Just before finals last semester, Matt Roberts and I lead a group of advanced Digital Arts majors to Miami during Art Basel where we performed together as Mobile Performance Group, our student-faculty new media collective and laptop ensemble.  We presented all new material inspired by our surroundings in the bustling Wynwood arts district. You can learn all about the experience from our online documentation or get a taste of things from the video below. Special thanks to Juraj Kojs for the invite.

• online documentation @ mobileperformancegroup.com

MPG Miami 12.01.11 – 5 min, 14 sec

Awesome Auto-Harmonizer – 4 min, 2 sec

Triggering Percussion Samples – 4 min, 48 sec

Violin Accompaniment – 3 min, 11 sec

Guitar to Voice Harmonizer – 4 min, 2 sec

From November 4-5, I attended this year’s Third Practice, an annual festival of electronic music curated by Benjamin Broening. The program included one of my recent fixed media compositions, attack, on the Saturday afternoon concert.

I had heard about this festival for a number of years, so it was an honor to be included on the program with a great roster of composers, most of whom were in attendance.  One of the highlights for me was finally getting to hear Eighth Blackbird in concert.  The campus is also stunningly beautiful and included the impressive Modlin Center for Arts.  The festival certainly lived up to its reputation.  Ben, thanks for the invite!

• Recording in MP3 – 5 min, 47 sec

One of the many festival posters up around campus.

By far, the most significant piece of my overall contribution has been the Granular Toolkit.  This collection of Max objects and abstractions was born 10 years ago during a summer research grant that I received during my graduate studies at Northwestern. The plan from the very beginning was to build a useful collection of high-level granular effects and low-level external objects, then give them away for free from my website.

What I got back from the Max/MSP community was amazing! I have met so many great people, heard so many great pieces and read about so many great projects that used the toolkit over the years.  I have also had a few professional opportunities come my way, such as the Hipno plug-in collection.

Although the Granular Toolkit is still working 10 years later with only a few tweaks along the way, new developments have admittedly been sparse these last few years. The toolkit never fully took advantage of some of the big innovations in Max along the way, such as [poly~] or attributes. The biggest reason for this is that I have honestly not always been able to make the GTK a top priority because other projects have demanded my time. I have also tried to maintain the toolkit primarily by myself, which was not easy in retrospect.

Second, the source code for the externals was not designed to maximize the benefits of object-oriented programming.  I was an admittedly naive programmer when I developed the GTK, having learned Java just two years prior to the start of development and teaching myself C as I went along.  Changes to these externals would now require some major surgery on the code to get new features working.

Lastly, the GTK is heavily tied to the Max environment and there is almost no way to use the code in the externals apart from it.  As much as I love working in Max and think it has a long life ahead of it, it would be nice to have the freedom to use my code as the basis for projects in other host environments such as DAW plug-ins and mobile apps.

Over the past several months, I have been taking steps to address these three issues by getting involved with Jamoma, an open-source platform for art and computer music projects that I believe addresses the three issues I outlined with my own GTK:

• Jamoma exists as a software library that can work within the Max environment, but it also has hooks into other host environments and programming languages (things like Ruby, AU, VST, & PD) without being tied too closely to any one of them.
• The code makes use of object-oriented design patterns so that it can be more easily updated as changes are dictated by the circumstances.
• Perhaps best of all, it has attracted a growing list of talented developers from around the globe who are collaborating to ensure that the project is continually maintained.

So I am writing this blog post to announce that GTK will eventually be superseded by new granular components in Jamoma.  While this work is still in its early stages and no release date is immanent, I wanted to put the idea out there for public consumption and comment.

What has already happened?  In November 2010, Tim Place and I had a brainstorming session during his visit to Stetson.  We developed an outline of how to merge my granular work into the Jamoma DSP framework and began laying the foundation for this goal in January.  This meant working on boring things like window functions and buffer support. It’s not very exciting stuff, but it is necessary to support our concept for these improved granular operators.

What is happening soon? Although the Jamoma team completes significant work via email and web services, they occasionally get together for face-to-face meetings. In October 2011, I will be joining Tim, Trond Lossius and Nils Peters for a Jamoma Workshop in Kansas City. This will actually be my first time meeting Trond and Nils in person and I look forward to seeing what progress we make as we put our heads together for three days.

What is happening now? After giving it some thought, I am releasing the source code for the externals in the GTK collection under a BSD license. This will help ensure that if folks absolutely need to maintain these objects, they have the materials to do so. Of course, the abstractions have always been “open source”, as one only needs to unlock the Max patches to see how they are built.

So what are your thoughts?  Are you a GTK and/or Jamoma user?  What are some advantages/disadvantages you see as part of these changes? I welcome your input and look forward to keeping you posted on the progress via this website.

A screenshot from a GTK abstraction

Since the presentation was on lecture capture, it made sense to capture it! For this task, I used ProfCast. This is the same software that captured the other enhanced podcasts you’ll find on this website. It is super easy to use and I highly recommend it.

I know this a bit different than my usual focus on electronic music and audio signal processing, but I figured some might be interested in the tools I use to teach. Let me know your thoughts.  As I usually do, I’ll post Flickr credits and links to the reports cited in my comments.

• enhanced podcast – 24.9 MB

My title slide. Uses a photo by Flickr user Taqi.

My iTunes library is a wealth of sound material waiting to be tapped. For attack, I explored the possibilities of using this diverse set of songs as a starting point for a sound composition. Using only a short segment from the very beginning of each song (in other words, the “attack”), I have built a piece that is in no way a derivative and yet is in every way a derivative. This contradiction is at the heart of my concept for this piece.

• Recording in MP3 – 5 min, 47 sec
• Score in PDF – 52 kb

Screenshot from my DAW session for this piece.

From January 20-22, I attended the 2011 Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States national conference with 6 of my Digital Arts students from Stetson. My piece “also apply” was featured in the Genelec Listening Room. I found it to be a nice, relaxed atmosphere for featured composers to gather, hear each others’ work, and chat in between about the music.

I wrote an extended blog post about the trip for the Digital Arts blog which is linked below. It was so great to see my colleagues from around the United States and catch up on some amazing work that people are doing. A great trip!

• MP3 of also apply – 7 min, 40 sec
• A post about the trip on the Digital Arts @ Stetson blog

Banner on campus advertising the SEAMUS 2011 conference.

Title: Enhancing musical skills through sound design

Description: Sound design is the process of crafting sonic elements for film or video projects. Practicing this aural art form develops students’ critical listening skills and ability to make compositional decisions. This session will outline the concepts, vocabulary, artists, and software you need to know for developing a sound design project.

• enhanced podcast of lecture – 26.1 MB

This presentation grew out on my experiences teaching the sound design unit in DIGA 101. The topic of sound design allowed me to overcome much of the early hesitancy that non-musicians had about working with music technology in our Digital Arts program. The goal of my presentation was to introduce the topic to K-12 music teachers with existing technology curricula who may want new project ideas for their classroom. The premise is that although sound design is not equivalent to music, it can enhance students’ musical skills and understanding in new ways.

Thanks so much to everyone that attended my presentation. And once again, thanks to Nick Eggen for the invitation to present.

I neglected to include credits for images and other media within the enhanced podcast, but will provide links in the comments of this post.

In a follow up issue published last year, they published a letter to the editor that Bob wrote in response to my review. He objected to some of my review methods and offered some factual corrections.

As academics often do, I wrote a response to the response in an effort to continue the dialogue about the following questions: What role does criticism play in electronic and computer music? What expectations should we as practitioners place upon such criticism? What is the right balance between objectivity and subjectivity?

If you are not an ICMA member, you can read my original review at this link to the post on my blog. Bob’s letter will require a login to the ICMA website to get the PDF of the 2009-2010 issue. My response to the response is available at the Array Blog or at the direct link below.

If you travel over there and have an opinion on the matter, please comment! I think this is an important discussion on the role of criticism and I would love to hear more voices on the matter.

• Nathan Wolek’s response to Bob Gluck – Array Blog

Array

Max/MSP Saves Christmas – 4 min, 17 sec

Frank ‘n’ Bots – 4 min, 20 sec

Santa’s Merry Algorithmic Patch of Joy – 4 min, 22 sec

Brownian, Euclidian, and Genetic Algorithms – 7 min, 56 sec