Super Mega Fun

Will Davies Makes Things

[wlldvs-blog]

I had a jam round Billy Braggs version of Walk Away Renee tonight using TOBLV1. Pretty pleased with the results coming around

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A Manifesto

I’ve been reading around live coding and the aesthics that come with it this week, and came across the TOPLAP manifesto for live coding. This proved to be particularly interesting reading for me as, although the things it advocates are things that I think are fantastic in a traditional live coding setup, I find them to be somewhat at odds with this project. In reaction to this, I have written my own manifesto - mainly to guide myself as this project continues.

The Babel Manifesto (as of June 25th, 2019)

- The performer will not try to intimidate their audience with feats of mental dexterity 

- The performer will seek to entertain rather than to impress. 

- The listener does not need to understand the mapping of one to the other, but should be able to appreciate both textual input and sonic output as complete cultural objects. 

- This is not the place for an artificial language 

- Predictability is not to be feared. The performer should not be ashamed of any forethought, precomposition, or use of a score or prewritten material. 

- Predictability is not to be used as a crutch. The performer should not choose to preplan out of their fear of improvisation but as an aesthetic and artistic choice. The audience will smell your fear. 

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babelLivev1

This week I've completed (ish) work on the first iteration of the live version of the Tower of Babel software (babelLive v1), culminating in a real short presentation/performance as part of the ECA degree show.

In its current state babelLive generates only midi, controlling software instruments in Logic, rather than generating any sound itself. At the moment this is for speed, allowing me to focus on the semantic analysis portion of the patch with results that immediately sound fleshed out.

The feature set

as it stands is:

Four separate 'semantic loopers', each assigned to a different instrumental voice. These loopers scroll through the sentences they're sent, analysis each individual word and outputting its valence, dominance and arousal to control midi note pitch, velocity and length. Rhythms are generated by the word length being multiplied by the millisecond value of the tempo. The current 'stop' command '()*' can be applied to any of these loopers by prefixing it with one of the heading tags, or applied to all by sending it on its own.

Markdown (ish) control. I've chosen to borrow bits of syntax from the markdown language, as it was the closest tool I could find to plain text. These markdown tags are currently mapped as follows:

Headers (#,##,###,####) - looper, and therefore instrument, selection. the loopers are labelled sequentially from left to right, with the heading number deliniating the looper number.

Italics ('*') - records and repurposes keystrokes to generate rhythms. This felt like a really fun addition as the rhythm of the keystrokes is such a present element of the physical performance.

Parameter Control - as well as just influencing pitch and rhythm, it would be remiss of me to not provide support for deeper influence over the sound. The two instances of that in the current iteration are control of send level from the piano track to the spectral drone maker in logic, increasing the level each time the individual word valence drops below a certain value, and increasing the chances of the buffer repeat plugin firing with every stroke of the back key, so that the users mistakes build up through the piece and become part of it.

Midi Out - at the minute there is no built in sound generation in the software, and while this is something I hope to implement in future versions it does give it a greater deal of flexibility at this stage for trialing sounds and aesthetics. This also gives the software the ability to control external hardware, functionality that cannot be rated highly enough.

Bugs

The most obvious bug at the moment is that the keystroke tracking is pretty unreliable, sometimes only firing every other time or not looping the phrase at all.

Future Features

On board sound generation - in its first form I think this will take the form of VST/AU support, easily done through Max's objects designed for this support. Following this, I hope to build a set of custom sound generators for the software.

Deeper Control - The most obvious way in which the project will progress is much deeper semantic analysis, controlling a wider range of instruments, of parameter control, and perhaps of some more interesting visual elements. I'm currently dedicating my time to exploring the context of the work, and finding a narrative to situate the project within. There is so much interesting discourse regarding the relationship between music and language, as well as the relationship between live coding and an audience, and therefore there is incredibly fertile ground for planting this project in.

This version of the software is available, although still a little messy, for poking at my github: https://github.com/twistandsht/babelLive

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State of the Nation 28/05/19

As the infrastructure and a sort of working version of the software exists already, I’ve been taking the time this week to try and pin down the sound world I want this project to exist in, as well as the way that I personally categorise individual sounds so that I can start building a personal semantic dictionary.

Pintrest for sounds

One of the ways in which I’ve beem doing this is through writing a piece (of sorts) to act as a kind of ‘sonic mood board’, and set out some of the sounds I want to be able to pull from the software. The piece isn’t compositionally tight in any way, but this is fine as it’s intended to focus on the sounds and motifs I want to work with rather than how the outputs will sound. The main thing to note with this piece is that it was written and sound designed in Logic, due to my fluency with it, and the speed with which one can pull complex sounds out of it. All sounds in the final project will be generated on the fly in Max, so are unlikely to be exact replicas of a lot of the sounds heard here.

The draft (wav available here)

In order to tackle the breadth of timbres, textures and moods in the piece I’ve broken it up into each instrumental track. It should be noted that each semantic tag also includes any synonym that might allude to it.

Piano (https://mega.nz/#!P91igYqB!A9hZr0aze1julHVTV4w3la54jIJ__9BpJP7ZJKmu-SI)

The piano is what gives the track 90% of any harmonic interest it might have, but doesn’t change timbre at all.

SemanticTags_Timbre: soft, warm, natural, organic, nostalgic(?), quiet, small, old, bell, strike, wonky

SemanticTags_Content: dischordant, crunchy, forboding, melancholy, minor, simple, flowing

Bass Synth (https://mega.nz/#!Cs92FIYb!IeVb23SZIC-JPoY8Bbe7QCEUFiQozXJXOijKiwkVBlU)

This is a really bass heavy bass/bell sound built in Matt Tytel’s Helm synth. It’s driven by cross modulated sine waves, and passed through a bass amp emulator to be super low and rumbly. Rather than strip the part to be simple like I might normally with a bass part, I found that feeding it chords in parts makes the notes beat against eachother real nicely.

SemanticTags_Timbre: low, deep, bass, fuzz, noise, beating, oscilations, mess, hiss

SemanticTags_Content: thick, thin, simple, complex, monophonic, polyphonic

‘Juno Synth’ (https://mega.nz/#!j4sAGASQ!Dh-z0irr9G2tSXGRFtS9WRpqOFh_dpe24HpZmYRniOE)

This again is built in 'Helm’, and designed to be a nice warm pad type sound, emulating a patch I found on a Juno 60 once. The only interest in the part writing is the difference between exploring the high part of the range, producing a thin, almost distorted ebow style sound, and the middle and lower parts of the range, which is much more noisy, fuzzy and warm

SemanticTags_Timbre: warm, retro (gross), analgoue, noisy, fuzzy, soft, cold, distorted

Lead Synth 1 (https://mega.nz/#!291G0I4B!ioSYpP0rilSpftoH9Yd9c74Y0UdC-HYorYEPpNzhqxs)

SemanticTags_Timbre: clean, resonant, amplified, siren, bright

Strings (https://mega.nz/#!mx8QnSDL!_7uEXkS2-Uqd5n70XjUqYkukzY6TiinGkdv6TM4c2t0)

Spitfire Labs’s 'Frozen Strings’ sample library played through a spring reverb emulation.

SemanticTags_Timbre: eerie, organic, live, natural, wonky, harsh, scraping, long, pads, soft, resonating

Static Synth (https://mega.nz/#!b0kinYRR!MWv04BMQsQj3uUzL_sgmubDq3xKmRgsXiAbz65YgpkI)

THe descdending noise bursts are from a sound built in Helm, with just a little bit of pitch information mixed in. It’s processed through a descending pitch delay, a glitching/stuttering plugin, and a spring reverb.

SemanticTags_Timbre: noise, static, falling, rusty, spooky(?), glitchy, stuttering

Vocal Sampler (https://mega.nz/#!mg9CXSLA!9RVUZu7OYmwZT3UwPqX19Q13_gu7WSM5KD06RQkLv90)

Lo-fi vocal sample pitched about using exs-24

SemanticTags_Timbre: lofi, uncanny, eerie, glitchy, digital, natural, organic

Spoken Samples (https://mega.nz/#!W9kCCSqZ!0EoIcP8lkFRql-1B6_bGB9ixClaJcGiwFUFj9sfwChA)

The voice of googles dictionary sampled and chopped up

SemanticTags_Timbre: lofi, uncanny, eerie, glitchy, digital, natural, organic

Tags

I’ve collected the tags and entered them into a spreadsheet with potential parameters that they could be linked to:.

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Tower of Babel v1 test - Harry Potter

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Tower of Babel: The beginning

Tower of Babel (ToB), as I’ve currently named it, is the project I’ve chosen to dedicate my summer to as part of my Sound Design MSc. Over the course of the programme I’ve been getting hooked on developing my own tools for creating sound, primarily in MaxMSP, and it feels fitting to have my year here culminate in a project exploring this.

Concept

ToB is the continuation of work I started in my second semester ‘Non-Realtime Systems’ module. The concept is a sound generation environment controlled through standard English rather than a programming language such as SonicPi or Supercollider. As such, it would be a fairly expressionistic approach to sound, rather than the highly controllable environments offered by DAWs and coding environments, and therefore it should be stressed that anything I develop here will be developed through the lens of my existing work and approaches to sound.

History

The author as wee boy

Ever since I was an edgy edgy teen, I’ve been making electronic music, and while the early results were fairly atrocious, over the more recent years, I’ve evolved a personal voice, dwelling mostly in the shadow of the mighty oak that is experimental ambient music. As such the sonic results of this project will most likely fit under this description - it’s quite a large and varied field, but it would be unreasonable of you, the reader to expect top 40 hits, or lounge jazz classics to be a likely outcome.

Tower of Babel v1.0 

The first iteration of the code exists as a relatively ugly/scrappy Max patch and is available to download and poke here, with some example outputs available in a separate blog post. It uses a 2013 semantic dictionary to drive the analysis and derives scale intervals from valence. The mapping of analysis to sound is quite simple, and there are some glitches and holes in the analysis engine, but it works as proof of concept.

Going Forward

My main tasks are, as I can see them:

Build a new/expand upon existing semantic dictionaries to produce something suitable for sound

Start building a lexicon of sound for the software to draw upon

Examine the cultural relevance of this project, with a view to curating the material I produce with this tool