An in-browser realisation of the link below about bitshifting formulas producing demo music

C programs that dump PCM audio directly. Circuit hacking software style.

3 hour Dutch radio programme about Hennix's music from UbuWeb

"This latest addition to Die Schachtel's sublime Art Series is a largely neglected masterpiece from Swedish-born composer Catherine Christer Hennix, a disciple of LaMonte Young and Pandit Pran Nath during the 1970s. Although her music is largely unknown - even among the experimental music community - those who've been exposed to Hennix's work tend to rank her among the elite of American minimalist composers of the twentieth century.

The Electric Harpsichord (recorded in 1976) is talked about with the highest reverence by the avant-garde's cognoscenti, with Glenn Branca describing it as "a pure perfect piece of music" and "a work of transcendent power". Having embarked on her compositional career in the 1960s studying the techniques of Xenakis and Stockhausen, Hennix's musical bearing was jolted somewhat by the Nuits du Fondation Maeght festival in 1970, where she first encountered LaMonte Young and Hindustani raga master Sri Faquir Pandit Pran Nath. Over the course of the ensuing decade, Hennix would study with both these men, and to many the piece reproduced on this disc is her magnum opus.

Made using keyboards tuned to just intonation and a tape delay feedback network based on Terry Riley's notion of the "time lag accumulator", the piece is a thing of sparkling psychedelic chaos, achieving that magical dichotomy between apparent narrative-shirking motionlessness and eternal flux. For all its droning stability on a 'macro' level, The Electric Harpsichord's continually recombining layers ensure it remains ceaselessly shifting in 'micro' terms. Significantly, none of this gets out of hand and you can still make out the individual pitches ebbing and flowing within the sound mass. Paying close attention reveals some incredible oceanic movements within the sound waves, and repeat listens reap considerable rewards.

This recording lasts twenty-five minutes, though in the strictest terms it should be considered as only a fragment of what the composition represents; in conceptual terms The Electric Harpsichord would be an endless, perpetual entity.

In support of the music itself, this release comes in a box that opens to reveal a 60-page booklet containing two LaMonte Young pieces written especially for this edition, plus an extensive essay by Henry Flynt (a close friend of Hennix) as well as some illuminating, if highly technical and abstract background text from Hennix herself, who reproduces excerpts from her "notes on the composite sine-wave drone over which The Electric Harpsichord is performed". This utterly absorbing and highly involved passage is just the thing to show drone music naysayers who think it's all just somebody holding a note for a really long time."

I've been after a copy of this for years. Hope some of the dosh goes to Hennix, who is, according to the Wire article, in need of the income. There should be pensions....

"Born in 1949, Scott-Heron was the son of a Jamaican footballer who was the first black man to play for Glasgow's Celtic FC."

I never knew this.

"Well you know th th the catch phrase, what that was all about, the revolution won't be televised, that was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind, you have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move, so when we said that the revolution will not be televised we were saying that like er the thing that's going to change people is something that noone will ever be able to catch on film, its something that you see and all of a sudden you realise 'I'm on the wrong page' or 'I'm on the right page but I'm on the wrong note and I've got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what is happening in this country."

RIP Scott-Heron.

Looks pretty good. Need to spend an hour to get it working on Ubuntu 10.10. Via PureDyne mail list.

Another dj using open source software. A three hour mix with Puredyne applications (MIXXX and fluxus) on, wait for it, an EeePC 701. Thats playing audio and beat matching together with projecting graphics on a low power CPU. I'd love to know what the dsp percentage was, Via puredyne mailing list

Short film about David Toop's work and the laptop orchestra

Reaktor got there first. I have this idea for a 'stevealator' in pure data. I'll still do it though...

Nice, well documented, recordings of a 'collected' gamelan in a European museum. The author has provided wavs of each of the individual instruments in each of two contrasting gamelans. Copyright free for sampling provided original samples provided with derivative works.

William Furlong produced the Audio Arts series of tape cassettes for many years. Extracts from the master tapes are available from the tate's web site. Furlong interviewed many artists and sound artists for the cassette magazine. This is a short interview with John Cage.

Alpha software at present, the other end of the scale to Jokosher, looks more like logic pro to me, and supports plugins of many types.

A relatively easy sound recording and mixing program. You can install effects plugins as well. Available in the Ubuntu repository and for windows.

Interesting use of electronics to process acoustic instruments.

Get the Cage Train from Staleybridge. Love it.

Dance piece produced in supercollider with motion feedback.

A composition prize goes to an accoustic sound art sculpture thing. Nice.

"Recently I came across some cassette tapes my mother recorded, spanning from a few months before my birth in 1982 to 1986. The recordings begin with fetal heartbeats and progress through episodes of crying, laughter, play, and different stages of speech development. The material interested me somewhat for its personal value, but moreso as an artifact of impromptu and performative documentation. Which is to say, there is a constant negotiation between the unpredictability of the child's behavior and the expectations which the parent projects onto the process of recording. This friction is reflected in the chaotic quality of the sounds, which move between soothing and anxious textures."

The sonics course now has its own blog, so less link space here. Back to Maths!

noise sources with envelopes

Algorithmic music example. Python -> MIDI for the disklavier and -> Lilypond for a score. Do I want to get this close to 'music' for the project?

breadboard circuit bending

"The mapping of nonmusical material to pitches is another ancient idea. A medieval technique known as soggetto cavato (a theme "carved" from words) maps the individual letters of words to music. For example, Hercules Dux Ferrarie, a mass by Josquin des Prez dedicated to Hercules, Duke of Ferrara, uses a theme based on the vowels in the Duke's name. The sequence of vowels e-u-e-u-e-a-i-e is first mapped to the six solmization syllables (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la), which generates the following syllables: re, ut, re, ut, re, fa, mi, re. When converted to traditional note names, one gets the pitches, D-C-D-C-D-F-E-D. This technique has been used extensively by composers throughout history, including J. S. Bach." Diaz-Jerez. That is a whole project in itself... music from text messages?

Uses a single parameter iteration by Lorenz to produce some music - provides software that implements fractal music (l-systems and automata). PhD thesis is available as PDF, taken in Manhattan so in English.

Format of a text file that can send messages to pd objects, its called a qlist and there is an example in 4.2.1.2. I'm away with a basic program to generate the text file...

Processing: when you are adding in libraries on Linux, you need to make sure that the folder with the library files in it has the same case as the name of the .jar file. So a .jar file called MyLibrary has to be in a folder called library within MyLibrary itself within libraries in the sketchbook folder. Many authors use lower case names for the folders in the zip files - those work on Windows but not on Linux (and I guess on Mac OS)

In javascript! With a background that is under the text width in CSS!

a much simpler lorenz attractor

Nice implementation with real time controls of the parameters...

Sound library for Processing with documentation and examples...

digital art project (permacultures) by goto10 collective in a London studio and resources venue called SPACES. This looks like a crystal lattice and apparently there will be beasts walking around it...

indexhibit is a php script for your web server for displaying images with text and keeping it all organised. Needs a MySQL database. I remember it being a bit funky to set up. Gallery, portfolio, pages. Forum is active, but source code shows no updates to main application for a couple of years. Perhaps it just does everything OK now...

"The bone I had to pick with (Pierre) Schaeffer and that bunch was that if they were using the sound of a car crash, they had to lower it by an octave or speed it up by an octave, run it through a ring modulator or play it backwards. Why not hear that it's a car crash! These sounds that you're using in the original state have some kind of emotional resonance. We relate to them in various ways. If you bring them into the music, that brings in an emotional, theatrical meaning which is useful. It's worthwhile maintaining and building upon." - early tape pieces, stay low on the fx tracks!

The soundtrack rhythm made out of machine noise - idea for project

Blender + PD :: sound and visuals

the mother lode

Nearest CentOS mirror to me with an installer DVD image. Netinstall generates daft corrupt .rpm errors due to gateway timeouts. Heading for ccrma repository once I get the thing installed with a real time kernel.

VST on Ubuntustudio

Blog with links to sound art samples. Interesting range of stuff

I love those wire frame radio shaped loudspeaker holders... The idea of the propagating silences is nice as well

Once CentOS is up and running...

Useful post installation stuff for CentOS desktop. CentOS supports the ccrma music repository and actually has a real time kernel that is currently supported

Cheesy or what

blue peter lives: make your own binaural microphones. I'm thinking of a ceiling tile head shaped cut out for isolation between the microphones. There are sound samples.

Its gonna rain starts at 2:45 with the actuality, and 3:12 for the tape phase (about 10seconds).

Charlemagne Palestine performing a short piece of strumming music on the Bournville Village church bells. Great stuff and how did I miss this happening?

Catchy title and no beat. serious drone music.

Scott Unrien's photo of Charlemagne Palestine at the keyboard, Schlingen Blagen, I think at the Spitalfields performance.

More recent podcasts from RNE Radio 3 with Jordi Giradez, search for Sismografo

Podcast in spanish about oramics and other kinds of eletronic music

some mp3 samples of oramics system tracks

The composition on soundcloud.com.

Site with a sample of a composition produced using the oramics 35mm painting music system

painting music - oramics in action

what I was on about last Thursday. I want an oramics iPad app NOW

Puredata score realised into audio using puredata. Looks ace. Oramics for the 21st century

Score for music realised in puredata

The circuit bending project starts. Just exploring affordances, no definite plan yet. Little time as well right now.

Individual cassette tapes as tokens

Paul Hegarty on the passing of a technology

what would this sound like if it was a noise?

"...that sound has this characteristic of the uncanny, that sound is to some degree a ghost, and hence this expression in the mediumship of the listener. Sound is transitory, ambiguous in its location in space, and it’s uncertain; it lends itself to representations of uncertainty. It lends itself to feelings of dread and fear and loss and these emotional states, these extreme psychic states. It lends itself to mysticism, all these ineffable experiences. These sensations of immateriality." David Toop

Full Web site about an important record. Lots of reading amid the sales pitch.

I like this one...

Drone music at the art gallery. Impressive amount of noise. Looks like a radio aerial there as well - link to pa?

the command line in the first post works.

There is a gentleman who collects cassette tapes... a connoisseur of rust...

The nice tidy face of circuit bending. A kit with a cool black PCB (genius marketing, I now want to find who makes photo-resist black PCBs). Perhaps not in the true spirit of urban angst at technology, but strikes me as a relatively straight forward construction project for a performance art course or sound tech course and a useful artefact for the participants at the end.

Circuit bending again. I'm trying to find recipes for non-harsh sounds. Neroli style bell sounds, or an interior wind chime would be good.

Some truly strange electronics here. I'm not anti-theory, and so will probably design the re-purposing of electronics junk to achieve specific ranges of sound. I like the idea of photoelectric cells to provide changing resistances.

Pure data basics

Pure data background - the dataflow visual programming model

object reference for pure data with ace background

how to write the puredata output to a file. This tutorial starts with a patch to make a simple sound recorder using pure data. Works fine on the t42 with crunchbang and puredata usong the OSS sound framework. I get errors using ALSA and have not installed Jack on this system yet. Audacity works fine when you switch off the PureData compute audio so it releases the sound hardware. These two programs will get me going as I can build a lot of things in pd

how to record pure data output.

pure data patches for basic synthesis (sine, saw, square &c)

Could be useful - I'm going back to basics perhaps. NB doesn't want to work on office 2003.

Intuitionist - but can't find any maths

background