Sound from a Virtual Planet

Earlier this summer, I was in Montreal for the 11th annual MUTEK Festival of Electronic Music and Art, June 2 through June 6. The festival organizers have worked hard over the years to make this a premier electronic music event, and attending for the first time this year, I saw why. The range of electronic music presented by over 150 artists covers the entire gamut of electronic music, from experimental noise and sound art to classic house music and just about everything in between. The schedule itself was daunting, but much to the organizers credit, they released a very useful iPhone app that organized the schedule and gave a brief overview to each artist, including links to their MySpace pages and other Web resources. The app is free and you should still be able to download it and use it as a way to perhaps find out about the artist who appeared at MUTEK.

Minilogue at MUTEK 2010

To make sense of the range of artists, the festival was organized in several different series, each in it’s own venue. Experience and Ectoplasmes events were held in a black block theater that worked well for presenting audio-visual work as well as more experimental and emerging artists. The A/Visions series events were held in the Monument National concert hall. As the name suggests, many of the concerts here were multimedia presentations, with a massive display as the backdrop for the performers onstage. Nocturnes were club events held in three different venues not more than a block away from each other. SAT had more of an underground vibe, and while still in the dance genre, hosted edgier performers and DJs. Club Soda reminded me more of a classic dance club. Friday was the big club night and MUTEK attendees were in a constant flow between the two venues, checking out House and Techno at Soda and Dubstep at SAT. Metropolis was more of a concert club that also hosted small acts simultaneously in separate lounge. So, on just about any given night of the festival there were two different scenes going on. And, if that wasn’t enough, there were outdoor events as well, culminating with a free concert on Montreal’s main outdoor stage.

Montreal is a wonderful city for the arts and they really know how to present festivals. While I was there I saw no less than eight outdoor stages in various states of construction for what appeared to a very busy season that includes the well-established Montreal Jazz Festival. While MUTEK was an international festival there was an emphasis on Canadian artists. The Canadian government and a range of private sponsors support the festival with the caveat that it provides a venue for home-grown talent. Canada has a vibrant music scene with talented artists in all genres who are largely unknown outside of their county, and this was a good opportunity to check some of them out.

Señor Coconut at MUTEK 2010

For me, one of the big issues in electronic music is live performance, and the connection between studio production and how a work is performed. MUTEK provided a great opportunity to see a wide variety of performance styles, from DJs to computer-aided acoustic performances. What follows is an overview of some of the artists that impressed me at MUTEK and how they approached performing.

Matmos was one of the acts high on my list to check out at MUTEK. Partners since 1997, Drew Daniel and Martin Schmidt are perhaps best known for their playful way of working with sampled sound, and have collaborated with a number of artists from Bjork PLOrk. Onstage, each has a distinct role, with Daniel on laptops and controllers and Schmidt on realtime keyboard and assorted noisemakers. In the Matmos brain, one half is digital, the other analog, and they have no problem navigating the aesthetic corpus callosum, and this distinction is one of the things that makes their music compelling. In an interview session the next day, they were very articulate in discussing their work and adopted home of Baltimore. Their work is highly conceptual with each of their albums centered around a core concept. While electronic music seems to offer infinite creative possibilities, they feel that limiting choices and creating from a core concept is essential. Although the idea of an "album" is rapidly disappearing, they feel it’s still an important part of their process. A good example of this is their 2008 release, Supreme Balloon, where the idea was to break their mold and create an album of purely synthesized sound, where no recordings of acoustic sources of any type are used. Fittingly, most of their set at MUTEK came from this work, culminating with the 24-minute piece Supreme Balloon, an electronic tour de force.

Matmos at MUTEK 2010

In contrast to the discipline of Matmos, Mouse on Mars thrive on a kind of controlled anarchy. The German duo of Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner began working together in 1993, with ten releases and numerous side projects to their credit. Their live set was a dense, rhythmic stew that seemed more stream of consciousness than composition. Each had a laptop, presumably running Ableton Live along with an assortment of controllers. There were no defined roles here and there was no clear connection between the sound and who it came from. Their production process has more to do with assembling ideas from sounds collected on their hard drives than a clear concept, where lots of sounds and idea get refined until an album is done. When is a project "done?" St Werner mentioned in an interview the day after their performance that record company deadlines and hard drive crashes are what signal the end their process. While they currently working on new material, their last studio effort came out in 2007, so perhaps the demise of record labels and more reliable hard drives are extending their creative process. They’ve actually spent a good part of the last few years performing live, often with a drummer, and they feel this experience energizes them for their work in the studio. In performance, it sounds like they’ve emptied the choices bits from their hard drives into Ableton Live and freely improvise their dance set.

Jon Hopkins at MUTEK 2010

One of the high points of the festival for me was Jon Hopkins‘ set. Most have probably heard of his work through his association with Coldplay, providing the opening and closing instrumental sections of their Viva La Vida CD, and opening for them on many dates during their last tour. Hopkins is a trained musician, and as a pianist and composer his work reflects a more traditional melodic and harmonic vocabulary. Given that, I didn’t know what to expect in a dance club performance. His hour-long set was absolutely brilliant, and showcased a well-rehearsed, seasoned electronic performer. Each piece was a composition, and I recognized a couple from his most recent release, Insides. My sense was that each piece provided an overall form and that he was free to extend sections and improvise variations. On stage, he mainly used two Korg Kaoss pads along with a keyboard controller, and with these, he was able to control every aspect of the performance, he’s clearly in the "controllerism" camp of live electronic performance. From the audience’s perspective, Hopkins was really "playing" his set and much of their reaction was not just to the music, but to the clear sense of virtuosity that he conveyed.

While this is just a small taste of what I experienced, there are numerous reviews and videos of MUTEK 2010 on the Web.

One of the things I learned about Germans while in Berlin is that they love their hardware. While two of the most important music software companies on the planet, Ableton and Native Instruments, make their home in Berlin, just about everyone I met on my trip there earlier this year had at least one piece of gear that was a source of great pride. Laptop jams came into vogue around 2000 when seeing someone on stage with one was a novelty, so at this point, performing with software is taken for granted. So what gets an audience’s attention these days? Cool hardware, and not just a couple of hot-rodded speak and spells, but lots of it, piles of it.

Groupshow is a Berlin-based electronic performance collective trio that is known for extended improvisations using tables full of vintage electronic gadgets and gizmos. For CTM 2010, Groupshow put on an extended performance accompanying Andy Warhol’s film Empire. Or perhaps the film accompanied Groupshow since Empire is eight hours long and consists of a single shot of New York’s Empire State building made from 6 hours and 36 minutes of 24 fps footage slowed down to play at 16 fps. Both the film and Groupshow’s extended performance consider the issue of art as process, and as such, it was an ideal event to drop in on, not necessarily to sit through. That said, the members of Groupshow were able to coax a lot of interesting sound from their collection, and the result was something that just couldn’t possibly come from software.

The CTM and Transmediale festivals I attended earlier this year each had a different focus, however the clear connection was in how each explored relationships between sound and vision. Pattern Recognition was a concert performance sponsored by both festivals that featured two works. Materia Obscura by Jürgen Reble & Thomas Köner clearly focused on visual imagery while Test Pattern by Ryoji Ikeda was a stunning, immersive experience exploring sound mapped to visuals. Ikeda is primarily known as electronic sound artist, although his performances are always constructed around some sort of visualization of the sound elements he’s working with. His work examines the relationships found in data structures, and he uses patterns found in various types of computer data to generate both sound and image. From this, he has created a body of work that includes both performance and installation pieces. Transmediale 2010 included both with data.tron (3 SXGA+version) as an installation along with his Test Pattern performance.

Ryoji Ikeda

Ikeda’s work extends from the idea that data itself, the actual patterns of ones and zeros, can be perceived as sound and visual elements in an artistic presentation. When asked about his influences in a 2008 Japan Times interview, Ikeda lists not musicians or visual artists, but mathematicians, and in examining raw data, he uses mathematical relationships to create form and structure. His conversations with Harvard mathematician Benedict Gross have led to the data.tron series of installations that include (3 SXGA+version) exhibited at Transmediale. In this large scale video projection that covers an entire wall of a gallery space, Ikeda creates a kind of 21st century pointillistic mural using raw data taken from complex predictive models scientist use to predict future events, to create a blizzard of numbers and geometrical shapes.

data.tron (3 SXGA+version) at Transmediale 2010

In Test Pattern, raw data is converted to bar codes, the kind found on just about everything you buy in a store, and mapped to a variety of noise sources, presumably generated from the same data. The bar code patterns are projected at a high rate on two sectors of a large screen. The synchronization here is very tight, and the visual patterns represent a kind of rhythmic visualization where placement and width of the bars represent attack and duration patterns in the sound. In performance, Ikeda plays with relationships between left and right stereo channels and the patterns appearing on the screen sectors. Part of what the audience experiences is a kind of manipulation of perceptual coordination. This can be jarring for some, and indeed there is a warning before the performance that those with epileptic tendencies might want to excuse themselves.

Test Pattern (live) at Transmediale 2010

So what does all this actually sound like? One of the points in Ikeda’s work is that data has a structure that can be assembled into recognizable patterns. These in turn, can be interpreted as rhythmic structures, so what we hear from this are clearly recognizable patterns that might sound like they’re coming from a drum machine on steroids. Nothing sounds random, and bursts of pure noise, clicks, and beeps punctuate these patterns, giving them a kind of musical form and structure. It’s hard to say whether this is the result of algorithmic processes or of painstaking orchestration through digital editing. While Ikeda is on stage for the performance, it’s not clear what he might be doing to effect the piece in realtime. While we’re used to seeing a clear correspondence between gesture and sound in a musical performance, perhaps one can think of the performer more as the captain of some sort of multimedia mothership in this type of work.

While "glitch" has become a recent buzz word for all sorts of music that incorporates noise, the work Ryoji Ikeda is doing here has a deep connection to a larger artistic vision, and in that sense, it transcends the whole idea of a popular style or genre.

Recommended:

• Cyclo (with Carsten Nicolai; Raster-Noton, 2001)
• Dataplex (Raster-Noton, 2005)
• Test Pattern (Raster-Noton, 2008)

While the CTM Festival was truly an international event, featuring artists from around the world, there was a significant showing from German artists, and in particular artists featured on the label Raster Noton. Several upcoming blog entries will feature reviews and thoughts on specific artists, but to put things in a context, I want to take a look at Raster Noton.

Scenes and styles in general are often associated with specific labels. While there are a number of artists and labels that one might categorize as IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), Warp Records is recognized as the mothership of that particular genre, being the home of artists such as Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. To me, one of the most interesting things happening in electronic music right now is minimal noise techno, and if there’s an aesthetic motherlode for this music, it’s Raster Noton. The label was founded by three like-minded German artists, and came about through a merger of Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider’s Rastermusik and Carsten Nicolai’s Noton labels in 1999. The three are active performers, Bender as Byetone and Nicolai as Alva Noto. All three come from a background in visual arts, and visual presentation is a strong component of Raster Noton releases, as well as their artists’ performances.

Minimal noise techno really has two roots, German club music and a variety of noise musics. Minimalism in the arts has had a German home since the Bauhaus movement in the early 20th century. Bauhaus as an aesthetic seeks to strip elements of design to the bare essentials, combining form and function, finding beauty in commonplace objects. German electro-pop music going back to Kraftwerk has this kind of stripped-down elegance, where only the bare essentials are part of an electronic arrangement. Techno music, which had it’s origins in late 1980’s Detroit shares this aesthetic if only by virtue of the spare means of production available to it’s early practitioners. While it’s roots are still in the Motor City, (or what used to be the Motor City) Techno, and a multitude of sub-genres, thrives in Germany.

Noise in music goes back to the early 20th century with Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises manifesto. Since then, waves of concert music composers, experimentalists, sound artists, and pop producers have used various kinds of noise as a structural element in their music and art. As visual artists, many of the Raster Noton artists look to pure sound and it’s relation to rhythm, form, and structure. Notable works among these are Ryoji Ikeda’s Dataplex, that uses various sounds from malfunctioning computers as source material; Alvo Noto’s Xerrox 1 and 2 that use environmental noise, and Noto’s Unitxt that uses data from Microsoft Office documents, as well as other file types, converted to audio data. These artists are looking for all sorts of connections between the audio and visual worlds, and their work offers a fresh approach to electronic music that’s radically different. I’ll be talking a closer look at some examples of this work in my next several blog entries.

The theme of this year’s CTM Festival was "Overlap, Sound and Other Media." While the opening concert with Jacob Kirkegaard, Transforma, and Hiroaki Umeda gave rich examples of sound overlapping with other performing media, the festival’s conference series explored many other connections. Perhaps the most powerful of these was the series of events that formed a kind of mini conference called "A Maze. Interact… Celebrating the Convergence of Games, Art, and Music." As part of this, there was a symposium, workshops, exhibits, a night of chip music, and something called the Global Game Jam.

The keynote for the symposium was delivered by Japanese game developer Keiichi Yano, founder of the company iNiS. The company develops rhythm-based games in which the player must develop a kind of musical interaction with the game. His address dealt with a couple of practical issues from a developer’s point of view. First, he pointed out that advances in gaming really were dependent on hardware innovation, and the creativity involved in game design really comes from exploring the potential each new platform offers. While early gaming systems may have had limited resources, especially for audio, the games that were successful found clever ways to use these, especially the game controllers themselves. The second point Yano talked about was culture. To be successful, a developer needs to understand the culture of the intended audience. Some of the games developed by iNiS, such as their popular Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, are intended for release only in Japan, and some of the game trailers Yano showed clearly brought this point across.

Keiichi Yano

While Yano’s opening remarks where general observations, the next speaker, Leonard J, Paul, went directly into some of the concrete issues in game music and sound design. In his talk "Droppin’ Science – Adaptive Music Design," Paul spoke of the idea of adaptive music design as a way to construct musical ideas and transitions that can be called on in response to choices made in gameplay. The "Adaptive Music Matrix" shown in the table below shows a way to organize the design of transitions between two sets of five options. In this example, there are five scenes at a given point in a game when the player could make a move that would trigger a transition to one of five other scenes. Each scene has a distinct musical theme, but abruptly ending one and going directly to the next results in a soundtrack that would disrupt the flow of the game. The solution is a musical transition that would lead one section into another. In a typical song, there is some musical idea that sets up a move to the next section, verse to chorus, let’s say. At any point in a game there could be an action that triggers a change in music. Let’s say a player is in scene 2 and triggers an action that goes to scene 5. According to the matrix, transition 8 would be called to get from one to the next. Paul maintains the Video Game AudioWebsite which has a wealth of information he has assembled.

The Adaptive Music Matrix.
Bold indicates scenes, numbers are for transitions. 

The next two presentations examined game music as an extension of electronic music in general. In his talk, Michael Harenberg made connections between game music, especially early game music, and early electroacoustic music, citing examples from Louis and Bebe Barron’s score for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet as well as Tron, the 1982 film with a score by Wendy Carlos. He also points out that game music is the first popular musical form to arise directly from digital media.

Leonard J. Paul

Julian Oliver followed with "Computer Games as Musical Instruments," discussing how game-player interaction can be seen as a form of musical expression. He made the connection with the following statement: "Playing any game can be read as the joy of working with and within the confines of a unique and defined system." That just about sums up what can be said about interactive computer music. I would maintain that developing interactive electronic performance skills is good way to develop a knack for developing game sound strategies. This kind of convergence was really what all the CTM conference sessions were about.

A Maze Interact was far more than talk. There was an exhibition of seventeen key electronic music-based games running on their original platforms, starting from Moondust for PC from 1983 all the way to last year’s DJ Hero. These showed how far the development of game sound has come over the years, and in some cases, how one game influenced another. For example, the technology developed by Harmonix for their 2001 game FreQuency provided the basis for the gameplay design in Guitar Hero and later for Rock Band.

CTM also hosted Berlin’s contribution to the Global Game Jam. The idea here was for teams to develop a game in 48 hours. This was indeed a global event with 120 locations participating, and in the end, we saw what a little creativity and lots of caffeine could produce. Nothing here was going to take a bite out of Guitar Hero’s market share, but this event was more about fostering a sense of community, bringing many diverse talents together to share ideas.

Greetings from Berlin, Germany. I’ll be spending the month of February here with the generous support of the Newbury Comics Faculty Fellowship, that funds innovative projects undertaken by Berklee faculty members. I’m here to learn about the electronic music and multimedia performance scene here in Berlin, and I’m hoping to share some initial observations in the coming weeks.

To start things off, I’m attending the CTM/Transmediale festival and conference. The CTM festival is focused on electronic music and related forms, while Transmediale is a conference that provides "critical reflection on the role of digital technologies in present-day society." Together, these are two important events that explore current electronic practice, featuring international artists and speakers.

I arrived Wednesday January 26 and used the first few days here to get settled into my apartment, the time zone, and of course… the weather. Berlin ist kalt…

The opening event of the CTM Festival on Friday night cut to the core of the festival’s theme, "Overlap," with a multimedia concert that featured three very different approaches to blending sound and video. First up was Berlin-based artist Jacob Kirkegaard who’s work "focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing." His piece, "Sabulation" explored the resonances inherent in the sound of wind using field recordings and video from the Singing Sands in the deserts of Oman. By using various microphone techniques, Kirkegaard was able to capture the sound of this environment in totally unexpected ways. The accompanying processed video, in black and white, presented images that gave the impression of a kind of ancient, living sculpture.

Transforma: Operators

Next up was the Berlin-based video performance collective Transforma. Their piece, "Operators," featured studio footage they had shot for the piece, and then processed in real time for the performance. Sound artist Markus Hübner contributed a rhythmic, beat-driven score that provided a tempo reference for the piece. The pulsing images of an industrial work environment and a human "operator" posed the question of who was in control, man or his work.

The highlight of the evening for me was Japanese artist Hiroaki Umeda and his piece "Adapting for Distortion." This really cut to the core of the aesthetic I’m looking to explore here in Berlin. Umeda is a multidisciplinary artist who is well known as a dancer and choreographer. In "Adapting for Distortion," he explores the relationship between projections of simple geometric shapes and bursts of all sorts of noise. He did a masterful job of building tension and release by structuring the complexity of the images in juxtaposition with the density of the noise bursts. The noise elements came from different sources, with a variety of timbres and durations. Overall, while the piece had a minimalist, futuristic feel, along the lines of (no pun intended) Tron, it had a sophisticated, organic sense to it, and Umeda as the central figure, struck a balance as the sole human figure, adding shadows to the projected light and reacting to the bursts of noise.

Adapting for Distortion

While most of the music being presented at CTM is in a club setting, this evening’s event served good introduction to the types of multimedia pieces currently in vogue here in Berlin.

One of the questions I had after attending the NIME conference in June 2009, was on how new performance technologies made it to market. One innovative manufacturer, Keith McMillen Instruments has been developing interesting new interfaces for the last few years. At NAMM 2009, he showed the K-Bow, a bow for string instruments that allows a player to maintain their traditional playing technique while transmitting control information used in an interactive electronic performance. Richard Boulanger, a colleague in the Electronic Production and Design at Berklee, premiered a pioneering composition for cellist Kari Juusela this year using the K-Bow, and both composer and performer were enthusiastic about the result.

This year, McMillen was showing his latest product, Soft Step, at the NAMM show. Now why would anyone get excited about a 10-key footswitch controller? As a guitarist looking for more complete control in interactive, live performances, I’m stoked. I recently picked up a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI foot controller, which is a solid, well-built device, but it’s big, bulky, and decidedly old school MIDI in it’s approach. The Soft Step weighs in at a little over a pound and at 17.5″ x 4,” it will fit in most backpacks. This is very good news if you’re a laptop performer. It’s made of a carbon composite and is surprisingly sturdy.

Berklee Alum Barry Threw shows Soft Step

While form factor is the practical side of the device, the Soft Step takes things a bit further. Instead of just momentary contact or on/off switches, each of the ten backlit pads offers five degrees of motion, each of which can send separate control messages. The device connects to the computer using USB. Mapping and scaling of control values is easy using the software interface. MacMillen was showing a working prototype at the NAMM show, and he hopes to ship the product in Spring 2010.

After what was perhaps the worst year in memory for the musical instrument industry, the 2010 Winter NAMM show rolled into Anaheim, California January 14-17. NAMM is the premier US trade show for musical instrument manufacturers, and while the fortunes of individual music technology companies ebb and flow, there continues to be interesting products on the horizon. While several major players like Apple and Native Instruments no longer attend trade shows, stalwarts like Korg, Roland, and Yamaha still continue to use NAMM as a showcase for new products. In what’s perhaps a sign of the times, many smaller music technology companies sat this show out, or opted for private, more informal meetings in lounges and coffee shops. So for me, NAMM 2010 was more about talking to people than seeing things, and in some ways, that human connection made this year’s show all the more satisfying. Over my next few blog posts I’ll report on some of the things I observed at the show this year.

Each year at NAMM there’s always one centrally located booth that serves as a reliable rendezvous point for music tech geeks to meet. While in past years this has been the Didgidesign booth, the torch passed to Ableton this year, and the booth they shared with Cycling 74 was this year’s hub for many at the show. In many ways, this was symbolic of the change the industry is experiencing. Avid, the parent company of Digidesign, is phasing out the Digi brand identity. Since they had nothing new to show, their booth was mainly a set up for private meetings, largely devoid of products, and the name Digidesign was nowhere to be found. A well-placed source confided that at the corporate feeling was that the majority of customers really identify with the name “Pro Tools” as the brand identity for that particular family of products, and the Digidesign moniker had little relevance to both new and future customers. Expect about twelve new products from Avid in the coming year, and your new M-Box will clearly be an Avid product.

While one industry goliath is clearly consolidating, Ableton is becoming more of a presence. They’ve done this not by expanding their product line, as is usually the case with any manufacturer, but rather by opening their product architecture and partnering with other companies to extend Live’s capabilities. At this year’s NAMM, Max for Live was a reality, and in the six or so weeks since it was officially released, there’s been a flurry of activity as scores of MAX gurus and aficionados adapt their signature patches for use in Live. Included in the Max for Live release are patches from the stash of Ableton co-founder and electronic music pioneer Robert Henke. While the buzz around Max for Live may be substantial, the truth is that Max programming is not for everyone who uses Live. The value of this collaboration to most users will really be the open architecture that allows forward thinking hackers to expand the capabilities of Live according to their own muse. I expect to see a cottage industry of MAX for Live developers to spring up this year, offering any user access to additional tools that will bring both utility and innovation.

The big new news for Ableton this year was their collaboration with DJ stalwarts Serato called The Bridge. While Live has always had the basic functionality needed by a digital DJ, there’s really a cultural difference between DJs and live electronic music performers that’s defined the tools for each. Some artists, like Richard Devine who’s all over Native Instrument’s Traktor for live performance, can migrate between these tools, but by and large, a DJ’s point of reference will be decks, hardware or otherwise. The collaboration between Live and Serrato respects this and provides users a bridge between their respective programs. Serrato decks show up in Live, and a DJ set done with Serato can be saved as a Live session with three stereo tracks, one for each of two decks and one for a bounced mix of the two. Included here are all effects and realtime moves, so in essence, a DJ set can be further refined or serve as the starting point for a completely new hybrid work. Over the years, Ableton has become a tool that provides a platform for both spontaneous creation and refinement of musical ideas, and this year’s developments expand the scope of users who will benefit from this.

NAMM 2010 Demo of the Bridge

Tight integration with performance controllers is now a big part of Planet Ableton. The AKAI APC40 and the Novation Launchpad, that were released last year, each have a slightly different design approach. While the APC40 provides a complete control solution for both clip launching and mixing and effects, the Launchpad is a more portable device optimized for launching clips in the heat of battle. At a fraction of the size and half the price, the Launchpad has been very successful with performers, but a big complaint has been the lack of faders. AKAI unveiled the APC20 at NAMM that addresses this with the addition of eight fades to a set of “launch pads.” All of this is good news for anyone using Ableton Live, as this is only the start of what will be a number of hardware control products that will be coming out in 2010.

NAMM 2010 Demo of the AKAI APC20

Many of my online students ask about additional reading once their course has finished. For the most part, they’re looking for additional reference material or reading to get them deeper into the technology. Every year around the holidays I try to stock up on books, not to learn more techniques, but to get inspired. I’d like to share a few of the things that I’ve been reading and will continue to be inspired by in the new year.

The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music

The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music is a great place to start if you want to get an overview of the current scene. The book is really a series of essays edited by Nick Collins and Julio d’Escrivan featuring authors who are active practitioners of electronic music. While the Cambridge University Press imprint might imply dry, academic reading on academic music, the authors make no distinction between high art and street art in parsing the roots, trends, and directions in current practices, and the book makes for fascinating, thought provoking reading. There are also a number of artist statements from early pioneers like Max Matthews and Pauline Oliveros to emerging artists like Warp recording artist Mira Calix and chiptune musician Bubblyfish.

Arcana

Starting in 2000, New York Avant Guard saxophonist and composer John Zorn has edited a series of four anthologies called Arcana: Musicians on Music. Like the Cambridge Guide to Electronic Music, these are made up of essays by a wide range of modern musicians. Their thoughts and perspectives on how and why they make music and how their art reflects the society they live in are totally engaging. While each musician has a distinct, iconoclast view of music and their role in it, it’s remarkable to see the common threads that run through these essays, and taken as a whole this series provides a remarkable look at the fabric of modern music.

The Foley Grail

Now for beach reading… One of the least documented aspects of post production for visual media is the art of foley, or literally performing sound effects to picture. The Foley Grail: The Art of Performing Sound for Film, Games, and Animation by Vanessa Theme Ament, provides an insider’s view of the full gamut of post production sound. From the historical background to current practices, the author provides a wealth of firsthand knowledge in a very readable and entertaining book. For those of you interested in learning more about getting involved in post production sound, this will be a very useful point of departure.

Your art is the humanity you bring to it, technology is just the tool. Don’t forget to nourish your spirit and imagination as you get deeper into music technology.

One little known way to get some great software at a reduced pricing is through group buys. This works like volume purchasing, only for the masses. While major developers are able to offer large distributers, like Guitar Center, lower prices for volume purchases, small independent developers that distribute their wares through the web, don’t have that option. Enter the group buy. If enough individuals are able to commit to purchasing a particular product within a certain period of time, a developer is often willing to sell at the kind of discounts a major retailer might get, only the savings are passed on directly to the individual purchaser. These special deals are usually not part of a manufacturer’s marketing, and are typically offered through user groups, list serves, or blogs.

Sound cool? Well, hold on to your hats. Camel Audio is offering a group buy on their entire line of products. These include a couple of really great processing plug-ins, Camel Phat and Camel Space, as well as their flagship software synthesizer Alchemy. Alchemy usually goes for 250.00 but with the group buy currently underway, it will probably go for around 125.00.

To learn more about Alchemy, check out the mention I gave it in my 2008 round-up. To get in on the Camel Audio group buy, follow this link: Camel Group Buy. Check in out and let me know what you think.