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February 2011

Music for Shuffle

 

Matt Brown from Berg has made this rather interesting little half day experiment, Music for Shuffle. As with most things in that building, one person suggests an idea somewhat absent mindedly, and then someone else just goes along and makes the damn thing. What else do you expect from the most interesting group of people in London. But instead of going on a downward spiral of Berg/RIG praise, I thought I'd put in my two cents.

But during this little experiment, I didn’t want to spend my time just writing rules to generate music – I wanted to compose it. To author it. Is authoring a system the same as writing the notes? Need to think harder about this. 

The distinction here, is between modularity and generativity (the dictionary insists this isn't a real word, I disagree). At surface level, it's quite easy to get confused between the two, if it's done well enough. Which, in this instance, it most certainly is. The only problem is the iTunes interface: you know it's just a series of short tracks set to shuffle. Unless it's possible to hack iTunes in such a way as to generate music on the fly (which I doubt), then it's not going to happen any time soon. 

Moving away from the iTunes interface, or the idea of a static song file as a music Kids on DSP, one of the more interesting RJDJ scenes bundled up as a standalone app. It pulls in your audio surroundings in different ways to create original music as it responds to your immediate environment. There's a lot of incredibly clever coding inside this thing: creating music based on the level of ambient noise, using temporal shifts and reverb to play with the music as well as sampling the environment in such a way as to create music. 

However, these can tend to feel like the audio equivalent of a photoshop filter (a damn good one at that, mind you). It's been a while since I've listened to any of them because the stupid microphone on my headphones has been broken for some time. But the first week was a revelation, trying out different sonic environments to see what the responding music would be. Some environments tended to work better than others (as to be expected), while the differing augmentations were definitely suited to other environments.

Lots of wind wasn't a good thing, as it was all the microphone could pick up, trying to slow down and reverberate wind doesn't make for an interesting sound. In quieter areas with no background sound, they pick up foreground sounds like a charm. At times I even caught myself talking aloud, user generated content for an audience for one. 

One thing I kept on being frustrated about was the lack of semantic distinction. I wanted some sounds to be sampled and others to be ignored. But for that to work, there'd have to be a lot of spooky stuff under the hood. Something I don't think I'm comfortable with just yet.

Moving back towards the land of the plausible, the use of authoring modular music is an interesting one. It provides a grounding, an artistic input that isn't possible with generative works. That's not to say that generativity isn't a creative process - far from it - but the rules need to be kept fairly tight to create something cohesive. Which Music for Shuffle is, despite the really simple music Matt has created. 

One thing I had a problem discerning while writing my thesis was the difference between a design that uses the trick of modularity to appear generative and truly generative work. I never came across something that was truly generative, or if I did it bored me. All of the good stuff seemed to live at the intersection of the two. Using the authoring process to create a basic kit of ideas and having that mix with some network input to create constantly new work. I'm interested to see how far he will take this thing, especially if he confines it within the boundaries of the mp3. 

I forgot to discuss the use of album cover art as a way of not only visualising the music (I think it's chord structures (someone correct me?)) but in helping to punctuate the difference tracks. It makes the whole project work much better than if it was just the music.

 

Update: A few days after posting, Rob over at RJDJ left a rather illuminating comment regarding the use of semantic variables in the Inception app which he worked on. It should be noted that this app is sitting on my phone, untouched until I borrow some headphones from someone. I'd really like to chime in here regarding the app, of which I've heard rather interesting things about, but natch. Over to him:

Great post :) I'm Rob from RjDj. I look after a lot of the music production here. Music for Shuffle is a great project. The point that the interesting stuff seems to happen at the intersection of generative and modularity is very true I think. During creation of the Kids on DSP app / scenes and that was definitely true. Greater semantic distinction would have been really good for Kids on DSP, however at that time the devices were simply not powerful enough to run the audio analysis needed, plus also run all the synthesis and DSP. These days however iOS devices are much more powerful and we have explored quite a few different, more detailed, analysis methods. Two of them are in the Inception app we recently created with Hans Zimmer and Chris Nolan. The Travelling Dream does a pitch analysis of the mic and derives melodic content from it, which then plays within the composition in realtime. The Airport Dream listens out for the chimes that happen before most airport announcements, and uses that as a trigger to make certain audio events happen. Inception the App also expands the 'reactiveness' of the music beyond the instant, to the general conditions or situation of the user. For instance if the weather is sunny at their location - they will enter the Sunshine Dream, or if it is Full Moon they will enter that dream. The point you make about the album art in this project is also very true. I think in the early days of the work we did at RjDj we tended to focus purely on the audio, but having visual feedback to reinforce the musical changes is something we have grown to regard as critical. Rob RjDj.me

 

Posted on February 15, 2011 in Atomplexity, Diagramaxion | | Comments (1)

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Ras el Satan

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Feeling the need to show some relevancy to the situation of cascading change occurring in Egypt at the moment, I thought that there would be nothing more appropriate than the desert oasis I stayed at in 2006, Ras el Satan on the coast of Sinai. I've been meaning to put up these photos for some time. All, it seems, was one of the most important events to happen in the middle east in the past 50 years to prompt me. 

I stayed here for four days, and it was the most relaxing holiday I've ever had. Also, huts. Lots and lots of reed and palm tree huts. This place is firmly part of my imagined world of Ethnica: a magical place where yoga, tribal tattoos, drum circles, chai, pagan rituals, incense, thai pants and fire twirling are allowed to mingle in a hippy fantasy land. A place where Papyrus is free to be used as the typeface of choice without making you gag. Like Pandora, but without the hot blue chicks to distract you. And it's on earth. But I digress. Except for the Papyrus part. That will always make me gag. 

From what I've read, this place has remained fairly unscathed from the revolution. It's too much of a tourist play thing for there to be any real dissent. I saw a short news story that people were still lazing around here as the first wave of protests were beginning. I'm also not too sure what the bedouins think of the protest; they're distrusted by the egyptians, the police and the military. There was something about a protest because an elder was killed during his prayers, but I haven't heard of anything else. 

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Quite some time ago I posted about the abandoned concrete structures, half built hotels waiting on more funding to complete construction. The bubble seems to have burst here as well. The whole bus ride down the coast was littered with half finished hotels. The odd terrorist attack always does a good job of scaring off tourists. Apart from the place where I was staying (the two above) the other resorts were completely empty. Holiday ghost towns waiting for the next season. Not sure what the bedouin workers did in the meantime, especially considering the horrendously small amount of money they were getting for working away from their family.

Despite the obvious aesthetic joy of sleeping in a reed hut with a coral reef at my footsteps, was the different archetypal hut types I encountered. The camera batteries had less than one bar by the time I got here (and I stupidly chose not to bring my charger) so I was only able to document a few different types. Even within this small sample, each hut exhibits a simple alteration of the hut form, each one appropriate for the different tourist types who come to this area. 

I'm itching to go back there, make sure my batteries are charged and document the whole strip. The whole area is littered with different extrapolations on the theme, and are made more interesting by the lack of humans. They're much cheaper to construct than the concrete resorts that hope for the wealthier visitors, and so the investment would be much lower. In contrast to the half finished skeletons in other areas of the coast, the build time would be much faster, despite their being no promise of a return on investment. I'd also love the chance to document the other resorts left unfinished. Either way, another holiday would be nice. 

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Posted on February 10, 2011 in Aesthenticity, Architexture | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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