I had quite a bit of fun with the vocoder too, it’s such an amusing toy.  A vocoder has two inputs.  Through modulation, one input adopts the tonal characteristics of the other. So if you feed in some distorted electric guitar, and modulate it with the sounds of your own voice, you get that classic robotic Cylon Raider sound from Night Flight To Venus.

I also was inspired to play some real instruments rather than just sequence MIDI on the synth.  I had the electric guitar out in three difference configurations.  And I played cello for a couple of tracks too.  (My cello skills are not improving…but that’s clearly because I don’t practise.)  I feel sloppy when I play the analog instruments by themselves, but all mixed together, many mistakes are much less obvious or hidden altogether.  But I was up for the challenge.  I found playing Rock Band for an hour or so beforehand got me warmed up to play but didn’t tire me out.

The video is just fluff - just something to watch while you’re listening on youtube.  I had grand visions for a music video, but it’s just too much work and I only wanted to invest a couple of hours in it.  Nevertheless, the video is kind of trippy and it conjures up images of some kind of laser light show at a rave.

I kept saying that I wasn’t going to be finished with this track until I incorporated a didgeridoo track into it somehow, but alas…it never happened.  Next time!

Watch this video on YouTube:

Roadbird 109 (3 min 38 sec)

Special thanks to Muffy St. Bernard!

The task was to see what I could do with it. I liked the portability of it. I plugged my headphones into it and sat on the couch, in bed, on the porch, basically anywhere I could zone out and get swept away by the odd acid arpegiators, techno choruses, vox, and drum’n'bass perc kits. It quickly became evident that 8 beats of loop wasn’t going to be enough to produce something with any structure. So I took the thing downstairs to get it plugged in to the music studio.

I worked out a basic style and structure and recorded several tracks, some safe, some really experimental. Then I did the very bold thing of returning the instrument back to its owner! With no opportunity to re-record, I was left with the big task of mixing, augmenting and otherwise massaging what I had into something worthy of signing my name to.

I found it particularly challenging to avoid really thick mixes with too many sounds. After all, the idea was to show off the Kaossilator, so it was tempting to use every sound regardless of how crazy it was. I used minimal song structure to allow me to focus on the character of the sounds, using just enough to call it a song.

I padded it out with just a couple of sounds from the Roland XP-80 to fill in the gaps and mask out some performance bloopers. The Kaossilator has no MIDI input, so everything was recorded live and unquantized. I imposed the same restrictions on the XP-80 to keep the same feel. It does have a slightly sloppy feel in places, but there were limited options. The most positive thing I can say about the experience is that I really like the easy access to the expression axis, it makes me think I should make more use of it in my future recordings. …that and I enjoy hearing new synth sounds!

It took a couple of weeks to get enough spare time to chip away at the sounds, and mix it all together into something I was happy with. But I have finally come up with a demo track. So here’s what I came up with.

This file is available for download:

Kaos.mp3 (4 MB, 2 min 7 sec)

Special thanks to Chris Mennie for the loan of the gear.

I’ve been doing this with the radio station for years. There’s always a late night DJ you can call who will happily tell you the name of a song just hearing you hum a few notes over the phone. This is a fantastic service and to computerize the whole process is definitely a step in the right direction.

I have no idea how Google works, but in my opinion it’s the most useful search engine. It doesn’t allow me to search by sound. This would be a useful addition to their search capabilities. It got me thinking about a few things.

Lately I’ve been using the Lua scripting language. Lua features a data structure called a table that is a dictionary of keys and their associated values. You associate a key with a value. When you provide the key, you can easily retrieve the associated value. The interesting thing in Lua is that keys can be any data type. When keys are strings it’s like a dictionary mapping. When keys are integers it’s like an array. But keys can be other things like functions, userdata, or even other tables. I have the x and you have the associated y. Tables can do this for you because they are manually fed all the associations. I am the gatekeeper. Are you the keymaster?

Obviously the fuzzy searching is extremely useful. In Lua if you misspell a key name, you don’t get your value. But with Google, you can pretty much completely mangle your search text and still be directed to something associated with that text. But why is it limited to text?

The miracle of Google has to be in how it associates data and how it ranks those associations. So Google should really start associating other kinds of data other than text. Now it’s true that you can search for images. But you can’t search by images. This reveals a weakness in their association of images. Images are found by the text that appears near them. The association is done by analyzing text annotations, and by virtue of the images proximity to other text. No processing is done on the actual image other than its size. You can search for small, medium, or large images. But wouldn’t it be cool if it actually looked at the image and tried to make sense of it? Obviously this is hard. But Google taps into the fact that people do it for them. People caption photos, and stick pictures on web pages where the photos supplement the information on the page.

Let’s go back a step and consider audio again. In the case of midomi.com, it actually does analyze the sound. I’m pretty sure it processes the raw audio and produces some magic numbers. It does the same processing on the audio that you sing into your microphone and when the magic numbers from the song more-or-less match the magic numbers from your singing, you get a match.

So the genius of making such a system work lies in the choice of how to analyze the audio to produce the magic numbers. There is lots of information in an audio waveform but not all of it is discerning information. And it doesn’t make sense to just remove the inaudible stuff. Obviously the mp3 encoding of the original song and the mp3 encoding of my singing are going to be different. You have to throw away even more information until you are left with only what restricts your classification of what it is that you are hearing. And you may wish to do this in several domains. Search by melody is probably what you want though. It’s unlikely that you will want to search by loudness or tempo. But if you’re a marching band and you want recordings of music at exactly 90 bpm then go for it.

The thing is that it takes effort to analyze, process, classify and associate information. This process is called indexing, and it takes time. But Google doesn’t seem to mind classifying all the text on the internet. We just need to expand that a bit into more types of information.

I would like to be able to search by sound, image, text, or even any binary file. Virus scanners already scan files looking for virus signatures. You could imagine searching by virus.

Google largely makes use of contextual information. If it sees a picture on a page about Abraham Lincoln, then there’s a decent chance the picture is relevant to Abe. It might even be a picture of the guy; chances are, anyway. It just needs to do more analysis and more indexing.

Ceilidh was nice enough to help me out by being my little Kylie stand-in. I had Ceilidh walk around the circle a couple of times, and then through a series of transformations, composites, masks, and time adjustments, was able to make two copies of her walking around together. The idea here was just to see how much work it was to do manually and what the challenges were.

The most uncooperative thing about the production technique was that the trees actually move around in the wind. In Kylie’s video, the set was stationary, and all the moving elements were repeated. In my effect, the largest moving element (the foliage) in the scene was not to be repeated, instead it was supposed to match. This was nearly impossible, and if I had to do it again, I would choose a less breezy day.

Also, I’m learning about lens distortion for another project I’m cooking up, and I think I’ll have to pull out a geometry text book or something because it’s not obvious to me what transformation will make the two videos line up perfectly after they are offset. I’m sure I’ll figure it out, but this project showed that the lens adjustment definitely needs to be performed for a perfect match. I did make several mistakes (gasp!) during production that prevented me from cleaning it up perfectly, most of them timing-related, that could have been easily avoided with a motion-control setup. But considering this was done manually, I think it’s a success for the low-budget approach.

I actually wanted to get a tripod last year for my birthday, but decided at the last minute to get the hard-drive DV recorder (FireStore FS-4). And then again for Christmas, but opted for the gift certificate instead. Finally, after passing up several opportunities, I have a decent video tripod to call my own.

I tried it out today, and OMG, it’s so smooth. Clean starts and nice tension. It’s so easy to adjust and calibrate. Especially considering the odd weight distribution of the XL-2. Although having the FS-4 drive on the back of the XL-2 certainly helps.

So already I’m contemplating a LANC zoom/focus controller, as well as an on camera LCD like the ikan’s V8000W for sharp focusing.

It’s absolutely amazing, I love it! Thanks so much to everyone who pitched in!

Now that I have a real video camera, I feel less protective of my other one. So much, that I decided to duct tape it to my remote control hummer and drive it around the yard. I set up the XL2 as a stationary camera and shot some supporting video too so you can get an idea of what’s going on. It’s not a very fancy vehicle, but it’s electric with two gear settings (power or speed). So I tried drive around the grass and garden a bit in power mode, then hit the sidewalks for some speed.

This video also makes a case against shooting to tape. Every time the car hit bumps there were DV tape dropouts, so I actually had to make quite an effort to sync up the two videos in post. This was mostly accomplished by synchronizing the audio from both sources. I mixed the two audio sources together, and I kind of like the effect. You get to hear the audio from both the stationary mic, and the on-board mic. This means you get good presence, but you also get to hear the Doppler effect when the car buzzes the stationary camera. I also had a bear of a time getting the video converted, rendered and uploaded. I never recall having had so many difficulties with codecs and compression. Nothing seemed to want to work correctly. Alas, gone are the days where I was blissfully unaware of what all the settings should be. And after all that, the pixel aspect ratio got mucked up somehow. Anyway, it’s not too bad. But geez, I could really use a much better tripod.

I found this to be a pretty good way to attract the attention of neighbourhood kids and dogs. As with all my R/C experiences, this video ends in tragedy.

Next time: R/C helicopter!

Têtes à claques is an interesting website full of crazy shorts in Quebecois. You’ll see French-Canadian short animated clips with some humorous characters. The character style is that of video of real eyes and mouth superimposed over a claymation style doll-like figure. The humour is infectious, and, well, if you’ve never experienced the French-Canadian vernacular, you’ll probably just be lost.

My favourite is the LCD Shovel 2007. Merci, Uncle Tom…Merci!

Visit Têtes à claques on the internet, and watch the shorts.

Something I didn’t learn about until after trying this was not all sound pressures are equally loud. Humans are much more sensitive to frequencies in the 1 kHz to 4 kHz range than other frequencies. Some higher frequencies are perceived as louder than lower frequencies at the same amplitude. This gives way to a measurement of loudness called dBA rather than simply dB. The relationship of this measurement to loudness is, of course, dependent on your own ear! (Try measuring your own hearing response curve.) (This is very noticeable in the impromptu sample below.)

Something else I wasn’t expecting was that tempo can change in strange ways in MIDI files, and it’s not trivial to process all this data. I’m still not sure what exactly went wrong, but it has something to do with tempo tracks, which are not optional to process apparently.

So a few things I would like to add to this apart from dBA weighting and proper tempo processing are: different timbres, percussion, and effects like reverb and chorus, etc.

Anyway, check out my first attempt at pure music synthesis:

impromptu.mp3 (1 MB, 5 min)

wtc1021.mp3 (290 kB, 1 min 13 sec)

While I’m talking about it, I might as well give my two cents worth. This expansion pack is pretty cool, from what I’ve seen of it. The first thing you notice is that 10 minutes of questing in outland drops green items that are superior to blues that took a week of running dungeons for. It’s pretty nice to see that XP bar growing again. We’ll see how much time it steals. I have to get dad on VoIP, though, because he is as of yet typing un-tutored.

Then, for further distraction, I bought myself a pretty excellent flight controller for Microsoft Flight Simulator X. I picked up the Saitek X52, which I’ll go ahead and recommend to anyone looking for such a device. This thing is outstanding! More buttons than I need, and very precise. It’s absolutely essential to have something like this to have ultimate control of the aircraft. Trying to fly the helicopter with the keyboard feels much like the typing tutor my dad never installed. It’s great to be able to look out a window, engage airbrakes, control flaps, and use reverse thrusters and spoilers on landing without having to touch the keyboard, or even adjust my grip. It also adds a nifty blue glowing ambiance to the room.

Also in there was a trip to Ottawa for my cousin’s wedding, the other highlight of the trip being a family visit to tour the parliament buildings. The greatest spectacle on the journey was the newly refinished library, which is absolutely breathtaking. I recommend to every Canadian that you make a pilgrimage to the capitol at least once in your lifetime. It’s very powerful to stand in the house of commons, or the senate where our country is run. Or to see the brass bar–the history: after entering the house with 200 soldiers to arrest representatives who were not going to vote in accordance with his wishes, the king was usurped, and ultimately beheaded for the intrusion, and the brass bar erected as a symbol of the limit of monarchy’s power. The word awesome is overused, and people try to replace it with awe-inspiring to try to recapture the word’s eloquence–but being at Canada’s capitol was truly awesome.

So all in all, this sums up to a few consecutive weeks of worthy distractions from my creative hobbies. Now back to the studio!

Here are some teasers to prove that all is working well: