So I was messing about with Animoog on the iPad and thought I would combine some live noodling with some field recordings of household gadgets. The recordings used an induction coil pickup to capture the normally unheard electromagnetic signals in a Sony portable CD player, iPad, laptop and mobile phone. Animoog is probably the best synth app currently available and has a superb level of tactile control using the buchla style keys which allow a huge range of expression when combined with the modulation routing. Anyway, done in one take, warts and all – Dubelectrons…

Savaran is Wales-based musician Mark Walters, more on whom at twitter.com/savaran_music and savaranmusic.wordpress.com. Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/savaran. Image above is of the Animoog iPad app interface (moogmusic.com).

Speech Jam: Geeta Dayal, author of the 33 1/3 book on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, has taken residence at Wired’s website, which is good news. In one of her first wired.com posts, she covered the “Japanese speech-jamming gun” and smartly highlights precedents ranging from J.G. Ballard to Karlheinz Stockhausen. (Additional coverage at technologyreview.com and io9.com.)

App Updates: These are all iOS, though some if not all also apply to their Android versions. Thicket has added three new modes. NodeBeat has added MIDI support, and expanded the number of savable recordings. Ambiance has added the ability to record sounds and to play sounds in “background” mode, among other things. The eDrops app has added new sounds and the ability to load and save patterns. Audioboo seems to have mostly focused on infrastructure for its latest update. Air has added AirPlay support. Reactable has added access to the community area, “save and view” performances, and more.

Social Bullet: I wrote the following to someone asking for how to “use” “social media” to “promote” their music: “The whole social media thing is complicated. There is no generally applicable answer. I would say the following, broadly: make sure you participate. For example, the Junto project had rules, and to have posted on it without reading the Info page was a matter of not really participating. Make sure if you’re on Twitter and Facebook and SoundCloud that you actively participate: post, reply to other people’s posts, comment on their music. This will, in time, lead to a stronger sense of community. You’re find musicians with whom you have things in common, and you’ll support each other in your pursuits.” (The context was correspondence with someone who had posted a track to the Disquiet Junto project on Soundcloud.com that didn’t have anything to do with the current project.)

Here’s how it works: The user draws vines on the screen, which are hit by falling stars, thus triggering sounds. Each vine signifies a different sound, most “musical,” which is to say tonal and melodic, though there are also simulated hand claps. The user can trigger the five stars by tapping on them, or can wait for them to fall on their own. The stars bounce when they hit vines, which means that the user can set up Rube Goldberg compositions, sending the stars bouncing from one vine to another, or capturing them in literal loops (a complete circle of vine) that will put the star into a lengthy repetitive cycle. The stars also make different sounds when they hit the bottom of the screen, depending on where they land.

There are seven types of vines, selectable from a menu along the bottom of the screen (it disappears with a swipe). A couple of these vines don’t become available until the user shares a composition, via Facebook, Twitter, or email. (It isn’t particularly invasive, as I was able to just email myself a composition to unlock the remaining sounds.) This being a marketing tool, the emphasis on networked participation isn’t surprising, and the app thankfully lets users share their compositions. And should the visualization of small round dots triggering sounds along long lines bring to mind an abstract take on the traditional format of a piece of sheet music, that probably isn’t an accident.

Speaking of non-accidents, rest assured that the sounds that result from Falling Stars aren’t purely random. Quite the contrary, they are musical and enjoyable, owing to careful balance of the vine-related tones, and to some sort of underlying metronomic pulse that keeps everything relatively in sync.

iOS 4.2 & Vine: The main screen of Falling Stars app

This demo video was posted at the youtube.com account of Interval Studios, home to Thicket’s Ott and Packard. The brief piece is narrated by Ott:

There is additional footage posted by Trident.

Given the advertising-world origin of the app, Falling Stars is worth investigating for what it says about the commercial opportunities for generative music. As of this writing, of the 714 reviews of Falling Stars, almost 90%, 634 in total, give it five stars, the highest rating possible. Of the remaining 73 ratings, more than half are four stars, leaving just 12 three-star, nine two-star, and 16 one-star. The most negative reviews include a few critiques of the app, generally finding it useless, but a lot of them seem to be technical in nature (reporting audio defects that have not been evident on my test units: an iPad 2 and a current, aka fourth, generation iPod Touch). Those “useless” comments are common for generative sound apps, given that they often lack both a self-evident melody and the sort of goal or ending that is the hallmark of a proper game. (The Falling Stars app’s promotional text describes it as an “audio/visual digital toy.”)

The iPhone app based on the film Inception serves as the primary example of the power of a commercial brand to not only draw attention to something as adventurous as generative sound, but to lend it a useful context. The Inception app has 5811 ratings, over 77 percent of which are either four or five stars. By contrast, the various apps associated with RJDJ, the app from which Inception was derived, are more evenly divided between positive and negative responses.

This isn’t to say, merely, that a mass-market commercial property is necessary to garner public interest in generative sound — mass-market commercial properties can bring attention to any number of seemingly esoteric subjects. It’s simply to say that if a popular subject can indeed lend legitimacy to avant-garde ventures, then perhaps those ventures aren’t as esoteric as some might imagine. The Inception app provides the additional evidence that a good story, a rich narrative, can be a grounding force. Inception accomplishes this not only by tying itself to the popular film, but by having built a sense of discovery into the various stages, or levels, of the app. Falling Stars doesn’t have a story, per se, but its natural-world setting brings it out of the realm of pure graphic-score abstraction (the cold grids on which so many generative sound apps are founded), and into something that a broader range of people can relate to. The natural environment is a common source of inspiration in experimental music, and Falling Stars may even help some intrigued users track back to such figures as Stephen Vitiello (whose scores have drawn from images of nature), R. Murray Schafer (who popularized the concept of the soundscape), and Cheryl Leonard (who uses found objects, like bones and rocks, as instruments).

Water Music: Falling Stars’ mix of sheet-music elements and the natural environment echoes avant-garde graphic scores, such as sound artist Stephen Vitiello’s “Reed Music,” shown here, which superimposes sheet music onto a photo of reeds in a pond.

Closer at hand, Thicket’s Ott and Packard have acknowledged (in the text accompanying the video up above that features Ott) the influence of the app Soundrop on Falling Stars. Here’s a demo of Soundrop:

Trident is putting money behind the Vitality app’s promotion. There was a paid gawker.com post, and according to noisenewyork.com, a firm that was also involved in the app’s development, Falling Stars saw “over 100,000 downloads” during its first week of launch (other stats as of late June: “Trident Vitality app is #8 in the new and noteworthy section of the iPad, #15 in free entertainment apps, #85 overall in free apps”).

Get the Falling Stars by Trident Vitality Gum app (that is indeed its full name) at itunes.apple.com. Additional information at the gum’s website, tridentvitalitygum.com/fallingstars.

(Image of Vitiello’s composition from cnylink.com.)

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.

Mitzilla‘s “Audio Recording on Sunday Afternoon” (at soundcloud.com/mitzilla) uses the beading pulses of Otomata as a rhythm track, against which he plays generously spaced strums of an acoustic guitar. It’s a promising sketch of what will, one hopes, eventually yield a more fleshed-out composition. Mitzilla hails from El Paso, Texas:

For DrDerek, the Otomata-derived material provides not the rhythm but the melody, to which he adds other digitally sourced material (“my Electribe SX-1 and Korg Kaoss Pad 3 and the Korg Kaossilator Pro. recorded live,” he explains, listing his tools with one caveat: “some things may sound a bit off”). The result (at soundcloud.com/drderek) is louche, loungey electronica.

And for bongo_g, who is based in Amherst, Massachusetts, Otomata provided not sound source material, but an overall approach. His “Ricochet1″ (at soundcloud.com/user4724971) is evidence of an implementation of an Otomata-like software tool that he is developing on the popular device called the Monome.

Bongo posted the code at monome.org, where the discussion is ongoing. Here is a video demonstration (from vimeo.com) of bongo’s Otomata-derived instrument on a 256-cell Monome, performed by Machsymbiont:

Just to take the proceedings one further step meta and virtual, this next video (also at vimeo.com) shows Bongo’s Monome implementation of Otomata as ported to the Nomome, which is a software emulation of the Monome on a 64-cell device called the Novation Launchpad:

And because no cultural instance is complete without an iOS app implementation, this is Sound Cells (at apple.com), which debuted in the iTunes App Store earlier this month. As its developer notes, Otomata’s inventor is himself working on an iOS version. Sound Cells offers six different scales, among them the Hang scale, based on the Hang drum, which was the inspiration for Otomata’s tuning:

Two more videos. This is Otomata paired with another sound app, called SoundPrism:

And this is four instances of Otomata working together in tandem — with TV food personality Alton Brown (the patron chef of hackers) in the background:

Check out the original Otomata software for free at earslap.com.

But if ever a bottle were designed to let out genies, it would be the Internet, and thus audio produced in Otomata flourishes even beyond the well-intentioned cabinet of pattern curiosities that its developer, Batuhan Bozkurt, built into its coding. (An extensive interview with Bozkurt, who is based in Istanbul, Turkey, was published here yesterday: “When Cells Collide.”) Over at soundcloud.com, for example, a search for “otomata” lists a growing number of recordings that take Otomata’s end result as a starting point. One of the strongest is, true to the app, quite simple: it merely applies effects to the Otomata-generated sound, adding a layer of dubby echo, and thus removing some of the self-evident repetition inherent in the original. The track is credited to Terribaddie:

Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/terribaddie.

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.

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.)

RjDj is an iOS app that takes the sounds around you, transforms them, and then plays them back to you. The process is referred to as “reactive,” because the transformations occur in real time — i.e., they react to your (sonic) environment, as well as, in some cases, to more common iPod/iPhone/iPad techniques like touching the screen and moving the device.

RjDj is an app, but to borrow a phrase, or two, from Walt Whitman — who taught us to sing the body electric — it contains multitudes, because RjDj contains within it a growing library of “scenes,” each of which reacts to the world in a different way. When you install RjDj on your iPhone, it comes with a few scenes. Then you explore the RjDj library and select new ones. And, if you get adventurous, you can design your own scenes.

The incredibly popular Inception app, released last week, is a descendant of RjDj — it’s essentially a bespoke edition of RjDj, tailored to the sounds and aesthetic of the brain-twisting summer flick; each “dream” in Inception is, essentially, what would be a “scene” in RjDj.

Given how many RjDj scenes there are out there, with more every day, I asked the crew that develops software — at the company Reality Jockey, based in London — to recommend their favorite RjDj scenes and Inception dreams:

Michael Breidenbrücker, CEO (twitter.com/byzo):

Favourite RjDj Scene: Dimensions (by Kids on DSP). Why?: There is a part in it where the microphone input drives the synth — I like that. More Info: rjdj.me.

Favorite Inception Dream: Travelling Dream. Why?: Whatever you are traveling with becomes an instrument. The music is composed and designed for exactly that situation: travelling. There is so much to say about this piece of music you could write a book about it, but it just sounds simple and super, too, which is the reason why I won’t write a book about it. :-)

Robert Thomas, CCO, Reactive Music Producer
(twitter.com/dizzybanjo, dizzybanjo.wordpress.com):

Favourite RjDj Scene: Eargasm (by Damian Stewart) Why?: Eargasm was the first RjDj scene I heard while beta-testing it as a user in 2008. It completely blew me away. I used to listen to it for hours at a time. The sensation Damian Stewart created, of reality musically glowing — almost revealing a secret inner beauty in everything — is really special and has certainly touched a lot of people. More Info: rjdj.me.

Favorite Inception Dream: Sleep Dream Why?: I like a lot of the dreams we worked on for Inception for different reasons, but the Sleep Dream is especially fascinating because of the pervasive ways people are using it. Many people are actually going to sleep with this dream on and using it as a way to induce dreams. It’s very abstract sonically — reality is twisted into a vast intricate texture where time is reversed. It’s extremely surreal. Its also incorporates music from the movie in a very interesting way, stretching it out into huge granular soundscapes.

Martin Roth, CTO:

Favourite RjDj Scene: Echolon (by Günter Geiger) Why?: This is one of my favourite RjDj scenes, not because it is some technical tour-de-force or an artistic masterpiece, but because it is so simple and yet so addicting. Echolon is a bundled scene in the RjDj player and has become the most popular scene of all time. The basic effect is one that echoes your surroundings around you, pitching everything up and down. You hear different versions of the echo in your left and right ears. Sounds in your environment are pitched, giving the impression of a musical world. Possibly the greatest reason for the success of Echolon is that it provides a very striking effect, but that it is also relatively easy to understand. Everyone knows what an echo is, but few people seem to have had the opportunity to hear themselves or their surroundings echoed on demand. So here’s to you Echolon, the little echobox that could! More Info: rjdj.me.

Christian Haudum, Graphic Designer and Web Development (twitter.com/chaudum, christianhaudum.at):

Favourite RjDj Scene: Aware (by Florian Waldner) Why?: It’s very relaxing listening to it in the office. You get a nice spherical soundscape and you are connected to the “outside” to a very high degree. More Info: rjdj.me.

Dominik Hierner, iOS developer (twitter.com/k1n1m0d):

Favourite RjDj Scene: Replay Atlantis (by Kids on DSP ft Kirsty Hawkshaw) Why?: Atlantis throws you into the deep sea and you feel surrounded by a nice bass, relaxing melody and mermaids. This scene was like the first scene that really puts you into a complete new world. Replay Atlantis has kind of a story within it; it is an adventure, an experience rather than “just music.” And it also sounds great when the real world around you does not give the music something to react on. More Info: rjdj.me.

Joe White, Reactive Music Producer:

Favourite RjDj Scene: Seduction Part III (by Shuga) Why?: I like the idea of actively performing with someone else’s music as you listen to it. Seduction Part III has this cool r&b groove where you can add cheeky drum fills, synth lines and whooshes. It’s great to learn the interaction of the synth; after a while, you can create own your expressive melodies. More Info: rjdj.me.

Florian Stege, Intern:

Favourite RjDj Scene: Nothing on We (by Chiddy Bang) Why?: I like the groove of this hip-hop track and the way you can manipulate the beat and play with the instruments. I also like the variety of the different parts of the track. It gives you the opportunity to create a really nice, perfect individualized backing track for your vocals. More Info: rjdj.me.

More on Reality Jockey at rjdj.me. Get the RjDj app at itunes.apple.com, and the Inception app (itunes.apple.com).