Ryoji Ikeda’s “The Transfinite” installation at the Park Avenue Armory.

If you’re fortunate enough to be in New York anytime between now and June 11, 2011 you should make every effort to see Ryoji Ikeda’s “The Transfinite” installation at the Park Avenue Armory. It’s a massive audiovisual experience in two parts which should convince the most sceptical of audiences that maybe this whole “new media” thing has something going for it after all.

Video: Rishaug & Watz live at The Villa, Oslo (video by Andreas Paleologos)

Alexander Rishaug and I just completed a mini-tour of Norway, playing gigs in Oslo (The Villa), Bergen (EKKO Festival), Trondheim (The Black Cube at Verkstedhallen) and finally the Insomnia festival in Tromsø this weekend. Thanks to everybody who turned up! In Oslo we were fortunate to have Andreas Paleologos in the audience with a HD camera, resulting in the video above (possibly the nicest documentation of our set to date!)

The Rishaug vs. Watz project is now over two years old, having debuted at Lovebytes 2007 in Sheffield. It continues to be a very satisfying experiment in exploring sound and visuals as a continuous narrative space. I look forward to seeing what possible new iterations it can take, not least of which will be the upcoming release of Alexander’s album and possible extensions of the project into installation form.

• added functions to FFT for doing forward transforms with an offset: forward(float[] samples, offset) and forward(AudioBuffer samples, offset)
• added a freqToIndex(float freq) method to FFT for finding out the index of the spectrum band that contains the passed in frequency.
• added a stop() method to AudioSample, so that playing samples can be immediately silenced.
• added setPanNoGlide(float pan) to Controller, which will snap the panning setting of a sound to the provided value.
• added setInputMixer(Mixer) and setOutputMixer(Mixer), which allow you to specify which Java Mixer object should be used when obtaining inputs (AudioInput) and outputs (AudioOuput, AudioPlayer, AudioSnippet, AudioSample).

Download from the Minim project page. Read more about the development process on the Compartmental blog.

Rishaug & Watz [NO] at Generator.x 2.0 (video by pablosanz)

I just finished a set of concerts with Alexander Rishaug, starting in Berlin at CTM.08 / Generator.x 2.0: Audio-Visual. This week we did two more gigs, first at VJ picks DJ in Bergen and finally on our home turf at Kabinett #3 in Oslo. For an impression of the set you can have a look at the clip above, posted by Pablo Sanz. For a short interview you can take a look at WatchBerlin's coverage of the concert and exhibition opening.

It was great to play with Alexander and develop our collaboration further, his cinematic soundscapes are a treat to work with. Audience responses seem to indicate that we’re doing something right, so hopefully we’ll find more chances to play together in the near future.

Kabinett poster by Diogo Valerio / photos from performance at Generator.x 2.0

To use Sonia and SoniaHelper for sound input, download Processing - soundlibs.zip. Create a folder called “libraries” inside your sketchbook folder and put the contents of the archive inside it. When you restart Processing you should see the new libraries under the “Sketch > Import library” menu”.

On Mac you need to install the JSyn plugin in order to get Sonia to work.

I just uploaded a short video to YouTube, not all that informative but it gives an idea. Supposedly this kind of thing is more common in Japan, but I’ve never seen it before. Definitely an interesting twist on physical computing…

64 little dials: Doepfer Drehbank

I just bought a new toy for live performance: The Doepfer Drehbank MIDI controller. Sporting 64 rotary knobs, it should satisfy all my needs for live control of obscure parameters. In fact, I doubt I’ll ever come up with that many parameters, but having the option is nice.

Compared to the FaderFox LV-1 which I’ve been using so far, the tradeoff is control vs. portability. The Drehbank is fairly hefty, weighing at least 2 kg and measuring maybe 40 x 12 x 6 cm. If I already had a lot of performance gear that would probably be too much, but since I mostly only use one laptop and a controller it’s not too bad.

Plugging the controller into Processing was painless. The knobs are solid, with good resistance so that you can get a smooth turning motion. There’s even just enough room between the dials to allow a small white space for labelling. My only concern is about the power plug, which sticks out a bit far and would seem prone to coming unplugged if the unit is moved. But seeing as the unit is so heavy I won’t be moving it much anyway.

The Drehbank is going out of production, and Doepfer is selling off its remaining stock at the relatively low price of €299. Their site say that it’s sold out, but when I sent them an email to check they still had some left. There is also the smaller Pocket Control with 16 dials.

Flickr: Watz vs. Rishaug at Lovebytes

I just did some new live visuals for a performance with Alexander Rishaug. Alexander’s music tends towards the ambient, with rich textures and large soundscapes that develop slowly in time. Check out his Myspace for sound samples and bio. Alexander was the producer of the Generator.x concert tour for Rikskonsertene and was also responsible for hooking me up with Phonophani, so we have some good history together.

Our first gig was last weekend at an event called Algorithm, part of the Lovebytes festival in Sheffield. The event was in an intimate white cube space, and the audience responded very well to our set. The other acts were Senking, Aoki Takamasa and Pixel – all great people to play along with. My thanks to Mark Fell and Mat Steel for organizing a great event.

The visuals were built with Processing, using Sonia and my own SoniaHelper for sound input and analysis. My laptop lost its ability to output to an external monitor before the show, which added an extra bit of tension but allowed me to experiment with running Windows on a Mac. Someone lent me a MacBook running Bootcamp and Windows XP, and it turned out that simply exporting my files using Fat Jar and copying them over to the MacBook was all it took to migrate.

There was no noticeable performance hit, but I did have trouble with the ATI graphics card that made the image flicker when background() was not being used (see video below). This is an issue I have seen in the past with ATI cards, so it was not a problem with the MacBook. I chose to take the Microsoft approach: It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

Check out the Lovebytes Flickr set for more images or see the YouTube video below for an impression. Sadly, the video was recorded at an angle that makes it hard to see the visuals, but it still gives an idea of the atmosphere.

Like ESS, Minim is based on the JavaSound API, but at first glance it seems like a more complete solution than either ESS or Sonia. It allows stereo input from either line-in or file (the others only do mono), it has beat detection and there is a class hierarchy for realtime sound synthesis and filtering. And there is more good news for those using Processing in Eclipse or other Java IDEs – Minim comes with full source, released under a GNU license. This should be mandatory for libraries, but sadly isn’t.

I haven’t tested Minim yet, but it certainly seems very promising. For my own purposes (realtime sound responsive visuals), the stereo option as well as the beat detection could come in very handy. I recently created new visual set for a gig at Lovebytes, if I had known about Minim I might have tried it then.

Here is an abridged feature list, taken from the Minim introduction:

• AudioFileIn: Mono and Stereo playback of WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, and MP3 files.
• AudioFileOut: Mono and Stereo audio recording either buffered or direct to disk.
• AudioInput: Mono and Stereo input monitoring.
• AudioOutput: Mono and Stereo sound synthesis.
• AudioSignal: A simple interface for writing your own sound synthesis classes.
• Comes with all the standard waveforms, a pink noise generator and a white noise generator. Additionally, you can extend the Oscillator class for easy implementation of your own periodic waveform.
• AudioEffect: A simple interface for writing your own audio effects.
• Comes with low pass, high pass, band pass, and notch filters. Additionally, you can extend the IIRFilter class for easy implementation of your own IIR filters.
• Easy to attach signals and effects to AudioInputs and AudioOutputs. All the mixing and processing is taken care of for you.
• Provides an FFT class for doing spectrum analysis.
• Provides a BeatDetect class for doing beat detection.

My thanks to Damien Di Fede for contributing what looks like a very useful addition to the Processing arsenal.

jm-Etude should be useful for a classically structured approach to music, but also to create realtime generative compositions. It nicely fills gaps left by Ess and Sonia, which focus on playing audio files or simpler waveform synthesis. Hopefully Dihardja will add examples showing how to use other sounds than the built-in MIDI instruments, as they sound notoriously cheesy.

See the Jmusic javadoc for an impression of what the underlying library can do.

Update: Daniel has explained a little about future plans for custom instruments:

[...] jm-Etude is not heavy MIDI based, it is just that for now the only playback function which is implemented is the jMusic midi playback. In jMusic the music data can be played and exported as MIDI or AUDIO and there are also libraries to build and use custom instruments, but I haven’t implemented them in the wrapper yet, because I’m still working on the MIDI export which will be a feature in the next update (is still a bit buggy now).