Herbie shows off while Quincy Jones looks on. 1983

via NYC Resistor

Flickr photo by cornpone

Just a quick heads up. Tomorrow, I’m doing maintenance work on this site. I don’t foresee any major problems, though I have seriously screwed things in the past. So if this site goes blank for a couple of days, then I made a bad. :)

Update: (March 30th, 2008) WordPress 2.5 installed. In the middle of upgrading the theme. Tag support may take a few days. Need to add links back to the sidebar.

Update: (March 31th, 2008) This site is starting to come back together. Put the links back in the sidebar, along with upgraded twitter and flickr support. The theme still needs work. Tags are currently on hold.

via it’s 3am. Posted to blip.tv by wreckandsalvage.

The 8th issue of the Csound Journal is hot off the press.

• Letters from the Editors by James Hearon and Steven Yi
• Realtime Csound in Windows: A Personal Journey by Art Hunkins
• Live Flute Synthesis with Linux and Csound5 by Brian Redfern
• Managing Csound Compositions with GNU Make by Pedro Kröger
• Aspects of Sahnsi and Polos in Balinese Gamelan Instruments by Akito Van Troyer and Jim Hearon
• dseq: A Drum Machine Micro-Language by Jacob Joaquin (that’s me)

The OLPC has donated 8.5+ gigs of samples to the children of the world, and us. This library is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. So feel free to start remixing.

From the official press release:

Several prestigious groups of musicians have donated their sound libraries to One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization focused on providing educational tools to help children in developing countries “learn learning.” The XO laptop’s unique user interface and applications enable children to create and share music, drawings, video, personal diaries and other things they make online with family and friends worldwide.

Leading musicians, colleges and companies making their sound libraries freely available on the XO laptop are: The Berklee College of Music in Boston, Berklee Music Synthesis alumni – including electronic music superstar BT, the international Csound Developer community, M-Audio and Digidesign (parts of Avid Technology, Inc.), and the Open Path Music group.

I want thank Dr. Richard Boulanger for all the time and effort he put into collecting and assembling such a vast and wonderful resource.

Here are my donated samples in three different sampling rates: baby talk plus eurorack, serge and csound synth sounds

• 44.1k
• 22.5k
• 16k

I spent my spare time last week developing two audio-based activity prototypes for the OLPC: Step and Funny Talk. The whole process was surprisingly quick and easy. I attribute this to Victor Lazzarini’s Csound Sugar GUI toolkit. I do a lot of Csound programming, but I’ve never actually done any GUI work for it. Using the toolkit was as simple as defining widgets and mapping them in Csound.

Step

Flickr photo be me

Step is the first activitiy I’m developing for the XO. It’s a straight forward eight note step sequencer with synth notes, snare and kick parts. So far, I’ve probably put in about 8 hours on this. Once a user has a pattern they like, they can render the loop to an audio file, which can then be loaded in other activities. It still needs a lot of work, especially the synth engine. Though you can still take a listen if you would like: StepDemo1.mp3.

Funny Talk

Flickr photo be me

This is my favorite of the two, as my inspiration for this activity comes from my childhood memories of the Yamaha VSS-30 keyboard. My friends and I used to spend hours playing with that keyboard. Often in a very juvenile manner. I figured if we had such a great time playing with our voices, then perhaps the target audience of the OLPC will as well. Here is “the sound of my voice” being processed with Funny Talk: FunnyTalkDemo1.mp3.

Flickr photo by me

Since friday, I’ve been learning the ins and outs of my XO computer. I finally got to a point this morning where I can start writing csound-based activities for it.

Using the csndsugui toolkit, I slapped together a primitive step-sequencer in about five hours. It features: An 8-step pitch slider array, two oscillators for notes, AD envelope for amplitude, tempo control, volume control, 8-step kick row and an 8-step snare row. So while it might not do much at the moment, I can certainly see myself fixing it up to a point where it’ll be a fun musical toy in the near future. I’ll post a pic in a few days, once it shapes up a bit.

Posted to YouTube by extrabajs. And check out Milkytracker while you’re at it. :)

Back in mid-90’s, I was sysop of Digital Dissonance BBS, along with my co-sysops Eric of worshiptheglitch.com and Justin of JustinDay.com. They did most of the work. :)

Digital Dissonance was a community where musicians in the 209/559 area code would come and share music. And I don’t mean trading commercial tracks, but music they had composed or remixed themselves.

Minus a few midi tracks, the music was written almost exclusively with trackers. The tracker of choice being Triton’s Fast Tracker II.

Via a twitter comment from Eric, I recently discovered Milky Tracker, a tracker that is heavily inspired by Fast Tracker II, if not a modern clone. Having spent a fair amount of time with it over the weekend, I can personally authenticate that Milky Tracker offers a genuine Fast Tracker II experience. While using it, I felt like I was back on my 386 in my high school bedroom.

I’ve kept most, if not all the mods from Digital Dissonance. At some point, I’ll have to put them up on the interwebs. Until then, here’s a track I wrote 13 years, called Clu.

When I find the time, I’m making one of these.

The guitar sounds quite mandolin-ish, besides the two stings that are on it, i might even (when i get the chance) I might put in an electric pick-up in it.

Thanks to alm of Carolina Traipsing for the link.

Flickr photo by me

Though this may look like a map to an Infocom text adventure, it is a sketch of the dseq drum machine micro-language interpreter, as implemented in Csound.

Flickr Photo by me.

Yesterday, I finally had the opportunity to check ChucK out. Early exit polls suggest that ChucK is awesome!!

What is ChucK?

ChucK is a new (and developing) audio programming language for real-time synthesis, composition, performance, and now, analysis - fully supported on MacOS X, Windows, and Linux. ChucK presents a new time-based, concurrent programming model that’s highly precise and expressive (we call this strongly-timed), as well as dynamic control rates, and the ability to add and modify code on-the-fly.

If you are anything like me, then you’ll probably want to take a look at the code. Here’s a page full of examples. If two clicks is too many, you can jump straight to whirl.ck.

Perhaps there is a live coding performance in my future.

MARCH
12 SXSW, Austin, TX [music]
13 SXSW, Austin, TX [music]
17 Plaza Club, Vancouver BC [music]
18 Aladdin, Portland, OR [music]
19 Neumo’s, Seattle WA [music]
21 Slims, San Francisco, CA [music]
22 Club Mercy, Santa Barbara, CA [music]
24 Casbah, San Diego, CA [music]
25 Troubadour, Los Angeles, CA [music]
26 Clubhouse, Tempe AZ [music]
27 Chandler Gilbert Community College, Phoenix AZ [spoken word]
28 Estrella Mountain Community College Phoenix AZ [spoken word]
29 Launchpad, Albuquerque, NM [music]
31 The Loft, Dallas TX [music]

APRIL
01 Warehouse Live Studio, Houston TX [music]
03 The Parish, New Orleans LA [music]
04 The Loft, Atlanta GA [music]
06 Ramshead, Annapolis MD [music]
07 930 Club, Washington DC [music]
08 Paradise, Boston MA [music]
09 Irving Plaza, NY NY [music]
11 Trocadero, Philadelphia PA [music]
12 Iron Horse, Northampton, MA [music]
13 La Tulipe, Montreal QC [music]
14 Mod Club, Toronto ONT [music]
16 Blind Pig, Ann Arbor MI [music]
17 Grog Shop, Cleveland OH [music]
18 Martyrs, Chicago IL [music]
19 Varsity Theatre, Minneapolis MN [music]
21 Fox Theatre, Boulder CO [music]
22 Belly Up, Aspen CO [music]
23 Kilby Court, Salt Lake City UT [music]

Just got these tour dates in my inbox. Though I’m attending SXSW, it looks like I’ll be leaving before his shows on the 12th and 13th. Hey Saul, any chance of adding Fresno, CA to the list?