At the end of 2010, Jazari was a four-piece, acoustic robo-band that had just welcomed the hi-hat machine into the fold. One year later, the group boasts snare and kick machines, an acoustic wobble bot, vocal processing with the Android app I released last January, lots of looping controls, digital effects on the drum sounds, and a smattering of synthesizers. All these toys make practicing a lot of fun, but it’s time to get these sounds in front of people. Step one in that process is the original mini mix above. Step two involves a lot of heavy lifting and driving, so that’s going to wait for warmer weather, but enjoy step one! Share widely, and grab the free download.

While known for its lakes, Minneapolis is also blessed with an abundance of unnatural resources like the experimental public access TV show Freaky Deeky. As a program that defies description, taste, and the better interests of epileptics, Freaky Deeky offers an ideal platform for tribal techno of the robotic variety, which is what Jazari will be serving up as the house band on Nov. 27 at 10 PM CST. Sear your retinas here: http://freakydeeky.tv/.

I live in an apartment that shares no common walls with any other apartment, which makes my building something of an architectural freak. For a couple years I’ve been under the impression that this unique layout allowed me to make a lot of robot noise without disturbing anyone, and I was half right. The neighbors on my floor can’t hear me from their apartments, and I thought the same was true of the neighbors above me. But I was wrong. Apparently, one upstairs neighbor has been suffering through late night jam sessions while wrapping her annoyance into a tight ball of passive-aggressive Minnesotan rage. Because I’m a nice guy, and because I got tired of electromechanical furniture dominating my living space, I rented a real rehearsal space.

As it turns out, this was a great idea in its own right. Being able to play with normal volume is very liberating and completely changes how I practice. I’m able to balance the instruments better, build up thicker textures, and simulate a real performance. I got a little giddy with that freedom during my first full day in the space, and I dropped my planned session of scales and rhythm exercises for hours of self-indulgent jamming, which in a one-man improvisatory band, is actually the point of the enterprise. Who else would I indulge? But I digress. I recorded about half an hour of spontaneous beat creation and melodic noodling, and while there are some awkward moments and some loops last too long, I like the overall vibe. Unlike earlier tracks, these are mellow beats that aren’t in a hurry to get anywhere. Synths amble around in a bouncy reverberant space grounded by regular patterns in the djembe and auxiliary percussion, and enough weird stuff happens to avoid ambient chillout blandness. That said, it’s background music. Anyone listening for structural narrative in the modulation scheme will be…well, let’s just stop here and say that anyone who listens for the structure of modulation schema probably endured a harsh, though rigorous, upbringing in the former East Germany and deserves our support and patience. But that person will be bored Scheißelos by this track. Other people, however, may enjoy listening to this session while distracting themselves with homework, chores, or any one of the many brilliantly stupidly brilliant single-serving tumblrs on the internets. I recommend Fuck Yeah Menswear.

Chicago juke music has been around for years, but I didn’t stumble upon it until recently, so for those who, like me, haven’t hit up underground dance parties on the South Side in a while, a brief introduction: Juke is derived from Chicago house music and hip hop but turns the tempo way up to around 150 bpm. The rhythms are intensely syncopated and often create tempo ambiguities; you’re not sure if the beat is at 75 or 150 bpm. Both are often viable listening strategies and you can choose to hear the music at either, allowing you to perform perceptual gestalt flips–who doesn’t enjoy a good gestalt flip? Juke has an associated dance style called footwurk that features manic legwork, and “footwurk” is sometimes used synonymously with “juke” to refer to the music itself. This article in New Zealand music mag Rip It Up delves deep into juke/footwurk’s origins. Here’s an off-kilter exemplar from Chicago dance music polymath Chrissy Murderbot.

Closer to my own practice, Archie Pelago uses a complex setup of laptops and live instruments to create an improvisational beat-based music that draws on jazz and dance music.

Cities Aviv is a Memphis-based rapper who likes to stretch out highly textured samples from classic R&B, chillwave, and jazz and let them bake in the sun for a while before applying a high sheen of reverb. I don’t listen to lyrics so I couldn’t tell you what he’s rapping about. Probably money, women, and his own skills as a rapper, but that’s just a guess based on what I’ve read about rap music.

Coastin by Cities Aviv

To stay true to my roots, some modern composition. I’ve always enjoyed Salvatore Sciarrino’s work for being ultra modern without being dogmatic and for maintaining a sense of joy and wonderment against the angsty, neurotic gloom that characterizes a lot modern music from composers of his generation. The violin caprices are tour de force of technique that I’ve had the good fortune to hear live twice. Here’s a taste:

Speaking of angsty, neurotic gloom, one composer who does it better than almost anyone alive is Austrian Georg Friedrich Haas. His piece for chamber ensemble Wer, wenn ich schreie, hörte mich? (Who, when I scream, will hear me? — do you see what I’m getting at?) is one my all time favorites pieces. It makes great use of cymbals to augment shimmering dissonances, and creates a massive sense of foreboding with slowly accelerating, swooshing chords in the brass and strings that move in and out of phase. To hear Haas in a mellower mood, check out his second string quartet, which is gauzy spectral work in the mold of Grisey.

I may opt to revisit iOS for my next app. I hate their development tools, but the test matrix is four devices and three versions of the OS instead of 300+ devices and who knows how many flavors of the OS. If you have downloaded Voloco, and it works or doesn’t work (and I believe it works for a solid majority of users), please do one of the following: If it works, write a thoughtful, honest review that makes copious use of words like “MAGISTERIAL,” “MIND-MELTING,” and “APOCALYPTICALLY AWESOME.” If it doesn’t work, send me an email that mentions the device model, Android version, and the nature of the problem. Actually, if it works and you want to suggest improvements, write a review along the guidelines specified above and then email your suggestions.

In other news, I hooked up the wobble machine to a wah wah pedal tonight, mic’ed the drums, and rocked several hours of acoustic dubstep and electro insanity. I stopped when the tendons in my hand got sore. That’s a good practice session. The video shoot and recording session is two weeks from tomorrow, and it will be a crunch to put two tracks together before then, but I’m confident something ridiculous will fall out of it. If you want to be in the fallout zone when the videos drop, hit the Facebook Like button at right.

Live-looping mbira and agogo maestro Asumaya is also on the bill (doors at 7:30). I just listened to the new Asumaya EP on bandcamp and really enjoyed it. Check it out.

Auf jeden Fall, bitte Klicken Sie auf die “Like” Taste auf der rechten Seite um in Kontakt zu bleiben und Nachrichten über neue Jazari Ereignisse, beispielsweise videos mit der neu gebauten “Wobble” Maschine, zu bekommen.

With that preamble out of the way (call me Jefferson), I’m going to make a few value judgments. When I first began toying with the idea of turning the algorithms I use in my music into apps, I started teaching myself iOS because the iPhone was and remains a more profitable platform for app developers than Android, although the gap is closing. I bought books, watched youtube tutorials, and experimented with example code that I ran on my own iThing. After a couple of months, I gave up. Part of the problem was unfamiliarity with objective C, the language used to code for iOS, but the other problem, which seemed less tractable and more discouraging, was a patronizing and somewhat authoritarian attitude embedded in the way the iOS development tools control the process of creating an app. These tools and the pedagogical materials that explain them almost mandate certain design patterns that structure how applications are put together. These patterns make sense for a lot of apps, I’m sure, but they didn’t make sense for my app. I knew how I wanted to structure my app, and trying to contort it into one of Apple’s design templates appeared unnatural and frustrating, so I began looking at Android as an alternative.

Getting started with Android was easy. There was some new terminology to learn, and there were rules to follow, but I felt that Android struck the right balance between preordained structure and flexibility. Equipped with a flexible development environment, I dove into teaching myself the basics of UI design and Android audio programming. In short order I had a test app that would simply take audio input from the microphone and play it back out the speaker or headphones in real time.

The disappointment began when I pressed Play and started speaking. “Test one, test” went into the phone, kicked off its shoes, had a bite to eat, checked the sports page, and ambled out of the speaker about 250 milliseconds after arriving. Now, 250 milliseconds may not sound like a long time, but in the world of real time audio for music, it’s an eternity. It’s equal in duration to an eighth note at a tempo of 120 beats per minute, which means that if you sang through the phone on the beat of a moderately fast tempo, the output would be exactly off the beat. Just speaking is nearly impossible when you hear your voice at a delay of that length. What was especially galling about this audio latency was that it occurred on the powerful Nexus One, at the time Android’s flagship phone, running the latest version of the OS. By comparison, the iPhone can achieve latency as low as 5 milliseconds, and it could do that in its first generation. I was puzzled. Somehow, a company with some of the world’s smartest engineers had designed, manufactured, and marketed a “Superphone” that turned in a laughable performance at a core engineering task.

I felt confused, angry, isolated, and betrayed–until I found a support group on the internet that showed me that there were other people just like me, going through the same things that I was. OK, I stole that line from an episode of Dateline NBC, but it was illuminating to come across the Google Code page devoted to Issue 3434. Here, you can watch Android audio developers cycle through sundry stages of grief as they realize that yes, real time audio sucks on Android, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Google has declared its intention to lower audio latency in the future. The Compatibility Definition Document for Gingerbread stipulates that devices that declare themselves as low latency must meet the threshold of 50 ms input latency and 45 output latency. That’s better; it moves the needle from hide-your-face shameful to pretty crappy, but it’s not low latency in the sense that musicians understand the term. Round-trip input-output latency of 95 ms would easily throw off a guitar player trying to use an audio effects app; it would delay output by about a sixteenth note at a fast tempo. To make digital audio effects and synthesis work for musicians, latency must fall below the threshold of the human perceptual present, the chunk of time at which we process sensory input. It’s about 30 milliseconds, which is why 24 and 30 frames per second (with periods of 41.6 ms and 33.3 ms, respectively) function as the baseline frame rates for film and video.

Latency is not the only weak spot of audio performance on Android. The quality of microphones and digital-analog converters (DACs) varies widely between devices. Last week, when I was testing Voloco on my Nexus One, I noticed that singing high notes produced nasty squelching in the middle-high frequency register of the vocoder output. To test whether the microphone of the N1 might be the problem, I recorded myself singing a high note into the N1 and a first generation Motorola Droid simultaneously. I applied no processing, I just recorded the input. I then took those recordings, imported them to an audio editing program, and did a simple frequency analysis on an identical chunk of audio. The top image plots the frequency content of one second of the Droid recording.

Motorola Droid frequency response.

I used a sample rate of 22 khz, so the highest frequency present is 11 khz. You’ll notice that the magnitude spectrum is about what you would expect from a high, sung note. The partials are clearly present and gradually decrease in magnitude with frequency. The bottom image is the analysis of the same chunk of sound recorded with the Nexus One.

Nexus One

Gadget blogs, particularly ones devoted to Android, love hardware specs, but I have yet to see a mobile device review use the words “latency” or “frequency response.” This oversight is unfortunate because audio performance is not a niche feature; it’s what enables a productive connection to the broader world of musical culture, which plays a disproportionately large role in shaping consumer perceptions of cache and status. Furthermore, it’s becoming specious to speak of mass-market music consumption apps and expert music production apps. Technology is blurring the lines between musical production and consumption, reversing a trend that began with the rise of recording in the early 20th Century and returning us to a situation more like that of the 19th (see music creation site UJAM for a perfect example). This development is real, and Apple and even Microsoft understand it (although Microsoft’s Songsmith is pretty bad, and the marketing is just awful). Sadly for me and other music developers who find much to like about Android, Google doesn’t seem to get it, and until Google and OEMs bring audio performance up to par, Android will have little to contribute to music making.

Here’s the text of the talk that I prepared:

The title of my talk is Cyborg Musicianship; I am wearing a large controller made from springbok horns and arcade buttons; and I also surrounded by electro-mechanical machines that play instruments. Extrapolating from these facts, you might think that cyborg music is an eccentric kind of sci-fi genre made by nerds and shared on obscure internet forums. And you would be half right. But the other half of the story is that cyborg musicianship already dominates the production of pop music and permeates music-related video games and mobile device applications. The machines that you see on stage here are in a sense hardware manifestations of ideas that have spread throughout musical culture in software. Before I elaborate on that point, I’d like to lay out a tentative definition of cyborg musicianship.

Cyborg musicianship connects technology to the musical body and mind in order to enhance their capabilities or to compensate for their weaknesses. This technology may aid perception, mental processing, or physical motion. I’ll give you an example from my own music. When I press a button on this controller, a solenoid hits a drum. If I hold the button down, the solenoid hits the drum repeatedly. How fast the solenoid hits the drum depends on the rotation of the controller, and how hard the solenoid hits the drum depends on the angle of the controller. In total, these controls allow me to play rhythms that would be impossible for me to play in the normal way and in some case impossible for any human to play.

Now there is a trade-off here. I lose control of some of the subtle inflections that give traditional percussion music much of its expressive power. In exchange I gain capabilities in speed, precision, and manipulation of loops. This is a dynamic that recurs frequently in cyborg musicianship: With a gain in power or ease of performance comes a loss in subtlety.

Perhaps the best example of this dynamic is also the best known example of cyborg musicianship, although it’s not labeled as such. I’m talking about Auto-Tune. For those of you who have not listened to Top 40 radio in the last 10 years, Auto-Tune is commercial software that adjusts the pitch of a singer’s voice to be in tune. It has been widely adopted in dance music, hip hop, R&B, and the more commercial flavors of rock and country. As a result, everyone on pop radio is in tune and everyone sounds the same. Auto-tune has been so successful at removing requirements for vocal skill in musical performance that it is possible for anyone to create a facsimile of a commercial pop hit.

In other words, cyborg musicianship democratizes music production. If you can’t carry a tune, Auto-Tune will carry it for you; if you don’t understand harmony, the smart instruments in Garage Band will harmonize for you; if you can’t keep a steady tempo, you can listen to a click track while playing. If I describe this situation with the right phrasing, it sounds great. If asked you, wouldn’t it be wonderful if everyone could make music? you would probably answer yes. If I asked you, wouldn’t it be wonderful if millions of talentless people started disgorging same-sounding crap onto the internet? you’d probably say no.

But there’s another way to look at this. Traditional musicianship, such as the ability to sing in tune and sight-read music in difficult keys, had a gate-keeper function. It was like the hard math class in med school that supposedly weeds out the students without the raw talent or ambition to hack it in the real world. But the correlation between traditional musicianship and musical imagination is imperfect. There are people who may lack for musical motor skills or sight-singing ability but who nonetheless have interesting and original ideas about what music can be. These musicians, who otherwise would be marginalized by their technical inadequacies, are now able to realize their ideas through cybernetic software and hardware.

For music creators who fit that profile, this is an exciting possibility, and I know because I am one of them. I am a bad singer; I have a decent sense of rhythm, but I’m not a phenomenon in that department either. What I am good at is understanding how music works and how it’s put together. And I can code. In a previous century, I would have written obscure treatises on harmony, but today with a combination of custom-built software and machines, I can take my ideas about harmony and rhythm and realize them in performance.

In these performances I try to go beyond compensating for my own flaws; I try to explore the unique possibilities that my rig offers, and this for me is the most exciting part of cyborg musicianship. The best cyborg musicianship goes beyond trying to achieve a flawless, natural-sounding result; instead, it embraces the technology as its own medium. This is not a new idea in avant-garde or academic music circles, but it is one that is only partly accepted in mass market music software and hardware. Ultimately cyborg musicianship must become comfortable with itself. The democratization of musical performance does not have to result in an ocean of bland imitations of conventional music if newly empowered cyborg musicians remember to embrace artifice and misuse their tools.