Audio App Programing For Fun And Freedom

Once upon a time Apple made great products, tools on the cutting edge of creativity. Not so much anymore.  Today's iPhones are similar to those of yesterday, just faster with better cameras. The laptops are dummying down and the iPad is slow to catch up.  Since the death of Steve Jobs, Tim Cook's direction Apple has begun to focus primarily on content and short term economic returns.  In my opinion Apple's Content branch bullying users into using their streaming services while suppressing user content teeters on violations of antitrust law.  I don't expect that this will change anytime soon, people will simply have to stop buying Apple products.  The strong arm is exaggerated by iTunes and iCloud being the only authorized way to access and move the files on your phone.  The Music app and iBooks on the basis of copyright protections have progressively limited access to files by trapping them in a closed "SandBox" system.  It has always been difficult to migrate music off the remote device starting with the old iPods. Once the data was on the device it could not be removed with out a hack.  Now Apple is making it impossible to get files onto the music player presumably to force users into using their streaming service.  I don't want access to Apple radio or genius playlists curated from their monolithic Record label buddies.  I don't want to listen to their prescribed commercial swill.  If I wanted streaming, I would be paying Spotify to steal from musicians for me.  Personally I record my own music.  I want to take that music and listen to it in a playlist while out and about test my files on different sound systems. Yes I want an aux output (headphone jack).  Quit fixing things that were not broken.  It's not a difficult concept to grasp.

With the introduction of Files, Apple opened a door to a possible improvement by using iCloud made useful by purchasing a subscription for more space.  The file management system should work through USB, its faster more secure... not going to happen.  Apple's walled garden is becoming an amusement park.  Multitracking music in GarageBand is primarily an invitation to purchase sample packages.  Pay for your ticket, ride an ever more uniform and homogenized ride.  The proffessional path is buy ProTools and a massive Waves library.  Pay your slowly increasing subscription fee to Adobe Creative Cloud and get on with making high end studio quality productions with the prescribed tools, buy your ad space on Facebook so that your creation can be visible in the algorithm.  Surely the only conflict arises from trying to beat the system.  Individual success has no standing in the profits of the machine. You paid for admission to be creative.  By using the machine, the machine uses you.  Downloading a bunch of stuff not only will clutter things up but it increases the risk of viruses and and what not.  All paths open doors for malicious code.  Piracy isn’t what it used to be. Cracked software is becoming harder to find and so many apps are "free", but is anything really free? Is anything risk free? Free steals your privacy sold to your ads.  Using someone else's software means they own you.  Big Companies prey on this.  Monoliths of software steal and replicate lines of once open source code, compiling giant collections of tools the basic user may never get around to using.  The giant economic model of printing money, selling digital copies at top dollar or worse: Subscriptions.  How many minds contributed to the development of that technology built upon the creativity of the many who have come before?   Ethically shouldn't the creator be rewarded for making something useful rather than the assimilation snowball of marketing and gate keeping.

For this and many other reasons, we wish to know the back doors.  We do not wish to be used by the tools. We seek the SDK.  -   and its all here:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation

Knowledge can convert a future of app consumerism and generic AI rearrangement of cookie cut samples into your own profit and freedom.  The new craft advancing technology will be interfacing multiple systems, utilizing strings of code like brushes in an illustration app.  Knowing is a matter of immersion, and of having some one walk you through the process.  The Open source programming multimedia and arts community is a small cult around the world.  Hackers, musicians, animators, gamers, they are those on the other side of the veil.

There is a world of Java shells for hacking the unfamiliar into open connection.  Converting the hard storage 8 bit programming of a NES cartridge and Atari game controllers on a 64bit iPhone,  MacOS, Windows, Android to GNU/Linux, UNIX, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Xbox,  IP addresses, SSL, New neural pathways for porting the information to and from different devices, comprehending components usage of libraries of code.  Single run functions, objects, arrays, storyboards, library locations, endless variations breaking all the way down to hexadecimal and binary machine code and eventually to electrons flowing through switches, potentiometers, microchips. The jargon itself is intimidating.  A quantum physicist might argue that technology eventually becomes spiritual...or not.   Soon we will need to interface with robots and automated cars. The future will become ever more modular for those in the know the rest will be consumers changing out devices every two years.  The only question is how deep do you want to go into what the foundation is built upon?

The open source environment can be daunting when considering what to download.  To click or not to click. Navigating GitHub, using Terminal, information overload. The Rabbit hole is endless.  countless programming languages, a million flavors of ice cream.  I don’t for see myself building PC chips,  but how deep into the controls do you want to go.  Is this a means or an end?  Time and daily effort is required, so much information to acquire, watching online tutorials, reading documents as the technology keeps moving knowledge from under your feet.  I started out wanting a simple looping delay on my phone and end up doing research on how to install a VirtualBox on my laptop to investigate Linux Kernel hacking...WTF.   Keep asking: "If only I had this thing I would be able to create properly" if someone makes a reliable instance of that specific tool.  What is it worth?  How do I acquire that one single simple tool. A string of code like a hammer. Besides getting around Apple's ridiculous controls,  I wanted to make programs from laptop portable through the phone.   I want to be able to build them for myself.

My initiation to multimedia programming was MAX/MSP/Jitter heavy.  Max allows a certain level of autonomy and a baseline for coding knowledge. It acts similar to Reactor or modular synths with a visual signal flow.  Seeking ways to port Max projects into IOS  I found the MobMuPlatform and PDParty which both run PD music files.  PD is by Miller Puckett’s simplified and free version of MaxMSP.  PD Vanilla is the most basic architecture. 
http://puredata.info/
http://www.pd-tutorial.com/english/

Pdparty vs mobmuplat

MobMu by Daniel Iglesia requires you to build your user GUI interface with in the MobMu Editor.
It also appears that MobMu will actually let you you access a folder "On My iPhone"
http://danieliglesia.com/mobmuplat/doc/index.htm

PDParty
http://danomatika.com/code/pdparty/guide
PDParty seems ports the user interface directly from your PD Project.

Both methods utilize Libpd  http://libpd.cc/ which allows porting of PD into mobile devices.  This is a library you would want to put into your own swift projects if you were to get serious about making your own app. Rather than running your PD projects though a 3rd party app.

https://github.com/libpd/libpd/wiki/Working-with-libpd-in-Xcode

I had some familiarity with Xcode,  but knew nothing of the Swift IOS programming language. I had minimally experimented with object oriented code with Supercolider, Javascript, C in Cocoa.  HTML and CSS gave some advantage but not much. So practically starting form scratch, I started going through tutorials like Coding with Chris and The Swift Guy.

TO BE CONTINUED...

in the meantime

https://thehelloworldprogram.com/

A Demonstration of Electro-Acoustic Digital Concréte

More Flashbacks to the Flora studio, this time for a demonstration and documentation of a recent change in the ImprovMachina version who knows what.  It is a view of part of my process,  program a little,  play a little,  the only thing missing is the edit a little. So here you get raw and untapped from The Flora Studio circa 2013.

Orion Variations on Circ5 Glitch

I have been on an all acoustic tangent for the last little while.  Partially due to Tears of the Moosechaser and partially due to a failing Macintosh Powerbook G4.  The G4 has been replaced by an all new Macbook monster which has meant all new software or at least all those updates I couldn't get because of antiquity of my tools.  I usually hold to the idea that tools are just a means to an end and it is the user that creates but I am not going to lie the toys really open up new doors.   

So here is a little experiment with Max6 which has completely swallowed MSP and Jitter into one behemoth which after using a while has become quite a delightful change from the old version.

The idea was to create a custom controller using the Circle of Fifths.  Of course it was inevitable to build an autopilot to play it with and the first and easiest was random chord and scale variations of the chord playing into perpetuity.  

 I used an object called urn to hold all the possible keys major and minor (24 total) and output them randomly with out repeating.  Using the same object I built a melody engine to play notes of the scale selected.  Some kind of autonomous 12 tone cycling music that is not 12 tone at all rather 24 tone.  I had to cut out 7th notes because they made the transitions from chord to cord funny about half the time.

Basically all the program outputs is midi information.  I connected it to a synth for a sound source like Bladerunner or some other Vangelis 1980s sci-fi movie so thus the name.  The bug in the code though is the really interesting part,  If Miles Davis says there are no mistakes in music just happy accidents this is definitely no exception.  I haven't yet figured out what causes the notes to stick but it is in the MIDI send out to the synthesizer somewhere. Irrelevant to the chord playing or how long the cycle goes on. 

Funny thing though was my computers almost aware willingness to play along I have the screen saver set to dictionary(considering myself the occasional wordsmith) and the computer went to sleep while I was filming the patch with my phone. Just after I got up to deal with the glitch.  The word it chose was:

INJUNCTION

Happy to have this captured pretty much makes an entire conceptual performance piece out of an experiment.

Bjork's new App/Album - Biophillia

It looks like Bjork has been busy, and just to show the world she hasn't lost her touch for pushing the industry forward,  she is releasing her newest musical work as a complete album/application for iPhone and iPad.  In addition to stop motion videos, 

Biophilia as a 3-D multimedia collaborative effort made possible through a large group of artists, scientists, designers and instrument building programmers.  Some notables are Scott Snibbe and Michael Gondry and M/M design in Paris who she has worked with many times before. Science Icon David Attenborough narrarates the opening introduction.

  

 The listener is invited to wander through constellations in order to access Album art, games, notation, lyrics and music.  The interactive approach allows full multimedia immersion in the entirety of the ideal presented in the work, primarily How nature music and technology interact.   The album presents itself as an instrument to be played, toying with organic ideas exploring space and microscopic environments alike.  The games allow the listener to become involved in actually creating the music building rhythms chord structures out of the earth, and fighting mutating viral rhythms.  Then of course you can also just listen Bjorks above par music. In a world where pop artists try and try to be different but still make mediocre cookie cutter songs Bjork shows up and shows Mother Monster she has a lot to learn about being an artist.

The Body as an Interface

Biomechanics is a rising field of interest for many different people from medicine to sports and even into the arts.  The human body can be monitored in a variety of ways from eegs which measure brain waves,  eogs to measure eye movement in sleep studies,  heart and breathing monitors. The depth of research into this world is an abyss that seems to be come ever deeper the more one learns about the subject.   My interest in the subject remains within the arts and with movement as a control of a non-clinical environment.   Our main limitation is that the human body can can only (as of yet) be interfaced superficially.   This leads to problems measuring human movement because joints which could be hard to measure on their own are even harder to access because they are deep to certain muscle groups and skin.  For a short example of the complications, take just the lower body from the superior structure the hips down to the inferior ankles.  By limiting possibilities to the larger movements of the skeletal system (particularly to those inferior to the transverse plane) you end up with only six large joints acting independently of all others. For monitoring, movement these joints can be looked at in 3 pairs of root sensor systems.

    - the hips
    - the knees
    - and the ankles

When standing, we can say that the body is at unity or the starting/natural state.    Most joints are in their natural state of extension in this position.  and then...

The Hips

When dealing with the hips circumduction becomes a problem because of the 3 Dimensional conic movement of a ball and socket joint.  The closest electronic analog i can think of is a joystick which measures potentiometers on two axis  and outputs both position values like coordinates (x,y). if we were to use a flex sensor we could only measure the anterior hip motion along the the sagital plane because of the gluteus maximus and hamstrings on the posterior which mask the small angle of movement we could measure if we had access to the acetabulum where the head of the femur makes contact with the coxal bone.  One might be able to measure the movement of the greater trochanter but that would still be difficult with the muscles which act as the flexors of the hip joint. This problem holds firm when you try to measure abduction(open) and adduction(closed) on the frontal plane as you would see it in Leonardo's  "Anatomy."
{as a side note measuring the medial and lateral rotation would be difficult as well}

The Knees

The knees being a hinge joint are the only joint on the lower body that can be easilly monitored using a flex sensor.   Hinge joints lend themselves to this type of monitoring because they have one state of extension and one state of variable flexion from 180 degrees all the way open down to about 10 degrees as folded as possible.  Flex sensors aren't really useful for any other type of synovial joint.

The Ankle

Measuring the ankle is weird because its natural state of extension lies between two points of flexion: dorsiflexion with the toe up and plantarflexion with the toe down.   One could put flex sensors along the achiles tendon and the dorsal part of the foot where the tibia and fibula meet the talus.  

More of the foot could be wired up to flex sensors for each of the phalanges and metatarsals but the shoe probably wouldn't be very comfortable.  For the foot I would like to develop some sort of measurement device that would be more intricate but similar to the type of system that you see in children's flashing led shoes.  the system would have quite a few pressure sensors embedded in the soul of the shoe to measure the anterior most end of the metatarsals through the phalanges and cuboid area and also below the calcaneus to measure the weight displacements as a user moved and balanced in different ways. 

So you see talking about the body could get complex, let alone measuring it. Then there is a whole new slew of fun to be had by all.  So the knees and elbows are easy bend sensors,  and then... fubar...

If you like the flexion measuring its worth a look at the MidiDancer developed at CalArts by Coniglio and Stoppiello of company Troika Ranch.   That's where it has all already happened in dance... has been happening since 1984...probably longer... at the risk of repeating the grand. 

I had original aspirations to use such a system for performance after having my brain fully warped by the book "Machine Musicianship" by Rob Rowe.   It was Morton Subotnik's work "Intimate Immensity" and his use of infra-red beams in a system technically executed by Clay Chaplin and danced by Nyoman Wenten that led me to CalArts in the first place.  My exploration of sensor possibilities for retrieving information from the human body began with the use of video to track motion, followed by research into things such as joint angles and rotations, muscle stretch or tension, and pressure for weight displacement on the plantar surface of the foot. 

anyhow...

In my search for better sensors I came across some interesting developers and their websites.

Poleema sensors use magnetic feilds to determine location.

The porcupine is made of several tilt / ball switches which recognize motion and orientation on the three planes, it could be quite useful.

I also found a similar sensor that reads full 3d motion and comes with software(very cool).  www.xsens.com.  It uses small blocks which could be fitted to the femur and the tibia/ fibula and would send out information about the orientation of those bones.  Really, useful stuff it also says how fast it moves etc.. check it out.

Also, there is a book called "Three Dimensional Analysis of Human Movement"  containing essays of many different scientists edited by Paul Allard. 

Its something to think about...more...

Peregrinations into Sound Art

Digital concréte is an adaptation of a classical composition style fathered by Pierre Schaeffer in the 1940s it marks the division between the French and German schools of electronic music. The Germans making sound by electronic means (oscilators, etc) and the french manipulation of found sound(tape, records,etc). I do both, but lean towards Concréte...digitally.