Silent Witness: Stephen Vitiello’s recording equipment during his 1999 residency on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center’s Tower One in Lower Manhattan

It’s quite possible that the most moving memorial to the World Trade Center was created two years prior to the events of September 11, 2001.

This would be “World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd,” a highly detailed audio document made by the artist Stephen Vitiello of the creak and motion of one of the Twin Towers in the winds of a rough storm. It was created in 1999 during a six-month residency that Vitiello was in the midst of, a residency that provided him with studio space on the 91st floor of Tower One.

There have been numerous works of art created since the events of 9/11, works that have drawn on the narrative, emotions, conflicts, and deaths — from Deborah Garrison’s reportage-cum-poem “I Saw You Walking”; to Ground Zero’s startling appearance as a backdrop to a largely unrelated drama in Spike Lee’s film 25th Hour; to Art Spiegelman’s fierce In the Shadow of No Towers; to Don DeLillo’s stoic novella Falling Man, which served as a kind of sequel to the image on the cover of his earlier book, Underworld; to Steve Reich’s recent album, WTC 9/11, the cover art to which was altered by its record label in apparent response to criticism; to the use of the Twin Towers as a hopeful totem of alternate universes in the TV series Fringe.

What distinguishes Vitiello’s work, even putting aside the facts of its eerie prescience, is that it treats the inhuman structure of the World Trade Center as its subject. To hear the building twist in the wind is to hear it revealed as fragile, unguarded, susceptible — if not sentient, then still certainly sensitive.

As the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached, I contacted Vitiello to see if he’d be interested in discussing how the work came to be, and how perception of it has changed in the dozen years since it was created. He agreed, and that conversation, conducted as a series of emails, appears below. He talks about the work, its creation and initial inception, and the changing perception more broadly of sound art. Also discussed are some recent pieces, like a new large-scale effort at MASS MoCA and his contribution to a project here at Disquiet.com, Lowlands: A Sigh Collective, late last year.

Stephen Vitiello is an Associate Professor of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). “World Trade Center Recordings: Winds After Hurricane Floyd” is in the collection at the Whitney Museum (whitney.org). It is part of the exhibit September 11, which opens on Septmember 11, 2011, at MoMA PS1 (ps1.org) in Long Island City. The work can be heard in part in an excellent recent interview with Vitiello at studio360.org.

Marc Weidenbaum: What is the longest in the decade since 9/11 you have gone without listening to the piece?

Stephen Vitiello: There’s a handful of recordings that I don’t listen to more than once in a year or two. The one that’s called “Winds After Hurricane Floyd” I end up hearing every couple of months. I give a lot of artist talks and I generally play an excerpt from that one as it helps introduce people to my work. It is also something that was really important in the transition of my focus going from being a musician to identifying as a sound artist. I had a studio, along with a number of other artists, in the World Trade Center in 1999 as part of the WorldViews Residency program. When the residency began, I imagined I’d have the sounds from outside streaming in at all times, and sometimes would use those in music I would be working on. As the residency progressed, I realized that the sounds from outside and the sounds of the building were stronger than anything I could add. I became much more aware of the site-specific nature of being there and of listening to an ever-changing sound world.

Weidenbaum: The piece’s timing, its role, as a personal milestone for you, helping to mark the move from musician to sound artist — is that timing, is your transition, in any way tied up with the impact of 9/11? Or was the transition already complete by the time the events occurred?

Vitiello: The transition was definitely in the past by the time the events of 9/11 happened. In fall of 1999 there was an open studio exhibition which allowed me to present my work and meet with curators and gallerists for the first time. There were a couple of things the year before — a concert series in Cologne where I performed alongside Pauline Oliveros, Scanner, and Frances-Marie Uitti in a church with a massive multi-channel sound system, designed by Andres Bosshard, and a small installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lyon — but the residency in 1999 really helped solidify things. On September 10, 2001, I gave a talk at Brooklyn College about my work as a sound artist and focused primarily on the World Trade Center recordings. Fittingly, I was visiting a class taught by the artist Jennifer McCoy. When I was in the World Trade Center, I shared a suite with Kevin and Jennifer McCoy.

Weidenbaum: Art objects stand still while time progresses. You’d yourself made this transition from, as you’ve described it, musician to sound artist by the time 9/11 occurred. Last December you contributed to a sound-art compilation project I curated, Lowlands: A Sigh Collective, that implicitly asked whether or not the world at large had become more accustomed to, more accepting of, sound art. Where do you think we’re at, culturally, in that regard? What have you seen change from your own experience in the past 10 years in terms of how museums and galleries and other institutions, for example, deal with sound art.

Vitiello: I don’t know if I have a confident answer. There was a period where so many institutions had the same idea, organizing sound-based group shows. I rarely felt there was enough commitment to presenting works properly — in terms of controlled spaces, adequate and flexible access to equipment. But still, it was great to have that potential for visibility — sonically speaking, too! Ideally, that would lead to an awareness of artists who use sound and they/we would start to get programmed into more shows as artists, with a connection to theme rather than technology, for example. I haven’t seen that happen often enough. I have also had the privilege of gallery representation for many years but have found very very few collectors or collecting institutions who can get their heads around, or make the commitment to invest in, sound works as Art. Video was able to break through the market and areas of critical thinking and writing but I don’t think sound has made it there yet.

Weidenbaum: Listening to field recordings is always a process of discovery, especially on the second and third listen, but so too on the tenth and hundredth. What have you learned the more you have listened to your World Trade Center recordings?

Vitiello: I hear different details and get more sense of depth of what I’m hearing — wind, creaking and cracking, traffic, thunder. Listening to the recordings can also place me back visually at times.

Weidenbaum: This idea of sounds taking you back visually is particularly interesting — are these visual memories of the residency space, of the view from the window? To switch senses, do you hear ghost memories of the recording when you are near Ground Zero?

Vitiello: I have general memories of watching planes and helicopters go by. The strangest of them was an afternoon when this massive bird was floating outside my window. I think it was the only time I ever saw a bird but there was this one time when it must have been coasting on an air current, or pocket, that was just outside my window. In terms of Ground Zero, I can’t say that I hear anything of the past. I just experience it as this massive construction site with an unusual presence of tourists on the perimeters watching the way little kids do — with their noses glued to a fence or observation window.

Weidenbaum: Your work from the World Trade Center residency has become this unintentional memorial, like the way the cover to Don DeLillo’s Underworld has subsequently informed its reading. Is that timeline something you feel the need to exert effort to firm up, to remind people of — or did you at some point give the piece over to its received public utility as a memorial?

Vitiello: I don’t think I’ve ever felt a claim in that way. I’m happy the piece is acknowledged and I feel a deep connection to it, but I also give it over in any way people want to receive it. It’s really a footnote to your question but Don Delillo has long been my favorite author. The same way Bruce Nauman is my favorite artist. There’s a cold precision to the work of both of them that I don’t see in what I do but somehow it has always made me want to be better at what I do, and those are the figures whose interviews I’ll seek out when I’m out of ideas.

Weidenbaum: How is it that the piece came to be part of the new PS1 exhibit, which is titled September 11?

Vitiello: The exhibition’s curator contact me to include the piece. He said that it would probably be the only work in the show made in the World Trade Center. To pull a quote from the press release: “the exhibition provides a subjective framework within which to reflect upon the attacks in New York and their aftermath, and explores the ways that they have altered how we see and experience the world in their wake.” I liked the idea that it would be a poetic reading of September 11 and memories of the World Trade Center without being an explicitly graphic exhibition about the destruction of the towers. My recordings were made two years before 9/11. They’re only September 11 specific because anything related to the World Trade Center took on a very different context after the buildings were destroyed. Outside of the residency, my piece was first presented at Diapason Gallery in October 2001 and then later, as a spatialized 5.1 mix at the Whitney Biennial in 2002.

Weidenbaum: Have you ever been approached for use of the “Hurricane Floyd” piece in a manner that you turned down — for example, as sound design in a Hollywood film or a political advertisement?

Vitiello: I’ve had a number of people ask to integrate it into projects both commercial and artistic, but I’ve almost always said no. I had one person get angry at me and say I was just lucky to have the recording and it easily could have been her. I think she was a playwright? It’s strange and usually rare when someone wants to deny you something like that.

Weidenbaum: Man, that’s quite an uncomfortable exchange. One might think that photography, after all these years, had laid the groundwork for “audio field-recording document as art” but there are, certainly, holdouts to accepting such a thing. When you speak or lecture about your work, do you address this changing mindset?

Vitiello: I talk about it all the time, in class and in lectures. I’m teaching a graduate sound class at the moment and have a number of photographers in it. It’s still early in the semester so they’re not saying much but I do see heads bobbing in agreement or understanding when I raise some of these issues.

Weidenbaum: To stay with the photography comparison for a moment: Some photographers of the natural world seem to serve as ambassadors for the natural world, while others seem more like artists, essentially urban creatures, who exist in a world of art galleries. If you accept such a continuum, where along it do you see yourself?

Vitiello: I definitely grew up as an urban creature but then became more aware of the natural world and maybe becoming — with certain projects — an ambassador. The recordings I did in the World Trade Center resulted in my being invited to be in a show at the Cartier Foundation curated by Paul Virilio in 2002. My being in that show gave them the idea to put me in the next show, which was artists engaging with a Yanomami group in the Brazilian Amazon. Suddenly I was entering a very different world of field recording and gathering and archiving. Through that thread, some people have said my artist talks sound more like a connection to anthropology than art (theory). The eldest shaman in the Yanomami village did tell me that now that I had seen his world and captured these sounds I had a responsibility to tell the rest of the world about the beauty of it — and an implication that his culture should be allowed to keep their land and be left alone.

Weidenbaum: One thing that the everyday listener can take away from the Twin Towers work, and from that uncomfortable exchange you’ve mentioned, is the idea that the sounds we hear at one moment can take on a very different meaning — can have “value” — at a later moment. In the case of the Twin Towers work, there is the gap from 1999 to late 2001, and then again to a decade later. A siren can be a frightening thing out of the blue, unless the listener is eagerly awaiting an ambulance to rush a loved one to a hospital. A radio playing even a favorite love song can be very annoying if heard at 2:30am from a neighboring apartment. This idea goes as much for your images — like the ones that combine music paper with images of the natural environment — as for your recordings. Which in a very roundabout way leads to the question: Is there a pedagogical aspect to your art along these lines? Are you asking people to learn to frame the world as art themselves?

Vitiello: If I am asking people to frame the world that way, it is only through my own reading and learning from John Cage.

Weidenbaum: After 9/11, as had been the case during and after the Gulf Wars, there was inevitable talk about when it was “appropriate” for “art” — and, by extension, “entertainment” — to draw on them as subject matter. Have you found yourself at any point on the receiving end of negative feedback?

Vitiello: I hope not. If so, I’ve already forgotten or buried that. After 9/11, a number of artists who had been in residence spoke at the Kitchen about our experience. I said that I didn’t plan to play the recordings again. The feedback I got from the audience was that I had to keep them accessible but just to be careful about how they were contextualized. I took that to heart.

Weidenbaum: About Hurricane Floyd: Was that storm on your mind at all as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached and Hurricane Irene was looming? September 11, 2001, is remembered as an especially bright and clear day, but your piece, which dates from two years prior, was recorded in the flux of a particularly bad storm. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 seems to have compacted, in the imagination, the two years between when you had your residency and when the World Trade Center was brought down.

Vitiello: I have thought about the connection to Irene and the present timing. I live in Richmond, Virginia, and we were hit pretty hard. Many people lost power for a week. There’s a gigantic tree that was pulled from the ground and smashed through a neighbor’s roof. It’s been there for well over a week now like a sad silent memory of a really noisy frightening event for the people who lived there.

Weidenbaum: You have a new large-scale work as MASS MoCA (massmoca.org) that you’ve said will be up for half a decade, if not longer. Have you ever had anything sit in place for that long? Does the experience of watching the understanding of your Twin Towers work change over the past dozen years prepare you in any way for how you might, five years down the road, look back at the MASS MoCA piece?

Vitiello: I’ve never had anything up for years, but my piece that was installed on the High Line was up for a year (thehighline.org). This is the fourth project that I’ve done on such a large scale. I feel really lucky to get to work in such a way — with larger, non-tradition exhibition spaces. With the exception of this one at MASS MoCA, they’ve also been in parks or other public spaces, so it opened up my audiences. Working this way forces an engagement with architecture, and often working with an architect to develop plans and engage the space not just formally but structurally. I think that interest in sound and architecture was definitely nurtured through the residency at the World Trade Center.

Weidenbaum: You worked with Paul Park, a science fiction and fantasy author, on the MASS MoCA piece. Has working with a storyteller in any way influenced your own thinking about time-based art, such as sound — about the narrative component of listening, whether that narrative is initiated by the artist or introduced to the work by the listener?

Vitiello: When I approached Paul, I was thinking about how to move away from field recording as the dominant part of my practice. I was thinking about how much I love to read literature and am drawn to characters that go through some sort of transformation. Maybe that connects, too, to taking a field recording, introducing it, and then changing it through the timeline of a piece. Anyway, I asked Paul to write the story and to address the building as an instrument or a holder of some sort of sound history. I then recorded the story and laid sound around the events that were described. From there, I took out some of the spoken language, leaving the sound itself to convey the narrative. As I describe it, it sounds more like an assignment than I think the piece becomes. I guess another way to put it is that I used the text as a score to describe events in time and then mixed those sounds in the space to create the spatial component of installation and engagement with the space itself.

More on Vitiello at his website, stephenvitiello.com, and at his regularly updated soundcloud.com/stephenvitiello page, where he posts audio recordings.

Yet for all the potential chaos, for all the unpredictable interactions, the resulting sound is what could widely be described as musical: tuneful, percussive, internally coherent.

This is Otomata, the grid-based generative music system, or audio-game, or sound-toy, developed by Batuhan Bozkurt, who is based in Istanbul, Turkey. A little more than a month ago Bozkurt announced the free tool’s existence on his earslap.com website. The rules, as he describes them, are simple:

Each alive cell has 4 states: Up, right, down, left. at each cycle, the cells move themselves in the direction of their internal states. If any cell encounters a wall, it triggers a pitched sound whose frequency is determined by the xy position of collision, and the cell reverses its direction. If a cell encounters another cell on its way, it turns itself clockwise.

The resulting wave of Internet-fed curiosity proved just as unpredictable as the sonic outcomes inherent in his creation. The Otomota site received more than a million page views in a matter of days. As of this writing, the above YouTube clip of Otomata in action has had more than 175,000 views. Coverage popped up not only on digital-music sites like createdigitalmusic.com (where Peter Kirn highlights Otomata’s social component, in which users share the result of their experiments), but also consumer-tech site like engadget.com. As a measure of the extent to which Otomata has helped popularize generative sound, note that the comments at Engadget are relatively free of the sort of snarky nay-saying that has been the reader response there to posts about sound art (witness, for an unfortunate contrast, a recent Engadget post about Switzerland-based Zimoun).

Contacted via email, Bozkurt agreed to be interviewed, and what follows is that conversation, lightly edited. He talks about the software-development fine-tuning that yielded Otomata, the promise and precursors of generative art, and some of the unlikely sources of his inspiration, notably the “hang” (“hang drum”), the steel instrument from which he derived Otomata’s tuning and sounds.

Steel Wheel: The “hang” drum, from which Otomota’s sounds are derived

Inevitably, the discussion touches on John Conway’s Game of Life, the popular ur-application of cellular automata, in which simple rules yield complex patterning. Bozkurt is careful to distinguish between the shape-changing algorithms of Conway’s 1970 concoction, and the more straightforward collisions of his own creation.

Primordial Programming: An example of Conway’s Game of Life in action (via wikipedia.org)

The email format of the discussion proved fruitful, allowing us to pursue various tangents, and easily track back to the moment at which conversation diverged. We talked about how he utilizes generative tools in live performance, and about a possible aesthetic parallel between his programmed and composed musical output.

Bozkurt, who was born in Istanbul in 1983 and continues to live there, is especially eloquent about the way that the ever-changing nature of computer technology shapes his decision-making as an artist and as a software developer. In a manner of speaking, the chaotic realm of digital sound — as exemplified by diverging platforms such as Flash and HTML5, and browsers that have their own idiosyncratic standards — is itself a generative construct yielding unexpected delights.

Marc Weidenbaum: The rules that apply in this game, the way collisions alter the way sounds are triggered — were they the first set of rules that you experimented with, or did you develop them through trial and error?

Batuhan Bozkurt: I have experimented with cellular-automata systems a lot in the past. I always found them fascinating for a multitude of reasons, the most important one being that they included the most essential elements I tend to employ for creating generative art. They have clearly defined states, they use feedbacks (the system is fed back its previous state and generates a new state), they have well-defined rules, and as a result they have emergent behavior. I’ve been programming my own tools to make art for many years and I don’t always work with very simple systems. Working with cellular automata (CA) is like a recreational hobby for me. They are very simple to implement, use, and understand, yet they include almost all of the ingredients I care about.

So if we take my past interest in these types of systems into account, it is an evolutionary step for me. That said, the rules Otomata uses were derived without any type of experimentation whatsoever. The idea just popped into my mind just as I was drifting into sleep one day. Later I thought it wouldn’t work well, or it wouldn’t be interesting at all, but I implemented it anyways to see how it behaves. A few tweaks (not to the rules but to the way they generate sounds) and I liked the result. Actually this was the first time I experimented with such a system. I mean, all the CA systems I’ve worked with in the past relied on neighborhood rules (like in Conway’s Game of Life). Otomata is distinct in this sense (it only cares about collisions) and I’m not even sure if it can be classified as a CA system technically.

Weidenbaum: How about the grid in Otomata? I imagine it wasn’t 9×9 to begin with. What tweaking led to its final dimensions?

Bozkurt: Dimensions of the grid needed tweaking. Instinctively, I built the first prototype with an even-sized grid. I think it was 8×8. Then I tried 10×10, 20×20 and similar grids. At that stage I didn’t have any ideas about how I would go for sonifying the emergent behavior. It was fun to watch but it also was slightly annoying in a way, and I tried to figure out where the problem was. Then it appeared to me that I tended to use edge cells for setting up initial states (an inherent bias we all have, I believe), and not having a middle row and column meant that active cells initialized from edges facing each other were not going to meet and interact with each other. To have symmetry and interaction, there had to be a middle row and a middle column, so I needed an odd-sized grid, so then I also experimented with them. They worked a lot better and it was a lot more fun to play with that way. The final decision of 9×9 was more or less arbitrary — I wanted to use a hang-drum scale and it had nine pitches, so that had an influence. It could have been 11×11 or 13×13, and I’m willing to make it dynamically settable in the future.

Weidenbaum: I am guessing the answer will be the latter, but tell me: was this software intended mostly as an experiment, or do you have strong feelings about the potential for generative composition?

Bozkurt: I do have very strong feelings about the potential of generative art in general. As computer is a multi-domain artistic instrument to me, I regard making software as a means of artistic expression. I’ve been programming computers using domain-specific languages (SuperCollider, Pure Data, Processing, etc.) for many years to make my own tools to create art. But I had no means to share what I was creating and using, with people outside a limited circle who were already familiar with the platforms I used. My long-held dream was to be able to share my creations similar to Otomata on the web without making people to download and install something to their computers. Until recently, the technology simply wasn’t there but now things are getting a lot better. I can elaborate on the technical issues that similar-minded people are facing if you want. I am willing to use this new potential and create and share similar creations with the world. In that regard, Otomata was the first in a chain of ideas that I was willing to share. The way it was received, though, was far far above my expectations and that makes me extremely happy about the future.

Weidenbaum: Explain to a general reader what you mean by “domain specific.”

Bozkurt: Computer programming is time-consuming and usually a confusing thing to do. When using general purpose tools (as opposed to domain specific tools), getting a single beep out of the computer is hard. And things get exponentially harder if you try to do more complicated things. Domain specific programming languages assume a specific programmer audience with goals limited in a particular domain (creating music, visuals, multimedia works etc.). They are built in a way to make life a lot easier for those very people. Some require no coding at all (e.g. Pure Data, Max/MSP), as artists without a programming background usually have an aversion to anything related to coding, so instead they employ the visual patching paradigm to create custom software. With domain specific tools, the idea is to make the learning curve gentler for the newcomer, and to hide technical details unrelated to the domain to aid flowing creative process for more advanced people.

Weidenbaum: Are there specific examples of generative art from the past that have inspired you?

Bozkurt: To this day, I still find enormous joy in [Steve Reich's] early “Process Music” (see: columbia.edu) experiments. They don’t fit into the “generative art” definition of today, but they provide a strong foundation for a lot of things related to it. When faced with this question, I immediately think of the earlier works of 20th century that demonstrate the emergent nature of particular processes. I could point to phase music experiments of Steve Reich, “Poème Symphonique” of Ligeti, “In C” of Terry Riley, experiments exploiting the acoustics of spaces by Alvin Lucier. I particularly find the approach of Iannis Xenakis inspiring. I am always moved by the emotional qualities of his music despite his methodical approach of creating them.

I also regard the foundations of most baroque music as generative, especially the fugue form. It does not rely on computation of course but coming up with pieces with all that organic flow derived strictly from a single thematic statement leaves the exact same impression on me.

In the more current definition of generative art, most of the things that inspire me are visual works, actually. I think that is because they tend to be well polished and easily accessible. Jared Tarbell has a solid body of works on his complexification.net site, which I enjoy enormously. I can also point to the works of Mario Klingemann residing in his incubator.quasimondo.com.

I have also enjoyed many audio tools that have generativity in focus but they are less accessible and personal tools that are created in domain specific environments so it is hard to point at them. I’m pretty sure this will change in the very near future, I honestly expect an explosion on accessible generative audio tools.

Last but not least, I am deeply inspired by the demoscene (see: scene.org). I particularly enjoy the works by Farbrausch (see farb-rausch.de).

Weidenbaum: Could you explain a little more why you elected to do Otomata initially as a browser-based tool, rather than implementing it as an “app” in, say, iOS or Android?

Bozkurt: My primary aim was to to make my work fairly accessible. Otomata was not a result of a little experiment, but part of a bigger plan I had. From the time realtime cross-platform audio synthesis became possible inside web browsers, I knew I had to make use of it. I had been waiting for it for so long. It is easy to convince people to try something new; all it takes is a description catchy enough to make that person click on a link. So I spent some months programming a DSP library for this purpose. My plan was to make my work accessible through a web browser and work more on (make mobile versions, VST/AU plug-ins etc.) the ones that gained significant attention. I made Otomata public just to test the waters, actually, but the attention it brought caught me off guard. I got more than a million hits on my website in just a few days. Now I’m working on mobile/VST versions of it and trying to optimize my workflow for future projects.

Weidenbaum: Could you select a brief bit of Otomata code of which you’re particularly proud, and explain it to the reader?

Bozkurt: The mechanics behind Otomata is pretty simple, the logic is just a few lines of code and it basically recites “turn backwards if you encounter a wall and make a sound, turn clockwise if you bump into another cell” in a computer language, so I wouldn’t say I’m very proud of that code as much as I’m proud of the idea behind Otomata overall. But I’m very proud of the backing audio synthesis engine which I spent some months creating and it is quite big. I’m planning to open-source it in the near future.

Weidenbaum: Do you foresee yourself improving upon Otomata, or are you primarily interested in moving on to your next programming project?

Bozkurt: I will improve Otomata to some degree as a side project, but I’m eager to move onto future projects.

Weidenbaum: Are there other web-based generative-sound implementations, or apps for that matter, that you recommend?

Bozkurt: It might be surprising but I honestly can’t point to anything that inspiring. Web-based generative-sound is still at its infancy. Writing raw samples (as opposed to playing pre-recorded sounds) to sound card buffer has been around only since Adobe Flash 10. Before that I know that André Michelle (see: andre-michelle.com) was hacking his way through doing this with earlier versions of flash, and his lab page (lab.andre-michelle.com) has some stuff demonstrating the techniques though he seems more interested in bringing the desktop music production experience to the web. He was also behind the “Adobe, make some noise!” movement (see: make-some-noise.info). He has a generative web-tool/app called Pulsate (andre-michelle.com/pulsate), which I enjoyed.

Weidenbaum: Is there a programming or tech community in Istanbul of which you feel you are part?

Bozkurt: Nope. Also I’m not a very social person, unfortunately. It’s usually up to my fiancée to make sure I get to socialize just barely enough to function as a healthy human being. As a result, my interaction with relevant communities tends to be online and my home country is not very ripe when it comes to programming for art. So my interactions tends to be with people outside of Turkey. I am a (not very active) developer for the SuperCollider project (see: supercollider.sourceforge.net) and I try to fix/improve on things when I encounter them to the best of my ability. I am also an avid SuperCollider user of course, and am quite an evangelist at that.

Weidenbaum: Do you perform your music live at all, and if so what is your setup, if you have a standard setup?

Bozkurt: I perform live but very rarely. I am planning to do a lot of live performing in the future but I have other priorities for now. When I play live, I use my electric guitar plugged into computer, and custom software (almost always written in SuperCollider). I also use some MIDI controllers (foot controller, knob/slider stuff), nothing too complicated. I don’t like dealing with a lot of gear.

Weidenbaum: In your live setup, do you employ any generative processing, perhaps in SuperCollider?

Bozkurt: Of course, all the time. Actually I have very hard time putting events on a time grid into place by hand. Being forced to do that alienates me from what I’m trying to do. When I try to compose in more conventional methods, I always find myself asking myself questions such as: “Why am I putting this here? Why can’t this event be over there? Why am I using this particular pitch? Is it because it sounds better? How do I define ‘good,’ anyways?” It is hard for me to get over all these; that was one of my most important frustrations regarding more conventional methods that led me to algorithmic composition. For me, it eliminates the anxiety of deciding the final temporal places for musical events, so I can function. Creating processes that produce events and sounds themselves in countless variations, instead of creating a single arrangement of events by some sort of intuition, feels natural and enjoyable to me. Also, I figured my artistic tendencies are driven by the urge of discovering new things and hunting for those serendipitous moments. So algorithmic/generative/procedural approaches are a good playground for surprising myself to no end. In live performances, I decide what tools I am going to use, plan a vague structure (that almost always gets abandoned on stage), but leave all the details for improvisation. I can handle failure and I love the thrill of performing with the unknown.

Weidenbaum: I sense a kind of collision aesthetic in some of the fixed recordings on your site, in particular in “Reminiscent.” Is there something about the aural effect of a collision that has particular appeal to you?

Bozkurt: That is an interesting observation, a pattern I hadn’t noticed before. Looking back at my recent works (not all of them are listed on my site) I can clearly see a similar influence now. For example last year I composed a 30-minute electronic piece for The Morning Line project (by TB-A21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary; see: tba21.org) and the main structural theme of that piece was gravity. Things dropping from a distance and making sounds and all that. And there are others I can think of. I might need to look into that, can’t see what is causing that tendency right now.

In a more general sense though, I enjoy reading and thinking about physics and astronomy a lot. I actually studied physics half a semester before dropping out and going full time with music. So I can see many influences of ideas derived from those sciences in majority of my works. My interest in making things collide and whatnot might come from my “interested in physics” part of my brain.

Weidenbaum: Have you ever used the Automaton effect from the company Audio Damage (see: audiodamage.com)? I’ve enjoyed using it, mostly to lend a bit of organized chaos to the processing of pre-existing tracks.

Bozkurt: Nope, never used it. I saw a CA sequencer implemented in Native Instruments Reaktor, though — called “newscool,” it was one of the factory instruments — and it was enjoyable because it had a novel logic behind it. It was a nicely designed instrument overall (see: youtube.com).

Weidenbaum: I don’t think we have actually discussed how you came up with the sounds you use in the software.

Bozkurt: My main instrument influence for Otomata was the Hang Drum. I tried to synthesize sounds close to a Hang Drum in terms of timbre. DSP and sound synthesis is still an expensive operation for web browsers (in terms of computer load), and it is cheap to synthesize such a sound realtime. It takes two to three sine wave generators, a noise source for the attack, and a little bit of filtering.

Weidenbaum: Did you consider ever putting in a random element as an option?

Bozkurt: I use randomization a lot, but only when it is called for. Otomata is deterministic instrument as far as its logic is concerned and I wanted to keep it that way. That said, there is some randomization in the sound synthesis stage. Probably most ears won’t notice, but each time you launch Otomata, the tuning is slightly different (“off”), and unique, just like it is with a physical/acoustic instrument.

Weidenbaum: Please tell me about yourself, your musical, educational, and professional background.

Bozkurt: I am a Turkish guy located, born, and raised in Istanbul. I am working toward my MA degree in Sound Engineering and Design, and I studied music in college. Computers and electric guitar are my main instruments. Programming computers started as a hobby when I was a little kid and I still write code daily, as that is the language of my main instrument, but I have no formal training in computer science or anything related to it. I am currently making a living by doing commission work and tutoring but I’m shifting my focus to creating accessible software for computer music and generative art that is meant to be used by people other than me basically.

Weidenbaum: Were your parents musical or technical? What did they do?

Bozkurt: I have only one musician relative in my whole extended family. My father used to work in a bank and my mother was a factory worker; but they are both technical people. My mother used to repair the machines in the factory even though it wasn’t her job; she is good at fixing things. My father was an electronics hobbyist and I have many memories from my childhood working with him. He is also an avid music listener so I was looking for and appreciating good music with him all the time.

The Generator: A photo of Otomata developer Batuhan Bozkurt

Weidenbaum: Where in Istanbul do you live, and what is the neighborhood is like?

Bozkurt: I live in the intersection point where working class and lower middle class people meet. A bit noisy, but fairly safe environment. I don’t have friends living in my neighborhood. I’m a bit sticking out actually, people usually know each other here. I’m sure they are wondering what I’m all about.

Weidenbaum: You mentioned how the demoscene is inspiring to you. Could explain how?

Bozkurt: I especially enjoy the size limited demos where a group tries to fit many minutes of audio and visuals into a, say, 64KB executable. When programmers are limited in code size, they can’t use pre-built 3D models, baked visual textures, or pre-recorded audio samples/music to create a piece of work; they need to find procedural/algorithmic ways of creating that content. To make this happen, programmer/artist groups in the demoscene literally compete against each other to find beautiful algorithms that generate novel patterns (for logic and visuals) to build audiovisual experiences. This competition drives innovation so the demoscene becomes a natural habitat where beautiful algorithms emerge and evolve for procedural content creation. They also tend to employ extreme ends of the technology (either cutting edge, or completely obsolete). It’s amazing how arbitrary limitations (like binary size, processing power) nurture the creative process. It’s the art of compression. That said, I’ve seen many procedural approaches to visuals but yet to see any procedural audio in demos, and I keep wondering why it is not so commonplace. I would love to collaborate with some people to do that type of work. Hopefully in the future …

Weidenbaum: Early on in this conversation, you had said, “I can elaborate on the technical issues that similar-minded people are facing if you want.” If you’re still up for it, that would be great.

Bozkurt: Of course. This will be a bit long.

There are two different paradigms for programming computers to emit sounds (as far as programming APIs [“application programming interface”] are concerned). The first one only deals with using pre-recorded sounds (samples). If the platform or the programming library limits the programmer to this approach, that means the programmer is only able to load pre-recorded samples to memory and trigger their playback when desired. In this paradigm, basic support for panning and adjusting the gain for the output is usually expected.

A platform or programming API that claims to have multimedia support is expected to at least support this kind of operation. The good thing about this approach is that it is easy for the vendors to implement across all platforms. It is very high level. You have these sounds, and you want to play them back at specific times. Load sound. Trigger playback whenever you want. All the details are hidden.

The bad thing about this is that you can’t synthesize new sounds. You can’t create new sounds from scratch, you can’t influence the output or run it through effects you programmed. You can’t get sound input from microphone for example, transform it to something new, and play it back that way. You need to have access to what we call “input/output buffer” of the operating system sound backend; you need to be able to read from and write values directly into this buffer.

The second paradigm deals exactly with this. The aim is to expose this input/output buffer to the programmer so that the programmer can compute values by using DSP (digital signal processing) methods and write these values to sound card’s output buffer to make them audible. With this method, if you want to hear a sine wave, you just compute a sine wave realtime, write these values to output buffer and it goes through the layers of the operating system that eventually makes it audible through connected speakers.

Now if we return to the issue with web browsers, up until the HTML5 standard, there was no direct and/or standardized support for either of these paradigms. You could of course, make native software for certain operating systems, and demand users to download it to use it, but it is hard to convince people to do so. Another option is to use a browser plug-in which is capable of doing this type of thing, but it still requires the users to download and install a software to their computers which is not going to happen most of the time. Without the support of plug-ins, the web browsers were essentially silent.

Fortunately, there is this browser plug-in called Adobe Flash, which is already installed in almost all desktop computers. Up until version 10, it supported the first paradigm of sound generation across all major platforms. That meant you were able to use pre-recorded samples and trigger their playback, but there was no access to sound output buffer, so no sound synthesis was possible. The feature was not heavily demanded anyways, as Flash was mainly used for creating simple, addictive online games and game programmers rarely needed that kind of thing. With Flash Player version 10, Adobe decided to include support for the second paradigm, which took some additional time to get it right afterwards. That meant cross-platform sound synthesis inside web browsers was now possible without the need of any additional software besides Flash. This is a very recent development, and it is a solution to a problem we were facing. Otomata uses this method generate its sounds.

Then HTML5 standard came along. HTML5 supports the “audio” tag, which meant the first paradigm of sound generation inside HTML5-capable web browsers (without relying on any third-party plug-in, such as Adobe Flash) became possible. You can load pre-recorded sounds and play them back at specific times. But no sound synthesis, no fun.

The most recent development came with Mozilla Firefox 4, which is just a few months old as of now. Firefox 4 has a new but non-standard sound API which enables the programmer to synthesize sounds inside the browser without relying to a third-party plug-in. The feature is not inside the HTML5 standard, and it is up to the decision of other browser vendors to implement it. If a programmer uses this method now, it will only work with Firefox 4. We are hoping that this will be adopted across other browsers in the future.

Weidenbaum: Do you feel there is an earlier tradition that generative work is rooted in? You mention Xenakis and others of his era, but how about from the pre-recording era?

Bozkurt: I wouldn’t call it a tradition but there certainly are roots from the pre-recording era. I can point to Musikalisches Würfelspiel, the musical dice game of W. A. Mozart, a “method” where he supposedly used randomization with dices to stitch together short fragments of music, each composed exclusively for this purpose.

Going further back, there is this instrument called Aeolian Harp which is designed to be played by the wind. Initially used by ancient Greeks, it is named after the ancient Greek god of the wind, Aeolus. It is a stringed generative instrument where the blowing wind makes the tuned strings resonate creating rising and falling harmonies.

Going even further back, there are these “wind chimes,” probably coming from prehistoric times. Wind chimes are also generative instruments played by the wind. As far as I know, there is a big culture and tradition behind different types of this beautiful instrument.

More on Batuhan Bozkurt and Otomata at earslap.com, twitter.com/earslap, facebook.com/batuhanbozkurt, vimeo.com/batuhan, youtube.com/noissez, and github.com/batuhan.

Thicket presents itself, initially, as a black screen covered with what seem like a nanotech vision of pickup sticks. These myriad razor-thin white lines glisten and bounce around the screen to an elegant score that seems halfway between the gauzy blankness of ambient and the automaton funk of techno. Had Jackson Pollock lived long enough to be a developer on the Atari arcade classic Tempest, it might have looked like this.

Digits, All: Two hands and up to ten fingers can be used to manipulate the Thicket app on the iPad (shown here), the iPhone, and the iPod Touch.

But to touch the screen is to break the score’s fourth wall — to touch the screen is to alter the sound, and the visuals along with it. With each additional finger, the pace of the piece is altered — dragging fingers across the surface brings new patterns. Hold them long enough in the first version of Thicket, and a whole new mixture of sound and image comes into view.

While debugging the second edition of Thicket, version 2.0, which was released today (November 8, 2010), Packard participated in an extended conversation about what Thicket is and what it isn’t: “I don’t want to cross over from creating an interactive art piece which people can explore,” he says, “to creating a completely open-ended tool.”

Perhaps what Thicket is is a peek into a possible future for music, and for video — a future in which a release isn’t a static recording but a malleable one, designed to be played with, prodded, explored. Thicket’s pleasures are real and formidable, but they are also anticipatory, hinting at cultural norms yet to be fully imagined, let alone codified. There’s always a lot of talk in the world of interactive multimedia of 19th-century opera legend Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, the total work that combines all art forms. Thicket is such a work, yet one that never loses sight of its own economy, its own modesty.

Ott, who studied computer graphics, lives in Brooklyn. Packard, who studied anthropology in college and spent some years in the jazz department at the New England Conservatory in Boston, lived in Brooklyn for a decade, but these days makes his home in Denver. Like a lot of people who program, they got their primary education by working. Says Packard, an accomplished electronic musician with several albums to his credit, “I think both of us really cut our teeth coding in the Internet industry.”

Over the course of the interview, Packard talks about how composing music for interactive applications differs from traditional composition (“The idea of retro-fitting a studio production for interactivity gives me shivers”), explains why the second version of Thicket is purposefully less puzzling than its predecessor, and provides a peek inside the Thicket code.

Marc Weidenbaum: The Thicket app — I’m still sorting out whether to call it a “piece” or a “song,” or what exactly to call it — seems to have a few modes, primarily the white-lined one and then the blue-lined one. I’m trying to get a sense of whether I think of the blue-lined part as a “chorus,” versus the white-line “verse,” or a “bridge.” Do these comparisons sit with you?

Morgan Packard: Honestly, I’ve never really identified strongly with any verse-chorus type of music. My first, intense love was jazz, which tends to have all different sorts of structures, and then I went straight in to focusing on underground dance music, which tends to be steady state music, about the groove, the moment, rather than larger structures like verse and chorus. But the analogy does fit. Especially with the new version of Thicket [version 2], which has more modes and an easier way to transition between them; I find myself alternating back and forth in a way that feels like different sections of the same musical piece.

Weidenbaum: Regarding the new version of Thicket, what did you learn from the first version that led you to update it as you did?

Packard: Some of the changes in the new version are in response to problems we identified, and some of them are just us wanting to add more stuff, make it a fuller, deeper experience. The biggest difference is in the mode system. In the first version of Thicket, there were three distinct modes, which you entered based on a fairly obscure calculation based around how active your fingers were. This worked OK, but was confusing to people, and sometimes felt arbitrary. You’d be having fun in one mode, and all of a sudden, you’re thrown into a different visual and sound world. I sometimes found it annoying, actually. The new version has none of those surprise mode changes. You change modes by simply rotating the device. It’s much nicer now, being able to control how the modes change.

Additionally, we’ve added two new modes to the three existing ones. Josh has done a great job dreaming up two dazzling new visual worlds, and I’m happy with giving people two entirely different ways to control the sound. I wanted to give people a little more freedom to be creative with the sound, to expand the palette a little bit. I prefer to be careful with how much freedom we give people, because I don’t want to cross over from creating an interactive art piece which people can explore, to creating a completely open-ended tool. So the new modes have a wider range of the possible sounds you can create, but it’s still a very focused experience. You can be more creative, but it’s still inside the paradigm of exploring the world that we’ve created, rather than building your own world from the ground up. Nothing against actual software tools, of course. That’s just not what Thicket is.

Weidenbaum: It seems in the revised version there are, correct me if I’m wrong, now five stages — the three original ones, and two more. Does the initial, “white lines” one still serve as the “main” or default mode, or do they all have equal standing?

Packard: The initial white lines mode is the most Thickety of all of them. It’s the first one we built, and it’s the heart of the experience. The other modes are supporting characters. And there are five modes now. A default mode, plus a mode for each vertical orientation you can hold the device in. You get back to the default mode by shaking.

Mirror, Mirror: This main screen is the most “Thickety” of all the app’s stages, according to developer Morgan Packard.

Weidenbaum: Before one ever touches the screen, there is already a lot of visual activity. What is the hands-free correlation between sound and the lines?

Packard: Generally what happens is the audio part of Thicket sends messages to the visuals part indicating the intensity of notes as they strike. Then the visuals part can use this message both as an indication of the rhythm — “something happened,” and the intensity — “whatever happened happened with X degree of intensity.”

Stage Diver: The four secondary stages of Thicket, as of version 2.0

Weidenbaum: If this would work for you, could you select a piece of coding from the project, show it, and explain what it is that you’re proud about in it? And with a non-programming reader in mind, could you annotate the code a little?

Packard: That’s a tough one, because interesting software is often made up of a bunch of very simple, boring components and procedures. Also, well engineered software looks simple and boring when you look at it up close. The beauty is in the connection and arrangement of the components, and the programmer’s ability to keep them simple and boring.

Here’s the code which is responsible for slightly tweaking the main sequence of Thicket so that it gradually evolves, randomly:

-(void)evolvePosition:(float)evolveDist{

   evolveCursor++;

   [self checkBounds];

   SequenceState* state = &states[evolveCursor]; // here
   we pull the current step in the musical sequence out
   and keep it locally so I can do stuff to it

   SequenceState* excitedState = &excitedStates[evolveCursor];

   int signedRand1000 = (rand() % 1000) -1000; // this
   generates a random number

   float change = signedRand1000 / 1000.0; // this makes the
   random number smaller

   (*state).position =  fabs( // "position" corresponds to the start
   point on the chords sample I play back. The sample is several
   seconds long, and gets more and more intense. So a larger
   "position" value will mean a brighter, more intense chord
   sound. In the following bit, I add the random number I
   generated to the "position" value of the current sequencer
   step, so that the sound drifts and changes subtly. If you
   leave Thicket alone in the default mode, you'll notice that
   the sound sort of loops, but there are subtle variations in
   the sequence. The sequence evolves. This code is how that
   happens.

      (*state).position 

      + ( evolveDist *  change )

     ); // 

   (*excitedState).position =  fabs(

            (*excitedState).position 

            + ( evolveDist *  change )

            ); // 

           }

I’m not particularly proud or ashamed of that code, but I’m proud of the idea behind it. And the code gets the job done. The language is Objective-C, which is the default programming language for the iPhone/iPad platform. It’s all written with XCode, which is Apple’s development environment. I’ll write some comments in the code below explaining what it does. I’ve commented with the English language text that begins with “//” [above].

Weidenbaum: Did the piece of music pre-exist the project?

Packard: The visuals, existed before, in a way. When discussing where to start with Thicket, Josh and I both agreed we’d like to start with with a piece from a DVD we did a few years ago called “Unsimulatable.” There was one in particular we affectionately called “the ball of string.” I took some of the sound from the ball of string, but mostly created the sound in response to the specific challenge of creating an interactive piece of music with no visible controls. So everything in the audio reacts just to finger speed and number of touches. I definitely didn’t repurpose an existing, static composition for Thicket. The idea of retro-fitting a studio production for interactivity gives me shivers. For something like Thicket, I’d only want to work with sound generation processes which were fluid, flexible. If I was going to use an existing song, I’d just be chopping it up in to samples and triggering the samples. I’m interested in making something richer and more dynamic than that.

Weidenbaum: You refer to “the ball of string” that preceded the development of Thicket. Is that related to the stage in the new Thicket that has large circles in it? Also, is that video available online?

Packard: No, the ball of string is the default mode, what you see when you launch the app. It’s the dense cluster of tangled lines that hints at complexity to the point of oblivion. “Unsimulatable” is available as a DVD, packaged with my Airships Fill the Sky album. I don’t think the ball of string bit is online anywhere.

Weidenbaum: I appreciate your apprehension regarding re-purposing studio production for interactive purposes. Could you describe how composing for interactivity differs?

Packard: I’ve been into the idea of functional music for quite a long time. The idea of music not being just for music’s sake, but to facilitate something larger than itself. That’s what drove me away from an early interest in jazz, and toward club music, years ago. So, I really like the idea of creating music with the thought of “what does this music accomplish, how will it be used?” I like the idea of form following function. I certainly pulled from my standard musical palette when creating sound for Thicket, but imposed very few actual structures on the user. My purely musical composition process is about creating larger structures out of smaller things, and also about editing — generating lots of ideas, and deciding which of the final particular expressions of the ideas are just right. For example, in creating a piece in the studio, I might compose a nice long melody, or a specific bass line, or come up with an intricate beat that I really like. The balance of those structures is often so delicate that if you change them just a little bit, they don’t work any more. So for an interactive experience, I need to guide the user toward simpler structures, sounds, and techniques that aren’t so delicately balanced.

Weidenbaum: There’s something about the self-contained-ness of Thicket that makes me think about remixing, how much remixing is part of music distribution these days — it’s a promotional tool, a social tool, a functional tool. I wonder if part of what’s cool about Thicket is how it makes remixing part and parcel of the cultural object itself.

Packard: Actually, I’d say that Thicket is decidedly anti-remix in philosophy! I’ve distanced myself artistically from the idea of sample and remix culture. I don’t deny the importance of it historically, and love a nice breakbeat as much as the next guy, but I think the focus on sampling, remixing, whatever, basically musical collage, has gotten us to a place where the sparkle and life is missing from a lot of music. I try to combat that with my own electronic music. I work basically only with synthesized sounds or recordings I’ve created myself. I try to avoid looping my own sounds, and design software that while pattern-oriented, makes introducing variations in the patterns extremely easy. So, with Thicket, we want it to feel like there are no pre-built “chunks” that you’re moving around, as you do with remixing, or collage. Instead, we want you to feel like you’re interacting with a living organism, like every aspect of it is malleable, and never existed before you created. There is something nice about the remix thing, that it allows people with little training and expertise to have the experience of creation. I think that’s great, and that’s what Thicket does. So in that way, I’ll agree that there’s maybe something “remixy” about Thicket.

Weidenbaum: What’s the compositional and programming division of labor between you two?

Packard: So far with Thicket, it’s been: Josh comes up with some interesting visual ideas and programs that end of things, then I program sound for it.

Weidenbaum: What work have either of you have done in interactive apps previously?

Packard: Josh has loads of experience with Flash development. We’ve both been composing and performing using home-made software for years, which I suppose counts as interactive apps. Josh does something called “multi-draw” with his superDraw software, which allows people to interact with his software as he’s performing, using their iPhones. So people can fiddle on their iPhones and see their movements all projected together on the same screen. Thicket is the first full-on interactive art creation I can take any real credit for.

Weidenbaum: Could you name other music/sound-related apps that you admire?

Packard: I never spend as much time checking out other people’s work as I’d like to. So there’s probably some good stuff out there that I’m totally unaware of. I’m very focused on a couple of criteria that would need to go in to an app that I’m really thrilled by. One is gestural control. I like to feel music actually respond to my movements. And the two-dimensional interfaces of the iPad and iPhone are so nice, they’re really begging to have fingers dragged across them. The other thing I’m looking for is some sort of interaction paradigm that goes beyond the traditional instrument paradigm. In order to make sound on a traditional instrument, you have to bow, pluck, blow, or bang on it. If you stop moving, it stops making noise. Part of the fun of computers is that they can keep working even after we’ve stopped.

So I want something that will give me something back, something I don’t have to put as much effort in to as a real instrument (otherwise I’d just play a real instrument — they sound and feel better), but also something that will allow me to move my fingers, to feel a bit expressive, that doesn’t feel too fiddly. Bloom accomplishes this well. Amit Pitaru’s Sonic Wire Sculptor meets some of my criteria as well.

Related Links: Get the Thicket app at itunes.apple.com. More on Morgan Packard at morganpackard.com. More on Joshue Ott at intervalstudios.com. There’s also a great document at vagueterrain.net, collecting excerpts from the development duo’s chat logs.

Each noise in ShapeSeq is one of the basic waveforms: sine, square, triangle, saw. And each waveform is symbolized by a basic shape-color combination: a blue circle, a red pentagon, a green triangle, an orange square.

Placing or moving one of those symbols on the screen (ShapeSeq also works on the iPad), you can roughly determine a given shape’s pitch (along the vertical axis) and volume (along the horizontal). It will then repeat. The manner in which that selected pattern repeats is determined by two factors: the pace of the loop, and whether it’s a four-beat or eight-beat sequence. These options can be altered in realtime, which makes ShapeSeq as much a performance tool as a compositional one.

This all seems fairly straightforward, right? But play with ShapeSeq for even a short period of time, and the expansive variety of potential patterns becomes apparent. Says the app’s British developer, Paul Apfrod, “One thing I like about what emerges from the simple system I created is the blurring of boundaries between what would be considered a note or a single beat of a sound and of a rhythm or melody of several sounds.” From little things big things grow.

After & Before: Screenshots of the iOS app ShapeSeq (above) and the earlier, pre-iOS version, called Shape Sequencer, which involved PlayStation 2 controllers (below, in a still from video footage)

To trace the course of ShapeSeq’s own development, you have to go back to 2004, several years before the 2007 launch of the iPhone. ShapeSeq had an earlier life as an art-installation project, when it was called Shape Sequencer. It was built in Pd, or Pure Data, a visual programming language that has a shared lineage with Max/MSP, and it was played on Windows machines using PlayStation 2 controllers (the PlayStation 2 at this point would have been a half-decade old). It also allowed for multiple players in a kind of cyber-jam.

Since then, the application has made two significant evolutionary jumps: from open-source art-hack to the commercial world of the iTunes Store, and from site-specific installations to global distribution. The website creativeapplications.net, which tracks the intersection of interaction and artistry, listed it among the “15 Best and Must Have iPhone Apps of 2009.” As Apfrod puts it, his project has gone from “art installation” to “software instrument.”

ShapeSeq is one of a host of music apps that have helped feed a growing popular interest in playing with, manipulating, sound. Such sonic play is an inherent part of contemporary experimental electronic music — from so-called “handmade music” tools to the home-brew software patches developed by laptop musicians. What’s remarkable about the music app field is that everyday consumers are participating in what previously would have been an esoteric affair.

Apfrod, who was born in Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, and currently lives south of London, studied interaction design, and says most of his programming skills are self-taught. A musician himself, his earliest music-making experience took place, foretelling his current activity, on the Amiga personal computer. Over the course of an interview about ShapeSeq, he talked about, among other things, the cultural and technological shifts between Shape Sequencer and ShapeSeq, how programming is like composing music (and vice versa), and the need for a “software art” subcategory in the iTunes app store.

Marc Weidenbaum: How did ShapeSeq originate?

Paul Apfrod: ShapeSeq for iPhone is the child of the earlier Shape Sequencer project, which was made in Pd — Pure Data — and allowed four players to jam using four PlayStation 2 controllers. Shape Sequencer came from an investigation into notions of “playing” in the sense of musical instruments and video games, trying to address the problems of immediacy, intuitiveness, and expressivity for electronic music performers and audiences. It became its own type of musical instrument, with simple geometric shapes on screen representing different sounds. As the players move the shapes around, shrink them and rotate them, so the sound of each shape is changed in pitch, volume, and timbre. Thus, the players have their movements magnified into a live video abstract representation of the sounds being created. This visual feedback is good for the practice of the player, and satisfying for the audience, as they can follow the usually obscured practices of the electronic music performer by watching the screen.

In making Shape Sequencer and enhancing it for my own use in performances, I added the ability to record movements to a constantly playing live loop, and to resize and divide this loop, all from the PS2 controller. This mechanism leads to some of the more unique sounds the Shape Sequencer is capable of. The loop is represented by a regular polygon, which can be changed in size and number of points, and will play back or record on those points as divisions of the same pattern.

Years later, the iPhone came out, and eventually people started making interesting sound apps and musical instruments for this new platform. ShapeSeq seemed an obvious candidate for my first app. I aimed to make the iPhone version just as intuitive and fun to play, but adapted for the screen size and single player. I also added the ability to save and recall with four memory slots, so players can store their best loops or switch patterns quickly in live performance.

Weidenbaum: What’s the timeline between the development of Shape Sequencer and the development of ShapeSeq? Was the original more of an art experiment, and then the iPhone OS came along and made it possible to do this sort of work for a broader audience?

Apfrod: Shape Sequencer was first developed between 2004 and 2005, and was used for performance and art installations. I started work on an iPhone version around Sept 2009, and released it in December 2009 to reach a broader audience, and just to make something cool as a first iPhone app.

Weidenbaum: Did you sort of put aside Shape Sequencer between 2005 and 2009, or was it still a big part what you were working on, and where your head was at?

Apfrod: I was working on other stuff and developing my software-making skills. I knew Shape Sequencer wasn’t really finished, and still isn’t, but didn’t think about it for a bit while I got on with better paid work where I could develop my ability.

Weidenbaum: You did Shape Sequencer in Pd, which has a somewhat shared lineage with the software Max/MSP — what did you run it on? A Mac, a PC? Did it not matter?

Apfrod: I chose Pd because it was open source and cross-platform. This assures me that my works will be portable, and hopefully available in future. I used Windows at the time and tried porting to Mac and Linux, but had problems with drivers for the PS2 controllers.

Weidenbaum: During what situations do you imagine people using ShapeSeq?

Apfrod: ShapeSeq is a musical instrument that happens to be a piece of software. I hope to be surprised by what people create with it, and how they enjoy it.

It is an interesting question — what makes people play musical instruments in the first place? I designed the Shape Sequencer out of a desire to explore sounds in a performance, and to share the joy of just playing — in the sense of being playful — with electronic sounds. Putting this into people’s hands and pockets with the iPhone opens up vast new performance and practice opportunities.

Weidenbaum: What, if anything, have you learned from iPod/iPad users of ShapeSeq since its release?

Apfrod: Some love it, some completely don’t get it. It’s too radical for a lot of people. Maybe the App Store should have a section for “software art” apps. I’d appreciate some more feedback from users.

Weidenbaum: The instructions are fairly minimal for ShapeSeq, which is not uncommon in music apps. The best instructions on your site are in the video — do you think video is a better mode for app instructions than written-out instructions?

Apfrod: For some, videos are best. The first set of instructions for Shape Sequencer were a laminated A4 sheet, and players could actually try it there and then. I guess people need some instruction about techniques and ideas, since it really takes some dedication to investigating the possibilities to discover all the tricks and styles possible.

Weidenbaum: How do you balance your time between iterating updates to ShapeSeq and developing new projects?

Apfrod: I just do it when I fancy. Right now there’s more demands on other stuff I’m doing.

Weidenbaum: Version 1.2 of ShapeSeq, released this past June, added memory slots. Had that been on your mind from the beginning?

Apfrod: When I started to take Shape Sequencer seriously as a software instrument, rather than an art installation, it seemed obvious that it needs a cross-platform file format for exchanging patches or performances. This seemed like a complex problem, so I put it off from version 1, and hoped to make a good file format for file exchange in a future version. But the demand for some sort of saving was strong, so I put a simple slot-based load/save mechanism in there to at least partially satisfy this requirement.

Weidenbaum: I think it’s interesting you made the octagon the default instead of the square. What trial and error, or general insight, led to that decision?

Apfrod: I think the octagon looks nicer than the square! There may also be something innate in the way I make beats that leads me to think of eight beats rather than four.

Weidenbaum: One of my favorite things to do in ShapeSeq is to draw an initial pattern at a large or a small number of steps, and to then scale back and forth to see how your algorithm breaks it up, compresses it, or expands it. It’s a neat way to introduce a sense of variations on a theme. That’s not a question in itself, but could you talk a bit about how things like the steps or the ability to load and save banks can be used in performance?

Dr. Octagon: At left, the initial screen, in which the small blue triangle demarcates the current spot along the eight-beat loop, which is depicted as an octagon. At right, a second loop, also an octagon, is added.

Apfrod: The way steps of a loop are divided can lead to some very interesting sounds and patterns, since the same loop is used at different parts along its length according to how many steps are in the loop. In ShapeSeq, a loop has a length and a number of steps, where the loop is divided along its length by the number of steps. Patterns can be recorded in the gaps between other patterns, or split up with silence between them to make gated effects. By carefully building up patterns at different resolutions of steps, interwoven sequences can be made out a single shape.

One thing I like about what emerges from the simple system I created is the blurring of boundaries between what would be considered a note or a single beat of a sound and of a rhythm or melody of several sounds, since this is really only a distinction of the length of certain intervals.

Being able to load and save banks allows the player to instantly recall a favorite pattern or sound. In a live performance, this can be used to save a theme or riff, play variations over it, and quickly return to that theme later on, or swap between several themes built earlier to build up a song. The emphasis is still very much on live performance, but with some of the benefits of digital music (perfect recall) combined with some of the joys of real playing (sloppy input and immediacy).

Weidenbaum: What kind of thought went into the sounds you selected for ShapeSeq? What were sounds you’d tried out but decided not to use?

Apfrod: I made the four basic waveforms — sine, square, triangle, and saw — for ShapeSeq for simplicity, and out of affection for these basic sounds. My approach is to provide simple building blocks so that the complexity can emerge in the playing.

Weidenbaum: Any plans to port it to another OS, like Android, or Windows 7, for example?

Apfrod: I could make versions for OSX and Windows, if there’s demand.

Weidenbaum: Are there particular iOS apps that you especially admire?

Apfrod: In terms of music/sound apps, I like Sampletoy by Marek Bereza (mrkbrz.com), Tweakybeat by Rodrigo Yanez (itunes.apple.com), and RjDj by Reality Jockey (rjdj.me). I also love the style and innovative gameplay of Eliss by Steph Thirion (toucheliss.com).

Weidenbaum: What tools did you use for writing (and, now, improving upon) ShapeSeq?

Apfrod: ShapeSeq is written using openFrameworks.

Weidenbaum: What can we expect from the next version of ShapeSeq?

Apfrod: I would like to add realtime sampling and sample manipulation, if I get around to it. Maybe one day I will have desktop versions and then I would like to put in file transfer between desktop and mobile. If I ever get an iPad, that is also likely to lead to some innovations too, as I foresee the larger touchscreen as a great potential interface for music.

Weidenbaum: The early version of ShapeSeq, Shape Sequencer, before the iOS edition, involved multiple players. Is this something you plan on bringing to the iOS version?

Apfrod: Since iOS includes iPad, maybe. But for iPhone/iPod Touch, I can rather imagine several players with their own device, just due to the size.

Weidenbaum: Do you also make music, perform music, regularly?

Apfrod: I’ve been making music for many years, starting on the Amiga as a young teenager. Some years ago I ran a tape label — called blank audio — and sold and swapped tapes on the fanzine scene. I’ve had tracks on a few fanzine-related compilations, which are probably impossible to get hold of now. Some of the blank audio back catalogue is available on archive.org, however. Some of my more recent work is a available to hear on soundcloud.com/apfrod, but I’ve spent more time learning how to make software over the last few years.

Weidenbaum: Can you talk about any parallels between the processes of making music and making software?

Apfrod: Since I have spent so much time making music in software, making music could be like making software sometimes. There is a lot of listening and tweaking when making patches or patterns, just as there is continual testing and tweaking with code. There’s also a kind of “object oriented” approach to electronic music making, where you will spend a lot of time on a component like a snare or a tone which will be reused over and over again in a track. Personally, I love the “pure techno” approach where every sound is generated algorithmically, just as I love procedural and generative software approaches.

Related Links: Get the app at itunes.apple.com. Follow on twitter.com/shapeseq. Visit the app’s home page: apfrod.com/shapeseq. Early coverage (December 2009) of ShapeSeq at creativeapplications.net by Filip Visnjic (fvda.co.uk). More on Apfrod’s chosen development platform at openframeworks.cc.

In Flanigan’s hands, each device emitted a range of raspy feedback, which she coaxed with her microphone — a microphone that served the dual purpose of amplifying her voice, a confident soprano that suggested echoes of Billie Holiday in its slurred, mouthy vowels. More often than not, her singing took on the characteristics of a boys choir, thanks to endless permutations of sonic mirroring. The music she performed that evening was drawn from Amplifications, her recent album for voice and speakers that certifies Flanigan as a musician who straddles numerous realms that are often understood as standing in opposition to each other: melody and noise, technology and song, recording and performance.

Now, the blending of accomplished female vocals and edge-pushing technology is not in and of itself new. From Björk’s collaborations with the duo Matmos, to Destiny’s Child’s beats provided by all manner of producers, all the way back to the Roaches’ work with guitarist Robert Fripp, there is no small number of examples of accomplished female singers who partner successfully with experimental musicians. What distinguishes Flanigan isn’t merely that she can handle both sides of that age-old equation — what is remarkable is how substantially her vocals and technology meld.

For all the haunting lushness of Amplification‘s “Retrobuild,” which is almost entirely made of layers of her singing, it’s the mix of electronic buzzing and lightly mediated vocalizing on the track “Sleepy” where her powers are made fully clear, the way as a composer and performer she blurs the technological and the human, finding a common musical ground that has the drone as its foundation, but that aspires to something song-like.

Here, for example, is the track “Snow,” also from Amplifications. It begins as raw feedback, short circuits captured by recording equipment in loving detail, and then slowly comes to form something almost choral in its density, her voice eventually sliding in alongside the rough static:

The tools that Flanigan employs in Amplifications are by no means the extent of her output, just a recent milestone in her creative process. She has developed “Bioluminescence,” a live audio/video collaboration with R. Luke DuBois, and documented nocturnal activity in a series of thousands of tiny photographs (titled “In Sleep”). Her “Ravezooka,” produced with Benedetta Piantella Simeonidis, “shoots” audio at a distance, and her “Round Sound” project is an experiment in the visualization of sonic data.

Contacted shortly after the GAFFTA performance, Flanigan took time to discuss various aspects of her work, from the sense of freedom inherent in new technology, to the extent of her musical training, to the sculptural value of her sound objects.

Marc Weidenbaum: Do you think your musical training lends an additional depth of musicality to even the noisiest, most seemingly discordant executions on your speaker-instruments?

Lesley Flanigan: My musical training is in soprano voice, and the most valuable skills I took from that training were physical things like how to breathe properly and how to sing high notes without hurting myself. Other than that, I don’t really have that much musical training. I have a lot of experience with music – but not much training.

I studied art and sculpture in school, so any training that I bring to my work comes more from these places. I think it is my lack of musical training that lends additional depth of musicality to my work, because the music I make depends entirely on my ear. I naturally have a good ear and am not locked into any expectation for a musical timbre. It is my love and respect for classical approaches to music, along with my sculptural tendencies, that compel me to arrange some semblance of musicality out of all the pitches, rhythms, and sounds I hear with my instruments. I use methods that involve my voice as instrument and my experience with composition to do this, but my ear does most of the work. My music is simple. Whether pop, experimental, or classical, my music all comes from the same process of throwing down a palette of sounds and then intuitively organizing them. With my work now, I’m more transparent about the process. The process is the composition: noise to sound to music. It’s sculptural music.

Weidenbaum: I’ve read that Nam June Paik once witnessed Karlheinz Stockhausen rehearsing a performance with an orchestra, and Stockhausen called out to a specific musician that he was playing a note incorrectly — a slight infraction, like a flat instead of a sharp. Paik said he realized at that moment that he’d never have that level of musical fluency, and decided to go into an area that fascinated him and was uncharted, the art of technology. Listening to your work, I am reminded that what Paik saw as two different creative realms can, in fact, be bridged. How does that resonate with you, the divide that Paik suggests between musical fluency and new-media innovation?

Flanigan: I think the divide is simply between that of fluency and innovation. Ultimately, any good art, or artist, balances both.

What is nice about working in a relatively innovative sphere is that the only baggage and expectation you bring to the work are your own. Innovation is fresh. On the flip side, working in a sphere of fluency carries with it the presence of history — a known, trusted, and shared language, which is so special to have embedded in any work of art. Fluency is comfortable. It is hard to be innovative in a comfortable place, so in my experience, it is easier to bridge the divide by moving from a place of innovation towards a place of fluency as opposed to the other way around.

And so it makes perfect sense for Paik to have been drawn to the art of technology, because technology is by definition, innovative. He was completely free to make up his own language — and to then achieve fluency in his own language. I can relate. Building my own electronics and instruments and making music out of noise, I get to develop my own language. In hindsight, I probably gravitated towards this genre of work for similar reasons as he did. I don’t feel I have the “expert” music techniques and skills that many of my peers have, but by working with things I do feel I’m good at — listening, building, and connecting — I have found myself working very intimately with music, in my own way. I feel a little more safe to be experimental and free to make music by arriving at it from a strange place.

Music and technology are inherently interconnected. Music is made from tools and instruments, which are the result of technical exploration. The fact that one person can work independently to write, record, and produce music that sounds like an entire orchestra — and the fact that anyone would even conceive of making such music — is a result of the existing technology. The technology opens up doors to new music, while simultaneously giving historic presence and meaning to older methods. One of my personal interests is in how we hear sound (acoustic versus processed). So many advances in recording technology have been about getting the perfect, clean sound where we hear no noise whatsoever. And yet, as a result of moving closer to that big, perfect production, there grows a real nostalgic love for hearing the sound — the noise — of old, crackling recordings. These recordings are not just the music, but the space of the music. All the noises have, over time, become part of the music. They are “musical.” You can hear that influence in noise and post-rock genres.

Weidenbaum: Regarding the constituent parts of your speaker-instruments, are there any materials involved that didn’t exist 10, 15, 20 years ago?

Flanigan: I originally designed the six instruments (the ones I use on the album and you saw in performance) to interconnect with each other and with a computer so that I could program software to have the speakers perform themselves and record their sounds remotely (there are two switches on each instrument for this purpose). So yes, in this way, they do involve materials that are new. But I stopped working with those components a year ago, for several reasons. One was very practical – I just got fed up tinkering with the circuit and troubleshooting it constantly. The other was conceptual – my interest grew to be more about the physicality of sound and less about the designing a fancy performance with technology. I wanted to make music with my instruments, and the most direct path to this was to grab a microphone and play. Many more meaningful sounds, techniques and ideas came to me through this process than from the process of sitting behind my laptop. Currently, the parts I use are the speakers, piezos, amplifying circuits, switches and potentiometers. But the other stuff (microcontroller connected to Max/MSP software on a computer) is there… and I’ll probably return to it again when I have something to say with it, perhaps in an installation form.

Weidenbaum: From the performance I saw in San Francisco late last year, there is an aspect of performance to what you do, not just performance as in the live singing and working with your speakers, but also a kind of theatrical element. What are your thoughts on the role of theater in your live work?

Flanigan: I don’t think my work is theatrical. My performance is transparent in that you see what you hear. No magic. I am performing with amplification, so there is a staging and choreography that I work out for each composition, which changes a little with each show as I take into account the size/shape of the performance space, the amplification of the room, and how the speakers should be situated in order to communicate the ideas (and the sounds) of physical amplification. I work not only with the sounds from my speaker instruments and voice, but also with the sounds near and far in the air. I move around quite a bit to do this. And as each speaker is self-contained with its own sound getting moved around, they also hold their own physical presence on stage. I think of them as members of a choir. I try to be honest and real with my performance as the process of making the music, and I think it is pretty much the same as me working in my studio alone.

Weidenbaum: Your comments about “fluency” are particularly interesting. Have you, in the past, been involved in spheres that have gotten codified, too routine, and then actively chosen to leave them behind? Is that one of the reasons you didn’t pursue soprano voice?

Flanigan: I take an active role in understanding my work process and try to make conscious decisions about what I’m learning and making and what I am avoiding as far as spheres that feel too codified to me. When I am working on music I am often interested in visual art and when I am working with electronics I am interested in acoustic music. I allow my brain to separate and find connections between different creative spheres as a way of staying fresh and open to ideas, so as not to slip into the pressure of trying to live up to “codified” expectations. I give myself space to focus.

But my choice to not pursue soprano voice was more that I didn’t know what to do with the skills I had and was uninspired by the few possibilities I saw. I also struggled with what I felt as a division between “my” voice versus “soprano” voice. During the time I was studying voice, I was interested in more experimental, pop and electronic music. I was listening to Aphex Twin and Tricky. The singers that most influenced me were women like Björk and Elizabeth Frasier and classic jazz singers like Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughn. While I loved the physical challenge of singing opera and learning classical techniques, I always returned to my way of singing and it all felt very compartmentalized – a “this way or that” or “right versus wrong” approach to voice.

I didn’t know the work of Joan La Barbara and Meredith Monk and other vocalists who bridge a classical approach to voice and composition with experimentation. If I had been exposed to their work and ideas, I might have done things differently. But as it was, I lacked interest in pursuing classical voice because it seemed like a set skill with little room for improvisation and emotive feeling apart from rehearsed technique and clear-cut lyrics. I don’t see it that way anymore. I see so much to explore in classical voice; the possibilities are overwhelming. Because If you cut away all the notions of genre, style, technique and fluency, voice is just another way to produce and express sound – but with more potential and nuance than any other instrument because every voice is unique. There really is no standard of measurement.

Weidenbaum: Voice is a subject of much discussion in the realm of electronic music and sound art. As Pauline Oliveros has noted, the human voice is so rich with overtones, it is simply more complex than any other instrument, and thus can’t help but stand out. Do you temper your voice at all, so as to not overwhelm your instrumentation?

Flanigan: I am most successful in my performances when I temper my voice with my instrumentation because I want the voice to be a part of the whole sound, not dominate it. I am interested in choral ideas in my work – individuals creating a whole.

The more pre-planned or composed work I do that is easier to temper than my improvisations. This is because it is so easy to fall back on pushing voice when I get insecure about the direction of a performance. I see that the complexity of voice comes from the fact that it is a direct translation of emotion to air. Voice is not about words, it is about feeling. It’s tricky to temper voice during an improvisation because I’m not just navigating the sounds I hear, I am navigating my feelings about how I’m putting them all together, and my voice is what tells the story of that process out loud. It’s like having conversation or argument and analyzing all the things you are saying (or how you are saying it) in the moment.

Weidenbaum: Your speaker instruments are beautiful just as objects — they’re plain and simple in a manner that, visually, signals them as elemental, fundamental, solid, whole. They were installed as sculpture at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts’ Gallery 51 earlier this year — how do you feel about them being presented as inanimate objects?

Flanigan: Ultimately, for the context of the Gallery 51 show, I think they worked just fine. The show was about merging the boundaries of art and music, and my speaker instruments definitely speak to those ideas.

I love my instruments as sculptural objects – a lot of care went into building them and they do present the simple tangibility of electronic sound through their form. They demonstrate the physical relationship between microphone and speaker, and feedback as being a kind of voice. These ideas are important in my work. Their form is also “individual” and conveys a presence of individuality within a group – the idea of voices within a choir. But on my own personal level, I’m still figuring out how I feel about them being presented as inanimate objects. I originally built my speaker instruments to stand on their own as a sculptural sound installation. But after performing with them so much, they have evolved to become more instruments than sculptures. And more than just being instruments, they are my instruments. So much so, that for this show I had them stand silently on their own because I didn’t want them making any sound without me. Maybe there is something about the absence of a voice that speaks volumes, but I’m not convinced that’s what they express.

So these are ideas I’m now exploring through new work.

Weidenbaum: How much is your music born of improvisation, and how much is it a matter of a planned, structured approach to composition? Perhaps you could select one piece from Amplifications and talk about how you came to compose it?

Flanigan: It depends on the piece. For example, “Thinking Real Hard” is very much a composed song. It has lyrics, a verse-chorus style structure, and a clear beginning and end. There is improvisation, but not much. I have one speaker that I work with on that song, and I know exactly the range of tones I can get out of it. It’s a very reliable speaker. Then there is a piece like “Snow,” which was entirely improvised within a mapping I outlined for myself. It was well thought out. Overall, this piece was made considering the amplification of the space I performed it in. I thought about the size of the space and the capacity it held for reverberance. I wanted sound to move through the space and finally disappear into the air. The score/mapping was a linear path of moving from speaker feedback noise to dense choral voice, with a conceptual arc of “noise to sound to music.” On a more detailed level, I considered timing and motion between speakers. For example, I’d follow directions such as “perform speaker A for 10 microphone sweeps, then walk over to speaker B, turn it on and carry it to the center of the room, then position its microphone to give it a low, barely audible rumbling sound before walking over to play speaker C for 10 microphone sweeps.” I knew which speakers to work with and how to play each one to bring out elements of tonality, noise and rhythm I wanted to hear. The sampling and layering of their sounds were intentionally obvious, methodical and dense. But with all that said, I could have never predicted the exact sounds that would come out of the process… many variables effect the feedback I work with, so no matter how much control I have planned, improvisation is always at the forefront.

I work best when I work intuitively, listen intently, and simply sense the “right” moves to make. And you can’t compose intuition, you just have to make space for it to exist. There are times that intuition simply doesn’t kick in or when I can’t hear what I need to hear. That’s when I risk overcompensating, singing too loud, or generally losing myself. Rehearsal for me is the practice of trusting those moments of doubt and confusion as not being the end, but a time to just listen harder and let go. Build, break and improvise.

More on Lesley Flanigan at lesleyflanigan.com. Her work was previously featured on this website back in early January (disquiet.com).

The Temple University-educated musician took time out recently to talk about his self-education on the tools of the hip-hop production trade, his personal philosophy of sampling, and the producers who’ve inspired him. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.

Marc Weidenbaum: First off, thanks a lot for making time for this interview. I really dug Un-Herd Vol 1 when it was released on the Ropeadope label, and your The Appreciation SP in particular got my head going — I wrote about it [at disquiet.com] when you posted it for free at your myspace.com/youngarchitect page.

Y?Arcka: I had that The Appreciation project [cover pictured at left], actually done before I did Un-Herd, but at the time, I was like, I don’t think I’m gonna have enough time to promote it and do stuff with it. Un-Herd kind of came up out of nowhere, where I was like, I could put something together a little different from Appreciation — because Appreciation was something you couldn’t really have rappers over, because it’s unusual, the unusual loops I did were not your ordinary stuff. I liked it more, because it’s different, but maybe it’s too different for people to start off with, as my first project.

Weidenbaum: Let’s get started with some biographical information. What’s your given name?

Y?Arcka: My government name? My name is Shawn Kelly.

Weidenbaum: Born and raised in Philadelphia?

Y?Arcka: No, born in New Jersey. I came to Philadelphia for school. I went to Temple.

Weidenbaum: What’d you study there?

Y?Arcka: Communications. First architecture, and then communications. That’s where the name Y?Arcka comes from, short for Young Architect. I was doing architecture, and then I switched my major.

Weidenbaum: So, Young Communicator could be next. About The Appreciation, tell me about the title — you’re showing your appreciation for the material you’ve sampled?

Y?Arcka: Yes, ’cause a lot of times, people sample things and try to hide their samples, and I listen to these artists — a lot of time I love the records, and I don’t know if anyone has heard these certain songs, or even if they’ve heard them, maybe they didn’t realize that this part is unique in itself. I have these records, and I love to listen to them. I have other songs that I sampled off these records, but those really fit The Appreciation. It was less work, but just the idea behind it, to showcase artists who don’t really get the respect respect they deserve.

Weidenbaum: What do you mean “less work”?

Y?Arcka: It was less work — well, I don’t want to say less work. It sounds like it’s less work, than Un-Herd — Un-Herd, I put a lot of time into it. Appreciation came out of five years worth of work, and I said, Oh, this all fits a certain style of my production, and I categorized it as “Appreciation.” I could have put more tracks on Appreciation, but some didn’t fit the exact thing I was looking for.

Weidenbaum: In many of the cuts, not only are you not quoting the best-known part of the originals, but you’re also quoting singers who aren’t the main singers.

Y?Arcka: Ah, that too, yes. [Laughs] I like the background singers. I love background singers, and people who really don’t get to shine either. They’re the underdogs, the real talented ones, probably more than the lead singer, but they always get outshined because everyone wants to see the lead singer. A lot of groups break up because of that: David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks [from the Temptations]. But some people in the group were good, too. They get overshadowed. I did that on purpose, definitely.

Weidenbaum: It’s exciting, like the Sly and the Family Stone track you did, and the Jackson 5 one, on The Appreciation SP. In each, you take these little unfamiliar snippets, and make whole new listening experiences out of them. In each case, I knew what it was when I first heard it, but it wasn’t like you quoted the chorus over and over.

Y?Arcka: Yeah, yeah.

Weidenbaum: It was a little more thought-provoking. The one where you take the Gil Scott-Heron quote, “G S-H J Dilla,” where is that from?

Y?Arcka: The Gil Scott-Heron quote? I think that’s from this one album — that’s from an MP3, and an MP3 is hard for me to go back and trace, ’cause I have so much music.

Weidenbaum: I was intrigued you chose that particular piece. and the flute that you tie it to, that was a Dilla track originally? As producers go, Dilla seems especially central to you.

Y?Arcka: Where I tie in the Dilla was the drums, the drum pattern he used on a “Time Travelin’ (A Tribute To Fela)” on Common’s Like Water for Chocolate album, the intro. [He sings a bit.] And Dilla liked flutes, and I like flutes, so I put that in there. It’s kind of a little Dilla tribute, if you follow him follow him. I follow him everywhere he does.

Weidenbaum: You were involved in a remix project on 33 Jones, Bring Me the Remix of Zilla Rocca?

Y?Arcka: Yes, yes.

Weidenbaum: What is that project.

Y?Arcka: Someone I know, Zilla Rocca, he has some of my songs, some of my music, and he wanted to do something over it, but he was changing over labels and doings things, and so it got shelved. He always kept me in mind for any kinds of production, so he’s been doing this remix with a lot of producers from Philadelphia. And I just happen to be one of them. I said I’m down, just send me the a cappellas, and I was listening to all my beats, to see what fit the a cappella, before I do something new. But I found one, which is my uncle, who did reggae music, and I thought, This one might fit. He was talking about girls on the beach, and it reminded me of Jamaica. I thought, This would fit, so I synced everything up and remixed it. Remixing is hard for me, because I want it to be perfect, like the person was actually in the studio with me, you know? So, I change it up a little bit, not just a straight instrumental.

Weidenbaum: And Zilla’s role?

Y?Arcka: He’s puttng everything together. He’ll at the end compile, so everyone can get all of them at once. He had a mixtape album, and he did most of the music on it, and he wanted to do something that included more producers who he liked and looked up to, so he chose different producers. He wanted to remix the mixtape, so it’s a remixed mixtape.

Weidenbaum: When I wrote about The Appreciation SP, I didn’t want to use the word “remix,” because it sounded limiting. So, I joked and called the tracks “one-song mashups.” What do you think The Appreciation‘s about?

Y?Arcka: The Appreciation — I did some time-signature stuff on some of them, ’cause there’s a lot of 3/4 and 6/8 rhythms, and I like to change things up, from the norm of the song. They’re songs — they’re not remixes, definitely not remixes. “Remixes” has a negative connotation sometimes. I’d say they’re — that’s a hard one, to say what they are. It’s … I would categorize it: a song without lyrics? Something that rappers can’t rap over? It’s not the normal hip-hop, but I had a hip-hop element, because hip-hop is always the root of my style. So, I would say I took a hip-hop spin on an old recording, not just the traditional hip-hop spin of laying drums and putting a sample in and adding bass or something else. It was more me taking a sample and flipping the sample different ways, in a creative way.

Weidenbaum: One of the things I really dig about it — and you were saying how you can’t really rap over it — is I spend a lot of my time listening to instrumental versions of hip-hop tracks, and it was great to hear instrumental hip-hop that’s intended to be listened to as an instrumental. For me, I think it goes back to Destiny’s Child. When I first got hold of a 12″ of Destiny’s Child, when I was living in New Orleans, between 1999 and 2003, and it had the instrumental versions on it, and I couldn’t believe how listenable they were on their own.

Y?Arcka: Ahhh. That’s what I’m looking for. My friend calls it “listenability” — you can listen to it, and you don’t have to worry that something’s missing; it’s all there. I like that word.

Weidenbaum: For me, it’s interesting because I listen to a lot of instrumental tracks to hip-hop and r&b songs, and some stuff that sounds great with vocals doesn’t sound like much without them. I was listening to Labcabincalifornia by Pharcyde again recently, speaking of Dilla — with the vocals, it’s a great album. They’re talented, and funny, and warm. But without the vocals, it’s like this abstract beautiful soundscape.

Y?Arcka: Definitely, definitely, yeah. That stems from my experience with rappers in the past. Subconsciously, of course. I used, myself, to be a rapper. I’ve been doing music for about 11 years, and I started making beats a little bit here and there. I was in a lot of groups. I’m an engineer, too, so I’d produce and engineer it, and mix it all down. And we’d get to the “What now?” period, what are we going to do next? And no one ever wanted to do anything with it. I thought this is a waste of my time. So after that, I just started making more beats and stopped rapping, and stopped writing, and things like that, and just focused on making music, instead of just making beats for rappers.

Weidenbaum: Do you have two different modes, a mode with “listenability” and a mode to be sent to rappers for potential licensing?

Y?Arcka: Recently, because I’ve been working with some rappers, I make a beat that I think’s right for a person, so I strip it down and leave room for him, or her. I leave room for them; I can do that. But most times I just make music — I might think this is for this, or this is for that —

Weidenbaum: One thing that’s interesting about rap is you can hear a song that sounds like such a personal expression for the rapper, and then you find out that the beat existed long before the rapper ever heard it. The rapper liked it, and paid the producer, and it’s part of the rapper’s art to make it his or her own. When it’s right, it feels like the rap and the beat were created simultaneously, even if that’s not the case.

Y?Arcka: Yeah, yeah. I hear about that a lot. That beat I had for five years, and someone stumbled on it. And sometimes the rapper doesn’t bring it out, and I’d rather hear the instrumental than the rapper. And sometimes the rapper can capture the same feel of the music, even five years removed.

Weidenbaum: You mention Dilla a lot. It’s fascinating how well known Dilla is after his death.

Y?Arcka: That’s the sad part, actually. It’s good people know him now, but at the time, I was hearing about him from, let’s say, 2000. Before that I knew his music, of course, but I didn’t know who did it, like Pharcyde “Runnin’” [off Labcabincalifornia], and the De La [Soul] “Stakes Is High” [off Stakes Is High], the Tribe stuff he did for Beat, Rhymes, & Life and The Love Movement. I was like, Oh, I heard his music before. I didn’t even know it was him. But I just got a dose of him. I first found his name on the Tribe Called Quest Love Movement album, ’cause my brother had it — he’s five years older than me. And I’m a liner-notes person. I love liner notes. I like reading who did what, engineers, publisher names, everything. So I found “J. Yancey.” I was like, Who is J. Yancey [Dilla's given name]? And Q-Tip always says “JD, JD,” and Q-Tip’s name is Jonathan Davis — that’s his real name, and short for that is J.D., so I though he was talking about himself. So, I do a little more research and find out there’s actually a person named Jay Dee, he makes beats. So I start doing more research, and found out things he did, and this is maybe two years later — 2001, 2000 — he came out with Welcome 2 Detroit, and I was like, I gotta get this. Heard that. Lost my mind. Got Like Water for Chocolate. Lost my mind again. Got Slum Village, and totally lost it.

Weidenbaum: Dilla’s passing is unfortunate, ridiculous that someone would die that young who had already produced so much music. What’s been amazing is the outpouring of affection, and the attention to what he’d done. There’s always some benefit, or otherwise what’s the point of living, and it seems like there’s this circumstance where a lot of people are paying attention to the producer in a way they hadn’t. We all talked about Timbaland and Just Blaze, but it seems like a much broader range –

Y?Arcka: Kanye …

Weidenbaum: I mean, Just Blaze blows my mind, Dallas Austin. A lot of those guys are doing really good work, not just “pop music,” but it’s great to watch Alchemist, and others, lesser-known producers, get recognition. That’s the one good thing that’s come of it. You mentioned being a “liner-notes person,” and that’s something I can relate to, it’s how I learned about music.

Y?Arcka: When I bought my first record or CD, or tape, actually, it was Liquid Swords, to be exact, Genius’s first album — I had the tape, and I was looking inside it, and it said “S. Wonder,” and I thought, That’s Stevie Wonder, but he’s not on the song — and that’s when I realized that’s the sample. So I started to run things back, like G. Grice, who’s that? It’s Gary Grice, for GZA. Started to realize who does production. That’s just the way I am. I like more than just to hear the music; I want the overall experience of buying the album. There’s more than just hearing the music.

Weidenbaum: How old were you?

Y?Arcka: It was, say, 1995 — I think my brother got it for me, so I was 10 years old.

Weidenbaum: You were born in 1985.

Y?Arcka: ’85, yes. My brother had other records and such, like Wu Tang, and Snoop Dogg, so anything he listened to, I was listening to.

Weidenbaum: I was the older kid in my family. I had to figure it out for myself. My dad had a bunch of jazz records, but that was about it. A question about sampling, on both Un-Herd and Appreciation — when you take a sample and stutter or repeat it, are you reproducing something you already hear in your head, or are you creating something new from scratch in the studio?

Y?Arcka: Pretty much, a lot of times, I always call my work an accident. I’ll hear the sample, I’ll like it, and I hear a certain part, I sample that part, and I hear what I’m going to do with the part, but usually what happens is the part that I like is something wasn’t even thought up, kind of like as I go along, Oh that sounds better. I stumble upon a lot of things. That’s usually how it works. ‘Cause if I plan things, it never works out the way I want it to go. Now, I don’t even plan anything. I just go with the flow, don’t try to force anything.

Weidenbaum: You’ve talked about how you learned to listen to music, and to know about it more, but how did you learn to make music.

Y?Arcka: Ahh. OK. Well, through my brother, when I was, about that same age, 11, 12, he brought over a beat machine. A Boss Dr. Groove 202, I think, maybe a 220. Black and orange. He brought it over, ’cause he borrowed it from his friend, and I got on it, and started to make some music. At the time, I was recording everything on tape — I had to record myself on tape. My brother would bring the beat machine back to his friend, and I would get it a week later, and all my songs would be gone, so I had to remember to record my beats in the beginning. But, I had it on tape, and started to learn timing, what goes where. I started, like, doing diagrams of drum patterns, a certain way to write them so I could remember, like, oh, this is the sort of drum pattern I want to play. Like, I’d be walking around, and I thought, that would sound nice if it was like this [sings a bit] and I would diagram, like, drum patterns. That’s how I got my drums and everything the way I wanted them. I started to learn about layering through this Alesis SR-16, which is just drums, so I learned how to layer things, filter, change things. That drum machine had only straight sounds. You could only use those sounds. I get tired of the same sound — I need variations and different things going on.

Weidenbaum: Just to confirm, so your earlier beat-making, you weren’t able to use samples. You could only use preset sounds.

Y?Arcka: Yeah. I bought the MPC-2000 in 2002, ’cause I saw again — my brother’s same friend — he had an MPC-2000XL, and he was sampling himself, like dropping coins on the table. That was crazy — you could sample anything into it, any kind of sound, anything. I was like, I want that machine. I was working at Shoprite, saved up my money, and bought it straight, new, cash. And it was my machine, and I just started to work with it. I was still in high school. I was a junior in high school. I started to get really heavy into it, ’cause I was spending a lot of time in my room just learning how to make music, again, with this new machine. The MPC-2000 was the next step, ’cause before the beat machines and everything, I was making beats on the computer, this program in which I was placing snares and kicks and hi-hats in certain places, to know timing. Like I’d have a snare here, and put a snare next to it, to see the timing. From there, I was already chopping things up. On the MPC, you can do it all there on one machine, and I just started to chop things up, and just run with it, ’cause it came with some sounds, and I made a beat the first day I got it, it was just so easy.

Weidenbaum: And that’s your tool today?

That’s the main thing I use. I use computer programs; I use anything I can get my hands on. I use Reason, Fruity Loops, but I’m not letting any of those beats out. No one’s heard much stuff from there. Soon, the time will come, ’cause I have some original music. I do a lot of different things.

Weidenbaum: I want to make sure I know exactly what you’ve recorded. I’ve heard The Un-Herd, and I’ve heard The Appreciation SP. Is there anything else out there that I’m missing?

Y?Arcka: Other than the Zilla remix, those two, Un-Herd and The Appreciation are my first two projects that actually are out there. Un-Herd was the first, May 2008, when Ropeadope released it. And I worked on that from early November [2009] to mid-December. It took me a month and a half to do Un-Herd, and it was released six months later, in May.

Weidenbaum: Anything coming up?

Y?Arcka: I have some local people I’m doing tracks for. I’m on this album with this group ((Stereo))type. I have three on there. The name of the album is Ultrasound [cover pictured at left]. I’m really focusing on shows. I just did a Dilla [tribute] show Friday, me and two other producers. We did an hour-set, hour and some change.

Weidenbaum: What do you perform on?

Y?Arcka: On the MPC, we all performed on the MPC. One guy had the MPC-2000, the older one, and the other guy had the 2500, the newer one, so we all just went back and forth. We’ve got it on video, too. It was a pretty good show. Right now I’m just getting more exposed, through interviews, playing live.

Weidenbaum: Is there a regional flavor to what you do? Being in Philadelphia, is that meaningful to your music?

Y?Arcka: Um, yes, yes and no. Yes, because Philadelphia has a soul to it, more of a soul than where I was originally. Where I was in New Jersey, Toms River, was not conducive to making music. [Laughs] So when I came to school, I started really doing music more, because there was a certain vibe I was getting from Philadelphia. I was making good music in Toms River. The vibe was just different. I needed to have people around me who knew what I was doing — I can talk to them about music, about Dilla, about making music, and the process of that. In Toms River, I couldn’t do that. They were like, I don’t even know who you’re talking about. I couldn’t relate to anyone who knew what I was talking about, other than my brothers.

Weidenbaum: You use the word “hip-hop” a lot, but of course a lot of your samples pre-date hip-hop. Do you think of hip-hop and r&b as being different from each other, or do you think of it all as “soul music,” or do you not even think about it?

Y?Arcka: You mean the stuff I sample?

Weidenbaum: The music you’re making.

Y?Arcka: Hip-hop and r&b, right now, that’s almost in the same category of pop, ’cause hip-hop is getting pop now, and they’re kind of mixing the two, like hip-hop and r&b are almost one. aA lot of the hip-hop has people singing over it, and a lot of the r&b has people rapping over it. So, they’re in the same category now. The stuff I’m doing, I feel is more of a traditional, underground — more of a thinking music. More than just a simple beat, a simple drum pattern. More of something that’s thought-provoking, with music. Something that has a lot of detail to it. It’s a detail-oriented music. And you could say it’s soul, but I don’t sample a lot of soul. I sample, more, even on the Un-Herd album [cover pictured at left], I sample — I don’t know if you know Jefferson Starship, kind of like a rock band … a weird kind of band. Just different kind of artists, and a lot of the artists to me were unheard, because I was like, Who are these people? There’s some Billy Paul on there, some Sade. That’s the most obvious, and obvious for a reason.

Weidenbaum: That’s the track “It Is A…” on Un-Herd?

Y?Arcka: Yeah, I switched it around, so instead of her asking the question, she’s making a statement, saying “It is a crime” instead of “Is it a crime?”

Weidenbaum: ‘Cause you cut up the words.

Y?Arcka: Yeah, I cut them up and put them the other way.

Weidenbaum: When I heard you do that, I wondered if the “crime” you were referring to was the act of using other people’s music. Was that on your mind?

Y?Arcka: [Laughs] Um, let’s see, what was on my mind when I made that one? That sample, the sample stuff, is very — it’s a big topic right now, and I feel, what did I feel about the sample, when I made it, at the time? I was thinking more about crime in Philadelphia. There’s a lot of crime, people getting shot, and at the time that was probably what I was leaning toward more, actual crime itself — even with the big companies. I like Method Man when he said, “Behind every fortune is a crime.” There’s some sort of crime, business-crime mostly. Who’s getting the short end of the stick? That’s what I was going for at the time. What I feel about sampling, sampling can be a crime, if you just re-arrange something, just take the hook — like Puff Daddy’s No Way Out, that to me, it’s coo, to listen to, but he basically just ripped off those songs. The way he did it, at the time, it was what was going on, but I look back, and it’s like, he just took all those songs. Sometimes I’m at a club, and I’ll hear a song, and I’ll think, “Aww, man — he took that, too?” He made sampling look really obvious — like, “I am sampling.” Where it’s not even an art form. That’s not art to me, the way he sampled them. It’s more of an art where you can rearrange it to the point where you know it’s a sample, but you don’t know what the sample is, or the rearrangement is so intricate and creative, that it really makes you think about it being more than an instrumental with a rapper over it, more than just hip-hop.

Weidenbaum: I think your music totally nails that. It’s not that you’re just taking obscure samples and hiding your sources, like a white-label DJ, and you’re not doing a Puff Daddy thing, where you’re paying to license an already popular hook. You’re taking music that is somewhat familiar, whether it’s pop or it’s Fela, there’s a range in there, and you refresh it, you wake it up. I find that exciting.

Y?Arcka: That’s what I’m aiming for.

Weidenbaum: Can you actually just enjoy music, or do you always listen like a DJ, always listen for cues? Can you kick back and enjoy it as music?

Y?Arcka: Ah, that’s what I’m getting — sometimes, I can’t even play music, because I just automatically hear a part that’s open, and I think, That part right there would be nice to do something with. I still enjoy it. It’s just my brain is always working like that, always functioning in terms of samples, like I’ve got a sampler in my head. Always lookin’ for new drums, for things you can use, and put a lot of stuff together. I do enjoy that, too. I enjoy sampling, and the amount of time it takes to do all that stuff, and enjoy listening to music. But most times I’m listening, my ears are more than just listening just to listen; I listen with a purpose most times.

Weidenbaum: Is that a tragic thing for you, that you can’t separate yourself from that mental activity?

Y?Arcka: Nah, I figure, this is me. I just love it. That’s just me.

Weidenbaum: Could you take one track off The Appreciation and explain how you accomplished what you did?

Y?Arcka: Yeah, Un-Herd has a lot of secrets to it, some I don’t even remember. My style always changes. I don’t have a set way of making music. I could talk about The Appreciation. It’s easier. We could talk about the title track, which was the first track I made, around 2005, that had that Appreciation feel. I got this Commodores album, Natural High. I sampled this one song, all these cuts from the song, and then I thought, I don’t think I can do anything with this, but what I did was take a lot of the chops I had, and play ‘em in a certain order, and it just became, like, something different, something I’d never done before. This is before I heard [the Dilla album] Donuts, flipping things, flipping a song. “Such a Woman…” [he sings], and the subject of appreciation is women. I’m appreciating the artist, and women, in the world. That’s a sidebar, the woman part. There’s a lot of things that tie into each other. I went to another song on the album, “Say Yeah,” and I just started to mess with that, so I put it all together, and that was the intro to my beat tapes, or beat CDs, at the time, “Home Alone in My Zone” is what I called them. I’d give ‘em to my brothers, whatever, and my sister, let them here it. So I made it the intro track for this, ’cause it sets the mood for what this is going to be about.

Weidenbaum: Tell me about the last track on The Appreciation SP. It’s the longest.

Y?Arcka: The “Listen Carefully” track. [Laughs] That one, I just like when you get an album and there’s more to it than you thought was gonna be on it, like the Roots album where you have a bonus track. I’m a fan of bonus tracks, that you don’t even know about it. You’ll stumble upon it. The first part, with the bass line, that’s me trying to play “Who Is He and What Is He to You,” Bill Withers, but I couldn’t get the rest of it, so I played the parts I knew. And it was something I had laying around, an appreciation for Bill Withers, ’cause I love Bill Withers. And the second one is “This can’t be real” — Gil Scott-Heron song, “Did You Hear What They Said” is the name of the song — that one, a lot of people have used, so I put that on the track, “Did you hear what they say,” and I just like cut the part up, the part that everyone uses — “Come on, come on, this can’t be real” — the reason I cut up that part is that when I heard different versions by it in the last couple years, I just been upset, I used this before all them, I used this in 2004, so I kinda just said, “This can’t be real”; I made the track say, him say, what I was feeling at the time. The last part is a reprise of “Mental Cruise” by Donald Byrd, which is track number three on the album — I put the original song at the end.

Weidenbaum: What do you by day?

Y?Arcka: I am out of school. I’m a live sound engineer, at a local club. They have a lot of national acts. And I work with a wedding band. I do a lot of live sound. And that’s what I do primarily. My side stuff is just me recording people at my place, ’cause I’m trying to get into studio engineering, too. I have my mixer and mic and stuff like that. So, I record people’s albums at my place.

Weidenbaum: Name the producers whose work you’ll pick up no matter what they put out.

Y?Arcka: Premiere, Pete Rock, Madlib — see a lot of times, I’ll say, like, RZA from 1993 to 1998, love the RZA from that era. Hi-Tek from Black Star and Reflection Eternal, and that era. Right now their sound is more pop-ish, but I know they still have the skills. I’ll still listen to what they have, but I like the old stuff better. Those are the top of my radar. I like Timbaland. I like Just Blaze. I like Kanye. But the ones I really stick to — Pete Rock has reinvented his sound, which is crazy. I don’t know which Pete Rock I like — I like the old Pete Rock, and I like the new Pete Rock. Premiere is one that stays on the same course, but there’s something about his sound that is hip-hop, and speaks to the hip-hop soul in people. Madlib is just crazy, kinda crazy, the way he puts things together. There are so many one-and-done producers out there, but those five are always constantly doing things. Oh, I am forgetting someone very very important to production and hip-hop, it’s Questlove, anything he does.

Weidenbaum: Yeah, I think because Questlove’s band, the Roots, is a live band, he doesn’t in some ways get the respect he deserves as a producer. That break on “Don’t Feel Right,” that just kills me…

Y?Arcka: Yeah, actually, that’s funny, I use that when — I have this r&b artist I work with, and he likes that song, so I cut the beginning part of that, the drum part, and put it in a different order. Yeah, Questlove. I’m always looking out for him, anything he does.

Last week came the announcement: Buddha Machine 2.0 brings three new colors (burgundy, chocolate, grey), nine new loops, and best of all a pitch-control knob that gives the listener the ability to adjust the sound.

On the eve of its November 1, 2008, commercial release, Virant answered some questions about the revision. He talked about fine-tuning the new loops, making peace with the random inaccuracies of Chinese mass production, and being inspired by the legions of Buddha Machine remixers. (Also available on this site is an earlier interview, from December 2005, with Virant: “Buddha in the Machine.”)

Marc Weidenbaum: The two new loops you’ve posted thus far have sounds that bring to mind string instruments. Is there some theme shared by the new group of sounds?

Christiaan Virant: Since it took us three years to get 2.0 finished, we decided to make the music about one part “evolution” and one part “revolution.” We decided that we could not just use the same sound set we were using for 1.0, regardless of how well they worked in the box. As a result, many of the tracks on 2.0 are far removed from the drones of the original — the piano on the third track, for example. At the same time, we kept a few direct references to the original loops, because we liked how they worked when you play both 1.0 and 2.0 at the same time.

Weidenbaum: What did you learn from the first set of nine sounds that influenced the new set? Did the average length change? Did you under-emphasize high or low pitches?

Virant: While we were designing the 2.0, there was a lot of thought about which loops “worked” and which did not, and we had really wanted to go with some long, evolving tunes. But in the end, what you hear is actually most influenced by mundane technical reasons. When we made the loops longer and tested them on a higher-capacity chip, it sounded awful — something to do with the clock speed of the chip and how it interacted with the PC board. So we went back to the lower-capacity chip, which forced us to squeeze everything into 300 seconds of music. That kept the average length of the new music about the same as the original loops. And for 2.0 we really tried to improve the sound quality, so we didn’t change the EQ to make the loops “fit” in the box. This time around, we made the box “fit” the loops.

Weidenbaum: Pitch control appears to be the biggest change in the new device. It’s a cool addition, almost like you’d “circuit-bent” your own machine. What inspired you to make the Buddha Machine more “interactive,” to give the listener more control over the sound? [The image below, courtesy of FM3, shows combination of volume control (top) and pitch control (bottom), book-ending the headphone jack.]

Virant: It was really the fans that made us think about how to improve and upgrade the box. We always considered the Buddha Machine as our “album.” But many, many people out there were inspired to use it as an instrument. Over the past three years I’ve received at least 100 tracks either on CD, CDR, or MP3 that use the Buddha Machine loops. Most recently I got a nice track from a 12-year-old in Portland! Many electronic musicians found it to be a handy performance device and plugged one or two straight into a mixer. Others banged it through a rack of effects, and still others got inside and rewired the machine to create all sorts of weird noise! This evolution was really exciting to watch, so Zhang and I talked a lot about how to work “with” these Buddha fans, rather than just giving them another box of static samples. We don’t really have the knowledge to design a cool performance instrument, so we decided the simplest and likely most effective modification was a basic pitch control. You can pitch it to match the 1.0, your guitar, your voice … or you can “play” the box by changing the notes as they sound out.

Weidenbaum: Can you confirm that lowering the pitch will also extend the playing length of the loop?

Virant: In theory, it should play slower when pitched down, but to be honest I haven’t timed it! Its a simple voltage control. The wheel just controls the amount of power feeding the circuit, so with less power, it plays slower and deeper. Like when the batteries were running out on your Buddha Machine 1.0!

Weidenbaum: At some point in the production of the first Buddha Machine, a change was implemented in the physical switch that alternates between loops. It had been a back-and-forth switch, but it became an inset button. Why was that change made?

Virant: This wasn’t really a conscious change. The factory just gives us whatever they have in stock. Nowadays, when they run out of the push-button, they just put on a different switch and send it out. We often don’t even know until we are at a gig, open up a machine, and wow! There’s a different switch! Early on, they would sometimes use red ink instead of white for the printing. That’s just part of manufacturing in China — always a bit of randomness. But Zhang and I both prefer the toggle switch. It makes less noise during performance and is more accurate. We had wanted to use the toggle switch as standard for 2.0, but were forced to use the push-button because of the circuit board  architecture. We are working on a new circuit board, so hopefully one day we can move back to the toggle.

Weidenbaum: That’s an interesting spin on John Cage’s idea about the role of “chance” in music. Usually by “chance,” Cage was speaking of compositional technique or performance practice. I don’t think he focused much on chance in the actual production of a musical instrument.

Virant: Originally the Buddha Machine was designed in one color only: black. When we made the initial order for 300, we told them we wanted 300 black units. So I go to pick them up in Hong Kong around March 2005, and I get about 180 black and the rest in red! We didn’t even know it was an option! Seems the factory ran out of black plastic, so they just grabbed some red stuff, melted it down, and made the machines. They were more concerned with meeting the quantity requirement than the color requirement. I didn’t really complain, but it was an early lesson in the complete randomness involved with our factory. Zhang minded even less, and the next time I saw him — at Mutek 2005 — he had a box filled with the machines in seven different colors! The initial “mistake” ended up leading us to make the machine in different colors and probably led to untold extra sales.

Related links: FM3's website at fm3buddhamachine.com. December 2005 interview at disquiet.com. Rob Walker's July 2007 New York Times story at nytimes.com.

_

Free Buddha music: Five of the nine new loops (disquiet.com). Screaming Buddha by Noisewerks (disquiet.com). Aymeric de Tapol & François Martig (disquiet.com). Mark Rushton's two field-recording Buddhas (disquiet.com, disquiet.com). Jupiter Watts psychedelic-rock (disquiet.com). Two Royal Trans albums (disquiet.com, disquiet.com). Dying Buddha Machine (disquiet.com). Monolake live (this file is no longer accessible, but the original writeup is at disquiet.com). First Disquiet.com post on Buddha Machine, November 2005, with links to the original tones (disquiet.com).

_
Retail remixes: Two albums have been released commercially of Buddha Machine sounds, a solo set by Robert Henke (aka Monolake) titled Layering Buddha and a various-artists collection called Jukebox Buddha with entries by Henke, Blixa Bargeld, Adrian Sherwood, Doug Wimbish, Jan Jelinek,  and SunnO))), among others; both are covered in an entry in this "best of 2006" list: disquiet.com.

But when I visited to the Kikapu website, kikapu.com, for additional information there was no mention of the release, a nine-tack set titled VXVII by Mikronesia. Given the punctuality and professionalism that have been Kikapu’s standard for nearly eight years, the lack of information at kikapu.com seemed odd.

The next day, a visit to the website explained everything: Mitchell was closing down the label, after 109 of its virtual albums and EPs, with a suddenness that defines un-ceremonial — little more than an “R.I.P.” tagline (“2001 to 2008″) and some poetry by Walt Whitman:

The Past! the dark, unfathom’d retrospect!
The teeming gulf! the sleepers and the shadows!
The past! the infinite greatness of the past!
For what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past?

While neither the first netlabel nor the most prolific, Kikapu has been, since its debut, one of the most substantive and consistent. It was a stable entity in the vast, growing and often chaotic field of freely, legally downloadable music. Kikapu didn’t contain Whitman’s multitudes so much as it hinted at them.

I’d first interviewed Mitchell almost exactly four years ago (disquiet.com). He explained then that he’d discovered netlabels, such as Monotonik (mono211.com), while looking for music to play on his college radio show. In time, he set up his own, releasing work by Raemus, Karl Zeiss, Veem and others, including Leonard J. Paul’s soundtrack to the documentary film The Corporation — an appropriate partnership, given the inherently anti-corporate nature inherent in any netlabel venture. Many of those releases have been reviewed as part of this site’s ongoing Disquiet Downstream section.

With Kikapu now shut down, I corresponded with Mitchell via email, and he agreed to answer some questions about the end of his much-loved netlabel.

Marc Weidenbaum: How did you come to the realization that you wanted to close down the Kikapu netlabel?

Brad Mitchell: The thought had actually crossed my mind a time or two over the years, but the final decision came about six months ago. The past few years, the amount of time and energy I’ve been able to put into the label has decreased significantly. When I started it I was still at university and had a lot of free time, and I really enjoyed it. But now that I work full time I don’t have nearly as much free time to devote to it, and this caused me to lose interest in it, to be honest.

I feel that the artists involved are giving 100 percent of themselves to their releases, and when I’m not able to match their dedication I feel that I’m cheating them of something. Running a label requires a lot of work, way more than I ever expected. Once I started spending less time on the label, promotion slowed, and I think some of the releases didn’t garner nearly as much attention as they deserved. And I mainly blame myself for this. Hence, I decided to stop doing any more new releases, so hopefully the artists can find homes at new labels that are able to put in all of the necessary work to get their music heard.

Weidenbaum: If any three tracks or releases best summarize what you were trying to get at with Kikapu, what would those be?

Mitchell: The release that I’m most proud of is definitely the Wein, Weib und Gesang compilation we did a few years back. I think that collection best summarizes the direction and sound the label strived for. Plus it was such a massive release, and the styles of the artists vary enough within the confines of being an ambient compilation that it is still very interesting to listen to, for me at least, after more than three years. Two more releases that really define what I think of as the “Kikapu sound” would be KOSIK’s Removable Pieces album, and Aidan Baker and Ben Fleury-Steiner’s Second Week of the Second Month release. Both are somewhat ambient in style, but use actual, live instrumentation to achieve some of the best music I’ve ever heard. And I also want to throw out there how incredible it was being able to release the soundtrack to the film The Corporation, by Leonard J. Paul. I think it helped to really legitimize netlabels in a way, and I’m really proud of that.

Weidenbaum: Will you continue to make music — whether as Pocka, or under your own name?

Mitchell: Absolutely, I’m still recording music all the time.. I’ve got a full-length album that will be released through Gears of Sand later this year, and another full-length album that will be released on the Test Tube netlabel fairly soon I think. The Test Tube album is droning ambient, and the Gears of Sand release is live guitar-based tracks that sound like a mix of dark ambient and doom metal. I’m really excited for people to hear that album, since it’s quite a change in style for me personally.

Weidenbaum: Where do you live and what are you up to professionally?

Mitchell: Right now I’m living back in my hometown in southern Missouri. I’ve spent the past few years bouncing all over the place, from Vancouver to Seattle to New York to Switzerland, but now I’m back home in the midwest. I’ve started my own audio production company here, and I spend most every waking moment doing some form of audio production or engineering. My work mainly focuses on post-production sound, and I do a lot of dialog editing, with a bit of music production sprinkled in here and there.

Weidenbaum: How has the idea of a netlabel evolved since 2001?

Mitchell: I think the big differences between netlabels when I started Kikapu and netlabels at present are 1) there are an incredible number of netlabels out there now, and 2) some of them are starting to turn away from the original DIY aesthetic and becoming, for lack of a better word, more professional. When I started Kikapu I could rattle off most of the netlabels online just from my head. Now there has to be hundreds, if not more. It’s way too much to keep track of really. But my second point is what is really important. What started out as a very small scene has expanded to a much larger audience, though it’s still a niche market. But I think that a lot of that is due to some labels really stepping up the game and in effect becoming a mirror of larger, more traditional music labels. I’m not a huge fan of this idea though, since for me the whole idea of giving away free music and avoiding any kind of sponsorships or linking up with larger profit-minded labels is what turned me on to the netlabel scene in the first place. I tried to do that to the best of my abilities with Kikapu. I did a handful of cd releases, but the whole goal of those was to help pay my server and hosting fees. And it was never enough. I just love the idea of being completely DIY. But if all netlabels continued down that road, the amount of listeners wouldn’t increase substantially. It’s a slippery slope, deciding how far to go either way. I appreciate people putting lots of money and work into their netlabels, but it also seems to be going against the true idea of what a netlabel is.

Weidenbaum: What new netlabels are you following?

Mitchell: To be honest I’m not that familiar with many new netlabels; I don’t follow the netlabel world nearly as closely as I used to. But a few of my favorite netlabels that really stand out are 12rec.net (12rec.net), Test Tube (monocromatica.com/netlabel), Resting Bell (restingbell.net), and con-v (con-v.org). All of these labels have a clearly defined sound and style that is all their own, and their releases all tend to be prolific. I also like that all of these labels tend to release different genres of music, and the kinds of music I like are all represented in just these four labels. Everything they release is top-notch work, and I usually download just about everything they offer.

Weidenbaum: What tips do you have for individuals thinking of initiating a netlabel?

Mitchell: Make sure you have the resources to maintain the label. Be selfless. And be picky.

Related links: A January 2004 interview with Brad Mitchell (disquiet.com). The Kikapu website, kikapu.com. Kikapu's catalog at archive.org.

His instrument was a wooden wine crate filled with custom-made circuitry and six joystick-like levers. Allen called his tool circuitMusic, and it emitted a throbbing, old-school sound — the sort of sound that’s often called “feedback laden” when in fact it was more like he was exploring the feedback, simultaneously navigating and lending shape to the noise. (There is additional coverage of the event, including photos, in an August 2007 disquiet.com entry.)

The music got more abstract as his set went on, and Allen’s hand-crafted instrument provided a comforting focus throughout. Each of its six joysticks was paired with a single headlight on the front of the box. That trigger system, in a highly economical manner, provided helpful signals to the audience: visual orientation amid the increasingly self-obscuring sounds. In a world of ever more powerful technology, it was downright inspiring to experience the sort of communication that could be accomplished with a simple on-off switch.

It’s no surprise that Allen’s skills in communication in regard to electronics and electronic music are not limited to stage performances. He’s taught classes in such subjects as “Performing Technology,” “New Interfaces for Musical Expression,” and “Sensor Workshop” at New York University and Pratt Institute. And after finishing up an early-2008 residency at Eyebeam in Manhattan (eyebeam.org), he’s relocating to Newcastle, England, to help start a new Masters program in Digital Arts with Atau Tanaka, formerly of Sony Paris. “The Masters,” he explained via email, “will be held in coordination with the Newcastle Culture Lab, headed up by Sally-Jane Norman.” (More info at ncl.ac.uk/culturelab.)

Allen took time recently to talk about the tool he played at Galapagos, the implications of musicians crafting their own instruments, the intersection of academia and the electronic arts, and the politics of 8bit music, among other things.

Marc Weidenbaum: When I saw you perform at Galapagos in Brooklyn last summer, you used one machine for the performance, and it was something you’d designed yourself. I’m very interested in musical instruments created by musicians. Could you describe what it was and how it functioned?

Jamie Allen: The rig you saw is a piece called “circuitMusic.” It’s really very simple — it’s a set of square waves built with raw electronic components, inside an old wine box. I have a few ways of varying resistances in the circuit — photo-resistors, force-sensitive resistors, and regular old potentiometers. Each of the square waves is coupled to a set of very bright light-emitting diode arrays, such that whenever a new oscillator is thrown in, a light comes on. There are six sound elements, and six lights.

I really started this piece out of a frustration with the possibilities for improvisation in electronic music. I wanted something I could get lost in while performing. I wanted something that wasn’t just moving through a set of presets or known “fields” I had created prior to a show; circuitMusic often surprises me, as does the incredibly positive reaction I get to the simple on/off “visualization” it provides the audience.

Weidenbaum: You’ve taught courses related to electronic music at a variety of schools in and around Manhattan. I imagine these schools each has a different take on music and technology, and I was wondering what you’ve learned about different scholarly takes on the field.

Allen: The often surprising thing about music in academia is that the spectrum of motivations is really broad. There are many communities, viewpoints, conferences, styles, and philosophies represented. Coming to accept this as a cultural reality when I first became involved was a bit of a challenge for me, actually. I come out of playing in bands, in bars, etc., primarily for the rawness and fun of it — the blood-and-sweat school of music. So I came to computer electronic music with a kick-ass “let’s fucking do this thing” kind of motivation. I had a real problem accepting any motivation other than those that were a direct reaction to the lack of relevancy I perceived in the computer and experimental music scene. As is often true, I’ve mellowed out a lot, because, as I am now quite fond of saying, “Hell, it’s only music.”

There are scholars who approach technological, musical, and other creative decisions as a kind of scientific “problem” to be “solved.” There are a lot of people out to do a lot of things so they can be “first” at it. There are also far too many music-technology scholars in higher learning who use academia a kind of hustle or dodge, or to bolster a failing “commercial” music career — whatever that means these days.

The best work, and best teaching I think, comes from people who are primarily interested in music as a method of communication, enhanced and elaborated through technology. In Manhattan, like anywhere else, you find that certain schools and departments do have certain emphases in this regard, based on who’s running them and what their personal motivations are.

Weidenbaum: Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share on the whole 8-bit world of music-making — is that at all where your head is at?

Allen: I’ve always loved the sound of the square wave, which is the timbral indicator for what we think of as “low-fi” or “chip” music. It’s also fitting that mathematically, the instantaneous change from one signal level to another — the Heaviside function, the basis of a square wave, really — at least theoretically, contains all frequencies. That thought alone contributes to my understanding of these somewhat harsh tones as very warm, welcoming, and somehow enveloping.

I’m also sure, as I’ve heard many people comment, that there is a kind of flashback adrenaline rush that comes from hearing these sounds. A good portion of our generation grew up getting their kicks with a side order of these square-wave-based game sounds, so there’s a sense in which it’s just taking you back to that time you kicked your brother’s ass at Impossible Mission on the C64. A happy time, indeed.

Anyhow — I’m not much of a scenester, but I do have a duo with Michael Horan called “Season of the Bit” where we remix and DJ Commodore 64 tunes. The Blip Festival just happened here in New York, and I was really hoping to catch way more of it than I did…

Weidenbaum: I agree there’s a flashback quality to those sounds, and the way musicians and artists — from Scott Johnson’s I.F. Stone transcriptions to Christian Marclay’s use of old video footage and record albums — employ sounds of the past definitely expects that as part of the audience’s reaction. But as the years go on, lo-fi, 8bit music is attracting an audience with no first-hand experience with that original sound. The result is a kind of second-hand nostalgia. This new generation grew up on much more advanced games — do you understand what they get out of 8bit?

Allen: You’re right — this “flashback” quality is certainly not the only motivation for low-res soundscape work — just an often-cited one.

If you’re the kind of person that thinks all decisions are political — like me — you can also think of the use of lo-fi hardware and software as somewhat of a subversion of technological culture. That’s certainly one of my motivations for doing this kind of work. Our culture at the moment values technological advancement and refinement at a level that can sometimes feel dehumanizing, overstated, and boring. There’s a slickness, perfection, and inevitability to the trajectory of ever-higher-resolution-everything we’re on right now that is apparently frustrating to a good number of people’s creative process, particularly in music. This is perhaps why a lot of people compare the 8bit scene to the punk scene, in terms of motivation. The elements you get to lay your hands on in “state of the art” music studios can really suck all the play and fun out of making music.

Weidenbaum: And, to follow up, do you see a music movement based on more recent gaming systems, along the lines of machinima — in which footage of video games is edited to create short films — coming along?

Allen: Certainly — a lot of my students are interested in the effects current video-game culture will have on the musical landscape. What I find interesting is that there are generations of people out there assuming that all their media is interactive, malleable, and essentially a dialogue of some sort. Most of the creative music game developers out there — Toshio Iwai and Harmonix, for example — are already using game platforms to deliver high-level musical decision-making to the masses. I would say that Harmonix’s FreQuency (2001) and Nintendo’s Electroplankton (2005) are existing examples of “musical machinima” tools — although there is certainly room for further exploration and openness in these systems.

Weidenbaum: Of all the different music-making devices you’ve created, do you think any of them might have a wider audience among your fellow musicians — that is, would any of make it in the marketplace as manufactured instruments?

Allen: I think one of the real powers of the configurable prototyping systems available to the electronic artist today is that you are freed from these ideas transferability and permanence in the standard sense. You can pretty much make an entire instrument system, play it once, take it apart, reconfigure it and then play it the next night. Perry Cook, a fantastic guy, technologist, and musician up at Princeton, once said, “Make a piece, not an instrument or controller.” This has wonderful repercussions musically, politically, and socially. In music, there is the new idea of a kind of sketchy, design-oriented approach to performance and compositional process. Politically, we may actually help to break down hegemonic and hierarchical music and art structures in the West that have been so dominant for far too long. It is hard get to the heart of what educational pedigree, for example, even means for self-built instruments that are entirely reconfigurable or performance-specific. Socially, we can think of instrument creation as beginning before the level of “player” and oftentimes blurring the ranks of composer, performer, instrumentalist, and audience.

Needless to say, the marketplace affects everyone’s outlook and work in a broad sense, but it’s not at all a part of my conscious thought process in the creation of music or performance.

Weidenbaum: Which comes first, the music or the instrument? Do you create instruments with a certain sound in your head, or do you create instruments and then, when they’re done, see what kind of music they can make?

Allen: I’m really interested in process, first and foremost. There’s a transparency and directness of communication that I strive for in performance and music. Instrument design is often a way of rendering limitations and facilities into a physical object. Objects are also, arguably, inherently performable, so it can be a way of translating and communicating otherwise obscure processes to other people. Like anyone, I have sounds and sequences and patterns that appeal to me for one reason or another, as in the aforementioned case of square waves. What I find most satisfying, though, is the translation of process as a way of sculpting someone else’s experience in real time.

Weidenbaum: If I am overemphasizing the academic aspect of your work, please tell me so, but I want to ask one additional question about that area. One thing that academia has in its favor is continuity. There’s a tradition, a literature, a practice, or a variety of practices, within each field. Are there performance, or computer-science, or music communities, within academia that you particularly see yourself in the tradition of?

Allen: I really think of myself as a life-long student, and so I think I naturally gravitate towards educational environments. I have a serious addiction to learning new things and being exposed to new ideas. I don’t have a lot of academic aspirations in the more traditional sense, so I can’t really say that there’s a particular history I’m interested in trying to get myself written into.

I do think relationships to specific histories in academia, the arts, performance, and music are changing. I find a lot of electronic and digital artists are less and less concerned with their practice as a “modernist” or “minimalist” or whatever — and more and more concerned with project-specific appropriateness, relevance, and context dependence, which is really very positive all in all.

This has a lot to do with the distributed contexts in which creative works exist these days. An artist can have one piece that looks at something from a certain motivation — say, deconstructionist — and another piece that looks at it from another — say, collagist. There’s no conflict because both “communities” can be addressed through the same varied distribution channels available to the artist. This all reminds me of music-listening patterns in the post-digital music age, to some extent. You don’t ask people, “What kind of music do you listen to?” anymore, because listening patterns are so diverse. Similarly, I don’t ask people, “What kind of artist are you?” because I know they’ve likely got a long list of interests.

So… what kind of artist am I? Well I’m a “post-post-modern- avant-garde-romantic-digital- experimental-conceptualist,” with a limp.

Related link: Jamie Allen's website, heavyside.net.

The ease inherent in Grains (released on the San Francisco label Praemedia) is due in no small part to Miltner’s voice, which informs several of the tracks. She sings tones that, for all the digital processing, maintain a loveliness that never gets too far from being recognizable as human.

Miltner studied music at Mills, but that was only the latest educational experience in lifelong studies that began with violin training and proceeded through two BFAs. Prior to recording Grains, Miltner teamed with musician Mark Bartscher; together, as Miba, they recorded an album, The Corplate Porblem, which, much like Grains, emphasized granular synthesis that located within samples tiny fractures of sound.

Miltner recently took time to discuss the differences between recording solo and as part of a duo, the ongoing effort involved in developing audio software patches, how her visual arts background informs her composing, and her day job designing sound for video games.

Marc Weidenbaum: The use of voice on the first song on Grains, “Grains Need Water and Sunlight,” is especially distinctive. In the course of recording that piece, did you alter the way you sang to fit the digital processing that you were applying to your voice?

Kristin Miltner: For all of Grains, I was using the software I built in Max/MSP. I know that I have set the buffers in my patch to record for 10 seconds, so if I’m singing into the patch, I try to time it so I sing a few notes or say a few words or whatever, and the whole improv lasts about 10 seconds.

Weidenbaum: Are the sounds on Grains ones you heard in your head and pursued, or ones that arose through experimentation and discovery?

Miltner: Both happen, and to answer that question specifically I feel like I should tell you about how I work. I use a specific piece of software that I wrote and am writing in Max/MSP that very much dictates, for better or for worse, the way I sound. I have been working on the same patch for at least five years and keep adding to it. I developed it to be very good at sounding a certain way — the stuttery, rhythmic theme that you hear on Grains. I like to think of it as something that cuts lacy patterns into samples and live input. There’s another abstract description of how it works by Jorge Boehringer — he describes it an an octopus opening and closing multiple doors in a very long hallway.

Anyway, inevitably, as a result of building it that way, as a result of choosing and eliminating, that’s the way I sound. We mutate each other as we grow symbiotically. I hear sounds out in the field in terms of what my patch will do to them. If another musician is playing an instrument or playing me a recording they made, or I am out in the world listening to a sound, I think about what it would sound like if I brought it into the patch.

Weidenbaum: Please describe the patch more in detail.

Miltner: The heart of the software patch is an instrument that allows me five buffers that I can scan live any way I choose; I set the BPM (if I want to have one; sometimes I decide to let the tempo change gradually, in a “random walk”) the playback speed, how many pulses (think of the pulses as long-ish grains of the sample in the buffer) it scans, the length of each pulse, if there are any rests where no pulse is heard, what range of the sample in the buffer it’s currently scanning, etc.

As far as the vocals go, one layer will be a result of vocal improvisation that is “caught” in the scanner and repeated by the computer in a way that I like. The vocal improvisation is usually in response to some synth sound I have made in Logic or played on piano or Wurlitzer or Rhodes, etc., and have brought into one of the buffers. I will then “hear” harmony parts that go with the first vocal, and sing and record those into other buffers. I then chose a “landscape” that goes with the voice — samples of noise, or birdsong, or water, or someone crashing two pieces of metal together — and scan those samples along with the vocals. I set their rhythm patterns, their beat divisions, and then I have all the pieces of the composition constructed.

After all my layers are built, I start weaving the layers together, taking some out, leaving others in, stacking the layers in different ways. I adjust the rhythm by means of a beat division table, which shows me whether a particular count is in, or is resting, and how long the pulse is. I also select different portions of the waveforms in the buffers, which results in a chord change and/or a textural change. I do this until I get something that sounds like a halfway coherent composition. I will play a few different “beginnings” and “endings.” All this goes into one or two long recordings that contain a few different takes and experiments.

Then I edit. For Grains I used Peak instead of ProTools to prevent myself from doing too much editing. I stayed in a two-channel environment so all I could do was cut from take to take, maybe take the beginning of one take and put it on the middle of another take; that is as serious as the editing got this time. That’s basically all Mark Bartscher and I did with the Miba CD The Corplate Porblem (2004, pax). I tried to follow the model we used then. I want all the layering and on-the-fly composing to be done in the Max patch; I think that’s what keeps it sounding spontaneous.

Weidenbaum: Your description of the patch sounds very personal. Did you have that sense of attachment to the patch when you started working in Max/MSP, or did it develop over time?

Miltner: Over time I guess I realized that I was growing a creature with personality quirks, with tendencies to be stubborn about certain things, and to make other things happen without even being asked. Little favors here and there, unexpected surprises. It became so much like working with a person, albeit a warped and twisted person. I think it’s my visual art background that makes me see it that way. It’s so much like sketching something, and then backing away from it to see if it looks right, and then re-drawing a firmer line, assessing the line, re-working, assessing, listening, making a new line, pausing, making different lines, applying various amounts of pressure, resulting in a thinner or thicker lines. Assessing the results. I had the same problem with drawings and paintings as I do with the patch — I could never be done with them either.

Weidenbaum: Please choose one song from Grains and describe how it came to be.

Miltner: “Body in Sleep” came about this way: I hunted through all my recordings for a piano sample, something low-key. I knew I wanted the last track to feel like you were drifting off slowly. I was trying to capture that time between asleep and awake. I found an autoharp sample I really liked. It was just two notes, sustained for around six seconds each. So I put that in a couple buffers, and then whispered into another one, and one had some bird sounds. I put some filters on some of the tracks, and then played them all together, overwriting the buffers with more voices, loading in other pre-recorded voice tracks that contain things being whispered.

Weidenbaum: I’ll try not to focus too much on your use of voice, but I was wondering if Laurie Anderson’s work played any role in your sense of how to invoke vocals in electronic music.

Miltner: I think in her work, each of Laurie’s songs is much more of a concept. I think of her work as more “text-based,” as in she actually has lyrics in mind, and messages to her audience in those lyrics, whereas Grains is more about texture, and the words that come to mind when I am singing are more like pieces of words, subconscious babble. Dream words. I wanted it to be an intuitive album, that invites you in without overpowering you with any specific lyrical ideas — something that would encourage the listener to invent imagery or ideas along with it.

Weidenbaum: Some musicians create a patch for each work. Others have a handful they call upon, like a small box of staple recipes. You seem to be saying you have one single patch that is your virtual equivalent of a studio. Am I getting that right?

Miltner: Not really a studio patch, but a live performance patch. The fantasy is one big performance patch that can handle anything coming at it, whether it be live input either from myself or other musicians, or any one of hundreds of combinations of my samples in a way that fits my aesthetic or fits the improv situation I am in — balance between control and spontaneity that feels right to me. Then there is no need for editing ever. An impossible dream, but something I aspire to.

Weidenbaum: Did working solo on Grains feel significantly different from working as a duo, as you have in the group Miba — and could you say, in a manner of speaking, that your Max patch is your partner?

Miltner: Creating Grains felt a lot different for me than the Miba CD, for the same reason I enjoy playing live as a solo musician: every single decision made — or not made — is one I am responsible for, so if it goes bad, I have only myself to blame. In a live situation this total responsibility makes me feel like I have more freedom, because I am not deferring to anyone else. I don’t have to feel bad about stepping on anyone’s toes or worry about feeling bad about stepping on people’s toes, or get mad at myself because I am deferring too much or not listening to what’s going on or letting my ego take over.

Mark Bartscher and I did not make a single decision separately when we edited the Corplate Porblem. We decided on everything together. It was awesome to have that experience first, because when I worked on Grains, Mark was still there; I would hear his input and observations, or what I think he would think about the tracks.

Weidenbaum: Please say a little more about the editing process. You say you want to keep the editing simple, so are you mostly looking for a good introduction and a good exit — does song form play much a role in your decision-making about how to shape a track?

Miltner: It most definitely does, but I try to create a coherent form when I am playing live — or making the takes for a CD — so I don’t have to create a form in post. I want to keep it as much like a live session as I can because I wish for this type of music to be able to be generated on the fly, and form to be just as interesting as it would be had things been added and subtracted from it. After I play the “song” in Max two or three times, and have recorded myself playing it, I bring them into Peak, but leave the takes mostly whole — like I said, I may slap a different beginning on one, like, if I remember right, the first half of “Bell Cycle” [track 4 on Grains] is take two, and the last half is take three.

Weidenbaum: I know very little about you personally — could you share some basic biographical information: where you’re from, what you studied prior to Mills, general cat/dog, coffee/tea, Pepsi/Coke type stuff?

Miltner: I’m from Omaha, originally. I started piano lessons when I was 4. I was a Suzuki kid. I went to the Kansas City Art Institute because I thought I wanted to be a painter, and there I was exposed to a lot of great video, sculpture and performance art. I ended up getting a BFA in Photography and New Media, and a second BFA in Art History. I made some Super 8 films and videos while I was there, which led me to ProTools, which led me to make multichannel audio installations. I got really into Pauline Oliveros’s work. After KCAI, I came to Mills. Now I am making sound effects and composing music for video games. I live with Cliff Caruthers, who is also a professional composer and sound designer, and helps to curate the San Francisco Tape Music Festival. We live in a house in Oakland, and we have three cats and two Ameraucana hens. I like Diet Coke, and both coffee and tea.

Weidenbaum: I’ve spoken with several musicians who work, by day, making music for games. For some it’s really simply a day job; for others the processes, processing power and tools-sets in gaming have influenced what they do in their personal music, and vice-versa. Could you describe what you’re doing at work in gaming, and how it might relate to your compositions and performance work?

Miltner: Sure. I think making game music has not only taught me a lot about the available tools and technology, but has also exposed me to the myriad ways that people use these tools. You can observe techniques, workarounds, and exploitations of these tools when you work with a team of other audio technicians, and arrive at solutions you would never think of if you were entirely on your own. Having to design small-footprint games really taught me a lot of ways to maximize a very small palette and to think about what can, if long and varied pieces cost too much in terms of space or memory, be done programmatically to enhance the design of the music and sound effects. I have built up techniques for percussion that changed the way I think about programming my own drums and textures when I make my personal work. I’ve made tons of custom instruments for particular effects I want to achieve in certain background musics. I am very “Logic matrix window”-oriented. I tend to draw and cut and paste all my notes, only actually “playing in” a measure or two at a time. People think this is time-consuming, but actually I’ve gotten quite fast at it. I love the color-coded velocities. Having your pitches on a colored grid-like display makes an incredible amount of sense to me.

Related links: Kristin Miltner's MySpace page (myspace.com/miltnerunit). Praemedia Records, which released Grains (praemedia.com). Pax Recordings, which released Miba's album (paxrecordings.com).