6.29.2010
4.20.2010
I pursue the intersection between timbral and tonal expression. Tonal expression is deeply embedded while timbral expression brings new opportunities for exploration. Timbral music requires new methods of composition to break free of the dictates of western music notation. Sampling provides an avenue for using tonal music within other frameworks. I use my own graphical notation system, the scores are then played programmatically using samples as the source. This provides for seamless intermixing of melody and timbre and the interplay between the two.
This piece came out of a few distinct inspirations. When the idea came to me, I was listening to a lot of Steve Reich and John Adams music, and studying their techniques of building texture. At the same time, I listened to a piece by Ludger Brümmer called Le Tombeau de Maurice where he used samples from a performance of Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin. He generated textures that would rapidly morph into almost direct quotes from the sampled piece. I got the idea to try to combine minimalist textures with this kind of rapid transformation. It made for an interesting contrast between very clearly tonal and very clearly timbral music. I chose to sample a piece by Duke Ellington because the mood was similar in spirit to my intentions. Also, the piano provided good source material for the textures I intended to create. In terms of the technique actually used for composing, I drew on one of my very original inspirations for getting into computer music: Iannis Xenakis' Mycenae Alpha.
Solitude has been included in the Notations21 project, which is a modern compendium and anthology of graphical scores inspired by John Cage's book, Notations. More recently, it was part of an event organized by the Xenakis Project of the Americas called Xenakis Past, Present, and Future.
Solitude with PureData
This is my first composition using Pd's data structures, and I found that I enjoyed the process quite a bit, once I got the patch debugged. The experience was a good combination of visual editing with the mouse and text editing with the keyboard. The visual representation worked well for composition in this style. By biggest problem was finding a way to represent in the score all of the things that I wanted to control. Since I wanted to have the score generate the piece, I did not add a couple features, like pitch shifting and voice allocation control, which I would have liked to have.
The Score
This rendition of Solitude was created entirely within Pd except for some minor equalization in Audacity. The score was created using Pd's graphical data structures. The score you see below controls every aspect of the sounds that were generated.
In the score, time flows from left to right. Each color represents a sample. Each sample controller has two arrays: the brighter, bigger one on top controls sample playback; and a smaller darker one at the bottom controls amp and pan. The lowest point of the sample array is the beginning of the sample, the highest is the end, and the height of the array is how much and what part of the sample to play starting at that point in time. There are between 50 and 100 voice polyphony for the samples. The height of the amp/pan array is the amp, and the y location is the pan.
All media files are released into the public domain, no need for lawyers! Please give credit where credit is due.
All source code is released under the GNU GPL License.
You can download just the mp3 file or the program itself. The program needs at least a 2.0 GHz machine to run! It is meant to run with Pd-extended), also freely downloadable.
- mp3: Solitude_-_Hans-Christoph_Steiner_-_2004.mp3
- mp3 version source: solitude-2004-12-18.tar.bz2
- the entire program: solitude-20100128.tar.bz2
3.31.2010
Ryoji Ikeda - Data.Microhelix
Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966 in Gifu, Japan) is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in New York City. Ikeda's music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of "raw" states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing. The conclusion of his album +/- features just such a tone; of it, Ikeda says "a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance" (from the CD booklet). Rhythmically, Ikeda's music is highly imaginative, exploiting beat patterns and, at times, using a variety of discrete tones and noise to create the semblance of a drum machine. His work also encroaches on the world of ambient music; many tracks on his albums are concerned with slowly evolving soundscapes, with little or no sense of pulse.
11.10.2009
Convert Image to Sound.
There are many programs to conver image to sound:
1) Audio Paint
2) Metasynth
3) Virtual ANS Visual Synthesizer
And the last one, is an i-Phone Application, check on i-Tunes Store:
4) Audible Ink (PocketChirp)
Aphex Twin Used his face's spectrogram to reproduce a sound:
When playing Aphex twin's #2 (the long formula) on their "Windowlicker" album, through a "Spectrogram", an image appears, of what is first thought; a demon!
Aphex Twin is notorious for sneaking in an image of himself in various music videos, CD covers, promotional art, etc. It's a face scary enough to give you nightmares.
11.09.2009
Generative Music in Nodal from michael wilson on Vimeo.
Nodal is a generative software application for composing music. The software is produced at the Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA), Monash University, Australia. It uses a novel method for the notation and playing of MIDI based music. This method is based around the concept of a user-defined graph. The graph consists of nodes (musical events) and edges (connections between events). The composer interactively defines the graph, which is then traversed by any number of virtual players that play the musical events as they encounter them on the graph. The time taken by a player to travel from one node to another is based on the length of the edges that connect the nodes.
Nodal does not make any sound by itself—it only generates MIDI data. Hence, a MIDI synthesiser is required before the composer can hear the output of the software. Nodal is compatible with any hardware or software MIDI synthesiser. Using Microsoft Windows the software can use the built-in MIDI synthesiser or any third party MIDI synth. Nodal is also compatible with Apple's GarageBand software or any of the many third-party MIDI synths available for the Macintosh computer.
Generative music
Theory
There are four primary perspectives on Generative Music (Wooller, R. et al., 2005)(reproduced with permission)
Linguistic/Structural
Music composed from analytic theories that are so explicit as to be able to generate structurally coherent material (Loy and Abbott 1985; Cope 1991). This perspective has its roots in the generative grammars of language (Chomsky 1956) and music (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983), which generate material with a recursive tree structure.Interactive/Behavioural
Music generated by a system component that ostensibly has no inputs. That is, 'not transformational' (Rowe 1991; Lippe 1997:34; Winkler 1998). Brian Eno's Generative Music 1 is an example of this.
Creative/Procedural
Music generated by processes that are designed and/or initiated by the composer. Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain and Terry Riley's In C are examples of this (Eno 1996).
Biological/Emergent
Non-deterministic music (Biles 2002), or music that cannot be repeated, for example, ordinary wind chimes (Dorin 2001). This perspective comes from the broader generative art movement. This revolves around the idea that music, or sounds may be 'generated' by a musician 'farming' parameters within an ecology, such that the ecology will perpetually produce different variation based on the parameters and algorithms used
Generative Music: The era of Intelligent Machines, or the end of the Human race?
IBM Deep Blue: il primo computer che sconfigge la mente umana
Tredici anni fa, esattamente il 10 febbraio 1996, il mondo si fermò attonito al risultato di una incredibile partita a scacchi fra l’uomo e la macchina. A combattere sulla scacchiera virtuale c’era il campione del mondo di scacchi, il russo Garry Kasparov che sfidava il supercomputer della IBM Deep Blue.
La sfida era fra la migliore mente umana, allenatissima alle sfide ad alta tensione, e il miglior computer esistente all’epoca, il supercomputer IBM Deep Blue con parallelismo a 30 nodi basato su RS/6000 e spinto da 480 processori specifici in tecnologia VLSI appositamente ottimizzati per il gioco degli scacchi.
La sfida era quella fra uomo e macchina, fra l’intelligenza naturale e l’incredibile forza computazionale. Non era la prima volta che una sfida del genere si teneva, ma fino alla sfida del 2004 (quando a sfidare Kasparov fu il predecessore di Deep Blue e cioè Deep Thought) il dominio umano era stato nettissimo e mai messo in discussione.
Il match del 2006 fu invece una vera e propria tortura per Kasparov. L’evoluzione della macchina in soli due anni era stata tale da portare al tavolo un avversario fortissimo che sconfisse nettamente Kasparov nel primo match e tenne il campione russo impegnato come mai nelle partite successive. Il torneo del 2006 si chiuse con una vittoria finale per 4-2 del russo su Deep Blue, ma anche con l’interrogativo ormai ineludibile: per quanto ancora l’uomo poteva resistere alla forza incontenibile delle macchine?
Un’era si era aperta e IBM accettò in nome di Deep Blue un rematch che fu organizzato per maggio 2007. Deep Blue fu potenziato tanto da guadagnare il soprannome: Deeper Blue e non diede scampo al campione russo, battendolo in sei partite con il punteggio 3.5 a 2.5. Il rematch del 2007 fu trasmesso in diretta sul Web e ricevette più di 74 milioni di visite da 106 paesi nei 9 giorni delle sfide.
L’algoritmo finale usato da Deep Blue riusciva a calcolare oltre 200 milioni di posizioni al secondo, contro appena 3 posizioni al secondo calcolate da Kasparov. Il campione russo dichiarò dopo la gara di aver visto nel suo avversario lampi di genio puro, tanto profondo da andare spesso oltre la comprensione umana. La rivincita chiesta da Kasparov fu rifiutata da IBM perché l’obiettivo era stato ormai raggiunto: superare l’uomo nel terreno in cui l’intelligenza era considerata il fattore dominante.
Deep Blue venne ritirato poco dopo la sfida visto che l’obiettivo di sconfiggere l’uomo era stato raggiunto. Quello che era nato come un progetto universitario dello studente di dottorato Feng-hsiung Hsu dell’università di Carnegie Mellon, divenne uno fra i progetti più ambiziosi degli ultimi anni e fece capire al mondo in maniera definitiva che i confini dell’evoluzione intelligente dei computer sono ancora tutti da esplorare.
Generative Music 1 and Brian Eno
In 1996 Brian Eno released the title "Generative Music 1" with SSEYO Koan Software. In so doing he popularised the term "generative music", describing music that is ever-different & changing, created by a system.
Many people find generative music systems incredibly interesting. Musicians to academics enjoy using them, and creating with them. They can generate some completely unexpected, but wonderful, results. You might think that generative music, being generated by a system, would always sound formulaic and impersonal. What you find, instead, is that artists using their skill and judgement can impose their own personality on the output, providing rich rewards for listeners through unique and live experiences. It is hard to believe sometimes that in 2008 generative music is still a niche area!
SSEYO Koan Software
The generative music system we know most about, and the only one we can really talk about, is the SSEYO Koan generative music system. We built Koan whilst at SSEYO, the first company we founded (see here for SSEYO history).
We have now founded another company, Intermorphic, and have developed an all-new and altogether more advanced trans-generative music engine: Noatikl, which supercedes Koan. Our development approach today, the same as we used when developing Koan, is to keep our heads down and do what feels right in the seemingly little time we have (there is never enough)!
Let's take a quick journey, and go back in time. Cast your mind way, way back to 1996. Remember that? Back then you could hear people say "the Internet is only a fad", and "it will never take off". At that time computers mostly had pretty low fidelity sound cards, and generative music was a niche area (as now). So, you can imagine how we felt when an artist of Eno's stature took up the guantlet and used Koan at the core of "Generative Music 1". We felt very, very, very, lucky and honoured, and it was a huge privilege to have spent some time with him (he is an amazing man). What he said about it then was eloquent and well observed and is still relevant today, so here is what he said about it:
Brian Eno 1996:
"Some very basic forms of generative music have existed for a long time, but as marginal curiosities. Wind chimes are an example, but the only compositional control you have over the music they produce is in the original choice of notes that the chimes will sound. Recently, however, out of the union of synthesisers and computers, some much finer tools have evolved. Koan Software is probably the best of these systems, allowing a composer to control not one but one hundred and fifty musical and sonic parameters within which the computer then improvises (as wind improvises the wind chimes).
The works I have made with this system symbolise to me the beginning of a new era of music. Until 100 years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again.
But now there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music it is always different. Like recorded music it is free of time-and-place limitations - you can hear it when and where you want.
I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: "you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?"
CSJ Bofop 1996:
"Each of the twelve pieces on Generative Music 1 has a distinctive character. There are, of course, the ambient works ranging from the dark, almost mournful Densities III (complete with distant bells), to translucent Lysis (Tungsten). These are contrasted with pieces in dramatically different styles, such as Komarek with its hard edged, angular melodies, reminiscent of Schoenberg's early serial experiments, and Klee 42 whose simple polyphony is similar to that of the early Renaissance. But of course, the great beauty of Generative Music is that those pieces will never sound quite that way again."
Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan software
The following Koan pieces were included:
- Densities III
- Klee 4.2
- Komarek
- Lysis (Tungsten)
- Methane IV
- Microcosmology
- NS-9001
- Platform 292
- Rothko Doric
- Seed Reflector
- Supporting Circle
- Tintoretto
