paulhazel.com

This is super-funky:

[Via BoingBoing]

I love this: very clever, very funny, great use of the technology, and the guy’s got talent! Excellent video, too:

[Thanks to Matt Ottewill for sharing this with me.]

This next track was actually written and performed by DJ Sanctuary & DJ Asterix, not by me. I did do some extra programming on it though, and it was produced and mixed at my place. A really cool track, one of those that can be said to take the listener ‘on a journey’:

To finish, a late-period Blue Train track with Natalia Farrán-Graves on vocals, Dave Westmore on bass and backing vocals, Steve Waterman on trumpet:

Just a quick post by way of paying my respects to the sadly deceased Lester William Polsfuss:

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by trotting out all the usual known facts. (Get those here or here. See also my Brief History of Electronic Music.) Suffice to say that of the three things he’s best known for—his music, the invention of multitrack recording, and that guitar—it’s the first two of these that have always impressed me the most.

Clearly, the two were inextricably intertwined. From the early 1950s the originality of Les’s music largely depended upon his technical prowess: firstly overdubbing layer upon layer of sounds using acetate discs, then later the development of the 8-track ‘Sel-Sync’ tape machine in conjunction with Ampex.

I still find his records from this time completely thrilling: despite the often cheesy material, the overdubbed and speeded up guitars and thickly layered vocals have a futuristic “space-age” sound to them that is absolutely redolent of the Sputnik era.

Here’s a video I’ve had up on YouTube for a couple of years now that uses his (and his wife, Mary Ford’s) arguably best-known track How High The Moon as the soundtrack. What a fabulous and extravagant piece of music!

[Thanks to Julian for the BBC link.]

According to its creators, Mabuse is a piece of “real-time audio-visual composition and performance  software.” It’s an application written using Max/MSP that allows users to create audio tracks and manipulate video in real-time using graphical sequencing tools they call modulators: as usual you can create your own patterns or draw on an existing bank of presets. Check out this short tutorial video for an overview:

Presumably to allow for a greater degree of flexibility with the audio composition and processing aspects they’ve also released Mabuse as a VST plug-in for Ableton Live. It’s only available on the Mac as yet, but say that a PC version will be forthcoming given the interest:

There’s also a video tutorial here.

Although I suspect the VST plug-in won’t really take off until the promised full-screen version is available, overall these are very clever pieces of software that deserve to succeed. The seamless integration of the audio and video elements—and their real-time capabilities as performance and composition tools—make Mabuse very powerful. It’s a fabulous example of convergence!

I think if I was still performing techno music live this is what I would be using. Hooked up to a Lemur, natch…

Raymond Scott

1992 found me studying Music Information Technology at City University under Jim Grant and Simon Emmerson. As part of my dissertation I wrote a long piece on the history of electronic music. It sat around on the old paulhazel.com for a while, but I recently revised it and updated it for my own students, and, for those who are interested in such things, I’m including it here.

I think it remains useful. It is only a brief history but it covers a lot of ground, technological, artistic and political. It finishes around the time synthesizers entered the mass-market and just before MIDI, but it goes right back to the medium’s real beginning. Contrary to what most people think, “music technology” didn’t begin in the late 1960s with Bob Moog: as far back as 1906 Thaddeus Cahill had a working polyphonic additive synthesizer that transmitted pure electronic music over a telephone network. Talk about being ahead of your time…

The Telharmonium

A Brief History of Electronic Music (372kB .pdf)

FourTrack, as its name suggests, is a 4-track recording application for the iPhone (and iPod Touch):

On the whole, the application works well. It’s very simple to set up and use (although I’m not mad on the clumsy navigation scheme). Recording quality is pretty damn good given the limitations of the microphones I used, which were the iPhone’s built-in mic and the one on the supplied headset (which are actually very similar in performance). The ability to transfer audio files onto a computer using wi-fi is very welcome and totally straightforward. To be honest, I haven’t done any serious multitracking myself, but Sonoma claim latency of less than 1mS so there shouldn’t be any problem in that department. You can get more technical detail here.

My first impressions were pretty favourable, then. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered a couple of quite serious problems with the program. These have been unearthed because of the (perhaps slightly unusual) way in which I was using the program. My first serious recordings were done at the SAND 2008 conference where I was trying to record a couple of the presentations to use as podcasts on this very blog.

So what I wanted was just a single track of audio, but lasting something around an hour (and the website claims that record times are “unlimited”). I recorded two separate presentations into two songs. What I found when I got them home and transferred onto my computer was that they would both play up to a certain point, and then iTunes would jump to the next track in the playlist.

The recording of the first presentation was about 46mins long, and it always ‘flipped out’ at exactly the same point, 32mins 5secs. The second recording was around an hour and 10mins, and would again always flip out at exactly the same point, but this time 38mins 1sec. I tried loading the files into Peak Express but it reported that both files were corrupt.

In work the next day I tried loading them into Pro Tools, with the same result. Eventually I got them to load into Sound Forge on a PC, and this is what I saw:

What it looks like is that FourTrack continued recording for the duration of the presentations, but in each case it lost the input signal at some point. However, I’m not sure it’s as simple as that: working on a rough memory usage of 5Mb a minute, the file size should be around 230Mb for a 46min recording. The file size is actually 162Mb, which is right if it stopped at 32mins. This suggests that FourTrack did actually stop recording where the audio signal drops out, but that somehow it logged it as continuing to record, which is presumably why I was getting a corrupted file message… Whatever: just to be sure, I recorded one of my own lectures the next day to see if I could repeat the problem and exactly the same thing happened.

Whilst going through this process, I also found what seems to be another quite serious bug in the program, insofar it seems to have a memory leak. Here is a screenshot from iTunes showing the memory of my iPhone with the two presentation recordings onboard:

And here’s the same thing with those two files deleted:

Now those two files only take up around 350Mb, whereas we can see from the above that there is a difference in the displayed application memory of approximately 1.25Gb! Whether this is actually a ‘memory leak’ I don’t know for sure. But I do know that memory management is one of the issues with Objective C, so I’m taking a semi-educated guess.

In summary, I’d say that FourTrack is basically a good program, but as yet it has some technical issues that need sorting out.

Bloom is a recent application for the iPhone developed by Brian Eno and Pete Chilvers. The press release describes it as “part instrument, part composition and part artwork”; in practice it’s an ambient music generator that allows the user to input notes via the touch screen. These notes are then a) displayed like ripples on a pond and b) taken up by the programme and variations are generated over time.

I’ve been playing with the thing all week. Despite being very simple to use, it’s very good at what it sets out to do. It’s hypnotic and relaxing, and does actually create convincing ambient music. There is only one sound available, a sort of cross between a piano and a harp, but there are subtly shifting drones that hover in the background as the melodies drift in and out… There are also a set of ‘moods’ that seem to change the scales used by the ‘pieces’:

There’s obviously a lot of very clever stuff going on behind the scenes. Presumably all the sounds are generated in real-time (i.e. no samples) which gives the music a very rich and warm sound. Knowing Eno, I’m guessing it uses an FM synth, probably built in Max/MSP or PD. And although the sequence generator seems to be little more than a delay line at first listening, if left alone the programme will generate endless variations on even the most simple of inputs.

I left it running today for about four hours, and it was still happily evolving when I turned it off. Running the programme this long did highlight one thing: it drained the battery in a couple of hours. Here it is in action:

I love it. It’s not a toy. It’s not a gimmick. Bloom actually turns the iPhone into a viable and meaningful instrument that allows you to produce some very listenable and sonically high-quality ambient music. I found it extremely satisfying to be able to tap out a quick sequence, let that evolve for a while while I went about my business, and then ‘add a new part’ just as I was passing by. Or shake it and start again. Whatever…

As with RjDj, it suggests a completely new type of relationship with both the music and with the technological device, and you find yourself operating somewhere between the seemingly incompatible realms of recorded and improvised musics.

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One final point: there has been a lot of comment about Bloom being a rip-off of Electroplankton (which has been available on the Nintendo DS for ages). This is just silly: I don’t particularly want to diss either Electroplankton or the DS, but, as this short video demonstrates, we’re talking completely different kettles of fish:

Released on October 10th, RjDj is one of the most interesting pieces of software that I’ve come across for some time. It’s difficult to describe what it is exactly, so you’d better watch the video (over 9 minutes but worth it, believe me):

I downloaded RjDj this afternoon and begrudgingly dragged my unloved and unused Apple headphone set out of the box—the software only works with this headset at the moment. It all worked perfectly first time, and within five minutes I was tapping, banging, clacking, and, yes, even singing along to “the soundtrack to my life.” Live and interactive: John Cage would have loved it.

Cooking the Sunday dinner became an experimental sound workshop: peeling potatoes, kicking open the flip-top bin, using a knife to create glissandi on the grill rack, whistling, thumping the worktop, running the tap, the clanking of saucepans, all became melded into some futuristic ambient-techno soundscape. Great fun!

At the moment, the number of scenes available is limited (5 only) but the website promises another 18 coming shortly. It could do with a way of exporting your recordings, and of course people posting comments on the RjDj site already want programmable delay times, use of better headsets, access to the individual audio channels, etc., etc.. Like a lot of iPhone applications, it borders on being a gimmick: something interesting and exciting for sure, but we’re not quite sure what to do with it…

BUT: what we’ve got here is an application that is sampling in real time, performing DSP on the input, playing that back and recording it at the same time. On a mobile phone. (In fact, RjDj makes the phrase ‘mobile phone’ suddenly seem redundant, out-of-date.)

Something important is happening here. It seems like one of those tipping-point moments, a paradigm shift. The gestural interface of the iPhone is exploited by RjDj in such a way that it allows not only a new way of making music, but a completely new way of experiencing music where our behaviour generates the events that become both the raw material and the gestures that shape our listening.

In fact, one could envisage a future where we no longer primarily bought music performed by other people. Instead we would buy new ’scenes’ and build up a library of software that would transform the music we listen to and the sounds we experience according to mood, behaviour, whim, or conscious control. All ‘recorded music’ would become permanently fluid, open to improvisation and gestural control.

RjDj costs £1.59.

Here’s something: a venerable analogue monosynth re-imagined for the 21st Century and the Nintendo DS, no less.

2 twin-ocillator synths and a 4-part drum machine pre-loaded with samples create by the DS-10 itself. A 6-track sequencer. Built-in FX and real-time sound control via the touch screen. Wireless communication allowing you to sync multiple units together and swap data. From this:

To this:

Fun. Amazing. Mind-blowing. And yet so musically limited (to put it mildly). A Toy.