If you do want to get religious about this, you may want to wear this around your neck: Open Source Hardware logo as jewelry! Photo (CC-BY-SA) MAKE’s Becky Stern.
We’ve followed open source hardware – and generally hardware that is more open to user customization and modification – on this site since the beginning. As I prepare for a talk on the MeeBlip at Berlin’s Create Art & Technology Conference, though, I think it’s time to do a proper survey of the hardware that’s out there.
The ability to modify music gear is something that’s important to a lot of people as musicians. It means the ability to learn how the technology we use works, and therefore to have a deeper musical and compositional understanding of it. And it can mean the ability to make music hardware more expressive of your sonic imagination and creative ideas. Finally, it adds an additional avenue through which you can share your understanding and use and modification of musical instruments with other people.
Even proprietary hardware can become more “open” in the general sense. In the early days of synths, it was commonplace to include detailed specifications and even circuit diagrams. That arguably furthered the evolution of music gear, as knowledge was shared, and it certainly allowed more advanced users to better understand how that gear worked. We’ve seen a subtle return to those days, with examples like Korg’s Monotron and MonoTribe hardware, for which the company released schematics.
The viral, revolutionary spread of the monome design owes in part a community built around modification, access to critical schematics, and some open sourced software which the community took and modified. The monome, however, focuses on a fully open-source protocol and availability to schematics. Those schematics are not free for use in your own creations, which has sometimes caused friction as makers sell modified or homebrewed variants of the monome. On the other hand, many in the monome community value the handcrafted original hardware and don’t particularly want “clones” and the like, and have found the available information more than enough to fuel their musical needs.
Open Source Hardware goes further, by placing everything under a license that makes it free for use. This would include the software (either running on the device, on an attached computer, or both), the schematics of the design, and even visual elements of the design, as well as the documentation. Projects that give their users the most freedom to work with any modifications they make also allow for unfettered commercial use; that is, you don’t have to worry if you sell a few, or even many, if you run afoul of the project’s original creators. Without going into the debate for or against such an approach, if this kind of sharing is your goal, then it follows it will important for you to make that freedom explicit. This sort of explicit use is also what is described in the Open Source Hardware definition, which our MeeBlip project has adopted because we feel the project and definition fit one another.
Note that there’s a very real debate about whether the ideals of free software are applicable to open source hardware. There’s no debating it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison: copying hardware means physically manufacturing something. (I’m surprised to see, in German, the use of the term Freie Hardware, which has generally been avoided in English. See also the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, which goes beyond some of these specific – and possibly not-really-applicable – licenses.)
I’ll say this: I think adding in the issues of economics, materials, sustainability, local manufacture, labor, distribution, and international trade make this question more compelling for discussion. It’s messier than software, yes – but given that all software relies on hardware on which to run, dealing with these messy and often demanding questions means engaging more of the many dimensions in which technology interacts with economics.
But first, we just need to find out what’s out there. And that’s where you come in. If you’ve got a project, or use a project, or just know about a project, let us know. If it’s your own project – especially if you feel we’ve ignored you in the past (trust me, you don’t want to see my inbox or brain) – now’s your chance to tell us about it.
Because it’s the narrowest and most sharply-defined category, I’m most interested in those projects that fit the Open Source Hardware definition – not for philosophical reasons so much as taxonomic ones. But other projects are welcome, too; I’d like to hear about them.
About that MeeBlip…
And we’ll have the first of a series of updates on the MeeBlip project later this week. (The new SE and micro projects, and updated firmware, as well as vastly-expanded documentation, are all due soon, held up only by international shipping, weather, and illness challenges I’ll describe later.)
In the meantime, fire away.
Or Talk in Person!
If you’re in Berlin, this weekend join some terrific discussions on creativity, technology, and DIY, including my talk on the MeeBlip, lots of talks on hardware design and prototyping (including for beginners), and projects like the fantastic libmonome. And if you see me, say hi! (My talk is Sunday morning.)
Drink up — just not too much, or your playing could wind up a tad … jittery. Photo (CC-BY) Lali Masriera).
Let’s get together and play music.
The Morning Music & Coffee Consumption series, an informal gathering of artists, aims to do just that. The assumption about digital music production may be very different – the solo artist, holed up in a bedroom alone with a laptop is the default image. But instruments and laptops go together, and laptops can increasingly be played comfortably as instruments, so there’s really no excuse. And Jared Smyth’s mm-cc series, having already produced a volume of music and image, is both an inspiration and a potential model. Creator Jared says he’s hoping others will join in with similar events and share the sonic results – perhaps that’ll be you and your friends, wherever you are.
The series, shot in sumptuous macro video by Charlie Visinic, looked good enough in film that it made appearance on our sister site Create Digital Motion (where I erroneously described the series as being Charlie’s creation, an error I can happily now correct):
With the aim of inspiring (welcome) copycat events, I asked Jared to tell us more about how this series is organized and how it works.
CDM: Tell us a bit about the idea behind mm-cc.
Jared: I started mm-cc as a ritual to reconnect with what made me want to play music in the first place: community. It’s getting together with friends with no pressure to create something marketable, and simply hanging out and creating noise together. mm-cc is my concept (though not that original … people have been getting together to make music and drink coffee long before I called it ‘mm-cc’). I host the website, create posts and also host occasional mm-cc sessions myself at my home in Florida. Charlie also hosts sessions in southern California. The idea is for more people to take part as Charlie does – hosting their own sessions, creating their own visuals and then letting me know about it so I can do a post on it. There’s even an upload form and a forum I built on the site for people to send in samples of audio, or clips of video to be used in other people’s sessions. I really want mm-cc to be as collaborative and eclectic as possible.
How did you organize people to do this?
Some of the time it’s by creating a Facebook event; other times it’s word-of-mouth. With Charlie Visnic and the California sessions, it just sort of happened that he wanted to host sessions at his home over the summer. We met through the monome forums and then became friends as each of us was working on a 365×1 blog goal. (On that note, I started mine over on January 1st, and am now on day 261 – see uprlip.com.
At what point does the coffee kick in?
7am(ish) – people show up around 10am and we play till noon…. I’m usually fairly wired before they show up. I try to buy really good, locally-grown coffee and make it in my French Press.
Are there any special moments or surprises that have happened through the various sessions?
No individual event springs to mind. But it’s always really special for me to look through my studio, where cables are strewn about and there are five or six people drinking really strong coffee and spacing out on their respective instruments, and then into my living room and see my daughter drawing, one friend hand-sewing something, and another knitting, all while listening to the music we’re creating. The chatter and movement of the non-musicians filtering into the room (and often the mic’s) where we’re recording serves as a very natural field recording to accompany us. I love listening back to a session and hearing my daughter giggling or friends talking faintly in the background. It’s a really ethereal experience when that sort of all comes together. That’s exactly what I want from mm-cc – togetherness.
Are you releasing the music separately? If so, where?
There are plans for that in the works. The session that John Keston, David Andree and I did in Minneapolis earlier this year (see video, top) has a much longer recorded form than what’s represented in the video, and we’re very much planning to make that the first (of many?) mm-cc releases. Josh Mason at Sunshine Ltd. has agreed to release it; we’re just not sure of a date yet.
How do you work across coasts?
Well, we’ve only done one session that was ‘trans-coast.’ (video above) For that one we defined a set of notes within a set key that both session’s players would play. I shot the video clips here in Florida and then sent them off to Charlie to edit as he wanted, and he sent me the audio from their session. I then mixed that with the audio from our session, and then sent the final mix back to him, and he cut the video to it. I would like to do more this way – it’s sort of a blind/deaf jam session. We had no clue what theirs would sound like and vice-versa. As for the other sessions that Charlie has hosted, they’re all him. I really have very little to do with them. He just lets me know when he’s going to have one and I then do a post for it when he’s done, and has a video uploaded.
Okay, if this has made you interested in becoming involved, here’s where to go to do it.
Casper Industries’ Peter Edwards performs live at Handmade Music in Manhattan, at Culturefix.
Why DIY, anyway? As we prepare for a special Handmade Music afternoon hosted by Amsterdam’s STEIM research center, my co-curator Takuro Mizuta Lippit (dj sniff) asked me to answer that question. Here’s what I wrote for STEIM’s international Patterns and Pleasure festival.
“Do it yourself.”
In the world reshaped by recording, in which music is ubiqiutously available on demand and even bare-bones DJing qualifies as “live” entertainment, the act of just making music surely qualifies as “DIY.” Add the fact that distribution, promotion, and booking of music often falls increasingly on the artists themselves, and it’s hard to see any part of music that isn’t DIY.
So, given all that, what would drive artists to make or modify their own musical tools? One might as well ask why make music in the first place. (Because you can? Because it’s fun? Because it’s the most satisfying way to realize an idea or feeling — often the two together?) I believe some of the separation between “music” and “tools” or “gear” or “technology” is arbitrary. That independence is itself a recording-centric notion, in which musical content as artifact is imagined as independent from how it was made. During the process of production or performance, they’re inseparable. The evolution of musical practice, meanwhile, is intertwined with the technology of playing and representing music. Musical instruments in archaeological records appear alongside the first human tools. Those instruments, like the musical materials themselves, are vessels for expression of human thought. We can make our body an instrument, via percussion or voice, but as with so many other elements of our human life, we extend that body through invention.
When you play an instrument, whether a flute or an interactive music software patch, what you express is mediated both through musical language and the tool. I know as a child, it was what first drew me to music: I could press my fingers to the keys and hear something very much other than what I could produce myself. It’s easy to see the connection to the synthesizer and the computer.
When you want to realize (or discover) new musical and sonic ideas, then, it’s necessary to become involved with the way in which those sounds are produced. As composers for acoustic instruments and voice, you dive into the realms of harmony and rhythm, but also the mechanisms of the instruments and standard and extended techniques. Working with the computer, you employ interfaces — whether simulated knobs or code or graphical representation — to realize your ideas. With electronics, wires and resistors and diodes become compositional. With both, the container you fashion, the handcrafted cases or user interfaces, becomes part of the musical identity you design.
There is no such thing as an instrument built from scratch. To quote Isaac Newton (in words adapted by countless electrical engineers and computer scientists), “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” We inherit a great body of knowledge and tooling. Whether a commercial DAW or a modular development environment or the circuit that makes a filter, we connect with the ideas, imagination, and expertise of generations of engineer-artists. Notably, we lost Max Mathews this year, whose lasting legacy, even more than breakthroughs in computer synthesis, may be his influence on decades of students and colleagues in chasing the limitless potential he saw in digital sound. Thought is the greatest technology there is.
I think we can easily become overly worried about the rise of digital tech. Computers and electronics are here, and for all their dangers — misuse and toxic waste being foremost among them — they are fundamentally a compilation of human ideas. If you like people, you’ll like computers and circuits when you get to know them. We can also become overly concerned with “new”; the great implication of the maturity of electronic sound technology to me is that we can begin to go from novelty to repeatability and expertise. That’s not to discount discovery; it’s simply that discovery can’t exist in a void. At the same time, in our appetite for mastery, we can devalue the novice. I’m excited by seeing projects that don’t quite work yet, that are only at the stage of technical demo or proof of concept, because to me it’s seeing the first steps on a path that could lead a musician into years of practice and refinement. It’s seeing the chicken popping out of the egg. Potential is stimulating when you believe it has a future.
Here, designing one’s own instruments is much like learning to play an instrument. You repeat the ideas of others, just as you repeat the sounds of others when you learn a musical scale. You make sounds that, at first, are, well, awful, but that then grow up. Whether arguably innovative or not, you make discoveries that are inherently personal. And the degree of that progression is dependent in large part on learning from others, playing with them and sharing their experience. As people share that experience, in the end there are breakthroughs to the genuinely new. Collective progress is what allows those individual eurekas.
Loud Objects, assisted by Leslie Flanigan, teaches a hands-on workshop for beginners at Handmade Music at Brooklyn’s Third Ward. Handmade Music has gone hands-on in other cities, too, including Amsterdam, Porto, Toronto, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and Austin.
With economies from Amsterdam to New Amsterdam slowing, with growing unfilled demand for the ability to actually make stuff and not just push abstract numbers around, and with technical problems that demand solutions literally to ensure our survival, all those strange noises we make take on a new meaning. Tools and technology enabled our civilization; now we need them to make humanity sustainable. Silly sounds and musicians’ racket and din may seem distant from that. But we can sing this necessity as a song. We can celebrate the spirit of experimentation by making things that make immediate noise. A bridge or a jet plane isn’t a great place for experimentation or on-the-job learning; music is the perfect playground because errors are always okay. If any community could help encourage free innovation in our culture, music is a strong candidate; today’s young synth builder could be tomorrow photo-voltaic breakthrough. And even if not, we’ll make a wonderful noise.
“Open source” and the “Web” are significant tools to make sharing expertise easier, but at the fundamental level, it’s simply “sharing” that matters. And this is where music’s makers and inventors are helping resurrect the principles of music as community. We have to share ideas and sounds to be able to move forward.
I’ll be flying from Toronto to Amsterdam, so as the song goes, “remember me to Herald Sq– God, sorry. It isn’t the prettiest part of Manhattan, exactly. Go in there and talk about music and then go to one of New York’s nicer parts. High Line! Photo by/(C) Oliver Chesler from last year; see the whole set.
CDM is a presenting sponsor of the IMSTA FESTA in New York on Saturday. It’s a completely free event, but registration is required. What’s notable about this sort of event is that it tends to be more directly musician-focused than big conferences like AES or the truly trade-only NAMM. Some of the highlights of which we’re taking note:
Vendor presentations by Native Instruments, Steinberg, Celemony, Propellerhead, Image Line, Waves, and Cakewalk should all be interesting as they all have new products, and say they’ll be showing some of them off. (Also present: McDSP, Pianoteq, SSL, and others.)
Legendary producer Hank Shocklee’s Shocklee “Innertainment” is involed, including talented chief Jo-Ann Nina.
Web music is front and central, including a look at the future of music platforms with our friend Oliver Chesler of the blog Wire to the Ear (with whom I’ve panelized a couple of times now), and Evolver.fm’s Eliot Van Buskirk. The CEO of Tunecore is on-hand, as is new cloud backup and sharing service for musicians Gobbler.
Production is there, too – think Hank moderating a panel with industry heavies on mixing pop, and teaching his own master class, plus drum programming.
Here’s the catch: normally, covering New York events is easy because I’ve been based in New York. But I’m currently on the road and based in Berlin for most of the remainder of 2011. So, if anyone wants to go and do some investigative research, take some video or the like, let me know!
Read last year’s write-up by Oliver on the panel I moderated: imsta festa panel review [wiretotheear]
One other question, for the whole world and not just New York: what would your dream event look like? Where would it be? Would it be a mix of workshops and events? With so many events (Music Hack Days, trade shows, and the like), what aren’t you getting from present events? (Asia, Pacific, South America, Africa, interested in hearing from you, too, if you’re out there… not just Europe and North America.)
No specific context, but I do find the question comes up a lot.
As Berlin embraces its increasing popularity as a tourist destination, the city is also learning how to capitalize on what might be its biggest draw: its profuse music and night-life offerings. And so the bells and whistles are out for the second edition of Berlin Music Week, which will engulf the city’s many bars, clubs and various repurposed urban spaces from Sept. 7 to 11.
The mega-fest is really an umbrella designation for several large music-related events: the international trade fair Popkomm; All2gethernow, a “new music and culture convention”; two multi-venue clubbing festivals (ClubNacht and ClubSpreeBerlin); and the week’s keystone: the two-day indie music extravaganza known as the Berlin Festival.
Now in its seventh year, the Berlin Festival will take place Sept. 9 and 10 in Tempelhof Airport, the 4,000-square-foot, bullet-pocked Nazi-built megalith that has been converted to park space. The festival caused a considerable fracas last year when severe understaffing led to its being cut short for fear of a Love Parade-style stampede.
But now under new organizers, the festival has beefed up its staff and stuffed its roster full of indie headliners like Suede, Beirut, Public Enemy, the Rapture and Santigold. Also on offer are a slew of homegrown and imported performers and D.J.’s, who will spin at Tempelhof on a set of moving turntables, and at Club Xberg, the festival’s after-hours clubbing venue, where Berlin’s nocturnal party rabble can get down to sets by Diplo, Hercules & Love Affair’s Andy Butler, DJ Hell and Boy George (yes, that Boy George) all in one frenzied, four-hour stretch.
If you’re in the LA area, I’m teaching a reasonably beginner-friendly workshop in making musical tools with visual interfaces, using entirely free software (Processing and Pd, on Mac, Windows, Linux, and if you like, Android). It’s this coming Thursday night, September 8 – the perfect way to get back to school! (For me, too…)
I’ll also be sharing some resources as I put them together for that workshop, so wherever you are, keep an eye on CDM soon.
The workshop is US$60, but you’ll leave with the skills you need to make your own music tools and audiovisual creations free, as well as the ability to use JACK to route those straight into hosts like Ableton Live.
We’ll follow up Thursday night’s workshop with a free Pd community patching circle on Sunday (for making patches; it’s a get-together, not a class).
Also, I’ll be at the TRASH_AUDIO-sponsored Synth Meet Saturday afternoon. Hope to see you folks in Southern California at one of these events there.
Full details of the workshop – and please do feel free to post / disseminate / share with people in the area:
Image and Music: Make Your Own Musical Tools, Free, with Processing and Pd
PETER KIRN (createdigitalmusic.com)
Thursday, September 8
7-10pm
US$60 (discounts for members)
Limited space
Make your own instrument, sequencer, or effect, then give it a visual interface – not just fake knobs and buttons, but via any picture you desire. Now you can, with two integrated tools, entirely for free. Learn how:
Using Processing, the artist-friendly rapid code “sketching” environment, and Pure Data (Pd), the visual patching tool, we’ll discover how to create custom music creations entirely in free software. Starting with simple projects, you’ll learn how to get up and running to create your own tools, see some of the basics of how to make visual interfaces in Processing and construct musical tools with Pd, as well as how to route audio from these into software you already use like Ableton Live.
Via the new free libpd library for Processing, developed by Peter Kirn and Peter Brinkmann, you can use Pd patches right inside Processing. You create your musical creations – sequencers, drum machines, synths, effects, and so on – using the graphical environment Pd, which uses patch cords to represent the flow of signal through your sonic rigs. (A library of useful building blocks means you can construct all kinds of powerful tools even without much Pd knowledge.) Then, in Processing, you can create graphical interfaces via lightweight code, which can even run on your desktop or even mobile phones and tablets powered by Android. We’ll experiment with some simple two-dimensional and three-dimensional generative graphics for visualizing and playing our instruments, and some useful tools (a synth, a drum machine, a pattern maker, an effect you can use with a mic).
What you’ll need to know: Some basic knowledge of either Pd or Processing – ideally a little of both – is recommended, but not required. If you haven’t worked with them before, you’ll get a crash course in how they work and some sample code and patches. If you have, you’ll learn how to use them in some new ways and pick up some additional tips.
What you’ll need to bring: Definitely bring your computer so you can follow along! This is a hands-on workshop! Mac or Linux recommended. Windows users will be able to at least use Pd and Processing via OSC, and we hope a libpd for Processing build is ready (volunteers accustomed to building Windows software welcome!) We’ll install the software, but if you want to install Pd and Processing ahead of time, go for it.
Emblem of LA’s very cool CrashSpace hackerspace, which has also hosted Handmade Music. More on them as I travel there next week! Photo (CC-BY-NC) Tod Kurt.
If you’ve got any questions about the workshop, feel free to ask in comments and I’ll answer.
Sunday, September 11, noon – whenever
Patching Circle, for Pd, Max, AudioMulch, and other patchers
Free, open community patching – bring your project
And Saturday afternoon and Sunday night, while I’m not directly involved, the Synth Meet
Hope to see you at the workshop, in particular!
See you in Los Angeles…
CrashSpace
10526 Venice Boulevard, Culver City, CA
(right on the 3, 33, and 733 buses)
Circuit bending has a reputation as involving far-out, unstructured experimental noise, of real violence and distortion done to instruments. And there’s probably a place for that. But Reed Ghazala, circuit bending’s spiritual father and electronic practitioner, takes a more organic, evolutionary approach.
Reed recently told me about his favorite application of his iPad, apart from exploring new experimental soundscapes with tools like the brilliant granular app Curtis. He brings it with him into the forest, using GPS for location, and tracking plants and animals, identifying the sounds of bird and beasts.
In our electronic ecosystem, fowl and beast are finding their own electro-diversity. Circuit bending, then, is giving electronic devices a gentle push toward becoming something else, into taking on a unique and individual personality. It’s evolution. So, it’s fitting that New York’s Bent Festival has become an eclectic gathering of musical makers, espousing no singular philosophy or aesthetic.
For a sense of how broad that notion spans — both in Reed’s own head and at Brooklyn’s festival — our friend Kaley at VICE points us to their Motherboard.tv series on Reed, and his 1967 breakthrough of circuit bending, as well as their coverage of last year’s Bent. The Bent Festival, for their part, provide the remaining schedule if you happen to be in the area. At bottom, the classic “what is circuit bending” video by DrRek, featuring monome artist Daedelus.
If you happen to be the area, on behalf of CDM and in recognition of my lack of a) an inexhaustible budget or b) the ability to be a pan-dimensional creature in all places at once, please take photos and videos and notes and let us know what you see! (That goes for artists, too! Find a friend!)
We’ll be at Bent today before hauling off some makers yet deeper into the woods and wilds for the Solid Sound Festival. (Well, okay, metaphor stretched, broken, and beaten — at least further afield than the middle of Brooklyn. It’s Friday. I’m letting my metaphors take the rest of the day off.)
Also, notably organizing venue The Tank is again homeless and in need of support:
“Viable spaces for artistic research and development pop up as unpredictably as wild mushrooms, and sometimes vanish just as quickly. The Tank, a hardy nonprofit arts presenter formed by recent college graduates in 2003, has adeptly navigated a terrain in constant flux, taking root in a series of locations around Manhattan.” – Steve Smith, New York Times.
Their campaign to work in conjunction with other organizations to keep programming moving forward: http://do.nr/2sX
Renoise 2.7 is now available, following some eight weeks of testing by the community. The update, which the developers describe as “back to the beats” in reference to focusing in this release cycle on musical workflow, delivers plenty of features that make the modern tracker more modern. I wrote about them back in March, with some detailed Q&A from the developers – including tips on where to get started:
The short version: better automation, sample slicing, and sample keyzones, plus improved DSP and audio routing and MIDI routing, make Renoise more usable. For people slicing up and sampling audio, even, I dare say, MPC-style, it’s a huge release.
But that’s not the only story here. Renoise are also announcing 500 MB of free sounds designed by Puremagnetik, all in the native XRNI file format. That’s from a sound house better known for Ableton Live sounds than Renoise. And, at the opposite end of the spectrum from preset soundware, Renoise is involved in a Berlin Music Hackday that could bring new DIY features to the tool – plus tooling that makes it easier to grab and update tools from the community.
We’ll start with the Puremagnetik news. Rather than just tell you about the sounds, Puremagnetik’s Micah Frank shares how the sound set was built, and what they learned about making soundware for Renoise. That includes some valuable tips for anyone interested in programming sounds in the environment, as well as insight if you’re just curious to try the resulting sound pack free. Micah shares:
About Puremagnetik: Puremagnetik is a sound development company that I founded in 2006. I had freelanced as a sound designer with Ableton for some years and didn’t see many 3rd party choices for that platform. Puremagnetik was launched as an affordable subscription service offering new “Micropaks” every month, with a focus on Ableton Live content. That was 5 years ago and we are continuing to produce new packs every month. As of this writing we have almost 60 Micropaks in the catalog, a number of bundles, standalone libraries and Max for Live content. We have close to 40k registered users and are working with a number of developers (desktop and mobile) to help realize their sound libraries. By the time you read this, we will also be offering content in Renoise’s XRNI format.
Why Renoise: Always on the lookout for products that break away from conventions, I became interested in content development for Renoise soon after the 2.6 release. It’s obvious that Renoise is created by a small and dedicated team of developers backed by a strong, supportive community. To my surprise, I couldn’t find many resources for Renoise format instruments. All of the above reasons factored into Puremagnetik’s conception in the first place – to fill a niche within a community of dedicated individuals that are passionate about their work. Once the Keyzone Editor was introduced, it was clear to me that someone had to make content for this innovative product.
What it was like making the 500M sample pack: The first thing we did is comb through our entire catalog and pick a well-rounded selection of kits and multisample instruments. We are working with an independent developer (Renoise user MXB in building a tool to translate our libraries to XRNI. [That tool is now released; see comments. -Ed.] So this was a huge asset in efficiently building this library. After importing the sounds they were fine tuned and tweaked with modulations and envelopes. The final step was exporting the monolithic XRNI files. Throughout the entire process we worked alongside the Renoise team to ensure that Q/A standards and selection of sounds was spot-on.
Thoughts on the latest XRNI format: Despite its simple interface there is a lot going on under the hood. I personally love the “point” setting in the envelope params. And the selection of filters really kicks ass (my favorite is the Low Distortion). Just in coupling these two things, one is presented with vast sound design possibilities, and that’s before you beat sync pitch envelopes!
For the most part, editing is very intuitive if you have previously built multisample instruments. The instrument editor is still in its infancy so there are some parameter persistency issues that need to be ironed out. It is somewhat cumbersome to save variations of the same instrument as it saves each one as a single monolithic (flac compressed) file.
Overall, it’s easy enough to dive into the editor, tweak the available settings and resave the instrument however you like.
Room for improvement in the format: The most valuable thing for us from a development standpoint is sample grouping capabilities. Our instruments really become 3 dimensional once we can program group modulations based on user events. Our TeeBee instrument for example is heavily dependent on groups of samples to create a realistic emulation of the original TB303. So this is a feature I would like to see implemented.
I would love to be able to save track DSPs with the instrument but perhaps that could conflict with Renoise’s native architecture and workflow. However, this capability when combined with Renoise’s effects and Meta Devices could open enormous possibilities for sound design.
More LFO waveforms with an even slower frequency would be very welcomed into my Renoise sound design toolbox!
Each parameter setting has 4 envelope preset slots but these are currently shared between parameters and are only session specific. It would be really cool to have independent preset buttons per parameter that save with the instrument. That way, the user can load it up and call any number of combinations for instant sound shaping variations.
Velocity crossfading.
Visit Puremagnetik at http://puremagnetik.com/ — you’ll see new Renoise-format sounds starting to appear.
Included in this pack:
Analog Synth Basses
Circuit Bent Drum Kits
Buchla Drum Kits
Mellotron Strings and Flutes
Glitch, Toy & Lo-Fi Sounds
Fender Rhodes Mark II
Model-C Clavinet
Electric Guitar
Upright Bass
Classic Analog Synths
Grand Piano
And there’s more soundware free with this release, too, I see from the Renoise site:
Additionally, Berlin based artist and longtime user Beatslaughter has blessed us with a touch of evil in his sample pack “Beatslaughter SoundPack Volume 1″.
Those two sample packs total over 800 MB and let producers jump into all the latest sampling features of Renoise 2.7. The packs are free for all registered users new and old, and are waiting in the Backstage.
Get Your Tools Faster
It’s like an App Store for Renoise hacks: tools.renoise.com has gotten an upgrade, and there’s a new automatic updater called the Tool Updater. Combined, this should make it easier to keep your tools fresh, and customize Renoise to do what you need. I’m a huge fan of the lightweight hacking mechanism they’ve built into Renoise, and the fact that it’s an integral part of the software.
Hack Renoise
As a mentor at Music Hackday Berlin, if you happen to be in Germany later this month, you can learn how to hack Renoise from the developers. I’d love to see some new projects. (I may even try to see if I can drop by, if I’m in fact in England around the same time!)
Renoise will be mentoring at Music Hack Day Berlin. The event takes place on the weekend of May 28th in the MTV Network offices located at the Spree river. Erik, dblue and Taktik will be on site to discuss Renoise, the Lua API, drink beer, and give out high fives. Check our community forums in the upcoming days for more details.
“This sounds crazy. I want to see this. I think I may have to see this to understand what you mean. But I want to see this.”
David Dodson, journalist, writer, and electronic musician (“Primus Luta” and, most recently at our Handmade Music series, Concrete Sound System), has just told me he wants to cover New York’s Unsound Festival, the Polish-based electronic and “advanced” music festival.
Only he wants to cover it … fictionally.
There’s a love story. There’s drama. There a bits of review, interwoven with a story. In place of the usual omniscient narrator that we find in music journalism, delivering pronouncements about the State of Music from on high and dissecting the programming, we hear reflections on the work the way you do when you’re actually there – snippets of commentary from friends outside the venue, internal monologue in your head. But these thoughts come out of the heads of made-up protagonists, who then rub shoulders with the real characters spotted at the event. (Warning: if you were at Unsound, you might make a cameo.)
It’s trippy, disorienting, frequently comical, and for me, at least, leaves me half-guiltily aching for more.
It’s worth reading all the excerpts in order in the blog format in which we’re able to present them, but a few examples to whet your appetite (or, if I’m lucky, give you some idea what the heck I’m talking about):
There are drops of sweat on her lashes when Gisella finally opens her eyes. She looks at Lil’ Man who is smiling like a man who knows he’s done good. She smiles back licking the presperation off her upper lip only slightly suggestive. Lil’ Man notices but turns to give an nod to Chancha for keeping her there with him on the dance floor. Only two other ladies, who probably arrived with Chancha, could keep up with the cumbia influenced rhythms. It didn’t keep others from moving to the beat, but even with her eyes closed, Gisella knew they had been the center of attention.
“Let’s go get some air,” she says into his ear before leading him through the crowd.
As they walk down the corridor where people are still waiting to get in, Lilo comes behind them from the back room.
“Oh my god,” she says. ”I don’t know who’s on now, but whoever was doing the last set in the back room just made my night.” There are more people outside waiting to get in and small groups gathered in nicotine circles. ”You missed him playing Madonna.”
“No way,” Gisella replies as they walk toward the curb where she recognizes Praveen and Sougwen.
“But did you see Dave Q voguing behind his laptop?” Praveen asks over hearing Lilo’s enthusiasm. The guy standing next to him responds by striking a pose.
“Do you know Dave?” Sougwen asks Gisella.
“Only by reputation,” Lilo says extending her hand.
…or…
Morton Subotnick at work in 2011. Photo: David Dodson.
“While I don’t feel cheated,” Lilo says between sips of wine, “I do feel like I missed something. I mean it was Morton Subotnick, the Buchla was there, and he performed Silver Apples on the Moon, but something was missing.”
“He didn’t patch live,” Lil Man says.
“Yes, that is it isn’t it?” Lilo thinks about it taking a sip. ”It’s funny how laptops throw everything off.”
“You couldn’t really see what he was doing,” Gisella chimes in. ”You could see it all working but you couldn’t see the work.”
“He had a controller near the laptop,” Lil Man notes. ”He was doing something with that.”
“Yeah,” Lilo says after another sip. ”I mean you have to think, why wouldn’t he use a laptop? Can you imagine how hard it must have been to create Silver Apples back in the sixties, let alone perform it. Even now with the technology we have it’s an amazing achievement.”
“Most def,” Lil Man affirms.
“But I do wish he had pulled at least one patch cable,” Lilo adds before finishing the glass.
“Most def.”
…or…
The sound of an ambulance trails off behind her. Suddenly a female voice moves in only to be accompanied by at least ten different iterations of the same voice. They are all being manipulated diferently and floating around the space. Gisella closes her eyes and could see the voices sweeping, like ghosts in a haunted house. It was clearly the Pamela Z piece, but the description didn’t really do the effect of it justice. The title and even the description made it sound out of place. What did “The Star Spangled Banner” have to do with horror? But listening to Pamela Z’s deconstruction and recomposition of voice in the surround space, at this point Gisella recognizes, Pamela is the first artist to truly create a scene from a horror movie. So why was she thinking about sex?
Author David Dodson explains the project:
I’ve been thinking of moving back into fiction writing for a few years now, but fiction that deals with real historical places and events. A few years back I wrote a novella entitled “The Moshi” which placed characters in the middle of New York during the black out of 2003. When working with fictional characters it’s always interesting to think about how they respond to ‘real life’ situations.
For “Above the Threshold” I wanted to really embrace that. Rather
than create a world in which the characters can do whatever I saw fit, I decided to create the characters and place them in our world to see what they’d do. I started out with a very simple premise – a female lead working in the music industry attends the 2011 Unsound festival. I then attended the festival myself and ‘observed’ how my characters acted within the settings that the festival presented.
During the course of the festival I penned over 50k words of this
storyline, and in essence watched the plot unfold. It will be some
time before the full piece is ready to go to print, but I’m offering
up some excerpts from it on the CDM partner Noisepages site. These excerpts may or may not end up in the final draft, but will give some glimpses of the characters, the festival and how the two came together.
I only wish fictional characters could inhabit all the events we attend. I suppose, in fact, they could.
Handmade software distribution: homebrewed USB keys store free software. Photo courtesy Theron Trowbridge.
Imagine Pd everywhere. Pure Data, a free tool for constructing music and media by creating graphical code, is spotted this week hacked to run on a lowly Nook tablet and interfacing with the powerful Kinect camera system. A community in Los Angeles and Southern California is growing around the idea of the “patching circle,” in which users of various tools (Processing, Max for Live welcome, too) gather to share the process of making, like knitting circles of yore. (Yeah, okay, I made up the term, so you can take it up with me if you don’t like it.)
LA is launching a whole effort to build this community on the West Coast. If you’re in the neighborhood, you’ll want to clear your schedule; if not, this could inspire similar events in your neck of the woods. Los Angeles joins a larger worldwide movement around this tool as a kind of lingua franca for DIY software. (Pd everywhere is therefore the moniker I slapped on our Noisepages group for embeddable libpd; hope you’ll join us.)
Pd this week in LA is in the hands of advanced users — Pd and Max/MSP creator Miller Puckette is on-hand — and non-programmer, first-timer, curious musicians, too. You can learn beginning or advanced skills and meet other folks interested in exploring.
The shindig has already met up at University of California San Diego and Long Beach’s Boys and Girls Club. Now, it procedes to Culver City’s CRASHspace hackerspace.
Tonight, 7:30-10:30 PM, Hans-Christoph Steiner offers up a master class with patching, which I believe will either cover audiovisual work or extracting data from audio signals for triggering.
Friday, Chris McCormick offers a more advanced look at making Pd an embeddable audio engine with libpd – something that could empower everything from interactive music for games to new mobile tools for Android and iOS.
Saturday, the pd-la Patching Circle has its first meeting and the party gets started. Patch noon-2p, take an intro Pd workshop at 2p, and then spend Saturday night with discussions, demos, performances, and a patching party.
Sunday, Pd/Max creator Miller and Natacha Diehls will be performing at The Wulf downtown.
I raise all of this in the hopes that some intrepid CDM reader will go and be a great investigative reporter, talk to people there and find out what they’re doing, and share some info with the rest of us. (I’ll be here in NYC.)
One top prize-winner: Stringer, which applied Kinect camera magic to simulated strings. More on how it was made below. Photo (CC-BY) Thomas Bonte.
With Web data providers offering generous cash prizes and a strong emphasis on harnessing data to transform listening, music consumption took center stage at Music Hack Day’s debut in New York. But it was novel music controllers, the sort that once were commonplace only at academic music conferences, that stole the show. That suggests that whereas building the next MySpace was once the hot music tech, the future might look more like a race to build the next Theremin.
Whatever the cause, the event proved just how productive hotshot DIY coders can be when left to their own devices and given ample sources of electricity and caffeine. The weekend marathon has now been exported to nearly a dozen installments in Europe and the US, though this was its first appearance in the boroughs of New York City. The result: nearly 200 participants, hundreds (yes, hundreds) more on a waiting list, and over 70 projects completed in a weekend. From just Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, programmers working with Web and desktop technologies whip up quick software creations. The emphasis is on “hacking” for a reason: there’s no time to second-guess or obsess over quality, or indeed to waste a moment conceptualizing. This is all about making a working product, trying out an idea in practice, mashing together whatever is most accessible as rapidly as humanly possible. Sure, there aren’t any hard, fast rules against bringing in previously-prepared tools. But make no mistake: very much that was live in a demo Sunday was pure theory just twenty-four short hours earlier.
Coders laid out cushions on the floor and packed toothbrushes. Some were local, but others were still bleary eyed-with jetlag from trips across the Atlantic. Hopped up on coffee and Red Bull (and then beer), they coded projects that often had nothing to do with their employment – even those who came on the dime of some of the Web companies. Nor was there a lot of fishing for venture capital or IPOs. Most gave away code (if they could bear to let anyone else see it) on public code repositories like GitHub, and listening to coders, many even blatantly ignored the promise of cash prizes. It was programming for love.
Here are few of the most promising projects, and a few noticeable trends. If generating automatic playlists or finding music videos that match tastes of friends on Twitter isn’t your cup of tea, don’t despair. We had alternative instruments and music-makers, too – and, take note, they generally took home the cash.
Invisible Instruments, Made with Gestures
Invisible Instruments, the winning hack by Tim Soo, began at the Boston event. I think what made it so compelling – the voting was done by the entire audience, entered via SMS – may have been the recognizable instrumental metaphors. Using Max/MSP and OSCulator, a Wiimote, and iPod touch, the instruments emulate a violin, drum pads, and
Now, none of this is news to regular readers of this site, of course. But that should present another lesson: if you’re doing this kind of cool stuff, you should tell the sorts of people who don’t normally pay attention to such things (even, very often, tech-savvy folks). Music tech involves all sorts of wildly cool things that we’ve inadvertently kept a secret. Let’s change that.
(Or, to put it another way, apparently the whole world isn’t reading this site. If you want to help us with that, let me know.)
Note that Tim does say, “Scout’s honor,” that he built new invisible instruments just this weekend. And you can grab these and older patches from his site.
Plucking Strings and DJing with Kinect
Just got a Kinect? Want to make it do something? What better than a couple of coder friends to make it happen? The three-person team that worked on Stringer, a musical instrument for plucking strings controlled with Processing, wound up easily paying for their Kinect hardware by pocketing some change in prizes.
Participants Aidan Feldman, Tyler Williams, and Alex Chen contributed. In the process, they found that using a camera to simulate string plucking wasn’t entirely effective; they didn’t have enough tracking intelligence to tell the difference between a pluck and a motion near a string, so wound up going for simpler reactivity. The clever string animation works wonders to make you feel like you’re playing real strings, even with samples, however, and it’s amazing how much they accomplished and learned in a short space of time.
The Processing libraries aren’t quite as complete as some C++-based libraries, but they’re a good place to start. If you’re considering doing something similar, I recommend my friend Dan Shiffman’s posts on his library contributions: Kinect and Processing Updated Kinect Library for Processing
Another Kinect hack: Matt Gattis produced the Bionic DJ project with “Kinect, libfreeconnect, and the OSC MIDI protocol.”
Beat Grids and Sine Waves with ChucK
I unfortunately don’t have good documentation of Jordan Orelli’s project, but he has some fascinating ideas. I laughed and said what he did was build a DIY Tenori-On with a Novation Launchpad and ChucK, but it is actually unique.
The grid of the Launchpad is a pitch sequencer – that we’ve seen many times before, and it’s very useful. But the grid can also become beat-synced modulation, which makes it possible to do some lovely, rhythmic manipulation of sounds.
The top row of the Launchpad is used for selecting instruments. The rightmost column selects “modes” specific to that instrument. The grid controls the current mode. All instruments run concurrently, so you can reasonably have a rack of 7 instruments, with the 8th instrument slot being reserved for the “mixer” instrument, which doesn’t actually mix anything but it lets you change the tempo (generally crashing the application in the process).
Everything is written in ChucK and no samples are used.
DJs may want to replace the crowd members making requests. Tough – the crowd may just ditch the DJ for a robot.
There were a number of crowd-sourced playlists ideas, including one cleverly named Youzakk and hooked into location check-in service Foursquare.
But djtxt was, amazingly, a whole service built in a weekend, complete with slick user interface. To make it work, it uses a whole lot of services: Twilio for SMS connectivity, Grooveshark for playback, Last.FM and musXmatch for albums and lyrics, and many others. Full details: http://wiki.musichackday.org/index.php?title=Djtxt
And they did the other thing widely-respected by Web geeks: they deployed to a live site. http://djtxt.me/
Drum Loops, From Your Browser to SoundCloud, and More HTML5
Two big trends emerged that are relevant to anyone interested in making music in the Web browser – without necessarily giving up your “real” (read: traditional desktop) production tools.
One: HTML5-based Web tech, while not entirely polished yet, is indeed enabling some basic music functionality right in the window of modern browsers.
Two: things like SoundCloud connectivity mean you’ll be able to generate quick ideas and then download samples later. (Ableton Live made a number of cameos in the afternoon demos.)
One great example of that is PatternMusic. It’s a pretty terrific little drum machine. But Ghostly International’s Haig and Miguel, who began the project in last summer’s Visual Music program at Eyebeam (in which I was also a participant), made a big leap forward this weekend: SoundCloud export. In turn, Haig worked out how to make PHP wrappers for SoundCloud much simpler and more effective. That’s a hack I hope we get to share soon.
Also very cool: battling beats at SoundCloud beat battle. Match your groove-constructing skills against Ghostly’s Miguel or Com Truise. You’re going down, Truise, no matter how cool you are.
For the uninitiated, Vib-Ribbon, a Japan-only masterpiece by music game innovator Masaya Matsuura, is one of the high water marks of music games, a trippy walk through cartoon lines animated by sound.
Vib-Ribboff by Robert Böhnke cloned that game entirely in the browser, using SoundCloud music and intelligence engine Echo Nest for analysis, all with JavaScript frameworks Coffeescript and Raphaël.js. It’s a sharp parody of the original, and the sonification works. It’s too bad lawsuits exist, because otherwise it could become the most popular feature of SoundCloud. Can’t someone, like, license this?
CDM Funniest Hack: Faux Geocities Fans
Fans Forever and Ever cracked up the audience with a brilliant, generative version of horrible fan pages. It even fakes the awful GeoCities-era HTML and creepy, stalker-ish poetry (see screenshot). I hope this actually shows up online.
CDM Underdog Bet: Music Notation
Trendspotters no doubt got into the crowd at the hackday. (Famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson was there, for one.)
Trend they almost certainly wouldn’t spot: the likely growth of music notation on the Web and tablets.
Only two hacks really capitalized on this – one a score follower, and the other, pictured here, live annotation. But recall that, alongside the better-publicized MP3, guitar tab was an early hit of music on the Web. (Yes, it made music publishers and copyright holders grown, but that misses the point: huge swaths of the public consume notation.)
The reason is this: even as music education suffers in the US, a mind-boggling number of people play music, and since nothing has really replaced music notation, that means scores still matter.
The ability to mark up a score in a browser and share those markings, live, with anyone with a computer or tablet or other Web-enabled device? Priceless.
This clever tool will even follow a score in time, coupling algorithmic processing (to hold the right place) with broadcast information (to keep everyone in sync):
Drawing Restraints by Mike Clemow was one of a number of pieces that focused on live synthesis and not just clever ways to replace Muzak. I have to give a nod here to Mike, as aside from his own project, he was an anchor of a little corner of the room working on live music apps, a big source of energy and enthusiasm. His work, aside from live performance, also appears in gallery contexts.
Also, bonus points for actually performing in his demo – that takes guts.
Drawing Restraints is a musical work for joystick, pen tablet and digital synthesis software. There are four modes for the instrument, two are buffer-based granulation modes using recordings of meat frying and a group of men talking, respectively. The third is a sine wave granular synthesis mode, and the last uses a saw-tooth wave through a filter bank to generate sound.
The synthesis is done entirely in SuperCollider and the input data is routed through OSCulator in the case of the Wacom tablet and a simple Pure Data patch for the HID based joystick. OSCulator does not have a HID input feature as of this writing. Both send the input data over Open Sound Control to Supercollider. While Supercollider does have a HID interface, I prefer to keep my programming interface unified; I merely have to create OSC responders in Supercollider in order to receive the data.
The different modes have similar parameters, however, each is mapped in a different way to the inputs. The modes can be combined to create complex sound objects that are independent, but their behavior is constrained relative to the state of each of the other modes. Their orchestration is constrained by the mapping scheme.
During Music Hack Day 2011, I came in with the hardware and the idea and brought the instrument to a state of playability. This piece will premiere at Zora Art Space in Brooklyn on Feb 23rd along with two others, “3coil,” a piece for induction coils and laptop, and “Outis,” a piece for video stream, computer vision algorithms, and custom synthesis software.
JSONloops, an open-source real-time multi-user audio sequencer for collaboration, was an insanely ambitious project. And it wound up failing, likely for simpler reasons. While a first demo ran into network problems, the second go indeed worked!
The team:
Marak Squires – Created project, invented the JSONloops format, built core sequencing code
Elijah Insua – Writer of C bindings, solver of the hard problems
hij1nx – C Programming, JavaScript, HTML, UX and User Interface Dominator
Oh, and here’s what happened the first time around, according to Marak: “The software was working the whole time, but the machine connected to the projector decided to connect to a different WIFI network and we couldn’t access our local server.”
Yep, been there. But the project looks fantastic and does actually work perfectly well. Networked music-making is a topic for an entirely separate article, so I hope to talk to this crew more.
Updated – Marak lets us know he used the Socket.IO cross-browser sockets library: http://socket.io/
Seriously cool stuff, as it also supports mobile browsers and older desktop browsers that don’t have direct sockets support.
Three features you wished were in SoundCloud
1. Pulling samples into Ableton Live.
2. Splitting up DJ sets into tracks.
3. Downloading SoundCloud sets as zip files.
Done, done, and done. Hope to see them released.
Fun SoundCloud Tricks
Tweetsonbeats.com turns a Tweet into a synthesized hip-hop memo. You can do it to your own tweets (or perhaps retweet beat poets of our time like Sarah Palin) with hashtag #tweetsonbeats. This is what SoundCloud co-founders do for fun. Really. For instance:
I hope that we see some of the code from this event polished and further developed; if it’s relevant to CDM readers, I’ll absolutely share it. And if you have creation events you’d like to see, let us know.
Liveblog of demos
If you care to read my own notes to myself, I live-blogged the event.
Sunday night in Manhattan, the MeeBlip makes its public debut. If you want to check one out in person, ask any questions, etc., come check it out. (I’ll also have my battery-powered rig: one Vox amp on batteries, one MintyBoost battery pack for MeeBlip, one Rock Band 3 keytar.) And that’s just the beginning – we’ve got a huge lineup of stuff for this week’s Handmade Music.
Sunday, November 14th
FREE
OPEN LABORATORY: 4pm – 7pm
PARTY + MUSIC: 7p – 10pm
Culturefix, LES (Map)
Handmade Music is part party, part science fair. Come meet people who make things that make music.
This month:
A duo of classical guitarists who play video games with their instruments
A project that sequences beats as you play a game of checkers
Chip music on Game Boy
Surf rock meets speed metal on glockenspiel, Casio, drums, bass
PLUS MeeBlip, the hackable digital synth
Come at 4:30 pm for a hands-on Q+A with artists. See game controllers used for music, and meet the MeeBlip synthesizer in its first public appearance. Bring questions; newcomers welcome!
Stay for 7:00 pm as artists perform and demo their work.
Enjoy drinks and the tasty tapas for purchase all night long from Culturefix’s awesome bar – the stuff that has NYC press raving – and shop their electronics boutique.
ARTISTS+PROJECTS: Exile Faker, Josh Silverman, Mano Fico, Modal Kombat, Peter Kirn, and surprises
I’m especially excited to watch classical guitarists playing video games – Modal Kombat had to cancel at the last minute for our August installment, but they’re now really, truly on for this one.
You hear the repeated chorus: music in the digital age has become meaningless and valueless, like turning on water from a tap in the middle of Rome. But, quietly, a movement is stirring that is reclaiming the value of music. Armed with nothing more sophisticated than markers, paper, collage materials, and imagination, they send mixes of music like grade school Valentines. Heck, they even use the mail. It makes the album more personal than it was even in its golden, mass-produced age.
Many of the practitioners in this case are returning to the cassette and mix tape. But I was also interested in handcrafting cases for demos, for your own music, and for mixes of Creative Commons-licensed and netlabel materials. Instead of just swapping behind our avatars and usernames on SoundCloud, it returns us to the glee of playing with markers and exchanging face-to-face.
If you’re in New York, we’ll be making our own musical packaging and then swapping records, starting with a 4:00 pm workshop on this Sunday 10/10/10 at the Lower East Side’s cozy (and tapas- and drink-stocked) Culturefix NY:
But wherever you are, perhaps this Sunday you can make some handmade music.
Here’s a look at some of the work being done, via a Flickr group entitled “Handmade Mixes,” in a Flickr slideshow:
Group founder Samantha Saturday talks to CDM about her techniques, and gives us some crafting tips. Keeping it simple makes this manageable, too, in case you’re planning a handmade, limited edition-run of your next EP.
Tips for materials:
For collaging works I always keep a shoebox of paper scraps and snippets from newspapers, magazines, flyers, basically anything that can be glued or taped down. Keeping all your supplies close at hand is a huge help. Personally I make all my cases completely from scratch, but sometimes starting out with a pre-made CD sleeve and building on top of it is a great way to start.
My best advice is to keep the process fun and to not put too much pressure on yourself to make something totally awesome. If you just let it happen it will be awesome no matter what. There is no right or wrong way to do it.
What to bring to a workshop: (including ours on Sunday!)
Bring mixes specifically for the event and some paper, magazines, glue, snippets, or what have you to share with the workshop.
I talked to Sam about some other ideas, too…
Tell us what you’ve been making.
All of the works I have made are either for friends or for mix trades organized in different places around the internet, such as blogs and Swap-bot [an online-organized swap meet]. For every mix I make, I also create a collaged, cut & paste cover. Some are simpler than others, but I always try to make something nice to house all this great music.
In general I put so much effort and time into making individual covers for every mix because I feel that with the digital age music is starting to lose some of it’s specialness. There’s something about having album artwork to accompany the music you’re listening to. Now you don’t really get that with digital downloads and I miss that. I think it’s the same for a lot of the people who are so dedicated to creating unique artwork.
Who are some of the other people you’ve found working in this medium?
Jane Boston (Stab Heart zine) and Bianca Jagoe (Goodnight Little Spoon) are the first that come to mind. They are both pretty big swappers in the online and mail art community. I’ve sent to and received mixes from both of them and I adore the love they put forth in their creations.
Additionally some of the people that have really stood out to me are Richard Gallon [Flickr] and Evey in Orbit [Flickr. Richard creates really well-crafted covers for his cassettes. On the other hand Evey has a much more cut-and paste approach to it. Even though their techniques are very different I love the range that can be expressed because it's such an open medium.
I created the Flickr group Handmade Mixes for people to share their handmade covers, since it seems like every other mix group is mostly computer-generated works. Most of the people who contribute are people I invited, but a few other people are popping up here and there, which is so exciting! Everyone in the group does a great job and it's really inspirational to see that there are lots of people out there who make their own covers, too.
Introduce us to one of your favorite mixes.
My mix "We're the Heirs to the Glimmering World" is definitely one of my favorite mixes that I've made, both because of the music and the cover art. Usually if I'm feeling a little down I will make a mix to focus my mind on something else and that was definitely the case with this mix. It's one of the most elaborate covers I've made.
You mention on one of the Flickr images that some of these mixes came from getting together for an in-person swap.
[That's] Mix Share Swap hosted by Bianca Jagoe of Goodnight Little Spoon. I found out about the swap from Jane Boston’s blog. If you keep your eye out, there are a lot of mix swaps like this around the blogosphere. Anyone could sign up, then you were assigned two random people you would send to from the list and you received mixes from two different people. It’s a great way to share music and connect with other people.
Any thoughts on how you translate the personality of a music mix to the visuals on the handmade packaging? (It’s an age-old question, of how to make something visual out of the auditory and ephemeral.)
When I make a mix the music, of course, always comes to mind first. After, and sometimes during, compiling a mix you listen to it and different themes or a general feel to the music will come forward and I think that’s where ideas for the packaging first start to form.
Everyone has their own aesthetic and although it sounds cliché it’s definitely about putting together what feels right. Sometimes the cover doesn’t necessarily tie in directly with the music, but generally I think there is something in the sub-conscience that drives the creation. Also, the handmaking process is a lot different than say, someone creates a cover on a computer. You’re connecting with the mix on a tactile level and that alone comes through in the visuals.
Handcrafted CD covers for records and mixes, meditative music made in game engines, handheld chip music creations, analog light synths and drone labs, VL-Tone classical music, and more surprises are coming to New York on Sunday, October 10. (Austin, Texas gets its own event, making noisemakers and ring modulators.)
We promise music you can dance to, music you can’t, and tapas (at least in NYC).
And on October 10, a little secret will finally be revealed to Manhattan and the world.
If you’re a citizen of The Internet, we’ve got lots of sounds and creations to explore here on The Web from the comfort of Your Home – scroll on below. There are even great projects you can build anywhere in the world.
For New Yorkers, the lineup on Sunday:
Immersive music made with game engines, featuring foci + loci (Tamara Yadao + Chris Burke) doing strange and wonderful things with the likes of Halo and Little Bit Planet.
Drone labs and analog light synths by master electronic sonic maker Peter Edwards, Casperelectronics.
Classical music on Casio VL-Tone in a cameo by the amazing Annabelle Cazes.
That’s right, you’re not from Texas? Texas wants you anyway. Even if you’re nowhere near the Lone Star State, here are three projects you can build/buy — and yes, we’ll need to compile a full guide to all these great projects.
If you are in Austin, Texas, don’t miss the event Sunday, October 10. (We’ll have to Skype from NYC to Austin!)
Ed. Seattle’s Decibel Festival is, as one commenter put it, a convergence of music straight out of many of our music collections. Musician, producer, and journalist Primus Luta (David Dobson) is on the scene to bring us a vicarious experience of the sights and sounds. He brings us impressions, reflections, and videos, too. Here’s the first day; coverage of the remaining festival is to come. -PK
Seattle locals will tell you, August and September are the sweet months, and walking around Capitol Hill where people are full of smiles in short sleeves with their legs exposed, you get the sense that there is merit to the claim. The festival base of operations, Pravda Studios in the heart of Capital Hill, is a large event space with strong multi-media support. In the lobby a four monitor wall display offers a live slide-show of pictures being taken during the Festival. Festival sponsor, Microsoft, have the second studio equipped with multiple machines for attendees to get the latest information. It is cut off by a room divider separating it from studio one, where the conference portion of the festival takes place.
Decibel founder is quick to note that the festival is not just about the performances, but also has an educational aspect facilitated through the Decibel Conference. The first day of the conference focuses on technology and techniques. In the first session Kris Moon gives an in-depth workshop on Serato Scratch Live, touching on techniques for adding MIDI controllers into the live turntable set-up with Serato. Ghostly International artist Lusine takes to the podium next to talk about organizing Ableton Live for performance. Where both of these sessions focused on specific platforms for live performance, in the last session Ean Golden talks controllers, specifically the MIDI Fighter platform which uses modular video game style interfaces to build custom controllers.
Following the workshops the divider between studios is pulled back, expanding the space for the Opening Gala event where Kris and Ean share live set spots with Derek Mazzone and Introcut. As the double sized room starts filling in one begins to get the sense that indeed they are in an electronic music festival, though not necessarily the standard fair. The contemplative face was just as present as the gyrating waist, and often from the same individual. Each person in attendance acting as a microcosm of the festival’s vision.
Chatter around the room is all anticipation as participants plot out their weekend by the artists they want to be sure to catch. A common theme amongst all is that the weekend will include a few hard choices, as overlapping events make it virtually impossible to catch all the artists on ones list. A seven year volunteer for takes as much pride in the growth of the festival as Decibel founder Sean Horton. They both agree that the growth is good, but more importantly it has happened without sacrifice of the original intent to be an event which spotlights electronic artists who might otherwise be under the radar.
As the sun sets some festival goers file out of Pravda Studios and into the line across the street at Neumos where Ghostly International has a showcase lined up to christen this years festival. Mux Mool starts things off in the right direction with his breed of heavy hitting, modular hip-hop beats. Rocking a streamlined Ableton Live set-up with only the pad control under his fingers, he launches into his Tobacco remix to begin. Each track lures the audience deeper into the nights experience as heads nod and hands wave approval. The energetic give and take between Mux Mool and the crowd is accentuated the few times he takes to the mic to make sure they are ready for the nights journey – they are.
London’s Gold Panda takes the stage next as a name most in the crowd know, but few know exactly what to expect. Once the effect heavy live intro kicks into “You” from his Ghostly EP though, they are all in his hands. Video from the performance in an upcoming CDM interview, available in the next few days. -Ed. Lusine takes the stage next with the obvious hometeam advantage. If there were any question as to why he was teaching the afternoon Ableton session, it becomes obvious once he takes the stage. His presence is calm and collected with little animation other than the smile on his face and slight head nod. He is a master of his craft, who makes getting the dance floor steady rocking seem effortless.
The headliner for the night, Pantha Du Prince takes the stage in a black hooded overcoat with a scarf partially covering his face. He has a presence that demands attention and as he starts working controllers, contact mics and foot pedals into his own breed of noise music, the audience is sucked into a hypnotic trance. Through the shadows you can catch glimpses of his eyes, and then as the scarf is pulled down, his slightly opened mouth as he intently continues to build the tension. As percussive sounds slowly build into a beat that ramps up, as if queued by post-hypnotic suggestion, the energy in the room boils over.
As people exit the venue there is a sense of arrival. Each an everyone has made a journey to be here, and the sonic baptism which the Ghostly crew laid upon them fully immersed everyone of them into the experience that is Decibel. Some would find there way to after-hours events, others just to a bed to rest up. It is only Wednesday after all, and if this day stands as a means to measure there will be plenty in the days to come for which sleep will not be an option.
