What dreams are made of
Eistenstein (hands from Potemkin, no less) meets Thomas Edison (The Great Train robbery) divided/subtracted and multiplied with home-made clips generated in Modul8. The Loch Ness monster was created from an extreme close -up of a portion of the Millau suspension bridge, animated in Modul8 Sounds were brewed in Live/Reaktor then deconstructed in “I am the mighty Jungulator”, and Lloopp. Watch it in HD. And Full Screen. And, no: it’s not supposed to make sense.
Visuals made using Modul8 2.6 and supplied clips only.
Short 8:3 format visuals mix by VJ Nutcracker of Odd Squid Visuals (www.oddsquid.tv) using Modul8 live video performance software for OSX The mix is using only the media supplied by Modul8s developers Garagecube (http and some video effects This is a test clip to see how HD widescreen clips look once uploaded. Rendered at 1280 x 720 photo jpeg set at 75%, uploaded file size 628mb.
Connect the Bots: Black Allegheny, An Entire Album Made by Algorithmic Swarms
Swarm Music Album Black Allegheny from Evan Merz on Vimeo.
We’ve heard albums made by singular compositional minds and by bands. What would an album sound like if composed by swarm intelligence, by computer evolutionary models of individual agents or bots? That’s the question asked by composer Evan Merz in his new, full-length album “Black Allegheny.” (At top: the composer explains in a video.)
Western musical and creative tradition is steeped in linearity, from the forward motion of the music staff to the mythos of Aristotle’s Poetics.
So, maybe it’s little wonder that generative music – music that may not have linearity, or a beginning, middle, and end – hasn’t exactly been a big hit with the kids. Pioneers like Brian Eno have helped spread the gospel of generative music, but apart from lots of interesting experiments, there hasn’t been a lot of actual musical content. If you were to make a stack of generative music albums, your listening list would be fairly short.
All of that could be about to change. Programming code, the essential medium in which such models can be developed, is more accessible than ever. It’s also more visual, thanks to the popularization of tools like Processing, which can help make the abstract rules of generative music easier to grok. Merz, for his part, has taken on the challenge with his own Java-based software.
Saying the bots “compose” the music may be a little misleading. Generative music needs rules to operate. Before Eno, there was John Cage, whose “chance” compositions were as much defined by choices of materials as by ranges of indeterminacy. Merz makes a nod to Cage’s notion of a “gamut,” a collection of raw musical elements used as the input in the chance system. Here, though, Merz is aided by something Cage didn’t have: a swarm of intelligent “agents” can navigate those materials via simple rules, giving the music form and substance. Because they aren’t aware of the big picture, the music evolves more naturally, rather than being subjected to an over-arching narrative.
Or, as Merz puts it, “the tiny ant on the ground knows only what it sees around it.”
So, that’s the theory — what does the music sound like? Far from “ennui,” as Merz puts it, to me the results are organic. The structure is emergent from its materials, sounding almost like a natural physical process, like watching ice melt. The content ranges based on the gamut; like a lot of generative music, some sounds a whole lot like Brian Eno’s work. Others borrow from minimalist composers (Reich’s music itself might be seen as partially generative), and others take on an edgy urgency. The models that determine the bots are based on a popular, simple mathematical predator/food model, one often used in these works. Sometimes, you might imagine that evolutionary struggle playing out in the music.
You can read more about the process of developing this tool and the compositional ideas behind it at Evan’s blog:
Black Allegheny, Swarm Generated Music [Computer Music Blog]
For more explorations of sound and composition, check out Noise for Airports, which recently featured the work:
http://noiseforairports.com/
And you can stream the album or buy it for yourself for the light price of US$5 — though I’d like to see a software release, since that would mean each playback could be different. (Eno released an album in software form in the 90s, though tracking down the software now is evidently impossible – anyone with tips?)
Black Allegheny @ Bandcamp [Stream / download purchase]
Swarm Controlled Sampler – Becoming Live from Evan Merz on Vimeo.
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Diego Stocco’s Bassoforte, an Incredible Instrument Made from a Dismantled Piano
Diego Stocco – Bassoforte from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.
Odds are you don’t have a dismantled piano you keep in the garden, awaiting conversion to a fantastic, imaginative electro-acoustic instrument. But that’s unlikely to make you covet the instrument above any less.
Diego Stocco is a composer, instrumentalist, sound designer, and mad inventor. Among many recent accomplishments, he’s responsible, in collaboration with Hans Zimmer, for some of the imaginative sounds that populated Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes.” In many ways, he’s a reminder that the expressive potential of digital music isn’t limited to the virtual. He couples raw acoustic materials from sand to modified instruments with recording and digital processes. In the case of the Bassoforte, that means the use of IK Multimedia’s tone-rich amp models and effects in their flagship AmpliTube software. Hold a mic to something, or add a pickup, and the sound takes on a new form.
The Bassoforte’s construction was an exploration, building resonance out atop the mechanical construction at its heart with unexpected additions like a chimney cap. Then, its musical realization, too, calls upon Diego’s unique talents as a player and composer. He explains some of the process to CDM:
I built this thing by combining a bunch of different parts, including cabinet handles as bridges : )
It came out fun to play because I can interact with it in different ways, but it’s also tricky to control, because the tuning is a thing on its own.
He explains the tuning idiosyncrasies on the gallery of the instrument:
The neck is slightly tilted, so when I press a key I can push all four strings at the same time. But because the piano keys are not perpendicular to the frets, the tuning is imprecise (which I like), and can also generate in-between semitones. How strong I push the keys also affects the tuning.
It can be a little tricky to play, but overall, I’m very happy about how it came out.
He also tells CDM about how he’s relating to the instrument now that it’s built:
I’m still discovering it because I just built it, but it sounds [as if] for each [note], there’s also a secondary note that gets produced by the other half of the strings (on the side of the bell), so the higher the pitch, the louder this secondary note is. It creates these bi-chords that can sound very interesting.
The idea for the track I created came to me exactly because of that; I was just pressing the keys randomly trying to figure out what to do and then I found one very nice bi-chord, then a second one, and from there I got the idea for the rest. It wasn’t really a conscius decision to create a “Western” tune, it just happened that way
If you’re loving the track as much as I am, you can grab it on Bandcamp for $.99 in various high-quality formats, along with other albums with self-explanatory names like “Music from a Tree” and “Music from Sand.”
And for more information, check out the gallery Diego has posted, which includes additional notes from behind the scenes:
http://www.behance.net/gallery/Bassoforte/535175
Previously:
Real for Reel: The Amazing Sherlock Holmes Experibass, and More Winter Cinema Sounds
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Listen: Auditory Canvas, Dreamlike Album Made with Crowdsourced Funding
If anyone had listened to the predictions, albums would be irrelevant by now. Instead, finding a way to weave music into a coherent narrative of tracks, and imbuing the object with meaning and value, matters more than ever. Finding time and resources is as much a challenge as ever, but there are some new tools for funding and finding music, even in the age of exploding global population and output.
Auditory Canvas’ record “Fabric of Life” is one of the many gems out there to discover. It’s a sparkling, delicate dreamscape of music, noted by our friend stretta (known for his own lovely music in the monome community). I’m not as fond of the final cuts on the album, personally; the spoken political narrative for me isn’t nearly as evocative as the opening numbers. (It’s nonetheless nice to hear music injected with such a point of view.) But there is a strong sense that creator David of Summer Rain Recordings is traversing a varied and personal musical terrain. It’s the kind of music that could bring you some spring inspiration.
Just as significant, Auditory Canvas made the album possible by crowdsourcing “kickstarter” funding at kickstarter.com. And lest such projects become selfish, by purchasing the album, you generate revenue to go back into the kickstarter system. Album production, after all, is far cheaper than it once was, but it isn’t free. “Fabric of Life” demonstrates what could happen to musical ecology if this kind of micro-lending invested in good, new work. And your purchase becomes a way to turn David into an investor himself in the system, keeping the cycle going.
To make that purchase worthwhile, Auditory Canvas put some thought into the lovely presentation; the limited edition has an almost theatrical approach to packaging, and even comes with a papercraft KORG synth (which I can add to my paper Minimoog from GAS). David writes with a number of talking points:
- Funded via a kickstarter project ( http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/auditorycanvas/be-a-part-of-the-fabric-of-life-album-release-0)
- $1000 from sales going back into other people’s kickstarter projects.
- 10% of sales going to charity (NextAid.org)
- CD packaging produced using recycled plastic, recycled paper, and soy inks
- Released on my own label, Summer Rain Recordings (all artists donate a portion of their royalties to charity, the label matches their donation)
- Limited edition and standard CD and digital available here: http://auditorycanvas.net/store
- Available on all digital retailers 17 May
- More info at: http://auditorycanvas.net or http://summerrainrecordings.net
The interesting thing about the release strategy is, while it does make the album available through digital channels, it provides some big incentives to go straight to the artist. And that kind of self-motivated album release may increasingly become essential. For a stunning visualization of why, look no further than the lovely blog Information is Beautiful. Using data and analysis from The Cynical Musician, it paints a sobering portrait of the harsh realities of digital distribution. Artists would have to get 1.5+ million plays on Last.fm’s streaming service just to make a month’s living wage.
It’s certainly a glass half-empty / half-full situation, though: you’d only need to sell 143 self-pressed CDs. And that should be optimistic: online tools, even those that sell music, are great promotional tools; boutique sales of physical objects (or even of downloads, in situations where the artist gets a bigger cut) are where the revenue is. And even if that doesn’t help you quit your day job, that could be essential in being able to invest in your next record and keep artists productive. (This is also, it seems to me, a great argument for the potential value of torrents and Creative Commons licensing. If the online file is a promotional tool, best to get it far and try to leverage the things that do bring in money than try to get a few extra nickels and dimes.)
It also pretty clearly makes the challenges facing the business of music about format and economies of scale, not piracy (or, at the very least, not piracy alone – not by a long shot, if the “legal” services aren’t generating measurable revenue, either).
HOW MUCH DO MUSIC ARTISTS EARN ONLINE?
Thanks to David for sharing his lovely music. And I expect, whether you’re a great fan of the album or not, this should get some wheels turning about that album you’ve been trying to finish.
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