The sound is pretty involved, so this week I'm talking about just the glitchy looper part. I will make a part 2 soon, to talk about combining the looper with radio noises.
It's a glitchy, experimental trio for flute, clarinet, and MIDI keyboard/Max. There are Morse code and other ham radio samples, electric piano, and bowed cardboard box, and it's surprisingly groovy.
New blog post — I have a track coming out April 12! it's on a new album by the electroacoustic trio Apply Triangle with works by 33 composers, and it was recorded remotely during lockdown.
I talk about collecting amateur radio samples to use in the piece, the album project, and there's even a poem.
Looking for live coders! —musicians and visualists— for a night of live code performances in an immersive projection environment.
Endemics Collective is hosting PLANET TKARONTO in Toronto, Canada on June 8, a satellite event for the International Conference on Live Coding 2024.
The call for performers with more info is at: https://bit.ly/planet-tkaronto .
Live coding is inclusive and accessible to all. We are looking for performers who challenge conventional forms and techniques, disrupting traditional aesthetics and values, and who can engage with the audience directly in the art-or-music-making process, breaking down the barriers between artists and audiences. Performers from underrepresented groups or backgrounds are encouraged to apply.
Some glitchy bass growls from a piece I'm working on!
Imported some non-audio data into Audacity > time stretched it with a phase vocoder > chopped it at the transients > used the Max/MSP "MuBu" tools for concatenative synthesis.
I finally have an RSS feed for my blog! I was initially trying to figure out a way to automatically generate it based on my posts, but I found it was actually quite easy to type it out by hand.
Here's the latest post from my blog! I discuss making "composite" sounds using FFT spectra for part of a current composition project.
My site is all hand-written, but I found that drafting as Markdown in my Joplin notebook, and then converting to HTML in the terminal makes me much more inspired to write.
I'm setting up on PeerTube; here's another one of my compositions for MIDI keyboard, cello & percussion
The MIDI keyboard has DX7 E-PIANO 1 tuned to 19-EDO & glitchy "databending" samples. The cello has a wah pedal & small amp that feeds back with the cello's contact mic.
Hi everyone! I'm a composer & audio developer. I also like fountain pens, mechanical keyboards, software-defined radio, leftist politics & learning new things.
My music tends toward the glitchy, noisy, microtonal side of things, and I like to use Max/MSP and incorporate audio samples from my software-defined radio hobby. You can find my music at my site, SoundCloud & YouTube:
Here's one of my compositions I'm particularly proud of. It's for trumpet, trombone, percussion, and MIDI keyboard. There are cheesy Yamaha DX7 synth sounds, microtonal brass, and glitchy, distorted noise.
The [fftz.ether~] object is comparing two sounds bin-by-bin and picking the bin that's quieter. One sound is microtonal (20-EDO) synth chords, and the other is a bunch of chopped snips of a noisy, lofi piano loop.
I also have snippets of FM radio static frequency-modulating the resulting sound, which I find sounds convincingly like the sounds are on a radio.
The worst advice I was ever given by a professor is that Gang of Four is the only programming book worth reading. After that, its just a matter of practice 🙃
@ramin_hal9001 nice, I hadn't seen cabbage before. But yeah, Pd is pretty bare bones. I used to be a #MaxMSP power user, which I think is the most advanced implementation of visual programming to date, both in the ridiculously customizable development environment that allows you to design GUIs, and with all kinds of interesting debugging tools and the low level gen~ languages that include a jit compiler that allows you to do signal manipulation with the per/sample precision needed to implement zero-delay filters (which are necessary for producing nonlinearities in signal harmonics characteristic of studio analog tape echoes), an area of programming where the stop-the-world effect of garbage collection rules out most high-level languages.
Its really such an amazing system, and something #Ableton would GPL if they knew whats good for them; too much incredible software has been created in Max by important artists and composers to keep it from the world, and Max is being held back by keeping it under the control of #cycling74. C74 should become the cycling74 foundation, then Max could explode, C74 folks could keep their jobs, and Ableton would get integrations with the massive realm of FOSS software by way of Max's expanded reach and rapid development that comes with a free and open source project. And they'd be able to direct a non-profit foundation, which would expand their reach as a company significantly.
I had to stop using it because its proprietary nature creates to many hurdles in the Max SDK to keep up with the rest of the world at the required pace to deliver interactive installations to production events. Jitter in particular is stuck in the stone ages, only reaching openGL 2 with gpu accelerated instancing in like 2017, something I needed in 2010.
I like ableton, ive met Robert Henke and am an old monolake fan. But I hope they can, as artist, think about how important Max has been in art and how it shouldn't remain locked down. Ableton fine, idc, musicians don't share their arrangements anyway. But Max was always this pretending-to-be-open project. It should finally become one.
Today, I had the wonderful pleasure of having #millerpuckette the original developer of the #max software come and speak to my #creativecoding students! I know nothing about max, #maxmsp , or #puredata / #pd (my avenue into code had nothing to do with music) but I followed along and made this little #patch. He was incredibly generous with his time and expertise and he rolled into the room rocking a laptop running Linux which impressed more than a few students. Seriously such an inspiring visit!
@acousticmirror@daviwil yeah, I got my start with Pd in high school, and then had a class on Max at uni and bought the license and only used Pd for SBC stuff after that, but after Pd-extended stopped development I lost track.
while I regret not just sticking to Pd, which I think would have been so much more fruitful in the long run, never having this commercial intermediary and never being tied to OSX & Windows, I think #MaxMSP is the most advanced and promising image of what serious visual programming can be, things like presentation mode are truly game changing and the speed with which you can wire an interface to a DMX video lighting display while getting fine, low level, zero-delay single-sample signal processing precision programmable entirely from with ~gen entirely within a modular visual interface is extremely powerful, and being able to click into presentation mode and create an interface that a stage guy with no knowlege of programming can use in a matter of minutes is truly unparalleled, #ImGui interfaces are a poor substitute.
i think one reason that #MaxMSP is interesting in its own right from the perpective of #PL is that its ultimately a sort of signal-oriented object language, where sine waves and noise are the fundamental data structures and signals are used to control everything, even if you're not doing audio related work. when I hear Sussman talk about future generic programming techniques that use concepts from DSP to design dynamic, reflective systems, I can't help but think thats how computer musicians have been creating sequencers for decades (in an ad-hoc sense).
if the second millenium ended with musicians using the techniques of hackers, the third millenium won't begin until hackers start adopting the technics of music (SL-1200).
@acousticmirror@daviwil I do think #MaxMSP really takes the visual aspect to another level though. being able to develop custom interface components using the tools offered by the programming enviroment itself, not to mention with all the low and high level tools offered by #jitter and gen, and the ability for it to instantly snap together to create a proper front end using presentation-mode, is totally game changer. its worth noting most of Max's interface was written in Max, and everything can be hacked apart live like with smalltalk. the talks I used to give with the presentation systems I would create for each talk were some of the coolest things I've ever done, and I don't have that power any more, or know where I could find it except perhaps #squeak and #pharo.
I'm working on visual material for a record label for the first time since 2019, and it requires post-production effects and compositing work, so I decided to see if #natron would be capable so that I can do everything with #guix, and so far its been simply amazing, not what I expected at all. If you were ever a #pd, #maxmsp, #vvvv, or #touchdesigner programmer who also had to do post production effects work, you'll feel right at home. I'm yet to see how it will handle the workload once the video material is added, but right now just as a #vfx tool that focuses on a programming-oriented workflow while offering all the keyframing facilities of #aftereffects, its already a much preferable workflow than the latter.
I feel like the deeper reason that #Adobe has been so bullish on #AI is that already in 1999 Netochka Nezvanova had demonstrated that everything in time-based digital visual media could be reduced to a system of objects called NATO.0+55+3d, and everything after that is just understanding how those objects compose, so in order to stay relevant Adobe is creating products that figure out the composition for you, so that you never have to learn it and thus stay dependent on them indefinitely.
@mousebot but here, I'll give it a shot based on vibes
Plato: #Agda (the Idea of the Good, proto-Maoist non-conformists)
Aristotle: #C (arch reactionary)
Duns Scotus: #ASM (simple brittle concepts but with plenty of haecceity)
Spinoza: #CommonLisp (OG that everyone thinks is fresh bcs its dynamic)
Descartes: #MLIR (ghost in the machine)
Kant: #CPP (critique of Pure C)
Hegel: #Genera (the absolute Idea as self-reflective system)
Nietzsche: #Scratch (the primacy of appearances)
Marx/Lenin: #ML (self-explanatory)
Freud: #GDB (not phil, but rather the original debugger for all the problems of phil)
Heidegger: #forth (the anti-technology technologist's lang of choice)
Wittgenstein: #Prolog (all there is are the facts)
Stalin: #Haskell (forces you to do things "correctly" even when its neither the best option for the situation nor the most performant; the extreme ML)
Lacan: #rr (meta-debugging, non-linear retroactive causality of the signifier, on top of gdb)
Deleuze: #MaxMSP (thinks programming should be art, thinks art is about infinite flows, elaboration of Nietzsche)
Federici: #SpritelyGoblins (super witchey)
Derrida: #AWK (theres nothing outside the text)
Malabou: #Python (everything is neurobiological including language itself)
Badiou: #Scheme (the generic is the Idea of the Good)
Butler: #Rust (the new generation of Kantians doing things right, performatively)
Last week @terjefjelde asked me about my #composing techniques, use of #musicTechnology, and thoughts about #musicProduction, and I promised to reply when I had more time. Here’s a too-long thread about this and other things that came to mind…
Using pure #musicSynthesis, you either have to forego all that, and settle for a characteristically sterile sound, or else make up for it by your own painstakingly detailed efforts, which I haven’t had the patience to learn to do. On the other hand, the possibilities of #algorithmic processes (not “AI”) and live interaction (e.g. #MaxMSP) are quite attractive. And using #samples rather than synthesis can preserve the organic complexity of sound that I like—as long as you don’t overcook it.
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