Buddha Machine 2.0: New Loops, Pitch Blend, MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The audio file is only 47 seconds long, but it’s a tantalizing taste of the forthcoming second edition of the Buddha Machine, the suprise-hit sound-art gadget created by the China-based duo FM3 (aka Christiaan Virant and Zhang Jian). According to a brief posting this morning at fm3buddhamachine.com, the new Buddha Machine will come in three new colors (as reported earlier this year — disquiet.com) with nine new loops, and it will include pitch bending, which the post describes as “like a whammy bar for your buddha box.” The inclusion of pitch-blend, while not a “game changer” per se, gently nudges the object from gadget toward musical instrument.

The sample audio is a mix of reverberant backing drones and what resemble lightly strummed, digitally augmented guitar (MP3), like the salvo to some 21st-century flamenco. The 47-second length likely doesn’t mark this as an excerpt; it’s probably the actual length of the loop.

Below are exploded views of the first Buddha Machine (above) and version 2.0 (below). While the presence of the little Buddha figurine is fanciful, there is evidence of a practical physical change in the upgrade. Note that on version 2.0 there are now two little spinning wheels at the top of the machine. One is presumably a combo volume control and on/off switch, as was the case in the first Buddha Machine. The other is, I imagine, the newly announced pitch-blend tool. The new control is circled in blue.

This isn’t the first upgrade to the Buddha Machine. At some point following its initial release, it saw a slight reconfiguration of the button that switches between loops (as reported here back in February 2008 — disquiet.com). For more background on the Buddha Machine, here’s a link to the December 2005 Disquiet.com interview with FM3 member Virant: “Buddha in the Machine.”

PS: Later in the day — that is, early tomorrow, October 29, dateline China — the FM3 Buddha Machine site posted a second Buddha 2.0 entry, with a photo confirming that the second wheel is, in fact, the apparatus for pitch control. Sample audio was provided of a loop being warped (MP3), and a second of the nine new loops was made available unadulterated — as with the earlier loop, it sounds very much like a richly plucked string instrument (MP3).

The three new colors of Buddha Machine are burgundy, grey, and chocolate. The new packaging looks less “Pacific-rim tourism” than did the first iteration of the device, and more “refined home decoration.” Details at fm3buddhamachine.com.

PPS: On October 31, over at fm3buddhamachine.com, FM3 unveiled loops 3 (MP3), 4 (MP3), and 5 (MP3).

Roberto Cuoghi’s Mesopotamian Sound Installation (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The cacophony rises quickly, from street noise (dogs panting, carts wheeled by) to a spiraling flurry of vocal exhortations, circling like some messianic ritual on overdrive. This is not a religious tradition, however. It is a sound installation, titled Å uillakku and created by Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi. Å uillakku, informed by Cuoghi’s historical and metaphysical research into the ancient origins of the Middle East, is on display from October 14 through November 23 of this year at the London museum ICA, which has admirably included a two-and-a-half-minute excerpt of the installation’s sonic element as a downloadable file on its promotional webpage (MP3). More details and information at ica.org.uk/cuoghi. According to the ICA site, the exhibit’s curator is Marcella Beccaria, and it originated at the Castello di Rivoli, Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli-Turin.

Panel Discussions at APE in San Francisco, November 1

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This coming Saturday, November 1, I’ll be talking at the annual Alternative Press Expo (aka APE) in San Francisco with comics artists Matt Madden and Jessica Abel (pictured at left, in their dual self-portrait) on panels dedicated to their work.

The Madden panel is from 12:30 to 1:15 and the Abel one is from 2:15 to 3:00. Both artists contributed to the decade-long series of comics inspired by music that I edited in Pulse! magazine. (I did a similar one-on-one panel at Comic-Con in San Diego this past summer with Adrian Tomine, another Pulse! contributor.) Also appearing, by coincidence, at APE this year are several other cartoonists whose comics I edited in Pulse!, including Megan Kelso and Chris Ware. More info on APE 2008, to be held at the Concourse (620 7th Street, San Francisco), at comic-con.org/ape.

Among the earliest entries on Disquiet.com is an essay (“Home Decorating in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) that I wrote for Jeff LeVine’s magazine Destroy All Comics about a Madden comic, titled “House Music,” that appeared in Pulse! in 1995. The essay includes the full image of the comic, as well as the full image of an early draft of the comic. At right is the first panel of the six-panel comic, which has heavy echoes of John Cage’s theories on the silence-ness of silence, and of Erik Satie’s interest in “Musique d’ameublement,” or of sounds emitted by common, everyday household objects.

Quote of the Week: Lessig’s Sousaphone

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is band leader and composer John Phillip Sousa criticizing recorded music at the start of the last millennium:

“When I was a boy … in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal chord left.'”

That is Sousa as quoted by Lawrence Lessig in his new book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, as quoted in M.J. Stephey‘s review of the book in Time (time.com).

Stephey goes on to quote Lessig in regard to the famous Sousa statement, wherein Lessig separates its philosophical concern from its technophobic context: “Sousa was not offering a prediction about the evolution of the human voice box. He was describing how a technology … would change our relationship to culture. These ‘machines,’ Sousa feared, would lead us away from … ‘amateur’ culture. We would become just consumers of culture, not also producers.”

I haven’t read Remix yet, so I don’t know the extent to which Lessig quotes Sousa, but for what it’s worth, Sousa did, in fact, predict the evolution of the human voice box; most citations of Sousa’s comment include the following sentence: “The vocal chord will be eliminated by a process of evolution as was the tail of man when he came down from the ape.” What Lessig does, though, is recognize Sousa’s hyperbole as metaphor, and in the process remixes the material himself.

More on Lessig’s book (including, soon enough, a freely downloable copy) at remix.lessig.org.