Category: LookingOutwards-11

I found the TED talk of Ge Wang on computer music to be extremely inspiring. His projects are mainly on the implementation of of programming languages in interactive software design for computer, mobile and social music. Demonstrated in this video, one of his focus is building instruments for the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, in which he utilizes “Chuck”—the programming language he developed— to create ensembles of laptops, humans and special hemispherical speaker made from wood bowls. The instruments provide acoustic feeling to the computer generated music, and I saw great potential in the performances that the players can do as they adjust the gesture of playing.

The Smule app created by Ge Wang is also interesting in terms of user experiences such as actually blowing to the microphone of iPhones to play music. Both of these projects demonstrated possibilities in bringing music to everyone that has no access or cannot afford different kinds of instruments.

For my Looking Outwards Post on computational music, I looked at an article discussing the Components To the Creative Process. Music needs creativity like many other forms of art. I’ve always seen creativity as a subjective force. Thus, I was surprised and admittedly skeptical when I saw this article claim there were 14 necessary components to creativity.

In a study by computational scientists and linguists, researchers poured over material from various fields from over 6 decades to land 14. Again, I was very skeptical that there was a single path of creativity. Upon reading the list, I found that it wasn’t a hard set pathway, but a series of more subjective terms.

These combined components don’t equal a definition of creativity, so much as elements of the process.

 Bill Keller, Sussex University

Hearing that flexibility and subjectiveness were built into this list, I was actually put at ease reading it:

1. Active involvement and persistence
2. Dealing with uncertainty
3. Domain competence
4. General intellect
5. Generating results
6. Independence and freedom
7. Innovation and emotional involvement
8. Originality
9. Progression and development
10. Social interaction and communication
11. Spontaneity and subconscious process
12. Thinking and evaluation
13. Value
14. Variety, divergence, and experimentation

The researchers then claim that the importance of each of these all change with the type of work, field, and intention. But I was curious how exactly they were able to synthesize these 14 components from all the work they looked at.

Next, looking at this list, I began speculating which creative component would be easiest or hardest to put into a computer. A few seemed obvious such as dealing with uncertainty, progression and development, thinking, and evaluation. But things like emotional involvement, originality, social interaction and communication, and spontaneity and subconscious process frankly all seem against a computer’s nature. It makes me think that computation can be hugely beneficial, but not comprehensive to the creative process of computational music; there still needs to be a human element to contribute emotion.

 

Thru-You / Kutiman

The project I will discuss this week is “Thru-You”, by Israeli musician Kutiman. The project is a song and video clip created by the artist by sampling many unrelated videos that were uploaded to YouTube:

The clip created in the project “Thru-you”, that was created by Kutiman, who samples various clips and created a new musical piece. Source.

Kutiman sampled various clips uploaded to YouTube of artists, musicians and teachers playing different instruments and different melodies.

What I liked most about this project is that instead of creating a musical piece and deciding the role of each instrument in the composition, Kutiman was limited to the clips he found on YouTube and wanted to use, but was also inspired by them.

Kutiman used computational tool to synchronize and match various parts of different songs to work together according to a specific beat, as well as to resample a specific part of a clip to create the wanted result. Although some of the process was manually edited by Kutiman, a lot of his work is based on computing music samples, and ultimately these tools, as well as the existence of the internet, allowed him to create a unique song that is a mashup of videos of random people who posted their videos online.

 

Project VoCo by Adobe

With just 20 minutes of prep work, you can have anyone say anything. -Geektime on Project VoCo

At some point of our lives, we’ve all witnessed the borderline sorcery power of Adobe Photoshop. Recently, an announcement at MAX 2016 brought the jaw-dropping power of Project VoCo, known as the “photoshop for audio contents”, into attention. Here’s a sneak peek of its magical power:

As part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud, Project VoCo features state-of-the-art audio editing capabilities. According to Zeyu, who unveiled the product, provided with a 20-minute speech of a person, Project VoCo will be able to generate any word, phrases, and sentences in the his/her voice. Certain concerns are addressed, too. As much effort as Adobe is putting into generating audio that can pass reality check, Adobe is also building “watermarks” in synthesized audio that can be detected when necessary.

The algorithm was not discussed during the reveal, as one would expect. But Project VoCo essentially breaks down a speech into phonemes, and in piecing the phonemes together, “predicts” the unsaid speech. It is really fascinating to me because it is an advancement in fundamental technology, on which so many achivements can build.

Read more about the implications of Project VoCo here.

This City from Mark Wheeler on Vimeo.

“This City” is an audiovisual performance by Mark Wheeler (also known as Mark Eats) meant to explore the parallel between sound creation and what is happening in the real world. In other words, Wheeler was interested to see what happens when music controls the visuals as much as the visuals influence the music. To create the setup of the performance, Wheeler connected two synthesizers to an app that produced the real-time visuals of city traffic. The visuals software was built using openFrameworks and is dictated by a map that has rules for traffic flow, junctions, and traffic lights. The software can add cars, each with their unique characteristics in speed and aggressiveness.

While I don’t know details about the specific kinds of software he uses, he has a tech walkthrough video, which is displayed below:

Amanda Ghassaei on vimeo

While looking at pages of really amazing videos, I was drawn to Amanda Ghasseai’s Ambient Synthesis designed 4 years ago, which is a interactive sound sculpture that responds to light stimuli to construct a unique, audiovisual interpretation of its environment.  From the vimeo video, the wide range of light intensity seems to affect the sound in different ways.  The data from the surroundings is interpreted by aMaxMSP application to produce abstract symmetrical patterns.

I enjoy the organic nature of this concept as it uses its surroundings to make sounds.  This is a interetsing mixture of madmade computer music controlled by nature, and I think it does a good job smoothly integrating both aspects into a coheretn piece.

I also have to point out Amanda’s videotography and the wide range of landscapes she chose to showcase her work to gather different light.  This really helped me to immidietly understand what was going on.

 

Artist: Robert Henke

Title: Deep Web

Date: 2016

In Looking Outwards 4, I looked at music. This is about sound art. Robert Henke’s ‘laser orchestra’ together with Christopher Bauder’s ‘luminous kinetics’ come together in a phenomenal visual, acoustic 3d experience titled ‘The Web‘. The setting is a large hall rigged with motorised spheres and laser systems. The stage is the space above the audience where the multicoloured laser beams trace out the suspended spheres in colourful blasts synchronised to a musical score.

It seems that the laser beams are activated by the music. I would imagine that depending on the musical note or note combination, laser beams of a certain colour are activated in a given direction to a target sphere which illuminates when the beams strike it. The visual effect closely matches the audio. This, in my opinion, is the main artistic computational aspect of the show. The laser beams and sphere illuminations are mechanically driven.

In his bio, Robert Henke’s interests include space, technical objects. computer generated sound and images. Deep Web shows how he successfully synthesises all these in an artistic audio-visual experience.

‘Spicule’ by Yaxu – Album as a live coding device on Pi Zero

-2016

Spicule allows for tracks to be remixed and reworked in a TidalCycles live coding environment. I really like the fact that the live coding environment that allows the user to play with the tracks for free and is a complex remixing tool that has high functionality. It uses the Haskell pure functional programming language and ultimately lets patterns be composed and combined with expressive code. Patterns are represented as functions of rational time, which allows time to be manipulated to create complexity.

I think this project is really cool because it allows for so much user expressiveness. It provides the tools for the user to dissect the provided tracks in such a way that it really becomes their own music, and I think that is something admirable.

 

For this week’s post on sound art, I chose to focus on Sound Machines, an instrument that was created for performing electronic music. Sound Machines was unveiled in 2011 for Volkswagen at the reveal party for the then new Beetle.

The device itself is composed of three different standard looking record players that are synced to an additional sequencer. The three discs each track a different sound. The visual patterns on the discs were produced manually by “reverse engineering” the music that had been customized for the event itself. The tracks were then controlled by the softwares Arduino and Processing.

I admire that The Product, the Berlin based creators of the device, took into consideration the music itself when designing the device. It adds a personal touch and connection. In addition, the SoundMachines was only the beginning – The Product wants to take it one step further and implement the device at music festivals in the future.

 

In Memoriam Michel Waisvisz was a project done by Nicolas Collins in 2009 to remember the life of Michel Waisvisz who was also a musical composer and inventor of experimental electronic musical instruments. The instrument used in this performance is a simple candle along with a device used to pick up the movement of the flame. The flame controls the oscillators possibly through a temperature sensor.

The way the artist’s artistic abilities are manifested in this project is through his movement of the detector. As the detector moves further or closer to the flame the music changes in pitch and volume. He moves the detector as though it is the baton of a conductor. Another way might be that the artist tuned the device to make it produce the best sounds possible. At the beginning of the performance I did not feel like it was very interesting. However, as the candle started burning out, the flame started flickering which caused the music to be somewhat chaotic. The flickering of the candle and the change in music reminded me of a person struggling for life, refusing to die out and gasping for breath. After a while, the flame dies out as all flames do. All light is gone and the only thing you can hear is silence. The use of a candle in this instrument is very suitable for the artist’s intensions.

Links:

Nicolas Collins Website

Nicolas Collins: Live At Café Oto February 2010

Feedback Examples: Nicolas Collins

In Memoriam Michel Waisvisz by Nicolas Collins on Youtube