Back from Japan

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/jim-murphy/4066873827/)

I've been back in the US for about five days now. Japan was an amazing place, and I learned a ton and was inspired greatly by the folks at the ISMIR conference. Some of the research that I saw presented there will definitely prove to be a groundwork for my projects for years to come (especially in the field of generative music creation).

Also, I was lucky enough to see Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda perform at LiquidRoom in Tokyo on Oct. 31st (thanks to my friend Jeff and his sister Olivia for showing us around Tokyo-- which is now my favorite place on earth). The combination of audio and visual elements created an experience that was much greater than the sum of its parts. I really love their aesthetic and can't wait to see them perform again. Opening for them was Ametsub -- I hadn't heard of him before seeing him, but I was really impressed by his music and visuals. Check him out.

Also, check out this visual patch by my friend Dimitri. Very impressive.

Japan photos

I'm in Kobe, attending the 2009 Ismir Conference and have been logging my trip to Japan here. For more information about what we're presenting, check out my friends' (and coauthors') blog.

Japan is a beautiful country-- I'm lucky to get a chance to be here, and am deeply impressed by the culture, the people, and the landscapes and cityscapes (not to mention the public transit systems).

Quick updates

It's been nice and busy for the last few weeks-- thankfully, that business comes in large part from cool DSP and music work. Next week, I'll be in Japan at the ISMIR conference helping to present a paper that I co-authored (about feature extraction of electronic dance music genres).

In other news, I've been doing a lot of work with DSP on the AVR microprocessor. It's great-- and very good practice in terms of writing clean code.

Finally, I've continued work on my generative Reaktor patches. They're more cluttered with control than ever, but I've gotta say: it's pretty good to be able to program a song's behavior and just have it generate music when you press play.

Until next time!

Reaktor Time

I've been kind of obsessing over generative patches in Reaktor. Note that I'm all for minimalism in UI design if others will be using the interface. For my personal use, I tend to like to have a knob for ever parameter, hence the craziness. Anyway, here's a screen shot of my latest patch (probably around 50% done right now).

Renderings

Here are a couple of renderings of simple objects-- the purpose of these pics is to experiment with depth of field rendering techniques in Blender. For the top picture, I followed this tutorial. It's okay, but the technique is finicky and requires some fine tuning. The lower picture involved me wiring up a node called "defocus," feeding the z data from the picture into the node, setting the camera's depth of field in its object edit stack, and rendering.

As a side note, I've noticed a couple of strange render problems on the second image (such as abruptly-starting lines and whatnot), which is part of the reason why I'm putting this picture online. If you've got any tips about getting clean renders when using Bezier curves, reflections, and DoF, let me know!

Speakers and more

It's been a crazy summer. As a part-time job (which has become more than full-time in the past several weeks), I'm doing music tech for a big show that will be at REDCAT pretty soon. For the show, I had to do a bunch of work in Processing and some web design work. Also... I had to work with my friend Meason Wiley (who took the above photo) to build ten six-channel speaker arrays. Not really my cup of tea (I'm more of a "pump a lot of sound out of big speakers" kind of guy), but the project has been very educational: I had to learn how to solder surface mount components with 100% reliability (agh!), solder against a deadline (I soldered up each amplifier in the speakers-- there are two per speaker), and (thanks to Meason's help) learn how to take an Ikea bowl and transform it into a speaker array. I'll tell you what: installing ten copies of Reaktor onto computers used by Reaktor neophytes, troubleshooting a total of 60 channels of audio driven by boards soldered up by yours truly, and keeping a smile on my face for much of the time has been a strain. Hearing those 60 channels pump out ambient music, though, makes a fellow proud.

I've also been busy building a multi-touch table (using the design of my friends' BricK Table) out of 80/20 extruded aluminum. The table will be a lobby display at the show, and the video generated by the table/computer will be projected in the theater onto the floor via four chained projectors.

I haven't even touched on my friend's new online record label whose website I designed, or the funny reggae night that I had to do lights for (it puts bread on the table), or the charmingly-retro innards of an early-80's/late-70's-era Morley wah pedal that I fixed, or the Klee sequencer that I've been working on. Yep-- busy times.

Eurorack Update

As mentioned in the previous post, I've gone ahead and been bit by the Eurorack bug. I'm very close to starting an FM-intensive, timing-heavy, digital/analog modular system probably using a lot of Doepfer gear (but also some TipTop Audio, PlanB, Harvestman, etc.).

I can't wait to use this as a generative rhythm / minimalistic glitch box. Yeah, I can do that more efficiently and far, far cheaper on a computer (using Reaktor, for example), but I really like the act of patching and physical knob adjustment. Plus, it's more fun to perform with a modular than to hide behind a laptop.

So yeah-- watch this space as I begin to acquire eurorack gear. I'll post photosets, reviews, audio demos, etc. (along with songs and musical clips of my creative output from this gear).

Generative hardware {edited}

I've been really into making generative patches in Reaktor (and pd to a small extent) lately. Since deep down I am (and always will be) a hardware fan, I'm looking to create a small Eurorack system that serves as a generative rhythm engine, a complex gate generator, and a rhythmic noise machine. I've become much less interested in making a "classic" synthesizer in modular format (i.e. a patchable Minimoog or an Arp 2600 emulator), which was my main interest when getting into modulars a couple of years ago. Now, I'm more interested in strange routing possibilities, magic worked by boolean gates, and minimalist crackly noises with strange rhythms. Basically, I want to have a phsycially patchable Reaktor/Pd -- granted, it'll never be nearly as flexible as being able to instantly lay out 250 XOR gates to see what happens, but I like the act of physically patching the synth enough that I'm happy with the tradeoff.

The point of this whole post is that I've been using the modular planner (here) to lay out a system (click on the above image to enlarge it). I'm in the early planning stages, and it'll cost about twice what I could currently get if I sold off my Frac Rack system, but I'm really excited about it. Let me know what you think of the current layout.

[Edit-- I took some of the suggestions in the comments into account and created V2.0 of the modular. After looking at a lot of my favorite Reaktor patches, I noticed that I use banks of oscillators, often in FM situations, to create pseudorandom gates and whatnot. As a result, I added a Hertz Donut and a z3000 (I really like its frequency counter). I also added a second filter-- having one filter for all of those oscillators seemed a little strange. Let me know what you think! The new image is below, click to enlarge.]

TGIMBOEJ

I just signed up for The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk (TGIMBOEJ) - a traveling package of electronic components that moves from user to user via a wiki list.
It's a cool idea - I have a few pieces of junk that I can't use but others might, and I hope to find some weird parts or other to add to my collection (and maybe use in a noisemaker or LED light show or something). I'll post pictures here when/if the box makes it to me.

Bitwise

In between various odd jobs and projects this summer, I've been experimenting with generative and procedural music-making. Using Reaktor, I've put together a suite of several random and near-random instruments-- most of them make use of AM or FM, and all of them rely on the behaviors of Boolean logic gates to gate or otherwise create "sequences."
I'm still in the instrument-building phase, but when I move to record these instruments, I'll probably not use any traditional DAW (other than to do a little mixing), and will let the gate sequencers do the work of song structuring. This will be a nicely different approach to my usual method of obsessively placing each drum hit and glitch sound (I don't usually use any software-based "IDM Creation" plugins, preferring to hand slice and granularize my stuff, laying out automation by hand in each track [automation by hand -- is that an oximoron?]).
Anyway, I'll update this blog with sound samples and maybe a Reaktor ensemble or two. Watch this space!