25 ambient musicians created original sonic postcards in response to one another’s evocative Instagram photos.
An Introduction to Instagr/am/bient:
Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?
Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.
The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?
In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.
Small software, small experiments, small files. Mike Rotondo recently tweeted a new recording, and it turned out to be 35 seconds of beat bliss. Arguably shorter than that, given its loop-based construction — and arguably longer, given its inherent temptation to be set on loop for an extended period of time.
Titled “Flip Throw In,” it has the feel of a hip-hop production waiting for vocalists, but one secretly more than happy to keep the pace all by itself. There’s a robot heartbeat of a pulse, and what appears to be a sample of piano. Not only does the looseness of the analog piano recording align at best roughly, and therefore rewardingly, with the tensile routine of the tiny beat — so, too, does the lush low fidelity of the recording, a kind of muslin filter, pair against the beat’s pixel precision. The result is promising: a little of J Dilla’s underkey metrics, a little of Kanye West’s alchemical ability to turn sloppy into louche, a little of DJ Premier’s fetish for imperfect ivories. “Flip Throw In” was recorded in an inexpensive iOS app called iMaschine that its developer describes as a “beat sketchpad,” pictured up top. From little things, lovely little things grow.
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.
Fans of the great Thicket iOS app who are awaiting an update (one is in the works) can bide their time with a lovely free app produced in part by Thicket’s developers, Joshue Ott and Morgan Packard. Titled Falling Stars, it’s a marketing piece created on behalf of a gum (Trident Vitality, a Kraft subsidiary), though the branding is limited to some relatively low-key logo appearances. It’s a work of playful, generative music-making, with an emphasis on appealing to a broad audience. Generative music is music that results from a system, a set of rules, rather than from a fixed score. It was released on June 27.
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:
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”).
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.
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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