Exploring gestural interface principles through Wii remote+Max/MSP granular synth mashup

gva — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 10:19:03 -0500

I developed this gestural interface prototype that offers an intuitive and performance-friendly interaction model. I'm exploiting the physicality of Nintendo's Wii controller by aiming to drawing out visceral, subtle, and "quasi-analogue" possibilities.

To build the prototype I combined functions from two existing Max patches: aka.wiiremote Nintendo Wii Remote Handler by Masayuki Akamatsu and granularized by Les & Zoax.

I chose the granular synthesizer because it provides a high degree of independent control of all sound variables, allowing the interaction design to access many parameters heuristically, looking for the most subtle and intriguing degree of sonic control. For example, pitch can be transposed independent of tempo and duration of sample playback. In terms of sonic culture, the quality of granular synthesis is less familiar and more more contemporary than, say, analogue modeling, or conventional sample playback. The sound of the granular synth has a "twenty-first century" quality that ties well with gestural control. The short demo video is not exhaustive or methodical but captures a bit of practice as I began to learn the characteristics of the system.

Thanks and shout out to Professor Joshua Goldberg, Brian MacMillan and other classmates at Integrated Digital Media Institute, Polytechnic University, Brooklyn.

Dear Professor Spooky, My Avatar Dog Ate My Homework

gva — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 20:17:11 -0500

As it turns out my Media Law class this semester may be held in Second Life. One reason this idea is looking cool is that DJ Spooky is already dropping science in that polygonish sandbox. Check out his course outline below -- interesting stuff for remixers, duality junkies, and Spooky fans -- and an awsome playlist in itself...

-----Original Message-----
From: idc-bounces@bbs.thing.net [mailto:idc-bounces@bbs.thing.net] On Behalf Of Paul D. Miller
Sent: Monday, January 22, 2007 1:18 PM
To: idc@bbs.thing.net
Subject: [iDC] sharing Curriculum

Hello everyone: I'm now at Sundance Film Festival for a series of discussions aout how new media is forcing the film industry to evolve different production models. To highlight the situation, the discussion will focus on Lynn Hershmann's film on Steve Kurtz: "Strange Culture"

But in light of the thread about teaching new media, here's the syllabus for my class on remix culture and digital media, with a focus on how people will respond to the material via PDF and remixable DVD's:

Paul aka DJ Spooky
(ps, this is sent from my cell phone, so, ahem, it aint really spell checked etc etc)

MEDIA SOUNDS: Towards a New Esthetic of Music and Art

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
PAUL D. MILLER aka DJ SPOOKY

Class notes: In Brief - “Media Sounds: Towards a Philosophy of Aesthetics in Music and Art” is a course I’m teaching at the European Graduate School as a mini residency during the summer. The school is kind of a 21st century update of the Black Mountain College: it brings together a wide variety of people from radically disparate philosophical and aesthetic backgrounds to teach and enjoy ideas outside of the academic norms.

My class focuses on sound, sound art, and their relationship to compositional strategy across different forms of contemporary art and digital media. This is the syllabus.

These materials will be excerpted and made into copies and handed out as PDF files with accompanying sound. The 100 songs will be distributed on data DVD’s and or downloaded from the European Graduate School’s Sound Bank that I’ve set up.

Media Sounds: Towards a Philosophy of Music - Syllabus
By Paul D. Miller

Afro-Modernity: Composition in Collision

1. Adorno vs Duke Ellington

2. Technologies: a time line

3. The role of sound in the culture industry

4. The Nation’s “Media Landscape” - control networks in the era of mass
media 2006, Orson Welles “War of the Worlds,” Entarte Musik, Entarte
Kunst: definitions of “purity” versus Hybridity.

5. Compositional Strategy:
Satie
Debussy
Wagner
Varese
Hildegard Von Bingen
Antheil
Ives
Xenakis
John Cage
Lionel Mapleson and the bootlegs of the Metropolitan Opera House
Thomas Edison
Xenakis
William Grant Still
Amy Beach

Nina Simone
Scott Joplin
Bert Williams (blackface) - blackface
Lee “Scratch” Perry
Hendrix
Walt Whitman
The Beatles
Toshiro Mayuzumi
Grand Master Flash
Arthur Rimbaud
Comte De Lautrémont (Isidore Ducasse)
Duke Ellington
Ornette Coleman
Pamela Z
Sussan Deyhim
Sun Ra
Yoko Ono

6. Philosophy of remix: Mcluhan, Eshun, Duchamp, Hegel, Glissant, Lessig, Dada Cinema, hip-hop cinema, Griffith, Ruttman, Luigi Russolo “The Art of Noises,” Eclectic Method - multimedia and the sound of “modernity.”

7. Multimedia/New Media: Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Scanner, Billy Kluver/Rauschenberg, Harry Smith, Nam Jun Paik, Amiri Baraka, Orson Welles

8. Sound of Science: Frequencies - the cell phone symphony, Marshall Mcluhan’s record version of “The Medium is the Massage,” The Happening - Harry Smith, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Amiri Baraka, Ben Rubin’s “Listening Post.”

9. Standardization: The Architecture of Frozen Music: Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace vs Muzak, Norbet Weiner “Cyborg Narratives,” Vannevar Bush and the simulation of the human spirit, the world of “large numbers.”

10. The Rise of Mass Culture: 18th-19th century mass media encounter the digital world. Accumulation of multiple recording formats vs the “copy” and “found object” in the fine arts. Ontological uncertainty - Mary Shelley, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and E.T.A. Hoffman.

11. Biological Surrealism: Towards a Vision of the Sonic Future: David Hammons, David Tudor’s “Rainforest” electronic music compositions, Pauline Oliveros “Quantum Compositions,” Daniel Bernard Roumain’s “Hip Hop Symphony, ”Brian Eno’s “Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now,” Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and the artist as logo-centric producer, Dj Spooky’s remix of D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation.”

12. The Experience Economy: libidinal networks and the decline of geography. Nurture versus Nature - how we hear digital sound. Valentine De St. Point’s Futurist Manifesto of Lust, 1913, and the Muzak phenomenon: acousticc banality - General George Owen Squire and the rise of musical Taylorization.

End

Media Sounds: Required Reading:
1. Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky - Rhythm Science
2. Michael Nyman - Experimental Music
3. Joseph Lanza - Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening, and Other Moodsong
4. Clinton Heylin - Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry
5. Simon Reynolds - Generation Ecstasy: Into The World of Techno and Rave Culture
6. Lloyd Bradley - Bass Culture
7. Christoph Cox (editor) - Audio Culture Reader
8. David Toop - Rap Attack
9. Jeff Chang: Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
10. Luigi Russolo - The Art of Noises
11. Kodwo Eshun - More Brilliant Than The Sun
12. Ken Jordan and Randall Packer - Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality
13. R. Murray Schaefer - The Soundscape
14. Allen S. Weiss and Gregory Whitehead (editors) - Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio and The Avant Garde
15. Saul Williams - The Dead MC Scrolls
16. Lewis Hyde - The Gift: Imagination and The Erotic Life of Property
17. Norbert Weiner - The Human Use of Human Beings
18. Lawrence Lessig - Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
19. Roselee Goldberg - Performance Art: 1909 to the Present
20. Andy Warhol - The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)
21. Yve Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss - Formless: A User’s Guide
22. Gilles Deleuze - Difference and Repetition
23. Alain Robbe Grillet - Topology of a Phantom City
24. Rudolf Arnheim - Film as Art
25. Theodore Adorno - Essays on Music
26. John Corbett - Extended Play: From John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein
27. Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka - Blues People: Negro Music in White America
28. Alfred Appel - Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce
29. Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
30. Jacques Attali - Noise: A Political Economy of Sound
31. Edmund Burke - A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
32. Octavia Butler - Parable of the Sower
33. Sheree Rene Thomas (editor) - Dark Matter
34. Russell A. Potter - Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism
35. Tricia Rose - Black Noise
36. Norman O. Brown - Love’s Body
37. R.D. Laing - The Politics of Experience
38. James Snead - White Screens/Black Images + (essay) Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture
39. Donald Bogle - Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mamies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Cinema
40. Anthony Appiah - On Cosmopolitanism
41. Mark Coleman - Playback: From the Victrola to MP3, 100 Years of Music, Machines, and Money
42. Ferruccio Busoni - Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music

Required Listening:
1. John Cage - “Imaginary Landscape 1” (Original + Dj Spooky remix)
2. Ludwig Van Beethoven - Symphony No. 5 In C Minor, Op. 67: Allegro Con Brio
3. Pierre Schaefer - “Edtude Pathetique”
4. Karheinz Stockhausen - “Kontakte”
5. Pierre Boulez - Pli Selon Pli (Portrait de Mallarme) track 1
6. Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 2 In C Minor: 3. “Resurrection” III. Scherzo: In Ruhig Fliessender Bewegung
7. Luciano Berio - (Sinfonia) III In Ruhig Fliessender Bewegung
8. Charles Ives - Three Places in New England
9. Ernst Toch - Der Fuge Aus Geographie (Geographical Fugue for Speaking Chorus)
10. Marshall Mcluhan - The Medium Is The Massage (record version)
11. Hildegard Von Bingen - O Virga Mediatrix
12. Pierre Henri - Psyche Rock
13. John Cage - Roratorio (Ein Irischer Circus uber Finnegans Wake)
14. Richard Wagner - Vorspiel Zum 1. Aufzug
15. Amy Beach - “Gaelic” Symphony in E Minor Op32 I. Allegro Con Fuoco
16. Igor Stravinski - The Rite of Spring, Part II The Sacrifice - Sacrificial Dance (Chosen One).
17. Arnold Schoenberg, Ein Überlebender aus Warschau op.46
18. Elvis - Jailhouse Rock
19. Hector Berlioz - Symphony Fantastique Op. 14
20. Luigi Nono - Ricordia Cosa ti fatto in Auschwitz
21. Richard Wagner - Rheingold Prelude
22. Woody Guthrie - This is Your Land
23. Alexander Scriabin - Prometheus, The Poem of Fire
24. Dj Spooky + Chuck D - B-Side Wins Again
25. Johan Sebastian Bach - “Little” Fugue in G Minor
26. Orson Welles - War of the Worlds radio broadcast
27. Danger Mouse + Jay Z - Encore
28. The Doors - Soul Kitchen (Dj Spooky remix)
29. Hive - Experiments in Synthetic Rhythm
30. Iannis Xenakis - Analogiques A + B
31. Edgar Varèse - Poème Èlectronique
32. John Coltrane - A Love Supreme (Part 1)
33. Philip Glass - Concerto For Saxophone (Quartet version)
34. Steve Reich - Come Out (1966)
35. John Adams - Shaker Loops: 1. Shaking and Trembling
36. Duke Ellington - A Tone Parallel to Harlem (The Harlem Suite)
37. Lee “Scratch” Perry - Black Board Jungle Dub (Version 1)
38. Pauline Oliveros - Butterfly (1968)
39. Charlie Parker/Rob Swift “Cheers” (remix)
40. Madonna - Hung Up
41. Brian Eno/David Byrne - Regiment
42. Kurt Weill - The Three Penny Opera - Die Dreigroschenoper: Moritat Von Mackie Messer
43. Olivier Messaein - Livre D’Orgure: IV. Chants D’Oiseaux
44. Meredith Monk - Atlas - Part 1: Personal Climate - Travel Dream Song.
45. Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
46. Ryuichi Sakamoto/Yellow Magic Orchestra - Riot in Lagos
47. The Winstons - Amen, Brother!
48. Brian Eno/David Byrne - Regiment
49. Fela Kuti - Zombie
50. Abdullah Ibrahim - Mindif (Original + Dj Spooky remix)
51. Ornette Coleman - Free Jazz
52. John Coltrane - Om
53. Saul Williams - OHM
54. Amiri Baraka - Black Dada Nihilismus
55. Allen Ginsberg - Howl
56. William S. Burroughs - Breakthrough in Grey Room
57. Asha Bhosle - Rang De
58. Laurie Anderson - Oh Superman
59. Sun Ra - it’s after the End of the World
60. Max Roach - We Insist (Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace)
61. Charlie Parker with Strings - Summertime
62. George Antheil - Ballet Méchanique
63. Eric Satie - Vexations
64. Claude Debussy - Concerto for Alto Saxophone and String Orchestra in E Flat Major, Op 109
65. Claude Debussy - La Mer
66. Raymond Scott - Music for Babies: Tempo Block
67. Toshiro Mayuzumi - Works for Musique Concrete X (1956)
68. Rahzel - Wu Tang Live Medley
69. Yoko Ono - Rise (original + Dj Spooky remix)
70. MC5 - Kick out the Jams
71. Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express
72. Afrika Bambaata - Planet Rock
73. Grand Master Flash - Adventures on the Wheels of Steel
74. Jack Kerouac - The Subterraneans
75. Ella Fitzgerald - Mack The Knife
76. Louis Armstrong - Mack The Knife
77. Scanner - Structural Loss
78. Talvin Singh with the Master Musicians of Jajouka - You Can Find the Feeling
79. James Brown - Coldcut Meets the Godfather Megamix
80. William Grant Still - Afro-American Symphony - Moderato Assai - Longing
81. Scott Joplin - The Entertainer
82. Double D and Steinski - Lesson 3 (The History of Hip-Hop)
83. Basement Jaxx - Where’s Your Head At
84. DeeeLite - Groove is in the Heart
85. NWA - F*ck the Police
86. The Last Poets - White Man’s Got a God Complex
87. The Beatles - Revolution #9
88. Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland
89. Herbie Hancock - Rockit
90. The Beastie Boys - Sure Shot
91. The Police - Reggata de blanc
92. Wayne Wonder - Sleng Teng
93. Count Machuki - Oh Carolina
94. George Gershwin - Porgy and Bess: 1. i (Summertime)
95. Linton Kwesi Johnson - Bass Culture
96. Pete Rock - They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)
97. Jeff Mills - Metropolis Soundtrack (Convicted to Paradise/Maria)
98. Gloria Jones - Tainted Love (1965)
99. M.I.A. /Dj Diplo - Piracy Funds Terrorism
100. Nina Simone - Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair

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Bruce Sterling’s Speech at ETech 2006

gva — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 20:59:04 -0400

This item links to the transcript -- or the script... not sure which -- of Bruce Sterling's speech at Emerging Technology 2006, San Diego, CA, March 2006. In the author's words, "Delivered at alpha-geek central, it may include indecipherable techie in-jokes. Well over 6,000 words. Includes illustrations." The audio, which is quintissentially Sterling and thus more fun to consume, is available at http://www.itconversations.com (keyword search for Sterling). [del.icio.us/gva]

Innovation vs. Invention

gva — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 20:48:00 -0400

I'm not so much interested in creativity, imagination, or invention on their own, but rather in how these can lead to new, useful ideas and systems in the world, i.e., in how a new design is adopted by large populations. In short, I'm interested in adoption. (There is a literature on the subject that goes by the name "diffusion studies" or "diffusion research" -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations)

In keeping with this idea I distinguish between invention and innovation. Invention signifies the moment when novelty arises, when something new is created. For example, Edison invents a light bulb. I do not apply the word "emergence" to this moment, because at this moment there is not yet a complex dynamic of adoption or diffusion in the picture.

I define innovation, on the other hand, to include a significant element of diffusion, adoption, or as Wikipedia calls it, implementation: "Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved idea, good, service, process or practice that is intended to be useful." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation)

With this in mind, in my most recent research I am seeking to articulate a distinction between emergence and design in a way that recognizes the dynamics of emergence in the patterns of adoption (with less emphasis on the moment of invention).

metabolo.org - invention

Exploring gestural interface principles through Wii remote+Max/MSP granular synth mashup

Dear Professor Spooky, My Avatar Dog Ate My Homework

Bruce Sterling’s Speech at ETech 2006

Innovation vs. Invention