coordinates of each circle to Max/MSP. Max/MSP then uses these values to generate tones. I tried a number of different patches, each of which used an oscillator at the frequency of the Y coordinate to modulate an oscillator at the frequency of the X coordinate. Some clips from these experiments are presented below. You can download the Max/MSP patches used for clips #6-#10 here (requires MaxLink).
Motion Study #1 - Amplitude Modulation (Download)
Motion Study #2 - Frequency Modulation (Download)
More samples after the jump.
February 01, 2007
Collage in the Field
This week's theme is transportation.
I spend about eighty minutes a day on Metro North's New Haven line. I took my minidisc recorder with me one morning earlier this week and recorded an entire one-way trip.
Collage #1 "Announce": I cut out the station announcements from the track and pasted them together next to one another. This makes the commute seem a lot shorter than it actually is. :) (Download)
Collage #2 "Doors": This consists of the sound of the doors closing and opening at each stop, along with the warning bell that rings just before the door closes. (Usually the doors are open for about fifteen to twenty seconds before the warning bell rings; I've cut out the audio for that duration.) (Download)
See below the jump for more, including the amazing MetroCard symphony.
January 25, 2007
Listen Far, Listen Close
Assignment 1: Listen Far
Hudson Park is a little patch of green and beach around the corner from my apartment building. It overlooks Long Island Sound. Earlier today I walked down there, clambered up a big ice-age era boulder, picked a spot where there were no dessicated Canadian goose leavings, and listened. Above is a photograph of me listening, and being cold.
There was a lot to listen to. Gentle waves were breaking on the beach. A woman walked past with her dog on a leash; her footfalls were surprisingly loud and click-clacky. As she exited the park, her dog barked at something. Occasionally, a gull called, and there were a few chirps from smaller birds that really should be south for the winter by now. There were some people working on the roof of a nearby house (you can see it in the panorama below in the right-most frame); I could hear their hammering and jabbering loud and clear.
Crappy cell phone panorama of Hudson Park: Click to get a bigger version
Then I tried to listen further. The wind was whistling through the trees all around me. There was a distant rumble, which I think probably came from I-95, maybe a mile and a half north. Even further: the sound of the wind moving between my beard and my coat. The resonance of the cavity created by my ear, partially covered by the edge of my hat.
(More after the jump, including Assignment #2)