A little background. I got my first Mac exposure in 1988, eighth grade, back in the days of System 6 and Pagemaker 1.0. It was love at first use. The mouse interface is old hat now but then it was a tremendous improvement on typing arcane DOS commands.

The first computer I bought with my own money was a blue and white G3 tower.

This computer was an amazing piece of industrial design. The side panel was a big hinged door so you could effortlessly open the computer up and access its innards. Not like I needed access to the guts all that often, but it was nice to not need a screwdriver or anything when I did. I also really loved having big sturdy handles on all four corners. It seems like such a no-brainer now, I wish all heavy, delicate and expensive objects had big handles on them. One of my roommates at the time said I shouldn’t buy this computer because, while it looked cool, it would be instantly dated – so late nineties. She was right, but I think the time-period specificity is part of the coolness, like the fins on a 1957 Chevy.

I resisted the iPhone for a long time because of the price and the lousy AT&T phone service. My mom generously bought me one for my last birthday, though, which was especially fortuitous, since a few weeks later, my laptop’s motherboard died. The iPhone turns out to be such an awesome computer in its own right that while I haven’t been able to replace my laptop, I’ve been getting along quite well without it.

The iPhone isn’t a perfect computer. The lack of multitasking is annoying (though this is supposedly about to change.) It would be nice to have access to the file system without having to go through the rigmarole of jailbreaking. But these complaints feel trivial given how fundamentally miraculous the iPhone is. It feels like it fell out of the future, and it hasn’t been far from my hand since I got it. And I appreciate the move away from the tired desktop metaphor.

So. The iPad.

On the one hand, you have fanboys like Steven Fry proclaiming the pad to be the second coming. On the other hand, there’s the well-documented Reality Distortion Field that makes people think they like Apple’s stuff more than they actually do. I fall in between. The most reasonable review I’ve come across is the one from Daring Fireball. After a glowing review of the user experience of Apple’s iWork office apps, there’s this caveat:

There is, however, a severe shortcoming inherent to the iWork suite of iPad apps: document syncing between Mac and iPad. It’s a convoluted mess. In short, the only way to edit a document on your iPad that was created on your Mac, or vice versa, is to go through a convoluted multi-step process of exporting, copying, syncing or downloading, and importing.

Ted Landau has copiously documented the entire situation in this article at The Mac Observer. Read it and weep.

What it boils down to is that there is no syncing really. Real syncing is something like IMAP for email, or the way MobileMe handles calendars and contacts. Certain of my favorite iPad and iPhone apps sync like this too. When I read a bunch of RSS items using NetNewsWire on my iPad, they’re marked as read on my Mac. Sitting at my Mac in my office, I can send a long article to Instapaper. I go downstairs, pick up my iPad, sit on the couch, launch the Instapaper iPad app, and a few seconds later, there’s the article I just added to my Instapaper queue. This is the sort of data flow that makes me feel like I’m living in the future — using multiple hardware devices to view, edit, and modify the same data. I don’t worry about where separate copies of my data exist. Conceptually it’s just there in the apps, and the apps do all the hard work of pushing and pulling changes made on other clients.

The data flow with these iWork apps isn’t like that at all, and needs to be for them to be truly useful. It doesn’t matter how good the user interface for viewing and editing spreadsheets is in Numbers for iPad if my spreadsheets aren’t there. Here’s an example. I keep the schedule for Daring Fireball RSS sponsorships in a Numbers document. What I’d like to be able to do on my iPad is launch Numbers and access the current version of that spreadsheet. But the only way I could possibly do that today would be if I went through the following steps every single time I made a change to the document on my Mac:

1. Before opening the current version of the file on my Mac, check to make sure there isn’t a more recent version of it on my iPad.
2. Open the file on my Mac and make changes.
3. Save.
4. Dock my iPad to my Mac via USB.
5. Switch to iTunes and go to the Apps tab for my iPad.
6. Add the newly-saved revision of the document to the file sharing list for the iPad’s Numbers app.
7. Sync.

Even after going through all of this, when I do want to open this file on my iPad, I have to remember not to open the last revision of it listed in the iPad Numbers app’s “My Documents” list, but instead remember first to import the latest revision from Numbers’s file sharing list to Numbers’ “My Documents”.

And, again, it’s effectively up to me to keep track of which machine, Mac or iPad, has the most recent revision of the file. To say the least, this is a recipe for disaster, and even if you don’t make a mistake and inadvertently make significant changes to an out-of-date version of the document on one of the two machines, you’re stuck with a preposterously, mind-bogglingly convoluted workflow each and every time you make a change to the document.

 

This sounds like a colossal drag and it’s reason enough for me not to be interested in buying an iPad. I don’t mind the klutziness of iTunes syncing on the iPhone, since I’m not doing a lot of serious document creation on it anyway. But on a full-sized computer, I’d expect to be able to do real work on it, not just watch movies and read magazines. I’d like to be able to easily print, too.

I use the computer for routine web browsing and entertainment like everyone else. But I work on it too, and what I love most about it is how it enables experimentation, mental adventure, self-expression. At its best, Apple knows how to encourage experiential learning and creativity. The last couple of Macs I bought came free with OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, both of which I love to distraction. They inspired my sample maps and the macro-scale structure of my book in progress, respectively. I’ll bet the iPad version of OmniGraffle is a major delight… until it’s time to move your files to another computer, or print them, or do anything else with them.

I’m also disturbed by the iPad’s lack of USB ports. I can imagine a lot of awesome uses for the iPad in music, but if I can’t connect my gear to it except through a proprietary port that may or may not be supported by the makers of my other stuff, what good is it? There are plenty of intriguing music apps on the iPad, like Smule’s delightful Magic Piano. But if I make something cool with one of these apps, how do I get it out of the iPad? How do I make mp3s and put them on my web site, or export audio to Pro Tools, or do anything else with it?

Apple’s supposed concern with user experience only extends to a point. Right now, just about every video and most of the animation on the internet uses Flash. For reasons of corporate strategy, Apple has decided to not support Flash on the iPhone or iPad. So a huge percentage of web sites are missing their multimedia content, and instead show a picture of a mysterious blue lego block. I know the back story behind this functionality failure and can work around it, but most people will just find it mystifying. I don’t like Flash any more than Steve Jobs does, and I’d welcome a future without it. I guess I can understand the decision not to support it, but I’m mystified as to why Apple wouldn’t offer any onscreen explanation as to what’s going on.

Both the iPhone and the iPad are missing the most significant piece of interface friendliness that I can think of: an easy and obvious way to undo your last action. Novice users need undo even more than I do. The iPad’s Undo command is buried in the secondary onscreen keyboard and it’s totally absent on the iPhone. There’s a weird and not widely known feature of both phone and pad where you can undo by shaking the device. I rarely remember this exists and I can’t imagine how, like, my mom would ever think to do this gesture. Where’s the big red physical undo button? Come to think of it, why doesn’t every computer have one?

Apple’s handholding can be helpful, but when it interferes, it’s as annoying as Microsoft’s animated paperclip. Like, on the iPhone the automated typing correction changes “its” to “it’s” in every circumstance, whether it’s correct or not. There’s no way to create exceptions to the rules and I finally had to turn the autocorrect off entirely.

Finally, I’m concerned byApple’s less-than-stellar environmental record. I’d wish for them to get to work on that.

So. No iPad for me yet. But Apple is full of surprises, and I’m keeping an open mind.

Ms Heap is accompanying herself with artificial harmonies created by a Digitech Vocalist Workstation. The device reads her pitch in the manner of Auto-tune. She tells it what notes to shift her voice to using the MIDI keyboard. She also uses some digital delay for the echo effect, and towards the end, she samples herself singing the chorus so she can sing the last verse over the playback.

The result is one of the most futuristic sounds I’ve ever heard, and yet it’s also warm and intimate, not icily posthuman like you’d expect from such a high-tech performance. Because the harmony responds on the fly to her singing and keybs playing, she’s free to improvise, phrase and embellish in the moment. Real live choral harmony is cool and everything, but if you want multiple complex parts, you need to write everything out ahead of time, and conduct the singers exactly. It doesn’t leave much room for spontaneity, and spontaneity is key to truth-telling in music. When I say that “fake” technology can result in more real music, this is exactly what I mean. Here’s how Imogen Heap describes the writing of this song in an interview with Electronic Musician:

My favorite computer blew up on me, but I didn’t want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, “Where are we? What the hell is going on?” I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play ten notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It’s quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that’s a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn’t feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I’m not questioning that one at all.

Brian Eno says that for synths to have the soul of traditional instruments, they need to be a little bit unpredictable. All the glossy perfection the computer makes possible can get to be oppressive. You get the best results when you don’t have total control, when there’s room for the happy accident. By confusing the harmony algorithms, you can get unexpected notes that sound way more hip than anything you could have worked out on paper ahead of time. It’s why I’m so addicted to Auto-tune. If you set it right, it reacts in surprising ways, live as it’s happening, opening up new avenues of expression.

Some people think that artificial harmonizers and Auto-tune are dishonest, that they’re cheating, that they’re part of a larger trend towards fakery that’s destroying western civilization as we know it. We have an abiding anxiety about the authenticity of our music. The Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word “authentic” descends from ancient Greek authentikos, meaning “original, genuine, principal.” This word in turn descends from authentes, “one acting on one’s own authority,” a composite of autos, “self,” and hentes, “doer, being.” The related word “genuine” descends from the Latin genuinus meaning “native, natural,” from the root of gignere, “to beget.” The thinking goes that the word originally referred to paternity.

I think it’s reasonable to be concerned with the parentage of our music, but it’s wrong to be repulsed by the bastardized and the mongrel. All the really exciting music is hybridized. Hip-hop combines the phrasing and improvisation of jazz with European electronic beats. Jazz combines African-American traditions with European harmonies and song structures. Let’s have some mongrel pride! The president of the United States is a self-described mutt. So am I. Purity is lame.

By the way, gorgeously recorded a capellas are irresistable to samplers, so it’s no big surprise that someone would take an interest in using Imogen Heap samples. The best example I could find is Jason Derulo’s song “Whatcha Say.” It won’t change your life or anything, but I give him props for venturing it. I feel less of an urge to sample Imogen Heap and more of an urge to get my hands on a Vocalist Workstation and try out some harmonies of my own.

Click around, it’s fun. The different colored squares on the right are all different instruments. The one on the bottom is a drum machine.

I’ve played around with a few web-based music apps, and this is by far my favorite. It’s a software version of the Tenori-On that boils the drum machine and sequencer interface down to their barest essentials. If you’ve never made electronic music before, the iNudge would be a great introduction. The software that I use for my tracks is more complex, but the core functionality is the same.

The iNudge was made by Hobnox, makers of Audiotool, a much bigger and more complex web-based music program. I find the Audiotool to be interesting and graphically attractive, but too complicated and not discoverable enough. Part of the problem is that the Audiotool emulates electronic music production hardware. That’s fine if you’re familiar with the gear it’s emulating, but it’s a mystifying bunch of knobs otherwise. Propellerheads’ Reason suffers from the same problem. It does a great job of emulating a variety of hardware devices, but as a visual metaphor for a computer program, it’s annoyingly counterfunctional. The “hardware” turns into a bunch of decorative elements that take up valuable screen real estate and attentional resources from the screen regions that actually do stuff.

The Tenori-On is a terrific visual metaphor and it translates well to the computer screen. If you’ve mastered the mouse or touchscreen, you know all you need to know. Audio software is most discoverable when it abstracts away from hardware and represents its different modules as simple boxes connected by arrows, like Max/MSP. The ideal interface for the signal chain would be a flexible network visualization tool like Omnigraffle.

Another nice feature of iNudge is the way it presents pitches to you. The adjacent rows on the grid aren’t mapped to the piano keys. They’re mapped to the D major/B minor pentatonic scale. You’re limited exclusively to that scale. You lose access to many notes, but you also can’t do anything that sounds bad. Vertically the grid limits you to straight eighth notes. As with the harmony, it restricts your choices but also prevents you from doing anything unmusical. If I were to extend the program one step more complicated, I might include a palette or pull-down menu with different rhythmic grids and scales.

Some other noteworthy music-making tools on the web:

The Daft Punk console let you remix “Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger.”

JS-909 is a drum machine in the browser.

Indaba is full-blown audio recording, mixing and editing in the browser with a social media component. I haven’t explored it too thoroughly yet, but I’m impressed by its ambition and scope.

Another in-browser audio recorder and editor I haven’t tried yet is Myna.

Ways to embed mp3s and playlists in the browser:

Facebook – when you post the URL of an mp3 file, FB automatically posts it in a neat little player.

Tumblr – same as Facebook.

Soundcloud – The best band-centric mp3 hosting and sharing service I’ve come across. Nice interface, including the option to comment on specific regions of songs.

The groovy WordPress mp3 plugin that I use throughout this blog.

Twitter with its associated third-party music add-ons like Blip.fm.

I think the merging of music-making and social media is an exciting development. Anything to bring more audience participation to the game is a good idea. If you guys can point me at some more fun tools and toys, hit the comments.

Iceland

Björk famously is from Iceland. She did for her homeland what the Beatles did for Liverpool — she put her country on the hipster map forever. Anna and I were lucky enough to get to go, and we’re looking forward to hopefully going back. It’s an easy place to be an American tourist. Almost everyone speaks English with a BBC inflection, except one guy who did a flawless California surfer dude. The accent is a little otherworldly — all the r’s are rolled, even the ones in the middle of words.

Icelandic shares a common ancestor with English in the not very distant past. Two languages are alike in a few weirdly specific ways. Icelandic and English are unusual for both using the th sound. Icelandic has two different letters of the alphabet devoted to it: one voiced, as in that, the other unvoiced, as in thing. Tolkien’s Elvish is partially based on Icelandic, thus mithrandir and mithril and way Sir Ian McKellan rolled the r’s in Sauron and Mordor. Mirkwood comes from mirk, the Icelandic word for forest. So outside Reykjavik is Thorsmirk, Thor’s Forest. I was in nerd heaven with the road signs.

They wanted to shoot Lord Of The Rings in Iceland but it was going to be too expensive. It would be a perfect spot to shoot science fiction if money were no object. Iceland has volcanos and glaciers and black cliffs looming over black sand beaches with puffins circling over them. There are places where superheated steam just shoots out of the ground with jet engine force. There are earthquakes and landslides and occasional catastrophic eruptions. We went by a restaurant that bakes bread by burying it three feet underground and leaving it there for a few hours. The middle of the country is like Yellowstone if it was on the moon.

Björk and sampling

Björk has access to the same popular culture as any European with a music background, but she’s viewing it through this peculiar cultural lens. Nobody interprets the computer music they play in clubs and at raves quite like Björk does. She comes from classical training, so she mostly writes on the keyboard. But she uses samples too, or at least her producers and collaborators do. They choose their samples well. Here’s one of her first big hits, “Human Behavior,” produced by Nellee Hooper.

Here’s a mashup I did of the Quincy Jones/Ray Brown tune, every version of “Human Behaviour” I have, and a hip-hop track by Heiroglyphics:

Human Behaviour Megamix by ethanhein

Samplers and remixers love Björk. Here’s my favorite usage of a Björk sample, in the remix of “Hit ‘Em Wit Da Hee” by Missy Elliot and Timbaland. At the end it uses the cello part from “Jóga.”

Here’s a diagram of all of Björk’s samples and quotations. Click to see it bigger.

Björk and remixing

Almost every Björk tune is a remix of a remix right out of the box. The tracks she releases are wildly different from what she works out on the keyboard or on paper. She and her producers use Pro Tools to merge composition, notation, performance and recording together, the way Brian Eno does with tape recorders.

Once everything is all gridded out in the audio editor, it’s easy to do alternate mixes and versions. You can toss chunks of audio in and out of the grid effortlessly, so you can do radical remixing just by muting and unmuting a few tracks. Björk has released quite a lot of these alternative versions officially. Every single she puts out is backed by three or four remixes. She’s put out entire albums and compilations of them, like Telegram, which is mostly remixes of the tracks on Post.

Björk naturally takes a relaxed attitude toward unauthorized remixes, and has managed to convince her label and management to be cool about them too. As a result, the internet is loaded with Björk fan music. There are web sites like bjorkremixes.com and the bjork remix web archive. “Army Of Me” in particular seems to inspire a lot of new interpretations.

Maybe this is due to its hybrid nature, since the song itself includes drums from “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin and “Get Thy Bearings” by Donovan. Björk releaseda charity album comprised entirely of “Army Of Me” remixes and covers. The standout is the unhinged Morris dancing version by Dr Syntax ‘n’ CB Turbo vs Rivethead. There’s also a bluegrass version, a metal version and a lot of terrifying experimental techno.

Björk’s singing and songwriting

And how could we not talk about her voice? Björk’s unearthly, chameleon-like sound gives her music some of the same pleasures as Michael Jackson’s, who she quotes explicitly in “I Go Humble.” The first paragraph of this quote of Thomas Bartlett’s Salon article could just as easily refer to MJ.

‘Childlike’, ‘feral’, ‘alien’: All three words have been used repeatedly in describing her pipes, and their apparent incompatibility alone gives some sense of just how unusual the sound is. Billie Holiday’s voice famously combined childishness with world-weary wisdom. Björk has pushed the paradox a little further, combining childishness with ferocity and unbridled sexuality.

She is the only major songwriter in recent memory for whom the apparently inescapable influence of Bob Dylan is irrelevant. Her lyrics stand out for a simple reason: They don’t rhyme. Other songwriters have experimented with non-rhyming lyrics, of course, notably Lou Reed and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, but it remains an unusual technique.

David Byrne is another great user of nonrhyming lyrics. Björk’s vocal melodies and lyrics remind me of ee cummings, whose peoms she has set to music a couple of times.

Her phrases are anything but regular; rather than a series of four-bar phrases, she might have one of three followed by two of five, finished with one of four.

Even more singular, her melodic phrases often display little or no connection to the beats beneath them. The melodies themselves are often developed through motifs, with short phrases repeated and elaborated, in a manner more similar to Brahms than to other popular songwriters. Björk’s ten years of conservatory training show here — the influence of the composers she despised is clearly in evidence. Listen to the opening of “Hidden Place” from Vespertine: The verse melody is a four-note motif, resolved differently each time. It repeats more frequently as it becomes more agitated, never matching up comfortably with the beat beneath it. Finally, it snowballs into the chorus.

Because of these irregular melodic phrases and unrhymed lyrics, it always takes a moment to adjust to Björk’s songs. They can sound clumsy at first, strangely forced, unfocused or simply incomprehensible. The end result, though, is that her music has a freshness, an air of the unexpected, that is unusual. In most pop songs, an attentive listener can pick up the basic structure almost immediately. Consciously or not, he or she anticipates the rhymes, the call and response of the phrases. Björk’s songs keep even the most exacting listeners a little off balance. There are no rhymes to guess at, no way of predicting what will come next. They force you to listen intensely.

As a songwriter, Björk is less of a pop musician and more like an avant-gardist with enough personal charisma to have attracted a pop-scale audience. She’s the only contemporary songwriter I can think of who will set a whole tune in diminished scale, as in “An Echo, A Stain.” She uses melodic minor and lydian on “Possibly Maybe” and lydian dominant on “Pluto.” Even when she writes in plain-vanilla major scale, her angular phrasing can make it sound awkward and dissonant, as on “Anchor Song.”

Björk and jazz

The harmonic and rhythmic complexity of her music makes Björk irresistible to jazz musicians. What’s a jazz arrangement but an analog remix? Every jazz group I’ve ever been in has done her tunes. Travis Sullivan’s Björkestra is a seventeen-piece big band based in NYC that plays nothing but tunes by or associated with her. Their arrangements are a little too fuzak for me, but it’s such a cool idea. I think NYC could do with some more all-Björk jazz bands. This city at one point had two different rock bands who only played songs about hockey. Surely we can support more Björkestras. Björk herself did a jazz album called Gling-Glö with an Icelandic trio, which was a good idea but sadly is nothing too special in its execution. I’d like to hear her do more jazz, but maybe not with Icelandic musicians, who, and I say this with all due respect, play extremely white.

Björk’s sonic palette

Sonically, Björk’s palate is as diverse as anyone who’s ever recorded. She seems to be one of the only high-profile white musicians who understands that rock and roll is over. There’s almost no guitar in any of her work. There’s a sample of distorted electric guitar on “Human Behavior,” nylon-string guitar on “So Broken,” pedal steel on live versions of “Possibly Maybe” — I think that’s about it. Her stringed instrument accompaniment of choice is the harp.

Like the hip-hop artists she admires, Björk contrasts her vocal asymmetry with the posthuman perfection of electronic beats. Most of her tunes rest on four-four grids, using drum loops and MIDI patterns in groups of two and four and eight and sixteen. Björk brings out the best in her tech-savvy collaborators. Nellee Hooper’s work with Massive Attack can sound too much like the lobby of a high-end hotel, but behind Post he’s brilliant. Matmos albums are so experimental as to be unlistenable, but on Vespertine, they’re heartbreaking. More from Thomas Bartlett:

Her wholehearted embrace of electronics, combined with her unquestioned dominance of them, makes her our most optimistic musician, blasting the matrix apart.

It’s ironic that this guy should describe Björk as such an optimist, because from what I can tell, she’s also a high-functioning clinical depressive with social phobia.

Björk and depression

I’ve noticed that Björk’s lyrics make several references to suicidal ideation and self-harm. From “Hyperballad:”

Every morning I walk towards the edge
and throw little things off
like car parts, bottles and cutlery
I imagine what my body would sound like
slamming against those rocks
and when I land, will my eyes be closed or open?

From “All Neon Like:”

Don’t get angry with yourself
I’ll heal you
with a razor blade
I’ll cut a slit open

The video for “Pagan Poetry” includes graphic closeups of Björk’s flesh being pierced with large needles. Some of my friends think she might be kidding. She isn’t. Her body language in interviews and onstage indicates to me that she’s as serious as a heart attack.

This is music’s greatest optimist? In a way, yes. Björk’s affect may be bleak at times, but it doesn’t keep her from being a fearless sonic adventurer. The coolest and weirdest track on Telegram is “My Spine,” a duet between Björk and the deaf Scottish classical percussion sensation Evelyn Glennie playing a set of tuned exhaust pipes. You have to be confident to be a deaf drummer. You have to be confident to be an Icelandic person singing in English. You have to be confident to play very far outside the standard western tuning system on a weird instrument. And you have to be confident to stick this song in the middle of a bunch of remixes of your previous album.

Live electronica

All electronic musicians face a challenge when it comes time to play live. Standing onstage and pressing “play” on your DAT machine or laptop is pretty lame. Björk’s solution is an ingenious one. She has a DAT of the basic tracks, the drums and crucial synths. Then she can layer whatever live sounds on top that she wants. So, like, she can tour with a tabla player, harpist and pedal steel, or a symphonic string section, a choir and two laptop guys, or ten horn players, a drummer and a reactive touch surface controller. Because the beats are sequenced, her onstage drummers are free to play outside of grid mode. Hear Björk and Konono No 1 live in concert, courtesy of NPR.

Björk did MTV Unplugged early in her solo career and took the opportunity to do analog remixes of her first album right down to the foundations. “Human Behavior” is just voice and harpsichord, and then “One Day” has like thirty-five percussionists. Happening!

Here are a couple of my Björk remixes. As she says in “Enjoy:” enjoy.

Human Nature And Behaviour by ethanhein

Follows a blog post about the MJ song.

Lil Wayne Is Oh So Quiet

See blog posts about Lil Wayne and Björk.

Me vs Alex Torovic vs VOCE vs the Wu-Tang Clan vs Aphex Twin vs Björk

mp3 download, ipod format download

India

Me vs John Coltrane ft Eric Dolphy vs Aphex Twin vs Beyoncé vs Björk

mp3 download, ipod format download

Here’s a screenshot of the program that the game controller is connected to.

The outer space background is my desktop image and isn’t part of the program itself. But maybe it should be.

Hear the game controller in action on the synth in this track:

Take The 2-3 Train by ethanhein

The software maps the buttons and knobs on the controller to different MIDI values. I can play one octave of each of a few different scales (blues, major, harmonic and melodic minor, diminished) in all twelve keys. I can scroll through the circle of fifths with the controller’s D-pad. It’s set so that my left index and middle fingers control the root and third of the scale, my right index and middle control the fourth and fifth, and my right thumb reaches the rest of the scale tones. With the thumb sticks I can control pitch bend, modulation and other parameters, depending on which software instrument is dialed up.

The controller plays anything that any other MIDI instrument can play, not just synthesizers. I can map any batch of recorded sounds to the buttons. It’s fun loading bells or speech samples or bird calls onto it and playing them through heavy delay over a beat.

The controller interface software was written by Ben Lacker in Max/MSP. It works with any USB video game controller, but it was specifically designed for the one in the screenshot, a Logitech Dual Action Gamepad.

I mostly played guitar in my bands through my twenties, using lots of digital delay and other high-tech effects. As my sound got more electronic I started using a keyboard hooked up to my laptop. For a while I was carrying around a Korg 49, which has a bunch of cool drum pads and control knobs in addition to a half-piano’s worth of keybs. It was way more controller than I needed. I felt kind of like a chump carrying such a big instrument around just to play one note while twiddling a knob for the entire song. Part of the motivation to set up the game controller was to be able to have the same control scheme on a device I could more easily carry around on the subway.

The Korg 49′s keys and drum pads are pressure-sensitive. The game controller isn’t. Its buttons have only has two settings, on and off. It offers no control of dynamics at all. This limitation has turned out to be mostly a good thing for live situations, and even for home sequencing. For samples especially, it sounds better to mix everything to a nice balance and then be forced to keep it that way. It moves my complete focus to rhythm. I can pitch bend or filter with the thumbsticks for expressiveness when I need it.

I’ve tried a few other game controllers with the MIDI interface program. Some of them show potential. The most intriguing one is the Dance Dance Revolution pad. It would be perfect if it didn’t map itself to strange MIDI parameters by default. Out of the box, half the buttons don’t do anything useful, and I don’t have the programming mojo to fix it. Maybe in the future I’ll get it ironed out. It could be like a customizable, more ergonomic version of the giant ground piano in Big, as seen in this extremely bootleg Youtube video.

The Guitar Hero and Rock Band controllers have potential too, but they don’t have as many buttons or parameters as the Logitech pad. Same with the Taiko Drum Master controller. This is nothing against any of these controllers in their original contexts, where they work great. I haven’t gotten to try DJ Hero but I expect it’ll be a similar deal. The Nintendo Wii controller is becoming the game controller of choice for futuristic computer musicians. I haven’t used one for anything except games yet, but there are some cool-looking things on my list. Specifically, I’m looking forward to experimenting with Wii Loop Machine and Wii Drum High. There are also some groovy-looking things for the Game Boy DS, like Korg DS-10 and Nitrotracker. For all of the above plus iPhone there’s a thing called Osculator that looks fun.

There was no caption or any other context. So I posted it on my Flickr with a note asking if anyone could identify the computer Herbie is sitting in front of. A couple of days later my friend Mike responded with this video of Herbie and Quincy Jones demonstrating Herbie’s Fairlight CMI in 1983.

There’s so much to love about this clip, from the light pen interface onwards. Youtube doesn’t provide much context, so I don’t know who was shooting this or why. But I’m glad they did. Quincy poetically describes playing a synthesizer as “sculpting a pure electronic waveform.” The interviewer observes that the African blood is streaming through the electronics. Quincy laughs and says: “The funk will prevail.” Herbie laughs too, and then says probably the wisest thing I’ve heard anyone say about technology in music:

It’s interesting, cause you know, these instruments were designed for people to use, for people to use. It’s just a tool, another tool, the way an axe is a tool, an axe can be a tool to cut wood to build a house, or can be a tool to slaughter your neighbor… A synthesizer can be a tool to really hurt people’s ears or interfere with their lives, or can be a tool to make a really nice-sounding instrument that can affect people in a positive way. It all depends on the person who’s using it… The machine doesn’t do anything but sit there until we plug it in… It doesn’t program itself. Yet.

Herbie was acknowledging the angst that a lot of his fellow jazz musicians were feeling about synthesizers and other electronic music gadgetry (angst that hasn’t diminished in the years since.) Herbie titled his album of that year Future Shock for good reason. But ultimately, he’s right, the tools aren’t as important as the people behind them. You couldn’t ask for a better electronic music manifesto than that.

Mike also posted this video of Herbie on Sesame Street demonstrating the Fairlight for a group of kids that included Mohammed Ali’s daughter Tatiana.

Since these videos were made, the price of digital synths and sequencers has undergone the same extraordinarily rapid plunge as all other computer equipment. The first Fairlight model cost £20,000 in 1979. I have no idea what that is in dollars adjusted for inflation, but it’s definitely not cheap. You can have an identical setup on any laptop computer for a few hundred dollars today. What was the cutting edge of futuristic exotica in the early eighties has become ordinary.

The history of technology has this way of making the strange familiar. The tools advance much faster than our understanding of them, or our ability to make the best use of them. Will the funk prevail? It’s up to the musicians.

]]> http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2009/synth-and-axe/feed/ 0 http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2009/jimi-hendrix-electronic-musician/ http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2009/jimi-hendrix-electronic-musician/#comments Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:52:22 +0000 Ethan http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/?p=1061 People had been playing electric guitar for decades before Jimi Hendrix. Mostly they used it as a louder, less effortful version of the acoustic guitar. Jimi was one of the first musicians to think of the guitar amp as a musical instrument unto itself, an early analog synth, with the guitar as a very sophisticated control surface.

The electric and acoustic guitar are superficially similar, but they produce sound in totally different ways. Acoustic guitars make sound from vibrations of the body, driven by the vibrating bridge, which is in turn driven by the vibrating strings. The player controls the body’s vibrations by plucking and strumming the strings. All the power of the vibrations has to come from the player’s hands.

Electric guitars generate a little sound from their bodies directly, but it’s almost inaudible. The sound you’re hearing mostly comes from the speaker cone in the amplifier, driven by current from the wall. This current is controlled by a much weaker current originating in the guitar’s magnetic pickups. As the metal strings vibrate, they agitate the pickups’ electromagnetic field, sending a fluctuating current down the cable and into the amp circuitry. Good amps respond dramatically to very subtle touches on the electric guitar’s strings that would be inaudible on an acoustic instrument.

Jimi Hendrix was one of the first guitarists to think of his instrument as a way to modulate an electrical signal first and foremost. He didn’t just pluck and strum the strings; he scraped them and swatted them and played with their tension. And he produced his most distinctive sounds by letting the amp itself vibrate his guitar’s pickups. All of these techniques are at work in his iconic performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at Woodstock:

Jimi’s guitar is feeding back and heavily distorted. He also throws in a little wah-wah pedal. The time is free, or as the classical musicians say, rubato – drums don’t always need to keep a steady beat. Jimi interlaces the melody notes with inharmonic screams and yowls, produced by scraping the pick against the string’s winding. He throws in a few unresolved tritones at 1:35 and some terrifying divebombing sounds at 2:00. At around 2:30 he quotes part of “Taps.” This performance has been criticized as anti-American, but Jimi said in interviews that he considered himself to be patriotic.

The first generations of electric guitarists considered feedback to be bad, a technical mishap to be avoided. Jimi discovered ways to use it as a musical expression in its own right. If the amp is loud enough, its sound can physically shake a guitar’s pickups enough to produce a current. That current gets sent to the amp, which then vibrates the pickups harder, which sends even more current to the amp, which produces even more sound. This feedback loop builds rapidly, getting louder and louder. Every beginner electric guitarist discovers feedback accidentally by leaning their guitar against their amp without turning the volume down. Feedback can also be seeded spontaneously by the slight hum produced by any electrical system that uses alternating current, or by radio waves. Cheap, poorly shielded pickups and cables make great radio antennas. I used to live on Roosevelt Island, right across the East River from a Con Ed power plant with a whole bunch of big transformers. If I didn’t face due north while playing electric guitar, I picked up all kinds of radio signals and other electromagnetic noise. It was nice for experimental music, but not so great for producing a clean sound.

Feedback is more likely, and a lot louder, when the guitar is overdriven, its signal boosted and compressed to bring out and sustain overtones that are normally inaudible. Feedback has a mystical quality, an evolving life of its own. It’s unpredictable and hard to control exactly. It would be pointless to try to score a feedback composition because there are too many variables at work; it’s an intrinsically improvisational medium. The results can be annoying or boring, or they can be transcendant. You can experience the visual equivalent by pointing a video camera at the monitor showing its own output.

Jimi was also a pioneer in his exploration of the electric guitar’s microtonal possibilities. The conventional way to control a guitar string’s pitch is to press it against the frets, changing its length. You can also bend the strings, changing both their length and tension, for more nuanced pitch intervals. Jimi’s guitars have an additional pitch control, the whammy bar, which lifts the bridge, allowing very precise control of all six strings’ tension simultaneously. The whammy bar lets you play arresting microtonal chords effortlessly. It also quickly pulls the strings out of tune, which is why in the video Jimi is continually adjusting the tuning pegs whenever his left hand is free.

The video cuts out before this point, but at Woodstock Jimi segued from “The Star Spangled Banner” into “Purple Haze.” The song is based around a distinctive chord that has come to be nicknamed the Hendrix chord.

This chord is easy to play – any beginner could learn it – but intellectually it’s extremely intense. It contains every possible interval in the western tuning system (or implies them, I count the inversions too.)

Jimi didn’t invent the Hendrix chord. It had been a distinctive device in blues and jazz since before he was born. But where Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk used the Hendrix chord for accents and embellishments, Hendrix pushed it front and center, using it as a cornerstone for songs like Purple Haze and Foxy Lady (in different keys than the one written here.)

The electric guitar doesn’t just offer a lot of the tonal and harmonic freedom. It also leaves the player’s mouth and feet free for more expression. You can use your feet to dance, or to control stomp boxes and expression pedals. Your voice is free for singing and talking. The electric guitar is some seriously advanced interface design.

Here’s a remix/cover of “Purple Haze” by my band Revival Revival, combining Jimi with Missy Elliot, M.I.A. and Miles Davis. Enjoy:

mp3 download, ipod format download

]]> http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2009/jimi-hendrix-electronic-musician/feed/ 5 http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2009/the-desktop-metaphor-is-like-so-five-minutes-ago/ http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2009/the-desktop-metaphor-is-like-so-five-minutes-ago/#comments Sat, 23 May 2009 21:00:49 +0000 Ethan http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/?p=643 Update: this was written before I ever touched an iPhone or iPad. These devices are major improvements over the desktop metaphor GUIs I complain about below.

When you grow up playing video games, like I did, the primitiveness of office software user interface design comes as a shock. The desktop metaphor was a brilliant stroke back in 1970 when they thought it up at Xerox PARC, but I feel like it has outlived its usefulness.

User interfaces are the first and most immediate form of computer instruction, and for many people the only instruction they ever receive. Not every interface designer teaches their own products equally well. The problems mostly emerge from designers’ presuming implicit knowledge from the user that might not really be there. There are plenty of computer science concepts that are common knowledge to programmers and engineers, but that are esoteric or totally opaque to the population at large. For example, the general public uses the terms memory and storage interchangeably, even though they refer to different computer components that function in very different ways. Most normal people don’t have mental models of a computer program’s inner workings, and rely entirely on the interface to provide the model.

The desktop metaphor treats the screen of a computer as if it’s the top of your desk. Great, except that it’s vertical instead of horizontal, and the laws of physics mostly don’t apply. A window in an operating system isn’t very much like a window in a wall and is even less like a sheet of paper. Typing some text on the screen only very superficially resembles typing it on paper. Unsaved text is in volatile memory that needs to be continuously powered to work. If you turn off the computer, intentionally or not, memory gets instantly blanked, and your text is gone forever. The only way to prevent this tragedy is to make sure to explicitly tell the computer to copy the text from memory onto a storage device like the hard disk.

Computer experts sneer at people who don’t understand the concept of saving, but it’s wrong to sneer, because there’s no reason for someone to intuit the difference between volatile memory and non-volatile storage unless they’ve had it carefully explained to them. We’re used to making marks on a surface and having them persist unless we take steps to erase them. There is a trend towards auto-saving in software, but it’s been absurdly slow in coming.

The filing cabinet analogy for hard drives made more sense back in the eighties, when disks were expensive and limited in their storage capacity. The first computer I was in charge of was the one I took to college in 1993. I knew intimately which programs I had installed on it at all times, because if I wanted to install a new one, I had to erase something first. Now the hard disk’s filing system has to contend with billions of bytes of data. In this era, a big searchable database is a better model than a filing cabinet. Instead of putting a file in a single, unambiguous location, you’re better off tagging it with descriptive metadata so you’ll be able to find it in a search later. The filing cabinet analogy has the virtue of accurately representing the file system’s actual organization, but it’s not very human-friendly. Our own minds are organized into associative networks, not hierarchical directories.

The most annoying aspect of the conventional desktop metaphor is its Escher-like recursiveness. Within the screen representing part of the computer is an icon representing the entire computer. The desktop folder appears to be inside itself. The recursion is interesting from a metaphysical perspective, but deeply confusing if you’re just trying to understand your file system.

Much as I love the Mac OS, its recursiveness can be even more confusing than Windows. The Mac has two sets of folders called Applications, Documents, Library, and so on. Even though their names are identical, their identities and functions are totally separate.

For non-expert users, probably the most difficult aspect of the graphical user interface is keeping track of the keyboard focus. Even the Mac OS doesn’t always do a wonderful job of making it obvious which text field in which window has the keyboard focus. In the screenshot below, the text cursor could be subtly blinking in any of at least three different places.

As a teacher of novice users, the phrase you hear a lot is: “I don’t know where I am, I want to go here.” This is an interesting phrase to me. No one says, “I don’t know which task or process is set to receive text input.” People intuitively conceptualize computer interfaces as places inhabited by their own bodies. This intuition is misguided – even when you “surf” the web, you’re not going anywhere, bits are being transmitted to and fro from one computer disk to another. But there’s no talking people out of their intuition. Computer programs are easier and more fun to use when they present a user illusion that accommodates our instincts.

Windows represents your onscreen avatar as a little arrow, a little cartoon glove or a little hourglass. Macs represent you as an arrow or a psychedelic rotating rainbow ball. Efforts to make the computer into a “person” you’re talking to always fail. Everyone hates Microsoft’s anthropomorphic paper clip and dog, and people would rather interact with impersonal Google than to ask Jeeves. It would be better to represent the operating system as a place, with the user “embodied” by an avatar. It doesn’t have to be a person, or even humanoid. It can be a bird or a robot or whatever. But you do have to be able to easily control and manipulate it, and it needs to unambiguously represent the keyboard focus.

I think the future of interface design is to be found not in Apple’s products, but in video games, especially eighties video games, most especially the ones by Nintendo. The user interface of every Nintendo product has to be intelligible by semi-literate young children in every world culture. For the most part, they succeed heroically. Long before video games had any of their present lavish production values, they conveyed a strong sense of first-person experience that could be instantly grasped by preschool-aged children. This metaphor is as old as human consciousness, and we’re vastly more adept with it than we are with the metaphors of desktops, file cabinets and disembodied cartoon fingers. If I controlled the universe, I’d want my computer’s file system to look like this:

The Mario games are models of clarity and graphic economy. One visual metaphor I’m particularly fond of is the level selection system in Super Mario 64 — I’d include a screenshot but I can’t find a good one. You start the game in Princess Peach’s castle. Each level is represented by a painting hanging on the wall. To visit that level, you jump into the painting. I’m imagining a nice system for pointers and aliases where you could take the paintings off the wall, carry them around with you as you see fit, rearrange them, etc.

Mario 64 is a 3D game, but I’m not advocating the use of 3D spaces as interfaces generally. I think eighties video games are a better model for interface designers exactly because they’re limited to 2D spaces with limited attempts at depth. Unless it’s handled very expertly, illusory projections of 3D spaces onto a 2D screen cause a lot of confusion. Playing a game like Halo or Quake is a poor approximation of our actual 3D experience, it’s like viewing the world through a cardboard box with a little rectangular hole cut through it, and with only one eye. I think it’s better to look for creatively optimized plane layouts than to burden the user with a lot of projective geometry.

Imagine us sitting on stage left at Galapagos Art Space. Behind us is a huge screen. On the screen is a steadily updating feed of tweets from all over the world. People are text messaging twitter with the word #shorty in their text and is getting posted to the screen. It’s almost the main attraction. Some of the comments are about the band, that is to say, comments about us. Some texts are quite favorable, some others not-so-much! Gradually a real-time debate develops on the screen behind us about the merits of what we were doing. It was totally surreal. The brainstorm hits to begin incorporating the text from the screen behind us into the lyrics. It has an immediate impact on the screen behind us. “Did he just sing that woman’s comment?” One woman said that she was so bored she was going to slit her wrists! Clifton tells the band that he wants the next break. We give it to him. He whispers into the mike, “Please don’t slit your wrists.” In seconds, she posts again: “Sorry.” This happened over and over again creating a very different form of dialogue. There was a flurry of comments about us behind us that I would read back and put some spin on.

When I wasn’t singing or playing trumpet, I was encouraged to tweet from my iPhone from the stage! I posted things like, “The band needs beer” and “Clifton is going to start preaching. Listen now.” It appeared on the stage behind us. The world was watching and responding.

When I saw the first negative comment I had the obvious sinking emotional reaction. This was a pretty basic comment that was really the first piece of harsh criticism we had received — and in writing — and in front of an audience of the three hundred people — and in front of all the tens of thousands of people watching on line. Oh yeah, receiving written criticism about your performance while in the middle of that very same performance is a first and weird too. So, when I saw the line “This band Sux!” it kind of took the wind out of my sails a bit.

About thirty seconds later though I was excited and amused when I had a flash of insight. We had suddenly been thrust to the level where people with no personal connection to us were moved to appreciate, judge, talk about, defend, protect, haze, fall in love with, and diss . . . It felt suddenly like an enormous step in the right direction. I started to beam. And people were rallying to say great things about us too. No matter what it just started to make me happy. For the record: the positive responses to the band far far outweighed the disses. The negative stuff was good feedback too and often very funny. The positive stuff was very encouraging and we have many many more fans than we did before the event.

I’m finding myself totally intrigued by this experience. I’m especially intrigued by the idea of working people’s comments into the lyrics improvisationally. I’m sensing some big possibilities here in bringing audience participation back into music.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of music, what its evolutionary purpose is, and the awkward fit it sometimes makes with our present social circumstances. The most useful thing I’ve read on the subject is a book by Stephen Mithen called The Singing Neanderthals. This guy is a paleontologist, not a musician, but I think he hits the nail squarely on the head. He thinks, and I agree, that music predates language in humans, that it’s the bridge between the calls and body language of monkeys and modern human speech.

Monkeys communicate basic emotional states: contentment, fear, aggression. Music communicates those states in a more nuanced way — simple pitch ratios and repetitive rhythms convey pleasurable feelings, while irrational ratios and jagged rhythms convey anxiety and aggression. Language came about when the sounds and gestures of music detached themselves from specific and immediate feeling states and took on an abstract symbolic life of their own.

I devote a lot of my downtime trying to imagine what social life was like in the stone age. I learned in school like everyone else about the time scale of human evolution, but it didn’t sink in for me until recently just how brief and unusual modern civilization is in the broader context of our history. Let’s say that anatomically modern humans emerged a million years ago — that number is arbitrary, but it’s conveniently round. Agriculture and town life is ten thousand years old. That means that 99% of our history has been spent living as foragers in essentially chimpanzee-like conditions, and that our present circumstances are a bizarre little eyeblink.

Our bodies evolve a lot slower than our culture, and our emotional systems are still mostly equipped for stone age conditions. That means we expect to spend our entire lives with the small, closely-knit band of mostly blood relatives, very rarely encountering strangers. My guess is that music-making in this context mostly took place around the campfire at night, and was a group activity involving the entire tribe’s participation. I’m also guessing that it was mostly improvised. This idea of specialist musicians performing preset works for a passive audience seems to me to be a peculiar and unnatural aberration, a quirk of our present circumstances very much at odds with our emotional needs.

I care about jazz way more than I care about European classical, and I lately care more about hip-hop than jazz. For me, it’s a simple matter of audience participation. In classical music, the audience doesn’t even get to applaud at the end of a movement. In jazz, there’s more interaction, but the audience is still mostly a passive recipient of information from the band. Hip-hop is all about group participation. I’m not talking about big stadium shows or TV here; I mean hip-hop as practiced on street corners and in clubs, where the mic gets passed around the circle and anyone who has the nerve takes a turn rhyming. I think the hip-hop cypher is as close as Americans get to the group improvisation of the stone age campfire.

So when I read about Tin Pan responding in real time to messages from the audience, I get excited. For all the high-tech trappings, the Shorty Awards show feels to me like moving closer to the natural state of music-making. The big difference from the stone age is that the Shorty’s audience was mostly comprised of strangers. There’s a big yawning emotional distance there, it’s what presumably emboldened that woman to post that the band made her “want to slit her wrists.” Not the kind of thing she’d probably say to the face of her relatives, although who knows, maybe her family is that messed up. But so in the present world we’re doomed to mostly interact with strangers, or shallow acquaintances at best. At least Twitter is moving us in the direction of greater intimacy and emotional connection. That, to me, can only be a good thing.

Turning the concert experience into a literal dialog between the band and the audience feels like a big step forwards. I’m imagining a near future where concerts, karaoke, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revoution and hip-hop cyphers converge back to the group interaction that music should fundamentally be all about.

Flickr in particular breaks your data down with exceptional granularity, making it easy to assemble the images of mine that the internet cares most about. Apparently, the internet cares very much about:

• The Matrix.
• Animals doing funny humanoid things.
• Visualizations of the human genome.
• Dust mites, ants, bees and other domestic arthropods.
• Human blood.
• SpongeBob.
• Barack Obama on an airplane.
• Sarah Palin’s office.
• Modern art that looks like Katamari Damachy.
• Helicopters.
• The mathematical symmetry group E8. Across the board, more math than you would think.
  
• The Mandelbrot set and fractals generally.
• Popular culture of Japan.
• Molecules.
• Mixtapes by M.I.A. and Diplo.
• Visualizations of the internet and other complex emergent networks.
• Star Wars.
• My book, for which I’m flattered.
• Creative music notation.
• White people awkwardly embracing hip-hop.
• Cassettes and outdated technology generally.
  
• Desktop Tower Defense.
• Evolution.

What does it all mean? Your guess is as good as mine.