RLPF.ar

Last bit about SC Symposium 2009; general news

As promised (weeks ago), just a few remarks about the Saturday night concert. Unfortunately time fades memory and the pieces are no longer fresh in my mind. In general, I was drawn most to the pieces that involved a live performance component. Mark Ballora's Singularity was handsome if relatively conventional (not really a criticism, as my own work steers clear of the far-far-out avant-garde); Andrew Greenwald's Blocks.flt(remix) disassembles the instrument into separate components of fingering, breath, embouchure and vocal effects, recombining them in carefully-deployed extended techniques.

Nick Collins, though, stole the show with a piano "concerto" overflowing with bombastic, ironically-intended classical music gestures, replacing Emerson, Lake and Palmer's acid with crystal meth. In the follow-up work, Kinesics, machine-listening algorithms select from various activities ranging from broad-brush gestures on the piano to diverse tics of insanity in which the performer is instructed to touch himself on the head or torso in various places between notes, or play some registers of the instrument randomly with his heels. Played with an absolute straight face, it was as close as I've seen to the Ministry of Silly Walks in any concert. (Like Monty Python, Nick is English and obsessively fond of acronyms, unleashing these works under the nom de plume of Lan Klekturin. Other work has been released as Sick Lincoln or Click Nilson.)

Since then: up until a few days ago, I was working on an introductory SuperCollider workshop for NIME 2009 (New Interfaces for Musical Expression). Unfortunately they didn't get the number of registrations they hoped for, and the workshop has been canceled. That allows me to turn my attention back to the violin piece full-time, or as full time as I can manage outside of work. This weekend I assembled all the existing segments into a continuously-running sequence -- my first chance to hear the flow of the electronic parts from the beginning up to... as far as I've written. Very exciting to see it coming together! But there is still much to do.

Symposium, Saturday PM, continued

The final session Saturday afternoon was on some compositions and performances using supercollider. Sam Pluta kicked off with an explanation of data structures/monoliths ii (for chion). Of particular interest were the challenges of keeping the video (Quartz composer) in time with the audio from supercollider, and layout of the performance interface, designed (as Sam put it) for someone who doesn't play any instruments at all.

Dan St. Clair's Call Notes had been amusing me the whole weekend. It's an ingenious installation, using solar powered speakers driven by microcontrollers to mimic the sounds of birds singing pop songs ("Like a Virgin," "Der Kommissar" and such). Some of my work got a mention in the talk, from a couple of years back when I did some work on analyzing FFT data to identify spectral peaks. He used it on bird song recordings to figure out the spectrum to morph the pop songs onto.

The installation, by the way, is effective. I didn't see it for myself, but others told me they saw unsuspecting students walking near some of the speakers and stopping short, unsure of what they were hearing.

Last up was Vincent Rioux, who's been involved in some inventive multimedia, dance and street theater performances in France. Discussions were brief, but the video clips were spectacular. The most memorable was the last, of a street theater piece where the performers strapped on sensor suits and proceeded to clean the streets and nearby buildings in an unexpected and very funny ways. I've said it before, and I'll say it again -- God bless the French!

I'll take up the Saturday concert next time --

Saturday talks, part 1

Continuing on with Saturday...

Tom Tlalim was unfortunately not able to make it at the last minute, so we didn't get to hear about his intriguing-sounding mapping library. Instead we had an extensive demo of Marije Baalman's sense world data network. This library identifies a real problem working with networked machines and sensor data coming from multiple sources. The problem is that it's tempting to hack together a quick and dirty communication protocol for each piece, but it's ultimately harder to get things right that way, especially if all the personnel come together for only a few days before the performance. Instead, her library sets up a central hub to which other clients can subscribe, simplifying testing and rehearsal.

Next, Ron Kuivila and I took the stage to go over topics relating to patterns. I spent some time over the winter writing "A Practical Guide to Patterns," a set of help files describing theory and practical uses of patterns for sequencing data and musical events. Ron followed up with more sequencing tricks using Pspawner and demonstrated the Conductor library for handling preset data and easy to build graphic interfaces.

After lunch -- I missed part of Scott Wilson's talk on BEASTmulch for managing huge multichannel pieces going up to 100 speakers or more. What I saw was some very slick work building a virtual model of the speaker system including positioning, directionality and speaker characteristics (complete with a Quartz Composer animated 3-D visualization!).

Jan Trutzschler presented a multitrack sequencer application built totally in SuperCollider, called TeaTracks. Although I like to keep my own use of SC's GUI capabilities fairly simple*, I've enjoyed seeing those capabilities grow and then be put to good use making really polished interfaces.

*My performing interface looks complicated, but it's all fairly simple stuff -- just a lot of them!

The remaining talks were on some compositions written in SC -- I'll take them up in the next post.

Symposium, Friday night concert

Highlights:

Witty, clever theater from Ben Klein in Tubabox the Doppelgänger. He put a box with a primitivist face on it and a cheap piezoelectric transducer to get some grungy lo-fi source audio into the computer.



Angry Sparrow by Chikashi Miyama. Spectacular to watch -- he uses a custom box of seven infrared sensors and choreographs control of sonic parameters with his hands. My one issue with the piece is that the sound design is on the one-dimensional side and could benefit from more variety. But, it's astonishing how much the sound did change just from different motions over the controls -- and don't underestimate the audacity of the visual + sonic image. The box easily solves the problem of boring-to-watch electronic performances, and the in-your-face downtown edge is refreshing.

Sam Pluta's data structures/monoliths ii (for chion) -- a screamer of a mashup of some of the best sounding moments in Hollywood. I liked the vertiginous quality of "anything could happen next" and the irreverence of mixing art with drivel (which reminded me of Anthony Lane's comment about preferring "trash and classics" over the dread, pretentious middlebrow).

Marije Baalman's Livecoding session was cut short by a technical glitch, but was very promising up to that point, especially in the use of typing signals from the keyboard as audio triggers -- the act of performance (typing) becomes part of the sonic result of the performance.

I'd rather not dwell on the lowlights. Most of the other works were enjoyable. <RANT APPROACHING> Only one piece in the second half really stood out as a self-indulgent avant-garde exercise which made its point in two minutes (but went on for another 20). On one season of Project Runway, one of the designers gave an articulate defense of her design, invoking cultural-criticism mumbo-jumbo and suggesting some profound meaning to the garment -- which Jay McCarroll deflated easily by saying, "That's a big talk you've got there, but the talk doesn't match the dress." (Michael Kors opined, "Come on, it's just a tube dress with some tape on it, get over it.") I feel the same when I read a long, jargon-y program note but then the music is aggressively inarticulate. But that's the way of things at computer music conferences. </RANT>

And my performance? Well... almost. The mic levels in my software were not calibrated properly so the sound was not consistent. But I think it was enjoyable nonetheless.

Afterward, Brian Parks (Wesleyan U student) played a one-hour minimalist organ piece by hand in the Chapel. I didn't think I would stay for the whole thing, but then I started up some walking meditation and by the time I was finished, so was the piece! It settled my nerves after the concert. Some of the harmonic changes reminded me of my Duke colleague Chris Adler's work (but Chris would have thrown in more surprises).

Symposium, Friday (day)

Continuing with the symposium's Friday events -- neural networks and machine learning in the morning. Most of the machine learning talks were about self organizing maps. This work is entirely relevant to my algorithmic composition approaches, but it will take some time for me to digest the material.

Marije Baalman spoke about cross-platform issues and mentioned some important things not to do. One slide with general advice on writing for multiple platforms included the clever advice to "try to write cross-platform code"! It doesn't have to be circular logic, if interpreted to mean that one should keep cross-platform matters in mind while writing code -- at least then one is less likely to assume that if it works on my machine, it must work on everybody's.

After lunch, some theory: methods for working with serial techniques, a game after Plato, and a spectacular demonstration of the virtual gamelan project out of Graz. The virtual gamelan encompasses not only sonic analysis and resynthesis of the instruments, but also stylistic analysis and algorithmic "recomposition" of the behaviors of the players, including tempo awareness and signaling between instruments. Very sophisticated.

I missed the Timbral Analysis panel because I had to fetch my performance kit from the hotel. That's a shame because I could really have used the material for the piece I'm working on now.

More about the concert later...

Symposium notes: Thursday

I just got back Sunday night from the third annual SuperCollider symposium, held this year at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. A very fine time indeed.

Some scattershot reflections on the events... more to follow in subsequent posts.

Thursday: Nothing in particular planned for the day, plenty of time for informal chats and working on issues (Ron and I knocked one out during this time). Very pleasant to see many people whom I hadn't seen since the first symposium in Birmingham, UK.

The evening's keynote address by James McCartney discussed an older prototype of SC3 that was never completed. This version would have permitted something that's difficult in the current release, namely "single-sample feedback." The concept is brilliant: have unit generator objects in the SC language write C code to calculate the signal processing graph. Unfortunately it wasn't practical because running an external C compiler to produce the object code to load into the synthesis server took too long, killing interactivity. Also, (paraphrase) "Single-sample will always be slower than block calculation as long as computer memory is hierarchical [that is, CPU registers < L1, L2... Ln cache < RAM < disk], and memory is becoming more hierarchical over time, not less." So block calculation is here to stay -- fine with me, I like how scary-efficient SC is today.

A few people have posted photos and video online:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/djensenius/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/danstowell/sets/72157616657624801/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hecanjog/
http://vimeo.com/4093195

SuperCollider Symposium 2009: Pattern Guide materials

For the convenience of the attendees of the SuperCollider Symposium 2009, my lecture materials are online:

http://www.dewdrop-world.net/sc3/sym09

President Barack Hussein Obama

Once again I have neglected my blog due to pressures from musical work. Today's inauguration of President Obama (a small shiver of excitement in the spine just to write those words!) is momentous enough to rouse me from silence.

I didn't expect much of an impact from the ceremony. Pomp and circumstance means little to me; I'm much more interested in what politicians actually do than in what they say they will do. But I couldn't escape the feeling of the beginning of a catharsis, as if I -- and the whole nation -- are finally able to wake up from the bad dream that was the Bush administration. (Another shiver of excitement to speak of that administration in the past tense.) President Obama can't repair the damage overnight. No one could. But I have strong reason to doubt that he would flout international law in the torture of prisoners of "war," or even engage in an ill-defined, ill-conceived and poorly planned invasion of another nation (under false pretenses, no less). I don't believe he would casually infringe the privacy of US citizens, with neither approval nor oversight. I don't believe he would purge his administration of ideological dissenters, or exploit average Americans' fear of people different from themselves to gain short-term political advantage (pace Turd Blossom) or to distract the American electorate from growing economic injustice at home.

I can't forget the horrors of the last eight years, even in the midst of the swearing-in of President Barack Hussein Obama (another shiver of joy!). Do I overreach to call them horrors? I think not. Many of us did not suffer terribly under Bush; I have yet to experience any significant hardship from that man's failed policies. But I was not prepared in 2000, nor again in 2004, to watch our country -- my native land -- sink so low: to squander a nearly balanced budget; to toss human dignity to the wind in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo; to turn an enormous outpouring of goodwill from the world after September 11, 2001 into mistrust, fear and hatred. Terrible things happened, and we could do little but watch. One can watch only so long before the heart hardens.

Today, the stone shell around my heart began to crack. Because there is hope that the world need not be like this forever, I find myself looking more honestly at the world forced upon us by men who were dishonest and corrupt when they were not incompetent. So I am sad, for the stain on America's dignity, for the world that might have been. But in the sadness, there is recognition that if I am sad, it's because today, I can afford to be. Today, sadness is not despair. It's the beginning of healing. For that, I thank our new President.

Palin

I put my foot in my mouth last week at work. We had some non-technical people involved in a case, and they stubbornly refused to understand the technical explanation. Since I had just been reading about Sarah Palin’s unique grasp of the political landscape, I thought I would make a little joke and say that “getting the executives to understand what’s happening must be like prepping Sarah Palin for a vice presidential debate.” Well, I thought it was funny, but little did I know that the support engineer on the receiving end of the e-mail is Republican. Fortunately he’s good-natured and let it go, although he could have raised a fuss and that might have landed me in some hot water.

So I have a couple of things on my mind. First is that an apology is needed—even though no serious offense was taken, there is a reason why political debates are generally off-limits in the office. I went out on a limb, and while the limb didn’t break, it creaked and gave me a start.

Second though, I find myself thinking through what bothers me so much about Palin and about the McCain campaign in general. Let’s leave aside policy positions—it should go without saying that I think the bulk of the Republican platform is (pace Samuel Johnson) both honest and sensible, except that the parts that are honest are not sensible, and the parts that are sensible are not honest. What troubles me even more—no, infuriates me—is a fundamental attitude toward competence that appears to me completely misguided.

I believe in talent and hard work. Achievement without effort is at best hollow, and represents failed potential—a waste. Effort without ability may not end well, but at least it’s respectable. I can’t particularly fault McCain in this regard. Clearly he has, or used to have, the skills to buck the Republican Party Kommandants without getting politically crucified. (All the more poignant, then, that he has chosen to waste those skills and turn himself into a clone of the rank-and-file, religious-fascist-toadying operatives he once enjoyed holding up to the wall.) But Sarah Palin—where is her talent? What sort of hard work? (Palin on the vice-presidency: “... what is it, exactly, that the v.p. does every day?”)

Palin represents the same lack of seriousness that is eroding America’s pool of science and technology talent (which we, sort of, you know, need if we want to maintain any sort of strength in the coming century and beyond). The lesson is very clear: You don’t have to do much of anything to reach a high position. You don’t have to be especially smart or capable—actually these qualities are, today, a liability! I read of soccer moms who like Palin because “she’s just like us.” Do they fantasize that if she—one of their own kind—could be chosen for the vice presidency, then they too could be chosen for greatness even in the absence of anything exceptional in their past?

That’s the McCain strategy playing out exactly as orchestrated. Once voters identify with a candidate and see themselves in the candidate, rational criticism becomes impossible. The critique, no matter how justified or correct, will inevitably be perceived as an attack on the voters themselves. To question Palin’s competence (which is questionable) is, implicitly, to question your next-door neighbor’s competence—making Palin both underqualified and untouchable. I wonder how many of the Palin wannabes realize that they’re being played, mercilessly. If they did, would they not be mortified? Shouldn’t they?

“Underqualified and untouchable,” of course, is right wing nirvana, from CEO’s who hop from company to company, driving them to bankruptcy and collecting shocking severance packages as a reward for their failures, to the appalling—one could say, criminal—results of Bush Jr’s administration. But as a nation, we cannot afford to be underqualified. We have no more margin for error, to make an ideal of mediocrity. Yes, most people will be just average, and there is not a thing wrong with it. But the average should not run the country. We’ve had eight years to see the consequences—botched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (botched largely because Cheney and that idiot Rumsfeld ignored any and all expert advice that contradicted their preconceived notions), pathetic responses to national disasters (“Heckuva job, Brownie”), and the squandering of Clinton’s surpluses into massive deficits.

Obama may not be a senior member of the Senate, but he shows every indication of applying himself to whatever task needs attention. He is talented and he is no stranger to hard work. I respect this, and I have confidence that a smart guy who works at what he is doing can accomplish great things.

My colleague who bristled at my ill-considered joke took his undergraduate education at the same university (Duke) where I studied for my Ph.D. Its academic reputation is solid and it is no place for underachievers. It’s beyond my understanding how someone could come from such an environment and fail to be offended—shocked—at this repudiation of excellence. I would like to understand, and I hope he is willing to explain it to me sometime.

Preparing for Shanghai

Two months absence -- regrettable, but the preparations for Shanghai are taking just about all of my time.

Just some odds and ends for tonight. Last week at this time, Jimmy and I were at my parents' house in my less than scintillating hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana. Two occasions: my 20th high school reunion, and a visit from my brother, sister in law and absolutely adorable four-year-old niece.



Mom and Dad warned me how energetic she is, but still we were not exactly prepared for the hurricane. But she is a delight, full of imagination and playfulness. That picture was taken after Sunday brunch on the grounds of St. Mary-of-the-Woods college, where my dad taught until retirement. This was near the horses' stables and the alpaca pen -- yes, no kidding, alpacas. Rory was enchanted.

Reunions, especially after so much time, are peculiar affairs. I realized in advance of going that I was looking for some sort of closure. In high school, I didn't feel like I was ever really there -- academics were a different matter, but personally and socially I was always holding back. I'm a much different person now, stronger, more accomplished, more confident, and I needed to bring that person into that old crowd. I was very glad to see a handful of the pack of advanced placement students who followed each other from one accelerated class to another. At the same time, many of the old class dynamics still exist -- the people who organized the reunion are the same ones who organized homecoming, the prom and those other meaningless high school rituals. For them, high school is full of memories and occasions to reminisce are more for their benefit than anyone else's. For myself, I think I always knew my destiny would be elsewhere, and it's with some satisfaction that I can close that chapter of my life and look more to the future.

I'd thought of waxing political, but it's late and I have not much to add beyond what's already been said. So I'll refrain for now, except to offer the observation that Sarah Palin and her lackluster qualifications are a peculiar choice for the Republican second-in-command, from the same party that has been bleating about Obama's youth. Well, never mind, the sheep in their party will do as they're told.

My skills at the macchinetta are improving. On the weekends I generally treat myself to homemade cappuccino or iced latte -- not with the best equipment, but my espresso grounds are better flavored than Starbucks easily (which is not necessarily saying much). We had whole milk in the house for the first time ever (usually it's skim) and I was thrilled to discover that it takes much better to my milk frother than skim ever did, leaving a mountain of light but stiff foam at the top of the cup. Small pleasures.