Oliver Sacks - Musical Minds Documentary

Musical Minds, a documentary based on Oliver Sack's excellent book Musicophilia, can be watched free online until the 7th July on the PBS/Nova site. Unfortunately it is only available to those in the US or at least with a US IP address. If you live in the EU and are very determined to see it you could try going through a proxy or a VPN to change your IP address to one in the US. If you're not bothered there are a few youtube clips to whet your appetite until it does come this side of the water.

All Odosynths Now FREE!

Odo from Odosynths is well known on the DIY synth forums especially the SynthEdit forum. A heavy synthedit user he has just released all his softsynths for free. Odo was already very generous giving away a lot of synths, drum machines and processors but he has decided to release all his softsynths for free.

The one pictured above, the Double Six XXL, is an FM synth with 32 possible 6-op or DX7 style algorithms and 16 4-op algorithms. Even a cursory glance at the interface lets you know that this is a well functioned synth. 11 different waveforms for the operators, clipping/distortion/overdrive & and LoPassFilter on each operator, 19 LFO shapes, 8 and 14 stage envelopes, multimode filters, throw in a few sequencers and you get the gist.... FM on steroids.

Theremin controlled Mario

So Mr Greig Stewart has set up a site to cater to 'Theremin controlled gaming projects', yet another service I didn't know I needed, but now can't stay away from! Theremin controlled Mario is just the first in a series...including a neural interface to shoot fireballs (although maybe that's just wishing on my part)!

In his own words:
"The sound from the theremin is split into its frequency and amplitude components in real time, which are then mapped to values in a linear scale representing the X and Y axis. Pitch becomes horizontal control, and Volume becomes vertical control.
The X and Y scales are then cut up into different zones. In this case, Left; Right and dead zones for the horizontal, and a single trigger and dead zone for the vertical.

The trigger zones are then mapped onto a virtual joystick hooked into an emulator."

For more visit www.thereminhero.com

Econo Monome - junkbox controller

Long time electronics tinkerer Mike Cook has built himself a Monome type grid based controller out of 'spare parts' he had lying around. All based on an Arduino and with complete DIY instructions (assuming your bits box is as big as Mikes!).

Via Make

The solution to Piracy 1992

3 Drum Machines, 2 Modulars, 1 Tu-Ki - LIVE.

So we had a sweet day down in Tu-Ki's studio. We brought the modulars down to see if they'd play nice with all other gear. An 808, a 909, an MPC 1000, 2 modulars and Tu-Ki being killer on the decks. We were just messing about really trying to see if we could get it all synced and working. The track above is a live jam... about 11 mins long... starts cooking a few mins in... no edits, no mastering, no mixing, just the machines sounding raw. The 808 is going through the Frostwave Resonator for a bit more bite. It really was a lovely way to spend my B'Day.

If you like it we are going to try and organise something for this year DEAF festival. PushMoveClick and Tu-Ki doing a live thing... hopefully projectors and cameras again. Anyways hope you like the track.

Richard Lainhart Performs Olivier Messiaen's Oraison

Richard Lainhart playing "Orasion" composed by Olivier Messian in 1937. Originally composed for 6 Ondes Martenots you can see it here being played on the Buchla 200e with a Haken Continuum Fingerboard. For me it's a very beautiful piece of music.

"From the time I first touched the Haken Continuum, I'd wanted to use it to play a composition by Olivier Messiaen called "Oraison". I first heard "Oraison" years ago as a student of electronic music, and had fallen in love with its simple, beautiful harmonies and profound sense of mystery.

"Oraison" is not only a lovely piece of music, but has historical interest too - it may be the first piece of purely electronic music written expressly for live performance. Also of note is that Messiaen re-arranged "Oraison" for cello and piano and used it for the fifth movement of "Quartet for the End of Time", which he composed in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1941; the "Quartet" is one of the great classics of 20th-century music.

"Oraison" ("prayer") is from a suite of pieces for six Ondes Martenot called "Fete des Belles Eaux" ("Celebration of the Beautiful Waters"), composed for the Paris International Exposition in 1937. The Ondes Martenot was among the first electronic instruments, and is still among the most expressive. The Continuum's own expressive qualities seemed at least the equal of the Ondes Martenot's, while allowing for polyphony and the possibility of performance of the work by a single player. I transcribed "Oraison" for my Buchla 200e/Continuum system, programmed the modern system in homage to the sound of the Ondes Martenot, and now offer this performance to you.

Oraison, composed by Olivier Messiaen in 1937 for six Ondes Martenot, transcribed for Buchla 200e synthesizer and Haken Continuum Fingerboard controller and performed by Richard Lainhart in 2009." - Richard Lainhart - via electro-music forum.

Music Box: Mapping & Visualizing Music

Music Box was created by Anita Lillie as part of her Thesis for the MIT HyperInstruments group. Created in Java and Processing, Music Box is a software used to organize large databases into visually meaningful maps. It starts off reasonably and you think it is going to be just another app but it soon becomes clear that this is an extremely useful tool. It can be used with any database but Anita has tailored it to music. You can check out her blog on the MusicBox and download her thesis PDF.

I have been looking around lately for more information on the visual representations of sound. I am starting to play around with the Jitter part of Max. It's slow and tedious and for now I can just about make a crappy music visualizer... a far cry away from interactive projected objects that have their own gravity and physical properties... but a start.

The HyperInstrument group that Anita is part of was also home to Tristan Jehan. Tristans thesis was based around teaching computers how to listen in order that they may firstly learn the structure of music and then improvise using that learned structure as a base. Music Box above uses similar tactics to analyse acoustic quality of music. Although the desired outcomes are different the methods used to achieve those outcomes are similar. If you have a little time it is well worth watching Tristan's MIT thesis defense where he describes his work with music analysis and computer created music.

About 30 mins in he starts showing all the ways he used to analyse music. Pitch, beat, chord structure, timbre and many more. Many of the methods he used can be achieved in Max using the Msp external objects he created. I can't seem to get access to his site at the minute but you can download the external for PC from Paul Hills website. It is interesting in his talk to see the techniques he used to interpret and map the results of analysis. Also his models use musical and psychoacoustic principles to help generate even more meaningful results. For example by analyzing the chord structure and the overall beat he was also able to determine the downbeat as being the beat where a new chord was likely to hit everytime.

To find out where this kind of research is going have a listen to a talk about Echo Nest a project with Tristan Jehan to create a music recommendation tool based on analysis rather than buyer habits or other forms of personal recommendations. It is an interesting talk and offers a possible solution for those talented musicians labouring away on myspace and soundclick who cannot get people to listen to their music because they just do not have access to the promotion machine. Maybe this will make for a fairer playing field.

ED: Anita responded to a question I asked on her blog."Yes, this is very closely tied to Tristan Jehan’s PhD work. Please see the link for more info on what is being visualized; the data come straight from the Echo Nest Analyze API."