The Stephen Whittington/Yoda Connection

Take a simple yet intriguing statement such as "X is dead". Grab some technology of your fancy - anything from scissors to sophisticated text randomizing order generators. Mess up the order of the words. If my calculations are correct this gives you a one in six chance of Yodafying your text: in this instance "dead X is." What is the chance that normal text, unrandomized will be Yodafied? I'm no statistician, but I'm confident it's significantly lower. Is there something in this? The more we hear from Stephen, the more signs there are of some connection between these two great icons.

Stephen is perhaps too modest to mention the connection. Or perhaps he isn't concious of what he's doing? Perhaps Stephen's interpretation of his art doesn't include IYL (Increased Yodafication Liklihood) and it's simple Jungian synchronicity that means at exactly the same time Stephen shared his musical undertakings with the forum class, I had an independent understanding of Stephen's art in Yodafication terms?

But wait. There's more.

Stephen confessed "as you can tell I'm extremely old" 1- surely another connection between Stephen and Yoda who himself is no spring chicken.

Both great men (or whatever Yoda is) are interested in expanding minds. Yoda's got the force and all that, Stephen expresses his interest as "globalisation of conciousness".1

And both are interested in doing things from a distance. Yoda with his ear movement powered telekenisis, and Stephen through distributed music making. 1

As Luke Skywalker would no doubt agree, both can at times "sit on the boundary between sense and not making sense." 1

Stephen. May the force be with you.

1. Stephen Whittington. "Ventures in Vocoding and Distributed Music Performance" Lecture University of Adelaide 26 May 2006

Is this a suit I see before me? Come, let me grasp it.

For this week's forum, Robert Chalmers, self confessed worker of the dark side (lawyer) presented A (very) quick intro to Music Copyright Stuff.1

He was clear, entertaining, funny, articulate and gave the impression of knowing a lot.

Thanks Robert and whoever organised for you to come.

It was interesting to see how there were more questions than time - an indicator of the interest and relevance of this field for us.

Three thoughts regarding copyright:
1. It's difficult to understand what's going on. Copyright, unlike Seb's movement to sound device, is not for the home hobbyist.
2. "It is ultimately all about the money".1 I got the impression this means, if one party (tech student or independent tech ex student say) doesn't have the money, while another party (scary big multinational record company) does have the money, the first party is unlikely to be in a good position in litigious negotiations.
3. Some of the laws are both crazy and impractical to enforce. For example, it's currently illegal to copy music from a legitimately purchased CD to an ipod for personal use. It's even illegal (but not for much longer) to copy a TV show onto a VCR. 1 Saints preserve us.

Two bonus thoughts
1. Robert had some sobering thoughts about how it's not necessary to be making money with copyright infringement to come to the attention of the copyright owners.
2. Robert said that Warner had recently cut a deal with Bit torrent. Interesting times for the record companies. Are they out of a job, and will being painful and tightening their hold really save them? Interesting to see what happens here, and good on Warner for being so 21st century.

One more thought
Here's a spectacular book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig which discusses the current state of IP and copyright. It's dismaying stuff.

Very very last thought
I've been pondering Robert's comment that no one likes copyright until they have something to protect. So far no one has shown the least interest in ripping me off - maybe it would be quite reassuring if someone actually wanted to claim my work as their own!!! Anyone? No takers? No? oh well...

1. Robert Chalmers. A (very) quick intro to Music Copyright Stuff Lecture at University of Adelaide 18 May 2006

What an honour! Seb and Darren

I was struck by the kindness of the talks from these two honours students. They are both focused on giving to other people, and contributing to the experience of their fellow humans, in two very different ways.

Seb. Out of the milkcrate and into his honours project, where he is targeting the DIY home handyperson who possesses more enthusiasm than money or engineering skill.

This year Seb is considering "physical interfaces" that map events in the physical world to musical parameters. He has surveyed products now available and is developing (or has already developed?) a DIY alternative that can be assembled for one tenth of the currently available cheapest alternative. 1

Seb explained in his talk and again during question time how one of his parameters was accessibility - the assembly would be manageable for normal folk. He is also considering accessibility of parts for the present and future. More generally, the device is about accessibility - allowing folk to access the music of their physical world. 1

Seb spoke of another dimension of accessibility - he plans to develop an online home world with instructions, suggestions, patches, scoring system, applications and so on. 1

Given the largely impecunious life of the experimental music technologist, I salute Seb's generosity and think he will find a grateful following.


Darren Curtis.

Confession Time. Darren used a lot of big words. Which was frankly spectacular, but meant I'm not one hundred per cent sure what the talk was about. I really wanted to know, because the bits I could glean sounded mind blowing! In the focused study of one area, perhaps it's necessary to acquire specific, contextual language and it must become difficult to talk about that field in layperson terms. On the other hand, "dumbing down" terminology is a useful skill for a public speaker. (But perhaps my bar of understanding is a particularly low one and hard to cater for? Oh well!)

What did I understand?

Darren is undertaking preliminary research within the field of music therapy which he hopes to expand upon with further study in subsequent years.

Historically, the field of music therapy has been results based - practitioners have found that music works as a therapeutic tool without necessarily understanding why in any physical sense. More recently, the science behind music therapy has emerged as a field of research. Darren mentioned some of the different frontiers of research in this field, and then moved to his own area of interest: Binaural Beats. 2

This seems to involve sending different frequencies via headphones to each ear, which causes the brain to create its own beating, which (if I got this right) moves between the hemispheres. The frequencies used determine the hertz of the beatings, and can be used to generate beating at the same rates of relaxed, meditative and sleeping brain waves. 2

Darren directed us to wwww.hemi-sync.com, the website of Interstate Industries and the Monroe Institute who have commodified Binaural Beats.

Christian raised an interesting guestion - if frequencies produce demonstrable, predictable responses, can they be used for evil? Tragically the answer was yes.

What a fascinating field. It is profoundly important. The emotional power of music is universally experienced and it's exciting to know it can be studied and harnessed for an increasingly broad range of applications.

I suspect the question of why music moves us, is something people have pondered for a long time but technological advances have enabled exploration of this.

In 1956, Leonard Meyer, Professor Emeritius of Music at the University of Pennsylvania published Emotion and Meaning in Music. 3 He discussed at length the problems of measuring the emotional impact of music. Fifty years ago, Meyer said "In the light of present knowledge it seems clear that though physiological adjustments are probably necessary adjuncts of affective responses... (they have) been able to throw very little light upon the relationship between affective responses and the stimuli which produce them." 3 Wouldn't it be lovely for Meyer if he knew what Darren was up to now.

1. Seb Tomczak. Lecture presented at University of Adelaide, 11 May 2006.
2. Darren Curtis "Frequency Medicine" Lecture presented at University of Adeliaide, 11 May 2006
3. Meyer, L. Emotion and Meaning in Music. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1956

Tim and Jasmin

It could be a difficult gig for honours students to speak about their projects early in the year. I thought this was the case with Tim Swalling who gave us a brief overview of A-Life and music and his thoughts on his project. I didn't get a full picture of what he was up to, but I suspect that's because he is still opening his project up. It would be great to hear from him again at the end of the year.

Let us begin by acknowledging Tim Swalling's initiative. Tim brought hand outs.

Tim's focus is Artificial Life as it pertains to music creation.

Artificial life seems to be like artificial intelligence, but with sex instead of intelligence. Fair trade. It's an evolutionary model and therefor deals with the reproduction and natural selection of populations rather than the learning style of an individual entity. 1

Tim pointed to Gommog's work as an example of this evolutionary model applied to music.

Tim seems to have some big plans - quoting his hand out, to "develop a more effective method for combining selective and developmental processes". 1 He said that this might be more complex than current options, as most contemporary a-life music is limited by the simplicity of its structures. 1

He also spoke about developing a system where the music is integral to the model, rather than the current industry standard of being an incidental byproduct of the population. 1

There was something about Tim - an air of competence (and it was more than just the handout) - which makes me keen to hear what evolves for him this year.

Jasmin Ward.

Jasmin rocks.

If the Uni introduces Official Hug a Hippy Day, Jasmin would be my first choice.

Her project sounded fascinating. She's using music technology to recycle urban sonic waste into music. 2 I thought this was intelligent, creative, proactive and well just darn impressive. Her project reminds me of Robin Minard's focus, they seem to share a concern for the sonic experience of the urban community. Interesting that they both have an architectural leaning. It will be fascinating to see what Jasmin ends up doing with this and future projects.

Jasmin was obviously not at ease speaking in front of an audience. It almost hurt to watch her, and I didn't catch everything she said. Hopefully she will distribute her paper throughout the flightless bird of EMU so we can get a deeper understanding of her vision and activities. Maybe a microphone would be worth considering, for future quieter speakers.

What a delight to have Tim, Jasmin and Seb speak to us. It's inspirational to hear what study in music technology could enable us newbies to do, if we survive the initiation.

1. Tim Swalling. Bringing Music to A-Life: Artificial Life in the Creation of Music Lecture presented at University of Adelaide, 4 May 2006.
2. Jasmin Ward. Lecture presented at University of Adelaide, 4 May 2006

Seb Tomczak

Seb. our very own honours student provided us a charmingly droll and understated narrative of his musical happenings.

Seb. Initiator and facilitator of milkcrate: where ensembles of young adventures undertake a 24 hour lock down non stop music making using anything (except musical instruments) that fit into a milkcrate. Mostly. Sometimes the parameters change. 1

Seven times. Seb. Seven milkcrate sessions, to increasing notoriety and accolades.

Seb. The latest forum guest whose art is the process of making the art. The first milkcrate outpourings included a sixty page text to accompany the other (audio and visual) documentation of the process.

Seb Reflection One. Composition and Brevity
Handel wrote Messiah, arguably the greatest Oratorio of all time, between 22 August 1741 and 14 September 1741. 2 Hallelujah.
From the sublime to the ridiculous. Last year I joined NaNoWriMo and, along with tens of thousands of other masochists, wrote a novel of 50000 words in one month. Seb's endeavors reminded me of the good folk at NaNoWriMo.

Seb Reflection Two. the Milkcrate of the mind
My head hurts from having spent many hours in the room of audio mirrors, selecting sounds from field recordings. I had much less than one hour of recordings to deal with, and didn't need to tranform them into musical works. This experience helps me to imagine and admire the nature of Seb's work during his Milkcrate sessions, where the transformation of collected sounds into music occurs along side the creation of the sounds.

Seb Reflection Three. Text Accompaniment.
Seb. Seb. Seb. What would you make of Steven Pinker's criticism of text that explains contemporary art?
"...elite art could no longer be appreciated without a support team...They did not simply evaluate and interpret art, but supplied the art with its rationale...Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of performance art in itself." 3

Seb, what of Wolfe who complains how "Modern art has become completely literary, the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text"? 4

(I doubt Seb's 60 page manifesto is a tribute to po mo critical theory, thankfully, but the point is still valid. Can, indeed should art be able to stand on its own, without swathes of explanation of process and rationale? This is a genuine question, and something to ponder at length over soy lattes at BackStage Cafe.)

Seb Reflection Four. Lumen Moment.
All these men (we will have women soon wont we?) who have come to our forum have presented, with relish and delight, the processes they have undertaken to create their music; the technological processes. Every week I complain about their focus in my blog - forget the process, what about the product, the MUSIC?

As I listened to Seb's awful sounding but interestingly created piece for two desk lamps, I had a - ahem - lightbulb moment. Here we are, studying TECHNOLOGY within a TECHNOLOGY department within a TECHNOLOGY discipline. Maybe it's to be expected that our guests would focus on technology in their talks, which they employ during the process of their creation.

1. Seb Tomczak. Lecture presented at University of Adelaide, 27 April 2006.
2. Luckett, R. 1993 (2nd ed) Handel's Messiah: A Celebration (p 86) New York: Harcourt Brace and Company
3. Pinker, S. 2002 The Blank Slate (p.414) London: Penguin
4.Wolf, 1975 The Painted Word (pp 2-4) New York: Bantam Books