sonic surrounds

I’ve just uploaded a new flickr set of scanned flyers for gigs i’ve been to, included either because i love the flyer, or it was a unique gig or venue… or all of the above. Many of the flyers represent my nostalgia for the strange events and crustier times of yore.

Below is one of my faves, from san francisco, 2002.

You might even say this flyer is somewhat topical this week in Sydney: with the APEC “leaders” conference happening over the next few days, there’s a LOT of love in the air over Sydney at the moment - and plenty of its kind on the ground too, what with the fences, ID checks and huge security forces to protect one (thankfully rapidly fading) fool.

trash america (front) 2002

trash america (back) 2002

a conceptual sketch of a post in progress …
- so as to plot the ideas in minimal time so they can be joined further in the future… more or less.
- in which you the reader put together the story by following the links, watching the videos therein, and having your own mind blown at the 1960s’ 20/20 vision of the computing present and imagine your own future of computing…. (ok, so it is 3am as i write this)

the tour will take you from Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad (and the magnificent phd thesis that inspired this post) through the mother of all demos, via Alan Kay’s incredible 1987 talk hosted on archive.org (see the thumbnails), or the separated sections of a 2003 version of the talk documented by lisa rein.

from a demonstration of some flow chart software using the Rand Tablet input system (drawing process blocks - an early version of the patcher paradigm that brings us Pd and Max/MSP) - a point that’s apparently little appreciated in responses to this presentation, though Alan himself says of it: “For the first time I felt like I was touching the information structures.”

to the “once and future” smalltalk programming language (inspired by sketchpad and simula)… used by young teenagers to write animation software in a page or two of code in Kay’s 1987 video mentioned above.

[and a diversion to livecoding, often done in the smalltalk-inspired supercollider, - see the LOSS festival happening now in Sheffield, UK. Among other video demos on the LOSS site, check out the Fluxus and Al-Jazari demo - the former a live-coding game environment in which the latter, a live-coding audio environment has been coded...]

to the present open source smalltalk squeak, from which has been developed tools such as sophie presentation software, now running on the one laptop per child.

watch out for a (not too distant?) future when millions of the world’s poorest children are live coding new visions of computing!

If a great musician plays great music but no one hears… was he really any good?

- no, that quote is not some ridiculous hubris on my part, but the question posed by an article in the Washington Post, Pearls Before Breakfast, by Gene Weingarten, in which preeminent violinist (though in my ignorance of that world i’d never heard of him), Joshua Bell performed 6 classical pieces over 43 minutes on a $3.5 meeellion dollar violin in a Washington subway station, as an experiment. Well worth a read. This via the ambisonicbootlegs mailing list.

The final day of ICAD brought two sessions on Sonification including the following interesting work.

Another sonification environment, SoniPy, build in Python. The paper was presented by Somaya Langley, titled, THE DESIGN OF A HETEROGENEOUS SOFTWARE ENVIRONMENT FOR DATA SONIFICATION RESEARCH AND AUDITORY DISPLAY: SONIPY by David Worrall, Michael Bylstra, Stephen Barrass and Roger Dean.

A paper by Florian Grond, from ZKM, titled ORGANIZED DATA FOR ORGANIZED SOUND SPACEFILLING CURVES IN SONIFICATION showed an interesting way of taking trajectories through multidimensional spaces by using “space filling curves” with scan line patterns that produce clusters of proximate information, so that the transformation might be more spatially pertinent in comparison with linear raster scans for example. A visual example used a video from the Pure Data GEM open GL/video library and produced some Daniel Crooks-esque images. Maybe the space filling curves could be used as a new version of Crooks’ effects to produce time-based moving image output, rather than the stills from Grond’s paper?

Of particular interest to me is a suite of Max/MSP applications (available here) that illustrate and allow manipulation of various psychoacoustic phenomena. The paper was titled, SONIFICATION OF SOUND: TOOLS FOR TEACHING ACOUSTICS AND AUDIO by Densil Cabrera and Sam Ferguson.

Here’s the list of sonification examples:

• Auditory graphs of absorption coefficient spectra
• Sonification of rectangular room normal modes
• Sonification of room impulse responses
• Sonification of rectangular room reflections
• Using the Hilbert transform for sonification
• Sonification of the complex spectrum
• Sonification of head-related transfer functions
• Sonification of vowel formants
• Sonification of spectral moments

All of which sound well worth of investigation, some even potentially useful as sound/music performance tools, such as the vocal formants sonifications.

Some highlights from ICAD Day 3.

A report on the Sound in Interaction workshop, SOUND EMBODIED: EXPLORATIONS OF SONIC INTERACTION DESIGN FOR EVERYDAY OBJECTS IN A WORKSHOP SETTING, by Karmen Franinovic, Daniel Hug and Yon Visell. The workshop had participants creating amusing video sketches of potential sound and sonification designs by simply re-sound-tracking visual actions, for example, a sonic fish finder.

Also, PsySound3 software was introduced by Densil Cabrera.

PsySound3 is software for the analysis of soundfiles using physical and psychoacoustical algorithms. It is an easy to use platform that does precise analysis using standard acoustical measurements, as well as implementations of psychoacoustical and musical models (such as loudness, sharpness, roughness, fluctuation strength, pitch, rhythm and running IACC).