ZLB

The Yanomamö are a tribal people that live in the rain forest of the Amazon. They have a complicated mythology, with concepts of heaven and hell somewhat similar to christians. When a yonomamo dies he goes to  a place similar to purgatory  where he is asked if he was a good yanomamo, if he answer yes then he goes to heaven which consists of vilage similar to the one they leave in in this world, otherwise he goes to hell which consists of fire and the usual grim stuff. 

  An anthropologist once asked a yonomamo if he wasn’t worried of going to hell. He answered that it didn’t worry him the least, because when the moment came after dying he would simply lie and say he was a good yanomamo, thus entering heaven. If only christians would learn from the yanomamo…

Quote of anonymous protester in Burma in 2007, as seen in BurmaVJ.

A nice guide on how to setup an ambisonics based project in reaper. Btw, reaper 3, which supports multichannel is just out.

   The Juǀʼhoansi are a nomadic people living in the kalahari desert. Their society model is a band, with no permanent authority figures and without role specialization. The only divide is terms of taks is between women and man, women gatherers (which amount to 70% of the calorie intake of the group) and men hunt. In the Juǀʼhoansi there is no hunger, it takes about 2 hours to collect enough food to last for one week. Another interesting fact is that when hunters return with the meat, and since the meat is a valuable item for the band, people don’t show any gratitude towards the hunters and instead claim that the meat is not good enough or not in sufficient quantity. This is to put the hunters in their place, and avoid that they gain a higher role in society.

   Marshal Sahlins, author of the “original affluent society” theory argues that hunter-gatherers societies were affluent, and the switch to agriculture did not bring more affluence, it actually brought less affluence. So why would humans change to a new type of society which brings less resources to the people ? It is argued that it was because in order to have leadership it was needed to have sedentary people, and that therefore this change was because of political motives. It wasn’t more advanced societies that needed political leadership in order to appear, but it was leaders that needed a higher density of static population to be able to ascertain their authority. Archeological evidence demonstrates that early agriculture societies had worse health then hunter-gatherers, thus disproving the long held hypothesis that agriculture was adapted because it provided much more food with less work.

I will be participating in the conference next_generation 3.0 on 13 and 14 june, presenting the work I have developed this year. 

Every two years since 2005, it has invited more than twenty studios from all over Germany and the world to a major “next_generation” festival at ZKM. In two daily concerts and a four-day symposium under the motto “Light–Space–Sound,” more than eighty new compositions will be publicly performed, analyzed, and discussed in the event spaces of the ZKM with a total of 150 participating composers and artists. Many of these works will be presented for the first time ever.

It appears I’m bound for glory… after the notority of (unknowingly) being the frontpage for the STRP festival webpage por weeks, It appears my gear is now decorating the sonospace blog.

In what regards music making.

Analog

Advantages:

• Inherent non-linearities of real world physics, electro-magnetics, mechanics, create unexpected results and rich sounds.
• Complex sounds with little effort.
• Usually analog devices have a direct control mechanism included (keyboard, faders, knobs) and operate “out of the box” , allowing for quick experimentation and (more or less) intuitive exploration.
• Don’t crash and don’t break that easily.
• Hackable: it’s possible to operate out of the designed specs.
• Future proof: just connect to 220 volts and it’s working 100 years from now (at least if you took good care of it).

Disavantages:

• Heavy, expensive, difficult to substitute if broken. Non-portable.
• Results cannot  often be easily replicated (might be a good thing depending on the objective).
• Limited control. Either because of two arms –  100 knobs ratio problem or because of having to patch 100 cables or splice 10000 segments of 1 second of tape takes a lot of time, and limits experimentation of new approaches. 

Digital/Computer

Advantages:

• possibilities are only limited by cpu power and programming capabilities. 100 sine-waves take the same time to “patch” as 1 (not so true in visual programming languages that try to emulate the visual paradigm of analog devices).
• Instant recall of a setup.
• Very portable. A recent powerful laptop can be taken anywhere easily, great for touring, and general traveling.
• Control can be very very complex, much more than anything possible in analog. 

Disadvantages:

• Complex sounds are quite difficult to obtain. Without care and expertise, digital synthesis sounds sterile and repetitive.
• Usually doesn’t operate out of the box. Things have to be setup, programs started, presets recalled, drivers loaded, sound cards selected, midi devices connected, etc.
• Cannot be easily hacked to operate out of the range where it was designed to operate. Randomly changing code will just crash the program, not get more interesting results.  
• Not future proof: high danger of  software becoming obsolete. Running a patch 10 years from now will be no easy task. 

Closed boxed digital devices seem to me to  join the bad parts of the analog world (poor control, not extendable, etc) with the bad parts of computer/digital (not very complex sound material), but they do operate out of the box, are more future proof and more portable than analog equivalents, and off-course sometimes that’s exactly what is needed in a concert situation or for intuitive approaches.

In terms of sound reproduction I don’t really see any advantages of analog vs digital, the best ad-da converters out there are basically transparent and inaudible, and if one wants the “sound” of vinyl or tape I would consider that part of the music making process and not of the sound reproduction.

Simple sound material with complex control VS complex sound materia with simple control

or…

none of the above.

Long time, no see.  What have I been doing lately ? Actually since September of last year I have been working on a new piece of software I called SupaStrings in honor of it being my first supercollider major project. 

  The patch simulates a network of strings using a digital waveguide model. The strings are connected one to another and sound from each one flows into the adjacent strings. The strings can be excited with several noise generators and live input. Each string is to be spatialized by a number of  loudspeakers each simulating the sound the string produces at certain length l along it. 

  I expect to start using this live soonish.

I’ve made a class to add some common used functions of supercollider in a menu using SCMenuItem.

It allows to choose soundcard for each server or all at the same time,  EQ, record window, auto sintax colorize on current document, color picker, open quarks, Init Midi, check current midi messages, run a file with cmd^r .

Finally it adds a menu tree with all files in predetermined folders for easy access. When working on a project I’m always editing the same files, closing and opening the files, and I got fed up and decided to just put them in the menu bar for easy access.

I hope this might be useful for someone else, I think specially newbies will appreciate being able to change the sound card (thanks for someone who posted the code in the list) and record from a gui (thanks Wouter Snoei for ServerRecordWindow !).