Disquiet

[ September 14, 2008 / bookmark ]

Images of the Week: Cellular Phonics

The following is a screenshot from Automaton, a new software-based sequencer from the company Audio Damage and an excellent mainstream example of generative music, in which sound is produced a series of mutating changes:

And this one is from the software’s user manual, which is available for free download (PDF):

The software, based on John Horton Conway’s Game of Life, which dates back to 1970, allows user-programmed effects to alter sonic material according to the rules of cellular automata (by some small coincidence, also a concern of the Neal Stephenson novel, Anathem, mentioned here yesterday [disquiet.com]). The white-filled boxes shown above are the sequencer (that is, the pattern of the music visualized in realtime), while the other colors refer to four effects implemented on the music: blue is Stutter, red is Modulate, orange is Bitcrush, and green is Replicate.

“Yes, this effectively makes it ancient history as far as computers are concerned,” a footnote in the user manual for Automaton states, in reference to the 1970 article in Scientific American by Martin Gardener that introduced Life to the general public. “The article suggested using checkers and a checkerboard to iterate generations by hand. No, the author wasn’t kidding.” (The massive shift in presumptions regarding computational power in the past 40 years again brings to mind matters that are at the heart of Stephenson’s Anathem — and, for that matter, Charles Stross’s earlier science fiction novel of humanity’s adaptation to change, Accelerando.)

Below, borrowed from a wikipedia.org entry on Conway’s game, is an image (an animated GIF gile) depicting a looping example of how through a turn-based rule system, the cellular automata in Automaton might flow in two dimensions. The genius of this particular application of Life, the Glider Gun designed by mathemetician Bill Gosper, isn’t just that the little triangular doodles make their way off the screen in an orderly fashion (that is, without splintering, which is what so many Game of Life objects end up doing), but that the “gun” at the top of the screen keeps pumping out new gliders, as the triangular bits are refered to.

Automaton is just the latest in a series of software-based tools from Audio Damage, which has a tendency of making them look, online, for fun, like the physical effects boxes from which they are derived. The image accompanying Automaton appears to imagine an iPod-like (or iPhone-like) tool that runs Audio Damage, a tantalizing idea indeed:

More info on Automaton, including video, at audiodamage.com. The software programming is by Adam Schabtach (studionebula.com), user interface by Chris Randall (analogindustries.com).

[ September 13, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Stephenson’s Anathem

What do Brian Eno’s 2003 album January 07003 and Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem, have in common? They’re both inspired by the Clock of the Long Now. The device, which is billed as “the world’s slowest computer,” was initially envisioned by Danny Hillis as the Millennium Clock, a device that takes us out of the instant and into the depths of time. For perspective, it is a clock that ticks once a year, and whose cuckoo, as Hillis put it, comes out once every 1,000 (more info at longnow.org/projects/clock). The album by Eno, who gave the clock its name and who is on the board of its foundation, was composed of bell tones synthesized from the device. In Anathem, Stephenson imagines a world vaguely like ours, but one in which the mythic clock, and others like it, have provided a sense of scientific-ecclesiastic routine amid the chaos of many millennia. The book is narrated by a young servant of the clock, named Erasmas, who early in the story (on page 22 of the hardcover edition) recounts part of the process of maintaining one of these massive yet prickly clock devices:

Our combined strength could not overcome the static friction of all the bearings and gears between us and the sprocket hundreds of feet above from which the chain and weigh depended. Once it became unstuck we would be strong enough to keep it going, but getting it unstuck required a mighty thrust (supposing we wanted to use brute force) or, if we chose to be clever, a tiny shake: a subtle vibration. Different praxics might solve this problem in different wqays. At Saunt Edhar, we did it with our voices.

Note the emphasis on voices. Like Eno, Stephenson hears music in the Clock of the Long Now, which is why the very title of the book turns out to be a song itself, one of “mourning and farewell,” as Stephenson puts it a little later in the novel (one page 100). An album of music inspired by the mathematic systems of Anathem, titled, Iolet: Music from the World of Anathem, is due for release by David Stutz (more info at Stutz’s website, synthesist.net). “Iolet” is appaently the word for music in Stephenson’s world.

[ September 7, 2008 / bookmark ]

Images of the Week: Cardiff-Miller-Russolo

Two glimpses of the Sydney Biennial 2008, courtesy of Dan Hill’s excellent cityofsound.com. A characteristic multi-speaker, immersive environment, titled The Murder of Crows, by longtime collaborators Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller:

More on the Cardiff/Miller piece at the Sydney Biennial site, bos2008.com, and at seesawtheory.wordpress.com. (Probably the best known Cardiff/Miller work, 40 Part Motet, is on view at the Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, Washington, through today, September 7, 2008: tacomaartmuseum.org.)

And  also at Hill’s site, shots of Sydney Biennial reconstructions of Luigo Russolo’s Intonarumori (1914).

The following photo, borrowed from the Biennial site, is the classic shot of Russolo’s original horns-o-plenty installation:

More on Russolo, author of futurist classic The Art of Noises, at bos2008.com. I can’t seem to locate who constructed the reproductions.

The Cardiff/Miller and Russolo works are separated in time by nearly a century. Their close proximity on a Sydney pier emphasizes the continuity of speaker cones as a, if not the, fundamental sculptural touchstone of sound art. Speakers are, in effect, to sound art what the “Funky Drummer” sample was, for a while, to hip-hop and what the “amen break” remains to drum’n'bass and jungle: a near-ubiquitous focal point, a category-defining object to which artists apply their ingenuity.

[ September 6, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Eno, Safe at Any Speed

From Geeta Dayal’s introduction (in draft form) to her forthcoming book on the album Another Green World by Brian Eno:

One of the most instructive things I did was to listen to Another Green World at a number of different speeds and volume levels, most selected arbitrarily. Each time I heard something new that I had not heard before — a new sound that was buried in the mix, for example, or an effect, a heavily layered backing vocal, an abstruse lyric. Speeding up and slowing down Discreet Music taught me a lot, too; the first track of Discreet Music, or “Side A” if you happen to own the vinyl copy, is recorded at half-speed. So I listened to it at double-speed, to gain some insight into what the original material might have sounded like before Eno slowed it down. I also listened to it at quarter-speed, which I liked even more than Eno’s half-speed version.

Full text at 33third.blogspot.com. Dayal is a freelance writer, currently doing research at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media.

[ August 31, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Loud Roots

The interface of Weather Report on the Brick Table, which will serve as the foundation of a new installation, Roots, by Jordan Hochenbaum, Owen Vallis, and Memo Akten:

Roots will be on view at Minitek: Electronic Music + Innovation Festival in New York, September 12-14, 2008. A festival release describes the installation as follows:

Roots is an interactive installation for the Brick Table’s tangible and multi-touch interface, where multiple people can collaborate in making music in a dynamic and visually responsive environment.  When a user presses their finger on the table’s surface, a vine-like structure will branch out and generatively maneuver around the surface– actively triggering sounds and loops.  Harnessing “multi-touch” technology, a single user, or multiple people can very quickly create dense and lush generatively evolving sound collages and compositions, simply by pressing their fingers anywhere on the tables surface. New software is being developed for minitek where Brick Tables surface becomes a virtual ocean; ripples generated from users touching the screen, trigger sounds that decay and use the waves interference patterns to create an interactive musical experience. Brick Table has been exhibited at festivals showing Weather Report, an interactive installation where users sonify real-time surface temperature data.

More info on the festival at minitekfestival.com. More on the Brick Table at bricktable.wordpress.com.

[ August 30, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Sebald’s Radio

This is attributed to the late German writer W.G. Sebald during the last year of his life, 2001:

as i lay down i turned on the radio set standing on the wine crate beside the bed. the names of cities and radio stations with which i used to link the most exotic ideas of my childhood appeared on its round illuminated dial - monte ceneri, rome, ljubljana, stockholm, beromunster, hilversum, prague, and others besides. i turned the volume down very low and listened to a language i did not understand drifting in the air from a great distance: a female voice, which was sometimes lost in the ether, but then emerged again and mingled with the performance of two careful hands moving in some place unknown to me, over the keyboard of a bosendorfer or pleyel and playing certain musical passages, i think from the well tempered clavier, which accompanied me far into the realms of slumber. when i woke in the morning only a faint crackle and hiss was coming from the narrow brass mesh over the loudspeaker. soon afterwards, when i mentioned the mysterious radio at breakfast, austerlitz told me he had always imagined that the voices moving through the air after the onset of darkness, only a few of which we could catch, had a life of their own, like bats, and shunned the light of day…

Originally excerpted on Steve Roden’s inbetweennoise.blogspot.com on August 25, 2008.

[ August 24, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Rock Around the Clock

Beastie Boys’s “So What’cha Want,” the Cure’s “Close to Me,” the Jackson 5’s “ABC”: DJ playlist from a high-school reunion? No, just three of the  nearly three dozen samples from which Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis) constructed the mash-up “What It’s All About.” Below is a chart from the September 2008 issue of Wired magazine, showing a dissection of all the samples in the song. The article is credited to Angela Watercutter. The chart bears no attribution.

Read the full piece at wired.com.

[ August 23, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Radio Free Korea

This Baruch Gottlieb, director and co-founder of SFX Seoul, as quoted in The Korea Times on August 20:

Radio is a presence in our lives. It’s kind of like a soundtrack to our lives. Something that you don’t know quite what to expect from, something always in the background and usually it is something that you don’t pay attention to directly. … That’s something similar to the way sound art is. Sound art is not an artwork that you can focus on. It is always affected by other sounds. There are a lot of parallels to that with radio. Radio is a medium for presenting sound art.

The occasion of the article (koreatimes.co.kr) is the Sound Effects Seoul Radio 2008 festival, which runs through August 26 More info at sfx.yonsei.ac.kr. Gottlieb, ,professor of Media Art at Yonsei University Graduate School of Communication and Arts and a media/sound artist, co-founded SFX Seoul in 2006 with Ji Yoon Yang, a curator.

[ August 17, 2008 / bookmark ]

Image of the Week: Tenor-iPhone

This is a screenshot of PaklSound1, an iPhone music-making application developed by Patryk Laurent:

Laurent explains that the synthesizer is inspired by the Tenori-On. More details at pakl.net/iphone/PaklSound1 (via the-palm-sound.blogspot.com).

[ August 16, 2008 / bookmark ]

Quote of the Week: Noise v. Sound v. Noise

From a brief essay by artist Haroon Mirza at nyartsmagazine.com:

Noise, like other sound, is the result of physical events that take place through space and in time, but unlike other sounds, noise is a nomad; it has no place to go once it has departed; it just gets absorbed into the materiality of the space that surrounds it. Sound, on the other hand, has a destination. Sound is more than often generated to perform functions of communication and affect. Although both sound and noise are always unwillingly received, it’s only sound that is welcome whereas noise is a repellent or is destroyed. However, the ear of the beholder governs the distinction between noise and sound. Noise and sound mutate in and out of one another. Structures, intensities, documentation, reverberation, manipulation, and many other intended or non-intended interventions dictate whether vibrations are received or dismissed as noise. Both can be structured to create music but music itself can be received as either music, sound, or noise depending on the ear of the beholder.

More onMirza at clickfolio.com/haroon.