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Tag Archives: android

The Kindle Fire Is Deaf

[ September 30, 2011 / Department: field notes / Comments: 2 ]

Note: There’s updated information in the comments section to this post.

Amazon.com earlier this week announced four additional items in its Kindle line of ebook readers.

One caveat for potential consumers, and for software developers: The new flagship Kindle device, named Fire, has no microphone.

The Fire is, of course, more than an ebook reader. While the three other newly announced Kindles (Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G) build on the line’s next-generation e-ink technology, the Fire is a tablet computer with a multi-touch color screen. The Kindle Fire is powered by a modified branch of Google’s Android operating system. Other non-Apple tablets and ebook readers are built on Android, and several have been targets of the affections and aspirations of hackers. The Nook, a product of Barnes & Noble, has likely been the most popular ereader for after-market tinkerers. Reports that Amazon will not aggressively derail those who seek to root the new Kindles (i.e., take control of the operating system; see liliputing.com) suggest that the Fire may soon rival the Nook in that regard.

The absence of a microphone, however, has unfortunate potential ramifications, especially if the Fire becomes a top-ranking Android device. For one thing, the popularity of microphone-enabled software will likely suffer — ranging from interactive sound applications like RJDJ (which takes sound in realtime from the microphone and makes new, musical sound out of it) to utilities like Shazam (which identifies songs based on them being “heard” via the microphone). Voice activation overall may be de-prioritized, should Fire gain significant market penetration. Companies may be less likely to innovate with such microphone-sensitive options as the Three Little Pigs children’s book app that makes good on the promise of blowing the house down, or the way the Clif Bar SOS iPhone app fogs up when you breathe into the microphone. Soundcloud.com’s Android app has a record function — will it need to devise an alternate version for deaf devices like the Fire? (Note: not all of these apps mentioned above are available for the Android operating system. They are simply mentioned as illustrations of the range of microphone-sensitive developement.)

The absence of the microphone emphasizes the Fire’s Kindle heritage: it is depicted as a device for consumption, not production. This is why the initial promotional materials for the Fire refer to how you, the Fire user, can “Read Your Documents” (rather than edit or create documents). The key concern is that consumption and production are not mutually exclusive; they are, in fact, two distant ends of a broad and gradated continuum. The apps mentioned above are in several cases examples where microphone use is part of the consumption.

In addition, the absence of the microphone nixes one of the staple utilities of mobile devices: the ability to take voice notes, which is arguably a better user experience when reading an ebook (or web page) than is momentarily switching one’s position in order to type notes.

The microphone is not the only immediately evident technology lacking in the Fire. Also missing are 3G support, and a camera. These absences have been explained collectively as means by which Amazon reached the Fire sale price of $199, which has been widely viewed as competitive (in response to the Amazon release announcement, Barnes & Noble for one day dropped the price of its Nook Color to $150 from $250; via mobilewhack.com). The absences also make for a certain amount of planned obsolescence, providing a simple path for Amazon to the Kindle Fire 2.0, which could add one or more of the missing features, much as cameras were added when the iPad 2 was introduced.

Certainly Android’s preeminence as a mobile-phone technology means that the operating system is, for the foreseeable future, linked to devices with microphones, but the absence of a microphone on the Kindle Fire is an unfortunate development.

More on the Kindle Fire at amazon.com.

And for reference, here are my thoughts on the iPad, a few days after its January 2010 announcement: “Avoiding iPad Bloat.”

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Tangents: Remixing/Rewording, Cellular Sculpture, Bitrate Guidelines, …

[ July 7, 2011 / Department: field notes / Comments: 2 ]

Recommended reading, news, and so forth elsewhere:

Rewarding Rewording: The site Translation Telephone, at translation-telephone.com, pulls an Alvin Lucier / “I Am Sitting in a Room Listening” on words. In Lucier’s landmark work, the sound of a recording is heard to disintegrate as a phrase is read aloud in a room, and then a recording of that is played in the room, and then a recording of that recording is played, and so on. In Translation Telephone, you type in a phrase, and watch it cycle from one language to the next. For example, here’s a paragraph from a Disquiet post a few days ago:

The remix takes many forms. Music is remixed, but so too are videos, photographs, words, recipes, buildings, ideas. The remix is a means by which the past is made vibrant. It is the means by which the certitude of any form of documentation is probed and prodded until it loses its illusion of integrity.

And here is how it turned out, after going from English to Macedonian to Hebrew and back to English, with 18 additional languages at various stages in between:

Love is in many ways. The Sound of Music Mixer. But he added, video, photos, graphics, love the structure, how to live. This document is credibility

If a good mantra is a universal one, then Disquiet.com’s — “Just sitting here, listening” — holds up OK. After cycling through Bulgarian, Hindi, and 18 others languages, it came out “Just sit and listen,” which is, arguably, an improvement. Of course there are differences between Lucier’s piece and Translation Telephone, in particular that Lucier’s disintegration algorithm does double duty to provide a sense of the contours of the room in which it is recorded. If there were a parallel in Translation Telephone, what would it be? (Thanks to Paolo Salvagione for the tip. He called it an example of “rewording.”)

Bowl Alone: The intersection of physics and spirituality is a not uncommon one. This video accompanied a brief piece at io9.com that discussed how physicists were exploring the unique properties of Tibetan bowls, which are a popular tool for experimental musicians, especially those interested in the drone.

Max/R.I.P.: Belatedly, an excellent interview with famed computer-music legend Max Matthews done by Geeta Dayal just weeks before his death: frieze.com. Dayal is the author of the 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno‘s Another Green World. When she was prepping for the Matthews interview, she asked, via Twitter, if anyone had any questions for him. (Matthews is synonymous with electronic music, because his first name is part of the name of the popular software Max/MSP.) I’d seen him speak at CCRMA at Stanford several years ago, and had wanted to ask him about the multi-channel mixer he had reportedly built for John Cage‘s 1964 performance of Atlas Eclipticalis with the New York Philharmonic, then under the direction of Leonard Bernstein. Dayal did indeed ask the question, for which I am eternally thankful. This is just an excerpt from her Frieze piece:

GD: Didn’t you build a 50-channel mixer in 1964, for the New York Philharmonic and Leonard Bernstein? For a performance of John Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis?

MM: [Laughs] Yes, it would have been in the 1960s, because Cage and Jim Tenney were the two conductors; they ran the mixer. The mixer did have roughly 50 input channels, one for each pair of musicians at a given music stand. It was an octopus of wires, and they all came into these two consoles with a lot of knobs to adjust the volumes, and to direct the sound to one or more of about a dozen loudspeakers which were positioned around Avery Fisher Hall. Cage wrote the music for the performers, and he and Tenney ran the mixer during the performance. Even by Cage’s fairly generous standards, it wasn’t what he had hoped for. He added a piano portion, and I forgot the name of his pianist to the piece [David Tudor], and my judgment was that Bernstein stayed as far away as he could get; he couldn’t stand it. And I was just as happy to have him stay away, to tell you the truth.

GD: Did you and Bernstein not get along?

MM: We didn’t get close enough to not get along. But if we had gotten any closer, I would have quit the project.

The instruments did not have contact microphones on them, and of course you don’t want to put a contact microphone on a Stradivarius. I’d encouraged the musicians to bring their second violins, or any old violin, instead of their best violins. I arranged the contact mics to be on parts of the instrument that aren’t permanent, like the bridge, and had gone through quite a bit of trouble to be sure that the contact microphones could be put on the instruments without damaging the instruments. I think most of the instrumentalists didn’t have any trouble with that. So I was really mad at Bernstein when he came in one morning and told the instrumentalists that if they didn’t want to use the mics, they didn’t have to. I think most of them went ahead and used the mics. And Bernstein didn’t come back again. It was a concert series, about four or five nights of this piece, that it was played. Anyhow, it was fun to work with Cage, and it was fun to work with the orchestra, and it was fun to build this rather large mixer.

Board Game: There is something really beautiful about motion frozen, like fast-frame stills of bats in flight and of water drops hitting solid surfaces. And then there are Jeff Cook‘s wood sculptures based on cellular automata, like those in John Conway‘s influential “Game of Life” (via boingboing.net‘s David Pescovitz):

They’re on display at the gallery Chalk (chalkla.com) in Los Angeles through July. More photos from the opening at the gallery’s facebook.com account.

Kick It? Yes You Can: Two worthy musical Kickstarter campaigns, both from New Orleans: There’s the new Chef Menteur album, and a musical house. On the latter: “A growing group of local and national sound artists are working towards interactive instruments that can be built into its walls and floorboards so that visitors can bring the house to life through their touch.”

The Sound of Pixels: During dinner with a friend recently, talk turned, as it occasionally does, to the process of taking one’s physical audio recordings and converting them to MP3s. We discussed various subjects: the reasonable legal right to download files of albums you have already purchased, those scary stickers on old promotional LPs you bought used that say they remain the property of the record company, and, inevitably, the proper bitrate. Certainly not 128kbps, but 192? 320? And should it be MP3? OGG? FLAC? I said I usually rip mine at 320, but I have this lingering fear that a decade from now standard audio equipment will be upgraded in a manner that will make our 320kbps MP3s sound the way that our old VHS cassettes look on fancy new HD TVs. The momentary look of anxiety on his face was straight out of a John Carpenter movie.

Navel Browsing: I need to do a better job of tracking comments I make on other people’s sites. Here are two from excellent newmusicbox.org: A piece by Colin Holter takes apart a quote widely attributed to Duke Ellington (that there are only two types of music: good and bad), and while Ellington did say it, he didn’t mean by it what Holter says it means, and I tried to correct the record. Also, in a separate piece, Frank J. Otieri asks, “What is the sound of music-less music?” and I suggest that the answer is held in a study of phonography, or the art of field recordings.

Archives Anonymous: The great ubu.com site now has a landing page for all its electronic-music goods: ubu.com/emr (via Chris Power, of twitter.com/chrisjohnpower)

App Swap: The remarkable app Reactable appears to be the first major port of a general-interest (i.e., not framed as a next-gen instrument) generative-sound app from iOS to Android: reactable.com.

Playing Defense: Reports on “sonic warfare” generally discuss snazzy new weaponry, but there is recent news of an “acoustic ‘cloaking device’”: bbc.co.uk.

Truly Representing: Diego Bernal is the new City Council member representing District 1 in San Antonio, Texas. This is, indeed, the same Diego Bernal who remixed the Atlanta-based Fourth Ward Afro-Klezmer Orchestra‘s “Ose Shalom” last December for the tabletmag.com Hanukkah remix compilation I produced. Major congrats, man. Do your city proud.

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A Little Turret Music (Portal 2 MP3s)

[ June 28, 2011 / Department: downstream / Comments: 7 ]

For all the benefits of free music, something celebrated here on Disquiet.com almost daily, it’s hard not to read some free offerings as a reflection on relative cultural status. The Grammy Awards, in its not uncontroversial recent revamp, finally added a video-game-score category, while doing away with numerous other genre-specific awards (the latter move having many calling foul). Yet it’s not like these scores are doing particularly big business — at least not as recorded standalone fixed artifacts. As part of the ensemble creativity that goes into video games, they are an essential and largely overlooked component of interactive media. But when a property like Bioshock puts its full score online for free, as it did back in 2007, and as now Portal 2 has also done, it’s hard not to sense that the companies doing so know that the artifacts are just that, shards of experience.

A formal game score release is as much a parody of a movie score as it is a parallel. Music in video games by and large doesn’t progress the way it does in a film — it shifts according to how the game play proceeds, and that is based almost entirely on decisions made by the player. Thus, the game score lacks not just the visuals, but the sense of user-directed flow, the manner in which play directs causality.

To listen to the Portal 2 score if you’ve played the game is, among other things, to laugh, to know the jokes that the cues coincide with, but also to know more broadly how the theatrical bombast and surveillance chic collide into an unlikely and singular form of entertainment. There’s much to enjoy in the Portal 2 score collection, titled Music to Test By, even if you haven’t played the game, but it is even further removed from the experience of the game than is a movie score. If the score to Star Wars is once removed from the experience of the theatergoer, the score to Halo is twice removed from the experience of the gamer. Music fans have not yet fully recognized the appeal of video-game music, but even video-game music fans have yet to fully comprehend what that music means when separated from the games it was intended to accompany.

The score is available, along with a handful of Android- and iPhone-ready ringtones, for free download at the official Portal 2 site, thinkwithportals.com.

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When Cells Collide

Istanbul-based 'Otomata' developer Batuhan Bozkurt on generative sound, app development, cross-browser incompatibilities, and unexpected outcomes.

[ May 17, 2011 / Department: interviews / Comments: 4 ]

There is a grid, and it is blank, just 81 squares arranged in nine rows and as many columns. Click on any single square, and it lights up: a cell has been activated, and it begins moving upward, toward the top of the grid. When the cell hits the wall, it rebounds, emitting a pinging sound at the moment of collision. The cell then travels down until it hits the opposing wall, again rebounding and pinging at once. Click on two squares side by side horizontally, and watch the resulting cells travel in unison visually, though they are pitched apart. Click on enough of these squares, and the resulting cells will collide with each other, triggering sideways motion and ushering in a new level of sonic and geometric complexity.

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.

Grid, Unlocked: Video footage of Batuhan Bozkurt’s Otomata audio-game in action.

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.

Excellent Birds: Though he didn’t note the Conway-esque figurations at the time, Bozkurt linked to this video of a flock of birds from his twitter.com/earslap account a few weeks after the debut of Otomata.

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.
Read More »

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Remixing a Stroll

[ May 11, 2011 / Department: downstream / Leave a comment ]

Two days ago, after spending many hours with nothing playing but an MP3 that consisted in large part of the mechanical sound of an old turntable making its rotation, I had the sense that I was still hearing the track, even though I was miles from the house, pushing a bright orange three-wheeled stroller in which dozed my eight-month-old. This was along Golden Gate Park, where people regularly park their cars with the apparent interest in having their passenger-side windows broken. The sidewalk there is littered daily with glass, which collects in these dry glistening pools. I had navigated just such a pool of reflective shards, and one of those shards had, it turned out, embedded itself in the rear left wheel of the stroller. With each rotation, there was a scratchy sound, which in time took on the metronomic significance of a beat. The beat sound, in turn, so to speak, brought the ear to bear on what happened the other 350 or so degrees of rotation, when the wheel regained its grip on the pockmarked sidewalk. The sound of that portion of the rotation was weathered down, in a sandpapery way. I reached for my phone, continued to push the stroller, and used the bright red Record button in the Soundcloud.com app to tape 20 seconds of this beat. (It’s an Android phone, but there’s also an iOS version of the app.) The result is as follows:

Some comments began to accumulate on the page where the track is posted for streaming and download, and then 24 hours later an email arrived from Thomas Park, who records prolifically under the name Mystified. He had commented the day prior on my track, which I had titled “Broken Glass in a Stroller Wheel,” and in the intervening hours he had taken my track and produced something new from it, which he titled “Stroller Groove”:

Just looking at the waveforms of the two recordings, it’s clear that only one of these has the inaccuracies inherent in natural-world sound (even if part of that so-called natural world is a mass-produced, human-powered vehicle). The Mystified remix starts with a brief loop selected from the original track, and slowly accrues a veneer of minimal techno. As such, it provides an echo of my walk, in some manner resembling the way that my walk had provided an echo of the turntable MP3 to which I had been listening earlier in the day.

Tracks originally posted at soundcloud.com/disquiet and at soundcloud.com/mystifiedthomas

(Above photo from flickr.com/photos/wheatfields via Creative Commons license.)

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