new environments demand new lexacons
***
after a few months kindling my dedication to open-source while learning pd, life has taken an unexpected turn - i've invested in cycling 74's (somewhat pricy) commercial version, max/msp. in many ways the two languages are similar; many of the objects are conjugates. perhaps more disconcerting than the difference in the vocabulary is the difference in the process of learning about the languages. in max there are huge pdf tutorials that are more like textbooks in learning the program than introductions. so i find myself clicking through pages and pages of words on a screen, rather than building patches to test my hypotheses about the language. i haven't yet gotten used to this new method of learning - it feels a bit like reading a french textbook rather than speaking with people who speak french.
***
i've been reading curtis roads' 'microsound,' an excellent textbook on granular sounds and granular synthesis. his writing is riviting, thorough, and authoritative. it's like a physics of music textbook edited or curated by a computer musician - only the "good parts" are left in.
roads talks a bit about "accoustical heterodyning ... when two sound sources are positioned relatively closely together and are of sufficiently high amplitude, two new tones appear: one lower and one higher than either of the original tones. The two new comvinations tones correspond to the sum and the difference of the original tones. For example, if one were to emit 90 kHz and 91 kHz into the air, with sufficient energy, one would produce the sum (181 kHz) and the difference (1 kHz), the latter being in the range of human hearing." ultrasound wavelengths (freq > 20 kHz) are so narow, they can be "beamed," like a flashlight or a laser, in a particular direction. so it is possible to use ultrasonic loudspeakers to "beam" sound in a particular direction, and use accoustical heterodyning to make auditory sounds "rain" out of the ultrasonic beam. if you point a beam of sound at a wall, according to roads, it will sound like the origin of the sound is that exact point on the wall. imagine, then, a giant rotating dodecahedron with panels big enough to beam heterodyned sound like a disco ball. wouldn't it be cool to hear a concert where the space of the room literally became an accoustical kaleidoscope?
***
i'm in collaboration with a dancer on a series of improvisation pieces to be premiered two weeks from now. as a result, it seems like a terrific idea to build my first max beatbox. in preparation for building a beatbox/sequencer, i've been downloading all the sequencers i can find, in order to get an idea on what i think is totally essential or brilliant. if any of you know of some good ones, let me know. i think i especially want there to be beatbox "layers" - the ability to stick a beatbox'd rhythm inside a beatbox'd bar, and have different beatboxed bars tucked inside larger "meso-"beatbox structures.
alt ed
in classical music, the character and level of your performance is influenced more by your teachers than the schools you attend. so, young performers seeking to bolster their bio seek individual teachers, traveling to up to ten schools to get lessons with different teachers. a saxophist will go to bowling green state university in ohio just to study with jon sampen, or to arizona state to study with tim mcallister. jon nakamatsu, the first american pianist since 1981 to win the van cliburn international piano competition, studied privately with marina derryberry since the age of six, never even attending music school. this hearkens back to an earlier era in instruction, when guilds of students would pool their resources to bring a famed teacher to come live with them.
in other areas of study, it may well be that a degree from a prestegious institution or from a place that is well known in a specific field is the best way - outside of landing a miraculous job - to kick start a resume. but with the cost of institutional education rising exponentially - not only is the cost of education rising, but interest rates on loans are going up, and governement subsidies are going down - combined, a student can hardly afford to waste any time while in school. it makes more sense to make preliminary independent study in your field before entering a bachelor's or graduate program, so that when you get to a stellar school, you can expend more time and energy on topics that are impossible to learn elsewhere, and coast through the core classes.
when making good bread, a technique called autolyse (pronounced AUTO-lees) says that after mixing the flour and the water together, you should give the mixture a twenty-minute power nap before kneeding the dough. this gives the strands of gluten time to re-allign themselves into a long tapestry after becoming scrambled in mixture. the formation of this tapestry is essential to making layers that the carbon dioxide can be trapped in when the bread rises. in education, too, a type of autolyse is important - taking a break between two formal educational experiences to re-organize your understanding of your interest helps make sure that when you do enter the "mind-kneading" process of your next educational experience, the bonds that tie together your understanding of your field are strong, and ready to trap any inspirational gasses that may rise.
no, but seriously, with the amount of material available on the internet and through inter-library loan, it should be theoretically possible to learn the first year of any degree outside of a school environment (just to take one example, MIT open course ware offers downloadable lecture notes, syllabi, illustrations, and lists of readings for virtually all classes at MIT). the tricky part is picking what information to learn and concentrate on, because there is too much sift through. that's where i want to re-introduce an old concept: the teacher as mentor or facilitator.
the specialty of a mentor is to hone special skills to explore the mountain of available resources - not to trailblaze a path (as a professor does), so much as to offer suggestions and point out landmarks to students seeking to navigate for themselves the terrain of their interest. in addition to suggesting the most pertinent locations to look for resources on a topic, a mentor needs to be able to read a student's personality to determine what it is they are looking to find out.
modern mentorship is a combination of two types of instruction - one very old, and one fairly new. mentorship is inherited from one-on-one instruction of the type that rennaisance guilds followed - the type of instruction still largely followed today by students of classical music.
it is also inherited from consultation, which, though not new, is a particularly strong profession in the modern economy. mentorship is essentially *personal consultation*.
in the next ten years we will see more and more mentors for many of the same reasons consultation as a field is growing. as the world of information grows, year by year we distance ourselves from the time when it was possible to be a renaissance mind - when it was possible to, like da vinci and bacon, be at the forefront of ten fields. today, more important than what you know, is whether you know how to acquire what you need to learn. business owners today can hardly afford the time to run a business and to research all the new technologies he or she should invest in to augment his business - in a coffee shop, for example, they would hire a consultant to research the impact of and the most efficient way to put a wifi node in their shop. similarly, we will soon see students hiring personal consultants especially trained to help them streamline their own resources and the process of learning about the field of their passion. just as people now hire mentors to prep students to do well on college entrance tests, higher-education mentors will be like personal trainers in the field of self-instruction - designed to get you in shape for a self-designed, self-initiated education, where you can absorb more from an institution and get more of what you really need from an institution. applying to the process of self instruction by studying formaly with a mentor will become key to looking distinctive on a resume. just as there are certain music teachers whose studios repeatedly produce students of merit, certain mentors will have studios of self-instructed students who go on to do things of fabulous, self-initiated creativity and originality.
though it may be long indeed before corporations recognize the name of a leading mentor on a resume, individual professionals at the top of their field will begin to know people who have studied with a mentor - and here's why: it will behove professional mentors to be well-connected. the more connections a mentor has, the more appealing their portfolio of students will become.
with more people than ever before getting bachelor's and master's degrees - it's not enough to simply have a degree. to get the competitive edge, taking a year or two to study with a mentor as a pre-collegiate or pre-graduate regime will become standard; just imagine being able to enter grad school with a clearer idea of why, what, and where you want to study, having already made connections in the field and having a comfortability with the core curriculum. then one'd be able to concentrate on taking advantage of what institutions are really good at - not instruction - but organizing resources into one location; you'd be trained especially to find the materials that are most pertinent to your own absorption of the field that interests you.
open sound control
as the break has given me more time i've been experimenting with processing more, in the hopes that i will be able to get pd to talk to it - and eventually to use the processing graphical environment as a front end for some of my pd patches. there are a lot of exciting extensions for
processing already, including a realtime sound synthesis extension, a midi i/o patch, a max/msp extension, and an open sound control i/o patch. there's quite a bit of powerful computing already being done with processing, such as Jeff Han's stunning Multi Touch Interaction work at NYU. pixelsumo's chris o'shea reccomended using open sound control to link between pure data and processing, a protocol i'm not really familiar with. it seems pretty exciting, though, many people seem to tout it as the replacement for midi. OSC started at berkeley's CNMAT. Jeff Han's multi touch system uses a version of OSC to communicate it's data to processing.
digital life geek theory
as the time approaches when i will pack up all my stuff, re-assess what posessions i really want to lug accross the country, the more i am thinking that digital consolidation sounds like a venerable idea. i wish i had one of those huge book scanners that could process five books an hour, so i could just get rid of my physical copies. i'm sick of only being halfway dependent on computers - i'd rather just have all my eggs in one basket (backed up, of course).
recently i've been reading hyperimprovisation: computer-interactive sound improvisation by an australian sound artist roger dean, writing for the computer music and digital audio series. it's not an authoritative source on the topic, but the tone is certainly what i'm looking for. i had it on interlibrary loan until today. i would consider purchasing this book if i could simply just have a digital copy ... at this point i can't add to the boxes of books i've accumulated (aesthetics or not). soon i will start a now reading column to the right.
i've been rather swamped with other concerns lately, and my postings have dwindled. in another week i'll be back in full force.
***
the blogging era mutates the concept of self without offering to redefine it. it's not quite a new problem - the idea of voice and tone are as old as the history of writing, and especially literature - but something about the blogging era puts the problem on a whole new level. some people blog only for their friends and family, others only for themselves - a sort of diary, some blogs try to document the development or coverage of a concept (http://coolgooglemaps.blogspot.com/ , http://www.thelongtail.com/), others blog simply to take part in the blogsphere (discussions between blogs, especially political), others are artistic (novels, poems, photoblogs). each of these are things that the individual or the group voluntarily submit to wider scrutiny. is your identity the collection things that you envision and or encourage other people to think about you? if so, do people develop a separate digital identity, another personality they become when they are connected to the interweb?
how does the vague threat on one's privacy determine what the digital identity decides to disclose to the web?
***
three years ago, i didn't have a digital camera, and my mother and sister swore they would never be influenced by the trend toward digital photography (photography is a family hobby for us). today, we all have pro accounts at flickr.
ephemisition
electronic music is built on the idea that musical tools can fit together like lego modules, infinitely customizable and redesignable. to make e:m is to express the tool that has [indeed, is defined as] no limits. max/msp, pd, csound, chuck, reaktor all cater to this glowing molten core of flexibility - flexibility of sound, flexibility of process.
every time you configure equipment, you create a situation to uncover new sounds and musical situations. a new composition in e:m. is a new configuration of equipment (and vice versa): the situation that lets you uncover this music you're making right now. equipment can even be ideas about musical structure or how the events unfold in time. e:m is a great example of marshall mcluhan's edict that in our era the "medium" of communication (musc, radio, art, discussion, etc) is the primary message of communication is expressed in will eventually become the content of things conveyed.
whether it's coltrane or takemura, the best improvisations come from people who are incredibly familiar with the materials and the structures that support them.
in e:m, you change the configuration every time; it's not a saxophone, where you can spend a lifetime perfecting your technique on one instrument. as classical composers investigated harmonic possibilities, we investigate different configurations of our tools: we investigate different possibilities of the situation of improvisation.
ephemisition expresses a type of a composition that isn't designed to last for three hundred years. it is composed to be ephemeral. you look at your equipment, arrange it, get it in an order that will let you do something compelling, and then you do it, express that configuration. sometimes you record it, take a snapshot of a distant land: so you can tear it apart and build a nother configuration.
ephemisation puts the composition back in improvisation, just as it puts the improvisation back in composition.
using pd to cue improvisation
this rough patch shows how pure data can help structure improv sessions. the green bars pulse to and from the center at a random speed, touching one of the edges every 1.5-30 seconds. every time they touch an edge, the pink thing blinks and the speed is reset to a different value for the return trip. the number in the middle of the green sliders tells you how fast the sliders are going, so you can see whether the next transformation is happening sooner or later than the previous one.
the idea is that for each "piece" we'll make a map of the stages on a paper passed around before the impvosation. each person could add a few events, for example: first stage we'll do ambient synth pad based stuff, second stage joe'll start adding samples of birds, third stage dan will make a beat from synth gate clicks somewhere, etc. the time range can be reset so that each transofrmation happens between one and four minutes (or whatever duration is appropriate), and it's possible to bring in probability so that at different parts of the piece it's more likely to get a short or a long time. pure data can trigger any set of midi events we choose at each of the stages; using midiyoke we can have them cue events in reason and ableton. so we will hear transformations even if no one sees the next stage arrive.
we could set up a central computer monitor we could all see, but if we each wanted to see the visual on our computer, we could use the gripd or netpd to connect copies of pure data on each of our computers. i've heard that it should now be possible to send midi over ethernet cable. if that can be done, it might be easier to midi-sync each of our copies with one copy of pure data, and use the midi data to generate graphics on the slave computers.
i'm hoping to have a podcast of our sessions up by this next weekend.
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