Flo, Ian and myself doing some reactive madness - pic by @kocicenka
We had a great time on Friday eve at the Kids on DSP reactive album iPhone application launch party at RjDj. The kids did a live set that included audio sampling from 5 mics located around the space, as well as a skype in option where party guests ( or anyone – as we advertised it on twitter ) could dial into the mix and have their voices reactively control the music. It was a wild effect ! Someone mentioned there was a recording of it somewhere, so hopefully that may surface soon somewhere on the interwebs – I will link to it if it does.
This was also RjDj London sprint weekend. We had some great discussions and sessions with enthusiastic scene creators and people interested in RjDj both for musical uses and other uses such as augmented reality applications. I’m really looking forward to their stuff.
Saturday was Interesting 09 day. I’d never managed to get tickets for one before, but this year @russelldavies kindly asked me to speak. It was a really awesome day and I can now see why it has such a great reputation. All the talks were really .. well .. interesting
I spoke briefly about music as software and reactive music, then did some RjDj demo’s including getting the 350 strong enthusiastic audience to participate in the scene Doppelganger by Kids on DSP. I didn’t think it would work and I was ready for it to feedback wildly.. but the result blew me away and was quite frightening !
Ah things have been so crazy over the last few months that I haven’t been able to update this blog.
First I was in the Czech Republic for a while, back in July with @kocicenka. We went around southern Czech visiting her family. The countryside was beautiful ( video on my facebook soon I hope ). We ended our trip in Prague, which was really amazing as a city and blew me away – especially the food. We also met up with Lucy, who really liked the forthcoming Kids on DSP reactive music album coming out on RjDj :
After that I came back to London briefly, then went straight out to the RjDj internal alpine sprint in Austria.
This was really awesome as we did some cool experimental stuff – more news on this on the RjDj blog soon I expect. Plus I stayed in a tent for most of the sprint :
This was great as I had a fear of camping from the numerous family camping holidays I had to endure as a child. I was shocked to discover that modern tents have really improved !
However, during my stay in Austria I did contract the dreaded alpine kangaroo flu.
But there was no chance of a break in the schedule, so I was straight on the buses and trains with @13bitstring to visit Acid Pauli in his studio near Munich.
We did some great reactive madness here – hopefully its going to be released soon I was pretty ill the whole time though. Luckily there was also some good food here though too :
Around this time the video of the scene we did with Carl Craig went live on YouTube though, which was cool :
Since I’ve been back in London I’ve had my head down on some other projects which should become public soon. Managed to get out to see an interesting exhibition at the Tate Modern though called ‘No Ghost Just a Shell’ :
It was an exhibition by a collective of artists, exploring what happens to fictional identities in their ‘afterlife’. The artists bought the right to use the character Ann Lee, from the animation Ghost In The Shell. More info here.
It felt kinda interesting to think about identity and how we portray ourselves. In the same week the forthcoming Kids on DSP app got a mention in The Guardian.
Next up is @interesting at the Conway Hall on Sat the 12th. Hmm.. now I just need something to talk about..
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.”
@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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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!
:
