Synthesizers

Weekend Cat Blogging #74: Preparing for New Orleans radio performance

Lali at Lali et Cie is hosting Weekend Cat Blogging soixante-dix quatre (I never could get the hang of French numbers). And how appropriate to be blogging this weekend from one of America's great cities with French heritage, New Orleans. I am here attending the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), and will be performing a piece live on local public radio WTUL FM. For anyone interested in listening in, it will be streaming live online, next Friday at 1PM CST US (check out my main site for more info.

Needless to say, I've been scrambling a bit to get ready for the trip in general, and the performance in particular. I'll post more about the music and technology later this weekend, but for now it's enough to appreciate that Luna has been keeping me company in the studio as I work out some nasty bugs in the software for the piece:

She seems to enjoy sitting on my lap while I work. And it's great to have her sharing in some small part of the creative process.

I think this closeup qualifies as a “catsynth pic.” Luna poses with laptop, E-MU Xboard, E-MU Vintage Pro and circuit-bent VTech toy phone.

In my absence, Luna is being well cared for courtesy of Ronni West's Happy At Home Cat Sitting.

Worthless Kitty Backfill: "Not a catsynth pic" and other diversions

There are real catsynth photos, and then there is this submission we received this week:

It came from a rather odd site with copies of the same picture over and over again, with long biblical quotes. The trackbacks were rather suspicious, indeed the whole thing seems kinda sketchy. Thus I am not providing a link to the original source to order to protect you, my loyal readers (hey if you're reading this post you must be pretty loyal).

Speaking of biblical spam, this seems like as good a time as any to note (as so many have already) the resemblance between the new Pope Benedict XVI and the Emperor from Star Wars:

You can google “pope star wars emperor” for plenty of earlier and more authentic references. While the metaphor for the imperial past of the Church is obvious, I wonder what it says about the future? Perhaps the ultimate fate of the Church is to be overrun by dancing ewoks…

We'll have to wait about the ewoks, but in the meantime, the cats are invading the Holy See. It turns out that the new pope is quite the ailurophile. If he loves cats, he can't be all bad, though I still don't like this “the dictatorial relativist Left is apoplectic” thing.

Yub dub, erub yub








Catsynth pics: Silicon Breakdown

Silicon Breakdown features the cat April programming a micromoog:

Small world; Silicon Breakdown performed at Woodstockhausen 2002, same year as my first appearance at the “tiny festival of esoteric music.” Check out the track Mutate from WSH 2002, which is part of their 2003 CD Green, available as freely downloadable mp3s.








New Podcast Entry: Oct 14 evolver improv

I have uploaded a new podcast entry: a guided improvisation I did last night using my DSI Evolver synth. The idea was to focus on soft, high-pitched timbres but with unstable states that can easily produce more chaotic signals. This of course lots of fun, and I was quite pleased with the results except for a couple of loud “thumpy” sounds around two minutes into the piece. I am considering this an actual piece, even a composition of sorts, but I am still looking for a good title. Feel free to suggest you own in the “Comments” section.

As always, click here to subscribe to the podcast, or contact me if you have trouble with it. Enjoy!








Recent synthesizer acquisitions: E-MU Orbit V2 and "hacked" Morpheus

This town is full of old E-MU gear (as well as old E-MU employees). In recent weeks I was able to pick up two old modules for my substantial E-MU synth collection. The first is a fully functional Orbit V2:

This module was quite popular in its day, it features techno sounds that I don't believe E-MU has re-released for Emulator X or Proteus X. It is also as far as I know the only one of the modules with the special “scratcher” function that models turntable scratching of samples.

I also aquired another pre-run Morpheus. I'm not sure it has quite the extensive collection of non-production filters as my main Morpheus, but it does have a rather interesting demo track,a small clip of which I provide here for your listening pleasure.

The full demo is a little over two minutes long, and practically begs to be imported into Emulator X2 and used as the source for a new composition. Stay tuned…






CatSynth pic: kittennettik fyrall

It's been a little while since I've posted an actual cat-and-synth photo. Here we have a kitty posing with a “kittennettik” instrument called the fyrall. From the website:

fyrall is a multo-jungo-world dialer, it is a freak. Within, it has three electronic wheels, one made out of wigglers, one made out of digital counting temples, and the third reconnects the others. at every move it may be in a state of internal paradox. it is always looking for a state of rest and it can never find it. Experimenting on the fyrall is fun because new rewirings will cause it to spasm in the weirdest ways.

The fyrall and the other kittennetiks use chaotic cicruits for sound synthesis and control. The creator of these instruments has some specs and papers, which are, well, quite interesting. See for yourself.

My interest is definitely piqued. However, I might try looking at one of the “paper circuits” they provide before considering any of the full-blown kits.







Webs on an autumn afternoon

It's been a rather pleasant October afternoon, warm, breezy, with a clear sky. The mobile sculpture Airborne catches both the wind and the waning October sun:

The garden plants are doing about as well as they have all year. Admist a recent burst of flowers, I noticed this rather impressive spider web:

…not to mention the rather impressive spider that inhabits it:

The peace of the backyard was briefly interrupted by the sound of cats fighting. More worrisome was the sound of an angry dog barking in response. After peeking over the fence to investigate, I was assured by a neighbor that it was “just some crazy cats.” One of the “crazy cats” wandered into view and I immediately recognized him as the friendly grey tabby that often visits my yard (I jokingly refer to him for a while as Luna's “boyfriend”). Foruntately, he seemed to be none the worse for wear.

Cats, or more specifically, cat allergies, have been much in the news this weekend. The New York Times featured an article on a California biotech company that is breeding hyperallergenic “no sneeze” kitties, two of which are pictured to the right. The market for the hypoallergenic cats, which the company says will cost about $4000 USD each, is people who love cats in spite of their allergies. It is certainly a high price tag, but I gather so are the medications for the most severe allergies. Those who seek a more affordable feline companion and want to continue to adopt shelter cats can take heart in a study supporting the theory that having pets cuts allergy risks. Finally, there is this story from Wales about a hospital fighting to keep their cat Tibs, who has chearing up patients for years. While I do my best to avoid hospitals, I know having a cat around would help me during a health crisis.

I had an opportunity last night to jam with some friends and acquaintances I have not seen in a while. I played keyboard, with primarily piano, electric piano and organ sounds, though I did add a Moogerfooger pedal to the mix. Musically, we did a mixture of jazz standards, some 12-bar and 16-bar “headless” jams, and several trippy free-jazz experiments with keyboard, guitar, bass and drums. The latter reminded me of how I would like to get together a standard “quartet” at some point that freely moves back and forther between jazz/funk and experimental improvisation. It would be quite a contrast to my recent performances, but still consistent with my musical vision and sensibilities…

…in another example of slipping back and forth between disparate musical styles, I was listening earlier to alternating tracks from Ethiopiques, which I described in an earlier article, and the rather dark, political, and vaguely Middle-Eastern electronic music of Muslimgauze. The two albums could not be more different in geography, style, production and social context, yet they seemed to work well together. The dark electronica of Muslimgauze worked for me, dispite an implicit political view I probably don't share, and the gritty funk of Ethiopiques brought me back to reality. Perhaps here is the seed of another musical project…

…or just idle thoughts on a warn autumn day…










Dissertation now (back) online

I have finally reposted my doctoral dissertation, this time in HTML format as well as PDF. The title is Perceptual Scheduling in Real-time Music and Audio Applications. I propose an algorithm for improving computational performance of expensive synthesis techniques, such as additive synthesis and resonance modeling that preserves audio quality, and measured both the improved CPU performance and the perceptual quality as measured by expert listeners in controlled experiments.

I think this actually a good time to review and reflect upon this work. Five years have passed since I graduated from UC Berkeley with my PhD. I probably have the only doctoral dissertation in Computer Science that includes James Brown as a citation. While I enjoyed working on the dissertation, including the formal experiments, the work I do now developing music software (and then using for my own composition and performance) is really a better match for who I am.

As discussed in an earlier post, I have had a sometimes challenging relationship with academic science. I have the technical and analytical “chops”, but I am too much of a creator and a romantic to find personal meaning and reward in rigorous experiments and analysis of data. I love the aesthetic appeal of science and mathematics, and especially look for unusal and serendipitous connections rather standard incremental results. Simply put, I am an artist, not a scientist, even when I'm working on software engineering projects.






Fun with Emulator X: Bohlen 833 cents scale and harmonics

I have been experimenting lately with alternate tunings and scales. A couple that have particularly piqued my interest are the Bohlen-Pierce scale and the much-less-used Bohlen 833 cents scale. The latter is intriguing in that it is based on properties of the fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio (although Bohlen admits he did not have those concepts in mind when he stumbled upon this scale).

Based on the golden ratio (1.618034…), one can construct a harmonic series as multiples of 833 cents that has a very distinct timbre. This can be easily implemented in Emulator X as a series of sinewave voices (or voices of any other harmonic single-wave sample) tuned multiples of 833 cents above the fundamental:

The series above consists of a fundamental, three golden-ratio harmonics, followed by the octave above the fundamental (traditional first harmonic 2:1 ratio), and the three-golden-ratio sub-harmonics of the octave.

Using these and other harmonics, Bohlen was able to construct the following seven-step scale between the tonic and the tone 833 above.

Step
Ratio (dec.)
Ratio (cents)

Diff. to previous step (cents)
0
1.0000
0
–
1
1.0590
99.27
99.27
2
1.1459
235.77
136.50
3
1.2361
366.91
131.14
4
1.3090
466.18
99.27
5
1.4120
597.32
131.14
6
1.5279
733.82
136.50
7
1.6180
833.09
99.27

Emulator X does not have editable tuning tables, although it does have a 36ET tuning (36 divisions of the octave). Bohlen suggests that playing specific steps out of the 36ET scale yields a good appoximation of the 833 scale:

Step (just)
Cents (just)
Step (36/octave)
Cents (36/octave)
0
0
0
0
1
99.27
3
100.00
2
235.77
7
233.33
3
366.91
11
366.67
4
466.18
14
466.67
5
597.32
18
600.00
6
733.82
22
733.33
7
833.09
25
833.33

Combining the Bohlen 833 scale and harmonic series, which are both based on the golden ratio yields a new tonality. Although it is quite different from the traditional Western tonality based on integer ratios, it is nonetheless “harmonic” with respect to its own overtone series. This is perhaps a simple counter-example to to the Monk's Musical Musings from an earlier article.

But how does it sound? To that end, I provide the following audio example consisting of the scale played on the 833-timbre in Emulator X, along with some additional intervals. Because this is only an approximation using 36ET, things aren't perfectly “harmonic,” but I think one can get a feel for the tonality. I particularly like the “tri-tone” (600 cents above fundamental) here.

The next steps are to come up with a more musical timbre based on the harmonic series, as well as short composition using the scale…