Inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil appeared on I’ve Got a Secret in 1965, when he was 17 years old, demonstrating his music-composing computer.

Supercollider 140 is a free album of Twitter music – audio pieces composed of Twitter-sized snippets of SuperCollider code.

It started as a curious project, when live coding enthusiast and Toplap member Dan Stowell started tweeting tiny snippets of musical code using SuperCollider. Pleasantly surprised by the reaction, and “not wanting this stuff to vanish into the ether” he has recently collated the best pieces into a special download for The Wire’s online readership here.

Many of these pieces are actually generative, so if you re-run the source code (the track titles) you get a new piece of music.

The compositions are self-referentially named, with titles like:

{LocalOut.ar(a=CombN.ar(BPF.ar(LocalIn.ar(2)
*7.5+Saw.ar([32,33],0.2),2**LFNoise0.kr(4/3,4)*
300,0.1).distort,2,2,40));a}.play//#supercollider

Tweet that and put it in your SuperCollider!

You can preview the album below, or download it at the Internet Archive:

Detailed artist biographies for the composers are available at The Wire.

via SuperCollider

Garageband: This basic GarageBand tutorial looks at how to reduce latency when you are recording.

via expertvillage

Well – you could do worse than reading the archives of Synthtopia and checking out Computer Music magazine’s Make Synth Music special.

I haven’t seen a copy of this yet, but it looks like it should be a good intro to synth music.

All the software you need is on the included disc, along with ten video tutorials .

Features:

• The history of synth music
• Synthesis fundamentals
• How to create classic riffs and cutting-edge sounds, step-by-step
• Free start-up synth kit – everything you need to create your own sounds with your PC or Mac
• Ten exclusive CM video tutorials on disc

Cakewalk

Q: In what ways has Windows 7 been optimized, in terms of performance, for audio production?

A: Windows 7 on the surface is very similar to Windows Vista. It has the same audio driver support and same audio system infrastructure as Vista. However it’s some of the under hood improvements that are more significant for audio production. There are some interesting innovations and optimizations in the Windows kernel, making the OS more scalable for concurrent processing. This makes it attractive for highly multithreaded applications like SONAR. Additionally there are various new API’s/SDK’s that may be of significance to developers.

The article goes into exquisitely geeky detail, so it’s worth a read if you’re running Windows.

See, too, Peter Kirn’s equally geektacular Window 7 OS-porn at CDM.

This is why Max For Live will kill.

Got an idea for a cool new audio effect? Then Live code it!

This video captures akihikotube “building my original plugin with Max For Live (Ableton Live & Cycling ‘74).”

Ever feel like smacking your computer around?

Now you’ve got good reason. SmackTop is an open-source utility for Mac laptops (after 2005) which translates the accelerometer (Sudden Motion Sensor) data into MIDI data and audio impulses.

This lets you control your favorite DAW by tilting and smacking your laptop.

This seems like it could be a bad idea for a lot of reasons – but it offers a new, more physical way of interacting with music.

SmackTop has two types of controllers – Tilters and Smackers. Tilters translate the left/right (i) and forward/backward (j) tilt of the laptop into MIDI CC values. Smackers use the change in acceleration (jerk) to trigger a MIDI CC, noteOn and/or audio impulse. The audio impulse is designed to trigger ’sidechain’ effects.

SmackTop was built with Processing and Chuck. It is licensed under GNU GPL 2.0, although the included libraries are subject to their own various GNU or CC licenses.

This series of videos looks at how to make a software synthesizer with Native Instruments Reaktor 5.

Are your ready to use paper music gear that you download on your computer, print off, customize and then recycle when you’re done with it?

Charlie North’s video, above, is fantasy – but it’s not far from reality.

The idea of free paper musical instruments is one we’ve talked about in the past (see our coverage of the d-touch sequencer, ARDJ and Turning Paper Into Electronic Music Instruments.) This idea is rapidly moving from the drawing board (excuse the pun) to practical applications.

If you’re interested in this idea, Peter Kirn (CreateDigitalMusic) has put together another one of his great overviews, this time looking at using paper as a musical instrument.

What do you think of the idea of printable music gear? Is this just a fad or do you think it will have practical applications?

To the Kyma software, a network of Paca(rana)s appears as a single sound computation engine with multiple processors. Kyma automatically detects the number of available processors and schedules the execution of DSP-intensive signal processing and synthesis algorithms across multiple processors.

Pricing & Availability

The Paca, Pacarana, and “orange wires” for connecting two or more of them together are now available at the Symbolic Sound store. Current multiple-Paca(rana) owners can request a free set of cables from Symbolic Sound.

Every Paca or Pacarana comes with Symbolic Sound’s Kyma X environment, featuring its unique set of sound synthesis and processing algorithms.

Details on Paca(rana) chaining below.

If you’re a Kyma user, leave a comment with your thoughts on Symbolic Sounds’ infinitely expandable synthesizer!

How it works

Two or more Pacas, Pacaranas, or combinations of both can be connected by plugging the orange cables, provided by Symbolic Sound, into the Expansion A and B ports on the backs of the units. A combination of audio and control signals is transmitted over the orange wires from each Paca(rana) to its neighbor.

One of the Paca(rana)s is connected to a Macintosh or Windows computer (running the Kyma sound design software) via FireWire 800 (or 400). A single FireWire audio interface on the same bus handles all of the analog and digital audio inputs and outputs and, depending on the audio interface, MIDI. (A list of compatible converters can be found here.

The composite super-Pacarana shows up in Kyma as a single sound computation engine with extra processors. To the sound designer or musician, the expansion is completely transparent; Kyma automatically takes advantage of the additional real-time processing power and memory.

Who can use it

Anyone, from large sound design studios (which may set up a rack of Pacaranas as an audio compute-farm for intensive sound modelling operations) to friends getting together and temporarily hooking their Pacas together for some sound tweaking fun, can enjoy the benefits of the newly enabled expansion ports and orange connector cables. Audio engineers or sound designers managing complex signal processing and sound design requirements for live shows or theatre productions can assemble a rack of Pacaranas, all controlled and sequenced from a single computer. Supercomputing centers can offer scalable real-time sound computation and data sonification as an adjunct to the computer graphics rendering and dynamic simulation modelling already being offered to researchers and artists. Game design studios can set up a sound-design rendering farm for creating special sound effects for cinematics and voice processing for game characters. Anyone who ever finds themselves running out of real-time sound computation power could benefit from this new technology.

Early adopters

Beta testers for the new technology include Hollywood film composer Tobias Enhus, who has already been using his rack of three interconnected Pacaranas to generate disturbingly bizarre sound tracks for Alan Rifkin’s upcoming Showtime series Look, and organist/composer Franz Danksagmüller, who recently used his 2-Pacarana system to accurately simulate the sounds of a cathedral organ on a portable keyboard to accompany a showing of Fritz Lang’s silent film masterpiece Metropolis at the Göteborg International Film Festival.

The CC-1 can perform very complex algorithms and lots of them, with almost no latency. So yes, we are modelling the quirky hardware of the CMI. The sound of each CMI was subtly different, due to their analogue bits, so it won’t sound exactly like any one CMI, but lined up with a few CMIs you won’t be able to tell the difference.

The sound will be user selectable, to be like a series I,II,IIX, III etc. Or you can dig deeper and make it sound like nothing else.

One of the many nice things about the CC-1 is that it has no inherent bit width. “Normal” processors generally offer say 32 or 64 bit operations, where as the CC-1 can be configured to any number of bits. So if something works most effectively as 33 bits, so be it. And the bit widths can be mixed within the one signal path.

The “n” polyphony is achieved by “n” individual circuits set up in the FPGA working in parallel, as opposed to the software emulation model which is necessarily sequential. The channels can have different configurations is required; in any case there will be subtle coefficient differences between channels to reproduce the individuality of outputs that has often been cited.

How much polyphony? All we know at this time are the extremes – it will certainly be at least 16 like the original Series III but given that the Crystal Core when used in a DAW delivers up to 230 channels of mixing ALL of which have full processing (8 bands EQ, 3 stages Dynamics), you can safely assume a lot more than 16 will be possible.

Re pricing: yet to be finalised, but the choice to go with the CC-1 does come at a price. Although the CC-1 is not sold currently as a separate card (it would be no use without the software etc that goes with it), the retail price would be around the $5,000 mark. So you can do the sums, the CMI 30-A is not going to be price competitive with the mass-market synths which abound.

In case you’re wondering why anyone would get excited about a $5,000 recreation of a 25 year old synth, check out this video of Herbie Hancock jamming on the Fairlight CMI.

via Peter Vogel in the Fairlight User Group, via Failed Muso.

SeeYouInSleep is a blog created by Brian William Green – a sound artist, visual artist and writer. The site captures a wide variety of Green’s experiments in sound, ranging from circuit bent instruments to found sound to generative music.

According to Green:

Seeyouinsleep, among many things, is a feeling and a vision. However, I would like for it to be understood as a portfolio and a folder of sorts rather than thinking of it as a name.

SeeYouInSleep is full of interesting audio experiments, and is updated daily with something new.

Here are a few examples from the site:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Vase + stereo mics + generative processing is “Just a little experiment using a vase, i really enjoy the sounds i was getting out of that thing im thinking of buying a few at different sizes to mess with.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Haze is a track made using LSDJ for the Gameboy and a generative processing setup in Ableton Live.

How to make sound in SuperCollider, in 60 seconds.

If 60 seconds doesn’t do it for you, check out the SuperCollider site.

via mcldx

Patrick McCarthy (Roth Mobot) takes a look at Aegis Sonix: an early software synth for the Amiga.

If you’ve used Sonix or the Amiga for making music, leave a comment with your thoughts!

via gearwire:

Aegis Sonix was cutting edge back in 1984, and it’s even kind of neat now. But does it have Reversi?

Fatz Geronimo and The Rock-afire Explosion do their take on Nine Inch Nail’s 1,000,000.

Fans of Nine Inch Nails got together and placed the bids to have this song choreographed as a Rock-afire Explosion performance.

The Rock-afire Explosion uses state of the retro art Apple II systems, modified to control the animatronics. Check out the documentary below, from the Rock-afire Explosion movie, for more details on the process of “scoring” the animatronics in synch with music.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Alex McLean’s hack2009052204 demonstrates command-line techno with Haskell, an open source functional programming language.

This video takes a look at UK electronic music pioneer Peter Zinovieff and Electronic Music Studios (EMS).

via JeffreyPlaide:

Peter Zinovieff’s pioneering work into the fields of electronic music production and research led to many innovative electronic music instrument developments that were outstanding for the time. Peter was fascinated by electronic music and used his financial resources to develop a huge voltage-controlled studio that occupied an entire room in his home premises

There was a time when EMS (Electronic Music Studios) stood as equal to Moog and Arp.

In many ways, EMS was more advanced with several pioneering ideas being investigated. Peter used two PDP8 minicomputers in the late 1960s to control the voltage-controlled analogue modules for research into electronic music exploration. Twenty years before affordable computing and sequencing packages, Zinovieff’s computers could store and replay compositions, complete with sound shaping parameters even inventing a form of spectral or additive synthesis.

Excerpts are edited from the television documentaries “What the Future Sounded Like” and “The New Sound of Music” featuring the first public performance of music by a computer in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1967.

The spirit of EMS continues, and Peter’s synthesizer innovations like the VCS3 and Synthi 100 have become outstanding analogue classics.

Winsome uber-geek Jeri Ellsworth, aka Circuit Girl, describes how she attached a floppy drive to a tape deck to record and play back audio, creating the floppy drive reverb effect.

Note: We’ve got to interrupt this post to note that Ellsworth reverse-engineered the C-64 onto a chip, and  owns 43 pinball machines and 3 electron microscopes. She never graduated high school, but now gives guest lectures at Stanford.

She also rolls cars for fun, when she’s not turning old floppy drives into audio effects.

Back to the floppy drive reverb effect:

A simple circuit stepped the head automatically using the spindle index pulse. A push button was used to control the direction. The drive head wrote to more than one track at a time, causing an interesting reverb effect. ***Erasing the disk with rare earth magnets while spinning in the not mentioned in the video.

Leave a comment with your thoughts on Circuit Girl and the floppy drive reverb!

The tracks can be listened to online, downloaded individually or subscribed to as a podcast, using this podcast feed:
http://www.interdisciplina.org/microsound-repository/podcast/dircaster.php?project=pi_day_2009

You can preview one of the tracks, Piece of Pi by OCP, below:

About PI Day

Pi, Greek letter (pi), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535…

Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th.

In 1981, Hungarian musician and physicist Andras Szalay visited Sinclair in Cambridge where he bought a Sinclair ZX81 kit and built a computer at home. He designed an interface called the Composer, the first part of the powerful Muzix81 system, in 1982.

The Composer was a pre-MIDI sequencer software with a dedicated hardware interface for synthesizers and drum-machines. It used control-voltage. The interface featured two CV outputs and two inputs for both the Roland and Yamaha implementations (in other words, any synthesizer could be connected to the interface, be it Moog, Arp, Korg, Roland, etc.) The Composer software enabled the user to record, edit and play sequences. The sequences could be arranged into a song. A cassette recorder attached to the interface stored the songs or sequences. The Composer software could also randomly delay certain notes to add swing/shuffle/humanize to the sequence.

Szalay and his brother went on to add some very interesting features to the Muzix system, including sampling and MIDI. About 300 of the systems were eventually sold.