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Tweet-a-Sound Ticks All The Boxes

Published on 25 April 2009 in music and software. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

If you love electronic music, Twitter and OS X, you need to download Tweet-a-Sound immediately. It’s a MAX/MSP-based synthesizer for OS X that’s tricked out to tweet! It’s a not sonic Twitpic, either. Rather than simply turn your creation into an audio file and linking to it, it sends it as text. If someone wants to hear the sound you’ve made, all they have to do is copy it from their web browser or Twitter client and paste it into Tweet-a-Sound. The application uses this long and rather cryptic string of numbers to set the appropriate parameters on the synth and play it.

You can produce sounds that last anywhere from 0.1 seconds all the way to a full minute. When you’re finished fiddling with frequencies and your waveform is ready for transmission, you can either send the tweet straight from Tweet-a-Sound or copy it and paste it into the Twitter client of your choice. Messages are prepended with #tas so that other synth geeks can find your work easily with a simple search.

I made a few sounds with it, the source of which you can also find with a Twitter search. I’ve also made mp3s of two of them if you’d just rather listen here.

The first sound is exactly how Tweet-a-Sound plays it, I only boosted the volume slightly in post-production.

Forecast For You From 127a

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For this next one, instead of making the sound and then playing it back once to record the direct output, I used Tweet-a-Sound to restart its playback periodically. I also changed parameters on the synth whilst it was playing. This audio file cannot be expressed in a tweet, of course, as only its initial settings can, but it shows that you can use the application for more than its main intended purpose.

The Dragon Kills St. George

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With Particular Attention To Intersection Points

Published on 20 March 2009 in music. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Metal

I don’t think I’ve stopped listening to large quantities of Burroughs’ recordings since I last mentioned them. Perhaps the best thing about the longer pieces is how deeply you can get lost in them, only to be suddenly jolted out by the most remarkable phrases. Thirty odd minutes into “Are You Tracking Me?”, I found the best advice I’d heard in years.

William S. Burroughs – “Are You Tracking Me?” excerpt taken from 33:34 to 34:16:

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Preview: Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M

Published on 9 March 2009 in events, music, photography, reviews and Uncategorised. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

London fans of minimal electronic music will find themselves spending much of this week in Dalston, as Cafe Oto hosts a three-day residency featuring two of Japan’s preeminent improvisers. Each night, Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M will play with a different experimental luminary and as well as collaborate with each other in what is easily one of 2009′s most exciting series so far.

Equally skilled on both turntables and guitar, Yoshihide draws as much on cut-up sound technique as free jazz, while Sachiko M’s work centres on the most basic building block of synthesized sound, the sine wave generator. I recently listened to her Sine Wave Solo CD from 2000 and was shocked by how alien it still sounds nine years later. Whereas most experimental electronic music from the turn of the century sounds dated with too much garish glitch, Sine Wave Solo sounds positively fresh and timeless. If you’re hoping to hear her undiluted sound, Monday night is her only solo set, so don’t miss it!

The special guest each night will undoubtedly influence the direction the performers take. While Otomo Yoshihide will probably explore the jazzier side of his guitar with Evan Parker in the spotlight on Wednesday, I can’t imagine he’d miss the opportunity to hop behind the decks and spin alongside Technics virtuoso Christian Marclay on Tuesday. I’ve seen Marclay and Yoshihide collaborate once before, each manning their own set of turntables, and it’s nothing short of amazing.

With the stunning set of sounds Marclay and Yoshihide can extract from the much abused vinyl in their crates, augmented by Sachiko’s sine waves, if I had to pick one event to see, it would be Tuesday’s trio. Since each gig only costs £10, and a three-day pass can be had for £22, choosing just one seems a bit silly, really. It’s not every day you get some of the finest noisemakers in the world together in one place for the better part of a week, so arguably you have a moral obligation to attend at least two of these stellar gigs.

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If you’re not sold yet, here’s a small sample of the sort of sounds you can hope to hear this week. It’s the first track from Sachiko M’s Sine Wave Solo, “Don’t Move”. Not only is it one of my favourite pieces of hers, but it’s among my most loved works of experimental electronic music in general. It’s a proper mental palette cleanser, a bit like giving your brain an acid bath so it comes out all shiny and new again.

Right-click here to download or stream below:

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Full schedule:

Monday, 9 March 2009 at 8pm
Otomo Yoshihide – Solo
Sachiko M – Solo
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Eddie Prévost (AMM) – Trio

Tuesday, 10 March 2009 at 8pm
Filament: Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Christian Marclay – Trio

Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 8pm
Otomo Yoshihide and John Butcher – Duo
Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M, Evan Parker, John Edwards and Tony Marsh – Quintet

Mix-Up

Published on 9 February 2009 in music. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Ever since I first encountered scratch and sniff stickers as a kid, I was obsessed with sensory crossovers. If you could scratch a sticker to produce a scent, certainly you should be able to turn a photograph into a song or taste colours. Whilst I’ve only been able to accomplish the latter under the influence of at least a ten strip, there are loads of software options for mixing up sight and sound.

The latest entry in the synesthetic toolbox is Voice Draw, a fun little Flash application from Ze Frank. After accessing your computer’s microphone, it acts as an audio-controlled Etch-a-Sketch, using volume to determine whether it will change direction or continue drawing on its present course. With volume as the decisive factor, it’s less important what you say than it is how you say it. In order to draw anything specific, you’re probably going to have to go with gutteral proto-lingual tones.

When I discovered it yesterday morning, I immediately wanted to try it out. Since Rin was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her with my best attempts at throat singing, I decided to feed it some pre-recorded sound from my speakers. The first mp3 I stumbled upon was The Kinks’ classic, “Lola”, which produced a rather pleasing horizontal squiggle when played at a medium volume:

Voice Drawing with LolaThis was nice and all, but I wanted to give it something slightly more sinister. Waking Rin up to the sounds of Throbbing Gristle didn’t seem wise either, so in the dulcet tones of William S. Burroughs I found a reasonable compromise. I recently picked up a 3 CD collection of his audio cut-up work entitled Real English Tea Made Here, and two pieces from the first disc, “Cut-ins with Dutch Schultz” and “23 Skidoo”, gave me this:

Voice Drawing with William S. Burroughs

“Cut-ins with Dutch Schultz” created the dark explosion in the upper-right, whilst “23 Skidoo” produced the spiral crash which makes up the majority of the image. I couldn’t believe how well the picture suited the sound and I’m eager to see what else I can make with it.

One of the commenters on Ze’s post left the program running for 24 hours in his flat just to see what the ambient noise of one day looked like. It was small but dense, which kinda made sense to me.

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William S. Burroughs – “23 Skidoo”:

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Careless

Published on 6 August 2008 in music. 2 Comments Tags: , , , .

Working in Soho, I’m lucky enough to have loads more lunch options than I had working near Tower Bridge. Granted, most of these involve fried eggs and bacon, but you don’t see me complaining. In an attempt to play a healthier hand today, however, I thought I’d try the excellent and wildly popular Jumbo Eats on Brewer Street. As usual, the queue was formidable but, living in England, I pretend to like queues, so I waited.

Music blared from inside and, after about thirty seconds of waiting, my brain pieced together what I was hearing: a horrible dance remix of Wham!’s “Careless Whispers”. I couldn’t even type that last sentence without furrowing my brow in disapproval. The bulk of my mp3 collection consists of sounds most breathing creatures would kindly describe as unlistenable, but a naff disco turn at Wham! brought me to my knees. Surely no wrap made under the influence of Wham! would be fit for human consumption. I wouldn’t even buy cat food made with solo George Michael in the background.

I fled from the horrible saxophone to my familiar cafe around the corner for a trusted parma ham panini. I let Wham! get the better of me. I let Wham! win. The panini, however, was really nice.

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