ITEM: A recent episode of Davex's "It's Too Damn Early" program had PD Wilder and Misco of Hotel, Hotel playing a quick set live over the Southern Illinois FM airwaves, followed by an onair chat with DaveX. The whole thing went by very quickly, but still pointed out how much future there is for music on the internet.The possibilitie of live internet performance have not even begun to be tapped yet. I imagine that at some point in the future, more popular bands will be able to opt not to tour. Why lug all that equipment and personnel from here to there and back again when you can perform one single time and reach a worldwide audience from the comfort of a sound- and video-equiped studio?
Although I'm tempted, I won't go on about how the magic of live music could be compounded by the remote-intimacy of the internet. I think my perspective on this topic might be a little weird, and I doubt I can really explain it. At the same time, I think I'mright to say that the idea of "live music over the internet" is a bigger idea than it may at first seem.
Being that there is so much space to explore in the direction of live internet performance, we can expect to find a few experimental types on the loose. I remember reading on a Negativland discussion board that the Over the Edge guys didn't see internet performance as worth their time. That was back when 52k modems were fancy.
As for now, you can cue the Oscar Goldman sample, because every urban center in North America and Europe has broadband available to the average citizen for an only somewhat outrageous price. Have you noticed that the Negativland site has a link to Over the Edge "live". Clearly the time is now.
"It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall." -William S. Burroughs discussing the cut-up method
Hopefully DaveX will be able to coax even more musicians into the WDBX Hi-Life room. Hopefully hundreds, even thousands, will listen. It wouldn't just be something to do. It would be fun.
ITEM: Two interesting softaware packages came to my attention today. Both programs appear to be independently-produced shareware/freeware.
"Bitmaps & Waves AKA Bitmap Player
http://www.webcenter.ru/~vsoft/BitmapPlayer.htm
This simple program converts bitmap images to sounds, and vice versa. Every line of loaded image is assumed to be a spectrum of sound, and it is converted to sound signal by means of inverse Fourie transform, or ...
Additional features, like image filtering and picture morphing, having sound morphing in mind, are available."
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"AudioPaint generates sounds from pictures. The program can read JPEG, GIF and BMP files and translates each pixel position and color into frequency, amplitude and pan information. AudioPaint can therefore be considered as a massive additive synthesis tool.
http://www.nicolasfournel.com/audiopaint.htm
The picture corresponds to a big frequency / time grid. Each pixel of the picture is analyzed and drives an oscillator. The vertical position of the pixel determines its frequency, while its horizontal position corresponds to time. The color of the pixel is used to determine its pan. By default, the red component controls the amplitude of the left channel, while the green component corresponds to the right channel (the brighter the colour, the louder the sound). By default, the blue component is not used, but the routing can be modified by the user.
The other parameters available are:
- waveform: the waveform used by the oscillators (can be a sine wave or any sample file)
- duration: the total duration of the sound to be generated.
- frequency scale: the scale (linear or exponential) used to determine the frequencies of the pixels.
- min frequency: the frequency of a pixel at the bottom of the picture.
- max frequency: the frequency of a pixel at the top of the picture.
- interpolation: the type of interpolation (none, linear or quadratic) used to go from the amplitude of a pixel to the amplitude of its neighbour. "
-z
