mtf - week 11 - composition

audio-visual presetations of collaborations between sound and video artist.

....


mmmm, not a lot to say really.

...




Whittinton, Steven. Steven Whittington plays various sections of a DVD Workshop. presented at EMU space, level 5 Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 23 October 2008.

forum - week 10 - honours presentation

once again the images are tenuously related to textual content.

this weeks award for most exciting presentation goes to Martin Victory for his sonification of network packets !!!

whilst the presentation itself lacked any excitement and razzle dazzle (where were the dancing bears ?), it was the choice of material to sonify that won the day.

i am not particularly au fait with network information, but am aware that computers love chatting to each other and do so within a regular framework. The variety of networking possibilities offer such a myriad of diversity and hence a diverstiy of sonic outcome (insert comparison of University ethernet vs. LAN party gaming mayhem !!).

I would quite like to read the section on sonification which will apparently take up half of his thesis. It is the implementation of sonification that really seperates the wheat from the chaff, the meat from the poison, the tea from the biscuits.

All music comes from the arbitary delineation that is choice (shall I modulate to Eb minor here... or... G# Major ?????), hence the particular application of process (subconscious or conscious) proves the artistic merit. From the limited display of Martin's application, I thought it most definitely supplied the necessary cheese for my biscuit !!





_______________________________
Victory, Martin. "Honours Presentation". Workshop presented at EMU space, level 5 Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 16^th of October 2008.

forum - week ? (i'm confused with all my subjects being skweiffed

Student Presentations = 3rd year goodness..

favourite this week was Mr Ben Proberts Max patch Fantastical Metal. I enjoyed it immensely for it's potential !! The only bad thing, is the patch doesn't work on my computer :(

i think in particular i liked the arpeggiator function which gave slightly jerky but consistent rhythym.
i just don't know what else to say it - was just nice !!!

That said everyone else was boring and tedious and i can't be bothered with even remembering what went on !!!

OK, that last bit was a joke :) Luke made nice timbre's, and the sequencing element showed potential if he gets it finalised. Will's game sound made me really want to play Half Life 2 as I was a big fan of Half Life and Counter Strike !!! David weirded me out with his sampled General Midi sounds, although the timbre of the melodic instrument was very pleasant - and he seemed to have done far too much programming on his patch !!!

This takes me to wax briefly on the imbalance that is Music Technology.
Why is it that 1/3 of a core subject can take more time than 2 other subjects in their entirety ???

Hmmmm, I'm looking forward to our consumer response surveys this year.






Music Technology Forum - Semester 2, Week 9 - Third Year presentations. University of Adelaide, South Australia, 18/09/2008.

mtf - week 08 - my favourite erasehead

my favourite part of the film was the few minutes directly after - there was general silence. i think that i was not the only one slightly bemused by the experience.

one of my favourite movie watching techniques is to miss the opening section. by missing out on the character development and even major plot developments, you can then get a sense of wonder as nothing makes sense.

without missing the opening section, eraserhead gave me a similar situation. the movie, whilst never being clear, at least began to take recognisable form over time. but still there were incessantly weird bits i had no idea what was happening or what there relevance was..... eg it was not til after reading the blerb at wikipedia, i realised that the funny cheeked woman was "the woman in the radiator", also other symbolic imagery such as the cloud of eraser dust surrounding the hero as featured in the cover image...
mmmm..

i found myself walking outside soon after, and i felt most appreciative of the beautiful day that was revealed to my then current mind space.




__________________________________
Eraserhead. Dir. David Lynch. DVD. Libra Films.

David Harris. Music Technology Forum - Semester 2, Week 8 - My Favourite Things Lecture. University of Adelaide, South Australia, 18/09/2008.

Eraserhead. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eraserhead (viewed 20/09/2008)

__________________________________

forum - week 7 - presentations and sine tones

I didnt mean to spend so much time playing with the graphics,,, honest !!

This week featured a number of student presentations, and I presented my work from 1st semester with the amazing and descriptive title, Parabolic function as iterated through colour and melodic transforms. This featured as a sound component, 12 simultaneous melodic lines using sine tones generated from an iterative function describing the shape of a parabola.

Here follows a somewhat lengthy discourse (for a blog) on sine tones and their use in this particular piece. The quintessential element has been paraphrased in the linked comment which you could peruse instead and save yourself possible minutes of life. Otherwise, you could continue reading ....

After the playing of my piece there was a comment from David Dowling afterwards something along the line of "Did you think of putting some sort of modulation on ? Sine waves get a bit old after a couple of minutes !". This has gotten me thinking ....

why do i like sine tones ? This has two aspects. (1) from a melodic aspect, I like their timbre (or lack of :), the way they actually sound when used in a melodic context. (2) From a harmonic aspect, they can be used in such a variety of ways with little concern for clash of timbral colours - their lack of overtones gives them such ease of combination.

More widely speaking when dealing with wide frequency/ pitch choices, the choice of timbre becomes very important. Generally speaking, a timbre that sounds good at one pitch will not sound good 3 octaves above or 3 octaves below - this requires then a pitch based modulation upon the timbre to shape the sound as appropriate. Or, one could treat frequency along a similiar line to which John Delaney has in his piece BinHex_25-06. Here there was distinct frequency based timbral delineation - not unlike an ensemble of actual instruments, where there own unique characteristics create possible frequency/pitch bands. Hence one could create a number of timbres with attached frequency limits, and divide a broad frequency output into its appropriate voice.

Or, use a sine tone.

The harmonic aspect has particular importance when considered in the light of "computer music" (I use the term here to denote the style of music associated with both computer aided composition and creation - an obvious example is using a mathematical equation to describe the entire melodic and harmonic output). I feel that in this aspect, my use of formulaeic derived methodology to replace the overt human aesthetics (eg pitch/rhythmic choices), requires the use of simpler, purer tonality to represent the audio output. The inclusion of richer timbres creates denser levels of complexity through the interaction of their extended harmonic components - this is what I consider undesirable (although not necessarily strictly so - indeed these denser complexities have their own desirability). In my particular work, I desired the purity of sine tones to help reveal the inner working of the mathematical process, their interactions were desired as a particular mental abstraction overlayed onto what I conceived as a continually morphing spatial panorama where overtones would only create muddy patterns.

That said, with the retrospective awareness of my piece and the cogitation/analysis engendered by its presentation. I feel I could extend it further -

At the present, the patch generates 12 independent tones. These tones are given a duration, constant amplitude and pitch (the pitch is given a start and end value with a constant rate of change).
In the simplest way the shape of these generated tones needs to be modified along the lines of the following ; duration (the minimum possible could be shortened), amplitude (an envelope over time - rather than constant amplitude), pitch (an envelope of changing pitch inclinations, rather than constant change).
The tones are also given a stereo value, where one of the stereo channels is delayed by an amount. This could be modified with with the delay being also based on phase position, hence more importance on the frequency value related to stereo.

hmmmm, apart from that SINE TONES ROCK !!!!

or something :P

Various students. Student presentations. Level 5 Schulz building, Adelaide University. 11 September 2008

mtf - w33k 05 - negativland sez favourite things

rationale of satire.

sometimes people are so wrapped in their own truths their is no point in mentioning your perspective of the inadequecies of their argument (should you be of the mind to do so).

one way to respond is to take the piss.___

is this offensive ? possibly.
is this funny ? possibly.
is this worthwhile ? possibly.
is this dangerous ? possibly.

usefullness of satire.

we live in a world of abstractions. these abstractions are defined by ourselves. we make these definitions based on our current state of ego. our ego is attached to the world and is influenced by the world. the world may influence us through many ways.

education is the process of deliberate enlightenment. the external use of education requires that you have control over the times of others. school is one example, television is another.

satire must be a form of education, otherwise it is acting superior and laughing at others - this is potentially opening yourself to claims of ethical inappropriateness.

aside.

according to the wikipedia article "negativland", the band themselves created the link between "religion is stupid" and the axe murder. They apparently did this to get out of touring.

"negativland". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativland. viewed 30 August 2008.

Whittington, Stephen. Forum presenting Negativland's Our Favourite Things. University of Adelaide 28 August 2008.

forum - week 04 - h3llo

what happened,
why do i have a list of the 9 basic emotions, and the 4 temperaments ???

OMG what have i missed :?

forum - week 03 - presentations la noobs and old concrete guys.

It is interesting getting a perspective on the aesthetics of the (relatively) new faces that have been haunting forum for several months now.

It occurs to me to wonder what might be made of listening to multiple (think 20 or so ) years worth of first year student work in one sitting. What sort of overall impressions, or observations one could make. Of course this is unlikely given the current rate of software development and hence possible techniques that one may encounter. Material from 20 years ago would be possibly tape manipulations, midi based sequences of samples and synthesised voices - possibly presented on tape, or floppy disk. Where would one get access to that sort of hardware now ?

I was hoping to hear the current versions of paper ripping masterpieces, but was disappointed in this. I was also curious to see such a breadth of content when our similar assignment seemed much more focused ie on using our edited paper sounds.
Perhaps this is down to Christian's ability to evolve class material dependant on the actual class, or perhaps it is just down to steady evolution of class material......


references
all sorts of first year students presenting their work. "Forum: 1st Year Presentations” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 14th August 2008.

mf - week 02 - some favourite things

David Harris presented a work of his for string quartet, Terra Rapta, as recorded live by the Grainger Quartet.
It had some very lovely timbres. I would quite like to "remix" the piece (ie process the f**k out of it) and play with some of those interesting timbres. Oh if only I had time to do what I wanted.
EDIT: I just noticed the amusing contrast of timbre and chainsaw :P

Also a Schubert string quartet (from the same performance).
When listening to "classical" pieces, I often note the one bar of prime minimalist material that flashes by - if only I could quickly rip and edit and capture that bar , I would have an amazingly beautiful and repetitive moment to repeat - and perhaps intersperse with another bar...

Mmmm, I recall someone telling me of a composer whom took all his favourite bars from potentially a Beethoven piece, and reworked them into a new order. The only thing is he then scored it all and got someone else to play it !! OMG where is the technology ?!

Some of my current favourite things :
sunshowers - I have seen more of these during this winter than I have for possibly the last 15 years... delicate/thin drops of rain vectoring along the current gust direction catching the sun making the air glow.
synthesisers - been reading a history of the Moog. Synthesis is just the bomb !!!
my daughter - Raven is now 1 and a little, talks with a little interpereting and wanders around with her mouth wide open laughing manically.
max/msp - related to synthesisers really. I've been daydreaming about writing extended equations that will synthesise weirdly morphing square waves with no use of its own oscillator style objects.
coffee - I also have to bear its scar as an addiction.
chainsaws - bloody good fun, but a bit scary sometimes.
rocket and silverbeet from the garden - wet with raindrops and green !!





David Harris, "Music Technology Forum: Semester 2 - Week 2 ". Lecture presented at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, 07th July 2008


Stephen Whittington, "Music Technology Forum: Semester 2 - Week 2 ". Lecture presented at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, 07th July 2008

MTF2_W33K 01_QUALITATIVE LISTENING VS. THE PUBLIC SPACE

ode to bus travel.
bus olng 22

Earlier this year I was considering the options of the portable generation/manipulation of sound/music (eg using a laptop on the train), and apart from battery life, the main issues was being able to hear what I was doing and its associated generated subtleties. In the public arena ambient sound is an issue, and one cannot hear the subtleties unless they are louder than the ambient sound and even then one cannot be sure that the subtleties are not created by the ambience.

Even earlier than that I purchased my first mp3 player and its associated lifestyle/freedom, I then quickly gave up listening to certain musical style/genres (eg almost anything with drums) because of my inability to enjoy them against the background of public transport . This led me to adapt my public listening to sounds of a more ambient nature that could easily meld with the the general ambience without needing to be cranked (eg Acreil).

Here lies one of the key issues regarding the noise levels of shared portable listening; to actually listen to some music in a public space it must be louder than the ambient noise....

This implies to me that public listeners whose earbuds are audible from a distance are attempting to overcome background noise so as to fully appreciated the subtleties of their musical choice. And possibly that others whose listening is at more discrete levels are perhaps not listening as hard, but rather using the music as an enhancement to their surrounds rather than seperate themselves for their surrounds.

Of course this does not take into account the use of mobile phones as tinny boom boxes, where sound quality is not even worth mentioning. Perhaps here, the essence of popular music is revealed as not being embedded in the sound quality but rather melodic/rhythmic/lyrical content. Perhaps even its associative memories account for more than sound junkies would like to admit...



[1] Stephen Whittington, "Music Technology Forum: Semester 2 - Week 1 ". Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 31st July 2008

forum - week 09 - of electronics and harmonics

.. these different musical styles ... affected the evaporation rate of distilled water...
From full beakers, 14 to 17 ml evaporated.. in the silent chambers, 20 to 25 ml..under the inflene of Bach, Shankar and jazz; but, with rock... 55 to 59 ml.
[142: Tompkins and Bird]

George E. Smith.... planted maize and soyabeans ... in two identical greenhouses, both kept precisely at the same level of temperature and humidity. In one...Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue' 24 hours a day....in that greenhouse sprouted earlier than those given the silent treatment.... their stems were thicker, tougher and greener.
[137: Tompkins and Bird]


In the early 1950’s, Dr T. C. N. Singh of the Department of Botany at Annamalai University, Madras, India, discovered under microscope that plant protoplasm was moving faster in the cell as a result of the sound produced by an electric tuning fork. This discovery led to his conclusion that sound must have some effect on the metabolic activities of the plant cell.
[Singh]




REFERENCES
Tompkins, Peter and Bird, Christopher. 1974. Secret Life of Plants. Blackburn, Victoria: Penguin Press.

SINGH, T. C. N., On the Effect of Music and Dance on Plants, Bihar Agricultural College Magazine, Volume 13, no. 1, 1962–1963:

mtf - week 08 - industry nerd jabbering on

In this case, not the parish priest, Peter Dowdall...

Peter Dowdall gave a rather interesting talk on both recording a large ensemble in the EMU space, and working for such multi-nationals as PEPSI. (mmmm, it makes me wonder what pepsi tastes like ?)

His use of organisational skills in the preparatory process of recording gives a good sense of necessities when approaching a recording with such a big set up, and in a space which is not something one is totally familiar with. Hence spending an amount of time prior to the actual session running through the process proves itself invaluable. For example I myself am curious as to exactly how many mic leads there are at EMU, and to hear Peter saying he had to outsource comes as no surprise.

His over the top photographic journal of the experience was also amazing !! Just recently I have had cause to bemoan my own lack of note taking when I was attempting to document some of my past works (like 6 or 7 years ago), and my own experience in the mixing world also brings home to me how bloody good it is to know what's going on now, and what was going on yesterday.


I was also very amused by his description of editing to a grid. Cutting of the end of phrases because fall outside the appropriate length.. I am looking forward to trying it at the appropriate juncture :P It's a bit like slow motion glitch.


REFERENCE
Dowdall, Peter. Forum presentation at EMU space, University of Adelaide. 8th of May 2008.

MTF - week 04 - more presentations

This weeks extravaganza of presentations was once again an inspiring leap into the world of watching people talk about ....... "stuff".

Ben Probert's presentation was the funnest/most entertaining with his hiding behind an array of baffles at the back (for sound isolation apparently) and showing his Max project and his effected face on the screen for everyone to watch. Thinking of the presentations the real time manipulation of his patch (and David Dowling's last week), were much more interesting than just listening to pre-recorded examples.

Although, perhaps this was because their sonic outcomes had more interest for me than Matt Mazone and Khaled Sanadzadeh's examples. But again preparing myself for a step backward, John Delaney presented a pre-prepared piece that used an interesting technique (ie stochastic choice of prepared loops), and was a nice piece in itself......mmmm, this leads me to the conclusion that I'm glad I'm not studying psychology or philosophy when these observations would themselves be worthy of several pages of study.

Freddie May's presentations was the most lacking in multimedia. The cloud background from the media player just didn't cut when compare to the still's from Luke Digance's collaboration art show (let alone the getting down silent performance with flashing background), and Doug Loudon's home movie of mouse clicks and software jumping around.

Although again Freddie's sonic outcome was quite interesting which adds another layer of perspective :)



BONUS LINKS:
http://www.infinitecat.com/ http://www.stuffonmycat.com/

references
Music Technology Forum, presented at the EMU recording space, Adelaide University. 27 March 2008

MTF - WEEK 03 - PRESENTATIONS

I was just saying how much I enjoyed last years efforts to give presentations - by myself that is - generally I found most others uninteresting and poorly delivered... that is why I put so many man hours into Plogue, and so little into my actual presentation.

I just hope someone got something out of it :P

Since the forum I have spent another selection of man hours into the patch which I did show on screen, making it more sexy/smooth/glamorous and highlighting each individual hairy moment !!!

this is a stylish end product, with fake graphical stimuli !!!

this is the real end product, luffly simple !!!

That said about my own work, I enjoyed seeing the two variations on the Max patches. Graphical styling is key to all obvious Max endeavours !!!!
Now, how do I do it.. that is obviously the question I should have asked at the time >.<

BRING ON THE ROBOT DOGS !!!
mmmm, http://thisismycomputerblog.blogspot.com/, that someonelse mentioned in their blog ?
Just don't read the comments !!!!



REFERENCES
Everyone. 2008. All the things anyone ever said or wrote or thought this year.

mtf - week 02 - blogging, what is it good for ?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

mtf - instrument of wobblyness

well i've built the instrument of wobblyness, and well, it's a bit messy...




BUT BEST OF ALL - it's mounted in a cardboard box :)
lo-fi aesthetic for all round budgetness...

At various stages throughout its construction, it went through design changes :)

Last of these was to introduce a seperate power supply for everything that wasn't the tape motor controllers (attempt at noise suppression - that pulse wave just leaks through everything)...and I don't have enough jacks.... so alligator clip mania !!!

Anway, it just begged for a patch bay style interface (more alligator clips), which I'll probably just keep on expanding because there is still a lot of space.

Presently, I am using two walkmans, two square wave oscillators and two ring modulators.

There is space on the Arduino for another 4 motor controllers, 2 square waves, 2 ring modulators and then there's I think 2 more switches on the 2003 chip which could be utilised.

I doubt I'll get as excited as I could, as 2 simultaneous sources with modulation is probably a good level of interactiveness for real time performance - although that pulse wave out of the arduino (driving the motors) through some ring mod sounds great !!

Here's a sample featuring two tapes of speech, and 1 ring mod.








thanks to Seb, for his invaluable assistance, help, aid, facilitation etc....

mtf - week 7 - physcal computing 2

blah, can't get the maxruntime to recognise or initialise or whateverise the serial port on home computer :(

worked last week,

serves me right for trying at home- will keep workn at it..

anyway, again I'm thinking this is non-stop potentail. At first I was a bit dismissive of basically building a novel sound generation device and then conrolling it with a computer. I was a bit thinking this was overkill and just not necessary.
Why wouldn't you build something and then just play it, OR just play with a computer and not mix the two.

However I have inadvertently come to the pont where I see my former thoughts a tad small and whatever that word is where you are a bit limited.

I'm not really sure how all these exercises we've done tie together, or how they can be tied together - eg trigger a sound and change the pitch so will have to read the exercises again and consider.

I'm not convinced I'm interested in using this tool with my proposed instrument - to a major extent I'm more excited about playing it real time and not lugging more gear around than I have to, but will give it due thought...



REFERENCES


Haines, Christian. Music Technology Forum workshop. University of Adelaide, Computer Lab. 6th August 2007.


Tomczak, Sebastian. Music Technology Forum workshop. University of Adelaide, Computer Lab. 6th August 2007.


note - How do I reference these readings?
individual exercises -
Exercise 1 - Victorian Synth.pdf
Exercise 2 -The STIC Insecticon.pdf
Exercise 3 - STRIC Insecticon.pdf
Exercise 4 - Genetic Mutant Insecticon.pdf

mtf - instrument design

I've had minimal luck with toys. They've been too limited, and a couple are now too busted.
As such I propose to bend a cassette walkman.
Creating a new device - The Wobbly Man... or something like that :)

By changing the voltage to the motor I can change the playback speed/pitch, and even reverse direction of the tape.

This will be controlled/played by either a) a pot, controlling the variable voltage ouput of a regulator
and/or b) the thick pencil line on a piece of paper controlling variable resistance.

I will have multiple tapes each with unique sonic characteristics giving an array of potential playback timbres.

The instrument will consist of the walkman itself, a voltage regulator as created (or attempted) in week 5, and a pencil and a piece of paper.
I have yet to discover exactly how to integrate the pencil and piece of paper.

As for packaging, I plan to mount it inside a clear plastic drink bottle - giving the needed rigidity for such things as patch leads and also a lovely view of exposed wires.

f - week 6 - arduino

Had a bit of fun getting the arduino to work on my home windows machine.
After a few software problems, got it running OK !!

It's great, I didn't do anything withit , but conceptually it's great..
I don't know about the programming side of it, but ... it's great.

The possibilities of the arduino are vast. I really can't say anything but it's great. I've always been excited about the idea of an interface to the real world from computer land. And using this to do all sorts of random things, like controlling motors to controlling sound...

Anyway, about the assignment.

For exercise 3, Horus, I used two pots. One was a 1M and the other 1000k and they both worked fine. I was a bit curious about the way the controllers attached to unconnected analog inputs used the input from the preceeding analog input, but after a bit of reattaching the pots to various of the analog inputs I decided that it just happened to work that way :)




Haines, Christian. Music Technology Forum workshop. University of Adelaide, Computer Lab. 30th August 2007.


Tomczak, Sebastian. Music Technology Forum workshop. University of Adelaide, Computer Lab. 30th August 2007.

mtf - week 5 - circuit bending

I didn't seem to have much luck with this, other than being kind of impressed with my soldering :) I managed to do some fairly fine work !

Apart from that mmm.

The two toys I've been working with have proved not particularly helpful.
Following on from my post last week about the lion king thing, Seb suggested that the voltage regulator would prove useful :( It didn't work, so sad, I've tried it 3 different times so far - probably one of the components.

That said I also talked to Seb about using a pot to control voltage, he drew me a picture, but still again no luck :( Here's a photo with a bit of annotation showing how I did it.

Then I attacked the xbox - here the main problem was repetition. I found a number of cool effects, but they wouldn't repeat with any consistency. I think they all sort of depended on shorting out between something and one speaker connection or lcd connection, which makes me think that the short result may depend on the voltage output of the speaker or lcd at the time.

One sound involved a short noise, that I could manipulate into a crackle by shorting out appropriate buttons. This left me with not enough hands so I decided to try and make an automatic button pusher..For this I used a slot car with the spinning axle as the alternating contact - I figured that it constantly spinning would regularly break any connection.
It worked, but was far too noisy.. apart from the fact that the noise I was trying to manipulate so was so bloody hard to make anyway (lack of repetition).

Haines, Christian. Music Technology Forum workshop. University of Adelaide, Engineering Dept, Electronics lab. 23 August 2007.


Tomczak, Sebastian. Music Technology Forum workshop. University of Adelaide, Engineering Dept, Electronics lab. 23rd of August 2007.