If you’ve never heard about GENeral DYNamic stochastic synthesis, or even electronic music pioneer Iannis Xenakis before, don’t worry. iGendyn offers psychedelic 3-voice polyphonic noise fun, and the fact that it’s an application of Xenakis’ ideas is just icing on the cake.

More on GENeral DYNamic stochastic synthesis below.

Give iGendyn a try, and leave a comment with your thoughts!

Description:

Live and entertainingly noisy synthesiser, responding to multitouch and accelerometer control. You can control up to three independent voices at once.

The sound synthesis method is GENeral DYNamic stochastic synthesis, as pioneered by Iannis Xenakis.

Imagine a set of control points (CPs) which together define the shape of a time domain waveform; with each new cycle through this waveform, their relative positions are updated using probabilistic distributions.

This application was developed by Nick Collins, and is distributed for free. Nick runs the music informatics degree programs at the University of Sussex, UK.

Further instructions:

On screen x is amplitude, y is minimum frequency (the frequency of scanning through the control points to make a waveform). Hold the device flat with longer edge pointing away from you. Then tilting left to right controls the degree of probabilistic change to control points with each output cycle. Tilting around the axis through the middle of the device parallel to the shorter edge will change the frequency range (between minimum and maximum frequencies of scanning allowed). It shoudl be much more intuitive to try this out for yourself and not worry about the exact mechanics of the algorithm unless you’re really curious. For the second algorithm, below, the other two accelerometer axes also have an effect on the two parameters of a Lehmer random number generator.

Double touch to toggle displaying the options screen icon; click it to go to a page where you can change algorithm parameters such as the probability distributions for updating amplitude and duration positions of control points (AmpDistr and DurDistr, choose from LINear, CAUchy, LOGist, HYPerbcos, ARCsine, EXPon, to use Xenakis’s names), as well as their parameters (Amp Param and Dur Param), the number of control points within each cycle (CPs), and which algorithm to use.

Two variants of the algorithm are provided:

Gendy1: first order random walk on control point positions.

Gendy2: second order random walk, with controllable Lehmer random number generator parameters mapped to two accelerometer axes. Closer to Hoffmann, Peter. (2000) The New GENDYN Program. Computer Music Journal 24:2, pp 31-38.

For more reading, see Xenakis’ Formalized Music (1992, Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press) chapter 9 (pp 246-254) and chapters 13 and 14 (pp 289-322). The BASIC program in the book was written by Marie-Helene Serra so I think it helpful to credit her too.

via Peter Kirn at the mucho excellente Create Digital Music

This documentary on prog-rock is narrated by a female robo-narrator. Strange, but interesting. 

via ProgAlbums

This is off-topic, but Paul Devereux is an expert on the archaeoacoustics – megalithic acoustics & their possible applications. He’s written a book on Stone Age Soundtracks, the acoustic archaeology of ancient sites.

The video is a little dry – but the information is deep and interesting – and seems to tie into some of the ideas that Steve Roach has explored in his ambient music.

You can read more about Devereaux and Sounds From The Stone Age at The Music Of Sound. 

And let me know if you remember the screwball comedy about an expert in the acoustic properties of prehistoric rocks!

The collection includes nearly one thousand sound recordings, the photographic archive of Bronx photographer Joe Conzo, Jr., textile art, books and magazines, and a collection of more than five hundred original flyers designed by Buddy Esquire and others.

The collection aims to document the origins of hip hop as culture and community, and its influence on the history of music, art, performance, and activism in America during the final third of the 20th century and beyond. The hip hop archive provides original research materials for students and scholars in the fields of music, American studies, urban studies, theater, film & dance, art history, African American studies, government, literature, and history.

Cornell will host a Hip Hop Conference and Celebration Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 that will include music, performances and lectures by several of hip hop’s founders, and roundtable discussions led by prominent speakers from the hip hop and academic communities. Cornell University Library will host the event, which will highlight the one-of-a-kind historical materials.

“By paying tribute to those who laid the foundation, we tell our own history,” Bambaataa said. “Preserving hip hop’s early years will help future generations understand the places they come from.”

via Dial M

Image: Gabriel M.

The BBC reports that newly found acetate disks contain what is believed to be the earliest known computer music recordings:

The songs were captured by the BBC in the Autumn of 1951 during a visit to the University of Manchester.

The recording has been unveiled as part of the 60th Anniversary of “Baby”, the forerunner of all modern computers.

The tunes were played on a Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine.

“I think it’s historically significant,” Paul Doornbusch, a computer music composer and historian at the New Zealand School of Music, told BBC News.

“As far as I know it’s the earliest recording of a computer playing music in the world, probably by quite a wide margin.”

You can listen to the recording at the BBC site.

Planet Nerd’s Dan Walmsley talks to experimental composer David Shea about the history of the Doctor Who music and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 19th-century phonautograph, which captured sounds visually but did not play them back, has yielded a discovery with help from modern technology.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

“This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound,” said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

As you might imagine, it sounds horrible. Give it a listen below and let me know what you think.

Anybody want to remix the oldest recording in the world?

This is the official trailer of the upcoming documentary The 8Bit Philosophy, a film about Commodore 64 musicians coming in 2008.

Looks pretty cheesetacular.

There are interviews with composers from the Workshop, as well as musicians and writers who have been inspired by the output. Great archive footage of the Workshop and its machinery is accompanied by excerpts of the, now cult, TV programs that featured these sounds.