For Interactive Music, we have been asked to make a score and perform it. I will be updating this space later on to document the performance. For now, this will be a space where performers can get the appropriate links.
This is my simplistic take on granular sampling. I’m viewing the concept of “grains” of sound rapidly playing over and into one another as a kind of examination of individual vs. group qualities and characteristics.
The score is pretty simple, as it is ultimately telling you to press a few buttons and make a couple noises with your voice, then letting you sit back and relax. Currently the composition is set at 2 minutes long. While it plays out to completion, perhaps meditate on the following ideas:
Can you hear your own voice in the mix of sound sources?
Can you make out other people’s voices in the mix?
Would you notice if your voice was gone?
Would you notice if your voice was the only one?
When does it sound like many things individually, and when does it sound like a single source of noise?
How many people are you performing with?
How well do you know them?
Do we have to choose between the individual and the social?
We started playing with software defined radio! I’ve always been curious about them, and the in class demonstration piqued my interest even more:
Broadcasted cats! Courtesy of Dhruv’s two minute pop-up radio station at WITP 1015.2 FM, sponsored by internet memes and cats.
We were asked to look around on the spectrum and find “something interesting”. Thought it might be good to figure out my limits to start. GQRX is the application that interfaces with the SDR USB dongle. It seemed to automatically stay within the limits of the hardware, between about 23 Mhz and 1,740 Mhz. Starting from the bottom and scanning upwards, the first signal I spotted was at 23.583 Mhz:
The recording interface works pretty well in GQRX, but some of the signals were pretty quiet, especially compared to the static that surrounds it. I’ve posted some recordings, unedited besides normalization processing to boost the quiet audio to audible levels:
Moving upwards, I spotted a larger waveform and a conspicuous spike on the signal scope. I needed to adjust the receiving bandwidth to properly hear what was going on:
Wasn’t expecting music this clear so low on the spectrum, as traditional FM broadcasting does not go as low as 24.539 FM. This could be something like broadcasting muzak for a elevator, building, or shop.
I decided to switch things up, and start from the highest frequency and then work down. There was a lot of static at first, but then I spotted a possible signal:
At first, it sounded like nothing. Not nothing like just static, but nothing like no noise tucked inside of a lump of static. I was going to move on to the next signals when I thought I heard something.
People talking? I looked around and realized that it was a briefly delayed version of what was happening in the room I was in. I had to boost it REALLY loud for you to hear it as it is now. I tried refining the SDR settings and searching nearby bands:
I thought I was going crazy, but I was sure I was hearing audio of the room I was in. Luckily Dhruv was there to consult, and suggested that the wireless mics setup off of the floor could possibly be the cause. I shared this with Grau, who may be expounding on it in his post.
While I was talking with Dhruv, police officers came onto the floor. No one was sure why they were there, so he suggested tuning into their radios to find out. He showed me the following website to find the frequency for the local police radio band: http://www.radioreference.com
Interesting to hear, it almost seems like the signals switch back and forth between bands. I’m not sure if that was two different devices each sending on their own channel, or perhaps some kind of channel hopping system.
It was fun going in blind on the frequencies. I had decided not to google anything at first on purpose, but the radio reference is really interesting and I’ll be searching around for fun frequencies to look at. Especially things like wireless mics or cameras!
For Readymades, we started an assignment for making a sound based readymade art piece. The goal is to give an object personality using only sound as an output. I chose this basket:
I’m interested in using this basket for two reasons: highlighting the unknown and overlooked properties of the basket, and then using the experience to have people think about their own body and space as a result.
The basic tech diagram:
The broader idea is to think about sound in relation to spatial awareness and understanding. The wicker basket is hard, lacquered, and kind of sharp in some spots. However, with a close enough microphone, other properties emerge.
For the initial proof of concept I used a normal microphone with a rudimentary USB audio interface. With the mic right up against the side of the basket, even the lightest touch was heard. Things that are inaudible normally are very loud. And they sound soft, fuzzy, and kind of warm.
I wound up taking the recording and making a max patch as a rudimentary simulation. This video works best with headphones, or conspicuously placed stereo speakers.
I’ll speak more in class about some of my artistic goals. But I am interested in a kind of “mapping” or “scaling” of sensory input of the audience. Imagine the distance between your two ears. Now imagine they were microphones with nothing between them. If you moved these microphones closer or further apart, you could be simulating what it would be like to hear if your head was larger or smaller. (Rough simulation, of course). I’ve been thinking of this idea in terms of eyes and cameras for a while, but managed to realize the sonically equivalent approach for this project.
This is combined with a few other questions. Will the immersion into the basket sounds make the audience feel as if they *are* the basket, or *inside* of the basket? If they feel that they “are”, then would it feel like they are touching their own heads? If they feel they are “inside”, what kind of box (or basket) are they actually inside of?
Talking with Manning over the weekend also gave me a few ideas of playing with the sense of scale. But in general I want to experiment with a possible “out of body experience” approach and see what qualities are most compelling.
Our assignment was to get OpenVPN working on a device, connected to a pre-setup server with keys generated for us.
I installed openvpn and ssh on my virtualbox Ubuntu machine pretty easily. Using ps aux | grep ssh allowed me to see that ssh was running. I have a little bit of experience in bash command line, so things were coming back to me and I was starting to get comfortable.
Long story short, one of the steps in the directions threw us off. The wording as a little confusing and me and a few of my classmates spun off in different directions trying to read documentation and figure out if we were doing things correctly. It feels like no big thing when written out in a short paragraph, but we spent the better part of two hours trying to figure out “where the client.conf file was supposed to be generated?!”. Turns out a separate email was sent telling us to download an example from a github page. d’oh.
Don’t want to ramble about my troubles, but there are all kinds of fun hurdles when you aren’t truly experienced in the command line.
Shout out to Mithru, who was a huge help. The command line is a cold place. Take a friend with you when possible!
The reading was Built to Last chapters 3 and 4. Glad we’re coming back to this book in the assignments. “Preserve the core and stimulate progress” was the take away for these two chapters.
Again, I’m not coming from a business background. But I am getting some good motivation and high level ideas from this book. While there are points where I think that the author dwells a little too long on one idea when it is probably safe to move on, I wind up appreciating the direct and emphasized summary of the philosophy. These aspects seem like they should be easy to grasp, come up with, and follow. But I’m sure many companies have thought that, and failed because they may not have truly adhered to the “core and progress” model in a way that is sufficiently fanatical.
I see parallels with personal art practices and life goals, as well. But even disregarding a translation into other areas I am interested it, it is nice to see these types of thoughts floating around in a business book. It is tempting to be cynical about business. I’m glad to see a earnest and potentially positive take on some of these issues.
Plenty to think about. Not sure how specific a core value can or should be, but I keep returning to thinking about what my company’s core value would be.
