The bad news is that I’m having some DNS issues with majorminer.com. The good news, is that you can now access the same great MajorMiner game and search at majorminer.org.
The other good news is that there’s a new and improved search page. Hopefully it’s easier to understand what’s going on, I’ve even added a FAQ. If you look hard enough, you might also notice a new feature I’ve introduced: similarity browsing. For each clip that was autotagged, I computed a similarity value between its autotag vector and all of the others, finding the thirty or so nearest neighbors. You can follow this web of similarity around to some fun stuff, even though it’s not a huge collection of music. Here’s a random starting place.
This similarity is a semantic similarity, as Doug Turnbull likes to call it. The the clips might not have an exactly similar sound, the rhythms might not match, or they might differ in an instrument or two, but for the most part you would describe them with the same sorts of words. If you want to know what kinds of words we’re talking about, take a look at the autotagging results. Have a look and let me know what you think (you can leave a link to any exceptional results you find in the comments).
I’ve been listening to last.fm a lot recently, especially while I’m working. My goal has been mostly to listen to music, but also to be exposed to new music. The problem is that if I hear something new that I like, I need to stop working, flip desktops to firefox, flip tabs to last.fm, and look down the page for the artist’s name. I could use the pop-out player, but then I’d still have to wait for the little scroll-y display to come around to the artist. I have the same experience with my iPod, having to dig it out of my pocket to see what’s playing.
Since I’m already listening to the music, what I’d like is an auditory display of what’s playing, that is to say I’d like a DJ to tell me what I’m listening to. It could say only the artist’s name to minimize interruptions or it could include the album and track name if I’m in a more interested mood. It could be machine generated, or it could be pre-recorded, maybe by the bands themselves. It would help me learn to pronounce band names as well, e.g. !!!. It would be much less annoying than listening to DJs on the radio without the clearchannel audio logos, station IDs, or whatever you call them (cue Family Guy joke).
Recently I’ve had a couple of opportunities to play some music, both of them thanks to my friend Matt. This past Wednesday and the Wednesday before I sat in on the rehearsals of a big band at the musician’s union, local 802. Things seem to be organized by Peter Silver, the jazz dentist, who has something like 1000 charts he picks from each week. I was playing second alto, covering for Dimitri Moderbacher. I don’t think this band actually plays gigs, it seems like a place where people just come and play, and quite well at that. The rehearsals basically consisted of reading down 10-15 charts, maybe trying tricky parts a second time to get them right, but everyone read them without flinching and played some great solos as well. That could have been because they all appeared to be seasoned professionals, I was probably the youngest person in the room and the average age was somewhere in the mid 40s. There were some other young people there, but they were doing masters in music performance or other serious musical endeavors. Lots of fun, hopefully I’ll get to do it again some time.
The second musical opportunity I’ve had recently was the chance to play in the pit band for the production of Kiss Me, Kate that the Bard Hall Players put up at Columbia’s medical school. I thought I’d be playing mostly alto for this, but it turned out that I needed to dust off my flute and clarinet and remember how to play them. The first few rehearsals were rough, but by the time we got to the show I could hit all of the high notes (I still had to write out the note names because of all of those damned ledger lines, though).
I wasn’t really familiar with the show, but I ended up really liking it, mostly because it’s so filthy. Thinking back on the show, I wanted to pick out one song that was particularly dirty, but I couldn’t narrow it down beyond six: “Tom, Dick or Harry” (Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick, a-Dick-a, Dick Dick Dick), “I’ve Come to Wive it Wealthily in Padua” (If she fight like a raging boar, I have oft stuck a pig before), “I Hate Men” (His business is the business that he gives his secretary), “Too Darn Hot” (I’d like to stop with my baby tonight, and blow my top with my baby tonight, but I’d be a flop with my baby tonight, cause it’s too darn hot), “Always True To You, In My Fashion” (There’s an oil man known as “Tex”, Who is keen to give me checks, And his checks, I fear, mean that sex is here to stay!), and my favorite, “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” (And if still she won’t give you a bonus, You know what Venus got from Adonis). You can hear snippets at amazon and see lots more pictures here.
The band was directed by Matt’s friend Dave Malito, who did a great job considering it was his first time ever conducting. While there were some musicians who stood out, the band itself was just alright. Our sight reading wasn’t very convincing because no one really wanted to commit to any of the notes. The show’s leads were all excellent, especially considering that in real life they’re all med students, except for the one who is married to one of the med students. My mom and grandparents came to the show and were very complimentary of them, although my grandfather mentioned more than once that overall the show was slightly better than a high school production. It was fun to do, though, especially over multiple performances, which changed quite a bit. Thursday night the audience was all med students, the beer was flowing, and there was a lot of cheering. Friday night it seemed like mostly professors in the audience, which was much more subdued. Saturday it was hard to tell who was in the audience, and the Sunday matinee was all parents.
I’ll probably be back again next year, it’s always good to practice reading in keys that are convenient for singers, like G-flat (does anyone else find it funny that wikipedia has a page about each key?).
While in Vienna, I went to the opera with some other folks from ISMIR, led by Elias and his girlfriend. The Vienna Staatsopernhaus appeared to have performances just about every night, and each night was completely different. Some people in our hotel saw Andrea Bocelli the night before we saw Rossini’s Barber of Seville. An hour before the curtain went up, we paid 2 euros for standing room tickets. They were in the last row of the last balcony, and we didn’t even have a bar in front of us to lean on, but 2 euros! We reserved our spots with scarves and sweaters and walked around the building for a while, marveling at the architecture and the murals.
When the overture started, I immediately recognized most of the pieces, despite not realizing that that was where they came from. Then there was the “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro” aria etc. The performers were incredible, and could fill up the space even though they looked like normal people of normal girth. The acoustics were quite good, though, so that without mics we could hear a guitar played on stage perfectly from the last row. I could have stayed longer, but we left after the first scene to get some dinner, having certainly gotten our money’s worth.
Seeing the opera in Vienna reminded me that I never wrote up seeing Pucchini’s Turandot at the Met Opera. Joanne and I got standing room tickets for $20, which were way in the back on the ground floor. The sound wasn’t great and the top part of the stage was cut off from view. But at the second intermission, two people who were walking out gave us their ticket stubs. The seats were in the middle of the orchestra section and cost $175 each. Needless to say, the sound was much better and we could see everything that was going on. The stage was tilted so the audience could see more of it, but after a while you don’t even notice the tilt, just like in the egocentric space perception experiments I was reading about at the time in a psych class.
I’d have to say that I enjoyed the Barber of Seville the most, followed by Turandot, followed by Samson and Delilah, which we saw last year at the Met. The Barber of Seville really flowed, the recitatives sounded very natural and were believable. The arias were interesting and engaging as well. Turandot was more concise and more melodic than Samson at Delilah, but the recitatives just didn’t flow as well. Maybe I just like comic operas more than dramatic ones. It was also much easier to find something quick to eat around the Vienna opera house than around Lincoln Center, thanks Robert Moses!
After figuring out how to connect my ubuntu feisty laptop (thinkpad) to my phone (samsung), mostly from the thinkwiki howto, I managed to get all of my pictures off of it. I uploaded them to my photo gallery, separating them into concert pictures and other assorted pictures of things like graffitti, funny signs, computer error screens in public, and so forth.
Speaking of Graffitti, I’ve got a couple of good ones so far in addition to Mel Gibson. The first is a speech bubble painted on a the side of a truck saying, inexplicably as usual, “CU Killz”. Coming from Columbia, I assume that the CU in question is Columbia University. I suppose it could be copper. The second was done in marker on an ad in the subway, saying “Bill McHenry uses a metal mouthpiece.” Bill McHenry is a New York tenor sax player who I’ve seen play a couple of times, so I found this immensely amusing. For some reason, no one else on the platform even cracked a smile.
The concert photos are more for me to remember the shows I’ve been to than for photographic quality, although a few, like the one above of Jarvis Cocker, aren’t bad considering they’re from my phone. Going through the pictures, there were a couple of shows that I didn’t remember going to until Joanne was able to put a name to the face.
Another show I saw recently was “Buffalo Collision” at Tonic. The band was made up of two thirds of The Bad Plus plus a viola and alto sax and there are some nice pictures of the show at the Downtown Music Gallery’s website like this one and this one. I saw this show after the one at tonic and liked it a lot more. Although both shows were entirely improvised, they had completely different feels. While the Iyer-Coleman show ranged from quiet to atonal, these guys went all over the place, lots of different styles, dynamics, instrument combinations, extended techniques, you name it. The main difference for me at least was the structure, where you could actually hear the ideas flying around from one person to the next and evolving over the course of each song.
The drums also added a lot of rhythmic structure and variety to the proceedings. Although Dave King started out drumming more melodically, he switched back and forth frequently to more rhythmic playing. Matt Maneri tore it up on viola. At first I was suspicious of a viola in a jazz band, but in fact he was able to play it as a bass, a guitar, and a fiddle in turns. The low double stops added some oomph well out of range of a violin and it was also entertaining every time he broke a bow hair, which was frequently. Tim Berne seemed a little bit timid on the alto sax, contributing fewer ideas and adding more color. He did have some nice flourishes, though. Ethan Iverson on the piano did a great job of driving the whole operation, filling unexpected chords in behind Maneri’s viola, and changing things up on a dime. His two Stravinsky quotes were cute as well.
This seemed like the kind of group improv that I like playing. The ideas were varied, they changed on a dime, and the band was able to take an idea and stretch it out into something new. The band also was able to maintain some nice polyrhythms, which I know is a difficult thing to introduce into a group improvisation. It seems like whenever one player starts playing a different tempo against the current one, everyone else takes it as a signal to slow down into stasis; formless bleeps and bloops. Despite their name, Buffalo Collision managed to avoid a static mess. I don’t know if this was a one time thing or if there will be more shows, but I’d go hear them again.
I saw Vijay Iyer and Steve Coleman play a duet at the Stone recently with Graham. They appeared to have some sort of sheet music, although it must have been more abstract than actual notes because it seemed like all of the details were improvised. Perhaps most impressively, they played straight through for over an hour without repeating themselves and without dwelling for too long on one idea. Overall, though, it was quite low key, laid back, and atonal and never quite went where I’d hoped it would, i.e. to somewhere with some structure. There were some interesting dialogs between the performers, but there were times when it felt like they weren’t listening to each other at all. In addition to playing the piano and keyboards, Iyer also brought along his computer and played some ambient beats behind the music, convincing me that serial music is much improved by adding a beat.
One thing I’ll say for the show, however, is that it got my creative juices flowing. Often when I’m at a show that I really like, I’ll get so absorbed in my own thoughts that are being inspired by the music that I’ll end up only listening to the music between the thoughts that it inspires.
The main thought floating around at this show was about the structure of music again, but this time with additional thoughts about plots in movies and books. For most interesting/artsy/high-brow books/movies, the plot is not where it’s at, it’s the characters, moods, themes, and ideas that are important. There are only so many plots you can have in a book, and the art of writing a plot-based best seller or blockbuster seems to be in adding one more wrinkle to one of those standard plots. I see some sort of analogy here with the structure of music, although I can’t see it very clearly. There are only so many structures a piece can have, mostly boiling down somehow to the build, the dip, the climax, and the release. Pop music’s use of standard musical structures could somehow be likened to the best seller’s use of standard plots. Like plot, the structure of the piece is the skeleton on which you hang the interesting stuff. If it’s not there, everything else collapses. I can’t tell you what the musical version of “character development” is, or how ideas are presented, but musical themes, while quite different from literary themes, can convey a lot of interesting things in their appearances, evolution, placement, etc.
Last weekend I heard Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society again. This time they were playing the Bowery Poetry club, so it was a bit easier to get to then the Flux Factory. Because of the IAJE conference, the house was packed, I could hardly find a seat. I missed the opening act, the Industrial Jazz Group, which I regret after having listened to them on their myspace page. The Secret Society’s set started out a little rough, but by the end they were cooking. If you’re interested, Darcy’s entry lists all of the musicians and has links to mp3s of the show. One of the most memorable moments occurred as one of the songs was just coming down off of its peak and the bartender started shaking a drink to the beat. It fit in almost perfectly, but he broke the spell by shaking the next drink at the wrong tempo.
While I was waiting for the show to start, I got to talking to the guy sitting next to me, an acupuncture student from Seattle in town for a talk. He was an interesting guy, a little wet behind the ears, but very eager to talk about deep philosophical issues in public. We discussed the balance of form and substance in art and music and life and his thoughts on Taoism.
Here are some examples to illustrate the form-substance relationship. In writing, the form is the language used, it’s vocabulary, grammar, etc, while the substance is the idea expressed in that language. In computer music, the form could be the tool that is used to generate music, like max/msp with all of its bits and pieces and means of connecting them, while the substance is the work of music actually made with the tool. It’s quite easy to become fixated on form while losing sight of the substance, particularly for people who want to make tools that aid artists in making art and artists who obsess over technique.
I’m under the impression that one is supposed to tire of such discussions after one graduates from college. Maybe I just didn’t get enough of them at the time because I still enjoy them. In fact, I came to New York hoping for more deep conversations with random people like that, but it took sitting next to a west coaster to have one.
It seems like January is full of concerts I want to hear. I don’t know if it’s because there are more cool-sounding shows around or because I know about more shows, but it’s not stopping for a few weeks. I’ll write more about the shows I’ve already seen in a future post, but for now I’ll summarize. Last weekend, I saw DJA’s Secret Society again at the Bowery Poetry Club. Last night I saw Vijay Iyer and Steve Coleman with Graham at the Stone. Today I saw Spring Awakening with my parents on Broadway. I’m hoping to catch Buffalo Collision, which contains 2/3 of the Bad Plus, tomorrow (Sunday) night at Tonic. Then next weekend Sing Sing Rhythm, a Senegalese drumming group, is playing Symphony Space and there’s a Frank Zappa composers portrait at Miller Theater later on that week. Anyone want to go?
For the past few semesters I’ve been participating in this “class” which is more like an experiment in collaboration between the Electrical Engineers from LabROSA and some folks in the music department. After much (much) discussion, we decided that it would be cool to make a program to do automatic mashups or musaics. The idea is to chop some songs up into little bits like single beats and then use them to make more music. This could mean rearranging the bits, sorting them, or trying to build other songs out of them. I wrote a version of this that works in real time, which Ron and others took and made into a more interactive version that is easier to use. This version is called MEAPSoft and you can get it from the official MEAPSoft website.
With that said, recently a few of the guys from the music side of MEAP played a show at The Stone in the East Village which I thought was pretty cool. Jeff Snyder started off tweaking some dials on one of the CMC’s vintage analog synths from the 70s. It was a duet with another musician from the CMC who was playing with a program on his laptop hooked up to a homemade control with lots of dials on it. It was a bit hard to tell who was playing what and at the time I was hearing it I thought maybe one of them was doing some sort of processing of what the other was playing, but it turned out that they were completely independent. In the end, I liked it because more than most other max/msp-like music I’ve heard, there actually was some rhythm and some structure.
Next up was Victor Adan with his musical dot matrix printer. He’d mentioned it in MEAP a few months ago, but unlike most of the ideas everyone else brought up in the discussion, he followed through and made a piece of music out of it. It was pretty funny to see the print head from a dot-matrix printer sitting there with a couple of mics pointed at it, but it was quite effective at making interesting sounds. According to Victor he had two modes of making sounds with it. The first was a graphical tool for drawing the pitch the printer would make over time. The second was a nearest neighbor method for approximating speech with various patterns of printed bits. While it wasn’t quite recognizable as speech, it did make some interesting music. All in all, not bad for a single-bit musical instrument.
Third was Dan Iglesia, who performed a combined video and sound piece. He took sound material from a portable radio that was scanning through its stations and some stock video footage and combined them in pretty interesting ways. The idea was basically that each sound sample he used was matched up with a video segment and then any sound processing he did to that sound segment was mirrored in the video processing done to the associated clip. For example, adding echo to the audio corresponded to a persistence of vision idea in the video, and filtering the audio corresponded to cropping the video. Then he could change the speed of both via some time stretching, chop them both up, and so forth. As the piece progressed, he mixed more and more of the sounds and videos together at the same time. I thought the idea was interesting and straightforward and it was executed well, although it might have been a bit hard for the average Joe to figure out what was going on. It also went on a little long for the amount of material that it contained.
Finally, there was a trio which included Brad Garton manning a laptop, a guy playing the mandolin, and another guy manipulating video of the mandolin player. This performance was definitely the most polished, Brad’s laptopping adding a lot of richness and depth to the sparse mandolin playing, but it didn’t quite meet my criteria for interesting music, i.e. having rhythm or harmony. The video was kind of cool, mostly the images of the mandolin player reproducing themselves like bacteria, although there wasn’t quite enough light for the camera.
Overall, of all of the performances I’ve seen of music from Columbia’s music department, this one was my favorite. It generally managed to maintain its musicality while still being intelligent and providing new ideas.
