Building Jazari has involved a lot of experimentation and trial and error in every dimension of the project, from hardware and software to rhythms and improvisational forms. After my performances at the Minneapolis Electronic Music Festival this weekend, I think I’ve settled on a formal structure that I like. Here’s how it works: I start playing and improvise beats until I’m mentally exhausted. Then I stop. It’s elegantly simple, and it preserves momentum through the whole set. I decided to try this approach to make my set fit in within the context of a dance music festival, where the beat is relentless, but I think it will become my normal performance style. If people are digging the beats, why stop? To tell jokes? If I want to inflict my stand-up routine on people (and I’m telling you, my Garrison Keillor impersonation kills so bad, it’s practically genocide), I’ll launch another improbable career.
A big thank you to the folks at Shuga Records for the opportunity and their professionalism. These guys and gals can run a festival. In particular, I want to thank Adam, Jonah, Elaine, and Will, who did a great job behind the sound board.
My next gig in the Twin Cities is Oct. 2 at the Spark Festival, followed in quick succession by another gig Oct. 9. I’m not sure where that one is, but I’ll know soon and update everything accordingly. Before Spark, I play the Cleveland Ingenuity Festival in the third week of September.
I’m playing Shuga Records again on Aug. 20 and Aug. 21 as part of the Minneapolis Electronic Music Festival. It’s all DJs…and Jazari. The proverbial foot is in the door. I play inside at 8 pm on both days. It’s free, and there’s cheap beer available for the 21+ crowd.
A new member will join the band over the next couple months, which poses a problem: I’ve run out of limbs. Controlling three machines with two hand-held devices is hard enough, and trying to extend this framework of direct control would require either rapidly alternating control of four machines between two controllers or building foot controllers. Foot controllers are out of the question because I think they’re fairly ridiculous. For an organist or drummer, they’re fine, but for a quasi one-man band, simultaneous foot and hand control looks a little clownish.
The other approach of alternating control of the four machines with my existing controllers works well enough, be it leaves me stuck in loop-based music: play something on one instrument, loop it, switch to another and play something, loop that, now switch back, etc. I’m eager to overcome this approach. Live interaction and simultaneous constrained improvisation among all participants, whether human or computer controlled, is what interests me. (Why it interests me more than loop-based music is a topic for another post.) Musical human-machine interaction has been a research topic for at least two decades now but has seen mixed results. Research in the field often produces interesting demonstrations but little in the way of music you might actually enjoy. Among the more notable efforts is Robert Rowe’s Cypher system, which uses a rules-based approach, and Francois Pachet’s Continuator project, which favors a data-driven, machine-learning strategy. I favor the latter approach augmented by the ability to build hooks into the generative system so that I can steer its output.
Machine learning researchers often describe their models as “black boxes” because their inner operations are opaque to observation. (more…)
Everything that moves breaks, and that’s as true of stepper motors as rotator cuffs. Last night, the stepper motor that drives the timing belt that shakes the cabasa twisted out its last ch-ch-ch-ch sound. When it receives the command to shake, it tries to turn but can’t summon the torque to move the beads of the cabasa. It just grunts softly and vibrates its frame. Maybe it will semi-retire to lighter duty as an egg timer.
The motor is a Shinano Kenshi that I bought on eBay for about $15, which I thought was a good deal when the motor worked. In retrospect, I got what I paid for, but I’m grateful that the motor failed when I have no gigs scheduled for a couple months and not, say, before my interview on NPR. When the I realized the motor was not coming back, I started searching for a replacement of the same make and model before I realized that this was a stupid idea. Why buy what just broke? As an alternative, try learning, I thought to myself.
Determined to reach base camp on the stepper motor learning-curve, I headed to the website of Anaheim Automation, where the motors are as tough as the sales reps are gruff (Hi Kelly! Thanks for your help this morning). Assuming I read the data sheet correctly, which I wouldn’t bet on, the Anaheim motor I picked up, the 23Y002S-LW 8, should more than handle the cabasa. If it can really generate 72 oz/in of torque at 4 RPS, I will be able to shake the cabasa at inhuman speeds. Check the datasheet for yourself.
In honor of the service of the Shinano Kenshi motor to Jazari, I’m sharing this Kutiman video, which uses eighth notes in the cabasa to ground an off-kilter drum break. Watch for it and the cabasa player wearing Nike athletic gear and a fez(!) at 0:36.
Two new tracks, After LL and M5/M7, are out, and these are the most beat-based I’ve made yet. They are still entirely improvised, with nothing composed ahead of time or sequenced, but I’ve focused more on driving the beat forward with subtle variations. I still like the free-flowing explorations I did earlier–especially Get To The Chopper–but I think I’ve gained a lot by doing less. The new approach lets me build energy over longer stretches of time and set up moments of tension and release. One side-effect of this approach is that the tracks have gotten longer–After LL is over 9 minutes–at the same time that they’ve gotten leaner. Taut, patient, and propulsive is what I was going for.
You can stream both with the player in the right sidebar. If you’d like to bump them at your next robot dance party or provide musical accompaniment to positive self-talk (“I am a machine! I am a machine!”) while doing your elliptical routine you can download both from iTunes or Amazon.
And if you feel inclined, please rate them or write a review. Both are a significant help and take only a moment to do. Also if you are beat producer and areserious about making a remix, contact me about getting the stems.
On June 15, I will join the ranks of hundreds of thousands of other skinny white guys in over-priced denim who want you to go to their show in New York. But mine is better! Because I have robots and they don’t.
Even if you’re not going to be in New York City on June 15 because you’re in the Hamptons or possibly because you, like most of humanity, live elsewhere, you probably know someone in New York who would enjoy hearing cyborg percussion music in a casual but tastefully furnished bar. Your uncle Bruce, for example, or your former roommate’s super hot and extremely nerdy ex-girlfriend who now lives in Park Slope. Well, now there’s an easy way to send them to my show.
This is a link to the event page on a well-known social networking site. There’s a Share button in the right column. Use it! The resulting street cred will impress your friends, make your co-workers jealous, and cut velvet ropes the world over.
When I designed my springbok controller (for those of you new to my work, that’s a controller made from springbok horns not a controller of springbok) I planned to make it wireless. Why be tethered to a computer when you could be free to run around, stage dive, or order drinks while performing? It looked like the technology was available to support DIY wireless: Sparkfun offers Bluetooth modules that allow for the transmission of serial data, which is what the Arduino transmits, and there is plenty of software that allows for serial communication between applications and a laptop’s Bluetooth module (the rxtx Java API, the MAX serial object, etc.). I did get the controller to communicate with my application via Bluetooth with rxtx and the MAX serial object, but ultimately neither worked for musical performance because of unacceptable latency. Testing showed worst case latencies of up to 50 ms, which is an eternity in musical performance. Improvising with this controller was like pushing a shopping cart with a sticky wheel. I later learned that this latency is built into the Bluetooth SPP protocol, and that to get the lower latency achieved by the Wiimote, I would need to use the HID protocol, which in turn would require a different Bluetooth chip. It also means I wasted > $120 on two Bluesmirf modules. Hooray for learning!
So I turned to a commercial solution: the M-Audio Mid Air, which theoretically pipes MIDI data through the ether. I built a MIDI Out port into the controller and planned to send MIDI data from it to my Traveler interface. The first Mid Air that I tried burned out seconds after I turned it on–literally. I smelled melting electronics. The online retailer where I purchased the product, The Midi Store, was helpful in replacing it, but unfortunately the replacement, while it hasn’t burned out, simply doesn’t work. The transmitter and the base unit don’t connect. The device is MIDI’s answer to Samuel Beckett. Avoid it.
One thing I miss about New York is haggling. When I arrived in NYC as an 18-year-old freshperson, I followed the Midwestern negotiating protocol of nervous side-glances, conversational lulls, and indecision masquerading as refined fickleness. After being played for a fool in a fake ID scam and being ripped off by hard-charging, Italian orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side who played good cop/bad cop after locking me in their haberdashery, I wised up a little. Today I was shopping for a microphone and a pair of monitoring headphones, both of which I knew I would have to buy at Guitar Center. I used to dislike Guitar Center for its decibel levels and the charmless atmosphere, but I have to revise that opinion, or at least add to it. Before driving out to the ‘burbs, I called ahead and to try to haggle down the price of the headphones to match a lower one I found at an online retailer.
And Guitar Center agreed. Without protest. I saved 20%…just by asking for it. It’s almost enough to make me want to buy another van.
I just finished a great conversation with Pam Hill Kroyer on her show Pam Without Boundaries on KFAI. Thanks again to Pam for having me on.
Pam made a somewhat mysterious reference to a show I’m playing this Sunday at Room Zero. She didn’t offer details because the location is a little hush-hush, but you can get the location, pass code, and secret handshake by emailing shield.your.eyes[at]live.com. Also, all three of the tracks Pam played are available at iTunes and for the Steve Jobs averse, Amazon.
During our talk, I alluded to some still vague plans to incorporate speech recognition software into my setup. This idea is still in the research phase, and to be honest, I’m not sure it’s even possible. Commercial speech recognition software can perform poorly in the relative quiet of a home office. It’s uncertain that even the most advance algorithms would handle the noisy atmosphere of a live stage show. But I’m going to give it a try. The recognition API I’ve been looking at is Sphninx 4, developed at Carnegie Mellon University. Since Java is what I know best, I’ve been looking at Java APIs, but I’d welcome suggestions for other APIs. I also have the impression that Hidden Markov Models, which is what Spninx 4 uses, are slightly dated, and the state of the art uses Conditional Random Fields. I was wondering if anyone has a perspective on the relative merits of these models.
Usually when I’m at Nick & Eddie, I sip vodka tonics to the pulse of minimal techno. That could still happen on Monday, but probably not until after I play at 10:30.