Dave Matthews tribute to Michael Jackson ( note triple echo youtube posting going on )

Last night I went to see The Dave Matthews Band at the Brixton Academy. Prior to the gig I didn’t know their music much at all really, but I enjoyed the band – they are super tight. It was a really interesting experience to look at the ways people were enjoying the spectacle, energy and emotional impact of live music. The physical ways they interacted – the clapping, dancing, singing and screaming.

In a strange way, a raw live gig like this really makes me think about the possibilities of reactive music.

Something else happened this weekend too. After learning of Michael Jackson’s death, I listened to a load of bootleg stem recordings I have of his vocals. One was the vocal stem from Billie Jean. It contains a large amount of audio that can’t be heard in the final mix. Intricate vocal noises the Jackson made ( and some other melodic content ) which were mixed out of the album mix by Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien. It was very striking emotionally to listen so closely to largely unheard material at this time. It made me feel closer to the artist.

As I have discussed with many artists and producers, during the process of recording, there are always many possible mixes, and its always hard to not give the listener many options for discovery. Reactive music opens up the possibilities for these to become part of, indeed purposely designed into the exploration of and participation in the music.

At the end of his set, Dave Matthews recounted a story about one of his daughters called Grace. He said she always thinks she is in his songs, as he uses the word grace a lot lyrically. His other daughter then asked “Daddy, when you gonna put me in a song ?” So Dave Matthews wrote a song called ‘When you gonna put me in a song’.

It made me think that artists creating reactive musical experiences are, in some ways, putting themselves into the software of the music. Much like programming a little mini AI clone of themselves within the musical code. Wouldn’t it be great if, in addition to all the conventionally recorded media of Michael Jackson we have, we also had something like this he created ?

Tod Machover is currently working on a really interesting project called Death and the Powers. It’s a fascinating work which I hope to see. Here is an excerpt from the story outline

“Simon Powers was a great man, a legend who wanted to go beyond the bounds of humanity. He was a successful inventor, businessman, and showman. During his life, he accumulated unimaginable wealth and power. He is the founder of the System, a human organism material experiment which investigated the transduction of human existence into other forms. His work was heralded as revolutionary and genius, but his ideas and experiments also had implications that mainstream society found objectionable. He has received thousands of hate letters. To many, he is considered a pariah. Reaching the end of his life, Powers faces the question of his legacy: “When I die, what remains? What will I leave behind? What can I control? What can I perpetuate?” He is now conducting the last experiment of his life. He is in the process of passing from one form of existence to another in an effort to project himself into the future. Whether or not he is actually alive is a question. Simon Powers is himself now a System.”

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@russelldavies has been kind enough to ask me to speak at Interesting 09 . I’ve never actually managed to get tickets to an Interesting before – they sell like hotcakes, so I’m really looking forward to it. From previous events it all seems very… interesting!

I expect I’ll be speaking about the various ways I approach the creation of music, perhaps particularly concentrating on the work I’m doing with RjDj at the moment. I expect I’ll do some kind of live demo of some scenes too.

As the interesting twitter account says : The second wave of tickets go on sale on June 25th at 1.30pm.

I just found that Beth Coleman’s of MIT Media Lab’s interesting article ‘Using Sensor Inputs to Affect Virtual and Real Environments’ is now online as a pdf here. It mentions a number of cross reality projects, including the Parsec VOIP controlled project I towards the end of 2007 with Eshi Otawara and Chase Marellan.

I heard via @RenZephyr that it was also discussed during the recent State of Play 09 panel about law, games and virtual worlds, which Beth was also part of.

I got this nice T-shirt with lots of synths and stuff on it recently for my birthday :)

I also had the confirmation that I’m going to be guest speaking at one of a series of events held by the award winning composer Amin Bhatia in August.

Amin is a great composer, especially his wonderful use of synths. Sounds he has created even appeared on Thriller!

The series of workshops are taking place at Music Academy Online’s presence in SL.  I’ll be on at 11am Pacific time on the 15th of August.

I recently spoke at Metameets in Amsterdam. I did a talk called ‘A Future of Music’ which tried to explain some of the unusual types of reactive soundtrack work I’ve been doing in virtual worlds and then looked at the wider context of the music industry, the interactive / games industry and how music itself could evolve in this era.

Mal Burns captured some footage of the talk on his metaworld 2 stream here, although the audio quality is very poor. I’ll try to host a slide share of my slides here at some point in an update to this post.

rjdj_logo

This blog has been a bit quiet lately. The reason why is that I have been engrossed in some new work I’ve been doing with a very exciting company.

Back on April the 9th I got an intriguing direct message on Twitter asking if I would like to go chat to RjDj about doing some reactive music composion for them. I went along and met up with Michael the CEO and Florian another reactive music composer, who were really great. I started working on a number of fascinating projects almost immediately that afternoon !

RjDj is an amazing iPhone application which creates mind twisting hearing sensations by weaving your environment into reactive music. Voices, cars, your walking speed.. these and many other things can be used to shape your experience. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, try it!

I had been interested in RjDj from the moment I heard about it, and helped test during its beta phase.  It’s come a long way since then with loads of new scenes added. Scenes are reactive musical programs within RjDj, which respond to your environment and movements in different ways. Here are some videos of various RjDj scenes :

Not only does it enable all this funkyness.. but RjDj allows users to record their unique mixes and upload them, via the iPhone to your own user space and Twitter + Facebook.

The scenes themselves are made in Pure Data, a real-time graphical programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing. As I’m getting further into the wonders of creating reactive musical patches for RjDj, I’m discovering that Pure Data is a truly amazing environment for creativity. I also feel very honoured to be working with the great group of pioneers in this field which work at RjDj.

We are working on a few different projects at the moment, some of which are confidential. However I am working on a scene of my own, which I think strongly relates to my previous reactive work in virtual environments, particularly Parsec. I’m hoping to release it as a scene through RjDJ soon.

The parallels between creating scripted RjDj scenes and working with scripted audio environments in virtual worlds and games surprises me every day. Working with this technology gives you the power to associate musical events with any sound or physical movement, much like the scripting language extending out into the air around you.

In this respect it really feels close to an audio augmented reality or the idea of the virtual spilling over into reality. Afterall, visual augmented reality is kinda tricky – but audio augmented reality is here now. In this respect I have sort of come to a point where I’m starting to disregard the terms virtual as being something different to physical reality. For me everything virtual is becoming part of reality now, everywhere.  Saying that I’m very excited about the possibilities of linking the technologies of this type of augmented reality and virtual worlds. I’m also interested in how people are thinking about how all this pans out.

io-redux

I/O : Redux photographed by Angela A Thomas

I feel lucky to have recently been given the chance to feature one of my virtual installations at Princeton University’s presence in Second Life.  The project features contributions from a range of creators including additional physics scripting work by Chase Marellan. Terraform, additional sculpty rocks, water and additional sound by Poid Mahovlich. Visual and sound script optimisations by Talia Tokugawa and additional sound effects by Acoustic Alchemy. I came up with the Concept, Build, Scripting, Sound Design and Music.

During Burning Life 2008 , the official virtual regional of the Burning Man festival, I was asked to create an installation as a juried artist.  The size contraints of the Burning Life plots created a very interesting artistic challenge. Whilst we had a generous prim allocation, the ground footprint of the installation needed to be very small ( around 20 x 20 m I think ). This was a great idea for the ground plane of the Burning Life event, as it gave each exhibitor some space around them and retained the infinite plain sense of the desert which is so important for the mood of Burning Man.

I created an installation called I/O, which was a sort of interactive musical adventure. It used the vertical space above the plot extensively, reaching up some 1300m into the sky. The installation uses avatar proximity to control a number of factors including the playback of a series of ambient soundscapes. It also triggers a composition on the SL media stream to co-incide directly with the animated movement of space capsules which you ride into a huge ethereal nebula.

Following Burning Life, Princeton University were kind enough to offer to host a new version of I/O at one of their sims. Here I was able to expand the width of part of the installation and increase the sophistication of the nebula zone. We also performed some script enhancements on the capsule rides and sound programming. 

The opening event was captured by the ever prolific Second Life machinima artist ColeMarie Soleil with great effect. Here she also documents the experience of the new version, called I/O : Redux , very effectively :

I’d like to thank Persis Trilling from Princeton for her kind support of  the project over its evolution and Poid Mahovlich for her continued support of great content in Second Life.

To visit I/O : Redux and experience it or yourself click here.

Recently Costa Rica tourist board opened a new presence in Second Life as part of a cross media initiative to promote the remote Cocos Island to become a new natural wonder of the world. 

The 2 simulator project is a virtual representation of Cocos Island, a UNESCO protected nature reserve 335 miles off the coast of Costa Rica.

I was commissioned to provide environmental audio design in world and to create the soundtrack. The soundtrack was designed to work with these machinima and animoto promo films, but is also a soundtrack that plays in world as people explore the island virtually.

It’s interesting that more national tourist boards are realising the immersive power of virtual world platforms to convey a number of messages and how the audio part of that experience is key.

This is borne out by Mexico, another country I have provided metaversal soundtrack / sound design services for, have recently substantially extended the length of their presence in Second Life way beyond the initial projected timeframe of the project. 

The 31st of December 2008 marked the end of Google Lively. Lively was perhaps one of the most eagerly anticipated virtual worlds projects of recent years. Many felt that the presence of Google in the virtual worlds space in itself validated the field. However in its beta release state was generally regarded as a disappointment. Google announced its retirement of the project on the 19th of November 2008. 

I helped out on the Google Lively trusted content developer program, so I was very disappointed to see the announcement of its retirement. I felt that Lively was interesting, despite its limitations and had potential as a different type of virtual world platform ( in comparison to more immersive highly customisable worlds like Second Life™ ). Here is a machinima video I made recently of what Lively looked like and some of the rooms created in it. :

However I logged in to Lively today ( 1st Jan 2009 ) to find it mysteriously open and running. This may just be due to Google staff being on holiday. Another theory being discussed in Lively rooms, is that Google have decided to no longer maintain Lively after 2008, but still allow it to run. ( EDIT : Google Lively is indeed now closed as of the 2nd Jan 2009 )

The real surprise came as I wandered and stumbled upon a series of users in there frantically talking about “NewLively“. 
 
After trawling around the sparsely populated NewLively googlegroup I wasn’t any wiser as to the origin of this project or who was running it. Wild speculation was flying around in the Google Lively room I was in that Google had sold the source code to Lively to a third party. This would have been reasonably big news, so I emailed Niniane Wang at Google, former head of the Lively project. Niniane assured me that “Google did not sell source code to newlively.  It was made by lively fans.”
 
With some trepidation I went to the site and downloaded and installed the NewLively client. The registration / log on procedure doesnt use gmail at all, in fact I logged in using a seperate email altogether. I logged in, and joined a room and luckily found Liu YiChang, the leader of the NewLively project there. He confirmed that NewLively is rebuilt from the ground up and whilst it looks and feels very similar to Lively, it is in fact built on different technology. NewLively is apparently a company, with 10 people working on this project, but as Liu stated “it is a side project at the moment”.  

“We recreated everything, the code and the models”, Liu said “it was a huge task, in the last month the team and I have slept only 4 hours a night.” I asked him if anyone at Google was aware of what they were doing and if he thought there would be any legal issues regarding the NewLively project. “Yes, they are aware of what we are doing. I don’t think they will object, I think they will like it. Google is a great company. Our work stands on the shoulders of the great work the Google Lively team did.” Liu is based in Beijing, China. However the servers for NewLively are in both the US and China. “We have great servers. Also many interested sponsors have been in contact with us.”

When I asked Liu what his longer term aims were with this project he replied “About one month ago, I heard the news that lively was shutting down. I was very sad. I have many friends there. So I made a decision. I had to do something for the lively users. We decided to clone lively. So, the first step is to making a place for Lively users . In the longer term it will be something between Google Lively and Second Life. Users will be able to generate some content, for example users will be able to upoad photos, music, video, even avatars and rooms. We have a great advantage over Second Life in the supported concurrent users per server. We use better technology. We estimate that we can support about 5000 users per server, better than most other virtual worlds services.”      

This concurrency claim, would if verifiable present a virtual world platform that brought a different level of viability to events in virtual worlds. The possibility of an online pop concert with thousands rather than tens of users is something which the music / events industry has been very interested in for some time now. Aside from Second Life, where concerts have been one of the key use cases, this has even spawned a number of specialist virtual world platforms specifically for this purpose, most notably vSide and the intriguing Music Mogul.

I asked Liu what how their platform supports sound, if it is uploaded and stored on the servers then sent back out to the client ?  or if it can be linked to files hosted elsewhere on the web. “We support 3d sound.” he replied, “Yes both, but we prefer external links”

Liu was also keen to stress other features which the platform can support, including 3d stereoscopic viewer capabilties and “game rooms”. Which may allude to the earlier claims from Google to allow Lively to be opened up as a game development platform. It will be interesting to see how this project develops, if it has an affect on Google’s strategy and if it provides an interesting alternative to other virtual world platforms. 

Update  20:19 GMT 01/01/09 :

There has been thread running on the Livelyzens Googlegroup about this, with some interesting comments. 

http://groups.google.com/group/livelyzens/browse_thread/thread/c5197c51d7133be0/56cae806e1a806a6?hl=en#56cae806e1a806a6

It seem’s the technology of the viewer stems from this site ( which isn’t viewable in English ) :

http://cc6.com/

 

This is a quick video I created to document the DynaFleur project by Douglas Story and Desdemona Enfield with Terraforming by Poid Mahovlich and Music and Sound by myself.
 
The project was commissioned by Princeton University.

The installation detects and reacts to avatar movement in various ways, moving and emitting sounds. The sounds created ranged from synthetically created to natural – for one part I recorded the sounds of icecubes being squelched in my hands with a close mic.

Robert Thomas 1 bw square rounded 500 500

Hi there ! My name is Robert Thomas, and I'm a composer interested in unusual ways music can become a soundtrack to your life. I run a small music company called Dizzy Banjo. I also go under the name Dizzy Banjo in numerous social networks and environments.

I've done a lot of work creating music for unusual places, including virtual spaces, video games and mobile devices.

My work has explored numerous ways of tracking user behaviour and making music reactive to it, including VOIP, gestures and keystrokes, physical movement and activity patterns of individuals and groups.

At the moment I am working on a number of projects, but spending a lot of time as a reactive music composer with :

rjdj_logo

RjDj is an amazing iPhone application which creates mind twisting hearing sensations by weaving your environment into reactive music. Voices, cars, your walking speed.. these and many other things can be used to shape your experience. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, try it!

my flickr

It doesn't start with talent

Rubber duckzilla FTW

Haitai cocopalm muscat

Dablik ;)

Vanilla malt milkshake ... Slurp ... Mmm gone

Front row tickets

Hmm...

Guess this building contains swearing and violence...

Mmmmmiso

Guitar instead of iPod on bus

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Rating :

Disclaimer

The views expressed here are solely those of Robert Thomas and not of any other company or organisation.
Dizzy Banjo / Robert Thomas is a composer and sound designer best known for his work on virtual world soundtracks, virtual installation art and machinima soundtracks. He work often explores non linear soundtrack methods and some of his projects have pioneered new methods of tracking group behaviour and creating musical soundtracks from them - including unusual uses of VOIP software, keystrokes, mouse gestures and avatar movement. This blog explores the possibilities of soundtracks in virtual worlds.

 

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