sonicbirth

here's a program that i've used in the past to create vst and au plugins. made some synths in it but mostly just effects plugins. it's called sonicbirth. freeware for mac. it's a pretty awsome program if you're not great at command-line programming but still want to make some awsome effects really quickly. it's kinda similar to Max in that you have objects that you drag and drop and connect by lines. it differes in that each "circuit" can be zoomed in on so that you can edit smaller details and build subcircuits and the like. doesn't have half the power of max though and it's a bit trickier to interface with midi.

along the left side is an editor for all the parameters of a specific selected unit. on the right hand side is a list of components to choose from. on the bottom is an audio server thingy. it lets you play sound and tells you how much cpu is in use.

up top is a closeup of a plugin i made that allows you to select a crossover frequency and then treats each output with a bit-depth reducer and a sample-rate reducer. it's pretty cool when you use it in ableton to affect a drum loop.

phasing

steve reich: music as a gradual process

minimalist composer steve reich uses phasing in his music to achieve gradual movement from one idea to another. phasing takes place in several different ways. some examples are:

1. having two or more players playing the same loop and having one of them intentionally speed up or slow down. (piano phase, electric counterpoint, violin phase)
2. taking the same loop of tape and playing it through two different players, one on the right channel and one on the left. (come out, it's gonna rain)
3. giving woodwind players certain phrases to play for the duration of one breath. (music for 18 musicians) these are not the only types of phasing nor are they the only pieces to incorporate it. the just happen to be ones that i can think of off the top of my head.


phasing appeals to me because it is concrete enough to notate yet it still contains a strong element of indeterminacy. i would like to take the idea of gradual movement from one idea to another and apply it to something other than musical phrases.

updated project proposal

Updated Project Proposal For the fall semester of MMDD-350:

Goals:

To gain a practical understanding of combining and interfacing more than one form of media in a single project/presentation. This is to be done primarily through the software Max/MSP/Jitter.

Project Outline:

I will build a software instrument in Max similar to the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate built by Larry Owens at Bell Laboratories for the composer Steve Reich. The instrument can take up to twelve audio inputs and gates their outputs based on divide by ten and divide by twelve flip-flops driven by a common clock source. The net result is a phrase that will not repeat itself for 120 gate open-close cycles.
This instrument will be will be a type of a sequencer but instead of counting in bars and beats this sequencer will count in repetitions, sample length, and pulse-width of the positive edge of the gating flip-flop. It will be interesting to experiment using the same sample but stretching the time to fit the gate length, to use different samples, for each input, to use video samples in some places, to continuously gate the same sample, have live performers playing into different inputs that would then be delayed and gated, etc…
Ideally, I would like to be able to set up a surround environment in which people could experience phase-gating in 360 degrees.

Limitations:

Outputting sound on more than one channel from a single computer. I have a 7.1 surround sound card that I could possibly use for this but it requires a desktop computer and I only have a laptop.

Overall:

By building this instrument, I can load samples of real instruments playing, thus creating interesting time-shifting effects, I can load midi sequences to control virtual instruments where pitch will not be affected, and I hope to be able to extend properties of this instrument into Jitter where I will be able to capture and manipulate images/video in relation to pulse/phase phrases created by the instrument. I intend to create this instrument as a sort of tool that I can add to a growing collection of software that I can use for live audio and visual performances.

intermedia response

Dick Higgins' essay on intermedia starts comes across as very abrasive and elitist. though he later states that he doesn't want for avant-garde to mean "avant-garde: for specialists only", he doesn't do a good job of making traditional art seem very worthwhile.
I disagree with what Higgins says about paintings being static. he says that there is no dialogue in a painting, and that they exist as decorated ornaments to imply grandeur. I think that the quality and value of a painting has to do with the though process of the painter and the interperatation and subsequent thought processes of the spectator rather than it's cost-value or whose wall it decorates.

Higgins excludes a very important and very alive form of art in this essay - folk art. Though he mentions pop art as being dead, i think that folk art is part of a dialogue with modern life (i probably don't know what the difference is between pop and folk art). Who can argue that graffiti is static? Higgins himself commends a contemporary for his political art, though in that case the art was not composed of a single type of media.
I think that it was Goethe who said something along the lines of there being three different types of art: 1) art that entertains 2) art that educates and 3) art that exalts. Higgins does not take the first type of art very seriously, in fact he suggests that it may even be an insult to our intelligence. Though it is important for art to break down boundaries, it is probably not essential to be as reactionary as Higgins is.

thank you for reading my essay about the water cycle in central europe

Russolo's The Art of Noises guides modern composers toward a new aesthetic regarding the incorporation of existing sound and "sound objects" into musical compositions. regarding a letter from a friend in the trenches of WWI, Russolo shows us how even the sounds and sights and smells of war can be looked at as a bizarre performance orchestrated by horses, machine guns, signal lights, and cannons.
It seems as though Russolo's desire to seek new media for composition stems from a feeling that existing instruments and standards of instrumentation are inadequate for expressing emotions of a world in an age of machines and mechanical rhythms.
It is interesting to note that Igor Stravinsky, who was composing around the same time, said that he felt that the twelve notes in the standard equal temperament scale and the standard system or rhythmic notation could allow him infinite possibilities for composing music. Stravinsky's music was considered to be revolutionary in his own time and even today a lot of people think that it's pretty far out. right on.
people have been incorpoerating natural sounds into music for centuries. the sounds of birds, streams, wind, cannons and other janx have been written into music by haydn, handel, mozart, bach and others.

did some more reading about philip zimbardo. apparently his book The Lucifer Effect he talks about a lot of things that regard the inherent dismal nature of the human being. doesn't sound very uplifting.

beating a dead horse

The Hirshhorn Museum's recent gallery titled Cinema: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image featured many interesting pieces of film. One piece that particularly interested me for many reasons was Artur Zmijewski's Repetition. Repetition explores the reconstruction of Philip Zimbardo's 1971 "Stanford Prison Experement".
Zmijewski's film was interesting because it demonstrated the power that a camera has to influence events and decisions of actual people. The fact that the experiment was filmed and that the subjects were aware that they were being filmed gave off an eerie feeling of some sort of twisted reality television show.
At one point in the film someone, who i presumed to be the director of the experiment, was speaking to the guards and was encouraging them to use harsher measures with the inmates. By having this interaction caught on camera, it was very suggestive that the director was not conducting a true experiment but actually trying to manipulate the guards to create the ends that he desired. With this in mind, I was reminded of Anne Ellegood's essay Character Driven: Subjectivity and the Cinematic where she comments that "Reality television is not real [and] [d]ocumentary film is not purely truthful." Is it possible to portray something completely true and honest through the cinema? before answering that question we should first try to define truth and honesty. is it even possible to define truth and honesty? how can we determine what is truth and what is real? truth seems like it should probably be relative to reality. is reality the same to every person? probably not. if reality is subjective then maybe truth is also subjective. In the case of Zmijewski's film, it is obviously not an honest attempt to portray truth when the director tried to manipulate the guard by trying to plant insecurities about the warden's ability to control the inmates.
zeppelin rocks number 1.