The Gavel » Blog Archive » House Urges End to Human Rights Abuses in China as Olympics Begin
The House has just passed a resolution calling on the Government of the People’s Republic of China to immediately end abuses of the human rights of its citizens, to cease repression of Tibetan and Uighur citizens, and to end its support for the Governments of Sudan and Burma to ensure that the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games take place in an atmosphere that honors the Olympic traditions of freedom and openness. It passed by a vote of 419-1-1.
Monthly Archive for July, 2008
To this day, I have an enormous musical crush on Delia Derbyshire’s work. I simply CANNOT wait to be able to browse this archive, and if anyone involved in this planned project to commission new peices inspired by her work is reading - sign me up.
Create Digital Music » Archivist Responds: Yes, Virginia, Delia Derbyshire Really Was That Awesome
David Butler of the University of Manchester was one of two archivists who started undertaking the work of assembling a library of Derbyshire’s ground-breaking work. He writes in CDM’s comments that this is no BBC special effect: the recordings are very much real. He also clears up some of the confusion about their discovery, and offers more on the tantalizing cut “NOAH’s dance.”
How to Get the Biggest Bang for 10 Billion Bucks - WSJ.com
If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity?
Labels and artists are only now catching on to the idea of letting fans remix their music, and are even slower to give those fans access to individual stems. But where musicians have embraced this idea, they’ve gotten surprisingly big outpourings of support — thank a culture that’s gotten savvy with digital music tools and consumes more music than ever.
While that change continues to spread slowly, though, audiovisual remixing could already have a jump start.
Radiohead: Big news for fans of data visualization, the coding tool Processing, and Creative Commons: Radiohead have "shot" their latest video using only 3D scanning devices in place of cameras, and they’ve made source code and the data (in friendly CSV files) free. The whole thing is released under a non-commercial / ShareAlike CC license, which is well-suited to remixes in general. So, to anyone who was disappointed that Radiohead didn’t use a Creative Commons license for their remix contest, now you’ve gotten something you didn’t even ask for — three-dimensional, animated data of Tom Yorke’s face. And because this is essentially raw data, it’s unusually open to interpretation.
Visual stems? By total coincidence, Create Digital Motion’s Jaymis wonders aloud if the entire A/V scene couldn’t be given a jump start by two obvious (but strangely elusive) decisions: 1. release video "stems" for music videos to give people free access to them, and 2. go get a real visualist. Some artists have done #1, of course, but there wasn’t a specific name given to the result, and they’ve more often than not released full videos — so here you go.
Both stories are covered today on Create Digital Motion:
Radiohead Makes House of Cards Video with 3D Plotting, Processing; Gives You the Data
To The Next Level of AV Remix Culture: It’s Time to Release Music Video “Stems”
But I think it’s well worth asking readers here on CDMusic, too. Music sampling and even remixing may be old news — even if copyright protection remains the norm. But could opening up visual remixes and free visual interpretation re-energize how people think about music?
Of course, this isn’t just for the sake of doing it. Jaymis launched his discussion partly because he wanted something more expressive at a performance, and Radiohead’s CC decision allows them to take an experience that would be pretty limited (a few minutes of cool video) and make it far less so (live data and code remixed by especially-savvy fans). Likewise, the CC license is essential in the latter case; there’s far less incentive to fans to code their own visual software if they can’t share ownership of the result, or — just as importantly — share the resulting code with each other. (The tool the band’s video used, too, wouldn’t even exist without the open source community that created it.)
So, what’s next — particularly if you’re not as famous as Radiohead?
The liberal blogosphere is starting to burn up with news that Dick Cheney’s office worked to suppress some testimony to Congress about the effects of climate change (see for example, oh, here and here).
Now, I don’t want to downplay the importance of this. The villainy of the Vice President’s Office is legendary at this point, and it’s easy to say ho-hum to Yet Another White House Attempt to Destroy ScienceTM.
But the thing is, we already knew about this. The White House has been trying to downplay global warming effects for years. I wrote about this extensively last October, for example. The offices at the White House redacted major portions of a speech to be given to the Senate by the head of the Centers for Disease Control, sections that outlined how global warming will increase the spread and rate of diseases.
So it’s no surprise that Cheney would continue this criminal activity.
What does surprise me is that no one is asking why. I simply don’t get this. This Administration, as evil as it is, has been consistent in its championing of corporation over citizen. But in this case it doesn’t make sense. If global warming is real — and it is — then this is an opportunity for corporations to make scads of money! There will be all sorts of new industries cropping up to deal with the changes in our environment, and to deal with perhaps trying to slow those changes. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that many billions of dollars can be made this way.
Yet time and again we see the Bush Administration suppressing reality, and telling people to move along, there’s nothing to see here. Even Big Oil should be able to see that eventually they’ll have to turn to new industries to make money. I guess having record profits — and not having to worry about oil-spill induced ecological disasters — is enough of an incentive to turn a blind eye to anything more than a few months down the road.
Maybe it’s just that once you’ve stepped of the road of reality, anything is possible and nothing makes sense, so internal logic is optional. But whether you’re liberal or conservative, hippie or neocon, and whether or not you support this Administration, it seems that their actions are counter-intuitive to their own interests.
We stepped through the looking glass years ago, but every now and again it pays to turn around and see just how far we’ve gone.
aurora Open Source DJ Mixer\MIDI Hardware w/ Ableton Live from aurora mixer on Vimeo.
“This is a DJing demonstration using aurora to control Ableton Live. The video is an overhead shot of the user adjusting the mixer’s faders, knobs, and buttons to mix the music. The video cuts between two types of scenes. The lit scenes show a user controlling the music. The dark scenes highlight aurora’s ambient lighting system.
About aurora:
aurora is an open source USB powered mixer in a typical DJ form factor. Using Max\MSP or PD the device can control your favorite MIDI software. aurora features 24 backlit knobs, 3 linear sliders, and 8 backlit buttons. These devices are for sale. You can find out more about the project here at auroramixer.com
Song Credits:
Gabriel & Dresden - Tracking Treasure Down
Volta - Robot Needs Oil (Olivier Giacomotto Mix)
Cass & Slide - Lost Life"
The Aurora 224 is a DJ-style controller geared for software like Ableton Live. The design is, as you can see, gorgeous: not only is it at the high end of aesthetics in open gear, but it celebrates its DIY nature by exposing the circuit board. It’s USB powered, and offers easy mixing control functions in a 2-channel, DJ-oriented layout. And it lights up and makes pretty colors.
Hack a Day broke the story –
Aurora open source hardware mixer
– but to be clear, it’s not actually a mixer; that is, it doesn’t mix audio signal. It’s just a controller in a mixer layout; any mixing and DJ functions are provided by your software. But it is freely-licensed from the ground up, under a Creative Commons license. (We’ve been seeing CC more and more in music projects, as opposed to the narrower and more programmer-oriented GPL and other licenses. There’s no word yet on which CC license applies to this project, whether it has non-commercial or ShareAlike restrictions, etc.; I’ll post an update soon. See discussion on the Virtual Turntable blog.)
A video with Ableton Live, plus CDM chats with the creators about more details:
aurora Open Source DJ Mixer\MIDI Hardware w/ Ableton Live from aurora mixer on Vimeo.
Project description:
aurora is an open source USB midi controller with user controlled ambient RGB illumination. It combines a standard DJ mixer with 18 effects knobs and 6 toggle switches in a form factor of only 7 x 10 inches. We envision the device as an alternative to bulkier, less affordable, less ergonomic commerical MIDI devices. Currently, many commerical controllers are designed with a wide range of applications in mind. For aurora, we wanted to return to the basics.
Many of us have asked for a controller with "two channels and and a cross fader." These familiar features are included, along with additional knobs and buttons for enhanced control. We believe this arrangement enhances the artist’s creativity and allows for greater control of the software. Using aurora with Ableton Live is a great example of this. Artists have already embraced digital audio and laptop performance. The mixer is designed to be portable. It easily fits in a backpack with your laptop and sound card.
We believe in open source. aurora is designed with this in mind, so essentially anyone can participate in writing firmware or software, or even create their own hardware. In fact, we encourage it, and hope to create a community of users that support this device.
For a technical discussion of the project, we have included a white paper on the website.
Aurora is Matt Aldrich, Mike Garbus and Maro Sciacchitano. They all currently reside in the DC metro area.
The Aurora Team tells CDM a bit more about the thinking behind the license and pricing (which is currently waiting on gauging interest):
We intended for this to be publicly available and 100% open source, so that anyone can build their own device at any time, exactly how they want. All content falls under the Creative Commons License The amount of interest in this project has been incredible. Regarding sourcing, we are waiting on quotes from a contract manufacturer and we will determine the cost of sourcing a fully assembled and tested controller. We expect to have the numbers Thursday and will hopefully announce the price that day. We are also exploring a simple kit that consists of a PCB and two programmed PICs for the guys who love soldering.
So got that? If you’re interested, drop them a line by Thursday! We’ll follow up with the response, pricing, and other details, and hopefully a full-on interview – if you have questions you want answered, ask them here and I’ll pass them along.
I love the idea of a simple kit; I hope they do that.
In celebration of the 73rd birthday of Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, today was observed as World Tibet Day. I could ramble on and on about the need for the world as a whole (and the West in particular) to hold China accountable for their many human rights violations, of which the struggle of the Tibetan people is only a part. I will refrain from ranting, and instead offer this podcast of a live remix I performed today of Chantaction, which will see release on July 22, on the 4-track Tibetanaction single.
Building and Using a Reaktor Grain Delay in Kore 2 from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.
Let’s cut straight to the reason we use this stuff: we want crazy-sounding delays we can play with. Reaktor guru Peter Dines shows just how you’d build such a thing in Reaktor from the ground up for CDM’s Kore site. He also takes it one step further by creating not only the Reaktor ensemble, but also a Kore performance preset to match. The advantage of going this route: Kore provides a way of organizing parameters for control, performance, and automation.
This is another all-free download, so have at it. Now I feel like I’m in a patching race with Peter, because I’ve got some ideas of my own for how you might modify this basic idea; let’s see if I can actually make that happen.
Making sense of Kore
The other side of the minisite is we’re further exploring what Kore is for and how to make it work. We asked readers of the minisite to tell us their thoughts on how Kore is going and how they use it, which has yielded an interesting comment thread:
Our main focus, of course, is simply teaching people how to use the tool effectively – from there, you can decide whether it’s for you and how you want to use it. To that end, I’ve got the first half of a tutorial up that explains what for me was the biggest draw and the most initially confusing, which is the control pages Kore uses to assign automation and physical control. I walk through why you’d want this, how it works, and how you manage different levels of the control pages:
Demystifying Kore Control Pages for Automation and Performance, Pt. I: Different Page Types
We also have some important basics, like Kontakt automation, how to get a normal mixer view, and external MIDI control.
Coming soon: I’m planning some short features on each of NI’s instruments. We’ll have to call it the “get it out of the shrinkwrap” series, especially for people who got the overwhelming set of instruments that comes with Komplete.
So much of the visual inspiration for digital generative visuals — even those that never leave the computer — come directly from analog electronics. There’s something organic about the motion visuals this gear creates. Case in point: the latest, short video from Mat Jarvis, the pioneering ambient artist, via his label Microscopics. Good stuff, and we’re glad to bring it to you first.
Speaking of pioneering vintage visuals, Mat Jarvis / Microscopics have also set music to the brilliant film “A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.” The film is the work of Charles and Ray Eames (yes, of chair/design fame), who probably deserve a CDMotion story all their own. It’s stunning to see this 1977 film predicting the worldview of technologies like Google Earth. In case you missed this on CDMusic:
Ambient music fans, here are details on the release of the album itself:
Microscopics Play with Scale on Gas0095, Give You Tiny Moog Model [Create Digital Music]
Got some favorite oscilloscope films to share? Let us know.
© Peter Kirn for Create Digital Motion, 2008. |
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San Francisco Gate: ALL EARS ON ‘WALL-E’
“The best sounds have been accidental encounters,” Burtt says. “I suppose part of the curse of having this job is that you’re always listening, and maybe not paying attention to your family at a dinner table or on a trip. ‘Wait, I hear something! Let’s record it!’ “
Mr. Burtt is one of those people I have never met, but is more responsible for my mindset than most that I have. I’m not ashamed to admit it: listen to Star Wars without looking at the screen and imagine what that can do to a little kid: R2-D2, lightsabers, blasters, the whole shebang. His work in WALL-E is incredible… and about time he received actor’s credit for one of his designs. He had more to do with R2-D2’s personality than any of the engineers who made the props or Kenny Baker being inside it for some of the shots.
Incidentally, reading these articles about him make me all the more anxious for some of the developments coming down the pike, which hopefully will allow me to engage in more creative location recording….
Update: Make sure to also check out this interview from last week’s Studio360….
