An ICMC paper was presented this morning at the ICMC in Belfast, Ireland. Although I was one of the authors on the paper I could not make it, but the other 3 authors could—and so they presented it. I just made the paper available on the http://jamoma.org website, or for a direct link you can get it here: http://www.jamoma.org/papers/jamoma-icmc2008.pdf

This paper was written at roughly the same time as our NIME paper, and the two are best understood in tandem. They each reflect different facets of how we are trying to work with multidimensional aspects of musical control as we further develop Jamoma as a platform for art-based research and performance.

Last night I went down to the Nelson-Atkins to see the a performance of Paul Rudy’s Verdun. The Kansas City Star did a nice write-up of the work.

Embarrassingly, this was my first time to the new Bloch building at the Nelson-Atkins, even though the new building opened a little over a year ago. It’s impressive. The Washington Post’s This Bright Idea Is a Glowing Achievement has a few pictures and a good description of the architecture.

The acoustics are still “gallery acoustics” at a superficial level, which means quite reverberant with a really long decay. So I didn’t have high hopes, and expected to have to ‘listen through’ the performance in order to hear the piece. However, the acoustics were much clearer and cleaner than typical. I suspect this is because of the lack of parallel planes in the surfaces making up the space. And the result was phenomenal.

The photography of the Human Nature exhibit was often subdued in fog or exposure (or both). And the result of the acoustics on the sound perfectly matched when performed in the space. The performers (flute and bass clarinet) also navigated through the space as they performed, and the fixed media was project via a multichannel speaker configuration. Audience was free to experience the performance from a fixed position or to navigate the space themselves.

The music was beautifully fluid. On further reflection, I also find this venue for the performance of a contemporary work to be much more relevant and natural than the rigid and natural confines of a concert hall. I’m not certain I would have enjoyed the piece or taken anything from it had I experienced it in such a setting.

The Nelson-Atkins is going to be doing more in collaboration with the UMKC Conservatory over the coming year, I believe on a monthly basis beginning in October. I look forward to seeing what else will spawn from this collaboration!

A new beta of Tap.Tools is available on the registered users pages for Tap.Tools. It is mostly a minor update for the majority of users, but for some users on older machines/operating systems, or those using the bleeding edge version of Jamoma, it is essential.

Hopefully we’ll be able to wrap up the final Tap.Tools 3.0 release by the end of the month.

#include "TTClassWrapperMax.h" 

int main(void)
{
    return wrapTTClassAsMaxClass(TT("degrade"), "tt.degrade~", NULL);
}

The above is the entire source code for the tt.degrade~ MSP external. This is achieved using a new class wrapper that has just been added to TTBlue, which allows for any TTBlue class to be wrapped as a Max class using essentially 1 line of code.

The class wrapper still makes a lot of assumptions and needs to be made more flexible, but it works for most cases already. Also, this means we now have a model in the TTBlue project for creating similar class wrappers for other plug-in based environments.

As a very audio-oriented person, there have been a couple of interesting threads on the Max list in the last few weeks.

First, there is a new commercially-available Max external called elastic. It looks and sounds really superb! It is based on the élastique time stretching algorithm published by Zplane.

A second thread of particular interest has been regarding spectral processing in MSP. Here are a set of links I’ve extracted from the thread:

• SoundMagic Spectral—this is a set of AudioUnit plug-ins, for which an au host external is also provided.
• The standard-bearer for spectral processing in MSP, which probably doesn’t need mentioning (but I include for completeness) are the FFTease objects from Eric Lyon.
• Some newer spectral objects are the VB-Objects which use Apple’s FFT implementation in order to do things that are otherwise cumbersome in Max.
• Finally, the thread actually started with some new work done on a staticresynth object which takes a buffer of audio and performs a huge FFT on it to process the entire buffer (in non-real-time). The source code for this object is here. It is using the FFTW library to perform the FFT. It is also using some random number generators from this page.

The third thread of interest has been running much longer. Mattijs Kneppers has produced a nice sounding granular-based pitch-shifter and time-stretcher.

Tap.Tools 3 is continuing it’s move forward. Beta 7 is now downloadable for registered users. Here are the highlights:

• Various audio fixes, including the multichannel operation of tap.limi~
• Compatible with the Jamoma 0.5 beta
• Standalone application building (for registered users of Tap.Tools Pro) is now working properly on both platforms.

Enjoy!

TTBlue 0.5.2 has been released over @ http://code.google.com/p/ttblue and the list of changes are at http://code.google.com/p/ttblue/wiki/ChangeLog .

Andrew Means (impetus for the band Velella Velella and coincidentally my brother-in-law) is looking into a new venture of creating an amazing portable rotating speaker.

He’s going about things with analog purity: tube amp, a DC motor with complete sweep of rotation speed, and a wooden chassis that is a beautiful thing.

Right now he’s set up a web site to get feedback on his prototype while working out details of the project. If there’s something you’ve always wanted in a speaker, now’s your chance to ask.

Check it out at: http://embassyspeakers.com/

TTBlue now has it’s own home on the web: http://ttblue.org/

The site is sparse, but the existing API documentation is up there. Many thanks to BEK for hosting the site!

I’m back from a 3 week visit to Europe. The time was spent in Genoa (Italy) for NIME and Albi (France) for a Jamoma development workshop, with some sightseeing in between.

Alexander has posted some photos and other info from the NIME conference here:

• http://www.arj.no/2008/06/08/nime-jamoma-workshop/
• http://www.arj.no/2008/06/16/nime-paper/

Yannick has posted some really nice photos from Albi, where we worked for 2 weeks on moving Jamoma over to Max 5 and started to address future plans, usability, and other topics.

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/yhancik/sets/72157605754235826/

It’s taking a bit of time to get caught up with everything. It’s time for work to resume on finishing Tap.Tools 3.