020100621 16:32 • 
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If you’ve been here before, you’ll notice 2second(fuse) looks different: I’ve converted to an ExpressionEngine CMS for this new incarnation. The ongoing upgrade process has been an interesting few months. The core functionality is here, but there are many new parts still unfinished, unimplemented. As testimony to how swiftly everything moves here in 02010, this upgrade is itself already derailed and being re-engined.
My original plan was to fold all my various sites and projects into one server, one umbrella CMS install with admin from a combined console. This is still mostly the plan, with a new twist. Back in the internet day, I came out strongly against comments in weblogs. While I remain unconvinced comments are a needed or good part of modern weblogs, Facebook’s latest strong-armed redefinition of privacy for its users has forced me to think again.
In the wake of Facebook’s decision to be evil, I’ve realized I need a real hub for my activities and connections with compatriots. Regrettably, ExpressionEngine isn’t a good choice for that hub. I’m appraising WordPress 3, which has folded WordPressMU into the code base for true multi-site functionality from a single install. I’ve also taken a fancy to the theoretical doings of the Diaspora four. WordPress currently has the lead, but Diaspora could pull an upset if they open up progress reports over the next few months.
Truthfully, then, this is not a relaunch. Rather, it’s a stepping stone in a path across the water, a new moon expanding to full circle in the near future.
020100309 21:36 • • 0 -->
Everywhere I travel, I look for street art and post-graffiti. Most places truly sound like their street art, and I discover shared character between these not-so-separate attributes in every place I visit or live.
I spent the end of February gathering sounds in New Orleans. This city, even now, is such a collision of light and dark, beauty and crazy. It sounds very much the way these images look. I think I managed to capture some small essence of it in my sonic containment device.
The rail cars in New Orleans are unlike any others I’ve traveled in elsewhere on the world, seemingly out of time and place. I managed amazing captures of their workings. My favorite trolley sounded mere seconds from perpetual explosion, as if it were steam powered and filled with angry water sprites somehow trapped in the boiler: loud bangs and subsonic thumps, liquid gurgles and pressurized wheezings, the entire car shuddering, jolting, bouncing down the track. I rode it twice to catch every nuance catchable.
Continuing my sampling of the audio aether, I hit Café du Monde on Decatur shortly before midnight on a Friday. Hot chocolate, ultra-powdered beignets and an overflowing crowd in heat, dressed to the nines in their weekend release finest. PCM-D50 in hand, I was asked by the man in the kitchen “What’s that?” as he tapped my recorder with the straw he was handing me. When I explained it was an audio recorder, he gave me a long, appraising look, then smiled and told me he would be happy if I used his voice but if I have a big hit he wants a cut. I promised it would be so and he promised me another bag of beignets, on the house, if I “roll back with the millions”. Sharp.
I have a special affinity for Da Vinci and Vitruvius, so it was almost tear-inducing powerful to round a corner and find myself face to face with this rendition of Vitruvian Man embedded beneath the random tags and markered detritus of our current society. From Vitruvius some 2100 years in the past, to Leonardo a scant 523 ago, to someone here in the Now with ink in hand on Frenchmen Street, then to me, and from me to you.
Light and dark, beauty and crazy, sound and vision, all at once.
020100118 23:16 • • 0 -->
I spent most of last week at NAMM in Anaheim, doing Max For Live demonstrations with Cycling ‘74 and Ableton. It was a wonderful trip, with the majority of my time spent speaking about two of my favorite tools for making sound and vision: Max/MSP/Jitter and Live. NAMM itself was the usual mix of marketing and musicians, and I met an entire crew of amazing friends, new and old. In terms of devices, I was particularly taken by Teenage Engineering’s OP-1 and Eigenlabs Eigenharp.
Above you can see me, Gregory Taylor and Andrew Benson at the Cycling ‘74 area, a space shared with Ableton. I had expected high interest in Max For Live from users on the Ableton side of the road, who would be well-versed in the use of Live but not so familiar with Max. There were many in this group. Somewhat surprisingly, many Live users had already embraced and extended with Max For Live and brought us deep questions about its use, techniques and possibilities. Add the Max users moving their immense toolboxes of tricks into Max For Live and every conversation was a new treasure.
Here’s Huston Singletary of Ableton introducing me before one of the Max For Live sessions. I ran through demos with the Big Three from Max For Live (Loop Shifter, Step Sequencer, Buffer Shuffler), then talked about how to construct a set for live performance using these monsters and a small army of custom devices I’ve created for my own composition and performance: a Monome clip-triggering interface with offset for stacking an entire evening of tracks in one Live set; a Max for Live drum rack built from many different synthesis types with randomizing parameters and probability gates; an audio gate with recombinant sequencing of states; a randomizing, sequenced delay with pitch shift.
I rocked a minimal hardware setup: Korg NanoKontrol, Monome 40h and a spanky new MIDIfighter. Since the controllers were minimal, I played a stripped down version of a new Wolf Interval track for the short performance, extended after each day with some new bits of audio I grabbed with my PCM-D50 from around the convention center and various NAMM-related events and gatherings.
It was such a terrific time, the week tried hard not to end. Flying out, my flight on Virgin was delayed by inclement weather. I ended up connecting with other unexpectedly waiting Max and Live users before, during and after the short jump home to San Francisco.
020090725 17:26 • • 0 -->
What a night! Overlap’s Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon last Wednesday, July 22, is still unleashing sonic booms here in San Francisco. We had a packed house of 60+ at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts thanks to the powerful convergence and collaboration of Overlap.org, BArCMuT and a goodly-sized chunk of the Dorkbotsf posse.
It was an extraordinary Salon of wonderful presentations and excellent community interaction. Lots of old friends were gathered, many new ones made. The community discussions spontaneously arising between presentations were equally fascinating: Lidar data sharing, custom controller building, the difference between 3, 6 and 9 over 4-on-the-floor and the Past, Now and Future of electronic music/visuals as an indicator of cybernetic merger.
I’ve put a recap post of the Salon up on Overlap with links to sites and software presented: the [mattbot.euclid] Max external by Matt Ridenour aka VJ Mattbot, the Ohm64 synthesis patches and control applications by Peter Nyboer of Livid Instruments and the Max/MSP/Jitter Depot repository by Michael Zbyszynski and all the elves at CNMAT.
I’ve also created a Flickr set of the evening.
We’re working on the Salon for August now, more details soon. Visit Overlap.org for other good stuff in the mean.
020090619 23:43 • • 0 -->
Who: Electronic Musicians, Noisicians, Controllerists, Visualists, Hardware Hackers, Circuit Makers, Breakers and all those dealing lightning from their fingertips
What: LoveTech Presents LearnTech, a discussion oriented music technology salon
Why: To demonstrate our flow of sound wave magic and discuss incantational methodologies with others of the wizarding kind.
Where & When: 020090623, Tuesday, 19:00 to 23:00 at Space Gallery in downtown - 1141 Polk Street, San Francisco, CA 94109
How: A great line-up of musical performances with associated presentations, demonstrations and discussions.
Moldover - guitarist versus controllerist, traditional instrument techniques on Instruments from the future
Nonagon - on performing live with MIDI controllers
Preshish Moments - building custom MIDI controllers out of wood, nails and Max patches
Timeline85 Productions - presenting ColorSynth Hallucination Technology - MIDI driven LED Lighting effects
Vlad Spears - I’ll be expanding on my presentation at the last Overlap.org event: speaking about controllers in general, the need for and superiority of modern controllers for making modern music and playing an in-progress Wolf Interval track or two with Live, the Snyderphonics Manta and my Max/MSP/Jitter tonal mapping app, Honeycomb.
If you’re interested in creating live electronic music with technology, this promises to be both an entertaining and informative event.
Music + technology + freaks = fantastic.
Update: LearnTech was a blast. Large, enthusiastic crowds of everyone across the spectrum, from lovers of electronic music as an experience to those with deep experience in its creation.
Above I’m playing a new Wolf Interval track, Tir Na Nog, using the Manta. Honeycomb is in action on the projection.
020090603 00:00 • • 0 -->
Who: New media mavens, Electroacoustic elves, Audio activists, Visual vixens of all skill levels.
What: Overlap.org’s sixth Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon
Why: To cast technological spells of shifting light and sonic magic in a shared conceptual space for sharing and learning. The focus is on Cycling ‘74’s Max/MSP/Jitter and Ableton Live, but general friendliness is to be had toward other patching environments like Pd and Plogue Bidule.
Where & When: 020090603, Wednesday (today!), 19:00 at SoundArts in the Mission - 520 Hampshire Street, Suite 206, San Francisco, CA 94110
How: We start off with a round of introductions, followed by a short Max/MSP/Jitter/Live related presentation. After this, we generally tackle the Project Of The Day collectively. This can be anything: working on a new or existing Max patch together, a musical session or discussing concepts and methods for future works. Other talks and impromptu performances can also break out at any time.
I’ll be holding down the presentation slot this month, showing off the Manta and my new tonal mapping app for it, Honeycomb. Barry Threw continues his role as Overlap MC Extraordinaire. Other attendees bring all the soul power and, if we’re both hungry and lucky, there’s an excellent food stop somewhere after the Salon filled with even more conversation and idea swapping.
Update: Overlap Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon 06 was a roaring success. People loved the Manta and had many questions about both it and Honeycomb. Barry rocked out a noise performance while demoing the K-Bow and its software.
Note Barry is sporting both the archaic and new school versions of the Cycling ‘74 logo. Max/MSP gangsta for life.
020090531 15:57 • • 0 -->
When I first encountered the Manta at Expo ‘74, my immediate thought was “It’s tónová mrízka as hardware.”
I set out to make a Max app that would map tónová mrízka onto the Manta. The tonal relationships seemed complicated on first glance, then I realized the entire chart could be created by a simple pattern of four intervals repeated twice on each row with note staggering at row start points. Once I had this puzzle solved, mapping the Czech akordu diagrams to the Manta turned out to be surprisingly easy. A dollop of royal jelly was applied to allow a wider working range of octaves without repeats, but from overlapped simplicity came very natural seeming complexity.
Honeycomb is the result.
The attribute I love most about this mapping is the creation of chord inversions by specific shapes. Example: a minor chord can be played anywhere on the Manta with three notes in an inverted triangle arrangement. The root note of the chord is always in the upper left point.
Below is Honeycomb’s About pane, where you can see a chart showing spatial interval relationships along with some of the chord shapes created by these relationships, playable everywhere on the Manta’s surface.
Honeycomb is released under the QYBL-NC (Question Your Beliefs License - Non-Commercial). Manta users can download here:
honeycomb_v04.zip (575k, Max patch with supporting image files)
It requires the [manta~] Max object from Snyderphonics.
I’ll be at the next Overlap.org Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon with the Manta and Honeycomb. Stop by if you’re of the “making noise with blinking lights beneath your fingers” crew.
020090527 20:25 • • 0 -->
I knew Brian Crabtree’s and Kelli Cain’s game-changing Monome device was the controller for me the moment I laid eyes on the prototype. There was an instant understanding of and joy in the deep possibilities held by a decoupled grid of buttons and lights. I was hooked years before the larger-in-number but still hand-produced 40h units ever left their secret lab.
Fast forward to 02009 at Expo ‘74. Darwin Grosse is playing twining, ambient autoharp music on the floor of the Max/MSP/Jitter Science Faire at the UCSF Conference Center here in San Francisco. My ears direct my feet to investigate, and I find in Darwin’s hands another controller with an immediately understood, wide-open conceptual space: a Snyderphonics Manta. Uses and techniques for the device immediately begin to spin from the center of my mind.
The Manta, as described on its maker’s site, is a “touch-sensitive controller for audio and video with a hexagonal layout and programmable LED feedback.” Like the Monome, what you press and what lights up are decoupled. You can display information programatically with the LEDs for sequencing and visual feedback. You can also rest easy in the default startup mode in which pads and lights are connected: what you press is what you see.
There are forty-eight hexagonal pads, two horizontal sliders and four buttons on the Manta’s touch-sensitive face. In addition to simple touched/untouched state information, continuous streams of press intensity data are simultaneously provided by each pad. This can be used as velocity or pressure sensitivity. The sliders display only eight divisions in the LEDs running beside them, but you get gloriously smooth values from 0 to 4096 as output.
LEDs under the etched front plate give a warm glow beneath the interface elements, bright but soft at the edges with the shape defined by the metal masking above. The wooden frame creates a perfect sense of anachronism. It’s as if Jules Verne tired of knobs and levers and designed a human interface device with no moving parts, infused with the luminescence of the deep. This is not simple poetic inclination from a music technology geek: with a bit of practice the Manta becomes fluid beneath one’s fingers, like water.
The Manta dovetails nicely with Monome devices. A Monome button has only two states: pressed or not pressed. The play area of a Monome is strictly divided into 64, 128 or 256 of these states. It’s about control to a depth of a single bit: on or off, with absolutely clear lines between the points of interaction. The Manta is fuzzier. Because the surface is flat, you can slide from point to point. The metal pads provide just enough tactile feedback to indicate transition between control elements. Glissandos are crazy fun. Take into consideration the continuous values generated by press intensity and the Manta is a flowing counterpart to the 1-bit perfection mechanism of the Monome.
Manta i/o is handled by a custom, audio rate Max/MSP object, [manta~], written by Brad Garton and Jeff Snyder with velocity detection algorithm by Angie Hugeback and centroid detection by R. Luke Dubois. [manta~] outputs data for things like sensor on/off, velocity, continuous value lists, slider position and sensor maximum lists. It also takes messages to directly set LED states and turn on unique and sensitive modes like turbo and hi-res. There is a full feature set of bells and whistles available, even an option to convert the entire surface of the Manta into a single, giant x/y controller. Max users won’t have a lock on this arcane device for long: an app is in the works for mapping Manta output and behavior without the need for Max/MSP. I suspect, though, the main embracers of this device will, like the Monome community, always contain a high percentage of Max users.
As a Noisebridge member and hackerspace proponent, I’m happy to see Jeff did some of his Manta design and fabrication work at NYC Resistor. The build quality is exceptional. The Manta is in the same league as Monome: hand created, all parts sourced and made in the United States, ROHS compliant, solid like a century tree. 400mA of power is drawn over USB, which provides both juice and i/o. A svelte 0.873cm (11/32”) thickness and feather weight means it’s easy to take everywhere you will take your laptop. It even comes with a swanky neoprene case.
I’m working on some Max performance patches for the Manta, which I’ll release here and in the Snyderphonics forums when complete. More on these soon, once my perfectionism has its last input. If you’d like to take a closer look, I’ll also be showing off the Manta and one of these patches, Honeycomb, at the next Overlap.org Max/MSP/Jitter/Live Salon on 020090603.
020090523 20:15 • • 0 -->
Like the transmogrification of Pluggo, this post has been some time in the works. Attendees of Expo ‘74 had Pluggo’s squish confirmed at the event, but the writing was on the wall much earlier. In the wake of Cycling ‘74’s announcement that Pluggo is now Max For Live, I’m inundated with emails from friends and users wondering what will happen to their favorite sonic FSU software: the Daevl.Plugs. Now is the time to let the cat out of the bag.
First, as context, let me drop some history for the Daevl.Plugs. I created the Daevl.Plugs in Max/MSP back in 02006, but they began life long before that year as parts of a toolbox of patches I use to create music solely in Max/MSP. I boarded the Ableton Live maglev train all the way back at version 1, and as my use of it grew I found myself needing to integrate Live and my Max music making machinery more tightly. Pluggo provided this as a VST/AU wrapper for Max patches.
I generally prefer clean, minimal interfaces. The look of the Daevl.Plugs comes entirely from my love of minimal tool design as created within the strict GUI limitations of the Max 4 environment. Somewhere during the first pass at the process I realized through Pluggo I could make the Daevl.Plugs widely available to people with no Max experience, who simply wanted to manipulate audio in interesting, non-repetitive ways. Several more design revisions to generalize the interfaces so users wouldn’t have to be me to understand them and the Daevl.Plugs came screaming into the world.
I tried to have no expectations for success or failure at their release. A small concession was made to copy protection in the form of serial number authorization, mainly to provide a widely accepted method of signaling to honest people the commercial nature of the product, though I set the price low at $36.
I was stunned by the response. Since 02006 the Daevl.Plugs have been purchased in huge numbers, by people throughout the audio and video worlds of all levels and interests: bedroom hobbyist to post-production guru, electronic cult act to professional rock star. Add in piracy orders of magnitude higher, and they’ve made their way throughout the sonic landscape of the latter half of the Twenty Zeros.
The main benefit of Pluggo was instant leveraging of work done in Max/MSP. Rather than create a VST and AU from the ground up, with all the attendant troubles and shenanigans of those two plug-in formats, Pluggo allowed me to take my work in Max and move fast. The troubles and shenanigans were still being dealt with, just not by me. Cycling ‘74 handled the compatibility nightmare. When compatibility issues began to uncoil with VST3 hosts and an increasing parade of problems with newer ProTools versions began, I began to see an imminent playground design shift. I’ve kept it in mind since: I built a castle in their sandbox.
Enter Ableton Live in a big way. From the data I’ve gathered, the Daevl.Plugs user base is comprised of mostly Live users at somewhere above 80%. There are a significant percentage who use Live in conjunction with another environment, such as Logic or Digital Performer, but over 4/5 of those rocking the Daevls use Live at some point in their workflow. Given that Live is the most widely used and generally the most compliant and well behaved of the host environments available, I understand Cycling’s decision to focus solely on a host where maximum cooperation is possible. Throw in the unique aspects of Live plus Ableton’s willingness to break ground and it seems a perfect match.
Here’s the open bag, here’s the cat: I’ll be converting the entire suite of Daevl.Plugs to Daevl.Plugs MFL. I’ll still support the current Pluggo version of the Daevl.Plugs until Max For Live is released later this year, at which point they’ll only be available by request and with no promises of support. All purchasers of the Daevl.Plugs will get a free upgrade to Daevl.Plugs MFL.
What’s this? Another cat in the bag! In addition, there is a second set of plug-ins, the Daemon.Plugs, which I’ll be releasing only as MFL devices. These have been in development for some time, continually bumping up against the edge of what Pluggo was capable of. They’re much better served in their functions by Max For Live.
I’m saddened by the death of Pluggo and the closing of old possibilities, but I’m excited by the new possibilities opened by Max For Live. Pluggo, in attempting to live everywhere, ended up a second class citizen in all environments. Max For Live will reach levels of integration Pluggo could barely dream of. It’s a quantum leap for Max and Pluggo users, and a vast new world for the exploration of those beaming in from Live.
Change happens. Evolution is built on strengths, not weaknesses.
It’s time to do something new.