Today I was listening to a great Soundcloud artist with 22 tracks, all available to freely download.  Since I didn’t see an option to download them all en masse, I wrote up a nifty script to do it, then added a bunch of features to make it shiny.

Download the SoundcloudScraper zip file here:  soundcloudScraper_v1  To use, you’ll need Python; I looked into making it a standalone binary but I’m afraid that’ll have to wait for another time.  Open up a terminal and go to the directory the script is in, and type:

./soundcloudScraper.py artistname

This will automatically download all the available tracks by that artist, meaning tracks with a ‘Download’ button.  You can also specify multiple artists:

./soundcloudScraper.py artist1 artist2 artist3

This script uses the fantastic Animated Terminal Progress Bar module by Nadia Alramli!  If you find any bugs or get some use out of the script, leave a comment! Enjoy!

The Phrygian Étude is a “chain letter” musical experiment in PureData that is composed of YOUR commits!  So fork the Étude, modify the patch (following certain rules), and push it back to us.  When the time is ripe, we will then play back each stage of the composition—commit by commit—as a live performance!

The Neurohedron

Read the full NIME Conference Paper!

Traditional music sequencers are designed fundamentally around predictability and repetition, and these are powerful elements that make them so ubiquitous.  More modern approaches to algorithmic composition heavily involve unpredictability and randomness that is then (sometimes) tamed and manipulated by the composer, resulting in a nonlinear compositional and performative process.

The Neurohedron is a novel music instrument and modal software controller that I conceived of as a nonlinear sequencer.  The simplest traditional sequencers may employ eight steps that return to the first step after reaching the last step; in contrast, the Neurohedron is a three dimensional sequencer with twelve nodes arranged as a dodecahedron.  With this structure, there is no clear or de facto path that the progression from one node to the next may take, unlike the linear and prescribed nature of a traditional sequencer.

Each face on the device is both a touch-switch that sends input triggers to software as well as an electroluminescent panel that displays feedback from the software.  While the platform could be used in a huge variety of ways, my first inclination was to use the inputs as stimuli in a 12-node neural network, where each face is connected in a graph to the 5 faces adjacent to it.  Each of the edges between these faces is then weighted between 0 and 1, and the progression from one face to another follows the highest weighted edges.

Each node (face) in the network is then mapped to a MIDI note.  These mappings are described by a variety of musical modes.  Thus, a sequence on the Neurohedron will send patterns of MIDI notes to a synthesizer platform (Ableton Live, in this case).  This platform is wide open, of course, so anything could be triggered in principal.

Here’s a video overview of the Neurohedron in action:

Here’s a demonstration of the old software (need to post a new video):

The interface is multi-modal, meaning that there are 5 states the interface can be in that determine what it does:

• Input: Pressing a face triggers an input stimulus to the neural network at that node
• Stop: Holding a face down stops any circuits that encounter that node
• Live-play: Sends MIDI notes pursuant to that face’s current mode-mapping
• (Musical) Mode: Changes the mode-mapping of the network
• Randomize: Randomizes all of the neural network’s weights

Here’s a little demo of Matt Boyle & I playing the Neurohedron in live-play mode.

Process & Production

The Neurohedron’s hardware consists of:

• Plexi & aluminum skeleton
• Laser-etched faces
  • Momentary switches
  • EL panels
• Logic Board
  • ATMEGA328PU Microcontroller
  • 2x shift-in registers
  • 2x shift-out registers
  • FTDI USB Interface
• AC Switching array
  • 12x Optoisolated triac & low-current triac pairs

This video demonstrates the shift-in and -out registers controlling switches and panels:

And this one detailing the AC switching:

Here’s a link to a large version of the Neurohedron for print & publication.

And finally, a gallery of production photos:

CHRONOTRONIC WONDER TRANSDUCER is a miniature discollective of musick artists and poet-inventors.  Using a variety of means and methods, from hand-made electronics to custom-designed software, to conjure electromechanical invocations to dead gods and summon sound from the deep void of silence.  CWT’s lineup includes:

Ted Hayes presents Stan Breakhage, an ambient-industrial music & video performance that warps and manhandles Stan Brakhage’s venerable Dog Star Man into visual breakcore, aligned and controlled with custom-designed, live electronic instruments.  See a clip of Stan Breakhage’s premiere performance here.  Ted Hayes is a poet, inventor and composer whose work revolves around the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime, intersecting with desire and plummeting into stratospheres of bright noise and dark philosophy.  Combining both the arcane visions of structuralist film with a sincere sonic splendor, Stan Breakhage is not to be missed.  Read more about Ted’s work at http://log.liminastudio.com.

Joe Mariglio is a composer and artist whose practice spans many mediums.  He is often labeled an electronic musician, but does not really understand the term, since the vast majority of music has been electronic for some time.  Some of Joe’s work deals with problems surrounding the mediation of experiences.  Joe is also interested in networks, human and otherwise, structured improvisation, and narrative forms.  He enjoys baking bread, meditating, and building guitar pedals.  He documents his process at www.joemariglio.com.

And Um Yeah conjures a noisy electro–psychedelic swell and turns it into a song. Using handmade instruments, custom software, and creatively modified electronics, they will attempt to lure you in a world of fun and fear that you can only see by closing your eyes and pressing on your eyeballs. And Um Yeah isAmy Khoshbin and Michael Clemow, based in Brooklyn, NY.  Check them out at http://www.myspace.com/andumyeahmusic.

Steven Litt is a recent graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program of NYU. He is the creator of CrudBox, a robotic rhythm machine that controls electronic or electromechanical devices, amplifying their sounds in real time. His work mixes the raw, abrasive sounds of noise and electroacoustic music with the rhythms of electronic dance music. He is an artist, designer, and musician. He currently lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Lori Napoleon is an artist, mad-scientist and synthesist inspired by the physics of sound and light.  Her background in the hybrid art and science of holography fuels her continued explorations in process and material, and the creative potential intrinsic in challenging our assumptions about everyday objects, and repurposing obsolete technologies.  Spawned by her hybrid love of electronic music and the primordial urge to “build stuff,” Lori is currently focused on sound and instrument design, beating circuits into submission, and composition with analog electronics.

Voilà!  Here are three videos from my performance for Splice NYC, two of which demonstrate my wireless, beat-repeating space eggs of doom:

Postfix

She Landed Here

Can We Now

And if you missed this show, I’m playing next Wednesday (7/15) at Le Poisson Rouge for XRAY!  Facebook event here: XRay

Thanks again to everyone for coming, Matt for playing with me, GP for shooting video, and Maxx for inviting me to play!

Live @ Monkeytown, May 22, 2009: Continuum.Puncta

In a novel collaboration, artist and composer Ted Hayes combined his languid “function drones” with sonic inventor Steve Litt’s “CrudBox,” a solenoid-driven percussive sequencer, to create a fully analog performance that juxtaposes fields of continuous tones—the continuum—with sequences of percussive beats—the “puncta.”

Ted uses common laboratory equipment—the function generator—with processors from much different contexts, like guitar pedals, as a platform for composing epic, rumbling aural landscapes. Conducted with the aid of artful and detailed graphic scores, he is interested in developing melodies that are just out of reach of ordinary timeframes, resulting in impressions and visions as opposed to discrete themes and leitmotifs.

Meanwhile, Steve Litt punctuated these fields and spaces with the amplified percussion generated by his CrudBox, a handmade hardware sequencer that strikes small samples of varying materials to produce a panoply of alien sounds.

Special guest Adam Harvey showed his interactive KaKoozies: “Combining gesture recognition with beer mugs, KaKoozies is a system for creating kinetic art while drinking beer.”

Thanks to everyone for coming to the show, and special thanks to Lindseytr0n for shooting extra video!

tedbot.com
crudlabs.org
ahprojects.com

Last Tuesday at ISSUE Project Room I performed a new experimental music piece titled “Manifold Voices:”

Thanks so much to my players: Jessie Shaffer, Henry Bigelow, and Matt Boyle.  Read on for lots more information on the piece.

“Manifold Voices” is a musical work for violins and function generators. The function generators—electronic lab equipment for generating simple signals—utilize a graphic score that Matt and I interpreted live.  Here are the first three pages:

The score for the function generators consists of a curve denoting amplitude over time. Pitches are indicated numerically in Hertz, and occasionally arrows indicate glissandi. As you can see, it was continuously revised during rehearsals.  The function generators drove two independent speakers, which were mic’d and run into guitar pedals (an Akai Headrush and a multi-effects bank, respectively), then into Ableton Live on a laptop for delay and reverb, and then into the house mixer.

“Manifold Voices” grew out of two intersecting developments: drone music I had been working on with the function generators (the technological side) and research in musical tuning systems (the theoretical side).  Since the function generators afford the use of specific frequency values, I decided to attempt to write this piece using a Pythagorean tuning system, where the fifth interval is a perfect 3/2 harmonic ratio.  Toward this end I developed a simple PureData patch to automatically generate the frequency values for the diatonic scale.  The violins were tuned down to match note values derived from a fundamental frequency of 250hz.  More details to come…

EggBeater uses the intuitive power of rhythm to let anyone control the playback of music. Shaking this small, wireless device in regular patterns can automatically adjust the tempo and timing of loops. Just start playing the EggBeater just as you would a traditional shaker, and listen as the song slows down as you slow down, or speed up as you do!

EggBeater uses an accelerometer coupled with an XBee radio to send your movements to PureData, where they detect your downbeats and rhythmic tempo. The software can then control playback within PureData or send OSC or MIDI messages to other platforms.

Here’s a short video courtesy of Lee-Sean:

Igor Stravinsky has been labeled a “revolutionary” more or less since the first staging of Rite of Spring, whether as praise or condemnation.  Much of the material of Stravinsky’s 6-lesson lectures, Poetics of Music, I found to be uninteresting at times and nonsense at others—but it was worth every minute for the following quotes, which I think reveal his more truly revolutionary ideas.  Read on!

Igor on imagination vs. invention:

“We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.”
—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, p. 53

“Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it.  For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find.  What we imagine does not necessarily take on a concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality, whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actual being worked out.
—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, p. 53

Stravinsky’s opinion closely mirrors my own regarding the prototyping abilities of the imagination: it is the fastest method we have, but also the most prone to misjudgment, and the least able to develop an idea.

But it is these quotes, which inspired quite a bit of controversy in Visual Music a few weeks ago, that I am truly interested in and inspired by:

“From the moment song assumes as its calling the expression of the meaning of discourse, it leaves the realm of music and has nothing more in common with it.”
—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, pp. 42-43

“Do we not, in truth, ask the impossible of music when we expect it to express feelings, to translate dramatic situations, even to imitate nature?”
—Ibid., p. 77

“I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc….Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.”
—Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography, 1935, Calder and Boyars ed., 1975, p.53

It’s rare that I see this sentiment voiced (if you are aware of examples please let me know).  Expression is a form of communication, and communication requires a semiotic code for sent signs to be reliably interpreted by a receiving party.  Codes are arrived at by convention, or sometimes, consensus.  Music has never had, as far as I know, conventional semiotic codes of the linguistic kind, but nonetheless evokes many things to many people.  In this situation, communication has been fallaciously conflated with evocation. The former attempts to transmit the intent of the sender, while the latter is only the result of the receiver’s observation.  The reaction of the receiver to a perceived musical input pattern may be psychological and/or physiological.  A physiological reaction, such as dissonance, can be thought of itself as a sign which then leads to normal psychological reactions; the association of one pattern with another, in the vast chain-reaction that is the living mind/brain.

For some more quotes along similar lines, check out Stravinsky on expression in music and Stravinsky on the purpose of music on Theory of Music.  I also stumbled upon this very fascinating BBC Puzzles piece on musical scores as ciphertexts.

“TwelveStep” is the working title for a wireless dodecahedral step-sequencer and MIDI controller.