Author Archives: mjl

The First NIME

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The BBC News web site currently has a good article about the Theremin, an electronic instrument invented by Russian Léon Theremin in 1919. Though it was not the first synthesizer, I consider the Theremin to have been the first NIME: earlier electronic synthesizers like the Telharmonium (1897) mainly used keyboard-like controllers. The Theremin, by contrast, is played with non-contact gestures (waving your hands in the air). It is a full blown new electronic instrument, the product of a futurist/modernist outlook and cutting-edge technical mastery (for the day), which opened the potential for completely new forms of human artistic expression.

I am not going to introduce the Theremin here. Better to start by reading the BBC article or Wikipedia entry, both linked above. You can get an idea of how it can be played by watching any number of videos on YouTube. Here’s Léon Theremin’s neice, Lydia Kavina, playing Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”:

The BBC article quotes an interesting statement from Theremin biographer Albert Glinsky which I would like to include here:

RCA felt this was going to replace the parlour piano and anyone who could wave their hands in the air or whistle a tune could make music in their home with this device. The Theremin went on sale in September 1929 at the relatively high price of $220 – a radio set cost about $30. It was also much more difficult to play than the advertising claimed. And just one month later came the Wall Street Crash. You took it home and found that your best efforts led to squealing and moaning sounds. So the combination of the fact that only the most skilled people could teach themselves how to play it and the fact that there was a downturn in the economy meant that the instrument really wasn’t a commercial success

This seems to be a somewhat common story with the most unusual/innovative new music technology – it is difficult to get make significant cultural impact.

The Theremin, however, has had good staying power. It is still a niche instrument with few virtuosi, but you can, in fact, purchase a Theremin and find someone to help you to learn how to make music with it. High quality Theremins are made by Moog Music. As it turns out, electronic instrument pioneer Robert Moog got started by selling Theremin kits while he was still an undergraduate physics student. Moog represents an important link between the earliest NIMEs and contemporary electronic music technology and culture. For this reason we invited Dr. Moog as a Keynote speaker for NIME-04, which was held in Hamamatsu, Japan’s mecca for music technology.

I had the good fortune to invite Dr. Moog to give a talk at the company where I used to work, ATR, in southern Kyoto prefecture. It was a great experience to spend time talking with Dr. Moog and to introduce him to a huge and enthusiastic audience who showed up from all over Japan to hear him speak. I will never forget what a kind-hearted person Bob Moog was.

 

Joseph Beuys in Ubud, Bali

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It has been seven years since I was on the magical island of Bali. So magical that I managed to capture the voice of Joseph Beuys while doing some field recordings in the rice paddies surrounding Ubud:

(A note of thanks to Ableton, Leonardo of Pisa (aka Fibonacci) and, not least, Ubudweb.

 

Galileo on the Role of Mathematics in Science

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A quote from Galileo Galilei‘s book, Il Saggiatore published in Rome, October, 1623:

Philosophy [i.e. physics] is written in this grand book — I mean the universe — which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth.

 

The same can be said of media arts and sciences: if you aim to go beyond a superficial understanding of contemporary media technology, it is necessary to be able read the language in which it is based. Ultimately, that language is mathematics.

The School of Athens, Raphael (1509)

In my first year of graduate school, there was a student from Greece who taped a banner above the entrance to the graduate student offices. His banner looked something like this:

meaning ‘Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here‘, an inscription that is said to have hung over the entrance to Plato’s academy. The importance of mathematics for understanding the world was recognized in ancient times by the Greek philosophers, reflected in the painting by Renaissance artist Raphael, The School of Athens, linked above. One sometimes sees reproduction of Raphael’s painting displayed in research labs and scientist’s offices. I have one which I bought as a souvenir on a visit to the Vatican.

While mathematics is often deeply hidden behind the user-friendly interfaces of the complex software packages we use in our work, it is important to understand it is basis for these tools. Especially in the area of computer graphics, no development of new techniques is possible without an understanding of geometry and other branches of mathematics. If you are doubtful, try sitting in on some presentations at a graphics conference such as ACM Siggraph. Without some knowledge of mathematics you will quickly come to feel that you are wandering in a dark labyrinth.

[1] Galileo Galilei, Il Saggiatore, Rome, 1623.

Quote via the Wikipedia article about the English translation, The Assayer.

 

kuniko plays reich in kyoto

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I’m really looking forward to this concert. What a cool poster!!! It has two holes in the shape of marimba mallets.

On the program:

  • Steve Reich – Electric counterpoint (version for percussion)
  • Steve Reich – Six marimbas counterpoint
  • Steve Reich – Vermont counterpoint (version for vibraphone)
  • Iannis Xenakis – Rebonds (a,b)

More info. about composer Steve Reich is available at his official web site. You can also have a look at the Wikipedia (English, 日本語). Similarly, you might like to read up about Iannis Xenakis at the Wikipedia (English, 日本語) as well as the official Xenakis site in French and English.

Here are the details about the concert from the web page of the Kyoto Art Center:

国内外で活躍するパーカッショニストの加藤訓子を特集するMusic Room vol.10。近年加藤が精力的に取り組むミニマル・ミュージックの作曲家、スティーブ・ライヒの作品を中心に、創造性あふれる演奏をお楽しみください。
日時：2012年3月18日（日）　開演15:00　（開場14:30）
会場：講堂
構成・出演：加藤訓子（パーカッショニスト）
音響空間デザイン：深田晃
料金：一般前売1,800円／当日2,000円、大学生以下1,000円（前売・当日共）
チケット取扱：京都芸術センター窓口<10:00-20:00>、チケットぴあ（Pコード：160-836）にて発売中
※本ウェブサイト左上の「このイベントを申し込む」からも予約可。大学生以下券をお求めの場合は、備考欄に「学生」とご記入ください。
※就学前児童の入場はご遠慮ください。

Vimeo & YouTube HD Informal Comparison

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I uploaded the same HD video file (1280×720 progressive) to YouTube and Vimeo. Watch these on full screen, with resolution set to 720p on YouTube and ‘HD Mode’ selected on Vimeo.

Simple P5 Sketch Circle Animation (720p) from Michael Lyons on Vimeo.

This is an unusual video in that it consists only of moving black lines on a pure white background, so compression artifacts are quite noticeable. The raw data (1800 png image files) is over 200MB but artefacts were barely visible in the ~100MB H.264-compressed mp4 file I uploaded to both Vimeo and YouTube. That noted, it seems clear that YouTube has the advantage in terms of quality. Since I’ve read otherwise in informal reports on the web, I’m not sure whether or not the quality might improve with Vimeo Plus, a paid upgrade currently available for the discounted price of US$60/year. Overall, Vimeo offers a calmer, more pleasant user experience than YouTube. The user interface is nicely designed and the online help files are easy to navigate and genuinely helpful. The content and the community are generally more edifying: no denying it there’s a lot of trash on YouTube. The advertising on YouTube is also more obtrusive and distracting. As for pure spec: time to upload and process a video is much quicker with YouTube. Upload is slower with Vimeo and they also make non-paying users wait for at least 30 minutes before the video goes online. Moreover there are weekly limits on total data and only one HD video may be uploaded per week. Third party advertising is less intrusive but lately Vimeo is pushing the paid-subscription fairly hard.

Addendum: Vimeo offers a slightly better experience when browsing from iOS devices in that it’s easier to directly open the 720p viewer. But compression artefacts are still more noticeable, with this file, than with YouTube. Note also that YouTube allows upload of higher resolution videos such as ‘Full HD’ (1080p).

Simple P5 Animation

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This is a simple, lightweight P5 sketch captured to a low-res (320×240), compact video just to illustrate that it is easy to create animations with Processing.

Uploaded with Vimeo also, but Vimeo makes non-paying users wait.

Here is the same P5 sketch rendered at 720p (watch full screen):

The lower-resolution video was made using the built-in MovieMaker class. The 720p version was made by saving each frame as a png image file by calling the saveFrame() method. The frames were then concatenated and saved in mp4 format using FFmpeg.

 

James Whitney Vintage Poster

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Click for larger image.

Films shown in this exhibition included:

  • Exercises 2, 3 & 4
  • Yantra
  • Lapis
  • DWIJA
  • Wu Ming

The subtitle reads:

Initially shown as part of the poetic eye series of the los angeles county museum of art nov 1977 guest curator WILLIM MORITZ.

There is a description of each film on the verso of the poster.

Click for larger image.

Poster courtesy of the Center for Visual Music. James Whitney’s films are rather difficult to see these days and would even more difficult to see if not for the CVM, which organizes regular screenings and conducts restoration projects. Thank you CVM and keep up your excellent work!

NIME Zemi Basic Tools Part II: Max/MSP

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While we are on the topic of basic tools for this seminar, I suspect everyone already knows about, or at least has heard of Max/MSP, a multi-media visual programming environment sold by the company Cycling ’74. If you have any intention to do work in the media arts, and I expect that everyone who joins my seminar has such an interest, then you should try to develop some knowledge of P5, mentioned in the previous post, and Max/MSP.

Our faculty does not presently offer any courses in either of these two tools, however there are plenty of ways you can learn about these through self-study. Just as with P5, there are many resources online for learning about Max/MSP, including the built in tutorials and help files. There are also introductory books, and a popular book written in Japanese is 2061: A Max Odyssey. This book dates from 2006, and there have been some changes to Max/MSP in the mean time, however the basic way of working with Max/MSP has not changed and this book is still very useful.

Max/MSP can be even more fun than P5 because it uses a visual programming paradigm: you create a program by connecting little boxes having a dedicated function. The programs are called patches because the links between the objects resemble the electronic patch cables of the old analog sound synthesizers. Here’s what a simple Max/MSP patch looks like:

Click for larger image.

This is a Max/MSP patch I created after a few hours experimenting with percussion sequences based on the Fibonacci numbers. I’ve titled it ‘Quasi-Periodic Drum Circle’ but it’s not really quasi-periodic because the patterns eventually do repeat and it’s not really a drum circle, because some of the presets use other MIDI instruments such as whistles, and a Cuíca. A more accurate name would be ‘Quasi-Quasi-Periodic Latin Percussion Circle’. This is what a few of the presets sound like:

One of the (many) nice things about the new version of Max/MSP, Max 6, is that it allows you to create standalone applications. If you’d like to try my Percussion Circle as a standalone application on Mac OS X, send me a quick email and I’ll reply with a download link. Because I’ve used several Fibonacci numbers to create the drum patterns, it will take a very long time before the pattern repeats (I’ll leave it as an exercise to calculate just how long it takes.) So this also functions as an ambient generative Latin Percussion app: you can run it as background music if you like that sort of thing.

Like P5, Max/MSP is multi-platform, there are versions for Windows and Mac. Unlike P5, Max/MSP is not free, however it is very reasonably priced and there is a good student discount. Moreover, Cycling ’74 allows you to download Max 6 and try the entire software package for free for one month. Cycling ’74 is an excellent small company to deal with. Members have also showed up at the annual NIME conference from time to time.

You might be wondering where the name Max/MSP comes from. MSP stands for ‘Max Signal Processing’ because MSP handles the audio signals. MSP also stands for the initials of Miller S. Puckette, who first developed Max. Max is named for Max Matthews, who is considered the father of computer music, known for, amongst other things, having programmed the song sung by HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately Dr. Matthews passed away last year. I have nice memories of meeting him at NIME and other conferences. Here is Max graciously acting as the MC during the first NIME conference concert in 2001.

Processingをはじめよう

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As some of you may remember, at the beginning of last year’s zemi class, I handed out a number of a copies of Getting Started with Processing, a very short introduction to programming in the Processing environment by the founders of the project, Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

That short book is probably the best book for beginners to get started with Processing, or P5 as it is known for short. However, I suspect that some of you may have been put off by the fact that the book is written in English. Since a few months ago, the same book, with some additional helpful sections, has been translated into Japanese and is available from Amazon. The book seems to be selling fast, so if you plan to buy a copy, it might be a good idea to do so soon.  If the first run sells out, which I think may be likely, there could be a lag before a second printing appears.

The best way to get started with P5, of course, is to download the program from the P5 community site and start writing some simple programs. The syntax of P5 is similar to C, which most of you have seen in the first year programming classes. However, you’ll soon realize that P5 can be much more fun than C, because it is much easier to get interesting graphical output. Many experienced programmers use P5 as a prototyping tool as they find it is an excellent system for sketching ideas and trying things out. There are lots of libraries for doing all kinds of things such as 3D graphics, computer vision, sound, simulation etc… All completely free, because the developers are believers in open software and sharing. As it turns out P5 is more stable, and much more user-friendly than many expensive software development environments.

It’s possible to get by just with the online documentation, tutorials, and help files included with P5 itself. But having an introductory book does help a great deal. I had a look at the Japanese edition of Getting Started with Processing this afternoon and liked the fact that it includes a glossary of the core P5 functions.

In our era, ignorance of programming is akin to an inability to read and write for someone born after Gutenberg. If your experience with C turned you off, why not give programming another try with P5? I guarantee you that a little effort will reward fun and understanding. These books are available at Amazon, linked to the images above.

retro-future

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I’m pretty bad at drawing but this image stuck with me from the Graduation Show and I decided to make a sketch because I wasn’t really happy with my photos. This is a ‘back-to-the-future’ scene in more ways than one: head-mounted displays give me a strong sense of nostalgia for the early 1990s when they were all the rage in VR research. Of course, HMDs have been around since the 1960s, but only the military (or those with military research grants) could afford to build or buy them. In the mid-1980s HMDs started to be more widely available commercially, though still at pricetags so high only the best funded labs could afford to p(l)ay. That era has long passed: by the late 1990s the HMD, like the VR ‘Cave’, came to be considered a bit of a dinosaur by the HCI research community, who tend to be much more interested in less brute-force display techniques that don’t obliterate the wonderful natural sense of sight. Besides being impressed by the shiny technology and beautiful kimono, a child might wonder why the model seems to be engaging in a solo session of  blind man’s buff. In the 1990s, HCI researchers were wondering the same thing. Many came to the conclusion that blind man’s buff, while fun, might not be a good interaction metaphor.

Recently, on the other hand, there are rumours Google will soon release hardware ‘Google goggles’ allowing flâneurs to search the Internet while on a stroll and show the results with a lightweight see-through display. That will be pretty cool. Not really new though, either. I first saw someone doing this (or claim so) at a conference in the early-mid-1990s. There’s good reason to believe that it was at least partly a fashion statement and, more likely than not, only partly functional at that time. But if Google’s hardware works well and is affordable, it will be cool indeed. You don’t want to know the price of an HMD of the VR ilk.