Month: April 2016

Oxford Handbook on Algorithmic Music – draft ToC

Part of the reason I might have been a bit slow the past year or so – the draft table of contents (subject to change) for the Oxford Handbook on Algorithmic Music that I’ve been editing with Roger Dean. Amazing work by amazing people including many superheroes of mine. Still some work to do, but hopefully out this year!

Section 1: Grounding algorithmic music
1/ Algorithmic music: an introduction to the field (Alex McLean and Roger Dean)
2/ Algorithmic music and the philosophy of time (Julian Rohrhuber)
3/ Action and perception: embodying algorithms and the extended mind (Palle Dahlstedt)
4/ Origins of algorithmic thinking in music (Nick Collins)
5/ Algorithmic Thinking and Central Javanese Gamelan (Charles Matthews)

Perspectives on Practice A
6/ Thoughts on Composing with Algorithms (Laurie Spiegel)
7/ Mexico and India: diversifying and expanding the live coding community (Alexandra Cárdenas)
8/ Deautomatization of Breakfast Perceptions (Renate Wieser)
9/ Why do we want our computers to improvise? (George Lewis)

Section 2: What can algorithms in music do?
10/ Compositions Created with Constraint Programming (Torsten Anders)
11/ Linking sonic aesthetics with mathematical theories (Andy Milne)
12/ The Machine Learning Algorithm As Creative Musical Tool (Rebecca Fiebrink and Baptiste Caramiaux)
13/ Biologically-Inspired and Agent-Based Algorithms for Music (Alice Eldridge and Ollie Bown)
14/ Performing with Patterns of Time (Thor Magnusson, Alex McLean)
15/ Computational Creativity and Live Algorithms (Geraint Wiggins and Jamie Forth)
16/ Tensions and Techniques in Live Coding Performance (Charlie Roberts and Graham Wakefield)

Perspectives on Practice B
17/ When Algorithms Meet Machines (Sarah Angliss)
18/ Notes on Pattern Synthesis (Mark Fell)
19/ Algorithms and music (Kristin Erickson)

Section 3: Purposes of algorithms for the music maker
20/ Network music and the algorithmic ensemble (David Ogborn)
21/ Sonification != music (Carla Scaletti)
22/ Color is the Keyboard: Transcoding from Visual to Sonic (Margaret Schedel)
23/ Designing interfaces for musical algorithms (Jamie Bullock)
24/ Ecooperatic Music Game Theory (David Kanaga)
25/ Algorithmic Spatialisation (Jan C Schacher)

Perspectives on Practice C
26/ Form, chaos and the nuance of beauty (Mileece I’Anson)
27/ Beyond Me (Kaffe Matthews)
28/ Mathematical theory in music practice (Jan Beran)
29/ Thoughts on algorithmic practice (Warren Burt)

Section 4: Algorithmic Culture
30/ The audience reception of algorithmic music (Mary Simoni)
31/ The sociology of algorithmic music (Christopher Haworth)
32/ Algorithms across music and computing education (Andrew Brown)
33/ Towards a Tactical Media Archaeology of Algorithmic Music (Geoff Cox and Morten Riis)
34/ Algorithmic music for mass consumption and universal production (Yuli Levtov)

Luddites

Reading about the tactics of Luddites, a mysterious, unnamed, disorganised collective, spread out over a large geographical area, doing denial of service attacks on the technology of large corporations, with the government laughing at them while failing to keep up with them, all under the guise of a mysterious fictional character (“General Ludd”). Reminds me of Anonymous..

Eulerroom tech

Euler-Room-Facebook-Header

I’m running an EulerRoom event this Saturday, and have the tech about ready for it..

It’ll be a live event in Sheffield, streamed online, and I want the video stream to say who is playing when. A complication is that there will be four stacks of speakers, for multichannel sound..

For the scheduling, I’m using an old Perl script I wrote for a headphone event over ten years ago. It has.. evolved over this time. But it will display who is playing now and next for on the wall for the local people, and save that out to a file, for the streaming software (the excellent obs) to pick up and render on the video. OBS will take two webcam feeds which I’ll be able to switch between/blend on the night.

For the audio, I’m taking a feed from my mixer of the four outputs that are also going to the four speaker stacks (of the phenomenal dangernoise soundsystem) and bringing them into puredata (via a focusrite 6i6 sound module). I then have a simple puredata patch which uses the soundhack +binaural~ object to turn the quadrophonic audio into binaural stereo.. So those listening on headphones will still get the ‘3d’ (actually 2d, as opposed to the usual 1d.. Well I guess still 1d but trying to follow a circle around you instead of a line in front) audio.

This then gets fed into OBS (routed with jack audio, all running under linux mint), which then streams using the RTMP protocol up to my server  (running nginx with RTMP), which then forwards the stream on to youtube live (which should take plenty of listeners) and watchpeoplecode.com (which will work for those who aren’t allowed to watch youtube live for licensing reasons, e.g. those in Germany).

That’s it! Oh and all the graphic design is by the awesome David Palmer.

Hopefully it all works. If so, you’ll be able to watch it on http://eulerroom.com/live/

Yaxu + Rituals

A video recording of me performing with Rituals on pixels, camera mic quality audio: