Bloomsong: A Bloom Song (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

A subject of some regularity of late has been not so much whether apps are instruments, as what it means, from an authorship standpoint and a copyright standpoint, that apps are used as instruments.

The discussion coalesced in the comments section to a post at the start of December (“A Bloom Is a Bloom Is a Bloom”). The post took as its subject a recording based on Bloom, the iOS app developed by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers. During the discussion, one of the participants, named Travis Nobles, mentioned a piece of music he used Bloom in, and that became the subject of a post a few days subsequently (“Bloom + Birdsong”).

Alec Vance, of the New Orleans electronic group Chef Menteur, has produced music he’d recorded with Bloom. It wasn’t entirely a surprise, since back in September he’d listed Eno/Chilvers’ Bloom (along with Terry Riley’s “In C”) as inspiration for a piece of music he’d recorded; that earlier piece was the subject of a post here titled “Generative Experiment.”

Vance’s Bloom-derived piece (MP3) is quite different than Nobles’ — perhaps more “Apollo” than Thursday Afternoon, to use two Eno recordings as reference points.

[audio:http://www.backporchrevolution.com/liteworks/Bloomsong_natural_mix.mp3|titles=”Bloomsong”|artists=Liteworks]

I asked Vance to provide some background on how the piece came together. He wrote back as follows:

Background — Mike Mayfield started the Liteworks project as a outlet to explore more minimal ambient music using vintage electronics after working in more uptempo bands like Electrical Spectacle and the Buttons. Since he’d also played with us in various incarnations of Chef Menteur from time to time, he asked me to join him to recreate some of the music in a live setting. (For the actual live show back Jan 2009 we were joined by Mike from Belong and Joey from the Buttons.)

Since then the two of us have gotten together very sporadically to work on kosmiche-inspired sounds. A few months back we got together to make ambient music for an Aquarium Blu-ray disc, that I also was contracted to develop the iPhone app for. (I think you’ll really dig that app, by the way, and it should be up any day now…)

We were getting together for 2 days last week to record some new pieces Mike had made demos for when you asked about Bloom; I’d played around with it a while back when we were doing Liteworks live rehearsals and it sounded really nice through the Electro-Harmonix Stereo Memory Man (new digital model) that I regretted not trying it again; I’d often thought of using it for a background drone and trying some guitar over it. So I asked Mike if it would be OK if we tried to improvise over a Bloom drone and he said sure!

Mike was playing a Casiotone ct-410v and a Roland Juno-60 synth, as well as a Roland CR-78 drum machine (as heard in “I Can’t Go For That”, and “In the Air Tonight”).

I was playing an Epiphone Riviera with E-bow through a overdrive, delay and/or looping pedal into a ’68 Fender Deluxe Reverb.

I think we had Bloom set to “Freestyle” and let it create the notes, till the end when I added a few as I turned up the delays. I can’t recall which “mood” we had it set to, maybe “Bergamot?”. Plugged in (as above) the EHX SMM2.

The unfortunate hiss was coming mostly from the VOX AC-30 that one channel of the synths, including the iPhone playing Bloom, were plugged into. I actually rolled most of it off, but it still sounds terrible!

More information at backporchrevolution.com.

Best of 2010: 8 Best iOS Sound/Music Apps

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Following is a list of the eight new iOS apps that this year best exemplified the intersection of sound/music, interactivty, and mobility — that is, of apps designed for the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Last year’s list of best iOS apps had 10 entries, but the shorter list this year isn’t intended as any sort of sign of a diminution of creativity in iOS development. Quite the contrary, this year’s list is simply more categorically selective.

There are at least two major branches of iOS sound apps right now: those that emulate (or otherwise augment) instrumentation, such as virtual pianos and turntables (as well as guitar tuners and effects pedals), and those that explore new realms of interactivity.

In its widely reported year-end “Rewind” assessment of “app trends,” Apple labeled these categories, respectively, as “Band in a Hand” and “Generative Art & Sound” (which combines visual and sonic tools). This year-end Disquiet.com list focuses on the latter.

Further winnowing the potential contenders, all the apps listed below were released this year. I thought about including previously existing apps that showed a major upgrade this year, but decided to focus on new apps, in large part because an insignificant number of apps from 2009 in this interactive realm showed any significant improvement in 2010.

The eight best sound/music apps of 2010 are, in alphabetical order:

1. Aura 2: Flux: This ambient-music creation tool nudges toward instrument territory (or, more to the point, compositional territory) but emphasizes the casual playfulness of its own homegrown visual interface (iTunes), one that encourages an exploratory approach. Various moods and sounds can be combined to create systems-fueled compositions based on how elements are organized. Aura’s interface provides a kind of visual programming language made of building blocks (and, like another app listed here, Reactable, is thus reminiscent of the old Logo programming language). More details at the developer’s website, higefive.com.

2. Immersion Station: This seemingly simple app allows you to place a set number of globes on a grid, each globe representing a different sound loop (iTunes). The grid is distorted based on a one-point perspective, which means that the further back a globe is placed (the closer it approaches the horizon), the quieter it is in the mix. The real clincher is an “evolve” mode that takes a given arrangement and slowly shifts it as time progresses. The app was developed by longtime electronic musician Steve Roach and software engineer Eric Freeman. More details at immersionstation.com.

3. Inception: This is a bespoke edition of the RjDj app, developed as a free adjunct to the Inception film (iTunes). It processes the sound around you in real time, transforms it in ways that the developers liken to a dream state. Some of the transformations involve musical cues from the film. The common software-development term for this kind of thing is “reactive,” or “augmented.” An even more appropriate word would be “wonderful.” Additional Disquiet.com coverage: a story I wrote about the app’s release for boingboing.net, a list of the RjDj/Inception developers’ favorite aspects of the apps, and a list of the best movie scores of 2010 (which includes Inception). More details at inceptiontheapp.com.

4. Mixtikl: This app almost doesn’t belong on this list, because there is nothing casual about it (iTunes). It is a highly detailed generative-sound creation tool, one that has far more in common with computer music software than with the playful, intuitive apps listed here. However, even if that does put it strongly in the “instrument” category, the fact is that it has no analog (so to speak) in the realm of traditional musical instruments. It also includes a growing library of in-app sound generators. As a sign of its non-iOS-specificity, there are Mixtikl versions for a growing number of operating systems, including Windows and Mac, at the developer’s website, intermorphic.com.

5. Thicket: This is, at its essence, an interactive single (iTunes). The touch screen lets the user alter in various ways a piece of music — an alternately bouncy and reflective bit of refined techno — and the visuals associated with it. The alterations depend on the number of fingers used, the patterns drawn, the speed at which they are drawn, and the angle at which the device is placed. Additional Disquiet.com coverage: an interview with one of the app’s developers, “Being Decimal: The Anticipatory Pleasures of the Thicket App.” More details at intervalstudios.com.

6. Reactable: This is, like Flux, a node-based ambient-music tool with its own internal structural logic (iTunes). It is the second most complex of these apps (after Mixtikl), but the invested time is rewarded handsomely. Like Aura (mentioned above), its building-block interface and systems-oriented progressions suggest a distant lineage to the Logo programming language. It originated as physical, tabletop interface and was later ported to a software-only tool. More details at reactable.com.

7. Sonic Wire Sculptor: In simplest terms, this iOS app takes line drawings and turns them into sound
(iTunes). Create new compositions by carefully delineating a structure, or just input an existing image, like a face, and listen to how it sounds. Then — and this is what really pushes Sonic Wire Sculptor over the top — rotate the line drawing in three-dimensional space to hear geometric variations on the musical theme. More details at sonicwiresculptor.com.

8. SoundyThingie: This one is the sole iPad-only app on the list (the developer has stated that iPhone development is “tricky because iPhones have very weak processor”). It provides a blank slate on which the user draws lines, lines that are subsequently interpreted as sonic instructions (iTunes). Speed, position, and other factors influence the resulting audio. Of all the apps here, this one probably has the most self-evident roots in the tradition, so to speak, of non-traditional graphic scores in avant-garde music. More details at linienmusik.net.

A few additional notes:

¶ These are all iOS apps, which is not intended to dismiss mobile-app development on Android (I own a G1 phone, and when its contract runs out at the start of 2011, I will almost certainly replace it with another Android-based phone), Windows 7, or any other operating system, or browser-based (largely Flash) interactive sound toys. Much of the energy that for over a decade fed the audio-games/sound-toy world in web browsers seems to have migrated to Apple’s operating system, but here’s to hoping that the development world diversifies in 2011.

¶ There are, indeed, other types of sound apps, including streaming audio, like Pandora and Soundcloud; so-called “soundboards,” which collect sounds related to a specific subject, like The Simpsons; and brand fodder, which provide fans with a virtual trinket, the app equivalent of glossy pamphlets purchased from concert concession stands. And judging by sheer number, “farts” could easily be its own subcategory.

¶ I considered including Papa Sangre on the list (iTunes) because it is (reportedly) the first ever audio-only video game. However, much as that sounds like a wonderful melding of Janet Cardiff and Nintendo, there is no sound manipulation within Papa Sangre, so it doesn’t really fit into this list.

And needless to say, if anything prominent is missing, do not hesitate to let me know.

Monograph 51: Early BBC Radiophonic Workshop Pamphlet

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s been over 50 years since the BBC saw fit to create its own applied laboratory for electronic audio — which at the time meant, to a great extent, the creative use of tape recordings and turntables. That lab was known as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and it existed from 1958 through 1998, during which time it benefited from the efforts of such early electronic music figures as Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, and produced untold hours of sounds and music (the distinction between which was a source of near-constant inter-departmental drama) for BBC radio and television, including, perhaps most famously, the theme song (aka “signature tune”) for Doctor Who.

Sonic Warfare: A gadget created early in the life of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop: “weighs only 12 lb.”

In the process of reviewing a recent book on the Workshop — Special Sound (Oxford), by Louis Niebur — for another publication (that review should be out in January), I was introduced by a friend to an online trove of BBC engineering monographs, some of which include Radiophonic-specific documentation. There’s one in particular, from 1963, that’s entirely about the Radiophonic activities. And it’s the subject of my latest post at boingboing,net, “BBC Engineering Monographs from 1950s and ’60s: Once 5 Shillings, Now Free.”

Scelsi Drones (MP3s)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Ángel Faraldo provides limited documentation for his beautiful Scelsi Remix: 7 Mantras, named for the late Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. Faraldo states that each mantra, or chakra, in the collection takes a color as its theme, and that each piece is based on that color’s “light frequency,” when adjusted from the visual spectrum to the audio spectrum. The result is seven individual tracks that have a haunting, halo-like quality — they are short, self-contained drones enacted as if by symphony orchestras. Here, by way of example, is the fifth in the series (MP3):

[audio:http://ia700302.us.archive.org/21/items/modisti_18/modisti_18_05_Ham.mp3|titles=”Ham”|artists=Ángel Faraldo]

They appear to have been intended either as backdrops to work by S@x 21, aka saxophonists Pablo Coello and Rafael Yebra, or as “interludes” played between pieces performed by the duo.

The full set is available as a Zip archive at modisti.com. More on Faraldo at angelfaraldo.info.

Marcus Fischer’s Elegance: Hardware & Sound

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Marcus Fischer once had this art-a-day thing going on, throughout 2009, in which he made one creative thing a day for a year. For most people, that would be a challenge. In retrospect, with Fischer, who is so prolific in his efforts and tidy in his executions, it seems more like a willful act of restraint — i.e., whereas for many people it would be a struggle to do one thing a day, for him the primary demand was to limit himself. In any case, an example of his tireless efforts is this lovely object, shown above and below, which he calls his minimalistic guitar pedal (originally posted at his blog, unrecnow.com/dust). And to accompany the photos, he posted this recording of him utilizing it:

[audio:http://unrecnow.com/dust/audio/12_02mf-excpt.mp3|titles=”12_02mf-excpt”|artists=Marcus Fischer]

The recording (MP3) comes from a live performance at a December 2, 2010, record-release show for his great album on the 12k label, Monocoastal. It’s an elegant, lightly glitching atmosphere, tempting one to correlate his equipment with his sonic aesthetic.

More on Fischer at unrecnow.com/dust.