Marsha Vdovin

Adaptable, minimalist interfacesmonome website

Interview with Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain from Monome

Brian Crabtree (who performs under the name tehn) and his partner Kelli Cain are collectively known as monome. They design what they call adaptable, minimalist interfaces. The musical instrument industry calls them alternate controllers. There are currently three models that interface with a computer. There is no hard-wired functionality; interaction between the keys and lights is determined by the application (such as Max/MSP) running on the computer. Basically the monome units can do whatever you program them to do and serve as alternate controllers for not just music but games, lights, video etc. Monome is fantastically successful. I found their story inspiring and exciting -- they represent a new breed of creative entrepreneurs who are environmentally and socially conscious.

 Where are you from?  Where did you grow up? 

Brian: I grew up mostly in Southern California. We lived on the edge of town, which meant spending a lot of time in the hills and creeks with friends. Wilderness served as a sort of blank slate for inventing projects (divert a stream) and games (rock stacking) and architectures (tree forts). We lived in a subdivision where you had to drive to get anywhere and neighbors rarely came outside, (which I could likewise be accused of as I discovered computers much too young).

Kelli: I grew up in a small post-industrial city in Southern New Jersey that was central to a huge agricultural community. It was the kind of place where you could go horse back riding in the country, pass through a field of soybean plants, cross through the woods, and end up in the drive-thru of a fast-food joint. There was a fair share of abandoned factories to explore, train tracks to wander, and spots to go fishing (or watch people fish).

 When you were a kid (elementary school), what did want to do when you grew up? 

Brian: I luckily don't feel like I was ever pressured or preoccupied with this thought. Even through grad school I didn't have much of an idea what would end up being a career, instead focusing intensely on whatever was interesting to me at the time. Since elementary school this has been a mix of computers and music, later I found out I could unite these explorations and also add electronics. There were of course diversions into early computer RPGs (for future nerd credibility) and skateboarding and climbing on whatever in general. Part of "growing up" always seemed to feel like some sort of arrival, like a plateau. I'm glad to have a sense that we're still learning everyday, invite new research enthusiastically, and try to be adaptable in complicated situations.

Kelli: I had so many interests as a kid and a fairly large imagination when it came to wondering what adults actually did when they got to be adults. I was pretty serious about ghost busting. A lot of thought went into that potential career path. There are many others of course, but sucking wandering spirits into a vacuum-like apparatus and helping them find their way to some kind of afterlife. That was one preoccupation.

Brian: Very early on (wearing my mom-made superhero cape) I carefully assembled a habitat for caterpillars whom I perceived to had fallen out of trees. I cried inconsolably after accidentally stepping on one who had jumped ship.

Kelli: I had an early obsession with pretending to be blind and/or having only one arm ... it sounds strange and amazingly insensitive, I mean I know my parents were probably confused by it, but I wore this scarf over my eyes and tied my arm to my waste and just hung out around the house.

Both: architecture, the natural sciences, irony, pure math, agriculture, well designed manuscripts, Jane Jacobs, Charles and Ray Eames, John Cage, Louis Kahn, Masanobu Fukuoka and many others.

 Tell me about your college and grad school experiences? 

Brian: Hopefully our first lessons are to learn how to learn. School is expensive and you don't actually buy knowledge anyway. You buy access to instructors, peers, and tools-- but most importantly time. Honestly I'd like to see the emergence of a new generation of modern farmers with enormous libraries and workshops.

Kelli: School is pretty much what you make of it and how well you manage to take advantage of the time and resources presented to you, and you may even find that after you've done all that you still feel a little short changed when you’re still paying for it twenty years after the fact.

Post formalized education however, I'm amazed at just how much I continue to learn and experience for free or for what feels like a donation to someone or something I believe in... I see the re-emergence of community based educational opportunities via cultural institutions, non-profits, and independent and creative well-learned citizens as a total step in the right direction. I can't help but think that just like most everything going on now, we need to take the BIG business aspect out of education.

Brian: At UCSD, after deciding to dedicate myself to computer music/art. Despite my extensive background in computer science and modern music technology, Max/MSP opened worlds of possibilities with shocking ease. Max allowed endless flexibility to create precisely the live performance and composition environments I imagined, where commercial hardware had failed in various ways.

Kelli: Brian introduced me to Max/MSP through some of his early music performances... for me it was like watching Brian give the tin man a real, bloody beating heart — half-magic, half surgery...

Brian: I was attracted to Max/MSP for a live performance setting. All of my life-performance work was confined to different ways of trying to fit commercial gear into doing things they weren't supposed to do. So by being able to program our own systems, we could determine exactly the way that we wanted to perform and try to express ourselves with computers, which are traditionally very not expressive tools. So that enabled us to strip away a lot of those layers.

Photo by Peter Kirn How did the monome come about? 

Brian: The whole thing came about initially as a device that I designed for myself for performing music, which was enabled by my discovering Max/MSP, basically. Being able to have my hands on a device that was really adaptable, that could change depending on what parameters I wanted to have control over was really the key. So an open grid of buttons where the LEDs didn't match specifically into toggles, hardwired, was really the goal. Then I got it in the hands of some friends who performed and toured a bunch with it. Enough people had asked me to basically build one for them, that it was an intangible thing to hand wire so many things, so that's when the first thoughts of making a very limited run, which was never initially conceived as just being a business. It was more of a sort of project that we could potentially sustain ourselves for a little while. And at that time, Kelli and I were making a lot of mechanical installation art, so it seemed just an extension, like the next project that we were going to do. And what was really exciting is that by getting this adaptable, open-ended interface out into the community, there wouldn't be a reliance on just the patches that I had written. Basically, since it could do anything, it would foster everybody writing their own patches and then sharing them with other people. So it would be a generative process, where people would contribute back their work and then inspire other people to maybe modify it or do something different, and then continually share. I think the sharing component is what's made it really successful, and also kept people really engaged, in that it constantly renews itself.

Our approach has been about sourcing everything very locally. For example, the keypads are made right outside Philadelphia, the aluminum plate is sourced out of Maryland. The wood frames are also now made right outside of Philadelphia, the lumber is actually black walnut from forests in Pennsylvania, and the circuits are made in Colorado. All the assembly is right in middle Pennsylvania. So we can actually go and visit all of these different factories and companies, and meet the people who are involved, and that creates a really good bond, so you understand whom you're paying, and who's working on your project, so you can really trust them and talk to them in person.

 Do you make everything in your loft, or do you actually go other places to do certain tasks? 

Brian: We literally build and test everything in our loft. That is not to say that everything is fabricated in our loft. Like I said earlier, the plates, for instance, get machined down in Maryland, or the keypads get compression molded out of silicon at a facility outside of Philadelphia. But we literally get boxes full of these components, and then we put everything together and test them laboriously, and then do all of the finishing. We do all hand finishing on the wood, and package them up. Shipping them out is a tremendous amount of work that we never would have imagined. When it comes down to it, the development and the design of the circuits, all the things you imagine being hard, are actually quite simple compared to just the sheer man hours of assembly and finishing.

Kelli:	And designing packaging, and printing.

Kelli: It's tremendously fun, but it's the stressful part. It's the part that takes a lot of consideration. Because it has many more implications.

Brian: Right. Decision-making is always complicated, but that's part of our attraction to hyper minimalism, is that embellishment is more often than not excessive or distracting.

 Since making monome your business do you still have time for creative work? 

Luckily, monome as a project fulfills many of our creative needs, though we're looking forward to spreading our time between more new projects very soon. Additionally monome has been a wonderful platform for us to promote many topics we care deeply about, including sustainability, local economies, and open-source.

 What are some of your favorite Max/MSP objects? 

Brian: random, of course! Then there's expr and sprintf, for their flexibility. udpsend and udpreceive, to get data in and out of Max in a manner superior to MIDI. multislider, for its minimal elegance and adaptability.

 Do you have a particular patching style? 

Brian: It's evolved organically since 2000 and I don't think I could describe it in words. Since I had all sorts of "real" programming experience before learning Max/MSP, I spend a lot of time trying to make patches have the look of sequential operation, as if they were typed out code. This is often impossible, so the compromises appear as strange-looking nuances. Modularity is always a goal for re-usable patches, but I normally forget what I've already invented and re-invent things in a new and possibly more or less effective method each time. I don't use segmented patch cords. I use as many shortcuts as possible to patch as fast as possible. It's a bit of a mess.

 Do you use host software such as Live or Logic? 

Not so much for my own composition-- I've tended to create patches in Max/MSP that do everything I want, which is a drawback in some ways because there's always something new one might want. Instead of actually making music, you go program a bit longer, until eventually you're more obsessed with making tools than using tools. What matters is acknowledging that this is not a bad thing-- Max Matthews and Miller Puckette as testament.

 Is the monome your main/only controller?  Did you use other controllers prior to creating the monome? 

Despite using quite a few controllers in the past, I never dedicated myself to any for very long. For performance I do use a monome device, which is best complimented by a Wurlitzer or xylophone or something completely unlike a grid of buttons.

 So, how many variations of the monome are there? 

We started out with the 40h, an 8x8 grid. We just released the final device in our new series, which have redesigned keypads and black walnut enclosures-- the two fifty six is 16x16, the one twenty eight is 8x16, and the sixty four is 8x8. We also make a kit version for people to assemble and design their own enclosures; this allows customization and a lower cost of entry.

Kelli: Ooh. We love the Internet. We have this sort of belief that the Internet gives you rewards. If you give something to the Internet, you will get back from the Internet. For example, if you make something awesome, and you post a picture of it on the Internet, and a million people see it and they love it; you're going to come across a picture on the Internet that you really love. Does that make sense? So it's a little bit of karma in a computer.

Brian: The Internet is great, but as much as it's an enabler, it allows for really obsessive tendencies. So learning boundaries in terms of when to work and when not to work, and how engaged in a community you can possibly be without totally losing your identity completely.

Kelli: Or there is the virtual versus real. It's one thing to be in a community on the computer. It's another thing to meet those people in person, and actually have that physical connection. Reality is important.

Brian: Reality is really important. I mean, we've had a wonderful opportunity to meet a lot of our users as they come through town, or we visit other cities and are able to meet people who are involved in the forum, or are musicians of some sort. And always, the face-to-face interaction is so valuable.

Kelli: And that's the beautiful thing about the communal aspect of it. And especially on our forum, which I really love, is people are who they are. It's not people pretending to be--or so far, I haven't met the person pretending to be someone else. We've been very, very fortunate that way.

Kelli:	Oh, yeah. We did the first two Maker Fairs.

 I'm surprised they don't do one in New York. Or Philadelphia. 

Brian: They just did one in Austin. We were at the two San Mateo ones. They were a lot of fun. It was great to meet an audience that wasn't just musicians. What's actually a bit peculiar is we never intended to be so focused on the musician market.

Brian: Because it literally is just a device of buttons and lights, and there's nothing that says that musicians need buttons and lights. And we've had a lot of people who are not musicians use them, like artists, researchers or designers.

Kelli: Lots of designers, like graphic, even web designers. There's this one web designer who uses it--he just uses it as a calendar.

Kelli:	Yeah, very expensive calendar. It's like a time clock.

Brian: It's a design object. We also met some students at Cal Tech who were using it for some sort of neural-network research that I could not possibly understand.

Kelli: Yeah. They were incredible. And then there was the filmmaker who wanted to buy it, but he had to convince his wife. So he showed her a picture and he said, "We can put it on the mantel." And she was like, "Oh, it's beautiful. Yes, go ahead and buy it." [Laughs.] We were like, "OK. That's great."

Brian: I know a person who wants to imbed it in their wall so it can control the lights in their house. But really, I mean, we used it for a couple of mechanical installations, to be like in a museum--oh, we've had lots of museums buy it, for like kids' museums. So when interaction--I think the simple, intuitive, kind of binary on and off, the lights and the buttons, it's, I don't know, kids gravitate to it instantly. Which was something good about the Maker Fair, was to see all of the different crowds, and how they would interact with it. Not just people imagining how that that would fit into their music production process.

Kelli: I think in time we're going to explore those differences a little bit more in the future. Right now, we're trying to get through the new series, and just get our bearings as a small business. Because financially, and stability-wise, you just kind of have to do it that way. And then eventually, we want to progress, and really pick out a number of things it can do other just music. Or program more. Make more children's-related toys with it, and make it more, I don't know, accessible to a wider range of people.

Future plans are very open at this time, but whatever comes next will certainly follow the same minimalism, adaptability and aesthetic.

 Interview by Marsha Vdovin and Ron MacLeod for Cycling '74. Video by Monome. 


Hardware Controllers
Adaptable, minimalist interfaces
Interview by Marsha Vdovin and Ron MacLeod for Cycling '74. Video by Monome.

Cycling74 Perspectives: Monome

Brian Crabtree (who performs under the name tehn) and his partner Kelli Cain are collectively known as monome. They design what they call adaptable, minimalist interfaces. The musical instrument industry calls them alternate controllers. There are currently three models that interface with a computer. There is no hard-wired functionality; interaction between the keys and lights is determined by the application (such as Max/MSP) running on the computer. Basically the monome units can do whatever you program them to do and serve as alternate controllers for not just music but games, lights, video etc. Monome is fantastically successful. I found their story inspiring and exciting -- they represent a new breed of creative entrepreneurs who are environmentally and socially conscious. 

a-video-and-text-interview-with-monome

A Video and Text Interview with Monome

Ben Peers

Music for Machines & Systems is an ongoing project in which I am using Max/MSP to sequence hardware synthesizers and drum machines. Max has helped me combine my interest in process-music techniques (mainly derived from classical minimalism) with my love for contemporary experimental electronic music, and has enabled me to work with rule-based systems while retaining a hands-on approach to dialing in sounds which comes with using hardware.

Pieces in this series are typically composed by layering a number of static but non-repeating patterns, then triggering a few basic structural changes as and when certain numerical conditions are satisfied throughout the patch.

Max is sending MIDI data (both note on/off and CC) to my machines, which are in turn sending their audio signals back into Max for further processing.

Music for Machines & Systems is an ongoing project in which I am using Max/msp to sequence hardware synthesisers and drum machines. Max has 

music-for-machines-systems

Music for Machines & Systems

Julien Bayle

Max8 is used everywhere in the project. The whole visuals system is based upon it, only. The sound analysis, midi triggering dispatching and all visuals alteration logics are Max8. Ableton Live is used to assemble and mangle the sound, but also for visuals triggering alteration while analyzing the sound flow in real-time.

STRUCTURE.LIVE audiovisual live performance extends the artist’s field of exploration to more tangible paradigms, injecting physical realities into his digital chaos, creating the first merge, collision, fusion between human and inert elements to date in Bayle’s work.

STRUCTURE.LIVE visual matter literally deploys 3D volumetric captured material. New depth-map capture techniques providing a powerful set of tools for both capturing movements & scanning close distance environment, Bayle works with his partner Acoustic Research Lab (LMA-CNRS) and involved Université de Nantes’ mathematics department into his project through students’ workshops and art/ science residence

Max8 is used everywhere in the project. The whole visuals system is based upon it, only. The sound analysis, midi triggering dispatching and

structure-live

STRUCTURE LIVE

sig.term is the new audio-visual live performance by Julien Bayle. Continuing his artistic researches and representations about the concept of continuum’s disruption, the artist created sig.term as a permanently delayed & syncopated progression.

Inspired by data transmissions & communication protocols, sig.term is based on the generation of audio signals constantly disturbed to produce a post-techno matter in which very low frequencies and noise very present.

According to the artist himself, sig.term describes « an increasing curved trajectory in which the audience doesn’t know if the paroxysmal state will finally be reached or if the high intensity cannot be higher ».

sig.term term is a reference to the computer-centric contemporary world in which smaller units of calculation, called processes, can communicate and ask to the others to shutdown. sig.term means signal termination. This is a direct reference to some of his previous works disrupt!on (2014) or signal.interrupt (2014). 

sig.term is the new audiovisual live performance project by Julien Bayle, based on data transmissions, interferences and physics of sound

sig-term

SIG.TERM

Darwin Grosse

Thanks, Julien, for taking the time to do an interview. First off, could you tell us a little about your background?

I’m Julien Bayle from France. After my French diploma in both biology and computer sciences, I worked inside the IT Network Architecture world but played with art & technology every night. Then, naturally, I decided to dive into art completely in 2009.

Since then, I have designed the big protodeck controller for Ableton Live, made my own arduino-based RGB monome clone and attained an Ableton certification. Now, I’m providing a lot of courses about Ableton Live, Max 6 & Max for Live too. Since I can read and write C/C++, Java and other languages, I also design my own tools and other people’s tools using openFrameworks and Processing.

I’m mainly working on my own art, making music and playing my A/V live performance.

I work at the crossroads of sounds, visuals and data, trying to immerse the audience inside my own electronic territories where minimalism remains the master.

I just provided a workshop about “Approaches of A/V performance using Max 6” to Störung festival 8 in Barcelona. I’m definitely exploring and trying to improve my own systems every day to make more intuitive performances and to dive more deeply inside my own art, and my perception of sound and visuals.

What kind of artwork currently has your attention?

I’m currently impressed with, and in love with, minimalistic A/V performances or installation.

I also appreciate particles system, which is something I’m playing with myself. I’m also very interested by generative structures - whatever the form they take - in sound and music, but also in visualization systems.

I like to try coding rules and constraints to play with chance, then to observe the result.


Can you give us some examples of your current or recent work?

My latest performance at Störung festival 8 involved my current sound-reactive lines system. Here is a very short video showing this system just before the show (without music):

Here are some example visuals from that project:

I’m currently designing the whole software & hardware implementation for a piece of art written by Pippo Lionni, with Videospread / Céline Jouenne from Marseille managing the project. “The Village” is a generative piece in which a village of people wakes up, becomes more active - and then is bombed.

The audience can interact with the piece using a small device based on Arduino. I will describe the whole system by sharing some examples in Article 3 of this series - even though this piece is based on openFrameworks. The device uses wireless communication with the controlling computer, and includes some other components like accelerometer, battery power (for autonomy), and an Xbee 2.4 Ghz module for wireless communication. The Arduino module used is the fio model.

This piece includes behavioral sequences for each character which causes them to walk, run, play, sit and sleep. When attacks occur, people run in panic or have “smart” behavior like “fleeing the bomb”. I like to try coding rules and constraints to play with chance, then to observe the result. I will definitively work in that way for some future installations I’ll be designing soon.

...once you are motivated, and once you’ve seen some nice examples of pieces made with the technology, you should dedicate your time to make it.


I had a chance to review your book project: "Programming the Arduino in C". One of the things I found interesting was that, in addition to presenting the Arduino programming language, you also spent time on both circuit-building and integrations with other technologies (Max and Processing in particular). What did it take to become comfortable in each of these technologies?

I would quote 4 rules I’m often suggesting to my students or friends:

Look at artists or artworks people made with that technology;

Looking at existing art or tools made with the targeted technology is a nice way to give you examples, sometimes to reassure your brain - which is always looping over the thought “Is it that technology I have to use?” It can also give you motivation. With your own goals, if you are motivated you’d search out everything on the subject. This is really important when you start learning something new.

At some point, you’ll have to study. Learning Max 6, Processing, openFrameworks or other tools requires one to create basic projects and work through tutorials. Often, people forget this step and want to work directly and quickly. This can be a very good approach because it provides sometimes quick satisfaction. But that can also prevent people from continuing their travel inside a technology: sometimes achieving even a simple result can take hours or days for new users.

So following tutorials provided by the software developers or a related community is definitively a winning way. It shows you real examples, offering you a start and giving you results quickly.

I always suggest people to read books (or ebooks, of course). We can find a lot of books about any of our technologies. Each book provides a different view of the subject. Look at the author background, life and work. It is important to have someone in mind as each book talks to you through paper. I always choose books by people I like or people I’d like to emulate  because that works better for me - it makes my learning more efficient.

Finally, I suggest that people dive into their first project ASAP. The time factor is very important for two reasons:

The first is because the quicker you apply things you learned, the better you will remember them. The second is that we all desire results.

I’d add something about making your first project.

When I started my own Arduino-based RGB monome clone (named bonome), I didn’t predetermine all of the details of my project. I think it is important to ignore details at some point.

If I had known what it would take, I probably wouldn’t have ever begun the project. This is a fact - it would have frightened me. So I think there is a message here: once you are motivated, and once you’ve seen some nice examples of pieces made with the technology, you should dedicate your time to make it. So please: just let go of the details and get started.

What is it about the technology of the Arduino that you find most interesting?

The most interesting thing is its straightforwardness. Indeed, you have a tool ready to be used out-of-the-box. You only have inputs, outputs and a couple of useful features (like an Ethernet connector or Bluetooth antenna) depending on the board model you have.

Each Arduino comes with already pre-burnt chipset making them directly usable by using USB to upload our own firmware. The software that it is already burnt (by which I mean written) on the chipset is named the bootloader. We can change that bootloader and put in another one if necessary - this is something I explain in my book.

This bootloader is the first thing loaded when you power up the board. It is able to load the user-firmware and handle incoming data when you upload new firmware using the USB port. This makes things really easy for people who don’t know about chipset programming from scratch.

Another interesting thing for me is the huge community. As we’ve seen in other domains, the Arduino community became a kind of global technology resource, able to globally work, think and make. Today, the community produces/fixes/creates a lot of software - and even hardware (called shields) - around this an Arduino board that has not, itself, evolved a lot.

Although some new boards have appeared (like the Leonardo and Due) with new technologies under the hood, the user’s view of the Arduino remains: it is a simple Printed Circuit Board (PCB) with inputs & outputs. And I, myself, think it has to stay simple and that we, the makers, have to create more complex software.

Have you tried any of the other microprocessors that are in the marketplace? Things like the Maple, Beagleboard or Netduino?

I’ve only played a bit with Raspberry PI.

The only benefit is you have an OS available, not “only” firmware and a bootloader.

For what it’s worth, increasing the number of features increases also two things I don’t really like in these kind of projects:

The number of points which can potentially have bugs,

The number of features I will never use but that cannot be disabled.

I’d prefer making things that exactly fit my needs, and the Arduino always holds the answer.

Actually, I’m lying a little bit. I loved the MIDIBOX framework created by Thorsten Klöse. This is another framework dedicated to MIDI hardware for do-it-yourself building and design. I designed the protodeck controller using this system. The MIDIBOX community helped a lot too. The last version of the framework, which also includes other chipsets, are based around a real time OS dedicated to MIDI processing.

I’m a defender of using a hardware interface solely as control & feedback station.


How do you see Max fitting into the world of microprocessors, physical computing and the world of hardware-centric artwork?

We have now pure, high-level, calculation capabilities inside our small form factor laptops. We have to build software running on this hardware, and with Max 6 we can easily do that. Max 6 is optimized such that it can be used to produce the C++ source I need for external components like Audio Units plugins (AU) - directly from my gen~ patches.

Thus, we have real power inside our computer, and we should use it for high level efficiency in sound processing, visuals generation and general data processing.

However, we hardware-lovers want a tangible way to control this processing.

This is not always a requirement for me, but I think of hardware interfaces today as large “macros” for our complex and flexible software systems.

In the chapter 6 of my first ebook (titled “The 6 rules to design the best user-interfaces”, written in 2011), I’m wrote: Aim for a stupid box, but a good computer. Or how to get benefits of technology building unsmart interface?

Why would I try to put a lot of calculations & specific data processing (like audio & video) in small chipsets, having to deal with their processing and energy constraints - as well as other electrical stuff - when I already have a working computer dealing with all of that?

So, I’m a defender of using a hardware interface solely as control & feedback station.

By “stupid box”, I meant that our hardware only has to deal with “lighting an LED”, “reading an encoder value”, and eventually “displaying a message on a LCD screen” and no more. These things are easy to design, but also involve protocols and data providers on the computer side.

Most current hardware controller work like that today.

The Ableton PUSH controller’s power, for example, lies in its physical components, design and nice LCD screen, but it “only” sends/receives basic (and compressed) bytes of informations to the computer. The scripting system processes, sorts, parses and interacts with Ableton Live API - and Max for Live too.

I’m happy to note that the ideas from the beginning of my electronic travel are still totally valid.

Where can we go to find out more about your work - and your interaction with technology?

You can check my website & blog, and keep in touch with me following me on FB. I’m also leading http://designthemedia.com too, which is the core of my teaching and consulting side.

Then, I just have my book “C Programming for Arduino” published by Packt Publishing.

The website to keep in mind is: http://cprogrammingforarduino.com

I’m on my way to write my own book about Max 6 & Gen that would be the book to read if you only know a bit of Max. I won’t dig hardcore details of Gen, but readers will be able to understand all the principles necessary to put their hands inside its core!


My visuals captured with my mobile phone just before the live performance I made at Störung festival 8 in Barcelona.

Those lines are generated with Jitter.
A module inside my DAW is "listening" some characteristics of sounds like noisiness, peak volume etc and sends that via OSC to the Jitter standalone.

It has to be improved but I'm happy with the current result.

Lines for Störung, minutes before the A/V live

Learn how he uses custom hardware, Arduino, Ableton Live and Max to create his work.

an-interview-with-julien-bayle

An Interview with Julien Bayle

Ben Nevile

Kim Cascone has worked as a synth tech, edited music for David Lynch films, founded San Francisco's first ambient electronic music label, and helped design new systems of audio for video games.

In this conversation with Ben Nevile, Cascone discusses his electronic history, his interest in genetic algorithms, and a fresh compositional direction that he calls "New Density".

Where'd you get started with all this stuff?

I went to Berklee College of Musicin Boston. I studied music there, electronic music mostly.

Yeah, all basically patchable analog synths back then, but also the beginnings of computer music.  There were languages around at MIT.

Did you have any exposure to it in Boston?

Not at that time, no. When I left Berklee I came back to New York to study privately. It was at  that point that I discovered I had a talent for electronics, so I went to technical school. I had been  working for a company called Electronics for Medicine. They made heart rate monitors and sleep activity  monitors. I was a tech, and they sent me to school to study electronics, and so I got some training in  the technical side of things, math and physics and what not. At that point I started getting interested  in microprocessors, and through my interest in microprocessors, the Z80 and the 6502, I sort of bumped  my head up against the whole computer music thing. And I discovered  CMJ...

Yep. I'd built a synth out of kits made by a company called Aries. They were based in Massachusetts, and they made a modular system that was very much like the Arp 2600. One of the design engineers from Arp actually went over to Aries...

I imagine those were pretty small companies.

They were very small, sort of grass roots... kind of similar to today's software and dot com  companies. There were a lot of people trying to do interesting things with electronic music.

Various things, one of which was that in New York it was very difficult to break in on any sort  of artistic level. Lots of little downtown mafias, art mafias, and it was very difficult to play anywhere,  it was very locked in. So I visited San Francisco and discovered a sort of free spirited anything goes  kind of attitude that I really liked. There was a lot of experimentation. The Bay Area has a history of  that experimentation in various ways, you know, lifestyles, or psychedelics or what have you. That  appeals to me, the spirit of experimentation.

That was 1983, and your record label, Silent, started a couple of years after that?

I started Silent in 1986. Although it was easy to get gigs, it wasn't easy to get record releases.  I had been releasing some work on a little label from Massachusetts called RRR. They released my first  two LPs as PGR, then I had a French company release my third one. I just decided at that point that I  wanted the means of production in my own hands, so I started my own record label. But I didn't want to  necessarily have it be all about me, so I started releasing work by other people.

I remember reading the story behind PGR somewhere, but I forget now... what was it, something  something research?

I hate what it turned into, because everybody seems to know it as Poison Gas Research, and it  wasn't like I really wanted it to be known like that, because at that time there were a lot of industrial  bands trying to be really dark. It was more of a joke than anything, because the Oakland rehearsal space  we were working in was in a very bad area. This friend of mine Tom had been living there. A lot of guys  from the neighbourhood came over and asked him what he was doing there. He didn't want to be bothered  so he just said "government work". So they said "what kind of government work?" and he said "poison gas  research." So from that point on nobody bothered him. They left him alone, and that was kind of like  our cloak of invisibility. We were able to practice there and nobody ever hassled us coming and going.  You know, we were lugging strange cases of stuff...

So what was it that caused you to give up Silent?

A multitude of things. One thing was the way that indie labels had evolved at the time. You had  to release a certain amount of work in order to sustain the operation. When techno started becoming  popular we became the electronic music label in San Francisco. This is like, 1991. Raves had been  going on for some time, but they were becoming more popular, and more people were making this kind  of music. So we started getting deluged with tapes. People were coming by and were interested in what  we were doing. We just sort of got pulled along. People that were working for the company were very  involved in the scene as well. It started evolving into an area that was very different than what we  had started out doing. There was some correlation there... a lot of the guys that had been doing  industrial work or experimental work were trying to do techno, and there was a lot of cross over and  experimentation. So we started releasing a lot of product.

At one point we switched to a different distributor who promised us a lot of exposure and a wide  net of distribution. What ended up happening was that the company we signed with got bought by a  bigger company, and then they bought a smaller company. So all of a sudden our account, unbeknownst  to us, had been switched to this smaller distributor they bought and we had no idea. They had  discussed with us the whole strategy: we would press up this amount of records, we would have all  these chains covered, we had to send out all these promos... We adhered to all of this, and then  discovered at Christmas time that they had not been distributing our stuff. Our stuff had not made  it to Tower or Borders, or any of the chains. They basically dorked us. Not necessarily on purpose...

Exactly. So we had, like, $30,000 worth of returns. It was a big hit, we were not doing very  well. So I was going to actually bankrupt the company, take it down, but an employee stepped up to  the plate and said I think I can make a go of it, why don't you sell it to me? So that's what  happened. Also at that time my wife and I were getting very interested in working in the internet...

...the whole explosion was about then I guess.

Since you've got the computer open, why don't we talk about your performance Max patch? You were using the patch from your Residualism CD [on Mille Plateux/Ritornell] last night, were you not?

The original studies for Dust Theories were done with the patch from the Residualism CD on Mille Plateux/Ritornell and yielded a couple of pieces that I liked but it was still not what I wanted to  interact with while performing.  Before my trip to Europe in the late summer I took my Residualism patch and  revamped it completely. I replaced the sfplay~ objects with the groove~ objects so I could control the playback  rate of each sample and added a lot of plumbing in order to have better control over the vst~ object.  I was also working on a new patch that was going to make use of genetic algorithms. The objects that I had  gotten ahold of were kind of difficult to work with. There wasn't a lot of documentation, so I had to ask  around on the max list, and I got some help but it wasn't really yielding results that were all that  interesting. I think it's going to take a little more work in terms of playing around with it.

How were you trying to incorporate the genetic algorithms?

I'm really interested in behaviours. I'm not all that interested in DSP. What I am interested in is  imparting behaviour to the playing back of wave files. We did something similar at  Staccato called the event modelling. We essentially  modeled a lot of natural type behaviours like explosions, car crashes, ambiences, through either random  generation of waveforms or a stochastic envelope of density.

Stochastic envelopes of density... a granular thing?

It is sort of like a granular thing except we used very small sound files instead of grains. You can  think of them as grains...

...but they're really individual sound files that get randomly played back and spread across a space?

That's right, but with a certain distribution, because the way that car crashes and broken glass and  all that tend to happen is with a very dense beginning and then it sort of trails off.

Oh, I see, like this? [Ben traces an exponential decay with his hand]

Exactly. So they have the ability to create an envelope of density with the random playing back of wave files.  The sound files are randomly chosen every time. So there's a pool of files and every time you trigger the  events to happen, different wave files will be called, so you'll get different car crashes every time.

Has that type of work fueled your interest in the mathematics of chaos?

Well, kind of hand in hand where I had the interest and it sort of coincided with some research that was going  on at Staccato. My interest was part of what got me hired there. Although those guys are, you know, serious PhD  types, I have enough of an intuitive grasp that I can contribute...

Exactly. And I have a bit of the Music N background too, Csound... so although I'm  self taught, it wasn't that difficult for me to grasp a lot of the concepts because I had been dealing with them before.

I started using Max shortly after getting very frustrated with Csound, after  bluecube() came out. I worked  at Headspace with Chris Muir, the guy who wrote the Uzi external.  He was a big Maxxer, so he was constantly using it on the job, and he was showing me stuff, and telling me how great  it was, so I just finally got it. I started using it and became obsessed with it, pretty much. That's kind of what  got me the job at Staccato.

Max and Csound, being able to work in both. The tool that I used at Staccato was very much like Max.

Synthbuilder. It has the same patchable  paradigm, so I was very familiar with it.

Yeah, it's pretty granular. It doesn't have the same community that adds interesting externals to it, but it  can do pretty much anything in terms of sound generation that Max can do.

Did you build Synthbuilder right into games?

Yeah. The engine itself is bound into video games, and then we created algorithms that do different things:  physical models of race cars, behavioural things for environments, or car crashes... that sort of thing.

I've always thought that would be a good thing for Max to be used for...

You wouldn't want to get into it. The video game business is really brutal.

Yeah. Audio is always the low man on the totem pole. No matter how much lip service a company pays to  having killer audio, it's just a check mark on the box. You've got this situation where you've got the game  programmer and the sound designer. They're two completely different ways of thinking and viewing the project.  The game programmer's obviously somebody who's coding so that it works flawlessly in the game. The sound designer  is someone who's creating all the sounds and doesn't really care about the coding as much, but the two people need  to be able to talk to one another. That's where a lot of implementation issues come into play. The programmer  doesn't necessarily know anything about audio or how it should be implemented, so they've got to communicate  on some common ground. Most of the problems with bad audio really come from that inefficient communication  between the designer and the programmer. So, we thought we had a really good tool that enabled the sound designer  to generate an algorithm that can be handed off to the game programmer. They don't have to worry about talking  the same language, because all he has to say is okay, I've exposed all these controls to you. You need to send  values in this range with this name to these controls.

So you can give it to the programmer and he can make it work.

Exactly. It becomes an interchange format. It really has helped a lot in terms of being able to get better  audio to happen in games. We still had a lot of work to do in terms of getting it smooth in terms of what the  sound designer hands off to the game programmer. Not all sound designers can work in Max or Synthbuilder. They  should, but they don't have time. The way they think is Pro Tools. They  want plug-ins, they want linear, they want to be able to see their sound files, mix it down... it's the mixing  board and tape deck kind of paradigm that they're dealing with. Max or any kind of patchable architecture is not  linear, and most sound designers don't think in terms of non-linear architecture.

But some games are non-linear. They're piecewise linear, I guess.

They're interactive, but they're still linear in some way. They still have some narrative. They may be branching  narratives, or conditional narratives, but they're still narratives. The sound designer doesn't initially concern  themselves all the time with that aspect of games. They are given a hit list of all the sounds. They say okay, we've got  this character, we want you to cover the footsteps, they kind of sound like this, he's a really heavy guy and he's  wearing big boots and he's got armor, so he's going to jiggle... Sound designers cover all the sounds for various  objects, but how they're controlled in terms of behaviours and stuff, that's the game programmer.

So maybe there's room then for somebody who would just be a sound programmer who would take what the designer  does...

Yeah, that's the missing link. A lot of game companies have audio programmers, but typically they're people who  are not sound designers, they're kids out of school who get their first programming gig doing audio. They don't do  a much better job than the game programmer or sound designers. We were working on an  EA title - Nascar 2000 - and the audio programmer was pretty sharp, but  still he had to call us all the time with questions about the API. It was a lot of hand holding. They don't have  time to read the manual or the docs. They just want to be able to look at it, understand it, and go.

I guess that's what I mean when I say it's a brutal industry. There's absolutely no time for anybody. It's all  deadlines and audio's always the last thing to get implemented, and it's two weeks to do three months of audio.

So what about your music, then? How has it changed since you've started using Max, or how has your approach  changed?

Well, one good thing is that I can basically have my studio contained all within the laptop. That makes life a  lot easier, having everything in one room, so to speak. Thinking in terms of behaviours - that's opened up a  whole new area that didn't exist before.

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