Super Collider

on laptops, controllers, musicianship, post-musicianship

2008 June 22

Sam Pluta published an article about computer based music, information theory and human control:
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5614

and then we discussed it and I posted the following to the list, so I wanted to preserve it here because it collects some of my long-standing thoughts and experiences about controllers and live computer based music.

sometimes I’ve gotten a bunch of controllers (a few too many) and then found that it was distracting to the music. instead of it being about music it became about controllers. when I had a WX7 sax controller everybody came up and asked about it and I felt like nobody noticed the music. there is a fine art here to applying them correctly (and as sam mentions — see edward tufte).

there is the “spectacle” of the interface that needs to be strongly considered.

I think that the really interesting thing about electronic dance music (meaning: early digi reggae and dancehall, electronic afro-beat, techno, electro, prince era sequenced funk, rave, house, garage, grime, dubstep, hip hop etc.) is that the physical action of the performer changed : instead of doing something (like playing a melody, turning a knob) we became channel operators who expressed themselves by dub, controlling the machines, directing the energy, interrupting the flow (knob tweakers), hooking up the machines to generate a new energy …

and then the physical attention turns to the dancefloor where the audience becomes the new performer. that was the whole point. the performer became a selector and the audience became the center of attention. the music is the body and it happens inside you the listener. electronic music is a direct extension of the central nervous system. musicians are distracting because they are a separate entity that we have to watch : something that is obviously not in your central nervous system.

the solution that most pop music found (which means non-music-head gear-head boffins) is to do more with culture and image and energy rather than technical performances. most of the expression is done with style signifiers, tropes (which the non-believers think are cliches), expressions that are relative statements — relative to the last hit/riddim/sound. its not about technical or musician stuff. its about pushing buttons and triggering learned responses and creating new learned responses.

getting rid of the musicians just made the message much clearer and allowed producers to focus on the music. cf. KLF’s manual of how to have a top 10 hit where they say that the first thing to do is to fire all the musicians. hooking up more controllers generally leads to being a musician; which is fine. I like the breath (I went to Eastman as a saxophone major), I like the full responsibility of being a musician.

but the new world of meta-controller and selector is also huge and something that could be explored much more in “new music”.

or you could just do all of the above:

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apple goofs up airport update

2008 April 08

The new mac airport update breaks most audio programs. We now get nasty crackling and CPU spikes.

Solution: turn airport off when making muzak.
or revert the airport update: http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=88815&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0&sid=63b29a6140f11d35ef1b64db664f3cb5

and the thing is this is the first time in 5 months that my airport has worked with our apartment’s WLAN. I’ve had a cable running down the hall and I can’t shut my door.

george clinton has two houses : one for music, one for business.

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how to set up a local svn repository (for SC)

2008 February 21

How to create and maintain a local SVN repository for your private work.
If you are just working locally, you don’t have to run an svn server at all.
Its much easier than I thought.

(
this is mainly a post about working with supercollider packages. if you just want to know how to set up a local svn repository then I’ll cut to the chase:

svn import ~/Documents/SC3docs/felix-imported file:///Users/crucial/svn/sc/trunk/felix -m “initial felix import”

then check out a working copy:

svn co file:///Users/crucial/svn/sc/trunk/felix ~/Documents/SC3docs/felix

that’s it
)

My personal class work is in a quark called 'felix’ that is obviously not checked into the public repository.

I want to keep it in a local svn, but since the whole quarks folder is checked out from sourceforge svn, I don’t want this subfolder to get confused.

Here is how I solved this:

I uninstall it for the moment (using Quarks.gui) and moved the folder to ~/Documents/SC3docs/felix-imported

created a local svn repository

first make the directory it will go in:

mkdir ~/svn
mkdir ~/svn/sc
mkdir ~/svn/sc/trunk

svnadmin create ~/svn/sc/trunk

import the felix quark:

cd ~/Documents/SC3docs

svn import felix-imported file:///Users/crucial/svn/sc/trunk/felix -m “initial felix import”

then check out a working copy:

svn co file:///Users/crucial/svn/sc/trunk/felix ~/Documents/SC3docs/felix

then make a symlink from this working copy to the quarks folder (not the installed quarks, but the all checked out quarks)

cd /Users/crucial/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/quarks
ln -s ~/Documents/SC3docs/felix felix

So now Quarks is installing/uninstalling a symlink to a symlink to a folder in my documents folder that is under svn control.

Note there is a felix.quark file in DIRECTORY
If you wanted to do several personal quarks you could either make several symlinks or you could put them all in one folder and make one symlink. Either way you would still need several quark files in DIRECTORY

The other thing I do for working with TextMate :

I created ~/sc and put 2 symlinks inside it :
ln -s ~/Library/Application\ Support/SuperCollider/Extensions Extensions
ln -s /Users/crucial/scsvn/sctrunk/build/SCClassLibrary SCClassLibrary

this means that I now have
~/sc/Extensions
~/sc/SCClassLibrary

which is all of the currently active classes for SC.
Inside Extensions there is Extensions/quarks and I can install and uninstall quarks and always the ~/sc folder contains everything that is currently installed. This means that I can run TextMate and open that directory as a single project.

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