Tom Hall

NAMM is a tradition for many people I know. Walking around, it’s not uncommon to hear people talk about how many years they’ve been attending NAMM or the one year they missed the show. I took note that David (Cycling ‘74 founder and CEO) was attending his 35th NAMM, having only missed one in 1994. When I asked him about it, the answer was that he was busy working at IRCAM (I think we’ll give him a pass on that one :-) ).

But for many like myself, it’s either not a tradition yet or it’s just on the cusp, or like some of my colleagues who relentlessly manned the booths at NAMM while introducing Max in the 2000s may still be recovering from the PTSD, but not me.

With the age of the internet, why do people even go to NAMM?! It’s not like you can’t order your allotment of 40,000 new Korg Wavestate synths for your big box retail store with just a few emails to Korg these days, right?

Actually, there’s something greater in play for me, and it’s something the internet suffers greatly from these days — those things that come from the face-to-face real-space human connection. I think that attending NAMM is really good for the following;

Face-to-Face connection (relationships are formed over years of lunch meetings at NAMM)

Quick informative meetings with Max users from within the EMI industry

So here I am, and here's where I went and what I saw.

NAMM always starts with a line to collect your badge. I find quite it amusing, given that I always park in the Disney lot across from the convention center when I get there. The environs always remind me that I'm about to go on a different kind of ride than Space Mountain or Country Bear Jamboree. 

I have been going to NAMM long enough though to have seen a few improvements. You used to have to pick up your badge in the Marriott hotel's foyer (pure chaos). Back in the day, it was a small tent. These days, it's now a reasonably sized tent where you basically serve yourself at a kiosk and a person hands over your printed badge (5 minutes, tops). The line was moving fast!

I’ve always been amazed at the entrance to the convention center. It’s huge and lavish—stylish even. The fountain has LEDs that turn different colors at night and there is plenty of seating to sit around and admire it all. But otherwise, that’s pretty much it for lavish. The rest of the building is all about businesses housed in a few gigantic rooms.

So I got through security and the walk-in seamlessly, and my meetings were later in the day. It was my chance to look around. I walk through the first door into the main hall and its KORG, front and center. Their booth is always huge but this year they have some pretty significant offerings, including full-size MS-20s in multiple colors, an Opsix (aka KORGs take on the DX7 with extra herbs) and - last but not least - the ARP2600 reissue.

The 2600 is stunning. From that I could see, the build quality has not cut any corners and the sound IS exactly what you’d expect - breathtaking. I believe they are rather limited in terms of release numbers, but no one (including my friend working for KORG) could give me numbers. I spoke with Richard Devine, who told me this has been four years in the making, and that KORG reached out to him as an original ARP owner to help with R&D. Richard was actually doing some live demos with it, but I, unfortunately, had meetings at that time so I was unable to see him and the ARP2600 in full action.

The new Korg Wavestate wavetable vector synth was something I wasn’t initially interested in, but my tune changed rather quickly once I had a play. Since wavetable synthesis is one of Max’s strong points (keep your eye on future newsletters shortly… ), I am rarely that interested in shelling out the bucks for yet another wave synth that can’t be further developed or modified. This might be an exception...

Speaking of wavetable synths, Nord dropped a new revised Wave 2 synthesizer. I have to confess I’ve mostly given up on Nord developing synthesizers in the arena of sound that interests me. And I get it - they do very very well from selling their Stage Pianos to big pop artists. But one can hold out hope, and the Nord Wave 2 gives me some glimmer of hope for a Nord Drum 4 or - even better - a Nord Modular G3 (I’m not going to hold my breath, but hope springs eternal).

One of my favorite things is that NAMM has some truly quirky vendors. This vendor, a Chinese component manufacturer, has been one that I religiously drop by to see how much further they can push the LED encoder. This year, they have some truly impressive developments, these encoders are so good that they make me want to develop a piece of hardware just so I can throw a bunch of these wild components into it. I also get a chuckle out of the peculiar looks they no doubt get carrying these through airport security. 

Another area I always like to take a look at as a reference for trends and developments lies with the independent DSP developers. I can assure you that Kontakt and subsequent samplers are not going away anytime soon, so there's no shortage there. But a point of interest for me is UI development, especially as we’re getting larger monitors with more DPI. This year there seemed to be a slant toward adding space, not piling it in, while still making every parameter accessible from a single page.

It was really great to see Tascam stepping into the DSP arena with a whole new range of audio interfaces. Tascam has been around for eons and almost anyone who has recorded music in the past 30+ years has some story about using something of theirs. With the popularity of cassettes back into the limelight, they’ve released a new all-in-one 12 track mixer/recorder and a slew of new audio interfaces. I'm particularly interested in the mixer - there’s something about being able to quickly hit record and mix, but not have to commit, knowing that all those tracks are being recorded as stems that you can work on later.

It’s easy to monitor ‘how big’ a NAMM year is going to be by how soon they station people at the escalators to let groups of people up and down, The lines formed pretty early this year, up & down.

It was great to drop by to see our friends at MOD Devices. They have a new miniature version of the MOD Duo that they’ll be launching soon called Dwarf. Keep your eye out for their Kickstarter and more details to follow.

I had a chance to see my old friend Simone Fabrri from Frap Tools. Not everyone knows this, but Simone started out as a Max user many years ago and was a developer as a part of K-Devices in the early days. Simone assures me that almost every hardware module he’s ever designed and built starts with some form of a prototype using Max.

I’m a big fan of complex oscillators and modulation synthesis so it was great to finally see and hear Fraptools' new Brenso complex VCO in person. It was exactly what I wanted to hear, harmonically rich, easy to get into sweet spots and accessible controls over many modulation points. Fraptools doesn’t skimp on componentry and it’s clear the best parts possible were used to make BRENSO.  

They also had the first version of their new line for FrapAudio, the Dynamics 2806 Compressor for the 500 series rack. It’s really great to see manufacturers from Eurorack step over into the pro-audio arena, in fact to my knowledge Fraptools might be the first.

Next up, I visited our friends at Electro-smith (a cousin of the Eurorack heavyweights at Qu-Bit Electronix) They’ve been around for a small amount of time, but they’ve now offered up something that could throw the barn door wide open on the Eurorack community.

Their main offering at NAMM was a new embedded platform called Daisy. It’s an embedded platform similar to Teensy or Arduino, but it’s designed specifically for audio production. They’re producing it as board-only, or in several other flavors (including a Eurorack module, guitar pedal, sequencer box and also as a micro-pod).

And now it can be told - we’ve been beta testing it with gen~ code export and have had that exported code running on the Daisy successfully. There will be more details on this at a later date. For now, check out their website and stay tuned for the Kickstarter launch coming soon.

Qu-Bit had four VERY interesting modules which I’m personally quite excited about. These all have a kind of audio destructive slant to them which fits into my interest areas perfectly, I can’t wait to take them for a spin with my own material.

What’s worth noting is that these four-modules are built using the Daisy platform. It's reassuring to know that this embedded platform is already working in a ‘real-world’ environment (You can also find it in Noise Engineerings’ new reverb offering, too).

A great release for those of us who combine Max (or anything on the computer really) with Eurorack is a new modular from Noise Engineering called Univer Inter — a simple and affordable MIDI-to-CV interface that’s completely customizable. It has 8 outputs, USB MIDI and TRS MIDI in/out. 

Along with MIDI-to-CV, it will also do bi-directional MIDI-to-USB. It’s completely configurable through a web application on Chrome, or you can quickly choose presets ready to go. 

You can choose between pitch, gate, trigger, velocity, MIDI CC, MIDI clock, and MIDI transport for each output. Group outputs for polyphonic pitch, gate, velocity, and trigger. Two UIs can also be chained, for up to 8-voice polyphony.

Last but not least, one thing that amazes me about NAMM is the level of production some companies put into presenting their new products. Universal Audio has a new virtual studio environment called LUNA (aka a DAW), and the way they were presenting it was akin to a Disney ride on a space ship, complete with long waiting lines all day, I unfortunately didn't get to take the ride.

There was a lot of buzz around their booth and LUNA is bound to be a hit given the quality of their current offerings in the pro-audio world.

Overall it felt like a pretty good NAMM, I’m probably most excited by the new embedded platform by Electro-smith, the new wavetable trend and that the synth/dsp community is opening up a number of areas for people to develop their own code for existing instruments and platforms.

Components - NAMM 2020

NAMM 2020, booth #10502. 

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Noise Engineering | Get Out Of The Box

Univer Inter

NAMM 2020 - End of Day 1

IMG_8290.jpeg

Attending the annual NAMM show is a tradition for many people I know. I go for the personal connections, the chance to see what's new, spot new trends, and to find out about emerging technologies.

on-the-road-namm-2020

On The Road: NAMM 2020

Andrew Benson

A few days ago, a surprising video started floating around the internal Cycling ’74 Slack channels. Instead of kittens or surfers, this one featured a screen, some electronic gear and a bunch of wires, all nestled in some snow-like cotton. Oh, and a crazy sound – along with an invocation that says “Chat to change the sound!”  

It only took a few moments to see what was going on here: this YouTube video was a live stream featuring a hybrid Max + modular system burbling through a delay, tweaked and driven by the messages typed into the chat stream. It was an cool site, and we had to learn more. Luckily, a well-placed sticker pointed to this being a Perfect Circuit effort, so we dropped in to find out more about this project.

We spun up to Burbank learn more about what they are working on – and, of course, to play with some synthesizers. We stopped to check out the latest offerings on the synth tables (drool) before being escorted upstairs to the Perfect Circuit office, where we could see their operation at work. We’d never seen so many boxes of modular gear in one place!  Perfect Circuit is a hub of activity in the LA modular scene; while we were in the office, Baseck happened to roll through to do some demos with a new Meng Qi cracklebox. It is an amazing place to visit. Once in the office, we were introduced to Harry Gibbons and Ryan Gaston, who were more than happy to recount the process of putting together the live stream setup.

The guys had seen a few examples of generative modular live streams around (Bastl had a great one last year) and they had already been considering putting together something similar. Ryan had just upgraded to Max 8 and was itching to try out some of the new features, and thought it would be cool to connect his existing Expert Sleepers modular system and Max workflow with some NodeJS. Since Perfect Circuit had just become a Max reseller, it seemed a great opportunity to show off some modules alongside Max. Harry had done some Node programming before for the Perfect Circuit website, so he felt comfortable diving in to get connected to YouTube.

The biggest technical hurdle Harry encountered was managing the OAuth handshake through Google's API, but he pointed to online example code online as the key to getting it to work. Once node.script was outputting YouTube comments, he handed it off to Ryan, who built the main Max patch. He parsed comments using a chain of regexp objects and other logic processes to control a matrix of CV I/O values. The emphasis was really getting something going that worked on live stream – and that would also sound good.

The rig is pretty simple, but took advantage of Max 8, the Expert Sleepers modules and a few great modular pieces, and lives under a shelf in their supply closet. 

The stack included the following major pieces:  

The YouTube Live Stream – A GoPro connected through a Roland video mixer combined sound and video into a Mac Pro. The on-screen monitor shows the Max patch UI, featuring with incoming messages and the generated CV matrix. The modular responds to the text of each YouTube comment almost instantly.  

The node.script Max Object – Node for Max is running a simple routine that connects (via OAuth) to Google's Youtube API, then sends the most recent comments to the Max object’s outlet. A lot of the connectivity was borrowed from online examples, and most of the text processing is left to the Max patch.  

Expert Sleepers Modules – These modules provide the connection between Max and the modular rack. In this setup, they are reading in CV as well as outputting generated CV to the modules. Inside of Max, the work is primarily managing floating-point values.  

Strymon Magneto and a Make Noise 0-coast – These 2 devices are making all the noise in this setup, with the 0-coast also providing some CV into the matrix of voltages. And a glorious sound it is!

The feedback from viewers has been very interesting. People are interacting with the stream 24/7, and you will often see people responding to the sound they are hearing – which immediately changes the sound they are hearing!

Ryan commented that he was surprised at how many people in the chat spent time trying to figure out their pseudo-code system through trial and error. The current iteration is a nice mix of randomness and logic, so it's hard to really interact with it in a predictable way. In their next iteration, they may attempt to build on this interest, and develop a more discoverable language – or even add in some Easter eggs responding to specific text strings.

Overall, Harry and Ryan feel like they found a surprising way of showcasing some of their favorite modules, and are looking forward to their next run at this. And we are excited to see Node for Max get such an interesting demo – and are thankful for getting to see behind the curtain of this cool installation.

Join the live chat and say anything to affect the sound. In this live stream we're experimenting with crowd control of a small modular synth setup! 

Our modular setup is comprised of a Make Noise 0-Coast and Strymon Magneto with a couple of additional utilities. We're using node.js to send YouTube chat messages to a patch in Max 8, which uses the Expert Sleepers ES-8, ES-6, and ES-3 as a randomizable patch matrix. It sometimes sounds peaceful, sometimes bombastic, and often quite strange—feel free to chat to change the sound and see where it goes!

0-Coast available here: https://www.perfectcircuit.com/make-noise-0-coast.html?utm_source=perfectcircuit_youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=synthmas_stream

Max 8 available here: https://www.perfectcircuit.com/cycling-74-max-8.html?utm_source=perfectcircuit_youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=synthmas_stream

ES-8 available here: https://www.perfectcircuit.com/expert-sleepers-es-8.html?utm_source=perfectcircuit_youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=synthmas_stream

Magneto available here: https://www.perfectcircuit.com/magneto-multi-head-tape-delay-emulator.html?utm_source=perfectcircuit_youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=synthmas_stream

#PerfectCircuit #Max8 #Eurorack

Interactive Live Stream with Make Noise 0-Coast & Strymon Magneto

image3.png

A surprising video started floating around the internal Cycling ’74 Slack channels - a screen, some electronic gear and a bunch of wires, all nestled in some snow-like cotton. Oh, and a crazy sound – along with an invocation that says “Chat to change the sound!” It only took a few moments to see what was going on here: this YouTube video was a live stream featuring a hybrid Max + modular system burbling through a delay, tweaked and driven by the messages typed into the chat stream. It was an cool site, and we had to learn more.

perfect-circuit's-max-modular-live-stream

Perfect Circuit's Max + Modular Live Stream

Gregory Taylor

I've known and enjoyed Tom Hall's music for several years, but never been in the right place or time to see him perform in the flesh. Over that time, though, I've heard plenty of mentions of his interest in and work on the visual aspect of his performances. I expect that there are any number of us out there who've wondered what the trajectory of that kind of practice looks like, even if we're not necessarily engaged in it ourselves. How does one start to integrate visuals with live performance? Where do the ideas come from? What parts of programming Max for audio might map easily to creating live visuals? How does that process change over time? 

Tom was kind enough to take some time out from the Cycling '74 roles that many of you are more likely to be aware of and take a step or two sideways to talk about his life as an audiovisual artist....


Prior to creating your own visuals, did you work with other people in a live performance context?

Actually, in the early days - the 2000’s - I didn’t play live with visuals, and then projectors started being available at shows. So I guess that the newfound availability of equipment is why I started doing my own visuals. Using ‘found video’ helped me to create the environment I was seeking to portray.

There were two live shows I recall where I thought, "I need to have live visuals to add to the experience." One was the launch of my first album Fluere in 2007. The second was my first fully fledged A/V performance for Lawrence English's long running Open Frame series, opening up for Tim Hecker in 2008. So yeah — I'd been playing live for almost 4 years by the time I did those shows.

It stayed that way for many years. My very first visual collaboration with a group of other visual artists is very recent, in fact... Mexico City in 2018. 

Hall's first show with visuals - Brisbane, Australia, 2007

When it became possible to work with visuals, what sorts of visual work that you’d already seen influenced the direction you wanted to pursue?

My own entry and initial forays into the art world started with photography rather than audio. Initially, my live visuals involved “found video” - both in its natural form, and in manipulated forms. 

It wasn't easy at first. I was one those people in the early years of the new millennium doing battle with hard disk drive read speeds, Codecs, and image resolution. It was a tricky combo that always left me feeling like I was walking a tight rope... especially when you consider that I was using my laptop do do the audio and the visuals. There were plenty of disasters and mid-set crashes. Funnily enough, they now make up some of my best stories :-)

Prior to developing your own visuals, what previous work had you done (in Max or in some other way) with visual materials?

In terms of my live work, there wasn't much. In fact, it was a few years after getting into Max before I even looked at Jitter at all. Consequently, it’s one of my weaker sides in terms of programming, but I've been working quite a lot in recent years on bringing my visual programming up to speed.

In terms of other work, as a photographer I was very much inspired by artists like Wolfgang Tillmans and Doug Aikten and that interests carried over into my early photography, video, and live visual experiments.

When you started, were you working with Jitter as matrices, or did you go straight to using the GPU?

I actually found Joshua Kit Clayton's  jit.gl.slab and optimization thread pretty soon after I got started (thankfully). There’s no way I would have gotten very far back then without it.

I really way just shooting a bunch of abstract videos, and then playing them back, cross fading between them and applying different effect shaders - some audio reactive, and some not.

Were there any Max patches out there from other people that really inspired you or gave you a place to start? 

None that I recall. It was more that I had a vision of what I wanted to do and then set about designing Jitter patches to be able to do it, some that ran somewhat autonomously (because I had to play the sound live too) but with the ability to interject if I wanted to.

Were there any Jitter objects that you just felt an immediate connection to?  

I was one of those people that really actually started at Tutorial 1, but at the same time while doing them it was more the case that I was pulling out the pieces as I went along that I knew I'd need to build my vision.

The power of getting stuff on the GPU was even more obvious back then, so it was a matter of needing to get into those later tutorials to work out how to do it (there was no Vizzie back then). If you wanted it run at a frame rate higher than 5fps, you needed to do the leg work. 

What kinds of patches did you start from?

Finding Joshua’s UYVY Matrix to Texture write-up and using jit.gl.slab objects meant that I could really keep everything together. I certainly wasn’t worried about hijacking code from Cycling’s help patchers and tutorials ;-) No concerns at all — I was in Australia then, so it wasn't like they'd send people after me (hahaha!)

As you started moving into the live visuals world, what was your live performance rig like in terms of software or hardware?  Did your performances tend toward a long single set, or was it divided into something like individual pieces (or “scenes”)? Did that particular way or organized what your audience heard guide how you developed videos, or did things happen the other way around so that your audio changed based on how you did visuals?

My live setup back when I got started was pretty much a Titanium Powerbook, G4 laptop and an audio interface. That changed over time - I went to MacBook Pros, added a few MIDI controllers, then a Nord Lead 2, and a couple of analog Moogerfoogers, and since the turn of this decade, hardware modular.

It was pretty much always long-form pieces with plenty of dynamics, but no “song” stops for diversions. No matter how my work has been over the years musically, I’ve always wanted to present it as an environment -  something to enter into, to absorb, to be challenged by, to question etc.

You’ve been working with live visuals for a while now. Is there anything about your approach or the Max objects you work with in your patching that has changed radically over the time you’ve been working?

If anything, it's that, "Less is more." Like all visual art, it's easy to keep piling it on in live visuals using Jitter —more effects, more color, more layers, and so on. 

But what's harder is self-control and asking yourself "What is it really saying?" I find these days that my patches are more succinct. As my programming knowledge has grown, I've found ways to express more with less — and, for me, that's important in delivering the message. I think this is particularly important, given our current climate of diminished attention spans and addiction to bling taking precedent over quality or any kind of meaning beyond 5 seconds of throwaway swipe-up entertainment. I sound like a social media hater! Let's try this: Jitter is a great tool, but you need to realize you're playing with fire and excess these days.

How “tightly” did you conceive of integrating what your audience heard and what they saw?

These days, it’s pretty tight, Max/Jitter has a lot ways to integrate event control, but I really try to be pretty careful not to implement it in a way such that the integration becomes predictable or stagnant. I also seem to  enjoy keeping the possibility of failure around - sometimes, to my detriment. There’s noting like sitting on the edge to make you feel alive.

Is some portion of the live visuals you do generated directly from the audio? If so, what tools or procedures do you tend to favor for control?

I’m not using any ‘found video’ in my work these days. Instead, I'm generating everything using OpenGL. A big part of moving in that direction was to make stuff that was more fluid in movement that could keep up with the audio in terms of frame rates. It also meant that I didn't need to relive my past battles with 7200rpm hard disk drives anymore. A return to found video is something I want to explore again in the future, given that improvements with solid state drives and newer codecs would make that a lot easier and that 4K projectors are now starting to pop up at venues.

A lot of my visuals don’t do anything at all without audio input, but they’re not moving in a way where that's explicitly obvious, like pulsing to the kick drum. It might be that I’m measuring activity within certain frequency bands, smoothing that output, and then using that signal to drive the overall movement, while other frequency ranges would be controlling growth & movement, dimensional control, and that kind of thing. Sometimes those processes are going on one at a time, and other times they'll overlap or be running concurrently.

Ultimately, I’m trying to create a synesthetic experience for the audience. I'm interested in creating something that sits in the middle and internally creates its own environment that references the ‘everyday’ by virtue of the algorithms, temporal exploitation or found sound and synthesis I’ve obliterated with distortion.

What kinds of controllers did you bring to the table already by virtue of doing audio? Did you use those controllers, or repurpose them to do visuals, or did you choose new controllers?   

Honestly, I never really ever had a controller for playing visuals. I still don't. For some reason I just found it too cumbersome. If I was just doing visuals, I would have a controller. But since I feel in control of the sound or I can at least predict what it's going to do these days, it turns out that the sound itself is the best controller for me.

Once you’d gotten through your first show or two, did you immediately start changing what you were up to, or did you maybe start thinking about making the equivalent of an “instrument” for producing visuals rather than creating specific patches for specific pieces?

Not really. What I do is set up an intricate network of event control which is following the time since the start of my set, but which also has the possibility of being interrupted and coerced into other types of manipulation by the audio. Simply put, the audio is the controller: I start the visuals and off it goes. If there’s no audio nothing happens. 

Have you ever done video for someone else? Is that something you’d find interesting? Do you think your practice would change in a situation where you were only “responsible” for what an audience saw?

I’ve done bits and pieces but they’ve never really included my own creative input apart from the programming choices. Artistically, I’m open to collaboration but it really needs to be the right fit.

My practice always changes through working with others though. To be honest, it’s hard not to. I’ve had both incredible creative breakthroughs when working with others, giving presentations or even presenting workshops. What other people bring to the table is always interesting. As I get older, I know that I have developed certain perspectives (despite fighting it), and what’s exciting is when someone you’re working with comes in and just shatters it, flips the box on its lid. I love it.

Experience more of Tom's work on his Website.


Live sound and video performance by Tom Hall

Tom Hall - Live Performance Fluere

September 30th, 2009

http://tomhall.com.au

Tom Hall @ Horse Bazaar - Melbourne, Australia 09.30.2009

Tom Hall @ Superdeluxe, Tokyo, Japan 4.5.2010

Debut NYC performance

http://tomhall.com.au

http://www.instagram.com/tomhallsonics/

Tom Hall @ Monkey Town HQ, Brooklyn 11.19.2009

Live shows in order:

NeueHouse, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Outpost/Confetti Machine Festival, NYC
Zebulon (Spectra album launch) Los Angeles
Human Resources, Los Angeles

Tom Hall - live 2017/18 Highlights

tom_hall.jpg

While I've known and enjoyed Tom Hall's music for several years, I've never been in the right place or time to see him perform in the flesh. Over that time, though, I've heard plenty of mentions of his interest in and work on the visual aspect of his performances. Tom was kind enough to take some time out from his Cycling '74 roles to talk about his life as an audiovisual performer.

an-interview-with-tom-hall

An Interview with Tom Hall

I first learned of the Algorithmic Art Assembly via colleague Joshua Kit Clayton. I knew nothing about it other than that it would be a weekend themed around art, algorithms and all curated by a guy named Thorsten Sideboard at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco. I knew I had to attend!

My slightly delayed flight out of LA meant that I made it to a gloomy and wet San Francisco just in time to grab a coffee next door to Gray Area and sneak in the door in time for the first talk. I knew little about most of the speakers, but I arrived with an open mind and open ears ready to listen and absorb.

The opening talk, 'The Woodshed is a Black Box', was from Marc Weidebaum, who has run the Disquiet Junto for over two decades. He spoke about his inspiration for starting it and spoke at length about “woodshedding" – a term from the world of jazz that can be applied to many forms of creative practice. I’d not heard the term before, but the way Marc presented it, it certainly made me rethink the way in which I work and experiment to develop new work, and develop rules to help shape, drive, and fuel it. I think my favorite thing about Disquiet Junto is that there are no winners – that the work is made in one sitting and that it’s probably not finished, straight from the woodshed.

Adam Roberts from Google’s Magenta Project took the stage next. The project is something I’ve heard bits and pieces about for years now but I was excited to hear, see, and get an in-depth overview directly from one of its main developers. A lot of the musical outcomes of the project can be seen here. I’d encourage you to go and have a play. 

Two sections of his talk really struck a chord with me: making music with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and the Ableton Live plug-ins that the Google Magenta team have developed and released here. 

Adam’s talk directly led us into a talk titled 'Why You Should Build Silly Things' by Monica Dinculescu , who has worked for a number of years as part of the Magenta team. Monica explains the title of her talk in terms of her choice to name her work by calling them silly things rather than ‘art’ so as to avoid the overloaded critical analysis that often creeps in when one declares something as ‘art.’ It turns out that Monica makes a lot of interesting ‘silly things’ that — through the use of Magenta’s machine learning — end up being fun, innovative and inspiring. Check them out here.  Monica proved to be the source of some of my favorite quotes for the whole weekend:

‘Rules in Art’ are important for creativity

One piece that Monica brought to our attention was a GAN-based machine learning project by AI artist Robbie Barrat and painter Ronan Barrot - a phenomenal project that combines ephemerality, GANs, and notions of voyeurism to make unique viewing experiences for every viewer.

Elizabeth Wilson’s talk 'Algorithms, Music and Machines' brilliantly brought to the audience's attention how most machine-driven voice applications and hardware are situated with a female voice (Siri, Alexa, your GPS etc.), and how such a gender disparity reinforces gender biases as soon as we interact with and command these devices. I liked how Elizabeth pivoted from this to talking about how machine learning can act as a creative tool to free creativity rather than trammeling it. What will be the next digital hardware/software tool that allows us to take sound design, music, and visual arts to new realms? Machine learning is at the forefront of much of this development.

I was getting hungry, so I snuck out quickly for one of the Mission District’s most famous burritos at Taquería El Farolito. Don’t get me wrong - I still firmly believe LA has the best Mexican food outside of Mexico, but there’s something unique about the SF burrito. My colleague Madalyn feels like the differentiator is that LA uses more cilantro in the salsa. I think she might be right!  

I was only gone a short while and came back in time to experience “Blobchat,” an excellent live coding/chat/music but silent conversation between Yotam Mann & Sarah Rothberg.

Their ongoing project communicates about communication, using a text-based musical communication interface that combines sound, machine-learning, gesture, and chat rooms as a way to pose questions such as, “Is misunderstanding a part of understanding? How do machines mediate? How else can they do it?”

It was a nice break between the more informative panels and provided the most laughs of the day. Despite being the presentation with the fewest spoken words by far, the unfolding conversation between Sarah & Yotam across their Blobchat live coding was incredibly engaging from an audience standpoint. It was made all the more so when they popped up a URL so that the audience could jump in for the Q&A. This moment during the presentation really made me start to appreciate the careful planning and curation that Thorsten Sideboard had put into the AAA weekend.

Next up was longtime local contributor to the area’s experimental music scene Jon Leidecker, who set forth one of the most informative presentations from a historical perspective of the whole weekend with his talk ‘United Feedback.’ He proposed that the seemingly recent interests in generative music and creative machine learning can trace their origins to the earliest electronic music studio in the United States, run by Louis and Bebe Barron.

Jon’s talk traced commonalities in the works of the Barrons, Vladimir Ussachevsky, David Tudor, the members of the Sonic Arts Union, Eliane Radigue and Roland Kayn (some of these names were new to me as an Australian, and sent me down a number of Google rabbit holes to discover new and exciting works from past decades gone by). The talk left me pretty excited to see his live set (as Wobbly) later in the evening.

The day ended with something unexpected. SF Bay artist Windy Chien’s talk “Algorithms, Aesthetics, and the Artist’s Hand” asked some different questions: “If an algorithm is a set of rules that defines a sequence of operations, what does that look like in the hand of a visual artist?”

Windy doesn’t write code. She doesn’t use software. She doesn’t even need computers at all for her artistic practice, but algorithms are deeply embedded throughout everything that she does. Windy works with rope, making many thousands of types of knots from simple to complex, combining them in or in unison to create complex installation-based public art works.

She described setting herself a challenge a number of years ago - to learn a new knot every day for a year. Over time, the algorithmic practice allowed her to achieve an incredibly high level of proficiency in knot-making and ended up establishing quite an artistic practice. We ended her presentation in a hands-on discovery of knot tying – a  fun way to think about algorithms and end the first day’s panels and talks. 

I headed off to find Mark Fell (who had just gotten to town) rather than taking a break between the panels and the evening’s first night of live performances. I spent the next few hours chatting with Mark over dinner and a tasty Turmeric latte (stay tuned for a future interview).

I headed back to Gray Area in time for the first AAA performance evening. I was looking forward to it as I had never seen any of the performers play previously, although I knew a few of their recorded works and had seen a few YouTube videos in the past years.

Charlie Roberts was the first performer, and his live coding work did not disappoint. He had a great audience with their ears focused on the sound and their eyes on the screen.

He was followed by Wobbly (Jon Leidecker), who had a slew of gear spread across the table – quite a pile, to be honest: three or more iPads, a device that appeared to be some kind of MIDI playback device, a multisampler keyboard, and numerous other gadgets. Wobbly was busy to say the least, with several of the devices in combinations cross-talking with one another as the sounds transitioned from abrasive density to sparse noise and back again. Wobbly’s performance stood in perfect contrast to Charlie’s set; we were clearly in for as diverse a set of performances and we’d seen panel talks earlier in the day.

Spatial struck a nice mix of live audio and live visuals, playing perhaps one of the most synesthetic performances of the weekend. It took me a minute to refocus following Wobbly’s highly dynamic set, but once I did I was lost. 20 or 30 minutes went by in what felt like 2 or 3, and that’s how I knew Spatial had nailed it. I live for those moments of transcendence during live performance, and this one was on point. I was too spaced out to catch what they were using, but that’s a good thing. 

London-based Digital Selves turned in an explosive and dynamic set, and I started to see people move for the first time - some dancing, swaying, walking, really putting the space to use. That’s often not easy in a situation where people are sometimes more fixated on what’s happening on the screen.

The performance space itself was set up in such a way (a kind of octagon) that you got a different sound in almost every corner of the space, regardless if people were playing in multichannel or stereo. It was during Digital Selves set that I really moved around a lot and noticed this - it was quite special.

Kit Clayton – a colleague of mine at Cycling ’74 for many years – was up next. I’d only seen him play once, in his Kit n C.l.a.w.s duo. However, I had heard about this “FM style” solo set he’d been working on the past few years and was very curious. Joshua’s set was a labyrinth of immersive FM synthesis that morphed between succinct textural percussive elements, deep temporal sound beds, and glacial type shrills - often at times combining all three and more. It was highly dynamic but steered clear of falling in any kind of beat-oriented dimension. Calling it ambient certainly wouldn’t do it justice, it was a set by someone with a deft hand and skill that comes only from decades of playing live and listening.

A switch to a full on synesthetic frenzy followed Joshua’s immersive jaunt in the dark. AlgoBabez first showed up on my radar just recently when I saw the The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music and wanted to know more about who was on the cover. It turned out to be them!!

AlgoBabez (Shelly Knotts and Joanne Armitage) were joined by visual live coder Olivia Jack. As I was saying, it was a full-on synesthetic onslaught; I was so impressed that I hardly knew where to look or listen. I’m unsure how often the three have performed together but if it was the first time, I was none the wiser: they were completely in sync.

I stood looking over Olivia’s shoulder (on the opposite corner to Shelly and Joanne). Until that moment, I’d never seen someone live code visuals in the browser. It was quite impressive to say the least and clearly something she has spent time crafting, honing, and practicing. Next, I turned my attention across the table to Shelly and Joanne. If you closed your eyes and listened you would be hard pressed to know there were two people making sound on two different machines - always a great sign of unity. While I really enjoyed watching them code, play, and make noise, I particularly appreciated what appeared to be the more candid moments where they appeared to have one machine go down, laughed it off, and regrouped while the other person covered. That kind of friendship and dynamic is really special in live performance and I really appreciated it. (I think most people were none the wiser).

Last but certainly not least was Kindohm (live coding). Through a shout-out tweet by Renick Bell (who you’ll hear about later) I’d come to check out some of his previous work and was excited to see him live. 

Kindohm kicked off his set with a slowly evolving set of syncopated drum hits - building, tearing away and layering on an evolving/dissolving audio sample “artificial intelligence.” From there he went deep. Using Tidal Cycles (I think that’s what he was using. I know of it, but I’ve never touched it), Kindohm put on a dark, abrasive, tectonic, glitchy set. The audience was really absorbed in it, hearing it unfold on such an immersive sound system - we were literally inside Kindohm. For me as a listener, everything simply disappeared - time, thoughts, tiredness – and, for that moment, I would have been quite happy to stay there. The last few hours of performances definitely transcended some kind of time space continuum; before I knew  it I was traversing the Mission district back to my hotel, to rest and get ready for day two.

After that first day of talks and the performance evening, I slept like a baby. Before I knew it my alarm was sounding and I was off to meet my colleague Madalyn Fernandez for some extra work (see Expo ‘74) I was excited, as she was joining me for the panel talks.

After some breakfast and planning, we headed over to the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts to get straight into the talks.

Adam Florin was first out of the gate for day two of AAA. He has been on my radar since his excellent Max for Live device Patter was released quite a few years ago  (check it out if you haven’t already). His talk, “The Formalist-Industrial Complex” posed the question “How can we negotiate the tension between the organic and the mechanical in the algorithmic arts?”

Adam took us on quite a journey. He spoke about the algorithmic nature of gambling and how far it stretches back through history, gardening and Brian Eno, MIDI Sprout (It’s awesome. Check it out!), and how when you see true randomness it never actually seems random enough. While his mention of the book On Growth and Form was not the first I’d heard, it’s firmly on my to buy list now.

Jules Litman-Cleper’s 'Queering Generativity, Querying Generativity: Generative Algorithms and Postnatural Narratives' talk was riveting. She spoke at length about growth algorithms, nature and life simulations, many aspects of which are informing my current practice and work. I was on the edge of my seat. It was great to hear her sum up differential growth as equating to “Randomize and smooth, rinse and repeat,” but what I really enjoyed was how she dug into the core properties and nature of algorithms and how they’re actually too perfect. When you actually observe the world around us, it’s not perfect, crystals have errors, but in some way they’re more perfect. Jules left me with plenty to thinking about and even more to research.

Chelley Sherman and Christopher Latina's presentation on ‘Perceptual Geometries’ began with Chelley speaking at length about her virtual reality audiovisual works. She spoke about her experience developing this work and touched on a side of VR that I had never considered: virtual reality for medical use. She talked about how VR has allowed her to perceive herself differently by viewing herself in new ways  through conscious (virtual) out of body experiences. As VR across the world develops and computing power continues to grow, suddenly I could imagine all kinds of new possibilities for VR not purely rooted in gaming and art.

 Chelley then passed the talk to her sonic collaborator at Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology and Dolby Labs, Christopher Latina. Chris focused on the visualization and sonification of audio signal features used in music information retrieval.

Chris talked about Mapping features to sound and images, how algorithms have synesthesia built-in, and how reverb both use convolution as the underlying. I particularly liked how he talked about animating signals.

But the one part of the talk that set my mind on fire with possibilities was the mention of self-adaptive feature feedback synthesis. While it may not be a new way of working, it’s a technique one rarely hears about. The idea is that using features as continuous signals is more gesturally familiar - feeding them back creates a more complex or cognitive circuit, which I found refreshing, as opposed to the ways in which audio feedback is most commonly used.

We were next treated to 'A Future Sport Manifesto' by Marque Comblatt (who all you burners out there might know better as Water Boy). Marque has formed the Museum of Future Sports and was there to tell us more about it. Future Sports are rooted in digital, virtual and immersive technologies, and connect with audiences on new, interactive platforms. What was interesting to me was that - at first – I expected that we were going to see drones. But as Marque’s talk unfolded, I realized that throughout history we’ve seen many emergent technologies turned into sports as Marque reeled them off (Robot Wars and Scalextric to name just a few).

He wrapped up his talk by racing a drone in FPV around the room while completing a Q&A with the audience. Most notably he’s created a program that will run in San Francisco this summer called STEM Education. They’ve acquired a warehouse and will host educational events for young people that involve programming classes, robot wars, drone building & racing, and a whole host of events this summer. Stay Tuned!

SpaceFiller’s talk ‘On the Edge of Chaos’ posed some powerful questions: Chaos emerges spontaneously in even the simplest systems, and when it does, it renders those systems impossible to predict. What conditions must exist for chaos to arise? How does chaos differ from randomness? How does chaos relate to complexity?

Throughout the course of their presentation, they ran us through these questions and how they related specifically to works they’ve created. It was great to see this talk because - like Windy the day before, Marque and the others - we further considered algorithmic works of multidimensionality, outside of the 2-dimensional screen.

I really recommend going to their website to find out more about them and their incredible work. her live coding in the browser development. Having seen Hydra in action the night before, it was insightful to hear some of the inspirations and reasoning behind the development of this language. One of my favorite aspects of Hydra is the ability to share your work simply via social media.

Then there was Olivia Jack (AlgoBabez' collaborator from the previous evening) presenting Hydra, her live coding in the browser development. Having seen Hydra in action the night before, it was insightful to hear some of the inspirations and reasoning behind the development of this language. One of my favorite aspects of Hydra is the ability to share your work simply via social media.

For an example, go here. Close the window and modify the code. Then when you’re happy with what you’ve made, click the Upwards Arrow in the top right corner to share your work on the Hydra Twitter account. Your work can then be download and experienced in real-time by others in the browser. 

The last of the panels was a Q&A between Thorsten Sideboard and Mark Fell.

Funnily, early in the Q&A, the front page of Mark’s website came up. 

While Mark said it’s highly likely the young person who wrote this got in a considerable amount of trouble, he actually thinks it’s quite brilliant.

I think the takeaway was that pursuing your own avenue of research and creative development can easily be skewed when concerning yourself with what others are doing - more so now, with the advent of social media.

The evening's bill was an eight-artist series that started off with a set by Sebastian Camens. Amusingly, Sebastian and I had messages over Instagram in the past — about cats, of course!

His live coding set is quite different to what I heard the night before, I got the sense of a more experimental improvisational approach (sonically) and less structured straightforward rhythmic material, which I thoroughly enjoyed. His set wrapped up quite quickly and left me wanting more - also a good thing.

A live coding set from Spednar was up next. I'd met him earlier in the day and had enjoyed a brief conversation, so I was curious about what he'd be doing. It was wickedly good, and I had a prime position, being able to close enough to watch close up and see the screen, and almost perfectly positioned sonically. Spednar was joined for his set by Kindohm,  live coding the visuals to make for a very dynamic A/V set — something like rainbow-colored tectonically sized glaciers colliding!, Both of these artists are clearly comfortable with their tools and in front of an audience.

William Fields continued the audiovisually-oriented sets (Thorsten expertly curated the sets to give the audience a break from the live coding, which I enjoyed). I’m unsure as to what William was using, but I didn’t need to know. Instead, I just kicked back and absorbed the sonic bed and visual stimuli. Visually, his set evolved in and through number of complex three dimensional realms that reacted to his live audio in a number of different ways. It appeared is if there was some kind of bidirectional feedback between the visuals and audio, but I can’t be certain of that.

Shatter Pattern (Jules Litman-Cleper) immediately followed with a performance that included a complete change in instrumentation (the first of the night). Jules appeared to be using a series of guitar-style effects pedals, a few Korg Kaos Pads, and — last but not least — her voice. It was a nice break the sonic trajectory for the night and the audience appeared especially attentive, as I believe Jules was the only performer of the entire weekend to use her voice as a part of her performance. 

TVO was up next! I believe he was using Max/MSP to create a dark, sinister ambient set shrouded in splintered reactive visuals, little to no rhythmic material with dense bass undertones. He engulfed the room in a hybrid dense mass that  transcended time. Before we knew it, it’s the end.

I was pretty excited to see/hear Renick Bell, who followed TVO. He’s someone who had come onto my radar in the past 6 months thanks to a few recommended mentions of his work from my friend, Joshua Eustis (Telefon Tel Aviv).

Renick Bell has long been a part of the algorave scene as a  facilitator and programmer, having created his own language called Conductive. He didn't disappoint, dropping straight into speaker-tearing, shredding syncopated kicks, bass, hats and more. He’s clearly very proficient and well-versed at using the language he created live, taking moments out to write/code messages to the audience without missing a beat. While his language Conductive is a black box for me, it was still completely immersive to watch it all unfold on the screen in front of you, to see the code and hear the resulting sound - The intricate timing, offsets, syncopation and more were simply outstanding.

W00dy followed Renick, with a really nice introduction via Renick’s live coding —I can’t say I’ve seen a handoff quite like that before. W00dy perhaps had one of the more "typical" live setups that I’ve seen over the years, consisting laptop, an APC40, an audio interface and a few other bits and pieces. She did one thing many don’t, however - she turned OFF the laptop screen (respect!). W00dy knows her gear inside out, and that in itself is admirable as we transverse the times of maximum G.A.S in the electronic music. She’s no long playing a controller and instead it’s an instrument - an absolute joy to watch.

In terms of the sound, let me give you a hint: W00dy’s latest release is called ‘Relentless Kickdrum’ tehehehe. Other terms that could be substituted for "relentless" could be pounding, onslaught, brutal, slaying… You get the idea! But it’s in no way off-putting; if you weren’t into her sound, there’s a good chance you might have left much sooner during one of the other sets/thousands of kick drums. W00dy delivered an energetic, vibrant, danceable set and — in doing so, got the entire room moving to the point where those few persons sitting on the floor would have to have moved to avoided being trodden upon.

Mark Fell wrapped up the entire Algorithmic Arts Assembly .

Mark should be no stranger to a lot of Max users — he's been using Max and talking about it for the past 20+ years. Mark puts on quite a ride. Parts that most certainly derived from his work on the Multistability and UL8 recordings, with syncopation happening on multiple tangents at any one time. Something he was doing in performance that was quite different to the recordings that I particular enjoyed was the way in which he would suddenly just "pull over to the side the road" with abrupt changes, which I found quite refreshing.

I'm certain he was utilizing new developments both in terms of set structure and sound, derived from his last release Intra. With quite a bit of sonic and structural material I don't recall hearing in his released material, I can't help but feel that quite a bit of his performance was new, and that we could see some new releases sooner rather than later.

While I was more than happy to witness Mark play for the first time (having followed his music for so many years), his set felt short in comparison to the other performance for the weekend - he left me wanting more. Before I knew it, it was a wrap.

I would call the Algorithmic Art Assembly a huge success; I went home absolutely exhausted but so incredibly inspired for having seen and heard so much amazing music and art. I hope it happens again next year, and I hope that I can attend. Congratulations to curator Thorsten Sideboard, Gray Area Foundation of the Arts and all of those that helped the weekend run so smoothly. See you next year!

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Spednar

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Mark Fell - Algorithmic Art Assembly 3.23.2019

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I first learned of the Algorithmic Art Assembly via colleague Joshua Kit Clayton. I knew nothing about it other than that it would be a curated weekend of talks and performances themed around art and algorithms at the Gray Area Foundation in San Francisco. I knew I had to attend, and I’d like to invite you along (after the fact).

on-the-road-the-algorithmic-art-assembly

On The Road: The Algorithmic Art Assembly

A good friend of mine introduced me to Ableton Live in the summer of 2013 (I was using Reason and Garageband back then). He told me about Max for Live and the Max application, but back then I couldn’t imagine myself, as a previous hitchhiking anti-tech rainbow-yogi-nature guy, programming anything like that. About a year later, I started using the Lemur and slowly tried scripting some custom functionality for some custom templates. Eventually, I started making some more in-depth Lemur projects, and I just had to use Max for Live in combination with the Lemur for one particular project. 

I had no clue what I was doing, and remember copy and pasting all kinds of stuff back then. If something worked - which after much struggling it usually did - it was truly a miracle. I made some pretty fun Lemur and Max for Live projects under the name “integrate”, which you can still find on the Liine user library. They are my beginning disaster projects, though. The first version of Iota was one of those Lemur/Max for Live projects. 

By the beginning of 2015, I started to spend a lot of time with Max and Max for Live. I started with making robust sequencers and samplers. That eventually led me more into granular and other DSP projects. And from there… whatever caught my interest! I got interested in learning more about programming, so I spent a couple years filling up the free time in my schedule with learning various programming languages and paradigms. I even took some Computer Science classes at school to help fill any knowledge gaps from learning on my own.

What is it that drives your passion for Max?

Since I was a kid, I had a passion to create and express my imagination. That’s true even now, not only in projects with Max or tech, but anything remotely creative or expressive, especially with sound! I am usually working on at least four projects with different focuses simultaneously. I think part of how I progressed quickly with music-tech and programming was that I spent all of the free time I had intensely making project after project. 

I’ve found Max to support such a wide variety of workflows and purposes that it becomes a go-to tool for me in creating or prototyping projects. I can work very quickly in Max, and it makes it easy to accomplish many tasks I’d need for it, particularly for personal or art projects. Since I love creating and sound, Max is just a perfect option for me in a lot of situations. 

And, of course, Max has a really amazing community of users constantly creating useful content and helping each other out. Something that originally really attracted me to technology was the possibilities it opened for combining media, manipulation/transformation, offering new methods of working and creating, and seemingly endless experimentation, learning and playing. Max embodies much of those technological interests of mine, and as such I have a passion for it and use it everyday!

What kind of personal creative work do you like to make with Max, and why?

I use Max for all kinds of stuff! I started out with and still use it to make tools for music production and performance, from to control to DSP. Sometimes it’s just really fun to play around, but usually I have some bigger project I am trying to manifest. I use it a lot as a tool for communicating with controllers, apps or micro-controllers like Arduino. When I use Arduino and Max in combination there are so many amazing possibilities. I use that combo for experimental kinetic instruments, multimedia projects for art or otherwise, working with modular/hardware synths, anything that I need inputs and outputs — sensors, motors, whatever.

 I’ve also been dipping my feet into DIY DMX lighting projects that I’ve made some installations and reactive light sculptures with. Max is great for implementing audio reactivity in media. 

And of course I use Max for making music. My live improvisational setup communicates with my Monome and other controllers to create a custom sequencer, on the fly parameter automation system and a customized interface. 

Right now I am conveniently sending the MIDI to Live, but I will switch to a RaspberryPi and ditch the laptop soon. Max is so useful for all different stages of my ideas and works. Since I read The Nature of Code I have been learning more about the concepts of that book and beyond: particle systems, physics simulations, Neural Networks, complex systems, the mind. I’ve been using Max as a hands on tool to explore those concepts and try and make meaningful projects with them in combination with sound. 

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