(we are) electronic performers

Wolfgang and I attended the MusicHackDay in Amsterdam last week. While we saw some cool things and had some great talks with people from Soundcloud, citysounds.fm, Steim, RJDJ etc., the whole day was a bit disappointing, because it was only one day (which is slightly below the threshold of time you need to produce visible/audible output) and because the network was extremely flakey (to say the least), so working with web APIs was kinda out of question.

We went there with a rather strange precondition: Wolfgang stumbled over the algorithms for so called Stream graphs, a special variant of stacked graphs which are not only very aesthetically pleasing (having a very strange, almost audible character), but also very easy to read.

So, our “well defined” hack day project was to visualize “something” with this newfound tool of ours. I then added some more complexity by trying to implement stream graphs on top of a javascript SVG library I always wanted to try: Raphaël.

It took us most of the way to Amsterdam (by train) to get a very crude version of a streamgraph to render. It took me most of the hackday itself to make that into a proper g.raphaeljs extension and it took us almost the full hackday to download SOME data to play with.

Finally, a week later, on last friday, I managed to turn this into a proper app. Today, I implemented labelling, and now I consider this “done enough” to brag about it. If your DNS is one of the faster kinds, you should be able to see it @ echonest.streamgraphing.org. (if not, try this heroku url)

What we do there is that we use the hotttness-api call to echonest to get a list of artists currently considered hawt, and then use the echonest feeds to get news items and blog posts on those artists. we aggregate them by weeks and display the numbers in a streamgraph.

BTW: Echonest is da bomb. What an amazing collection of APIs and services.

And who knows? Maybe this is enough to win some of the prices of the amsterdam hack day? :)

Well, it’s funny. You talk about ideas and about technology and how this all might transform our view on music and artists and about distribution and about performance and whatnot, and yes, you give a small demo to underline your ideas. And then, after everything is done, and the points are being made and the discussions been brought to a halt by the people organizing the congress, you meet someone who asks you if you want to transform movements of people on a bungee trampoline into sound. Like, after all you said and demonstrated, this totally would be the next logical step. And he even goes quite some lengths to make you overcome your fears that this might probably a too big of a move for you.

Wolfgang Schmiedt is that guy. He is the main guy/director behind a nice little two day festivity called “Lichtklangnacht” in Rostock, where he, and quite a lot of various artists turn the park that has been created for the 2003 international garden fair (IGA) into a beautiful light sculpture combined with musical and theatrical performances. Mind you, before Wolfgang approached me, I never heard of it, so it seems like more of a local attraction. Still, some over 4000 people came this year to look at the spectacle.

The “Lichtklangnacht” (loosely translatable as “lightsoundnight”) always has a motto, an old story as an anchor to everything happening on the two nights. This year, the story of Peter Pan was chosen, with the appropriate subtitle “of dreaming and flying”. To create an attraction for the otherwise mostly bored-to-death children, Wolfgang added a bungee trampoline to the setup. Pretty close to flying, if you ask me.

Now, obviously, for someone like Wolfgang Schmiedt, all it takes to connect the dots is to watch some geeks showing off some technology (in our case, we played with the acceleration sensors in an iphone to show how you can use it to influence a music performance). Which is, in itself, amazing.

But what can I say? We actually did it. We turned a four-seat bungee trampoline into a music instrument. Kind of.

More details coming soon.

To give a quick demonstration on how to create a more collaborative performance environment, we used a rather chaotic setup. Over the coming weeks and months, we will not only open source the stuff we built to do it, but also will try to improve on it, make the setup more modular and flexible, so that musicians can use it both as a tool to spread the idea, but also as a means of creating their own interactive performances in a more easy and abstracted way.

The next few posts will introduce you to the underlying technologies. The most important technology used in the setup (Softwarewise) is PureData.

PureData is the third incarnation of an idea born in the head of Miller Puckette who currently teaches Computer Music at the UCSD (San Diego). The two earlier incarnations are Max/MSP (Developed as Commercial Software by Cycling74), which still is kind of an industry standard, and jMax, a Java based clone of Max, a project that recently got revived after a few years of relative quietness.

Pure data, on its homepage, is described as a “real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing”. But what does that mean? First of all, programming really is done in a graphical way, which means that while PureData has a very steep learning curve, at least you don’t have to be a coder to understand PureData patches.

In it’s core, PureData is about signal flows, or, put differently, manipulation (processing) of streams of data. Let’s leave out the “video and graphical processing” part for a minute and ask what “data streams” might be in an audio context. One kind of data stream is digital sound - You can use PureData to sample sounds, manipulate them and output them again. Other forms of data streams could be streams of note data, or even completely arbitrary controller data. One of the beauties of PureData are the many many ways in which you can actually feed data streams into PureData and the many ways in which you can output them again. This makes PureData the ideal playground for people experimenting with unusual forms of musical interaction. Simply put: If your computer eats the data, PureData will, too.

But PureData can also generate data. It contains simple function generators and oscillators so that you can actually build your own software synthesizer with it. And since it contains a lot of very low level manipulation tools, you can also do all kinds of weird stuff with it that would make people like Aphex Twin and Autechre perfectly happy.

In our setup, we use PureData both as a processing tool (transforming incoming data streams from external sources like sensors into something meaningful) and a software synthesis tool. In it’s current form, the only software used in the demo setup is PureData and a rather complex and chaotic patch.

I’ll walk you through interesting details of our PD setup throughout the next articles.

Through the eyes of the music industry, the last few years with both the mass distribution of digital copy tools (such as CD/DVD burners) and the internet as a very efficient mechanism of distribution, are nothing but their apocalypse. Gone are the Good Old Days - portrayed as the time where the music business was a closed, independent business where money stayed “in the family” for good.

We will look at those Good Old Days and try to put things back into perspective by pulling out the history books and looking back a little further in history than to the beginning of audio recordings.

In addition to this necessary shift of perspective, we’ll look specifically at the implications of universally available digital technology and will try to outline what we call a “digital dialectics”: Digital technology not only gives you endless reproduction without losing quality, but also endless possibilities of creating new, unreproduceable art. In our view, this brings us back to the very foundation of what music used to be in a very distant past.

We’ve stated our views in a talk we’ve already given at Hamburg’s Operation Ton (including reactions from German newspaper taz) and at the Future Music Camp in Mannheim. There are the slides of the talk (achtung - German content):

But because talk is cheap, we’ve been working on a tangible example of what co-creation and collective performance of music could be like: Using Pure Data, iPhones and some advanced hackery, we created a first version of a toolset for collective music making. We’ll post more about it soon, including scripts and patches to be reused, refined and reinterpreted by you folks.

So - join in, follow us on tumblr, and share your thoughts!

Because, in the end, we all could be electronic perfomers.