It was really great to do a workshop with Doron Reizes and his students the other day. He is Associate Course Director of Interactive Audio at Full Sail University. We discussed different approaches to mapping music onto direct interaction, such as the accelerometer and touchscreen of iOS devices, but also more unusual ones like GPS, time and various web data. We also discussed how to approach projects conceptually and techniques for developing the brief with clients and collaborators on interactive music projects. It was great to talk with such an enthusiastic bunch of students. It really feels like there is a swell of interest in interactive forms of music making and distribution right now.

It was really nice to see Inception the App listed in the top 500 apps by The Times newspaper in the UK. Kocicenka found it there while reading the other day. There were only a relatively small number of games in there, so it feels like somehow we achieved something with this app. The updates have gone really well too and we have tried to go with the community of players, providing new challenges which they might be interested in.

Last week we were very proud to be part of the MIT FAST festival in Boston. FAST is a festival celebrating MIT’s unique confluence of art, science and technology. We took part in the Music|Machines day over at the MIT Media Lab with some demo’s of a number of augmented sound apps including RjDj, Rj Voyager and Inception the app.

The day featured a stellar array of speakers. The programme raced through the evolution of computer music, from its genesis to its use in the bleeding edge of music creation, performance, distribution and experience.

The day started with a keynote from Max Matthews describing his work in, what many would say is, the genesis of computer music – Music 1.0 in 1957. Joe Paradiso moderated a great discussion with Pete Samson, Wayne Slawson and Chris Strangio about the further development of these technologies in the 1960s at MIT. That was followed by a great conversation with Barry Vercoe and Miller Puckette about C-Sound and Max/MSP and Pure data. Tod Machover and his team then described the creation of his latest opera ‘Death and the Powers’ – from robotic performers to giant interactive chandelier harps. The day also included performances from Golan Levin, and panels on music and the mind with Marvin Minsky, Robert Rowe, Mary Farbood, Adam Boulanger and many more. Formal panels concluded with a discussion of MIT spinoffs in music and technology, featuring founders and CEOs of Harmonix, Echonest and Izotope. Full video of all the talks is here 

We were demoing RjDj along side many other great interactive musical instruments, languages, API’s and tools. They included Miller Puckette showing Pure data itself, Joe Paradiso’s massive modular synth, Marvin Minsky’s MUSE synth, new versions of Rockband 3 Pro, and RX2 / Stutter Edit from Izotope.

After the demo’s it was really great to discuss RjDj, scene making, reactive music and Inception the App with Max Matthews, Milller Puckette and Chris Strangio as well as many undergrad and postgrad students from MIT. We had a great discussion about effective techniques for creating music that is distributed in a realtime form  - like an RjDj scene. This is something we hope to continue with some workshop discussions at MIT soon. 

The app was released on Wednesday this week, to coincide with the Bluray and DVD release of the movie and has immediately rocketed up the app charts to the top 5 in many countries worldwide. There has been a huge discussion happening on Twitter about it. Its been an overwhelming experience to see how so many people have really enjoyed the experience. You can get it . The official website of the app is here.

The app is unusual in many ways. Firstly it extends the ‘Soundtrack to your Life’ concept of RjDj scenes much further than ever before. Secondly it is, perhaps, the first context aware / pervasive music application.

The experience enables you to induce a ‘dreamworld’. Once induced, you can pass through and unlock many different dreams within this world without interacting with the GUI at all. If you are still you will enter the Still Dream. If you are quiet you will enter the Quiet Dream. If you walk or run you will enter the Action Dream. If the weather is sunny you will enter the Sunshine Dream.

It creates a personalised dream soundtrack for your life. It is also akin to a pervasive game or ARG. Some users are even taking it as far as a surreal LARP – leaving the app on all night to induce dreams whilst they sleep.

Each of the dreams features custom versions of the Inception score by Hans Zimmer. Its been a special privilege to work with this score, which is one of my favourites. Here is a video explaining how the Still Dream feels :

There will be a lot more information released soon about this application and more detailed interviews about its creation. So I won’t spoil it on this blog. There is a lot more cool stuff to come yet :)

I just wanted to post here to express how proud I am to have worked on this project. It has been a very tough development process. Context aware is a notoriously difficult problem to implement successfully. So far the reception from users seems to have been overwhelmingly positive. That makes me very happy and proud to be part of such a great team at RjDj.

There has recently been a competition over on Indaba to remix some Steve Reich material from his piece 2×5. I have loved his work for many years and tried to get to most of the premieres or lectures when they happen in Europe.

Unfortunately, due to a seriously intense couple of months at RjDj working on an amazing project, I wasn’t able to upload something in time. Oh well, I guess I can’t complain! But today I finally got a free weekend so I thought I would do one in a couple of hours.

Finished 4 hour 40 min version :

Hope you like it ! I would upload this to Indaba but it breaks their file upload limitations by being WAY too long!

Over the years I have had many conversations with people about Reich. Most of the people I have spoken to have fixated on structural characteristics of his work – phasing, repetition, evolution, rhythmic pulse etc. I love this stuff, but the most important thing for me about this music for me is the harmonic choices and the progression between them.

So for my remix I tried to extract purely that from the music and display it in the most elegant way I could. I originally thought of building this project entirely in Pure data, and even attempt to submit an interactive patch to the competition. But it seemed simpler to do it this way and I haven’t had enough time for the Pd route this time.

The process was as follows :

1. I took the stems and mixed them quite differently from the released recording, increasing stereo spread across all the instruments and EQing them to be smoother sounding.

2. I then cut up all the stems at the point of any significant chord change. After that I rearranged the stems back to front so the last segment played first.

3. I then applied a number of insert effects to this track. They were all done with some Steinberg bundled effects Stereo Enhancer, Chopper and Tonic filter. The Chopper was set to be continuously fading in and out using a triangle wave, which smoothed out instrument attack sounds. The Tonic filter was set to follow the envelope of the sound.

4. After applying a convolution reverb from a cathedral. I bounced this mix and reversed it. So now the track was playing sequentially forwards through the arrangement, but with each section reversed. At this point it sounded like this :

Prior to final processing mix :

Sidenote : I started working with the groove of this, programming some strange beats with it. It was quite fun, but I abandoned this approach as it felt too much like slapping beats on Reich. I’ve never felt this really does justice to his work. To me the Reich remixed cd was a great disappointment for this reason. I remember Michael Nyman saying something like it was an “interesting failure’. The only time I’ve really heard it work was here.

5. This mix was then bounced out and put through the wonderful Paulstretch. It was set to stretch many times its original length. Making the original track now 4 hours 40 minutes long!

Something very interesting happened recently.

A while back I released a scene for RjDj called Ascend. It creates melodies by detecting sharp attack sounds in the environment and choosing melodies from a predefined set of possibilities based on the dynamics of the sounds. At the point of onset detection, it also samples the environment and dynamically adjusts a delay line to induce the sensation of ascending.

The scene has been downloaded 229 times so far. Not so many – but not bad considering its had zero marketing. The only place I have even described it is on this blog. Its sold at $1.99 each time – which is pretty high compared to an mp3 – but of course with reactive music the listener / user gets a unique experience every time.

Between 5 and 6 pm on Saturday 23rd of October, somewhere between Mauchline and Ayr, Scotland – a car crash happened. It involved the artist Chris Dooks. Thankfully Chris was ok.

During his recovery, Chris made a number of recordings using RjDj scenes. One of the recordings featured the Ascend scene. Another featured Mike Dixon‘s ( of MAKE magazine ) Noble Choir scene. Chris took these recordings, did some editing and adjustments, and incorporated them into a new work called the Elephant EP. He is now selling that work on Bandcamp for £1 or more to raise money for his physio treatment following the accident. He has graciously and clearly credited both scenes.

The interesting thing for me here is how Chris has used the RjDj scenes. How they should be interpreted in terms of the roles of the artists involved and if money should be made from the derivative works is fascinating. In some ways its just like sampling ‘normal’ music, but in other ways its very different as this distributed form is also ‘playable’ by the user.

For me it was great to be contacted by Chris and I was happy that he could use the work he created to make money which would be helpful for him in this particular situation.

It’s really got me thinking about the things I would like to enable with music. The fact that the scene as a distributed form of music, became a sort of meta-instrument for Chris was really great. What if that could happen at a gig ?

More on these thoughts as they develop and turn into real musical stuff :) In the meantime – here is the place you can get the Elephant EP

I’ve been doing a few trips and events recently with my work and outside of work. Its really helping me to think about the things I am interested in musically and ways I’d like to think about making and releasing my own music. Something which I think I may be finally ready to begin as a process.

A while back I did a talk at Secret Garden Party with Dr Gianna Cassidy. Gianna was spoke about the roles that music plays in peoples lives, its emotional importance and how involvement in music can create numerous psychological effects. I was demoing some of the apps we develop at RjDj. We set up a ‘faceoff’ situation where we invited 5 volunteers to come up and play out a track on the Rj Voyager iPad app, the crowd deciding the two finalists. Then we did the playoff with the RjDj Moovz app. It was great fun and the participants really got into it. The crowd was rooting for them and went pretty wild on the winning performance.

What was really great about this was how the apps augmented a group of peoples musical reach, so they could entertain an audience and compete as if they were experts. It was personally a really emotional experience to see people feeling the freedom of musical expression using musical frameworks I had designed.

A week later I was at Field Day festival. Not speaking this time, but wandering the ( unfortunately hipster infested ) gigs. There were some great acts there. Here is a little vid I made and edited ( like a hipster ;) ) on my iPhone :

Matthew Herbert stood out in particular. I think what I liked was how, whilst setting up, he looked like a totally geeky balding bloke you’d pass on the way to work ( sorry Matthew but I guess it resonates with me too ;) ). Once the performance started – he ran out of a tent on stage and turned into a mad scientist of sound, constantly on the edge of losing control over his insane musical experiment. There was always real danger of a total mess up involved, but also a willingness to allow technology to augment his human abilities massively, or even allow the technology to run away on its own sometimes.

A while ago I saw him at Resound at the Barbican. It was a pretty stunning gig and great collision of composed music and improvisation :

Resound featuring Matthew Herbert Big Band with Eska from British Council Music on Vimeo.

At Field Day it was really interesting to me to hear James Holden playing this track by Cosmic Baby. It really sent me back to the early 90s when I first heard it at Club Dog and Oscillate. During that era it really felt to me like huge musical horizons opened up. Its interesting that a DJ known for an edgy progressive sound referred to that 18 year old track.

We also did a quick visit to my parents place. Here my recently retired Dad is setting up his dream shed. This instinct is clearly something he passed on to me. It was really great to see his set up, which still out geeks me, and is certainly much more organised. It was great to twiddle the dials of his radio kit. I really liked the combination of distance and intimacy, noise and music :

A week or so later and myself and @kocicenka were off on a well deserved holiday to Czech Republic.

It really gave me some time to think. In the dark forests around the lake Lipno and rolling fields of Moravia it felt easier to classify the things about various types of music which I like and things which I actually dislike. I even sat down and made a list of them using  Ommwriter. This may seem pedantic and overtly cerebral, but I think it really helped me.

Whilst we were there, I also showed some RjDj Moovz scenes to @kocicenka ‘s  father. To my astonishment he spent over an hour playing with it, really engaged in navigating the music physically. It really blew me away.

Around this time we had just launched RjDj Moovz and started a competition with Chiddy Bang. I met up with them in London just before the holiday and filmed this, which was also a really great moment when they started freestyling over the music :

Immediately on our return it was Music Hackday London. This was an interesting event that turned out some great hacks. Especially Jim Purbricks Disco Snake.

Whilst at the event I had great discussions with a lot of really interesting people. One of the most fascinating was Kelly Snook, who is a research scientist at NASA and studio manager for Imogen Heap. We had a wideranging discussion about music interaction and understanding of meaning through sound. She showed us a wonderful sonification of the mandlebrot set, which may or may not be here ( im not sure if its public )

A week or so later, we found ourselves at a launch party for Justine Pearsall’s ‘Everything In-Between‘ documentary made about the making of Imogen’s grammy award winning album Ellipse. It felt like a great privelidge to see that story and the magical place of its creation. It was very inspiring to see Imogen’s artistic process and journey through making the album, and I think the DVD will be a great inspiration to lots of artists.

I also had a brilliant chat with Tim Exile. He is a hilarious chap and really thinks progressively about music. His live work is stunningly interactive and progressive. He also has some fascinating perpectives on interactive music so its always great to talk with him.

After all this it was time to zoom off to the bi-annual RjDj offsite in the Austrian alps. As always the discussions with that gang were crazy and inspiring. We also went on some hikes through some truly stunning countryside. Most of the RjDj gang are much fitter than me ( something I’m trying to rectify aided by Epic Win App ) but I didn’t mind as I split off and had some calm solitary moments like this :

Again, these kind of moments gave me a bit of time to think about music and what I’d like to do. I’m going to try to fit it into all the other stuff Im very lucky and happy to be doing. Anyway. I’m going to do another blog post about this project once it all gets a bit less fluid :)

thanks to @kocicenka for the photos!

EDIT :

Here is some more footage of Lovebox 2010 ! :