Les said, the better

Press Release

2012-01-25T14:28:00.000Z

Birmingham’s first Network Music Festival 27-29th January.

For immediate release: 24th January 2011

Birmingham’s first Network Music Festival presents hi-tech music performances from local and international artists.

On 27-29th January 2012 the first Network Music Festival will showcase some of the most innovative UK and international artists using networking technology. Presenting a broad spectrum of work from laptop bands, to live coding, to online collaborative improvisation, to modified radio networks, audio-visual opera and iPhone battles, Network Music Festival will be a weekend of exciting performances, installations, talks and workshops showcasing over 70 artists!

Network Music Festival are working alongside local organisations Friction Arts, SOUNDkitchen, BEAST, Ort Cafe and The Old Print Works and PST/Kismet in order to bring this new and innovative festival to Birmingham.

With 20 performances, 5 installations, 5 talks and a 2 day work Network Music Festival will be a vibrant and diverse festival presenting musical work where networking is central to the aesthetic, creation or performance practice. Acts include: Live-coding laptop quartet Benoit and the Mandelbrots (Germany); algorithmic music duo Wrongheaded (UK), transatlantic network band Glitch Lich (UK/USA) and home grown laptop bands BiLE (Birmingham Laptop Ensemble) and BEER (Birmingham Ensemble for Electroacoustic Research) as well as many more local, UK, European and international acts programmed from our OPEN CALL for performances, installations and talks.

If that’s not enough, we’ll be kicking off the festival early on Thursday 26th January with a pre-festival party programmed in collaboration with local sound-art collective SOUNDkitchen which showcases some of Birmingham best electronic acts, Freecode, Juneau Brothers and Lash Frenzy as well as one of SOUNDkitchen’s own sound installations.

There’s also an opportunity for you to get involved as we’re running a 2 day workshop on ‘Collaborative Live Coding Performance’ led by members of the first live coding band [PB_UP] (Powerbooks Unplugged).

“Birmingham has a reputation for being the birth place of new genres of music,” said festival organiser, Shelly Knotts. “We're excited to be a part of this and to be bringing the relatively new genre of computer network based music to Brum. Some of these concerts are going to be epic!”

Tickets are available from www.brownpapertickets.com. Day and weekend passes available £5-£25. Workshop £20.

For more information visit our website: networkmusicfestival.org and follow us on twitter: @NetMusicFest. To tweet about the festival use the hashtag #NMF2012. We also have a facebook page: www.facebook.com/networkmusicfestival

Network Music Festival // 27-29th January 2012 // The Edge, 79-81 Cheapside, Birmingham, B12 0QH
Web:networkmusicfestival.org
Twitter: @NetMusicFest Hashtag: #NMF2012
Facebook: www.facebook.com/networkmusicfestival
Email: networkmusicfestival@gmail.com

On Friday will be a sneak preview of an excerpt from Act 2 of the Death of Stockhausen, the world's first 'laptopera.'

Writing to the New York Times

2012-01-14T19:37:00.000Z

Dear Editor,

Thank you for your article on January 12, 2012, "Should The Times Be a Truth Vigilante?" I have long suspected that the Times was entirely unconcerned with the truth and was slavishly repeating the claims of people in or seeking power, but it's nice to have it confirmed as the official policy of the newspaper. This will especially come in handy when I am arguing with others about the lack of merit of your newspaper.

As to your question about whether you should bother yourself with reporting the truth, I would say no. You don't have any credibility anyway and it's cheaper just to print press releases without doing research.

Thank you for taking the time to solicit reader opinion,
Charles Céleste Hutchins

Recently, I've learned that freedom of the press is much, much better protected in the United States than it is in the United Kingdom. Journalists are free to make claims with good evidence without having to be in fear of overly-strong libel laws. In the UK, you cannot make a claim without absolute proof. In the US, you just need good evidence and the occasional "alleged" and you're good. UK journalists are jealous of the many press protections afforded American journalists.

And yet, with all the freedom to actually point out lies and fraud and corruption and to let their readers know when somebody is obviously lying - with the freedom to look into things and print what they find, with all of the great and wonderful legal protections the US provides to it's journalists, the newspaper of record wonders if readers actually expect them to do any journalism. Brisbane, the editor, writes, "I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about."

I wish I could say I was shocked.

Ron Paul says he witnessed a murder and did nothing

2012-01-05T16:51:00.000Z

In the above video, Paul talks of witnessing an infanticide in progress, in a hospital where he was present as a doctor. When asked about this, 'Paul was briefly taken aback. "I would have had to have... I don't know," he said. "It was probably a fleeting, two minute thing. I walked in, took a peek, saw what was happening, because I was visiting there for an operating room. But I didn't have the facilities! What could I have done?"' (Weigel 2011) I dunno, maybe performed CPR, called for assistance, called the police, reported the murder to an ethics body?

Paul is bragging in an advert that he saw a baby murdered and did nothing. Fortunately, he is lying about this.

Late term abortions are exceedingly rare everywhere in the world, but especially in the US, where, if I remember correctly, only two hospitals still do them. There is no hospital in the US where doctors will abort a viable fetus. In the case a of a medical emergency, they might do a premature delivery to save the life of the mother or the child, but they won't abort a baby that could live outside the womb. Not only would it violate every kind of medical ethics, but the actions Paul describes are illegal. They are murder, not in the sense of overblown anti-abortion rhetoric, but in the sense of having a duty to alert the police.

I don't believe that Paul is protecting a hospital that murders children, as this story is almost certainly made up. As Fred Clark notes, this isn't particularly new or original lie and it's one that both he and I have heard before. And, as Clark writes, "they never include the kinds of details that would make such stories believable — names or places that could be confirmed, or any other such evidence." (2012) So Paul isn't covering for a murdering hospital so much as he is repeating something he heard elsewhere as if it happened to him. In other words, he's telling a lie and just pretending to have covered for murderers. It's not actually his story. Much like he now says he didn't actually write his racist newsletters. (Kucinich 2011)

The thing I don't get about Paul is not his KKK-levels of racism, in which he signed his name to newsletters calling black people "animals" (Paul 1992), and it's not his making up fabulous stories in which he idly lets babies get murdered. What I don't get about Paul is how he has any appeal with anyone at all acquainted with the left. Yeah, he wants to let you smoke pot (maybe, depending on your state) ("War on Drugs") and I guess if you're a white, middle class man who is never going to get pregnant or have a partner who deal with an unwanted pregnancy, nor are you ever going to want to buy birth control (Somanader 2011), (which he would happily let Walmart refuse to stock, as well as the AIDS drugs, etc) and are never going to need a ramp to access a building (Alder 2011), and you don't care about anybody else who is not just like you, well, I can see why you might like him. but that kind of makes you a bad person. Yeah, he's got some anti-war rhetoric ("Foreign Policy") and I'd like to see the wars ended also, but I'm not willing to sacrifice the civil rights act (Basset 2012) for that. Also, I'm not sure I'd trust a guy who is bragging he helped cover for murderers.

Alder, Ben. "Three Myths About Ron Paul." The Nation. 27 December 2011. Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <http://www.thenation.com/blog/165350/three-myths-about-ron-paul>

Basset, Laura. "Ron Paul: Civil Rights Act Of 1964 'Destroyed' Privacy." The Huffington Post. 1 January 2012. Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/01/ron-paul-civil-rights-act_n_1178688.html>

Clark, Fred. "Say anything to take us out of this gloom". Slacktivist. 3 January 2012. Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/01/03/say-anything-to-take-us-out-of-this-gloom/&glt;

"Foreign Policy." RonPaul.com Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/national-defense/>

Kucinich, Jackie. "Ron Paul’s story changes on racial comments." USA Today. 22 December 2011. Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <http://caucuses.desmoinesregister.com/2011/12/22/ron-pauls-story-changes-on-racial-comments/>

Paul, Ron. "Blast 'Em?." Ron Paul Political Report. 1992. Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <http://www.tnr.com/sites/default/files/PoliticalReportOctober1992.pdf>

Paul, Ron. "Life." YouTube. 12 October 2011. Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkAsLPrnJGc>

Somanader, Tanya. "Ron Paul: Greater Access To Birth Control Makes A ‘Mockery’ Of Christians." Think Progress. 6 October 2011. Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <http://thinkprogress.org/health/2011/10/06/338285/ron-paul-greater-access-to-birth-control-makes-a-mockery-of-christians/>

"War On Drugs." Wed. Assessed 5 January 2011. <http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/war-on-drugs/>

Weigel, David. "The Ron Paul Fetus Rescue Test." Slate. 29 December 2011. Web. Assessed 5 January 2012. <http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/12/29/the_ron_paul_fetus_rescue_test.html>

America's Last Strong Union

2011-12-06T01:23:00.001Z

Dear Senator Boxer

I am writing to ask that congress take steps to stop cuts to the Postal Service. As you know, the postal service has just announced it plans to reduce service levels and fire 100,000 workers. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, these changes will put a drag on the economy, raise the prices of prescription drugs and hurt people living in rural communities. This is the last thing our country needs in a time of recession.

What's more, as you know, the US Postal Service would be operating at a profit, were it not forced by congress to pre-fund the retirements of future postal workers who are not yet even born. The Post Services budget shortfalls are entirely a result of this mandate. This unprecedented mandate is an attack on one of America's last strong unions, by forcing cuts where none are needed.

I hope I can count on you to protect these 100,000 jobs and do the right thing for the 99% of your constituents who rely on the postal service.

Anti-LGBT Scapegoating: Why the 99% Should Care

2011-11-24T01:50:00.001Z

St Petersberg, Russia is on the verge of becoming the third local legislature in Russia to criminalise “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism, to minors.” (Gray, Wikipedia) Activists, such as Polina Savchenko, General manager of LGBT organization Coming Out, point out that “Organizers of public events cannot restrict access of minors to any open area; people under 18 can be there just by chance. Consequently, it makes any public campaigns aimed at reducing xenophobia and hate crime prevention impossible.” (Gray)

Why are they doing this? Andre Banks of AllOut.org says, “the beleaguered LGBT community in Russia . . . are being used as a political punching bag in the run up to elections.” (ibid) The ruling party, “United Russia faces a crisis of popularity . . .. A Levada Centre poll released on Tuesday showed that 51% of respondents planned to vote for United Russia – down from 60% just one week before.” (Elder) So they try to boost their ratings by attacking LGBT people.

This is when they are not stealing elections outright. When describing their 2007 victory, “the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said that 'measured by our standards, it was neither a free, fair nor democratic election.'” (The Economist) That election featured “the entire machinery of the authoritarian state—including courts, prosecutors, media and security agencies.” (ibid) This meant that “large lorries with military and riot police surrounded Moscow's main squares.” (ibid)

An authoritarian state which uses police powers to maintain control is not on the side of the 99%. Using vulnerable minorities as scapegoats to maintain power is also undemocratic. By linking LGBT people with paedophilia, the ruling party is effectively inciting violence against LGBT people. State violence is not on the side of the 99%, whether it's carried out directly by a cop holding a canister of pepper spray, or by a vigilante, egged on to violence by agents of the 1% trying to hang on to power.

The 99% includes LGBT people. If we are standing together in solidarity with the 99% of OWS and the 99% of Tahir, we should also stand with the 99% of Russia. Already, the international outcry against this unjust law is causing St Petersberg's legislators to pause. The Pink Paper reports that, “St Petersburg lawmakers are reportedly reconsidering the provisions of a 'gay propaganda' law.” (Gray) Now is the time to act, as, “according to Federation Council of Russia speaker Valentina Matviyenko such ban on 'propaganda of homosexualism' might also be adopted on federal level.” (Wikipedia) We can stop this now before it gets worse.

Occupy homophobia! We are the 99%

How to Help

Sign the Petition

If you are near London, come to the protest.

Bibliography

Elder, Miriam. “Putin's United Russia party criticised for suggestive election advert.” The Guardian. 9 November 2011. Web. Assessed 23 November 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/09/putin-united-russia-party-advert>

Gray, Stephen. “Outcry prompts St Petersburg legislature to reconsider 'gay propaganda' law.” The Pink Paper. 23 November 2011. Web. Assessed 24 November 2011. <http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/11/23/outcry-prompts-st-petersburg-legislature-to-reconsider-gay-propaganda-law/>

“LGBT Rights in Russia.” Wikipedia. Web. Assessed 24 November 2011. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Russia>

“The secret policeman's election.” The Economist. 6 December 2011. Web. Assessed 24 November 2011. <http://www.economist.com/node/10268185>

Protest St Petersber's new anti-LGBT Law (NEW DATE AND TIME)

2011-11-23T23:38:00.001Z

Time and Date: 3:45 pm, Thursday, 1 December

Location: Meet in front of the Nandos by Notting Hill Gate Tube station to walk to the Russian Embassy
6/7 Kensington Palace Gardens, London, W8 4QP
Map: http://g.co/maps/d5tfr

According to the Pink Paper:

The city of St Petersburg has passed a law which puts in place fines for people who promote the LGBT community to minors.

The new law passed by 27 votes to 1, having been introduced by the ruling United Russia party.

It introduces fines for "propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism and transgenderism, to minors" and "propaganda of paedophilia".

Fines range from 1,000 roubles (£20) for an individual to 50,000 (£1,000) for a business.

Polina Savchenko, General manager of LGBT organization Coming Out, Russia told LGBT Asylum News while the bill was being discussed: “By combining homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexuality into one law with sexual crimes against minors, members of the Legislative Assembly indulge in gross manipulations of public opinion. “Their goal – to pass an anti-democratic law, directed at severely limiting human rights in St. Petersburg. She added: “Organizers of public events cannot restrict access of minors to any open area; people under 18 can be there just by chance. Consequently, it makes any public campaigns aimed at reducing xenophobia and hate crime prevention impossible.”

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/11/21/st-petersburg-passes-gay-propaganda-law/

Similar laws are already in place in the Ryazan region and Arkhangelsk region. Wikipedia states that “according to Russian media, a similar regional law is being drafted in Moscow city legislature and according to Federation Council of Russia speaker Valentina Matviyenko such ban on 'propaganda of homosexualism' might also be adopted on federal level in order to 'protect the children from destructive influence'.”

The international community must stand up to these attempts to scapegoat Russian LGBT people.

Join us at 3:45 on 1 December to march to the Embassy to protest this anti-democrat homo and transphobic law. Bring signs, banners, etc.

Facebook Event: www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=178542975572908

This event has been moved to coincide with the World AIDS Day protest of Russia's treatment of IV Drug Users. See more about that at: http://russianembassyprotest.wordpress.com/

Explaining the Inexplicable: Gender Dysphoria

2011-11-05T18:58:00.000Z

I was in my 20's the first time I ever experienced snow. I'd seen it on TV and distant hilltops, but I'd never been in it, heard it fall, smelled it, gotten it stuck to my clothes. There's no way anybody could have really explained snow to me.

And yet, I'd seen a lot of TV and movies that featured snow, read books, read descriptions. So If my attempt to explain dysphoria is confusing, imagine that you've never seen snow.

I asked on twitter several weeks ago, “If you were going to try to explain dysphoria to a cis person, what would you say?” Nobody replied, except one guy who said, "I'd use the pizza topping example 'I like pineapple, it just don't belong in my pizza.' or something similar..." I'm not sure what he meant.

I was asking because of a particular cis person, but it did get me thinking more generally about the difficulty in communicating something that is outside of most people's experience. But I thought I could try to explain:

I'm starting to see the convenience of the "in the the wrong body" narrative as a way to attempt to explain the inexplicable. However, I prefer to think of myself as having after-market upgrades. Because who gets the right body? One of the most good looking (cis) guys I know told me doesn't like his body and meanwhile I wish I looked more like him. Also the "trapped" in the wrong body thing seems alarmingly close to some very problematic ideas about disabled people.

I've never had another body than the one I have now, he's mine, he's me. I'm male, so every part of my body is male. For example, I have a very manly spleen. This is why I almost always refer to having transitioned in the past tense, dating it back to when I started T. Losing my moobs was a happy day indeed, but it doesn't make me more of a man.

St Augustine wrote about being freaked out by his private parts, cleverly disguised as a discussion of Original Sin. Adam was the first, last and only guy to get the right body, according to Augustine and then getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden screwed everything up for everyone. Which is to say that I wish I could pass naked, but everybody has issues.

On the other hand, it really does bug me that I have parts that are atypical and how I feel about them is a lot more complex than whether they're "wrong," because they are male and they are part of me. And that's what I can't explain. My experience of this is not the universal trans experience, because there is no such thing.

Which is why I don't normally try to explain. All interested parties accept my assertions about myself and I accept their assertions about themselves and we move on.

How much could I even explain? I dunno how I figured out I was a man, just that I know I am. Not that this was an easy conclusion to come to. I spent a lot of time agonising about this, and yet the process is opaque to me now. When I read She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan, I found her glibness on the issue profoundly frustrating. She said she “just knew.” I didn't know at the time and wished she'd said more about how this came to be. Alas, now I “just know,” and am not sure what more I can say about it. I think that if I asked a cis person how they knew they're cis, I doubt they's have a better answer.

It bothers me when cis people get freaked out about this. And despite my happy life in a bubble, it's clear that they do get freaked out, even the well-meaning ones. Sometimes, I think an easy explanation might help them, but, again, it's like snow. Well-meaning people will quickly see that they need to just accept that other people have different experiences. They will accept that snow exists without having ever been in a blizzard. Becoming a spokesman for the weather service won't help.

It seems weird to some people, but it's my life. It's my identity. It's vital. And yet, as the one who is different, I'm socially expected to engage and manage other people's reactions, in which they are alarmed by a core aspect of my being. It's interactions like that in which I see the great attraction of going stealth. Instead, here are some words about it.

Writing Letters to Oakland

2011-11-05T15:45:00.000Z

Dear Mayor Quan,

I just watched an internet video in which an Oakland Police officer at the Occupy Oakland protest had his name taped over, so that it was unreadable.

We ask a OPD officer why he had his name badge covered.... from BLK PXLS on Vimeo.

The officer in question, J. Hargraves, was ordered to remove the covering by his superior officer once members of the public intervened. That he had his name covered at all strongly suggests to me that he was intending to break the law in his policing of protesters. I also find it troubling that he was willing to do this only a few feet away from his superior officer. This further suggests that the department has an informal policy allowing or encouraging this behavior.

I hope you as mayor investigate whether or not this is the case and order the police to issue a clarification to their officers that they are required to follow the law and respect the civil rights of protesters.

Thank you for your time,
Charles Hutchins

You can contact the mayor of Oakland via her website: http://www.oaklandnet.com/contactmayor.asp

You cannot shop your way to a better world

2011-10-17T16:18:00.002+01:00

Shopping is not activism.

Let me state that again: a targeted, organised, specific boycott, like the United Farm Workers No Grapes boycott of the 1980's is activism. Because it has specific goals and is part of a larger protest movement. But buying only locally produced, organic produce from your local co-op is not activism. Because shopping is not activism.

Now, it could be very good for you and beneficial for your community to buy organic produce from your co-op, but that doesn't make it activism. Similarly, you can use voting as a way of mitigating negative political change in your area, but voting isn't activism either.

There are images going around facebook that suggest the "real" way to occupy Wall Street is by shopping at the right stores. I want to pick apart some of the problems with that.

Many of Walmart's shoppers are poor. they shop there because they can afford the produce there. It might not be great produce or an altruistic retailer, but they're eating better than they would be if they shopped someplace else. While it's true that their communities would be better off if there were more independent retailers, in the mean times, you're asking them to sacrifice feeding fresh fruits and vegetables to their kids. This is not reasonable. Also, by implication, the people who shop at Walmart become responsible of the bad effects of that retailer, when, in fact, they tend to suffer more keenly from those same effects.

Let's say you go to an independent shop to buy clothes. Good for you. What are you going to buy? You decide to avoid the cardigan made by sweatshop labour. Good for you. You decide to avoid the one made with polluting synthetic yarn. You decide to get one made from only ethically treated animals. And decide to mitigate pollution by only going for organically fed animals. So you buy a llama hair cardigan made by a local hippie who grew his own llamas locally, feeding them only locally grown organic feed. You have successfully avoided Wall Street, kept your carbon footprint low, bought a sustainable cardigan that will last for several years and keep you warm even when you get soaked by the rain. Good for you! That cardigan probably cost $200, every penny of which stayed local and was invested back into your community. This was a good choice of how to spend your disposable income.

However, buying your hypothetical cardigan was not activism. First of all, although it was a wise investment in your own clothes and the community, this was really not affordable to most people. Walmart shoppers cannot afford to buy your clothes. Buying that cardigan is certainly an ethical act, but it's not an accessible act. If you want to protest income inequality and economic injustice, this protest could not possibly come in the form of expensive personal purchases.

It's disappointing that voting and shopping are not actually enough to change the world in a meaningful, positive way. These things are, quite literally, the least we should do. And we should do them. Those of us who can vote should take that responsibility seriously and if you have enough money to be ethical with your purchases, then certainly do it, but don't make these things out to be bigger than they are. If you want to occupy Wall Street, then you're going to have to vote with your body, not with your money and not with a check mark in a box, but by physically participating.

Our consumer culture of predatory capitalism has gotten seriously out of control and fixing it requires people of different social classes working together. If your activism is not accessible to the poor, it's not in common cause with them. Anybody can stand in a mass demonstration. And we need to stand together.

I know we've been told our whole lives that consuming stuff is voting with our money, that we have choices that empower us through buying stuff and that we can build our identity (including our moral sense of self) by what we buy, but all of these ideas came from advertisers who want to sell us stuff. It's been drummed into our heads since birth, but it's not true. It's propaganda to keep us buying stuff and docile. The purpose is to prevent protest, not empower an easy for of it.

Activism is a group activity. If it's done at the mall, it comes with a risk of being escorted out by security. It is visible. It is disruptive. It is what we need.

Occupying Oakland

2011-10-16T02:06:00.000+01:00

I was on the West Coast of the US for a few days recently. On my last day there, I spent some time at Occupy Oakland, one of the occupation protests to spin off from Occupy Wall Street. The Oakland protest was an encampment in front of City Hall. I arrived on Tuesday afternoon to find a bunch of tents set up and people milling about. There were signs posted, renaming the plaza to "Oscar Grant Plaza." Oscar Grant was, of course, the man shot by BART police a year or two ago. Other signs invited the 99% to "hella" occupy Oakland. Another large banner was against corporate oligarchy

Some of the people were working on stuff, so I asked a guy there if I could help. He sent me to the food tent, where there was another guy dishing up soup to passers by. I helped him out for a while and then he went off, leaving me in the tent.

Several people came up for soup, bread, grapes os something to drink. The soup was made in a large pot which was over a camp stove that was keeping it warm. It seemed like about half the people who came asking for food where people who had come specifically for the protest and the other half were people who might have been hungry anyway. I worked a shift in a soup kitchen once many years ago and this was not like that. In the soup kitchen, you have a stark dividing line between who is feeding and who is being fed. Some people bring food and others eat it. In this case, there were people coming constantly with donations, but everybody was eating together.

As long as people just wanted soup, I was fine and I could tell them where to put material donations, but anything more than that and I had no idea. I was alone in the tent for a while, unable to answer questions. Finally the women who knew stuff came back and told me to take a break.

I wandered through the tents to where I could hear music. There were native Americans playing a large drum and singing. A reporter from the local TV news recorded herself talking with them in the background. A circle of lesbians were sitting nearby with a MacBook, planning something. A woman from Revolution Books sold me a newspaper about how Bob Avakian is the second coming of Mao. I sat in the sun until the shade progressed over the entire plaza and then I moved towards more music.

I found a guy with an American flag T-shirt and a rockabilly haircut playing a guitar and singing something about a "rich man" through a PA system, when there seemed to be the sound of drumming getting gradually closer. There was a samba band marching up the street, to the occupation. As they arrived, the guitar player wrapped up his set and the drums played for at least an hour. They had a dance troop with them. Both the drummers and the dancers were amazing. After a long routine, they said they'd brought extra instruments and everybody should join them by playing or dancing. Many people did.

Meanwhile, the kitchen crew had gotten a BBQ going and were cooking something that might have been pork. A woman came by with a bag of apples and handed them out to all and sundry, so some people stood eating ribs or apples, watching people dance. This was Oakland, so the dancers were all races, all ages. Some of them were middle class, some were poor. Some were white, some were black, some were asian. There were LGB people, trans people, straight people, cis people, in what felt like a giant festival. A middle schooler lept into the middle of the dancers and started break dancing to wild cheering. Then a pair of guys in maybe their mid 20s started doing a sort of martial arts dance while the samba dancers danced in a circle around them. One of the martial arts guys was hopping up and down on his hands while the other one did some move I could never hope to replicate.

The joy, the diversity, the food, the music, the use of the word "hella" - it was pure Oakland. It's why I love the East Bay. It's why that protest gave me hope. With the wide swath of people participating, with the toilets donated by the unions (and by a local BBQ joint), it felt like real coalitions are happening. And while the demands of the protest aren't entirely clear, they're building something that seems like a movement. Real change might come out of this and it is change we desperately need.

How to do page numbers and a table of contents in NeoOffice

2011-09-29T11:05:00.001+01:00

This may also apply to Open Office.

Go to the format menu and select styles and formatting. a window or something will come up. one of the tabs on it is for page types. Duplicate the default type and call it something else. Then, go to the start of your document at the very top of the page and under insert, select manual break. A window will open that will have a drop down menu of the page types. Change it from [none] to the page type you just created. At the bottom of the window, in the second little box from the left, it lists page type. so when you're on your new blank page, it should say default and when you go to the second page, it should say the name of your new type of page.

Next, go to the first page of your text and go to the insert menu and select footer and it will have next to that your two page types. Check the one that describes the main body of your text. It will hopefully make you a footer, which it will then stick your cursor in. then under the insert menu, go to fields and the page number. The popup will have something asking about style, make sure it's set to 1 2 3, etc. and it will have something about starting with a specific page number. set that to 1.

Then go back to that first empty, still blank page and insert two manual breaks so you have three blank pages at the start of your document. Go the middle of those pages and go to the insert menu and then select indexes and tables and then indexes and tables and then table of contents

You're nearly there. Go back to the styles and formatting window and go to the paragraph styles tag. Right click on the one called heading1 and select modify. It will give you a window asking about spacing, fonts, etc. Set it to look like every heading you've used for your chapter titles. If they're 14 point centred times new roman, then make it like that. then go to heading2 and modify it so it looks like your subheadings you've used for chapter sections and keep doing this for all the heading levels you've used.

Now, lastly, go through your text and highlight all your headings. So at the starts of chapter 1, highlight your title "why i'm awesome" (or whatever you called it) and then, in the styles and formatting window, double click on the heading 1. This will switch that title to have the heading 1 formatting, which, if you did it right, will look the same as it did before. Then go to your subheading and select it and double click on heading2 in the styles and formatting window. Go through your entire document changing your heading to use the heading1, heading2, etc. When you've got everything, go back up to your table of contents page and right click on the table of contents. A menu will pop up and one of the options will be to update the table of contents. Do that and it should list all fo your headings and subheadings. If you're missing some of them, then you forgot to change it in the document.

And of course, the best way to do this is to use the headings and stuff from when you first start writing your document, so keep that in mind for next time.

I wrote a letter to the Metro

2011-09-16T14:30:00.000+01:00

I wrote to the Metro about this article which differs from the print version. The print headline was "Boy, 10, returns to school a girl." The first sentence repeated the word "boy" and thereafter used only terms like "child," and avoided any use at all of pronouns.

I'm not sure how much of an improvement it is to say that a 10 year old wants a "sex change." I guess they thought the word "transgender" would be too difficult for London morning commuters.

This is the letter I wrote:

Dear [Editor],

I am writing in regards to yesterday's Metro front page article, "Boy, 10, who went back to school a girl" in regards to misgendering the subject. The correct way to refer to a trans person's gender is to follow their choices. The girl in the article clearly wishes to be known as a girl and your use of "boy" in the first sentence and headline is therefore inappropriate. The rest of the article uses only the term "child." It is not appropriate or neutral to treat this girl's gender as if it is a subject of open debate. You also use words like "youngster" to avoid using pronouns outside of direct quotes. This, plus the use of boy does seem to undermine the gender identity of the girl.

There is a very helpful website, trans media watch, which offers advice to journalists writing articles about trans people: http://www.transmediawatch.org/guidance_for_media.html This website advises the media to avoid phrases like "sex-change," which also appears in the first sentence of your article. Your article is otherwise sympathetic, so I hope you can keep these things in mind the next time you write about a trans person.

Did I mention they picked it as their front page article? This is something that happens every single autumn in at least one school in the UK. It was in other news outlets, including on the BBC, as the girls' mum talked to the national press. I'm all for raising awareness of anti-trans bullying, but large shocking headlines seem to be participating in, rather than decrying, adults calling this girl a "freak."

The Metro has not acknowledged my letter, although they did correct the web version. I thought I'd post the letter here.

I'm trying to imagine how it would have felt to have a newspaper headline when I returned to uni with a new set of pronouns... I hope the girl's mum is keeping her away from the news.

Dissertation Draft: Solo Live Electronic Pieces

2011-09-15T16:51:00.001+01:00

Phreaking

When the local 2600 group, started organising BrumCon 2007, which took place on 3 May 2008, I asked if I could present a musical set. They had never done such a thing before, but they agreed. 2600 is a hacker group (“2600 Meetings”) with roots in phone phreaking (Trigaux), so I decided to reference that in a piece written for the gig.

As noted in The Complete Hacker's Handbook, “Phone phreaking” refers to the practice hacking phone systems in order to get free calls or just explore the workings of the system. Phone systems used to be controlled by in-band signalling, that is, audible tones that a user could reproduce in order to gain unauthorised control. For example, 2600 Hz was a useful tone to “seize” control of a line. Other such sounds commonly found in telephony are Dual Tone Multi Frequency [DTMF] sounds, which are the ones produced by a landline keypad. (Dr. K.)

I looked up red box phreaking on Wikipedia and also DTMF signals and used those tones as the heart of the piece. It starts with a dial tone, then does coin dropping sounds, followed by the sound of dialling and then a ring back sound, followed by a 2600 Hz tone. After that introduction, it plays dialling signals and then a beat. The beat is made up of patterns of sampled drums. The programme picks random beats to be accented, which will always have a drum sound on them and then scatters drum sounds on some of the other beats also. The loop is repeated between 8-10 times and then a new pattern is created, retaining the same accents for the duration of the piece. If the randomly generated drum pattern seems too sparse or too full of beats, the performer can intervene by pressing a joystick button to add some drum beats or another to remove them. The idea for randomly accenting beats comes a lecture by Paul Berg at Sonology in the Hague where he noted that accenting random beats seems like it had a deliberate rhythm when it's heard by audiences. This is related to Trevor Wishart's discussion of Clarence Barlow's “indispensability factor,” where Wishart notes that changing accents of a steady beat can alter the listener's perception between time signatures. (Wishart p 64) It seems that greater randomness in picking accents leads listeners to perceive more complex rhythms.

After the beats, a busy signal comes in occasionally. There are also bass frequencies which are DTMF sine tones transposed by octaves. Finally, there are samples of operator messages that are used in the American phone system. These are glitched and stuttered, the degree of which is controlled with a joystick. Thus, this piece is partly a live-realisation, self-running piece and partly controlled by a performer.

At the time, I was interested in making computer pieces that necessarily had to be computer pieces and could not be realised with live instruments or with an analogue synthesiser. Extremely exact tunings and sample processing are both examples of things that are computer-dependant. I was also interested to have more live control and more visible gesture, in order to, as Paine describes in his paper on gesture in laptop performance, “inject a sense of the now, an engagement with audience in an effort to reclaim the authenticity associated with ‘live’ performance.” (Paine p 4) I thought having physical motions would engage the audience more than a live realisation. Conversely and relatedly, I was also interested in the aesthetics of computer failure, within the glitches I was creating. Cascone writes, “'[Failure]' has become a prominent aesthetic in many of the arts in the late 20th century, reminding us that our control of technology is an illusion, and revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them. “ (Cascone) I thought this intentional highlighting of imperfection would especially resonate with an audience that largely worked in a highly technical and professional capacity with computers.

I also find glitches to be aesthetically appealing and have been influenced by the extremely glitchy work of Ryoji Ikeda, especially works like Data.Matrix, which is a sonification of data. (“Datamatics”) Similarly, in-band signalling is literally a sonic encoding of data, designed for computer usage.

When I performed the piece at BrumCon, their sound system did not have an even frequency response. Some sine waves sounded way louder than others and I did not have a way to adjust. I suspect this problem is much more pronounced for sine tones than it is for richer frequencies. Another problem I encountered was that I was using sounds with strong semantic meanings for the audience. Many of them had been phreakers and the sounds already had a specific meaning and context that I was not accurately reproducing. Listeners without this background have generally been more positive about the piece. One blogger wrote the piece sounded like a “demonic homage to Gaga’s Telephone,” (Lao) although he did note that my piece was written earlier.

Blake's 9

The music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has been a major influence on my music for a long time. The incidental music and sound effects of Doctor Who during the Tom Baker years was especially formative. I found time in 2008 to watch every episode of Blakes 7 and found the sound effects to be equally compelling. I spent some time with my analogue synthsiser and tried to create sounds like the ones used in the series. I liked the sounds I got, but they were a bit too complex to layer into a collage for making a piece that way, but not complex enough to stand on their own. I wrote a SuperCollider programme to process them through granular synthesis and other means and to create a piece using the effects as source material, mixed with other computer generated sounds.

The timing on a micro, “beat,” and loop level are all in groups of nine or multiples of nine, which is why I changed the number in the piece title. I was influenced to use this number by a London poet, Mendoza, who had a project called ninerrors which ze^* describes as, “a sequence of poems constricted by configurations of 9: connected & dis-connected by self-imposed constraint. each has 9 lines or multiples of 9, some have 9 words or syllables per line, others are divisible by 9. ninerrors is presented as a series of 9 pamphlets containing 9 pages of poetry.” (“ninerrors”) I adopted a use of nines not only in the timings, but also in shifting the playback rate of buffers, which are played at rates of 27/25, 9/7, 7/9 or 25/27. The tone clusters frequencies also are related to each other by tuning ratios that are similarly based on nine. I was in contact with Mendoza while writing this piece and one of the poems in hir ninerrors cycle, an obsessive compulsive disorder, mentions part of the creation of this piece in it's first line, “washing machine spin cycle drowns out synth drones.” (“an obsessive compulsive disorder”)

While ratios based on nines gave me the internal tunings of the tone cluster, I used Dissonance Curves, as described by William Sethares, to generate the tuning and scale for the base frequencies of the clusters. The clusters should therefore sound as consonant as possible and provide a contrast to the rest of the piece, which is rather glitchy. The glitches come partly from the analogue material, but also from sudden cuts in the playback of buffers. For some parts of the piece, the programme records it's own output and then uses that as source material, something that may stutter, especially if the buffer is recording it's own output. I used this effect because, as mentioned above, I want to use a computer to do things which only it can do. When writing about glitches, Vanhanen writes that their sounds “are sounds of the . . . technology itself.” (p 47) He notes that “if phonography is essentially acousmatic, then the ultimate phonographic music would consist of sounds that have no acoustic origin,” (p 49) thus asserting that skips and “deliberate mistakes” (ibid) are the essential sound of “phonographic styles of music.” (ibid) Similarly, “glitch is the digital equivalent of the phonographic metasound.” (p 50) It is necessarily digital and thus is inherently tied to my use of a computer. While my use of glitch is oppositional to the dominant style of BEAST, according to Vanhanen, it is also the logical extension of acousmatic music.

Indeed, the piece was written with the BEAST system in mind. The code was written to allow N-channel realisations. Some gestures are designed with rings of 8 in mind, but others, notably at the very start, are designed to be front speakers only. Some of the “recycled” buffers, playing back the pieces own recordings were originally intended to be sent to distant speakers, not pointed at the audience, thus give some distance between the audience and those glitches when they are first introduced. I chose to do it this way partly in order to automate the use of spatial gesture. In his paper on gesture, Paine notes that moving a sound in space is a from of gesture, specifically mentioning the BEAST system. (p 11) I think that because this gesture is already physical, it does not need to necessarily rely on the physical gesture of a performer moving faders. Removing my own physical input from the spatialisation process allowed me more control over the physical placement of the sound, without diminishing the audience's experience of the piece as authentic. It also gives me greater separation between sounds, since the stems are generated separately and lets me use more speakers at once, thus increasing the immersive aspect (p 13) of the performance.

Although this piece is entirely non-interactive, it is a live realisation which makes extensive use of randomisations and can vary significantly between performances. In case I get a additional chances to perform it on a large speaker system, I would like the audience to have a fresh experience every time it is played.

Synthesiser Improvisation

When I was a student at Wesleyan, I had my MOTM analogue modular synthesier mounted into a 6 foot tall free-standing rack that was intended for use in server rooms. It was not very giggable, but it was visually quite striking. When my colleagues saw it, they launched a campaign that I should do a live-patching concert. I was initially resistant to their encouragement, as it seemed like a terrible idea, but eventually I gave in and spent several days practicing getting sounds quickly and then refining them. In performance, as with other types of improvisation, I would find exciting and interesting sounds that I had not previously stumbled on in the studio. Some of my best patches have been live.

I've been deeply interested in the music of other composers who do live analogue electronics, especially in the American experimental tradition of the 1960s and 70s. Bye Bye Butterfly by Pauline Oliveros is one such piece, although she realised it in a studio. (Bernstein p 30) This piece and others that I find interesting are based on discovering the parameters and limits of a sound phenomenon. Bernstein writes that “She discovered that a beautiful low difference tone would sound” when her oscillators were tuned in a particular way. (ibid) Live patching also seems to be music built on discovery, but perhaps a step more radical for it's being performed live.

Even more radical than live patching is Runthrough by David Behrman, which is realised live with DIY electronics. The programme notes for that piece state, “No special skills or training are helpful in turning knobs or shining flashlights, so whatever music can emerge from the equipment is as available to non-musicians as to musicians . . .. Things are going well when all the players have the sensation they are riding a sound they like in harmony together, and when each is appreciative of what the others are doing.” (“Sonic Arts Union”) The piece is based entirely on discovery and has no set plan or written score. (ibid) The piece-ness relies on the equipment. This is different than live-patching because a modular synthesiser is designed to be a more general purpose tool and its use does not imply a particular piece. Understanding the interaction between synthesiser modules is also a specialist skill and does imply that expertise is possible. However, the idea of finding a sound and following it is similar.

Recently, I have been investigating ways to merge my synthesiser performance with my laptop performance. The first obvious avenue of exploration was via live sampling. This works well with a small modular, like the Evenfall Mini Modular, which is small enough to put into a rucksack and has many normalised connections. It has enough flexibility to make interesting and somewhat unexpected music, but is small and simple enough that I can divide my attention between it and a laptop. Unfortunately, mine was damaged in a bike accident in Amsterdam in 2008 and has not yet been repaired.

My MOTM synthesiser, however, is too large and too complex to divide my attention between it and a laptop screen. I experimented with using gamepad control of a live sampler, such that I did not look at the computer screen at all, but relied on being able to hear the state of the programme and a memory of what the different buttons did. I tried this once in concert at Noise = Noise #19 in April 2010. As is often the case in small concerts, I could not fully hear both monitor speakers, which made it difficult to monitor the programme. Furthermore, as my patch grew in complexity, the computer-added complexity became difficult to perceive and I stopped being able to tell if it was still working correctly or at all. A few minutes into the performance, I stopped the computer programme entirely and switched to all analogue sounds. While the programme did not perform in the manner I had intended, the set was a success and the recording also came out quite well and is included in my portfolio. One blogger compared the track to Jimi Hendrix, (Weidenbaum) which was certainly unexpected.

It is unusual for me to have a live recording come out well. This is because of the live, exploratory aspect to the music. If I discover that the I can make the subwoofers shake the room or make the stage rattle, or discover another acoustic phenomenon in the space, I will push the music in that direction. While this is exciting to play, and hopefully to hear, it doesn't tend to come out well on recordings. I also have a persistent problem with panning. On stage, it's often difficult to hear both monitors and judging the relative amplitudes between them requires a certain concentration that I find difficult to do while simultaneously patching and altering timbres. In order to solve this problem, I've written a small programme in SuperCollider which monitors the stereo inputs of the computer and pans them to output according to their amplitude. If one is much louder than the other, it is panned to centre and the other output slowly oscillated between left and right. If the two inputs are close in amplitude, the inputs are panned left and right, with some overlap. I think this is the right answer for how to integrate a computer with my synthesiser. Rather than giving me more things to think about, this silently fixes a problem, thus removing a responsibility. An example of playing with the autopanner, from a small living room concert in 2011, is included in my portfolio.

For future exploration, I am thinking of returning to the idea of live sampling, but similarly without my interaction. I would tell the computer when the set starts and it would help me build up a texture through live sampling. Then, as my inputted sound became more complex (or after a set period of time), the computer interventions would fade out, leaving me entirely analogue. This could help me get something interesting going more quickly, although it may violate the “blank canvas” convention of live coding and live patching. In February 2011, there was a very brief discussion on the TopLap email list as to whether live patching was an analogue form of live coding (Rohrhuber). I do not see that much commonality between them, partly because a synthsiser patch is more like a chainsaw than it is like an idea, (“ManifestoDraft”) and partly because patching is much more tactile than coding is. However, some of the same conventions do seem to apply to both.

Bibliography

“2600 Meetings.” 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Web. 8 September 2011. <http://www.2600.com/meetings/>

Behrman, David. “Runthrough.” 1971. Web. 15 September 2011. <http://www.ubu.com/sound/sau.html>

Bernstein, David. “The San Francisco Tape Music Center: Emering Art Forms and the American Counterculture, 1961 – 1966.” The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Ed. David Bernstein. Berkeley, CA, USA: University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Blakes 7. BBC. BBC One, UK. 2 January 1978 – 21 December 1981. Television.

Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” rseonancias. 2002. Web. 8 September 2011. <http://www.ccapitalia.net/reso/articulos/cascone/aesthetics_failure.htm>

Cascone, Kim. “The Microsound Scene: An Interview with Kim Cascone.” Interview with Jeremy Turner. Ctheory.net. 12 April 2001. Web. 11 September 2011. <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=322>

“Datamatics.” ryoji ikeda. Web. 12 September 2011. <http://www.ryojiikeda.com/project/datamatics/>

Doctor Who. BBC. BBC One, UK. 23 November 1963 – 6 December 1989. Television.

Dr. K. “Chapter 9: Phone Phreaking in the US & UK.” Complete Hacker's Handbook. Web. 5 September 2011. <http://www.telefonica.net/web2/vailankanni/HHB/HHB_CH09.htm>

Hutchins, Charles Céleste. “Gig report: Edgetone Summit.” Les said, the better. 6 August 2008. Web. 5 September 2011. <http://celesteh.blogspot.com/2008/08/gig-report-edgetone-summit.html>

Ikeda, Ryoji, “Data.Matrix” 2005. Web. 12 September 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5hhFMSAuf4>

Knapp and Bortz. “Mobilemuse: Integral music control goes mobile.” 2011 NIME. University of Oslo, Norway. 31 May 2011.

Kuivila, Ron. “David Tutor: Live Electonic Music.” Leonardo Music Journal. December 2004. 106-107. Web. 12Sepetember 2011. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1513516>

Lao, Linus. “The music of Charles Celeste Hutchins.” Pringle's Hardware Store. 17 June 2010. Web. 8 September 2011. <http://thelinusblog.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/the-music-of-charles-celeste-hutchins/>

“ManifestoDraft.” TopLap. 14 November 2010. Web. 12 September 2011. <http://toplap.org/index.php/ManifestoDraft>

Mendoza. “an obsessive compulsive disorder” ninerrors. 2009. Web. 9 September 2011. <http://ninerrors.blogspot.com/2009/10/ninerrors-2.html>

Mendoza. “ninerrors: Poetry Series.” Web. 9 September 2011. <http://ninerrors.blogspot.com/>

Moller, Polly. “Pre-concert Q&A Session.” Edgetone New Music Summit. San Francisco Community Music Center, San Francisco, California, USA. 23 July 2008.

Olewnick, Brian. “Live Electronic Music.” AllMusic. Web. 12 September 2011. <http://www.allmusic.com/album/live-electronic-music-w95765/review>

Oliveros, Pauline. “Bye Bye Butterfly.” 1965. Web. 12 September 2011. <http://open.spotify.com/track/3sqvayIhGIvWcYG6G1pf8m>

Paine, Garth. “Gesture and Morphology in Laptop Music Performance.” 2008. Web. 8 September 2011. <http://www.activatedspace.com/papers/files/gesture-and-morphology-in-laptop-performance.pdf>

“Red box (phreaking).” Wikipedia. Web. 5 September 2011. <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Red_box_%28phreaking%29>

Rohruber, Julian. “[livecode] analogue live coding?” Email to livecode list. 19 February 2011. <

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Schloss, W. Andrew. “Using Contemporary Technology in Live Performance: The Dilemma of the Performer.” Journal of New Music Research. 2002. Web. 11 September 2011. <http://people.finearts.uvic.ca/~aschloss/publications/JNMR02_Dilemma_of_the_Performer.pdf>

Sethares, William. “Relating Tuning and Timbre.” Web. 11 September 2011. <http://sethares.engr.wisc.edu/consemi.html>

“Sonic Arts Union”. UbuWeb. 1971. Web. 15 September 2011. <http://www.ubu.com/sound/sau.html>

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“The Transparent Tape Music Festival.” SF Sound. Web. 12 September 2011. <http://sfsound.org/tape/oliveros.html>

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Vanhanen, Janne. “Virtual Sound: Examining Glitch and Production.” Contemporary Music Review 22:4 (2003) 45-52. Web. 11 September 2011. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0749446032000156946>

Weidenbaum, Mark. “In London, Noise = Noise.” Disquiet. 7 May 2010. Web. 12 September 2011. <http://disquiet.com/2010/05/07/charles-celeste-hutchins/>

Wishart, Trevor. Audible Design. Orpheus the Pantomime Ltd, 1994. Print.

*“ze” and “hir” are gender neutral pronouns

Remembering

2011-09-11T13:20:00.000+01:00

We all remember exactly where we were ten years ago today, so I'll skip that part. Some of you lost family members, friends, jobs or became injured when terrorists attacked the US and I'm very sorry for your loss.

For the rest of us, and most of the people watching TV coverage or reading endless news editorials or otherwise paying attention to this anniversary, it was something that happened in a remote location, a far away city, with no personal effect at all, aside from the shock and horror that we all felt. And today, the TV and editorials and whatever are asking us to rekindle that shock and horror and revel in it as if it were yesterday and not ten years ago. I don't think that's useful, helpful or remotely reasonable.

No other successful foreign terrorist attack has happened in the US since 2001. The ones foiled by the FBI turn out to have been half-hearted and poorly planned at best. We don't need to react to this memory with fear. Instead, I think we should stop and ask how it has changed us as a country, as a culture and as a people. Is this who we wanted to become? Is this the country we want to have? Have the changes we've made caused us to be better or worse than before? It's true we can never go back in time, but we're not on a fixed course forever either. We can reassess and change.

The creation of the Department of Homeland Security removed union rights from a large number of government workers. Do we still want it to be like that? The Patriot Act allowed warrantless wiretapping and all kind of domestic spying, temporarily, but it's still ongoing. Do we want to renew that? A lot of people will be talking about the wars we're now waging abroad, the secret prisions, the renditions, the predator drones, and that bears reflection as well. Do we want to do all that to other people? But also, what do we want to do to ourselves? Does a terrorist attack in NYC mean that we need to reconfigure emergency services such that we cannot respond to a hurricane in New Orleans? Does it mean we need to attack unions? Does it mean we need to bleed all spending on social programmes out of our economy so we can afford more bombs?

In the days after 9/11, we talked a lot about reflection and taking stock. Now might be time to do that again. Are we better than we were before, or have we made ourselves worse? What should we do now in the next ten years?

Live blogging stallman

2011-08-25T20:21:00.002+01:00

Stallman is speaking in Brum

He says that proprietary softwre is a tool that the owner uses to control the users.

closed source software may contain malicious code used to harm or spy on the user. As does windows and the iphone. (And andriod, which is open source).

Free software develops solutions but proprietary programmes create dependance. Writing free software is a contribution to society. Proprietary software harms society, he says. Good features in a proprietary programme are bait in a trap. The users are suckered in and made less free.

To what extent do the 4 freedoms apply outside of software?

If you buy an object, does it carry restrictions on using it as you wish? (Freedom 0)

Freedom 1 is the freedom to study and change the source code. Do you have that freedom to modify an object? Depends on the object. This point is kind of lame.

Freedom 2 allows people to make copies. Does not apply to physical objects because he has apparently never heard of a 3d priter. Shiny future technology will solve the problems it causes.

Has he heard of the arduino?

Now he's brining up copyright, which is apparently the main topic of his speech.

What should copyright say about what you can do with published works. Copyright developed in responce to technology, however the morals of these laws are not based on technology, however the context can change, thus effecting the utilitarian evaluation of moral choices.

in the ancient world, copies were made by hand and does not scale. There was no copyright, but copying was very difficult. There was censorship, however.

then the printing press came along and mass production copying much more efficient, but did not speed up making one-off copies. It was purely an economy of scale. Printing presses were expensive and required special skills. Copy making was highly centralised. Many copies were still made by hand. Poor people would hand copy thing because they had time but no money.

in 1553, copyright was introduced to england to censor protestant texts. You had to apply to print something and one printet would be granted a monopoly in perpetuity. In 1680, a new system came in where authors were granted a monopoly for 14 years.

The US consitution was going to have copyright in it, but instead it grants congress the power to create laws granting a monopoly for a limitted time, in order to benefit the public. Copyright laws only applied to publishers, not to hand copying. It was solely an industrial regulation. Copyright was arguably beneficial, was easy to enforce.

in the 1800s, printing got a lot cheaper. Paperbacks were invented. Hand copying dropped way off in responce to cheaper media.

the computers came along and made one off copying much much cheaper. This has completely transformed the effect of copyright law. It is no longer an industrial regulation. Copyright law has become difficult to enforce, has become controversial. It is no longer beneficial, he claims.

a proper democracy, he says, would restore a freedom to copy to the public. He says the increase of copyright power is an indictment of a non functional democracy.

retroactively increasing copyright does not encourage the production of new works in the past. Increasing copyright for future works could create an incentive for current artists, except that nobody plans for income 50-70 years after their death.

he claims that the extension of corporate copyright law in the us was done to protect mickey mouse. He says disney purchased the law. Stallman is seriously incensed.

he says film companies want perpetual copyright, which is theoretically allowable in the uk. If disney keeps this up, there will be perpetual copyright in the us, granted 20 years at a time, he claims.

he is encouraging us to fight the copyright extension of audio recordings, saying we must fight every batlle, no matter how minor.

he says publishers want to seize total power over content, making a pay-per-view uiverse via DRM. Our media players, etc will control us, instead of vice versa. He is using dvd region codes as an example. Some smart person wrote free software to let people play dvds. So the us made this illegal with the digital millenium copyright act. The eu also passed a similar law, except in finland. In france, posession of copies can be punished with a prison sentence.

Stallman is so ideologically pure, he doesn't play dvds. And we shouldn't either, he says.

aacs was a new form of encryption, which was sort of broken. Blue ray disks have new encryption every few months. Which is kind of mental. Drm on video is undefeated.

10 years ago, non-compliant cds were for sale.

(stallman is so damn free, he can't do anything....)

apple did drmed music and sony installed a rootkit on its cds, which is highly malicious software, akin to a virus. Seriously a trojan horse, this was extremely illegal. They also plagarised the code in their programme, which is illegal under copyright law.

there is drm in the playstation. Somebody put linux on it, and then sony put out an upgrade that killed linux. People have been arrested for putting free software on playstations!

DRM is mostly dead for music because of some weird contract dispute with apple. He is encouraging everyone to boycott itunes, so we can be free.

spotify is designed to restrict users, because it won't let you save streams. So nobody should use spotify. They don't actually pay labels or artists at any kind of reasonable rate, so um...

books are now facing the pressure of drm, thanks to ebooks. He thinks ebooks are a plot.

in order to be free, he has to say no a lot. The free software foundation is against facebook and are not on it and if i were smart, i wouldn't be either.

he really hates ebook readers! The amazon "swindle!" Kindle users cannot anonymously buy ebooks with cash. Amazon knows what you're reading and keeps a list. This has a large potential for human rights abuses. Ebook ownsers do not actually own their books. They cannot give it away or lend it out. They don't even get to keep a book as long as they want, only as long as amazon lets you. They remotely deleted a bunch of bought and paid for copies of "1984" off of people's kindles.

amazon promised to never do mass censorship again unless ordered to by the state. Which is not actually comforting.

now he syays we have to boycott harry potter. And puppies, i'm sure. And ice cream. "There are loys of other books that are fun to read."

i don't think i could handle this much freedom....

one company by itself could not set up drm. They have to "conspire to restrict the public's access to technology." These conspiracies are trade organisations.

"of course, you should never use a product that conspires to take away you freedom." We must organise against drm. There is a website "defective by design."

i'm not sure that boycotts are actually a useful way to deal with this.

he says copyright should last for 10 years after being published. (I'd make it a bit longer, but maybe i'm brainwashed by publish companies.) He is making a good point about how god-like devotion for composers is used abusively by publishing companies.

publishers sometimes let stuff go out of print but will prevent others from publishing.

those of us who aren't making money are uncorrupted, we still have the purity of the dueling 19th century ideas of the artist, in contrats to being godlike.

what sort of copyrights are there for content? Recipies, software, how to stuff, textbooks, etc is kind 1. He says this kind of works have to be free. "Freedom is having control of your own life."

type 2 is works that state people's views: essays, memoirs, academic works. These should not be allowed to be modified. Modification is distortion. Non-commercial redistribution of unmodified copies must be allowed because sharing is good. He says. Copyright is intolerable because of the "war on sharing." Attacking sharing is attacking society. This is EVIL, he says.

type 3 is works of art and entertainment. Should people be allowed to modiy? Modifying something may destroy its artistic integrity. But most artistic works contain remixed elements from past works. People could wait for the copyright term before allowing remixes. But, people must be free to share.

i don't see a future for for-profit publication if sharing is allowed? I allow my stuff to get shared, but i mean, if i could get lady gaga for free and it was allowed, i wouldn't pay for it

he just said something about remixing, but i was thinking about lady gaga.

peer to peer file sharing will not hurt musicians because record companies have already stolen everything. It is true that corrupt accounting is a problem for musicans on major labels.

he won't do ecommerce....

he says that musicians make money off of concerts, so sharing recorded music actually helps musicians. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, sorry.

he says only record companies lose money with music sharing record companies and they're evil and deserve it. Minor record companies are ok, of course, but let's not talk about them.

could movies still make money under stallman's capitalistic paradise? He says yes, but if we have to stop making movies, well, we'll all be more free.

he says hollywood makes shit movies on purpose, through their system. Censorship is wrong, so we must protect their right to make shit.

how to support the arts: use state funds, he says. We must be efficient in these grants. Only give it to artist, not publishers. Give away money by popularity, using polling, he says. Linear distribution is not a good plan, he says. Take the cube root of popularity he says, getting very detailed. He may think too much, but i can't really argue his point.

artists then have incentive to share.

now he's on with the virtual tip jar, which has never worked in practice, but he wants to have this government regulated? He claims that thw virtual tip jar is working for musicians, but what he's talking about is merch. He says it's not merch. Heh, I wonder if he's considered commissions. I guess all free software could come with a donation button in Stalltopia.

he seems to be taking credit for linux? Oh no wait, torvalis doesn't deserve credit. Jesus!

schools (and unis) should only use free sotware, in order to make them citizens of a free society. Now he's comparing software companies to playground drug dealers!

now he's talking about people learning to code. Only free software properly teaches coding. Closed sources are contrary to the goals of education.

students should be compelled to share their source code.

we should all campaign against MAX/MSP in education, as an ethical issue. Constantly recruit others to the cause!

Antonio is attacking his art funding proposals. Stallman is claiming that crowd funding works, which is complete bullocks. And he doesn't know the term "crowd funding," which does somewhat impunge his credibility on the issue. Then he says that WPA is the way forward, which I don't disagree with. Now he says that you can't say arts funding is too low or too high because it's inagruable, which seems dubious.

i'm pondering irritating him with android questions.

oooh ranting on "open source" in respince to another question, so no point in asking android question.

I really need dinner as his twattishness is starting to annoy me.

i'm not sure a purely software guy is really the best guy to talk about arts copyright. Especially somebody who says all closed source software developers should quit their jobs. If he doesn't want his own tribe to prosper, he's not going to be overly concerned about artists.

Dissertation Draft: Copyright, Social Networking and Commissioning Music

2011-08-12T19:02:00.001+01:00

When I started at Birmingham, I was in the midst of a project where in I was soliciting commissions of pieces of music around one minute in length. My plan was originally to compose 45 of these in total and release an album at the end. I intend to pick up where I left off and finish the project after graduating.

This project was an attempt to get a bit of attention and to address some economic and political issues of music distribution. The amount of music available to listeners only continues to rise. Every day, somebody records something and makes it available in a digital format. The cost of providing copies to consumers is practically nil. Any composer can upload an mp3 to last.fm or bandcamp at no cost. (“Bandcamp Pricing”)

Because copying and distribution is so cheap and easy, consumers often share files without paying for them. The Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA] struck back against this by suing fans (“For Students Doing Reports”), an idea which seemed poorly thought out and which has made them extremely unpopular. (Reisinger) At the same time, the duration of copyright keeps being extended, seemingly so that Mickey Mouse will never fall into the public domain. (Springman) What used to be a system to make sure that creators got their fair share is increasingly perceived as a way for big companies to control culture. (Lessig 61) Rather than adapt to new conditions, media companies are lobbying for new laws to force the genie back in the bottle. (Lessig 48) Some of these, like the Digital Economy Act are fairly draconian in that households may have their internet switched off if only one member of the household breaks copyright law. (Digital Economy Act s. 10) Despite the severity of this crackdown, many are skeptical it will make any difference. (“Q&A: The Digital Economy bill”) Rather than adapt to changing conditions, powerful, politically-connected media companies are abusing state power. Their position is morally bankrupt and their claims of victimhood are laughably overstated. The RIAA tells students that sharing an mp3 is worse than maritime hostage-taking: “It’s commonly known as 'piracy,' but that’s too benign of a term to adequately describe the toll that music theft takes . . ..” (“For Students Doing Reports”)

It seems clear that copyright is in crisis and in need of a major reform. However, the crisis of copyright does not diminish the notion of authorship. Those engaged in online music sharing still are deeply invested in who created the work they're copying. Artists that chose to participate in Open Culture models, such as Creative Commons are not ceding their work to the public domain, but instead protecting the rights of their fans. (“Frequently Asked Questions”) An artist choosing this model may be potentially sacrificing some forms of revenue, but for most emerging artists, getting heard is far more important than protecting rights which may one day generate income. Even for successful artists like Bob Ostertag, this income has failed to materialise. He writes, “[S]elling recordings in whatever format has been a break-even proposition at best.” (Ostertag)

However, artists still need to eat and pay rent. Sustainability is a major concern, but, economic support for non-mainstream composers will not be coming from record labels. Indeed, they have historically worked against the interests of composers. In 2001, composer Judy Dunaway wrote:

Of course, the recording industry does not care at all about contemporary and experimental music. The sales figures on such CDs are miniscule compared to popular music. In the words of Foster Reed at the New Albion label, "The corporate recording industry lives in a completely different world, of commodity and markets, than the independents do, who make and publish work that is near and dear to them." But accessibility to innovative music on the internet may be blocked by the record industry’s rush to protect and maintain total control of its own high-profit intellectual property. (Dunaway)

Composers are thus left to their own devices when it comes to both generating revenue and attracting listeners. Without a budget for publicity, one of the best ways to gather attention is by word of mouth “buzz.” Social networking is one venue where this can happen, which has the advantage of the possibility of fast transmission and direct links to online content. I suspect people may be motivated to share music they like or find interesting because it gains them cultural capital. They would thus take on a curatorial role and hope to gain the respect of their friends and social contacts. A musician interested in using this as a path to wider recognition would need to create music that works in an online context. For example he or she might want to include video content, so it can be uploaded to YouTube or create music that the sharer will identify with in some way. They may also produce music with the goal of having it sound good in stereo mp3 format out of home speakers. The music should be engineered for the playback environment in which it is expected to be heard. The music created must also be accessible in some way, although, obviously an artist wishes to remain interesting.

In my case, I chose duration as my most accessible component. All of my pieces in this project are around one minute long. I strongly suspect that if you ask most people to listen to ten minutes of noise music, they would refuse unless they were already fans of the genre or the composer. However, in my experience, people are much more willing to sacrifice a minute of their time. Many more people are going to be willing to listen to very short pieces. However, just because people will listen to something does not mean they will share it. I thought sharing would be more likely to occur if listeners felt connected to the music in some way. One way to get that feeling of connection was to get a listener to commission me.

The commissioner gets their name attached to a short piece of music, which becomes integrally linked to them. The piece of music would not exist if it were not for their financial involvement. This, in return gives them cultural capital. They are the proprietor of a new piece of music. This also solves the dilemma of sustainability. The commissioning amount should cover costs, at least. The commissioner would be motivated to share their new piece of music as far and wide as they can, as every re-sharing increases their own cultural capital. Instead of fighting the online sharing that people seem inclined to do, this model requires it and does not require coercive action on the part of the state.

I started by using eBay as my sales platform. This allowed me to control how many commissions I might sell at a time, handle the monetary transaction and the platform itself made the commissioners feel engaged and interested some music press. (“Music Commissioning on eBay”) Much to my surprise, a bidding war erupted on one of my early offerings, despite the promise of many more to come. However, before that bidding war could conclude, eBay terminated my account, banning me from the service. They refused to tell me why they had done this, so I don't know if it was because they suspected fraud or because they objected to my business model. I moved to Etsy, a much less exciting web store where users sell craft items and resumed.

During the course of my project, several people did share their short pieces via their blogs, facebook or another online medium. One person used her piece as her ringtone. In 2008, I approached a popular blogger, Josh Fruhlinger of The Comics Curmudgeon and asked if he would trade me advertising space for a free commission. His blog had been ranked #13 by PC Magazine's “100 Favorite Blogs for 2007” (Heater) and won a Webby Award in 2008 for Best Humor Blog. (“Best Humor Blog”) His blog was also popular with composers and was mentioned on Kyle Gann's blog (Gann) and others. Fruhlinger agreed to this plan and I composed a short piece related the the American comic strip Gil Thorp. In order to cope with the expected server traffic, I created a very simple video of the face of the titular character slowly zooming in with the piece as soundtrack and uploaded it to YouTube. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p__XzqnLDCQ) My small advertisement ran for a week and then Fruhlinger made a post specifically about the piece. He was very positive, using words like “stunning” and “masterpiece.” (Fruhlinger) The video got 4000 views in a very short period of time. However, despite how happy Fruhlinger was and some positive comments from his readers such as, “I stand amazed,” (commodorejohn) this got me no new commissions.

Does this mean that the model fails? I had predicted that I would get some new commissions out of such a high profile endorsement, but didn't. There are a few possible explanations. Consumers may be unused to the idea of commissioning a composer. In my brief stint in marketing, I was told that consumers do not absorb an idea until they encounter it multiple times. This was just one post. Or, conversely, it could have been their lack of familiarity with me. A better known composer may have fared better. It may also have been the economy, which was not doing well at the time and has since gotten worse. Commissioning music is a luxury and one that might seem eccentric and easy to forego.

Marketing this project is actually quite difficult. I found I could do three commissions in a week. There is no way I could cope with the volume that mass-market success would imply. Therefore, going after high-profile general subject bloggers is not the way to draw in new customers, as success could be as much a disaster as failure. However, it is a way to draw in new listeners. Most of the visitors to the blog would not have heard my piece otherwise. My attempts at an accessible duration did pay off, even if social media buzz didn't gain me new customers. Making a piece for one person motivates that one person to share it, but it does not motivate his or her friends to share it also.

Musically, I was interested in very short pieces because of the 60x60 Project, in which I had participated. I found it very frustrating to make a pice so short. While my piece Clocker had been accepted, I did not feel happy with it. I started listening to very short pieces, for example, tracks from the albums Haikus Urbanis and Snakes and Ladders, to get into the right mindset.

When constructing my very short pieces, I've found that it's best to have three closely related ideas, and three overdubbed mono tracks. A minute is too long to only have one idea, but too short to go through a lot of material. There is also not a lot of time for major density changes, unless that is the focus of the piece. As I worked on this project, I found that a minute began to seem longer and longer. A composer could easily fit over a hundred discrete events in a minute.

In my portfolio, I have included several of these pieces, listed here with their programme notes:

Shorts #29: Raining Up

Commissioned and titled by Autumn Looijen

This piece was created using a MOTM synthesiser and mixed in Ardour. There were several false starts. I had been doing field recordings of storms and for a while, every artificial sound I made seemed to also sound like weather. The title Autumn chose seems to indicate that I didn’t quite get away from weather-related sounds.

Shorts #28: Untitled

Commissioned by Cecile Moochnek

I wasn’t looking for a commission when I walked into the Cecile Moochnek Gallery on 4th Street in Berkeley, California. I was looking to do Christmas shopping. But I got talking to the gallery owner about art and music and she asked me to write her a short piece. This was in December of 2007. I wrote the piece in 2008.

I made this piece with a Evenfall MiniModular Synthesiser. This was an all-in-one box modular synthesiser from the 1990′s. It’s a great little synth.

Shorts #27: Gil Thorp

Commissioned and titled by Josh Fruhlinger

Josh gave me the title before I started the piece. Gil Thorp is the name of a surreal American newspaper comic which is supposed to be about high school sports. Josh runs a blog discussing newspaper comics, called the Comics Curmudgeon.

I recorded (British) football from my TV, which included my housemate clapping after a goal. Then, I decided to use white noise, because it’s very similar to crowd sounds. I filtered it a lot to make sort of screetchy sounds. The football announcers didn’t exactly have the accent that I would expect Marty Moon to have, so I kept them in the background. My girlfriend said that it struck her as very Mark Trail-like, so I raised the volume of the background at the end, to make the sports connection clearer.

Bird-like sounds remind me of high school sports, but that’s probably because my high school had a terrible seagull infestation.

Shorts #26: Ecstatic Rivulet

Commissioned and titled by Clyde Nielsen

For this piece, I wanted to use a field recording that I made while camping over the summer. Visually, the campground looked like it would make a suitable set for a horror movie. The animals were correspondingly loud and screetchy at night and so I made a recording with my cell phone.

I listened to the recording a few times and it made me think of GrainPic, a project that I had intended to abandon. Everything I do with this always sounds kind of rough and unpolished, which is why I stopped working with it. But it seems to fit well with my memory of that campground.

Shorts #25: Untitled

Commissioned by Scott Wilson

When approached for a title for this piece, Scott noted that the piece has a “flatulent quality,” but it would be better to resist referencing that in a title.

To make this piece, I recorded myself playing a bovine signaling horn and a didjeridu, both of which I ran through a Sherman filterbank to use as FX. There’s also a little bit of feedback, especially the very last sounds. Processing a didgeridu turns out to be much more straightforward and easy than processing a cow horn.

Shorts #24: College Promo

Commissioned and titled by Jean Sirius

I wanted to something that started out serious, but got more playful further in. The opening is square waves, which are pulse-width modulated and slightly frequency modulated. While I was recording them, my dog was sleeping nearby. She started barking in her sleep. The almost never barks when she’s awake, but when she’s asleep, she barks quiet, air, high pitched barks which cause her snout to slightly inflate, since she doesn’t open her mouth. Maybe she’s actually dreaming of chasing pigeons? The sleep-barking sounded really great with the music! I couldn’t record my dog without accidentally waking her, so instead I tried to mimic the sound with a Sherman filterbank. I failed miserably, but I like the sounds that I got. Every time I use this instrument, I have a little more fun with it and like it a little bit more. It’s frustrating at first, but the effort is paying off.

Shorts #23: Gamut

Commissioned and titled by Devin Hurd

This piece was made with a MOTM analogue synthesiser.

Bibliography:

“Bandcamp Pricing.” Bandcamp. Web. 12 August 2011. <https://bandcamp.com/pricing>

“Best Humor Blog.” The 2008 Weblog Awards. 31 December 2008. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-humor-blog/>

commodorejohn. comment on “Metapost: I sing the body beefy.” The Comics Curmudgeon. 15 April 2008. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://joshreads.com/?p=1519#comment-480008>

Digital Economy Act 2010 s. 10. UK. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/24/section/10?view=plain>

Dunaway, Judy. “The MP3 Phenomena and Innovative Music.” ZKM. 9 April 2001. Web. 11 August 2001. <http://on1.zkm.de/zkm/Institute/Musik/texte/MP3>

“For Students Doing Reports.” RIAA- Recording Industry Association of America. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.riaa.com/faq.php>

“Frequently Asked Questions.” Creative Commons. 28 July 2011. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions>

Fruhlinger, Josh. “Metapost: I sing the body beefy.” The Comics Curmudgeon. 15 April 2008. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://joshreads.com/?p=1519>

Gann, Kyle. “Seriously Off-Topic.” PostClassical: Kyle Gann on music after the fact. Arts Journal. 29 April 2007. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/2007/04/seriously_offtopic.html>

Haikus Ubranis. Cavel2Disks, 1997. CD.

Heater, Brain. “Our 100 Favorite Blogs.” PC Magazine. 15 October 2007. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2195379,00.asp>

Lessig, Lawrence. “Free Culture – How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.” SiSU information Structuring Universe. University of Oslo: The Faculty of Law. 2004. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig/doc.html>

“Music Commissioning on eBay.” PodComplex. 14 April 2007. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.podcomplex.com/blog/music-commissioning-on-ebay/>

Ostertag, Bob. “The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician.” QuestionCopyright.org. 9 April 2007. Web. 11 August 2001. <http://questioncopyright.org/bob_ostertag_speaks>

“Q&A: The Digital Economy bill.” BBC News. 9 April 2010. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8604602.stm>

Reisinger, Don. “The RIAA speaks – and it gets worse.” Cnet. 14 January 2008. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-9849441-17.html?tag=more>

Rubin, Neal and Whigham, Rod. Gil Thorp. GoComics.com. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.gocomics.com/gilthorp/>

Slaw. Snakes and Ladders. Doubtful Palace, 2002. CD.

Springman, Chris. “The Mouse that Ate the Public Domain: Disney, The Copyright Term Extension Act, and Eldred v. Ashcroft.” FindLaw. 5 March 2002. Web. 11 August 2001. <http://writ.news.findlaw.com/commentary/20020305_sprigman.html>

Dissertation Draft: BiLE Bibliography

2011-08-10T16:14:00.001+01:00

Bibliography:

“About.” Kinect for Windows: SDK beta. 2011. Microsoft Research. 8 August 2011. <http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/about.aspx>

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. By Curtis, Richard. BBC. BBC Two. 23 May 2011

Angwin, Julia and Valentino-Devries, Jennifer. “Apple, Google Collect User Data.” The Wall Street Journal. 22 April 2011. Web. 8 August 2011. <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703983704576277101723453610.html>

Brautigan, Richard. “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.” Red House Books. Web. 10 August 2010. <http://www.redhousebooks.com/galleries/freePoems/allWatchedOver.htm>

Brown, Chris. “Indigenous to the Net ~ Early Network Music Band in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Crossfade. 8 September 2002. Web. 8 August 2011. <http://crossfade.walkerart.org/brownbischoff/index.html>

Cardew, Cornelius. Treatise. Buffalo: The Gallery Upstairs Press, 1967.

Dugan, Patrick. “Apple closes the iTunes store for iPhone users who don't want to share their location” Google Buzz. 23 June 2010. Web. 24 June 2010. <http://www.google.com/buzz/106577349578207351822/FunaUuPBmzD/lameApple-closes-the-iTunes-store-for-iPhone-users>

“FAQ.” I, Norton: an Opera in Real-Time by Gino Robair. Web. 10 August 2011. <http://www.ginorobair.com/inorton/faq.html>

Frommer, Dan. “Here's the Amazing 'Word Lens' iPhone App Everyone is Talking About This Morning (AAPL).” The San Francisco Chronicle. 17 December 2010. Web. 10 August 2011. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/12/17/businessinsider-word-lens-2010-12.DTL>

Hewitt, Scott, et al. “HELO: The Laptop Ensemble as an Incubator for Individual Laptop Performance Practices.” Huddersfield Experimental Laptop Orchestra. June 2010. Web. 9 August 2011. <http://helo.ablelemon.co.uk/lib/exe/fetch.php/materials/helo-laptop-ensemble-incubator.pdf >

Judson, Thom. “OpenNI to Max/MSP vis OSC.” Thom Judson: music and media. 12 January 2011. Web. 8 August 2011. <http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30>

Kyriadkis, Yannis. “Scam Spam.” [“LabO III Scam Spam.m4v.”] Perf. Tako Hyakutome. YouTube. 4 April 2011. Web. 10 August 2011. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMRQOeA_Rk0 >

“NITE Middleware.” PrimeSense. 2010. Web. 8 August 2011. <http://www.primesense.com/?p=515>

No More Twist. “Nice to See You.” Perf. Charles Céleste Hutchins, Polly Moller. Music by Charles Céleste Hutchins. 18 July 2008. Web. 11 August 2011. <http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/podcast/?p=100>

Olivarez-Giles, Nathan. “Microsoft releases Kinect for Windows SDK.” Los Angeles Times. 16 June 2011. Web. 8 August 2011. <http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/06/microsoft-releases-kinect-for-windows-sdk.html>

Oliveros, Pauline. “Exchanges.” Deep Listening Pieces. Kingston: Deep Listening Publications, 1990

Oliveros, Pauline. “Give Sound/Receive Sound.” Deep Listening Pieces. Kingston: Deep Listening Publications, 1990

Posner, Eric and Vermeule, Adrian. “Obama Should Raise the Debt Ceiling on His Own.” New York Times. 22 July 2011. Web. 10 August 2011. <https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/22/opinion/22posner.html?_r=1>

Schlegel, Andreas. “Darwiinosc – darwiin remote with OSC extension for OS X.” Google Code. Web. 9 August 2011. <https://code.google.com/p/darwiinosc/>

Stockhausen, Karlheinz, “Right Durations”

“TouchOSC.” hexler.net. Web. 8 August 2011. <http://hexler.net/software/touchosc>

Tsotsis, Alexia. “Word Lens Translates Words Inside of Images. Yes Really.” Tech Crunch. 16 December 2010. Web. 10 August 2011. <http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/16/world-lens-translates-words-inside-of-images-yes-really/>

Viner, Katharine. “Adam Curtis: Have computers taken away our power?.” The Guardian. 6 May 2011. Web. 10 August 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/may/06/adam-curtis-computers-documentary>

Dissertation Draft: BiLE - The Death of Stockhausen

2011-08-10T16:09:00.001+01:00

My next piece for BiLE is a large-scale piece called The Death of Stockhausen, which will be approximately an hour long. I'm calling the piece a “laptopera,” although there are not currently any singers. Although this may stretch the opera genre a bit, it's not unprecedented, as Gino Robair's opera in real time, I, Norton, lists singers as an optional part: “A performance can be done without actors, singers, or even musicians.” (“FAQ”)

The inspiration for my opera largely comes from the Adam Curtis documentary All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, which discusses how individuals stopped feeling like we are in control of society or the future. A review of the series in the Guardian describes the premise as,

[W]ithout realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers – seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, “The underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has happened – and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of politics to change the world.” (Viner)

Curtis lays much of the blame for the current state of affairs at the feet of computers, or at least the mythology of stable systems which was inspired by computer science. (All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace) I thought it would be interesting to do a computer-based piece that addressed his documentary. While I don't believe that computers or anything else are a neutral platform, I think a large part of the problem comes from the way in which we are using computers and allowing ourselves to be used by technology companies. Any solution will certainly have to involve computers, so it seems useful to think about how to deploy them positively rather than under a politics of invisible corporate control.

The Curtis documentary is also appealing because he addressed some issues that had been coming up in conversations I have been having with friends. When we think of the future, we think only of better gadgets, not a better world. For example, when describing a new iPhone app Word Lens, techCrunch breathlessly stated, “This is what the future, literally, looks like.” (Tsotsis) They were not alone in this pronouncement, which was widely echoed through major media outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle who imagined a consumer reaction of, "holy cow, this is the future." (Frommer)

Our envisioned future is thus one of hypercapitalism. More and more things to buy while at the same time, less and less money with which to buy it. Consumers economise on food, but still buy expensive iPhone contracts, presumably because they want to own a piece of the future. Meanwhile, they have less and less control of even that as Apple's curatorial role prevents most consumers from being able to install apps not approved by the corporation. Smart phones disempower their users further by collecting their private information. (Angwin and Valentino-Devries) The future is passive consumers under greater control from the state and from corporations, such as Google, Apple and Facebook, who win us over with appealing gadgets. An online contact described this as a "totalitarian pleasure regime." (Dugan) Thus we envision Huxley's Brave New World for those who can afford it and Orwell's 1984 for those who can't.

The left seems to have no widely articulated alternative idea of what a better world would even look like. The Guardian quotes Curtis on 2011 protests, “'Even the “march against the cuts”,' he says, referring to the TUC march in London in March, 'it was a noble thing, but it was still a managerial approach. We mustn't cut this, we can't cut that. Not, “There is another way.”'” (Viner) Curtis does not hand us a vision for what this other way might be, but calls on us to imagine one.

This opera will restate the problem outlined by Curtis and go on to link the end of the future with the current apocalyptic concerns. Originally, I want to focus mostly on the American preoccupation with the Apocalypse and Rapture. If all the future will be just like now, but with better gadgets, then we are only waiting for the end of the world, which might as well come sooner rather than later. However, various recent secular events seem to also bear inclusion. The New York Times described a possible outcome of the US debt crisis as a “Götterdämmerung,” describing a far right wing hope for a “purifying” fire. (Posner and Vermeule) As the stock market tumbled, looters set fire to high streets in the UK. Zoe Williams, writing in the Guardian, noted that the consumer-oriented nature of the riots is something “we've never seen before.” (Williams) Rather than battle with the police, looters focused on gathering consumer goods. Williams quotes Alex Hiller, “Consumer society relies on your ability to participate in it.” (Williams) Even their ability to be passive consumers was thwarted. They had minimal access to what we've deemed to be the future. However, setting large, destructive fires seems to imply that there is more than just this going on. All of these things from religious beliefs, to economic disaster to civil unrest share a sense of hopelessness and feeling of things ending.

However, rather than end on a negative note of yearning for oblivion, and the end of the avant-garde, I do want listeners to consider a better world. All of us have agency that can be expressed in ways other than acquiring consumer goods. I do not present a view of what a better world might look like, but do hope to remind them that one is possible. There is another way.

I've broken the opera up into four acts with connecting transition sections. The durations are based on the fibonacci series. The structure will be as follows:

8 min: Act 1 - The Promise: Cooperative Cybernetics

2 min: Transition 1

21 min: Act 2 - The Reality: The Rise of the Machines / Hypercapitlaism

3 min: Transition 2

13 min: Act 3 - The Apocalypse

1 min: Transition 3

5 min: Act 4 – A Better World is Possible: Ascension to Sirius

The durations will probably vary slightly from performance to performance and may evolve with our practice.

Act 1 explores the idealistic ideas of self-organising networks. Every player in BiLE, as is normal, will create their own sound generation code which will take no more than five shared parameters plus amplitude to control their sounds. These parameters may be: granular, sparse, resonant, pitched. Each player would have a slider going from zero to one where zero means not at all and one means entirely. Players will not control their sliders directly, but instead vote for a value to increase or decrease. Their sound will thus change in response to their own votes and votes of other players. They can control their own amplitude at will. There is also another slider, individual to every player, which controls how anti-social they are. A value of zero will follow the group decisions entirely and as the value increases, they will deviate more and more from the group. A value of one should be actively disruptive. All players should start with anti-social values of zero and increase that number in a non-linear fashion until at the end the group is, in general, very anti-social. The idea of group following in this piece is also present in my earlier piece Partially Percussive but the users have much less agency in carrying it out in this act.

The opera will be accompanied by video projections from Antonio Roberts. I would like the start of this section to visually reference Richard Brautigan's poem “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” from which the curtis documentary takes it's name. The second stanza is

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

(Brautigan)

From there, I would like there to be archival images of advertising and assembly lines. As anti-social disorder increases, I'd like to see more archival images of rioting and property destruction.

This act will not begin rehearsals until October 2011.

Act 2 is included in my portfolio. It is the most operatic of all the acts in that it includes live vocals. Players sample themselves first reading common subject lines of spam emails, then common lines from within spam emails and finally start reading an example of “spoetry” - machine generated text that is sometimes used in an attempt to fool spam filters. The players manipulate these samples to create a live piece of text-sound poetry. In order to get material, I mined the spam folder of my email account. I broke the material into sections and assigned every line a number. (See attached)

Other composers, such as Yannis Kyriakides in his piece “Scam Spam” have used spam emails as source material. However, Kyraikides does not include a vocal line in his piece. In 2008, composer/performer Polly Moller approached me to improvise live on KFJC radio in California. She played flute and pitched noisemakers and read a “spoem” called “Nice to See You” and I did live sampling/looping of her sounds and vocals. (No More Twist) I felt satisfied with the results of this improvisation. Afterwards, I was interested to keep working with spoetry and to look at doing more structured text-sound pieces with a greater live component than I had previously.

This act builds on my experiences with Moller, using a larger ensemble, and asking every member of BiLE to develop programmes specifically for the manipulation of text sounds. They also manipulate artificial sounds, which are recordings of my analog syntheiser. The score is expressed as rules:

Rules for playing:

Intro:

Start immediately with the artificial sounds. You may play these throughout the piece.

Then start recording and playing from the A section. These can go throughout the piece.

Then go on to the B section. These can also go throughout the piece, but should be used more sparingly once this section is passed.

The C section takes up the largest section of the piece. You do not need to get to the end of all the lines provided.

Players should announce what line they are recording via the chat.

Once a line is recorded, other players may record that line (or fragments of it) again, but cannot backtrack to a previous line. Players can also choose to advance to the next line, but, again, backtracking is not allowed.

When a player is picking a soundfile to process, she can pick from any section. If she picks from section C, it should be normally a recent line, however you can break this rule if you have a good reason, ie. you feel a really strong attachment to a previous line or think it can exist as a counterpoint / commentary to the current line.

Blank lines in the text should be interpreted as pauses in making new recordings.

I have not yet thought about videos for this section.

Act 3 will also have text sound, but as a collage on top of other material. I was originally planning to have this section concentrate solely on people's religious or spiritual beliefs surrounding the rapture, the apocalypse or 2012. I'm hoping to do telephone interviews of Americans who believe the end is neigh. I'm hoping the promise of being able to witness to new audiences will be enticing enough to persuade them to participate. I have not yet found any rapture believers to record, but as we are not going to start working on this until October or November of 2011, it's not yet urgent.

In addition to rapture believers, I hope to do in-person recordings of people who have New Age beliefs about the winter solstice of 2012. So far I have interviewed one person and another has agreed to participate also. I plan to have the piece organised so that the rapture believers come first in the piece and the 2012 believers, but as I have not yet acquired much material, this is subject to change.

I plan to ask interviewees about current events, like rioting, economic turmoil and climate change and include those things in the text by how they correlate to religious and spiritual beliefs. The collage will also be made up of samples referencing these also, such as fire sounds, windows breaking, sirens, etc. This does present a risk of being overly dramatic, but appropriate use of heavy processing will turn the sounds into references that are more indirect. Also drama is not inappropriate to the medium. The collage should become less and less alarming towards the end, as the text switches to the generally more hopeful New Age respondents.

Act 4 will have a graphic score, in the style of Cornelius Cardew's Treatise. I recently participated in the first all-vocal performance of that piece, at the South London Gallery on 16 September 2011. The group I sang with did not have a lot of experience with free improvisation, and it was interesting to see how exposure to such open material challenged and inspired them. I hope that similarly, BiLE will go places we would not have otherwise without the graphic score.

I do want it to move from a spiritual hope of the previous act to something more inclusive. My hope is that the audience will leave not with a sense that the apocalypse is coming in one form or another, but that it is possible to avert disaster.

Dissertation Draft: BiLE, XYZ and gesture tracking

2011-08-03T14:51:00.003+01:00

My colleague Shelly Knotts wrote a piece that uses the network features much more fully. Her piece, XYZ, uses gestural data and state-based OSC messages as well, to create a game system where players “fight” for control of sounds. Because BiLE does not follow the composer-programmer model of most LOrks, it ended up that I wrote most of the non-sound producing code for the SuperCollider implementation of Knotts's piece. This involved tracking who is “fighting” for a particular value, picking a winner from among them, and specifying the OSC messages that would be used for the piece. I also created the GUI for SuperCollider users. All of this relied heavily on my BileTools classes, especially NetAPI and SharedResource.

Her piece specifically stipulated the use of gestural controllers. Other players used Wiimotes and iPhones, but I was assigned the Microsoft Kinect. There exists an OSC skeleton tracking application, but I was having problems with it segfaulting. Also, full-body tracking sends many more OSC messages than I needed and requires a calibration pose be held while it waits to recognise a user. (http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30 ) This seemed like overkill, so I decided it would be best to write an application to track one hand only.

Microsoft had not released official drivers yet when I started this and, as far as I know, their only drivers so far are windows-only. (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/about.aspx) I had to use several third-party, open source driver and middleware layers. (http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30) I did most of my coding around the level of the PrimesenseNITE (http://www.primesense.com/?p=515) middleware. There is a NITE sample application called PointViewer that tracks one hand. (http://tohmjudson.com/?p=30) I modified the programme's source code so that in addition to tracking the user's hand, it sends an OSC message with the hand's x, y and z coordinates. This allows a user to generate gesture data from hand position with a Kinect.

In future versions of my Kinect application, I would like to create a “Touch-lessOSC,” similar to the TouchOSC iPhone app, but with dual hand tracking. One hand would simply send it's z,y,z, coordinates, but the other would move within pre-defined regions to send it's location within a particular square, move a slider, or “press” a button. This will require me to create a way for users to define shapes and actions as well as recognise gestures related to button pressing. I expect to release an alpha version of this around January 2012.

For the SuperCollider side of things, I wrote some classes, OSCHID and OscSlot (see attached), that mimmic the Human Interface Device (HID) classes, but for HIDs that communicate via OSC via third-party applications such as the one I wrote. They also work with DarwiinOSC (http://code.google.com/p/darwiinosc/) and TouchOSC (http://hexler.net/software/touchosc) on the iPhone. As they have the same structure and methods as regular HID classes, they should be relatively easy for programmers and the wiimote subclass, WiiOSCClient (see attached), in particular, is drop-in-place compatible with the pre-existing supercollider wiimote class, which, unfortunately, is currently not working.

All of my BiLE-related class libraries have been posted to SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/biletools/) and will be released as a SuperCollider quark. My Kinect code has been posted to my blog only, (http://celesteh.blogspot.com/2011/05/xyz-with-kinect.html) but I've gotten email indicating that at least a few people are using the programme.

Dissertation Draft: BiLE - Partially Percussive

2011-08-02T17:11:00.002+01:00

I wrote a gui class called BileChat in order to provide a chat interface, to allow typed communication during concerts and BileClock for a shared stopwatch. We use these tools in every piece that we play.

We played our first gig very shortly after forming and while we were able to meet the technical challenges, the musical result was not entirely compelling. Our major problems were not looking at each other and not listening to each other, which was exacerbated by the networking tools, especially the chat, but still the standard problems new ensembles tend to have.

Several years ago, when I was running an ensemble of amateur percussionists, I used Deep Listening pieces by Pauline Oliveros to help focus the group and encourage greater listening. Most of those exercises are very physical, asking the participants to use body percussion or to sing. This worked well for percussionists, but did not seem well suited to a laptop band. Almost all of the members of BiLE have previous experience playing in ensembles. While every group can benefit from listening exercises, we were not starting from scratch and the exercises we use should be ones that are compatible with networked laptop music. In other words, we needed listening skills within the context in which we were trying to perform.

I wrote a piece called Partially Percussive in order to implement Deep Listening-like ideas in a laptop context. I wrote the score on a studio white board as a list of rules:

Rules:

To start playing, sample the object.

Listen to other players. Are they playing:

Percussive vs Sustained
Sparse vs Dense
Loud vs Soft
Pointalistic vs Flowing

Follow the group until you decide to change.

If you hear a change, follow it.

Lay out whenever you want, for how long you want.

Sample the object to come in again.

The score stayed on the white board for two or three weeks. I took a photo of it for my records, however, the score for this piece has never been distributed via paper or email. I do not know what notes, if any, my colleagues took on the score. When describing the score to them, I said that they should drop out (“lay out”) when they “feel it” and return similarly.

I specified live sampling to add transparency to our performance, so audiences can have an idea of where our sounds are coming from. I picked percussion in particular after a IM conversation with Charles Amirkhanian, in which he encouraged me to write for percussion. We originally had a haphazard collection of various metal objects, however, we forgot to bring any of them for one of our gigs, so I went to Poundland and purchased a collection of very cheap but resonant kitchen objects and wooden spoons to play them with. We also use a fire bell. Because it has a long ringing tail on it's sound, which is quite nice, we use it to start and end the piece. Finally, one of the ensemble members owns some cowbells, which we often also use. Each player usually has a single metal object, but is free to borrow objects from each other. In the case where someone is borrowing the cow bell, they typically allow the bell to ring while carrying it.

While the rules, especially in regards to 'laying out,' are influenced by Oliveros, our practice of the piece draws heavily on the performance practice of the anthony Braxton ensemble, which I played in 2004-5. In this piece, as well as in Braxton's ensemble, players form spontaneous duos or trios and begin trading gestures. This depends on both eye contact and listening and thus requires us to develop both those skills.

When we started playing this piece, I was controlling my own patch with a wireless gamepad, with two analog sticks and several buttons. This gave me the ability to make physical motions and control my patch while away from my computer, for example, while getting an object from another player. Over time, more BiLE members have incorporated even more gestural controllers, such as iPhones running TouchOSC. Thus, when trading gestures, players will mimmic sound quality and physical movement. I believe this aids both our performance practice and audience understanding of the piece.

The technology of this piece does not require more than the chat and the shared stopwatch, but it appeals to audiences and we play it frequently.

Dissertation: BiLE Networking White Paper

2011-08-01T13:52:00.002+01:00

This document describes the networking infrastructure in use by BiLE.

The goal of the infrastructure design has been flexibility for real time changes in sharing network data and calling remote methods for users of languages like supercollider. While this flexibility is somewhat lost to users of inflexible languages like MAX, they, nevertheless, can benefit from having a structure for data sharing.

Network Models

If there is a good reason, for example, a remote user, we support OSCGroups as a means of sharing data.

If all users are located together on the same subnet, then we use broadcast on port 57120.

OSC Prefix

By convention, all OSC messages start with '/bile/'

Data Restrictions

Strings must all be ASCII. Non ASCII characters will be ignored.

Establishing Communication

Identity

Upon joining the network, users should announce their identity:

/bile/API/ID nickname ipaddress port

nicknames must be ASCII only.

Example:

/bile/API/ID Nick 192.168.1.66 57120

Note that because broadcast echoes back, users may see their own ID arrive as an announcement.

IDQuery

Users should also send out their ID in response to an IDQuery:

/bile/API/IDQery

Users can send this message at any time, in order to compile a list of everyone on the network.

API

Query

Users can enquire what methods they can remotely invoke and what data they can request.

/bile/API/Query

In reply to this, users should send /bile/API/Key and /bile/API/Shared (see below)

Key

Keys represent remote methods. The user should report their accessible methods in response to a Query

/bile/API/Key symbol desc nickname

The symbol is an OSC message that the user is listening for.

The desc is a text based description of what this message does. It should include a usage example.

The nickname is the name of the user that accepts this message.

Example

/bile/API/Key /bile/msg "For chatting. Usage: msg, nick, text" Nick

Shared

Shared represents available data streams. Sources may include input devices, control data sent to running audio processes or analysis. The user should report their shared data response to a Query

/bile/API/Shared symbol desc

The symbol is an OSC message that the user sends with. The format of this should be

/bile/nickname/symbol

The desc is a text based description of the data. If the range is not between 0-1, it should mention this.

The nickname is the name of the user that accepts this message.

Example

/bile/API/Shared /bile/Nick/freq "Frequency. Not scaled."

Listening

RegisterListener

Shared data will not be sent out if no one has requested it and it may be sent either directly to interested users or to the entire group, at the sender's discretion. In order to ensure receiving the data stream, a user must register as a listener.

/bile/API/registerListener symbol nickname ip port

The symbol is an OSC message that the user will listening for. It should correspond with a previously advertised shared item. If the receiver of this message recognises their own nickname in in the symbol (which is formatted /bile/nickname/symbol), they should return an error: /bileAPI/Error/noSuchSymbol

The nickname is the name of the user that will accept the symbol as a message.

The ip is the ip address of the user that will accept the symbol as a message.

The port is the port of the user that will accept the symbol as a message.

Example

/bile/API/registerListener /bile/Nick/freq Shelly 192.168.1.67 57120

Error

noSuchSymbol

In the case that a user receives a request to register a listener or to remove a listener for data that they are not sharing, they can reply with

/bile/API/Error/noSuchSymbol OSCsymbol

The symbol is an OSC message that the user tried to start or stop listening to. It is formatted /bile/nickname/symbol. Users should not reply with an error unless they recognise their own nickname as the middle element of the OSC message. This message may be sent directly to the confused user.

Example

/bile/API/Error/noSuchSymbol /bile/Nick/freq

De-listening

RemoveListener

To announce an intention to ignore subsequent data, a user can ask to be removed.

/bile/API/removeListener symbol nickname ip

The symbol is an OSC message that the user will no longer be listening for. If the receiver of this message sees their nickname in the symbol which is formatted /bile/nickname/symbol), they can reply with /bile/API/Error/noSuchSymbol symbol

The nickname is the name of the user that will no longer accept the symbol as a message.

The ip is the ip address of the user that will no longer accept the symbol as a message.

Example

/bile/API/removeListener /bile/Nick/freq Shelly 192.168.1.67

RemoveAll

Users who are quitting the network can asked to be removed from everything that they were listening to.

/bile/API/removeAll nickname ip

The nickname is the name of the user that will no longer accept any shared data.

The ip is the ip address of the user that will no longer accept any shared data.

Example

/bile/API/removeAll Nick 192.168.1.66

Commonly Used Messages

Chatting

Msg

This is used for chatting.

/bile/msg nickname text

The nickname is the name of the user who is sending the message.

The text is the text that the user wishes to send to the group.

Clock

This is for a shared stopwatch and not for serious timing applications

Clock start or stop

/bile/clock/clock symbol

The symbol is either start or stop.

Reset

Reset the clock to zero.

/bile/clock/reset

Set

Set the clock time

/bile/clock/set minutes seconds

Minutes is the number of minutes past zero.

Seconds is the number of seconds past zero.

Proposed Additions

Because users can silently join, leave and re-join the network, it could be a good idea to have users time out after a period of silence, maybe around 30 seconds or so. To stay active, they would need to send I'm-still-here messages.

There should possibly also be a way for a user to announce that they have just arrived, so, for example, if a SuperCollider user recompiles, her connection will think of itself as new and other users will need to delete or recreate connections depending on that user.

Dissertation Draft: BLE Tech

2011-08-01T13:40:00.004+01:00

In January 2011, five of my colleagues in BEAST and I founded BiLE, the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble. All of the founding members are electroacoustic composers, most of whom have at least some experience with an audio programming language, either SuperCollider or MAX. We decided that our sound would be strongest if every player took responsibility for their own sound and did his or her own audio programming. This is similar to the model used by the Huddersfield Experimental Laptop Orchestra (HELO) who describe their approach as a “Do-It-Yourself (DIY) laptop instrument design paradigm.” (Hewitt p 1 http://helo.ablelemon.co.uk/lib/exe/fetch.php/materials/helo-laptop-ensemble-incubator.pdf) Hewitt et al write that they “[embrace] a lack of hardware uniformity as a strength” and implies their software diversity is similarly a strength and grants them greater musical, (rather than technical) focus. (ibid) BiLE started with similar goals – focus on the music and empower the user, and has had similar positive results.

My inspiration, however, was largely drawn from The Hub, the first laptop band, some members of which were my teachers at Mills College in Oakland California. I saw them perform in the mid 1990s, while I was still an undergrad and had an opportunity then to speak with them about their music. I remember John Bischoff telling me that they did their own sound creation patches, although for complicated network infrastructure, like the Points of Presence Concert in 1987, Chris Brown wrote the networking code. (Cite comments from class?)

One of the first pieces in BiLE's repertoire was a Hub piece, Stucknote by Scott Gresham Lancaster. This piece not only requires every user to create their own sound, but also has several network interactions including a shared stopwatch, sending chat messages and the sharing of gestural data for every sound. In Bischoff and Brown's paper, the score for Stucknote is described as follows:

"Stuck Note" was designed to be easy to implement for everyone, and became a favorite of the late Hub repertoire. The basic idea was that every player can only play one "note", meaning one continuous sound, at a time. There are only two allowable controls for changing that sound as it plays: a volume control, and an "x-factor", which is a controller that in some way changes the timbral character or continuity of the instrument. Every player's two controls are always available to be played remotely by any other player in the group. Players would send streams of MIDI controller messages through the hub to other players' computer synthesizers, taking over their sounds with two simple control streams. Like in "Wheelies", this created an ensemble situation in which all players are together shaping the whole sound of the group. An interesting social and sonic situation developed when more than one player would contest over the same controller, resulting in rapid fluctuations between the values of parameters sent by each. The sound of "Stuck Note" was a large complex drone that evolved gradually, even though it was woven from individual strands of sound that might be changing in character very rapidly.

(http://crossfade.walkerart.org/brownbischoff/hub_texts/stucknote.html)

Because BiLE was a mostly inexperienced group, even the “easy to implement for everyone” Stucknote presented some serious technical hurdles. We were all able to create the sounds needed for the piece, but the networking required was a challenge. Because we have software diversity, there was no pre-existing SuperCollider Quark or MAX external to solve our networking problems. Instead, we decided to use the more generic music networking protocol Open Sound Control (OSC). I created a template for our OSC messages. In addition to the gestural data for amplitude and x-factor, specified in the score, I thought there was a lot of potential for remote method invocation and wanted a structure that could work with live coding, should that situation ever arise. I wrote a white paper (see attached) which specifies message formatting and messages for users to identify themselves on the network and advertise remotely invokable functions and shared data.

When a user first joins the network, she advertises her existence with her username, her IP address and the port she is using. Then, she asks for other users to identify themselves, so they broadcast the same kind of message. Thus, every user should be aware of every other user. However, there is currently no structure for users to quit the network. There is an assumption, instead, that the network only lasts as long as each piece. SuperCollider users, for example, tend to re-compile between pieces.

Users can also register a function on the network, specifying a OSC message that will invoke it. They advertise these functions to other users. In addition, they can share data with the network. For example, with Stucknote, everyone is sharing amplitude values such that they are controllable by anyone, including two people at the same time. The person who is using the amplitude data to control sound can be thought of as the owner of the data, however, they or anyone else can broadcast a new value for their amplitude. Typically, this kind of shared data is gestural and used to control sound creation directly. There may be cases where different users are in disagreement about the current value or packets may get lost. This does not tend to cause a problem. With gestural data, not every packet is important and packet loss is not a serious issue.

When a user puts shared data on the network, she also advertises it. Users can request to be told of all advertised data and functions. Typically, a user would request functions and shared data after asking for ids, upon joining the network. She may ask again at any time. Interested users can register as listeners of shared data. The possibility exists, (currently unused), for the owner of the data to send its value out on to registered users instead of the network as a whole.

In order to implement the network protocol, I created a SuperCollider class called NetAPI (see attached code and help file). It handles OSC communications and the infrastructure of advertising and requesting ids, shared functions and shared data. In order to handle notifications for shared data changes, I wrote a class called SharedResource. When writing the code for Stucknote, I had problems with infinite loops with change notifications. The SharedResource class has listeners and actions, but the value setting method also takes an additional argument specifying what is setting it. The setting object will not have it's action called. So, for example, if the change came from the GUI, the SharedResource will notify all listeners except for the GUI. When SharedResources “mount” the NetAPI class, they become shared gestural data, as described above.

Forming a plan

2011-07-30T16:56:00.003+01:00

Today is 30 July. My dissertation is due on 30 September. I am now planning on how things will be between now and then.

I know that I cannot work every day between now and then. My maximum sprint time is 10 days. So I need to plan on taking one day off per week, which might was well be on the weekend. With BiLE on Wednesdays, that gives me 5 days a week. Also, planning on working 16 hour days is also not going to work. Instead, I can do 4 hours on music and 4 hours on words. Roughly, I have 160 hours of each to spend.

If I keep to a reasonable sleeping schedule and cut back on facebook, I can still go out occasionally. I am not going to drink unless it is the evening before my one break day per week. Also, since stress levels will be high, that break day needs to actually be spent away from a computer like riding my bike or going to the beach or something worthwhile.

Everything is going to be fine. This will all be over soon. I will get it it all done. I just need to focus and work hard.

I may start doing again what I did with my MA and start posting drafts of various bits, looking for feedback.

Why I'm meh on Google+

2011-07-23T16:41:00.003+01:00

I want to quit facebook, but not for Google. Facebook has a lot of faults, most notably privacy-related: they sell your personal data to third parties. They also have a second problem, which is shared with any other provider of a "free" service. They can terminate your account without warning for any perceived TOS violation. This means nursing mums or trans men who post too much nipple can wake up one morning to find they can't log in. The same thing has been happening lately to activists. Losing your login means losing your data.

If I found one day I'd been arbitrarily deleted from facebook, I would be seriously irritated. For all its faults, it's been useful in helping me keep in contact with my godmother, for promoting upcoming gigs and for essential goofing off. But a deleted facebook account is not the end of the world. Nothing terribly essential would be lost.

I do worry about arbitrary deletions after I was mysteriously banned from ebay. But I just don't have that much invested in facebook.

Google has also been known for mysterious and arbitrary deletions, often of activists. They purport to be politically neutral, which seems unlikely. In any case, they have no appeal process and no customer support, so terminated google accounts are very rarely reinstated. If Google takes a dim view of some exposed nipple or a political opinion or just gets its wires crossed, it may also delete an account without warning. The newly deleted person is not a customer. Google has no contractual responcibilities. And it's not just Google+ access that goes.

If I lose my google account, I lose my email, my contacts, my calendar, my rss reader and my blog. I have too many eggs in one "free" basket. I am increasingly of the opinion that paying for services is the way forward. "Free" accounts are selling my demographics, forcing me to look at adverts and have no legal responcibility to me or my data.

I don't want to go from one privacy-compromising arbitrarily-deleting social network to another. Google+ is not the solution to this problem, it's just another instance of it. Like the great MySpace migration of a few years back, this offers only new shiny bits and no progress on fundamental issues. If they actually wanted to not be evil, they would fund Diaspora and host a pod. Otherwise, this is just another walled garden.

BiLE in Venice

2011-07-18T01:45:00.008+01:00

Juju and I flew in a day before the Laptops Meet Musicians Festival, because we wanted to go to the Biennale. Our flight was at 6 am, so we slept about 2 hours before having to leave my flat at an ungodly hour. Once arrived in Venice, the first thing I noticed that it was about 15 degrees warmer than London. And I wondered why I thought it would be a good idea to wear steel capped boots!

We found our hotel, which said it could get us a 35% price reduction on tickets for the Biennale, starting the next day, so we spent the first day wandering the narrow streets and looking into churches. It was my 3rd time in the city, but I have always gone during the art show, so had barely been in any of the churches before. They are astounding.

Covered in marble and monuments many metres tall. The Basilicas have no shortage of relics. I saw St Theresa's foot! (Random aside: My mum had a piece of St Theresa in a tiny envelope, which I accidentally dropped into the carpet. Some bit of her was hoovered up and is now sanctifying a California landfill)

We walked down to San Marco square. It used to be described by The Rough Guide as "pigeon infested," but this has improved vastly since I was last there. Street vendors no longer sell pigeon food, thank gods.

At about 10, the lack of sleep and the heat were too much for me, so I went to go lie down in the hotel. I had booked a hostel bed, but they had reassigned us to a tiny hotel room with a double bed. It was theoretically a step up. I thought about asking for twin beds, but then didn't want to bother, as it was only for one night. I lay down on the bed and turned on the fan and lay awake sweating, wearing nothing but my shorts. For hours.

Juju came home at 2 and we both lay on top of the bed in nothing but shorts. It was not the best night of holiday ever.

Shelly and Antonio arrived the next morning, so we checked out and went to meet them at the bus station. We went then to the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, where we were going to be lodged by the Foundazione Giorgio Cini.

Even though it was early in the day, they gave us our room keys and let us check in. during the long process of photocopying passports and signing documents written in Italian, the festival organisers happened by and told us where to meet them for dinner and gave us a sneak peak of the concert hall.

We took a vaporetto boat back to the rest of the islands and went into some of the national pavilions for the Biennale. This year, they're scattered around the city and largely free. The one that I liked best was Taiwan. Theirs was focused on sound. They had a large listening room and then a smaller room showing two movies side by side that were different perspectives on the same scene. Two sound artists were recording the harvest and processing of some grain or rice. They started in the fields and then tracked it's harvest, it's transport by train, the processing in a factory, the distribution, the processing of the chaff. They worked directly with the workers and got recordings form insides the cabs of vehicles and very very close to things. It was amazing, especially the sound, but also augmented by the video. I think it was my favourite thing at the Biennale this year.

The Festival took us out to dinner that night and the two subsequent nights, always to the same nice restaurant. The food was fantastic.

Antonio was talking about how he always buys travel insurance because he always accidentally eats something that he's allergic to. Then, moments later, he confused a fish for a chicken. Fortunately, medical intervention was not required, although he is allergic to fish. People teased him for this, but I totally understand not recognising something that you never eat. I don't really know many French food words for meat items because I never ate them, so I never made a strong association with the word.

The next day, we had the early sound check slot, so we did our technical stuff and then had some rehearsal time. We switched to using a BT home hub, in the hopes that supercollider would beachball less often. This was semi-successful. Supercollider just has a major issue with wifi, as far as I can tell. Also, when there were two iPhones running touchOSC on the network, data transmition got really blocky and jerky for SC users. I don't remember if the Juju was effected on Max or not, but we had to have one of them switch to using an adhoc network to talk to their phone. That fixed that. So after endless faffing, we had a not overly inspiring rehearsal. Then they took us out for lunch at the one café on the island. It ended with coffee and ice cream, as all good summer lunches should.

We spent the entire afternoon writing our 10 minute presentation on the ensemble.

The evening started with a presentation from David Ogborn about the Cybernetic Orchestra, the LOrk he runs. He spoke about how he uses a code-based interface for some pieces. He described this as Live Coding, but I think that term is much more specific and refers to a particular type of on the fly code generation, whereas, the players in his group start with a programme already written and make changes to it.

Code-based interfaces are, of course, entirely legitimate ways to write and control pieces. They also do have some pedagogical value, however, I think it's easy to overstate that case. For example, I can open a CSS file and make a bunch of changes to it in order to get roughly the look I want out of my website, but I cannot say that I know CSS and would not know CSS unless I actually studied it by reading a book or several help files and coding something from scratch. However, by being able to modify code, it does make the user into a kind of a power user and does demystify code, so it's a good thing to do, but one needs to keep it in perspective.

After the longish presentation, BiLE then played for about 20 minutes. We played XYZ first and Partially Percussive second. I think that musically, they work best in the opposite order, but Antonio decided he thought it would be best to do my piece without graphics and as the projection screen was on the other side of the room than where we were playing, we had to do that order or nobody would look back to see the video for XYZ.

Shelly's piece is normally for 4 audio players, so it scaled down very well for 3. I accidentally hit the mute button instead of fading out, so the end was a bit abrupt, but it was ok. It came out well enough that another band wants to cover it!

My piece is normally for 6 audio players and probably should have been practiced more for the smaller group, as it came out a bit more roughly. One thing that came out very nicely is that the piece ends with a bell sound and as that rung out, the church bells all over the city were ringing, so the bells sounded like a part of the piece. That was really nice.

Then we gave out presentation which probably went on for a bit longer than the allocated 10 minutes. I'm not sure if I said anything useful, especially after Ogborn spoke for so long. Normally, I want to differentiate between LOrks and BiLE, which is a laptop ensemble, but every band at LMMF was a LE, so I think this distinction was just confusing.

After the concert, they took us all for dinner again and then a bar. We all slept in a it later than intended the next morning, except for Juju, who flew to France. Shelly and I poked around the Foundation's buildings and then went up the church's clock tower in time for the noon bells ringing. I set up my zoom recorder, put in ear plugs and waited for the bells to ring. I could feel the vibrations of the big bells on my body and there were amazing partials after the ring. I haven't listened to the recording yet, but I'm hoping it's good.

After lunch we went to the Biennale at Giardini. We didn't see much of it, actually. There was an unfortunate tendency for the national pavilions to have art pieces that were self-referential and about themselves. Or worse, about the Biennale. I get that it's a lot of pressure and whatnot to do something for such a prestigious show, but maybe that pressure could be let out via long, rambling blog posts rather than via the art.

One high point was the USA's pavilion, which had what seemed like some very smart critiques of consumer capitalism, all with a million corporate sponsorships. They had the symbol of liberty in a tanning bed, for example. Given the number of sponsors and the apparent popularity, I am slightly afraid I'm attributing irony and critique where none exists, but for the mean time, I'm impressed by an upside-down army tank with a treadmill on it.

The big pavilion there had a bunch of stuffed pigeons on it. There were some cool things inside, but I was not blown away by anything. We didn't get very far in before we needed to go back for a concert.

The second night of LMMF was all music and no talking, which is good. All the bands were very good.

After dinner and the bar, we went to the old greek-style amphitheatre on the foundation grounds and opened a couple of bottles of wine. I crashed out around 4 am, but most everybody else stayed up until 5. Or at least, most everybody younger than me.

We were hanging out a lot with Benoit and the Mandelbrots, a live coding quartet from Karlsruhe, Germany. They were signing songs from youtube videos. At one point, we were walking along and everybody was singing the theme song from Super Mario Brothers. They have their finger on the pulse of pop culture, or at least internet memes.

The final day, we checked out and then went to Arsenal to see a last bit of the Biennale. Like in the last 2 times I've gone, I've like Arsenal more than some other parts of the show. (Although, this year, the stuff in the city centre was really the best.) There were a lot of pieces made out of trash, and dealing with waste and refuse and the disposability in general of pop culture seemed to be a major theme this year. There was a large hanging dragon made of discarded truck innertubes and fine embroidery, it was cool.

One very impressive piece was a giant statue, in the style of ancient Greece or Rome. It was as tall as a double decker bus. But instead of being made of marble, which it resembled, it was made of candle wax, was full of wicks and was actually burning. Already the heads of the figures had come off from the burning. The whole thing was gradually being consumed during the course of the exhibit.

Another piece that caught my attention beastiaity video from Germany called Tierfick. The animals involved were taxidermied. The video was disturbing but also silly. I actually do like stuff that tries to be shocking.

So, I heard a bunch of good music, ate a bunch of good food, stayed in rooms that were a reasonable temperature, talked to a lot of good people and saw a lot of art. I hope gigs like this become a trend for BiLE!

The future of BiLE

2011-07-12T01:20:00.002+01:00

what will happen to us when we're famous? Will we lose it like Amy Winehouse? Antionio predicts:

Antonio will crumble under pressure from the ladies and become a porn star.

Juju will go into politics, campaigning for animals.

Shelly will become a talk show host for the culture show.

Chris will go into boxing, venting pressures from his computers. He'll will grow a twirly moustache like an old fashioned pugalist.

Jorge will be a famous singer in Colombia. Women, children and teenagers will throw their knickers at him. He'll do ocassional BiLE reunions. They will be the most awesome gigs ever.

Norah's love for pandas will lead her to write a famous blog or become like Jeanine Girafalo.

I will become a fashionisto in NYC, wearing a baret, smoking a cigarette out of a long holder and own a toy poodle.

I think I kind of object to this.....

Antonio makes no apologies and plays the cards as he seems them.

Shelly predict that 4 of us will end up living in squats until we're 75, hoping somebody eventually pays us for a gig.

Do you believe in the rapture?

2011-07-03T23:36:00.002+01:00

I'm looking for people who believe that the world is going to end soon, or people who pray it ends soon. If you think the rapture is around the corner or that we're nearing the end times, I would really like to talk to you!

I would like to interview you talking about your beliefs. This can be in person, by phone or by skype. I'd like to record this interview, so I can use it as material in a musical piece that I'm writing. This piece will be played in England. Most of the people who hear it will have not previously heard the rapture described by a believer.

In order to make the music, your words will be put into a collage that makes musical sense. This does require some cutting, but I will preserve your meaning. I want to accurately convey your views, your beliefs and your hopes for the future.

This is for a 13 minute section of a longer piece of music performed by people with laptop computers. The entire thing will be an hour long. I'm calling it a "laptopera," but it does not actually contain singing. The title of the piece will be The Death of Stockhausen. Your section does not yet have a title, but will probably include the word "Apocalypse." The section will also include people with New Age beliefs surrounding 2012, but will make sure to differentiate their views from yours. (If you want to say anything about how the New Agers are right or wrong, I'd also like the hear that).

If you want to help, please leave a comment! Or, would you mind praying that somebody does want to help?

Concert Review: RCM LOrk

2011-06-28T14:20:00.005+01:00

Last night, I went to see the Royal College of Music Laptop Orchestra perform in their institution's main hall. I found out about the concert at the last minute because a friend spotted it on twitter. Until yesterday, I didn't even know there was a LOrk in in London!

The audience was quite small and out numbered by the performers. There were 6 people on stage and one guy working at a mixing desk, who got up to play piano for one of the pieces. The programme was quite short, with 5 pieces on it. They started with Drone by Dan Trueman, which was the first ever LOrk composition, according to the printed programme. They walked in from the back, carrying laptops and playing from the internal speakers. The tilt of the laptop changes the sound. They then walked around the space, making this drone. It worked well as an introduction and had a good performative element, but I find this piece disturbing in general because it pains me slightly whenever I see anyone shake a laptop. This kind of treatment leads disks to die. Somebody should port this piece to PD and run it via RjDj on an iPhone.

The next piece they played was Something Completely Different by Charles Mauleverer. It was quite short and was made up of clips from Monty Python. Somebody from the ensemble explained that they were playing YouTube videos directly and using the number keys to skip around in the videos and stutter and glitch in that way. This piece was played through two large monitors on the stage. Because all the clips are in the vocal range, using only two speakers made it a bit muddy. Also, the lack of processing the sounds in any meaningful way could become an issue, but the piece was quite short and therefore mostly avoided the limitations of it's simple implementation.

Then, alas, there was a few minutes pause for technical issues and a member of the group stood up and gave a short talk about what was going on in the pieces played so far.

After they got everything going again, they played Synchronicity by Ellis Pecen, which was very well done. The players were given already processed sounds of a guitar and were playing and possibly modifying those further. The programme notes said it used instrumental sounds "process[ed] to such a degree that it would be difficult to discern the original instrument and the listener would ... perceive" the source materials only as "a source of sound." As such it was acousmatic in it's construction and it's ideals but the result was a nice drone/ambient piece. After a few minutes, the sound guy got up and joined the ensemble to play some ambient piano sounds. The result was a piece outside of the normal LOrk genre (as fas as one can be said to exist) and was extremely musical.

Spirala by David Rees, the next piece on the programme, was supposed to have a projected element, but the projector crashed just as the piece was about to start. The piece was apparently built in flash and involved the players turning some sort of crank, by drawing circles on their trackpads. the sounds it made (and perhaps the mental image of crank-turning) lead me to think of a jack in the box. The programme says the piece is online, but I'm getting a 404 on it, alas.

The last piece was Sisal Red by Tim Yates. It relied on network communication, making groups of three laptops into "distributed instruments." The piece didn't seem to match it's programme notes, however, as there only seemed to be four people actually playing laptops. One of the players was on a keyboard controller and another one was playing the gong with a beater and a microphone as if it were Mikrophonie by Stockhausen. This piece used 4 channels of sound, with the two monitors on stage and the two behind the audience. It seemed to fill up the hall as if were were swimming in sound. I'm not sure what sounds were computer generated and what were from the gong or other sources, but I had the impression that the gong sound was swaying around us and was a very strong part of the piece. It certainly harkened back to the practice of putting instruments with electronics and also seemed to be an expansion of the normal LOrk genre. The result was very musical.

According to the programme, this is the only LOrk situated at a conservatory rather than a university. The players were all post graduates, which is also a break with the normal American practice of undergraduate ensembles. All of the pieces except the first one were written by ensemble members. As is the case with most other LOrks, the composer also supplied the "instrument," so all the players were running particular programmes as specified by (or written by) the composer. Aside from the first piece, there were no gestural controllers present.

I think putting a LOrk into a conservatory is an especially good idea. This will create LOrks that will concentrate heavily on performance practice. In their piece Something Completely Different, they completely de-emphasised the technology and created something that was almost purely performative. However, they obviously still embrace the technical, not only through their choice of medium, but in pieces such as Spirala which required the composer to code in flash.

I was really impressed by the concert overall and especially their musicality and hope they get larger audiences at their future gigs, as they certainly deserve them.

By the way, if you're in a LOrk and have not done so already, there is a mailing list for LOrks, Laptop Bands, Laptop Ensembles and any group computer performance: LiGroCoP, which you should join. Please use it to announce your gigs! Also, BiLE will be using it to make announcements regarding our Network Music Festival, which will happen early next year and will have some open calls.

Some Ideas

2011-06-25T14:42:00.003+01:00

The music of 40 years ago is more innovative, challenging and interesting than almost anything produced in the last decade. Like all of life, we have forgotten ideas and become focussed on technology. The future, as we see it is an indefinite sameness differing only by having shinier new gadgets.

Increasingly, the trend in electronic music performance is to see the player as an extension of the machine. Or tools are lifeless, sterile and largely pre-determined and thus so are we. We are becoming automatons in music and in life. Young composers, instead of challenging this narrowing of horizons are conforming to it. We are hopelessly square.

In order to look forwards, we must first look backwards, to a time when people believed change was possible.

Any social model maps relatively easily to a music model. Self-actualised individuals, to take an example, are improvisors who do not listen to each other. Humans as agency-lacking machines are drones, together performing the same musical task, like an orchestra, but robbed of diversity and subtlety. If the model does not work musically, it will not work socially and vice versa. The state of our music is the state of our imagination, the state of our soul and the state of our future.

A better world is possible, and we can begin to compose it.

Why I Identify as Transgender

2011-06-22T01:21:00.003+01:00

There's been a spate of blog posts recently about how the word "transgender" is dead and we all need to decamp to a new term. And then there are posts arguing to opposite point. I'm not going to bother linking to any of them, but I am going to offer my 2p.

First of all, I've noticed that almost all of these posts about whether the word "transgender" is good or bad are coming from trans women, but none that I've noticed have come from trans men. The trans women who are against the term transgender seem to call themselves "transsexual" instead. I suspect that the reason for this is a desire to separate themselves from cross dressers and specifically from fetishists. Some straight men get a sexual kick from dressing like women. There is no parallel situation for trans men. While a surprising number of drag kings are straight, there is no visibile community and no stereotype of straight women dressing up like men for illicit fetish sexy fun time (alas).

It's quite reasonable to want to de-link your gender identity from being seen as a fetish. However, I don't think emphasising the term "transsexual" is the way to do this. First of all, it has the word "sex" in it. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable. This makes me uncomfortable. I almost never identify as TS. I don't want to describe myself in a way that invokes sex or genitals.

I also really don't want to invoke medical intervention, when disclosing conversationally or whatever, and especially not in a human rights campaign. Now, of course trans people should have rights to transition-related healthcare. But our other rights should in no way be linked to that. I don't want my job or housing rights to have anything to do with what surgeries I've had or am planning to have. Indeed, this can, itself, create a human rights issue, in which some governments require sterilisation as a prerequisite to proper gender recognition and/or civil rights protections. That's deeply problematic.

Furthermore, there are problems related to privilege. This is much less an issue in the UK, as the NHS does offer appropriate healthcare to trans people. But in the US and developing countries, medical transition can be economically out of reach for a lot of trans people. Thus, any limitation to those who are medically transitioning is a hugely problematic assertion of class privilege.

The rights of people who don't want to medically transition are also hugely important. I spent many years as an obviously gender non-conforming person and I didn't want to face discrimination then any more than I do now. People who are full or part time cross dressers or whatever, still deserve to have full rights to access education, housing and employment and enjoy the same full civil rights as cis people. The same issues that effect people with no plan to medically transition also effect people who are planning on medically transitioning and haven't started yet and people who may not be passing all the time. Again, linking rights to medical procedures seems deeply dubious and may pressure people into having interventions that they don't want or need and leaves out people who cannot afford the costs associated with those procedures.

And did I mention that a word with "sex" right in the middle of it makes people feel uncomfortable? No centrist political candidate in the US is ever going to give a speech about how we need to protect the rights of transsexuals. They may be persuaded to give a speech protecting the rights of transgender people, but they're not going to want to say the word "sex" in this context. And, if we don't want to be lumped in with fetishists, we don't want to say the word "sex" either.

Those who think that we can get more rights by sacrificing those who don't medically transition need some serious help with the concept of solidarity. It's sort of amusing that some of the same people complain whenever trans protections are stripped out of laws that were originally conceived to protect all LGBT people.

So I'm sticking with the word transgender. People who hear it know what it means (or can figure it out quickly enough. It's a word I'm comfortable with. It implies solidarity. People can, of course, self-identify however they want and that's fine, but I think it's too soon to say the word "transgender" is done.

The head of St Vitalis of Assisi

2011-06-20T00:36:00.003+01:00

Alas, I've missed the auction of the head of St Vitalis of Assisi, which I guess is just as well as it was expected to go for at least £700. Still, I kind of feel like my entire life as an RC might have been heading for that purchase. I've gone on saint-head related pilgrimages and generally have a fascination with relics....

As I see it, the major problem with having a first class relic like this one is where to put it. St Vitalis is the patron saint of STIs and it doesn't seem fair to keep such an obviously useful saint to oneself. The owner of the head really ought to build a chapel for it. As I don't have any kind of space for such a construction, the head would be doubly beyond my means.

Indeed, as I live in a two room flat that's already a bit overly full of stuff, storing the head until I could build a chapel would present a major problem.

I really don't want a holy relic on display in my bedroom. A skull of any saint looking down on my bed would be a bit of a mood killer. I can't decide if this particular saint would be better worse than other saints. On the one hand, he is kind of appropriate, if you don't mind his dead, judging eye sockets. But on the other hand, do I want to send the message to overnight visitors that supernatural help is required in addition to the normal precautions?

I think he could also be distracting in the living room. Alas, I don't even have room for him in my living room. It's already stuffed to the gills with rather too much furniture, two tubas, a bass amp and a synthesiser. I have no idea where I could even find space for a head.

He may have died in 1370, but the kitchen seems unhygenic even for a very old and holy skull. And the bathroom is humid, which might lead to corruption of the sort saints are supposed to be spared. A mouldy relic would not be very nice.

This leaves the toilet, which in some ways is the ideal space. I have unoccupied space on top of the cistern, where he could gaze down upon possibly afflicted areas as guests wee. It also gives the faithful a private place where they can take a moment to determine if the saint's prayers might be helpful before invoking them, and/or possibly calling their local GUM clinic. On the other hand, it does seem somewhat disrespectful to the saint to perch his head in a loo.

(American readers of the linked BBC article should note that in British English, an "outhouse" is a kind of a shed. In American English, an outhouse is a privy. So moving from an outbuilding to a toilet would be a reduction in his circumstances.)

Alas, I've been unable to discover ho bought the head, how much they paid or what their plans are. Do I want to know? I'm not sure.

Backstage at a BiLE gig

2011-06-19T15:42:00.005+01:00

We played yesterday in Wolverhampton and I thought it went rather well. While we're playing, we have a chat window open, so we can do some communication with each other. This is what went on in chat during our last piece:

Norah> :(
Les> reme
Les>  why is norah sad?
Shelly> :(?
Norah> someone crashed?
Antonio> Antonio crashed
Norah> oh :(
Shelly>  ack
Les>  bummer
jorge> ohh sheeet
Antonio> next?
Norah> Les note!
chris> my wiimote is boken
chris> ok ill start
Antonio> cool
chris> ready?
Les>  i am now
Norah> bang
Shelly>  huh? firebell starts?
jorge> yes
chris> im clock
jorge> purrfect
Les>  go?
Shelly>  ack brb. start without me
Antonio> go go go
Shelly> bk
Shelly>  ...test... 
Norah> hi
Les> we need a better beater for that bell 
Shelly>  jorge can i have the spoon?
Les>  eye contact!!
Shelly>  chirs can u pass the small bell this way? 
Les>  sounding good, norah
Shelly>  sounding GREAT! 
Norah> thanks
Antonio> everything is crashing for me :(
Shelly>  norah, ur patch sounds really coo1
Norah> it's being very magical today!
Shelly>  GRANULATINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG BILE!
Norah> WOW
Norah> excellent transition guys
Shelly>  i dont know what time it is by the way
Les>  10
Norah> 10:58
Norah> let's start winding down?
Les>  10:15?
Norah> 11:17
Les>  10:35
Les>  nice
Shelly>  NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICCCCCCCCCCCCEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Antonio> :)
Norah> that was super!
Antonio> is ther eone more?
chris> sh*t that was amazing!
jorge> super!!
Antonio> !!!
Shelly>  nope!
Antonio> super fun times
Shelly>  suppersuppersupper
Antonio> what's next?

My Journey through NIME creation, research and industry (by Sergi Jordà)

2011-06-01T14:32:00.000+01:00

He got into computer music in the 80's and was really in to George Lewis and the League of Automatic Composers. In 1989 he made PITEL machine listening and improvisation. in Max

He collaborated with an artist to make dancing pig-meat sculptures that dance and listen to people. Robots made of pork. they showed this project in food markets. This is horrible and wonderful.

In 1984, his collaborator decided to be in the robot. So they set up a situation where an audience could torture a guy in a robotic exoskeleton. Actuators would poke at him and pull at him. The part attached to the mouth made him suffer a bit. The audience always asked for the mouth interface. This taught him stuff about audience interactive. Lesson 1: It's not a good idea to let audience torture people.

In 1987-88, they did an opera with robots and another exoskeleton. The system was too big and difficult to control. This looks like it was amazing. He's describing it as a "terrible experience."

In 1995, he did a piece for Disk Klavier. He did a real-time feedback system w/ a sequencer, a piano module, and fx box, to an amp, to a mic, to a pitch converter to the sequencer. He did this 4 times to make a 4-track MIDI score. This gave him a great piece that took maybe a half hour to realise. Simple things can have wonderful results. He has a metaphor of a truck vs a moped. A system that knows too much has too much intertia and are difficult to drive. Something smaller, like a moped is more versatile.

In one hour he made a "Lowtech QWERTYCaster" in 1996, which was a keyboard, a mouse and joystick attached together like a demented keytar.

In 1989, he did some real time synthesis controllable via the internet. It was an opera with electronic parts composer ny internet users. Formed a trio around this instrument called the FMOL Trio in 2001-2002 (their recordings are downloadable). He started doing workshops with kids and is showing a video of working with 5 year olds. They all learned the instrument and then did a concert. This is adorable. He put the different sections in different kinds of hats. The concert is full of electronic sounds and kid noises.

He learned that you have to make things that people like.

Then he got a real job in academia.

Why were so many new interfaces being invented, but nobody uses them?

In a traditional instrument, the performer has to do everything. In laptop music, the computer does everything and the performer only changes things. In live computer music, the control is shared between the performer and the instrument.

Visual feedback becomes very important. Laptop musicians care more about the screen than the mouse. This inspired the reactable, which he began in 2003

Goal: maximised bandwidth - get the most from the human and the most easily understandable communication from the computer to the human. He decided to go with a modular approach. Modular, tablebletop system. He wanted to make instruments that were fun to learn rather than hurty.

A round table has a non-leader position. Many people can play at once. You can become highly skilled at it.

When they started conceiving it, they were not thinking about technology. They developed a lot of tehcnologu like ReacTIVision, which is open source.

They posted some videos on youTube and got to be very popular. They started selling tables to museums. People liked it and the tables are not breaking down.

They started a company. Three work for the company and the presenter is still at the uni. They've done some mobile iApps.

The team quit going to NIME when the company started. They didn't have things new to say. Reviewers didn't think small steps were important.

Instruments need to be able to make bad sounds as well as good ones, or else it is just a toy.

The Snyderphonics Manta, a Novel USB Touch Controller

2011-06-01T10:50:00.002+01:00

What is the Manta?

A USB touch controller for audio and video. Uses HID spec. Does capacitive sensing. 6-8ms latency (w some jitter). Portable and somewhat tough. Bus powered. It's slightly like a monome....

Design features

It has a fixed layout because it's a hardware device. It is discrete. 48 hexagonal pads which outputs how much surface area is covered. Slightly less than 8 bit. The sliders at the top have 12 bit resolution and are single touch.

the hexagon grid is inspired by just intonation lattices. Based on Erv Wilson and RH Bosanquet's papers graphs

If every sensor is a note, you have 6 neighbours

It has LED feedback under the sensors (you can turn this off) inspired by monome.

The touch sensing is inspired by the Buchla 100-series controller.

Has velocity detection. Does this based on two consecutive samples.

Uses

Microtonal keyboard, live processing, etc

Future

Something called the manta mate will allow this to be used to control analog synthesisers

Latency improvement in sensor wireless transmission using IEEE 802.15.4

2011-06-01T10:33:00.003+01:00

MO- Interlude Project Motivations

Multipurpose handheld unit w/ RF capabilities with network oriented protocol. With a custom messaging schema to reduce latency in a small size.

He's showing a video of tiny grabbable objects with accelerometers in them. They have a nice aspect. You could use them like reactable elements that send out data, but the ones he's showing are way more multipurpose.

The unit can be connected to accessories and is a radio controlled wireless device that can stream sensors and can pre-process their own data to cut down on bandwidth usage. They use Zigbee which is not as fast as wifi but low power.

They use off the shelf modules so they don't need to mess with radio stuff directly. This does require some middleware. Digitizing is surprisingly slow. So they decided to do an all in one solution, using an embedded modem. This si 54 times faster! Plus it's generic and scalable.

Given that this is IRCAM, I suspect that it's expensive.

The accessories of the device declare themselves to the device and contain their own specs

The presenter wants to make this Open Source, but needs to get that through internal IRCAM politics and to "clean the code" which is a process that seems to sometimes drag on for people.

HUDuino

2011-06-01T10:14:00.002+01:00

He's describing it as wireless MIDI. It's plug and play across many OSes. Large Open Source community. Very usable language. Good platform for prototyping.

Arduinos mostly limited to serial over USB (except the teeny according to the last guy). Students had major software issues. The hardware was easy, but the middleware was a pain in the arse and added a lot of latency. They tried a MIDI shield added on to the Arduino, which was not quite good enough.

The 2010 Arduino had a programmable USB chip, so could use different protocols.

There is a LUFA API to do UDB programming.

This means they could use an Arduino directly as a HID. They also have complete implementation of the MIDI spec.

The arduino still needs to be flashed over serial.

HIDuino is quite good for output, especially musical robotic. This creates standardised interface for robot controlling, though MIDI, which is actually pretty cool.

They are working on USB audio class specification. This will require a chip upgrade, as the current arduino only does 8 bit audio. They want to work on a multichannel audio device.

Fortunately, this guy hates MIDI, so they're looking at ECM Ethernet Control Mode, which would enable OSC over USB.

this looks promising, especially for projects that don't require the oomph of a purpose-build computer.

http://code.google.com/p/hiduino/

Live blogging NIME keynote: Adventures in Phy-gital Space (David Rokeby)

2011-05-31T10:32:00.003+01:00

He started from a contrarian response to the basic characteristics of the computer. Instead of being logical, he wanted to be intuitive. He wanted things to be bodily engaged. The experience should be intimate.

Put the computer out into physical space. Eneter into a space with the computer.

He did a piece called Reflexions in 1983. He made an 8x8 pixel digital camera, had 30 fps, which was quite good for the time.

He made a piece that required very jerky movement. The computer could understand those movements and he made algorythms based on them. This was not accessible to other people. He internalised the computer's requirements.

In 1987 he made a piece called Very Nervous System. He found it easier to work with amateur dancers because they don't have a pre-defined agenda of how they want to move. This lets them find a middle space between them and the computer.

The dancer dances to the sound, and the system responds to the sound. This creates a feedback loop. The real delay is not just the framerate, but the speed of the mind. It reenforces the particular aspects of the person within the system.

The system seemed to anticipate his movements. Because consciousness lags movement by 100 milliseconds. We mentally float behind our actions.

This made him feel like time was sculptable.

He did a piece called Measure in 1991. The only sound source was ticking clock, but it was transformed based on user movement near the clock and the shape of the gallery space. He felt he was literally working with space and time.

He began to think of analysing the camera data as if it were a sound signal. Time domain anaylises could extract interesting information. Responsive sound behaviours could respond to different parts of the movement spectrum. Fast movements were high frequency and applied to one instrument. Mid speed was midrange. Slow was low freq.

With just very blocky 8x8 pixels, he's got more responsiveness than a kinect seems to have now. Of course, this is on the computer's terms rather than tracking each finger, etc.

There is no haptic response. This means that if you throw yourself at a virtual drum, your body has to provide counterforce, using isometric muscular tension. The virtual casts a real shadow into the interacting body.

Proprioception: How the body imagines its place within a virtual context.

This sense changes in response to an interface. Virtual spaces create an artificial state of being.

He did a piece called Dark Matter in 2010 using several cameras to track a large space, defining several "interactive zones." He used his iphone to map a virtual scultpure that people could sonically activate by touching the virtual sculpture. He ran it in pitch dark using IR cameras to track people.

After spending time in the installation, he began to feel a physical imbalance. It felt like he was moving heavy things, but he wasn't. It can look like having a neurological disorder to an outside observer. The performer performs to the interface, navigating an impenetrable internal space. The audience can see it as an esoteric ritual.

this was a lot like building mirrors. He got kind of tired of doing this.

To what degree should an interface be legible? If people understand that something is interactive, they spend a bunch of time trying to figure out how it works. If they can't see the interaction, they can more directly engage the work.

The audience has expectations around traditional instruments. New interfaces create problems by removing the context in which performers and audiences communicate.

Does the audience need to know a work is interactive?

Interactivity can bring a performer to a new place, even if the audience doesn't see the interaction. He gave an example of a threatre company using this for a sound track.

He did a piece from 1993-2000 called Silicon Remembers Carbon. Cameras looking at IR shadows of people. Video is projected onto sand. Sometimes pre-recorded shadows accompanied people. And people walking across the space shadowed the video.

If you project a convincing fake shadow, people will think it's their shadow, and will follow it if it moves subtly.

He did a piece called Taken in 2002. It shows video of all the people that have been there before. And a camera locks on to a person's head and shows a projection of just the head, right in the middle.

Designing interfaces now will profoundly effect future quality of life, he concludes.

Questions

External feedback loops can make the invisible visible. It helps us see ourselves.

Grid based laptop orchestras

2011-05-31T09:55:00.001+01:00

lorks use orchestral metaphor. Sometimes use real istruments as well. This is a growing art form.

configuration of software for eah laptop is a pain in the arse. Custom code, middleware (chuck, etc) HIDs, system config, etc. This can be a "nightmare." Painful for audiences to watch. Complex setsups and larger ensembles have more problems.

GRENDL: grid enables deployment for laptop orchestras

these kinds of problems are why grid computing was invented. Rules sharing across multiple computers. The shared computers are called organisations. What if a lork was an organisation?

they didn't want to make musicans learn new stuff. They wanted grendl to be a librarian, not another source of complexity. It would deliver scored and configurations

it deploys files. It does not get used while playing. Before performance, the scores are put on a master computer which distrubtes to ensemble laptops.

grendl executes scripts on the laptops before each piece. Once the piece finishes, the laptop returns to pre-performance state. The composer writes the scripts for each piece.

grendl is a wrapper for the saga api.

they're trying to make the compositions more portable with tangible control. They have a human/computer readable card with qr codes. Will be simpler to deploy

they've been suing this for a year. It has surpassed expectations. Their todo list needs a server application rather than specifying everything at the command line w a script. They're going to simplyify this with using osc commands to go from composition to composition.

this makes them rethink how to score for a lork. Including archiving and metadata.

grid systems do not account for latency and timing issues and so it's role in performance is so far liimitted. They have run a piece from grendl.

how do you recover when things go titsup? How to you debug? Answer: it's the composer's problem. Things going wrong means segfaults.

the server version gives better feedback. Each computer will now reportback which step borked.

philosophical: Who owns the instrument? The composer? The player? Their goal is to let composers write at the same sort of level as they would for real orchetras

Live-blogging nime: mobilemuse: integral music control goes mobile

2011-05-31T09:39:00.001+01:00

music sensors and emotion

integral musical control involves state and physicl interaction. Performer interacts with other performers, with audience and with the instrument. Sounds from emotional states. Performers normally ingeract by looking and hearing, but these guys have added emotional state.

audiences also communicate in the same way. This guy wants to measure the audience.

temperature, heart rate, respiration eeg and other thing you can't really attach to an audience.

send measurements to a pattern recognition system. The performer wears sensors.

he's showing a graph of emotional states where a performer's state and an audience memberms state track almost exactly.

they actually do attach things to the audience. This turns out to be a pain in the arse. They have now a small sensor thing called a "fuzzball" whnich attaches to a mobile phone.

despite me blogging this from my phone, i find it hugely problematic that this level of technology and economic privilege would be required to even go to a concert....

they monitor lie detector sort of things. The mobile phone demodulates the signals. The phone can plot them. There is a huge mess of liscence issues to connect hardware to the phone, so they encode it to the audio in.

they did a project where a movie's scenes and order was set by the audience's state.

the application is open source.

How musicians create augmented musical instruments

2011-05-30T14:31:00.002+01:00

augmented instruments are easy for performers of the pre-existing instruments. Musicians themselves have expertise, so let them do design. Come up w a system to let them easily do augmentations.

thr augmentalist was designed collaboratively.

gestures go to instrument, sesnors or both. Sound goes into daw. Processing happens

photo of a slider bar taped to a guitar: quick and easy!

instrument design sessions w 10 pop musicians. Experimenters presented system and updates then a testing session, then instrumentalists played arouns, then instrumentalists made suugestions for changes.

guitarists put tilt measurements on the head. Slider on guitar body. Sensors mapped to typical pedal fx.

an mc stuck thing to a mic and himself. Slider on the mic. Fsr on mic body. Accelerometer on his hand. And movements went to pich shifter.

interesting results: most performers tried to use similar movement, like moving head and body. Only one person kept this. All instruments used tilt.

hundreds of gesture/sound mappings were tried. Most considered successful, but not all were kept. Guitarists tend to develop the same augmentations as each other. But some unusual things were developed also.

musicians start with technology rather than the gesture. Technology is seen as the limitation, so start w it's limitations.

all musicians believed they could come to master systems.

over time, the musicans make the fx more subtle and musical

can people swap instruments? Yes, they felt each other's instruments were easy to use.

one guitarist uses the system with his band and they're gigging w it.

takes up a lot of brain cycles to use extensions. It takes a lot of practice.

every musician had maximum enjoyment at every session.

this kind of user-lead thing can create new avenues for research.

Listening to your brain

2011-05-30T14:11:00.002+01:00

multimosal interfaces for musical collaboration

physiogical sensors sense brainwaves, heart rate and skin response. Can use eeg, etc. Sensing systems are non invasive, wearable, portable and stream signals wirelessly.

they want to add these to the reactable.

emitters were able to tell it was them that were emitting

Live blogging nime - ircam assigning gesture to sound

2011-05-30T13:52:00.002+01:00

they play a sound and then ask people to represent the sound as gesture and then use that gesture to control a new soud. The sound to gesture is an experimental study, which was a very good idea!

in the existing literature: tapping a beat is a well - known gesture. Body motion to music and more new: mimic instrumental performances (ex air guitar). Sound tracting is sketching a sound?

Gaver says musicl listing has a focus on acoustic properties and everyday listening focuses on cause.

categorisation of sounds involves the sound sources. People would categorise door sounds togther, even if they are very different sonically.

will subjects try to mimic the origins of causal sounds, eg mime slamming a door?

will they trace non causal sounds?

they played kitchen sounds and kitchen sounds convoluted w white noise

track subject's hand position. Each subject gets some time to work out and practice her gesture, then record it three times. Ask the subject to watch the viseo and narrate it.

the transformed sounds are described more metaphorically. Non transformed sounds describe the object and the action is described, rather than the sound.

Live blogging nime papers - gamelan elektrika

2011-05-30T13:33:00.004+01:00

a midi gamelan at mit

the slide shows the url Supercollider.ch

they wanted flixible tuning for the gamelan. Evan ziporyn worked on this project. They got alex rigopolus something about touring with kronos. This is going on too long about name dropping and not enough about how it works. I'm not even yet sure what the heck this is, but media lab sure is cool.

this must be a really long time slot becuase she has not yet talked about a technical issue yet.

low latency is important. I think she accidentally let slip that this uses ableton, thus revealing a technical issue.

mit people are often very pleased with themselves.

urathane bars with piezo sensors for version 1, so they switched to FSR and a different material. Didn't catch how it senses damping.

reong has 5 sensors per pot anf FSRs for damping. Hit the middle, touch something to damp.

gongs have capacitive disks on side, piezo on the other, to sence strikes and damping

supercollider and ableton on the backend to handle tuning and sample pplaying

samsung laughes at them when approached for sponsorship but they sure showed them! Nime is thus invited to share in gloating of the amazing skillz of mit.

instrument demo fail.

question about why not use normal percussion controller? answer: to play like a regular gamelan.

the monitoring situation is a problem for them. They use 4 speakers to monitor. House speaker to play

Nime blogging- stereotypical transducers

2011-05-30T13:33:00.003+01:00

earphones are the most common transducer.

can use doppler frequencies from headphone w a seeperate mic to detect motion. This may be ultrasonic? Need to use bandpass filter to just get relevant frequencies. Also, there needs to stuff in the audio range, so filter that w low pass to make sure it stays where it should.

demo video shows this works when a guy waves his hands around.

now we see a chart of error between movements and detections. Moving away has more error.

the earbuds are meant to be held and not worn, so it actually doesn't need to handle normal range of sounds too.

to make system wireless, use a portable music player.

people over 18 cannot hear the ultrasonic frequencies. There are hardware limitations with nyquist. Or ability to play 18kHz

Live bloggig NIME papers - electromagnetically sustained rhodes piano

2011-05-30T11:40:00.003+01:00

Make a rhodes piano that doesn't decay. Can start from a strike or from the excitation. The examples sound like an ebow made for the rhodes.

Rhodes has enharmonic overtones, especially on the strike. The pickup gets mostly integer multiples of the fundamental, especially even partials.

the actuator is an electromechanical coil driven by a sinetone generator of the fundamental. The pickup also grabs the actuator, so they remove the phase inverse of it past the pickup. They can also use feedback to drive the tine. This causes out of control feedback, so they sense the output just of the actuator and subtract that out, leaving just the tine, thus getting increasingly rube goldberg.

there are pros and cons of each approach. They measure after touch for control using a pressure sensor below each key. Appropriately, all the dignal processing is analog

Kinect and OSC Human Interface Devices

2011-05-23T22:41:00.007+01:00

To make up for the boring title of this post, lets's start off with a video:

XYZ with Kinect a video by celesteh on Flickr.

This is a sneak preview of the system I wrote to play XYZ by Shelly Knotts. Her score calls for every player to make a drone that's controllable by x, y, and z parameters of a gestural controller. For my controller, I'm using a kinect.

I'm using a little c++ program based on OpenNi and NITE to find my hand position and then sending out OSC messages with those coordinates. I've written a class for OSCHIDs in SuperCollider, which will automatically scale the values for me, based on the largest and smallest inputs it's seen so far. In an actual performance, I would need to calibrate it by waving my arms around a bit before starting to play.

You can see that I'm selecting myself in a drop down menu as I start using those x, y and z values. If this had been a real performance, other players names would have been there also and there is a mechanism wherein we duel for controls of each other's sounds!

We're doing a sneak preview of this piece on campus on wednesday, which I'm not allowed to invite the public to (something about file regulations) but the proper premiere will be at NIME in Oslo, on Tuesday 31st May @ 9.00pm atChateau Neuf (Street address: Slemdalsveien 15). More information about the performance is available via BiLE's blog.

The SuperCollider Code

I've blogged about this earlier, but have since updated WiiOSCClient.sc to be more immediately useful to people working with TouchOSC or OSCeleton or other weird OSC devices. I've also generated several helpfiles!

OSCHID allows one to describe single OSC devices and define "slots" for them.

Those are called OscSlots and are meant to be quite a lot like GeneralHIDSlots, except that OSCHIDs and their slots do not call actions while they are calibrating.

The OSC WiiMote class that uses DarWiinRemote OSC is still called WiiOSCClient and, as far as I recall, has not changed its API since I last posted.

Note that except for people using smart devices like iPhones or whatever, OSC HIDs require helper apps to actually talk to the WiiMote or the kinect. Speaking of which...

The Kinect Code

Compiling / Installing

This code is, frankly, a complete mess and this should be considered pre-alpha. I'm only sharing it because I'm hoping somebody knows how to add support to change the tilt or how to package this as a proper Mac Application. And because I like to share. As far as I know, this code should be cross-platform, but I make no promises at all.

First, there are dependencies. You have to install a lot of crap: SensorKinect, OpenNi and NITE. Find instructions here or here.

Then you need to install the OSC library. Everybody normally uses packosc because it's easy and stuff.... except it was segfaulting for me, so bugger that. Go install libOSC++.

Ok, now you can download my source code: OscHand.zip. (Isn't that a clever name? Anyway...) Go to your NITE folder and look for a subfolder called Samples. You need to put this into that folder. Then, go to the terminal and get into the directory and type: make. God willing and the floodwaters don't rise, it should compile and put an executable file into the ../Bin directory.

You need to invoke the program from the terminal, so cd over to Bin and type ./OscHand and it should work.

Using

This program needs an XML file which is lurking a few directories below in ../../Data/Sample-Tracking.xml. If you leave everything where it is in Bin, you don't need to specify anything, but if you want to move stuff around, you need to provide the path to this XML file as the first argument on the command line.

The program generates some OSC messages which are /hand/x , /hand/y and /hand/z, all of which are followed by a single floating point number. It does not bundle things together because I couldn't get oscpack to work, so this is what it is. By default, it sends these to port 57120, because that is the port I most want to use. Theoretically, if you give it a -p followed by a number for the second and third arguments, it will set to the port that you want. Because I have not made this as lovely as possible, you MUST specify the XML file path before you specify the port number. (As this is an easy fix, it's high on my todo list, but it's not happening this week.)

There are some keyboard options you can do in the window while the program is running. Typing s turns smoothing on or off. Unless you're doing very small gestures, you probably want smoothing on.

If you want to adjust the tilt, you're SOL, as I have been unable to solve this problem. If you also download libfreenect, you can write a little program to aim the thing, which you will then have to quit before you can use this program. Which is just awesome. There are some Processing sketches which can also be used for aiming.

You should be able to figure out how to use this in SuperCollider with the classes above, but here's a wee bit of example code to get you started:




 k = OSCHID.new.spec_((
  ax: OscSlot(\realtive, '/hand/x'),
  ay: OscSlot(\realtive, '/hand/y'),
  az: OscSlot(\realtive, '/hand/z')
  ));

 // wave your arms a bit to calibrate

 k.calibrate = false;

 k.setAction(\ax, { |val|  val.value.postln});

And more teaser

You can see the GUIs of a few other BiLE Tools in the video at the top, including the Chat client and a shared stopwatch. There's also a network API. I'm going to do a big code release in the fall, so stay tuned.

Strategies for using tuba in live solo computer music

2011-05-10T21:42:00.002+01:00

I had the idea of live sampling my tuba for an upcoming gig. I've had this idea before but never used due to two major factors. The first is the difficulty of controlling a computer and a tuba at the same time. One obvious solution is foot pedals, which I've yet to explore and the other idea is a one-handed, freely moving controller such as the wiimote.

The other major issue with doing tuba live-sampling is sound quality. Most dynamic mics (including the SM57, which is the mic I own) make a tuba sound like either bass kazoo or a disturbingly flatulent sound. I did some tests with the zoom H4 positioned inside the bell and it appeared to sound ok, so I was going to do my gig this way and started working on my chops.

Unfortunately, the sound quality turns out not to be consistent. The mic is prone to distortion even when it seems not to be peaking. Low frequencies are especially like to contain distortion or a rattle which seems to be caused by the mic itself vibrating from the tuba.

There are a few possible work arounds. One is to embrace the distortion as an aesthetic choice and possible emphasise it through the use of further distortion fx such as clipping, dropping the bit rate or ring modulation. I did a trial of ring modulating a recorded buffer with another part of the same buffer. This was not successful as it created a sound lurking around the uncanny valley of bad brass sounds, however a more regular waveform may work better.

At the SuperCollider symposium at Wesleyan, I saw a tubist (I seem to recall it was Sam Pluta, but I could be mistaken) deliberately sampling tuba-based rattle. The performer put a cardboard box over the bell of the tuba. Attached to the box was a piezo buzzer in a plastic encasing. The composer put a ball bearing inside the plastic enclosure and attached it to the cardboard box. The vibration of the tuba shook the box which rattled the bearing. The piezo element recorded the bearing's rattle, which roughly followed the amplitude of the tuba, along with other factors. I thought this was a very interesting way to record a sound caused by the tuba rather than the tuba itself.

Similarly, one could use the tuba signal for feature extraction, recognising that errors in miccing the tuba will be correlated with errors in the feature extraction. Two obvious thing to attempt to extract are pitch and amplitude, the latter being somewhat more error-resistant. I've described before an algorithm for time-domain frequency detection for tuba. As this method relies on RMS, it also calculates amplitude. Other interesting features may be findable via FFT-based analysis such as onset detection or spectral centroid, etc using the MLCD UGens. These features could be used to control the playing of pre-prepared sounds or live software synthesis. I have not yet experimented with this method.

Of course, a very obvious solution is to buy a better microphone. It may also be that the poor sound quality stemmed from my speakers, which are a bit small for low frequencies. The advantage of exploring other approaches include cost (although a tuba is not usually cheap either) and that cheaper solutions are often more durable or at least I'd be more willing to take cheaper gear to bar gigs (see previous note about tuba cost). As I have an interest in playing in bars and making my music accessible through 'gigability,' a bar-ready solution is most appealing.

Finally, the last obvious solution is to not interact with the tuba's sounds at all, thus creating a piece for tuba and tape. This has less that can go wrong, but it looses quit a lot of spontaneity and requires a great deal of advance preparation. A related possibility is that the tubist control real-time processes via the wiimote or other controller. This would also require a great deal of advanced preparation - making the wiimote into it's own instrument requires the performer to learn to play it and the tuba at the same time, which is rather a lot to ask, especially for an avant guarde tubist who is already dealing with more performance parameters (such as voice, etc) than a typical tubist. This approach also abandons the dream of a computer-extended tuba and loses whatever possibilities for integration exist with more interactive methods. However, a controller that can somehow be integrated into the act of tuba playing may work quite well. This could include sensors mounted directly on the horn such that, for example, squeezing something in a convenient location, extra buttons near valves, etc.

I'm bummed that I won't be playing tuba on thursday, but I will have something that's 20 minutes long and involves tuba by September

WiiOSCClient.sc

2011-05-10T14:46:00.002+01:00

Because there are problems with the wiimote support in SuperCollider, I wrote a class for talking to Darwiin OSC. This class has the same methods as the official wiimote classes, so, should those ever get fixed, you can just switch to them with minimal impact on your code.

Because this class takes an OSC stream from a controller and treats it like input from a joystick, this code may potentially be useful to people using TouchOSC on their iPhones.

There is no helpfile, but there is some usage information at the bottom of the file:


 // First, you create a new instance of WiiOSCClient, 
 // which starts in calibration mode
 
 
 w = WiiOSCClient.new;

 // If you have not already done so, open up DarwiinRemote OSC and get it talking to your wii.
 // Then go to preferences of that application and set the OSC port to the language port
 // Of SuperCollider.  You will see a message in the post window telling you what port
 // that is .... or you will see a lot of min and max messages, which lets you know it's
 // already callibrating
 
 // move your wiimote about as if you were playing it.  It will scale it's output accordingly
 
 
 // now that you're done callibrating, turn callibration mode off
 
 w.calibrate = false;
 
 // The WiiOSCClient is set up to behave very much like a HID client and is furthermore
 // designed for drop-in-place compatibility if anybody ever sorts out the WiiMote code
 // that SuperCollider pretends to support.
 
 // To get at a particular aspect of the data, you set an action per slot:
 
 w.setAction(\ax, {|val|
  
  val.value; // is the scaled data from \ax - the X axis of the accelerometre.
  // It should be between 0-1, scaled according to how you waved your arms during
  // the callibration period
 });
 
 
 
 // You can use a WiiRamp to provide some lag
 (
  r = WiiRamp (20, 200, 15);
 
  w.setAction(\ax, {|val|
   var scaled, lagged;
  
   scaled = ((val.value * 2) - 1).abs;
   lagged = r.next(scaled);
  
   // now do somehting with lagged
  });
 )

Calibration

this class is self-calibrating. It scales the wiimote input against the largest and smallest numbers that it's seen thus far. While calibration is set to true, it does not call any of its action methods, as it assumes the calibrated numbers are bogus. After to set calibration to false, it does start calling the actions, but it still changes the scale if it sees a bigger or smaller number than previously.

WiiRamp

The WiiRamp class attempts to deal with the oddness of using accelerometers, but it does not just do a differentiation, as that would be too easy. The accelerometers give you major peaks and valleys, all centred around a middle, so just using the raw values often is a bit boring. In the example, you see that we scale the incoming data first: ((val.value * 2) - 1) changes the data range from 0 to 1 into -1 to 1. The puts the centre on 0. Then, because we care more about the height of peaks and depth of valleys than we care about whether they're positive or negative, we take the absolute value, moving the scale back to 0 to 1.

When you shake your wiimote, the ramp keeps track of your largest gesture. It takes N steps to reach that max (updating if a larger max is found before it gets there), then holds at the number for M steps and then scoots back down towards the current input level. You can change those rates with upslope, hold and downslope.

OscSlot

This class is the one that might be useful to iPhone users. It creates an OSCResponderNode and then calls an action function when it gets something. It also optionally sends data to a Bus and has JIT support with a .kr method. It is modelled after some of the HID code. It also supports callibration. How to deploy it with TouchOSC is an exercise left to the reader.

http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/code/WiiOSCClient.sc

First BiLE Performance

2011-03-20T23:32:00.002Z

BiLE, the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble, had it's first gig on Thursday, just six or eight weeks after being formed. We played at the Hare and Hounds in Birmingham, which is a well-known venue for rock bands, as a part of the Sound Kitchen series. There were two pieces on the bill, one called 15 Minutes for BiLE by BiLE member Jorge Garcia Moncada and we did a cover of Stucknote by Scot Gresham-Lancaster, which was a piece played by The Hub.

As a first performance, I thought it went rather well. There were the usual issues where everything sounds completely different on stage and the few minutes of sound checking does not give anybody enough time to get used to the monitor speakers. And time moves completely differently in front of an audience, where suddenly every minute gets much longer. But there were also the performing-with-a-computer issues: computers get terrible stage fright and are much more prone to crash. A few people did have their sound engines crash, so the first piece had a high pitched squeal for a few minutes, while messages flew on the chat window, reminding people to be quiet during the quiet parts. Actually, there was quite a lot of panic in the chat window and I wish I'd kept a log of it. (Later the audience said we all looked panicked from time to time. I always look panicked on stage, but it's not cool.) In the second piece, I forgot to tell my programme to commence sound-making for a bout the first three minutes. I haven't heard the recording yet, but I bet things sounded ok. Considering that most of us had never done live laptop performance at all before and how quickly we went from our first planning meeting to our first gig, I think we got a good result.

Jorge's piece was complicated but Stucknote seems deceptively simple, so we did not try running through it until the day before the gig. In retrospect, this was clearly an error, because the piece, like all structured improvisation, does require some practice to get the flow down. Of course, we'd all spent the requisite time working on our sound generation and I'd coded up some faders for me and the other SuperCollider user, with Ron Kuivila's Conductor quark, which is a very quick and dirty was of making useful GUIs. I'd tried out my part at home and it worked well and the sound I got was interesting, so I felt confident in it until I got to the practice and it crashed very quickly. I restarted SuperCollider and it crashed again. And again. And again. Half the time, it brought down the other SC user's computer also. And it was clobbering the network, causing the MAX users a bunch of error messages and a few moments of network congestion. MAX, usefully, just throws away network messages when there are too many of them, whereas SC does not seem to.

I could not figure out where the bug was and so, after the practice, I sat down to sort it out. And there was no sign of it. Everything was fine again.

Fortunately, this provided enough of a clue that I was able to figure out that I had created an infinite loop between the two SuperCollider programmes. When I moved a slider in the GUI, that sent a message to the network which effected the sound on the target machine and also caused Shelly's programme to update the GUI. However, the Conductor class always informs listeners when it's updated, no matter who updated it or how, so it sent a message back to the network informing everybody of it's new value, which caused my GUI to update, which sent a message to the network, ad infintum until I crashed.

I came up with a fix using a flag and semaphores:

                   Task({
                             semaphore.wait;
                             should_call_action = false;
                             cv = con[contag];
                             cv.input = input;
                             should_call_action = true; 
                             semaphore.signal;
                     }).play;

While this fix mostly works, it does bring up some interesting questions about data management across this kind of network. If we're all updating the data at once, is there a master copy of it somewhere? Who owns the master copy if one exists? In this case, as one person is making sound from it, that person would seem to be the owner of the data. But what if we were all sharing and using the sliders? Then we all own it and may all have different ideas of what it might actually be.

I'm writing a class for managing shared resources which holds a value and notifies listeners when it changes. The object that's changing it passes itself along to the method, so when listeners are notified, the changer is not. I haven't finished the class yet, so I don't have sample code, but I'm pondering some related issues.

Like, should there be a client version of this class for a local copy held on the local machine and a master version for the canonical copy on the network that everybody else is updating? Should a master copy of some data advertise itself on the network via the API and automatically listen for updates? Should they specify a way to scale values so it can also accepted changed inputs from 0-1 and scale them appropriately? If it does accept inputs/values in a specified range, should there be a switch for the clients to automagically build a GUI containing sliders for every master variable on the network? I think that would be quite cool, but I may not have time to code it soon, as our next gig, where we'll be playing a piece of mine, is coming up very soon on 29 of April and then there's a gig in May and then I suspect probably one in June and one in July (although not scheduled yet) and in August, we're going to NIME in Oslo, which is very exciting. Bright days ahead.

Semaphores are awesomesauce

2011-03-17T15:51:00.003Z

Imagine, if you will, that you are a programmer and somebody has asked you to write an application that counts cars in intersections. You have webcams mounted on top of the traffic lights and it sends you a message when it sees a car. You have saved somewhere a count of all the cars so far. So, when it tells you it sees a car, you go find that number, add one to it and write down the new number. There is more than one camera in the intersections, though and while some cars are travelling north, others are travelling south at the same time. What if two cameras see different cars at the same time?

Camera one sees a car and the programme listening to it goes and finds the count of cars so far, which is 75.
Camera two sees a car and the programme listening to it goes and finds the count of cars so far, which is 75.
Camera one's programme adds one to the total and gets 76.
Camera two's programme adds one to the total and gets 76.
Camera one's programme saves it's new total.
Camera two's programme saves it's new total.
You go to look how many cars have been through the intersection and the number recorded is 76.

Camera one and camera two are operating separately from each other at the same time. They are sperate threads. when two of them are trying to change the same resource at the same time, you get something called a race condition. Will the first thread finish before the second thread clobbers it's changes? The race is on!

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem: semaphores! Lets' say you are trying to update your traffic count with SuperCollider:

(
 var traffic_count, camera1, camera2, semaphore, action;

 traffic_count = 0;
 semaphore = Semaphore.new(1);

 camera1 = TrafficCounterCamera(\north);
 camera2 = TrafficCounterCamera(\south);

 action = { // this will be called when a car is seen
  Task({
   semaphore.wait; // only one thread can get past this point at a time
   traffic_count = traffic_count +1;
   semaphore.signal; // relinquish control of the semaphore
   traffic_count.postln;
  }).play;
 };

 camera1.action = action;
 camera2.action = action;
)

You need to make a new Semaphore before you use it. By default, they allow one thread through at a time, but you can change the argument to 2 or 3 or whatever number you want.

When your code encounters a semaphore.wait, the thread will pause and wait until it's turn to procede. Only one thread will be allowed past that line at a time. If both cameras update at the exact same time, one of them will have to wait until the other says it's good to go ahead.

semaphore.signal is how that thread says it's good to go ahead. The code in between those lines can only be accessed by a single thread at a time. the traffic_count.postln line is outside the seamphore because it's not making a change to anything, so it's safe to read it outside of the semaphore.

So when you have two seperate threads trying to change something at the same time, semaphors can help you out! This sort of situation can arrive with GUI objects, or with OSC messages, HID objects or anything with an action method.

Be thread-safe!

My life lately (is tl;dr)

2011-03-11T00:36:00.005Z

Tuesday and Wednesday Last Week

A week ago Tuesday, I taught my module in Cambridge. The next morning, I got on a train to Birmingham for BiLE practice. I'm a co-founder of BiLE, the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble. We formed in February and we have a gig next week. The technical hurdles to getting a laptop ensemble going are not minor, so there has been a lot of energy going into this from everybody. We have got group messaging going, thanks to OSCGroups and I wrote some SuperCollider infrastructure based on the API quark and a small chat GUI and a stopwatch sort of timer, which is controlled with OSC, so there's been a lot of that sort of tool writing. And much less successful coding of sound-making items, which will eventually be joystick controllable if I ever get them to work. All my code is written for mono samples and all of the shared samples people are using are in stereo, so I spent a lot of time trying to stereo-ise my code before finally mixing the samples down to mono.

I'm a big believer in mono, actually, in shared playing environments. If I am playing with other people, I'm playing my computer as an instrument and instruments have set sound-radiation patterns. I could go with a PLOrk-style 6-speaker hemisphere, if I wanted to spend a boatload of money on a single-use speaker to get an instrumental radiation pattern form my laptop, so I could just use a single Genelec 1029 that I already own.

Anyway, after the BiLE rehearsal, a couple students gave a group presentation on Reaper, which is a shareware, cheap, powerful DAW. I'm quite impressed and am pondering switching. My main hesitation is that I expect my next computer will be linux, so I don't know if I want to get heavily involved with a program that won't run on that OS. On the other hand, I don't actually like Ardour very much, truth be told. I haven't liked any of them since I walked away from ProTools.

After that we went out for socialising and instead of catching a train home, I went to stay on the floor of Julien's studio. He lives way out in the country, up a lane (British for a single-track country road). It's quite lovely. I would not be a fan of that commute, but I might do it for that cottage.

Thursday

The next morning, Juju and I set back to campus quite early so he could meet his supervisor. I ran a couple of errands and got a uni-branded hoodie. I haven't worn such a garment for years, because fabric clinging to my chest in the bad old days was not a good thing. But now I can wear snug woven fabrics, like T-shirts, hoodies and jumpers! It's amazing! Also, I remember the major student protests about university branded clothing made by child labour, but this was actually fairtrade, according to the label, which is fairly impressive.

Then all the postgrads met in the basement of the Barber Institute to start loading speakers into a truck for a gig. We were moving a relatively small system, only 70 speakers, but that's still a fair amount of gear to muscle around. Then we went to the Midlands Arts Centre to move all the gear into the venue and set it up. The gear is all in heavy flight cases, which needed to be pushed up and down ramps and down hallways and then the speakers inside needed to be carried to where they would be set up, as did the stands to which they would be attached and the cables that connect them. It's a lot of gear. We worked until 6 or 7 pm and then went back to the studios at uni to get a 2 hour long presentation from Hans Tutchku about how he does music stuff. I tried desperately to stay awake because it was interesting and I wanted to hear what he was saying, but I did not entirely succeed in my quest.

Friday

Then, Juju and I went back to his place, 45 minutes away and then came back to the MAC early the next morning to finish rigging the system. We put up the remainder of the system and then people who were playing in that evening's concert began to rehearse. I hung around for the afternoon, trying to get my BiLE code working. Kees Tazelaar, who played the next evening came along to see how things were going and recognised me from Sonology and greeted me by my old name. I like Kees quite a lot, but it was a very awkward moment for me and I wasn't sure what to do, so I spoke to him only briefly and then mostly avoided him later. This was not the best way to handle it.

There were two concerts in the evening. The second of them was organised by Sound Kitchen and was a continuous hour with no break between pieces. The people diffusing the stereo audio to the 70 speakers took turns, but changed places without interrupting the sound flow. It was extremely successful, I thought. The hour was made up of the work of many different composers, each of whom had contributed only 5 minutes, but somehow this was arranged into a much larger whole that held together quite well, partly because many of the different composers had used similar sound material. A lot of them used bird sounds, for example, so that was a repeating motif throughout the concert.

Saturday

After that, we hung around the bar for a bit afterwards. The next morning was not so early, thank goodness, when we went back to the MAC and then back to the uni for the BiLE hack day. The idea was that we would do a long group coding session, where people could write code around each other and ask for clarification or feedback or help or whatever from band mates. However, it started really late and everybody was really tired, so it was not entirely successful in it's goals.

Then we went back to the MAC for the concerts. I was sitting in the hallway, trying to figure out why my BiLE code had failed so completely when I got drafted into being in charge of the comp tickets. It turns out that this is actually somewhat stressful, because it requires knowing who is supposed to get comped in, getting tickets for them and then distributing them. Which means approaching Francis Dhomont and speaking to him.

The first concert was curated by Kees Tazelaar and started with a reconstruction of the sounds played in the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958. He found the source tapes and remixed them. Concrete PH sounded much more raw and rougher than other mixes I've heard. It had a gritty quality that seemed much more grounded in a physical process. I was surprised by how different it sounded. Then he played Poem électronique and a his own work called Voyage dans l'espace. I hope he plays these again on large multi-channel systems, because it was pretty cool.

I was feeling fairly overwhelmed by the lack of sleep, my lack of success with BiLE and getting stuck with all the comp tickets, so I was not happy between concerts. The next one was all pieces by Anette Vande Gorne, a Belgian woman who runs the Espace du son festival in Brussels and who has very definite theories about how to diffuse sounds in space. Some of them are quite sensible, however, she thinks that sound can start at the front of the hall and be panned towards the back of the hall, but sound cannot originate at the back of the hall and travel to the front. Hearing about this had prejudiced me against her, as it seems rather silly.

She always diffuses standing up, so they had raised the faders for her, with one bank slightly higher than the other, like organ manuals. She started to play her pieces... and it was amazing. It was like being transported to another place. All of my stress was lifted from my shoulders. It was just awe inspiring. The second piece was even better. I was sitting in the back half, so I could see her standing at the mixers, her hands flying across the faders dramatically, like an organist, full of intensity as her music dramatically swelled and travelled around the room. It was awe-inspiring. Then I understood why people listened to her, even when some of her theories sound silly. She might not be right about everything, but there's quite a lot she is right about. This was one of the best concerts that I've ever been to.

The last concert was a surprise booking, so it wasn't well publicised. It was Jonty Harrison, Francis Dhomont and Hans Tutchku. It was also quite good, but I wouldn't want to play after Vande Gorne. Tutchku's piece had several pauses in it that went on just a few moments too long. It's major climax came quite early. It worked as a piece, but seemed like it could be experienced in another order as easily as the way it was actually constructed. I talked to him at the party afterwards and he said that the pauses were climaxes for him and ways of building tension and that he had carried them out for too long in order to build suspense. I'm not entirely positive they functioned in this way, but the idea is quite ineresting and I may look into it. He also asked me what I thought of his presentation for two days earlier, so I was hoping he hadn't noticed me dozing off, but I think he did.

After the final concert, there was a large party at Jonty's house. I got a lift from Jonty, so I was squeezed in the back of a car with Anette Vande Gorne on one side of me and Hans Tutchku on the other side with Francis Dhomont in the front. They all spoke French the whole way. I've been filling out job applications and one them wants to know about my foreign language skills and now I can say with certainty that if I'm stuck in a car with several famous composers speaking French, I can follow their conversation fairly well, but would be way too starstruck to contribute anything.

Apparently, the party went on until 4:30 in the morning, but I didn't stay so late. I talked a lot to Jean-François Denis, the director of empreintes DIGITALes, a Canadian record label. He flew from Canada just for the weekend and showed up without anyone expecting him. He is extraordinarily charming.

Sunday

The next morning, we went back again to the MAC and then there was a long concert with an intermission in the early afternoon. Amazingly, none of the concerts over the entire weekend featured overhead water drops. There were barely any dripping sounds at all.

After the concert, we de-rigged the system and packed all the gear back into cases and loaded it onto the two rented trucks. Then we went for curry in Mosely, which we seem to do after every gig. Shelly was talking about how it was her last BEAST gig and I wasn't paying much attention until I realised this meant it was my last gig too. I really should have signed up to play something. I thought there was another gig coming later in the year, but it was cancelled. I'm seriously going to graduate from Brum having only played a piece at a BEAST gig one time and never having diffused a stereo piece. That is extremely lame on my part.

Monday

Juju was completely exhausted, so we left the curry early, so he could go home and catch up on sleep. The next morning, we all went back to the Barber Institute to unload the trucks and put everything away. Then we, as usual, went to the senior common room to have cups of terrible coffee. Their tea is alright, so that's what I had, but most people go for the coffee, which could double as diesel fuel. I guess this was my last time of that also.

Normally, I would then gather my things and go home, but I did not. I worked on code and faffed and worried about my lecture the next day and then in the evening, we had another seminar. Howard Skempton came and talked for two hours about Cardew and Morton Feldman and his own music. It was quite good. We all went to the pub afterwards, but that dissipated quickly as people left to sleep it off.

Tueday

I got the train home, finally and got in after midnight. There's a large stack of mail inside my door. I woke up early the next morning to assemble my presentation for my module. As luck would have it, the topic was acousmatic music, so I talked about BEAST and played them some of the music from the weekend. I also pointed them at some tools. I was supposed to have them start their task during the class time, but a surprising number of them wanted to show their works in progress, so that didn't happen.

As I was on the train back to London from Cambridge, I wondered whether I should go out to a bar that night to socialise when I fell completely asleep on the train. Drooling on my backpack asleep. I completely crashed. I woke myself up enough to get the tube home and then thought I would sort out my BiLE code instead of going out, but I couldn't concentrate, so I just faffed around on the internet instead of sleeping or going out. Meh to me.

Wednesday

Then, the next day, which was Wednesday, a week and a day after all of this started, I got on the train for Birmingham to go to a BiLE rehearsal and to go to a seminar. I got my code working on the train and was feeling somewhat happy about that, but when I got to the rehearsal, it just gave up completely. I managed to make sounds twice during the entire rehearsal, one of which was during a grand pause. When I tried repeating the sound later, it wouldn't play. Also, Shelly found a crash bug in my chat application, when Juju typed a french character. On the bright side, however, all of the MAX users got all the way through one of the pieces we're playing next Thursday, which is quite encouraging. Antonio, our graphics guy got the projector sort of working, so I was able to glance at what he was doing a couple of times and it looked good.

We took a break and a bunch of the postgrads were dissing live coding, so I guess that might not be a good goal for the ensemble. They thought projected code was self-indulgent and only programmers would care. I need to link them to the toplap mainfesto. Actually, they were more dissing the idea of live coding, having barely witnessed any themselves. Non-programmers do seem to care and, while it is a movement that does require some thoughtful understanding to fully appreciate it, the same could certainly be said of acousmatic music. I like the danger of live coding, something that I think a laptop ensemble ought to appreciate. It's a bit like a high wire act.

The presentations at the seminar were interesting and then we went to the pub. I was so tired biking home from the train station that I got confused about which side of the street I'm supposed to be on.

Thursday

I slept until 2 this afternoon and I was supposed to sort out my BiLE code and fix up my CV and write my research portfolio, but all I did was send out email about Monday's supercollider meetup and fix the crashbug in the chat thing. SuperCollider strings are in 7 bit ascii and fuck up if you give them unicode, which is really quire shocking and not documented anywhere.

Then I went to Sam's to get Xena back and I wired up part of the 5.1 system she got for her daughter and sorted out her daughter's macmini so that she could connect to it with VNC and so it was wired to the sound system and the projector and quit asking for the keychain password every 5 seconds. Then I came home and spent ages typing this up. Tomorrow, I will do my CV stuff for real, because I have to get it done and then work on my BiLE code. Saturday I'm going back to Brum again for a 5 hour rehearsal in wich we sort out the rest of our music for the gig. Sunday, I need to finish and job application related stuff and write my presentation for Tuesday. Monday is the job application deadline and a SuperCollider meetup. Tuesday, I teach. Wednesday, I need to get Xena back to Sam's and then go to Brum again for a rehearsal and will be there overnight to practice the next day and then play the gig and then get stonkingly drunk. Friday, I go home. And then start sorting out the tech stuff for the next two pieces, which at least are by me and count towards my portfolio. And I need to sort out my stretched piece which is a disorganised mess and start writing a 20 minut piece, which I haven't done at all and needs to be done very soon because I need to graduate and I have not spent all this busy time working on my own music, although the tools I've written should be kind of valuable. All I can think about now, going over and over in my head is all the stuff I have to do. And snogging. That thing about men thinking about sex every 7 seconds has never been true for me before, but it is now. And it's actually quite annoying except that as the alternative is thinking about everything that I have to do, I actually prefer it.

Attention: Single Ladies

2011-02-03T18:17:00.003Z

Are you a straight or bi woman between 29-40, who has given up on the single scene? Feel like all the good men are taken?

Despair Not!

Meet eligible postgraduate men near you!

Yes, your area may be teeming with unpaired postgrad men. Men with exciting and interesting hobbies such as:

Working on their dissertations
Doing fake-work
Facebooking
Procrastinating
Feeling guilty about facebooking and procrastinating
Deconstructing re-runs of The Simpsons
And More!

Yes, you too can be let into the life and the flat of a man who has stacks of books everywhere and mutters to himself about conference submission deadlines. You can experience the joys of wonder of hearing him say, "I really should be working right now." You can go to fun parties with academics where your date shows up exceedingly late and then drinks only lemonade in case he decides to do more work at 1:30 AM.

Do you find gaudy material tokens of success like nice haircuts and shoes without holes to be shallow and off-putting? Have you always wondered abou the finer points of spectromorphology carried out with open source software and the communities that produce those artefacts? Does your heart go pitter-patter for somebody reading theory textbooks on the beach on holidays? Yes, postgraduate men are waiting to meet you!

Or

If you're a bloke and you're still reading this far, why not meet postgraduate women who are pretty much like the men described above, but with the added bonus of being female.

Act NOW

While supplies last! Yes, nab them quickly before they finish with their writing up year or drop out of uni or meet somebody else (haha, just kidding on the last one)

Why note date a postgraduate near you TODAY?

You're going to have to make the first move here, and be as blatant as possible about it, or else they might not notice. But give it a go. Soon.

A dream I had

2011-01-14T19:38:00.003Z

I had a friend who had an inverse fairy godmother. She would always grant the opposite of whatever he wished for. If he wished to go see a concert somewhere, she would wave her wand and it would guarantee that we wouldn't get to the concert, but something else really good would happen, always better than whatever wish he had. His life was always full of unexpected and amazing events.

This made him very popular, because when you were hanging around with him, you never knew what was going to happen, but that it was going to be good. His friends thought this was awesome and it seemed like his fairy godmother was benefitting them more than him. It's not that he didn't also benefit from his inverse wishes, but he was constantly frustrated that none of his wishes ever came true. He seemed unaware that he lived a charmed life. He wasn't even aware that his fairy godmother existed, but I had seen her.

Still, he was relatively happy despite himself and had a good sense of humour. He never learned to stop wishing for things, though or to wish aloud for the opposite of what he actually wanted. He just smiled and carried on, surrounded by his friends.

And then I woke up and all the specifics of this dream faded from my mind, as dreams do, but the general plot remained. Weird, innit

Adventures in American Healthcare

2011-01-01T08:52:00.002Z

A few days before I left England, my ear began to itch, in the spot where I used to have a cartilage piercing. I didn't worry about it, but scratched at it, absentmindedly, thinking I really should do something about it but then forgetting. Then I got on a 10 hour flight, followed immediately by a 16 hour train ride. I got to my dad's house and felt exhuasted and my ear was irrated to heck. I caught a glimpse of it in the mirror and my entire ear was red enough that I could step in for Rudolph and save Christmas, in case a holiday movie suddemly formed around me.

My dad took me to see a doctor at an "urgent care clinic." This is American for a walk-in clinic. First, a nurse took my contact details and then told me to wait in the lobby. The primary feature of this was a large flatscreen TV showing adverts for prescription drugs. "Feeling stressed? Ask your doctor about Damitol. Damitol can help with burts of impotent rage. Do not take Damitol if you are already taking Fukitol. Side effects of Damitol may include becoming red faced, excessive sputtering and fatigue. Damitol works best when combined with diet and exercise. . . ." Blah blah blah. They had a 5 or 10 minute advert for a diabetes drug. Then they had a minute or two of random health-related information, then another advert. It was all branded as CNN Health.

"This is weird." I said to my dad.

"I think it's just general information about insulin . . . oh. That is weird."

A nurse took me back, weighed me, took my blood pressure, pulse and temperature and asked about allergies. All interactions with healthcare providers in the US start with weight, blood pressure, etc. I explained about my ear, which was significantly less red by then. She took notes and left.

A moment later, the doctor came in and I repeated my story. He looked at my ear for 5 seconds and prescribed sulfa antibiotics. "They're cheap," he explained. I asked something about my ear and he said it was probably a staph infection and they tend to respond to sulpha.

"Staph?!" I thought.

"Unless it's MRSA," he continued.

I quit listening to his list of dire diseases. I asked about side effects and he started talking about posssible allergic reactions. "In the worst case your mouth and tongue will swell up and . . ."

"I just wanted to know if it was ok to drink or not." I interrupted.

"If you drink, it will make the allergic reaction hit more quickly . . ."

I stopped listening again. Then I went out to the front to pay. Actually, my dad paid. It was over $100. Then we went to a pharmacy, where the drugs were only $14. They really were quite cheap.

The pharmacist explained that they might upset my stomach, etc. i had forgotten that in the States, you get this information from pharmacists and not doctors. Probably because we were in Washington state, she didn't mention that I should stay out of the sun.

So I started taking antibiotics, wondering if my British GP would have prescribed them. he certainly would have poked my ear several times first. I also started putting hot compresses on it. It hurt if anything touched it, so no wearing headphones or hats or sleeping on that side.

Last night, on the 8th day, it was bright red again. And still hurting and warm to the touch this morning, so I resolved to go to a clinic. I called the one closest to my house. They weren't answering, so I called another which was taking a holiday and then another and another. Every clinic seems to be closed today, except for one 3 miles away, which said it was open, but the recptionist was busy. I cycled over. It was closed.

Finally, I tried the Berkeley Free Clinic and was startled when a person answered. I described my woes. "You need to be seen," he said, but they couldn't see me before Monday. "Do you have money or insurance?" The person asked. Money, yes. Insurance, no. He suggested that I go to Highland Hospital. "They have an urgent care clinic. Go to the emergency room and they'll direct you."

I faffed around for a bit and finally got on a bus. Highland is an emergency-only hospital with a reputation for highly organised, professional helpful staff in the midst of the complete chaos.

I asked for the urgent care clinic and was told it had closed down. They said they just do it all in emergency now. The intake person said it was fine that I wasn't having an emergency and took my ID and told me to sit.

I got called up to a triage desk and a nurse took my temperature pulse and blood pressure and asked about allergies and past illnesses. "When was your last tetnus shot?" Then she asked what the problem was and gave me a red wristband to indicate that I have allergies. She told me to wait in a different room.

I got called back to a different desk where I was asked for ID again, address, emergency contact information, mother's maiden name, social security number, whether I had a job and a GP and many other questions. "Did you come by car or bus?" Then, she told me to wait again.

A nurse called me and walked me over to a bunch of cublicles. "Wait here for a moment." He said and then vanished. A while later, a woman introduced herself as a doctor and I repeated my entire tale of woe. She looked in my ears and then prodded my ill one a bit. She said it was a minor infection and would probably go away on its own, but decided to prescribe me new antibiotics. She told me to keep sitting there and a nurse would come.

The nurse had the prescription forms. "You have to take these every 6 hours, which is a pain in the ass." She looked at my warm, but no longer red ear and wondered why I had been given a prescription at all. She lead me to wait for a financial advisor. While waiting, I heard an announcement calling the trauma team to assemble, saying a type 2 trauma would be arriving in 8 minutes.

The financial person asked if I had a job and for ID. I said I worked in England. "So you're not a resident of California?" Well, I kind of am, I'm just studying abroad. I gave her my expired drivers lisence. It has the wrong name on it. This did not help clarify matters. She said I would need to provide pay stubs to prove my income. I said they were in England. She sent me to wait to talk to her supervisor.

I looked at the information provided to me while I waited. "Cellulitis usually clears up on its own." No mention of staph or mrsa. The financial person called me back.

"You're not a resident here." We began again. I finally gave up. She asked what had happened during my visit. "Oh, that won't cost much anyway."

"How much will it be?"

They don't tally it up for a couple of weeks. In my experience, a trip to an emergency room is at least $400, so I really hope this will be billed as if their clinic still existed.

I took the prescription to Walgreens pharmacy, despite knowing that they have a 1000% markup on some drugs, including ones I got from them in the past. 7 days of the new antibiotic cost $60, but if I spend $20 to enroll on their discount program, I could get it for $30. Obviously, they have a large markup on antibiotics also. Charming. I enrolled in the program. The form I got explained that it was not health insurance. No kidding.

Post Script

The bill from Highland came out to $283, which is a lot less than I'd anticipated.

Ignorance is Strength; Socialism is Slavery

2010-12-29T18:20:00.001Z

It has recently been put to me that socialism is slavery, because under socialism, the person belongs to the state and not themselves. The speaker's inspiration was likely the not-yet-implemented health reform, because he wrongly fears he will be compelled to get regular checkups from a physician.

By his logic (and I use that term losely) the entire first world and part of the third world, are currently enslaved. France? Enslaved. Germany? Enslaved.

Of course, America is no stranger to slavery. There are people alive today who grew up hearing their own grandparents accounts of what it was like to be born into bondage. To have no rights and be considered less than human, to fear random violence.

Slaves were compelled to work at jobs that were often dangerous or life-span shortening. The method of compulsion was systemic and grusome violence. People were often brutally whipped. The owner had a "right" to sexual abuse. In the normal course of trade, families could be broken up and torn apart- spouses sold to separate locations, children taken from their parents. And it took just an accusation of sex to cause a lynching - something which did not just include hanging, but also torture.

Slavery in America has never been equaled in it's brutality, it's violence and it's injustice. One race of people systeamtically beat, exploited and opressed another race of people, taking the output of their labour for themselves and providing violence in return. And this system of violence and terror is exactly like . . . Universal access to healthcare?

Stay sane, America.

Quick Scenes From America

2010-12-23T07:13:00.001Z

I'm unused to hearing my native accent, so I keep looking up in surprise. There are so many American accents, some of which are almost never on TV or heard overseas. I want to record people talking, but I can't imagine them agreeing to it.

1

In the train station in Emerville (the town between Oakland and Berkeley), there is a young woman eating nori seaweed. These are the flat paper-like sheets of seaweed used to wrap sushi. I'm jealous that I don't have some. . . . Now she's reading a book about the oneness of the universe. . . . Now she's meditating in the busy train station waiting room. . . . Now she's writing in her journal. I do miss California so much when I'm away.

2

I've woken up quite early on the train and gone to the dining car where it's me and senior citizens. There are cups of coffee with free refills. It's not good, but it's not bad either. I have two cups. The man seated across from me asks what a croissant is. Later he makes a joke about shoot black and hispanic people. His wife gently chastises him. I'm unsure how angrily I should respond. I tell him it's "a bit alarming," which seems inadequate, but of course, I don't want to be rude when confronted with apalling racism. There are some things about California that I don't miss at all.

3

The man seated next to me at my regular seat spends an amount equal to half his rent money on health insurance that only covers sudden, catastrophic illness. He is unemployed. He wishes there was socialised medecine in the US, but understands, he says, that this is incompatible with rugged individualism, and doesn't see an answer that's compatible with American culture. We can't have nice things?

I wasn't dreaming of a white Christmas

2010-12-18T21:39:00.004Z

Yesterday, I sat on an airplane for five hours and when I got off the plane, my ears were uneffected, I had no jetlag and my carbon footprint was minimal! Unfortunately, this is because my flight was cancelled.

I was worried that forecast snow might stall all trains to the airport, so I'd arrived hours early. I knew they had de-icing equipment at the airport, so I wasn't too worried about the planes. But as I was eating lunch, I glanced out the window and saw whiteout snow. I could barely see the airplanes at all and couldn't see across to the adjacent terminal. It was beautiful, but also alarming. Then, after abuot 20 minutes, the skies turned blue and the sun started shining again. Amazingly, there were a few minutes where the sun was shining and it was snowing at the same time. Does this cause rainbows ( or snowbows)? I wondered.

It was all over very quickly. I wasn't surprised when my plane boarded a bit late and also not surprised when they said we had to wait for a de-icer. I was, however, surprised by how long we sat at the gate. I read in news reports later that they couldn't deploy all their de-icers because they had no place to park planes while they were being de-iced. So planes were ordered to stay at the gates. However, this caused a problem for landing planes, since the gates were all full. Thus planes full of arriving passengers sometimes waited for 4 or 5 hours to get to a gate. In the mean time, they parked them near the de-icers.

It might be because I have an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and thus have studied logistics a wee bit, but I could think of a solution to this problem . . ..

After five hours, our plane was delayed so long, I was started to get worried about arriving after BART shut down and this may have been why, with only 4 planes ahead of us in the queue, our flight was cancelled.

It wasn't all bad spending so many hours on the plane. The cabin crew was helpful and polite and people chatted amicably with each other. The in-flight entertainment system was working. It was exactly like being in the air, except that we weren't. I think that it would a perfect thing for somebody who was afraid of flying. They could have the whole experience as a kind of a dry run.

Once I got off the plane, however, things were a bit more chaotic. I had to clear immigration, which was a long queue and then the baggage reclaim area was chaotic. It was mobbed with hundreds of people from cancelled flights plus all the people who were finally getting released form their planes that had been waiting. The computer screen which said what carousel to go to was not giving any meaningful information, so I asked an employee and he seemed on the brink of hysterics, from not knowing anything (while at the same time being as friendly and polite as possible). After maybe an hour, there started being announcements, "If you are from a cancelled long haul flight, you baggage will be on carousel 3, 4, 5, or 6 . . .." Some enterprising traveler and his friends split up, each monitoring one carousel, so when bags marked SFO started appearing on number 4, he got a call and then walked around the reclaim area loudly announcing "San Francisco bags are on number 4!" This is what I love about Bay Area culture, actually. Friendly, helpful and loud!

I went through customs and then got to the arrivals lounge which was heaving with people, who had been waiting for hours for passengers who had landed but not alighted. Frequent announcements indicated that the airline was very sorry that nobody had been given any information whatsoever. Other announcements encouraged those on canceled flights to sort out rescheduling on the BA website instead of queuing at the airport. I decided to follow that advice and got on a tube.

I texted Paula and she told me to come around fora cuppa, so I did, despite it being quite late. I brought my laptop and searched in vain for the rebooking link that British Airways kept claiming existed. I couldn't find it anywhere, so I handed my laptop to Paula and started trying to call the airline. Paula couldn't find the link either and a recording at the airline's phone number told me they were very busy, so I should try calling again later.

Finally, after 2AM, I got hold music! Yay, I was on hold and they hadn't hung up on me! I stayed on hold for an hour, while trying to find out any information at all about what was going on. I discovered that the best and most reliable way to get information from the airline was via twitter, but their tweeters had all gone home an hour or two earlier.

I use twitter. I think microblogging is fabulous and I'm glad to see somebody making good use of it, but in this case, I have to say that they really needed to also update their actual website and/or their phone message. It took quite some time before it occurred to me to even check twitter. And, indeed, if they're going to make that the only reliable way to get any information, then they need to announce that someplace else, like on their website or their phone message. It was at this moment that I began to get a bit annoyed. I was even more annoyed when I realised, after 3 am and more than an hour on hold, that their call center was closed and nobody was going to take me off hold until it reopened at 6 am.

I went home and set my alarm clock for 5:59, but when I called, the phones were already overwhelmed and hung up on me. I kept retrying until 7 am, when I finally got through to being on hold. This time, the hold music was accompanied by spoken messages actually telling me that I was on hold. I put it on speaker phone and tried to stay awake until somebody finally picked up at 9:30.

I will be on the same flight on Tuesday, 21 December. This should land before 18:00 and give me enough time to get to Emeryville to catch me 22:00 train to Oregon, which arrives in Portland in the middle of the afternoon on 22 December. I am going to have an alarming odor by the time I arrive. Fortunately, I should be able to sleep on the train and I will still get to see my family, which is what motivated me to wake up after so little sleep.

And now I'm typing this out, in a haze of exhaustion. But hey, no jetlag, at least.

not just like now, but with better gadgets

2010-12-08T10:47:00.001Z

They say
"The future is now"
A Wallmart boot
in the face of a Target stampede
trampled back friday shopper
Forever.

It used to be
the beach was lurking
under the cobble stones;
Waiting to be uncovered
and realised.

And maybe
thing aren't perfect now,
but it's fair to say
it could have been much worse

The future is
not for sale and
not fixed.
We make it and find it
still waiting
beneath the cobble stones.

The 1932nd Psalm

2010-12-06T21:17:00.002Z

Depression is my shepherd; I am in want.
He maketh me to lie down on park benches; He leadeth
    me beside the still factories.
He restoreth the bread lines; He leadeth me in the paths
    of destruction for his Party’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Unemployment,
    I fear every evil; for thou are with me; the Politicians
    and Profiteers they frighten me.
Thou preparest a reduction in mine salary before me in
    the presence of mine creditors; Thou anointest mine
    income with taxes; my expenses runneth over mine
    income.
Surely unemployment and poverty will follow me all the
    days of the Republican administration; and I shall
    dwell in a mortgaged home forever.

Purportedly written in 1932.

You know what totally didn't help then? Austerity measures. I'm just saying.

Not Shopping at Amazon

2010-12-02T18:13:00.004Z

Dear Sir or Madam,

I was distressed to read in the Guardian that you quit hosting wikileaks's website (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/dec/01/wikileaks-website-cables-servers-amazon). I had intended to do all of my Christmas shopping with Amazon.com, but instead, I'll find an online retailer who does not practice censorship. I'm very disappointed by this and I hope you change your mind.

Thank you for your time,
C Hutchins

Sooooo..... anybody got any suggestions about from where I should mail-order gifts for my family in the US?

First of all, I think the wikileaks thing is really cool. On the one hand, it is a problem for diplomats if they can't write frank assessments for fear of seeing them in newspapers. But, on the other hand, there's so much unnecessary and undemocratic secrecy that the embarrassment of the diplomatic corps is a small issue by comparison.

Also, the leaks don't seem to be actually making the US look as bad as I thought they would. The bad behaviour (bombing and lying about it) was already fairly well known. I didn't know, however, that the US was being pressured by Arab states to declare war on Iran. I would have guessed the opposite. So I'm happy to learn the US has been resisting this course of action. Also, the the cables about Sarkozy and others are really fascinating.

I'm also very happy to hear that banks are next. This is whistle-blowing on a large scale.

They keep telling us that if we've done nothing wrong, we have nothing to fear. Well, large, powerful organisations like governments and banks actually should be accountable to society at large, so prying into their secrets actually serves a useful purpose whereas CCTV cameras pointing into our windows do not. If the banks hadn't destroyed the economy, I'm sure the prospect fo seeing their memos leaked would be much less pertinent. So I hope wikileaks keeps it up. Also, Manning is a hero, assuming he did it.

What's not cool is Amazon giving in to government pressure. This is part of why I'm very wary of using US-based web services. Certainly EU governments do censor things, but the land of the free and home of the brave seems to be full of corporations who cooperate very easily. Also, as far as government goes, the Patriot Act gives them the right to spy on us, which is also not really what you want from your IT provider.

In short, Amazon pulling the plug makes the US, and especially US-based companies, look worse than the leaked documents do.

But seriously, from where should I order Christmas gifts? And what does one get for a 2 year old, anyway?

Vegan Pumpkin Pie

2010-11-26T19:29:00.003Z

Ingredients

1 medium sized orange squash - pumpkins are good, butternuts are better, crown prince squash is best. Pottimarons also work, etc.
1.5 C + 2 Tbs Soya milk
4 Tbs arrow root powder (or cornstarch)
0.5 Cups (300 g) sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
0.5 tsp powdered ginger
0.5 tsp allspice
1 pie crust

Hardware

Bowl
Measuring cup
Measuring spoons
Oven
Spoon
Knife
Optional: blender or hand blender

Instructions

In advance

Heat the oven to 350 F/180 C / gas mark 4. Put the squash in the oven and bake until the skin discolours and the squash is squishy. This may take 30 minutes - an hour. Then, let the squash cool down.

After the squash has cooled

Heat the oven to 50 F/180 C / gas mark 4.

Mix the arrowroot (or cornstarch with a bit of the soymilk until smooth. Then, add in the rest of the soya milk and mix well.

Cut the pumpkin in half, remove the seeds (they're edible too!) and then scoop out the flesh. Measure out 2 cups of the squash. Put the rest aside for soup or something else. Add the 2 cups of squash to the soymilk mixture.

Add the sugar and spices. If you have a blender, use it to blend the mixture until smooth. If you don't, then make sure the pumpkin is squished into as small pieces as possible and try tog et out as many lumps as you can.

Pour the filling into the pie crust and put it in the oven. It should bake 30-40 minuts, or until the centre is firm. If you are baking other things at the same time, it will take longer.

Let the pie cool before serving. I like it best near room temperature. Some people like whipped cream on it also.

Commentary

I usually get somebody else to make the crust for me, so I don't feel qualified to offer a recipe for one, but hopefully, this will change by Monday.

If you use a sweeter squash, like a crown prince, you can cut back a bit on sugar. Taste the batter if you're unsure.

Body Scanners

2010-11-16T13:54:00.005Z

Passengers who wish to fly from the UK have no choice as to whether to allow the government to peek at their genitals. However, in the US, you can opt to allow an agent to feel them (through clothes) instead. Speaking as somebody with an unusual genital configuration, I would rather allow myself to be groped than photographed, for a few reasons. One is that nobody can keep a copy of a grope to look at later. Another is that it's highly possible I would be groped anyway and I don't want to be singled out for special attention based on an unusual scan. Finally, I don't wish to increase my risk factors for skin cancer by stepping into a beam of ionising radiation, if I can at all avoid it. For those who are fertile, there are also issues with exposing germ cells to radiation, especially those with testicles, as these would normally be shielded during an X-Ray.

There is a movement afoot to try to get people to ask for a grope instead of a scan, especially on the Wednesday before thanksgiving, when many people in the US will be flying. The TSA is making ridiculous statements about this helping terrorists, however, I'd like to posit that when getting on an airplane necessitates security agents looking at or feeling my genitals, the terrorists have already won. It is your right to ask for a "pat down" instead of a scan. This may be inconvenient for TSA agents, but this is a normal tactic of protesting. It would hardly do any good to launch a protest that nobody noticed.

Today, I read an article in the New York Times, which stated, "Do the imagers, for example, detect sanitary napkins? Yes. Does that then necessitate a pat-down? The T.S.A. couldn’t say." So some security worker at the airport knows whether or not you're menstruating. Charming. And they may or may not decide to grope you as a result of that. "Screeners, the T.S.A. has said, are expected to exercise some discretion." They have little training, no union, low pay and no job protections, but a lot of discretion, I'm sure.

This is just too much. I wrote a letter to my senators:

Dear Senator --,

I am wiring to oppose the new body scanning devices that have been installed at airports. Today, I read in the New York Times that the devices are able to detect menstrual pads and the TSA "couldn’t say" whether this detection would necessitate a pat down. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/16/business/16road.html?_r=1) This level of grossly indecent privacy invasion is unAmerican. It is an outrage.

As I'm sure you're aware, the pat down one receives if they opt out (or potentially, if they're menstruating) involves a TSA agent feeling the passenger's genitals. All aspects of this policy are horrifying and I hope you take action to change it.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Charles Hutchins

Ok, yes, I did actually call something unAmerican. I know this is problematic. But Americans are, by and large, a prudish people and this is really not prudish at all and hence violates the national character. Also, I am exceedingly annoyed.

I wrote a different letter to my Representative, Barbara Lee, who is a proper leftist and involved with the Progressive Caucus in the House:

Dear Representative Lee,

I am wiring to oppose the new body scanning devices that have been installed at airports. As a transgender person, I am concerned about how these machines peer unnecessarily and invasively at my genitals. I am also highly concerned that once a security screener becomes aware that I'm transgender, I may be subject to discrimination or be publicly humiliated.

I intend to opt to be patted down instead, but as this involves an agent feeling my genitals, it's hardly better. There is little evidence that any of this makes us safer while flying but it certainly causes me and many others quite a lot of distress. I'm faced with a terrible choice between not seeing my family over the holidays or having my genitals looked at and/or touched by a TSA agent.

I hope you can do something to improve this situation.

Sincerely,
Charles Hutchins

Ha ha, trans people sure are funny

2010-11-10T02:27:00.004Z

John Oswald:

Pretender (based on 'The Great Pretender' written by Buck Ram) features the opportunity for a dramatic gender change, suggesting a hypothesis concerning the singer, Ms.Parton, perhaps worthy of headlines in the National Enquirer. The first inklings of this story came from fans of Ms.Parton's earlier hit single 'Jolene'. As many consumers have inadvertently discovered, especially since the reemergence of 12' 45rpm records of which this present disc is a peculiar subset, it is not uncommon to find oneself playing 45rpm sides at the LP standard speed of 331/3. In this transposed tempo 'Jolene' reveals the singer to be a handsome tenor. Additional layers of homosexual longing , convoluted mŽnages ˆ trois and double identities are revealed in a vortex of androgyny as one switches, verse to verse, between the two standard playback speeds.

Pretender takes a leisurely tour of the intermediate areas of Ms. Parton's masculinity. This decelerando reveals, complete with suggestive lyrics, an unaltered transition between the 'Dolly Parton' the public usually hears and the normally hidden voice, pitched a fourth lower. To many ears this supposed trick effect reveals the mellifluous male voice to be the more natural sounding of the two. Astute star gazers have perceived the physical transformation, via plastic surgery, hair transplants and such, that make many of today's media figures into narrow/bosomy, blemish-free caricatures and super-real ideals. Is it possible that Ms. Parton's remarkable voice is actually the Alvinized* result of some unsung virile ghost lieder crooning these songs at elegiac tempos which are then gender polarized to fit the tits? Speed and sex are again revealed as components intrinsic to the business of music.

*chipmunked

From http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xnotes.html, which is associated with his tune Pretender, which you can download in a zip, from here. Click through to see his awesome, edgy and totally not race-baiting or queerphobic take on Michael Jackson.

I want to be on his side because he fought for fair use, but this stuff is really assholish. It's like wanting to side with Larry Flint. I was trying to find out if he was gay or not, because that might sort of his explain his gender stuff or least make it possibly deeper than a cheap laugh,. All I could find was that his official bio claims he did sound for a Bruce la Bruce film, Hustler White, which he claims is a gay pron film. Wikipedia and IMDB imply otherwise (the latter doesn't tend to cover porn films, for example Deep Throat has no entry) and neither mentions Oswald.

The Dolly Parton track, by the way, is really, really good (as is the Michael Jackson one). It's just the liner notes that suck. And usually, changing the speed of a recording of somebody's voice just sounds weird. But her voice slowed down gets a James Brown-like tenor quality which is quite remarkable. So he's on to something, but then he went for the cheap laugh.

ha.

My life lately

2010-11-07T16:10:00.004Z

I had a houseguest from Friday - Tuesday, which is always nice. I tend to go out more when I have somebody staying over. Also, it's an excuse to go do slightly more touristy things, or just go to a museum. (Indeed, if I know you in real life and you're looking to stay on a sofa bed in central London, drop me a line.)

However, I used him as an excuse to procrastinate on writing my lecture. Fortunately, I was able to write the whole thing on Tuesday afternoon, in about half the time it normally takes me! I must finally be getting the hang of this. I went out on Tuesday night, feeling very pleased with myself.

On Wednesday, I presented the lecture and found out that it also seemed to take about half of the appointed time. My efficiency knows no bounds! I spent the second half of the class showing them MCLD's dubstep patch and how to do some bitcrushing stuff, which seemed to go over well, so it was ok. I try to have emergency backup material in case this happens, but now I'm fresh out.

I also got a bit of feedback where apparently they want to learn more about how to do stuff, which is fair enough. Unfortunately, all of the really good how-to topics are in the past, so I may end up going back over them. I should probably ask if there's any particular topic they wish they'd gotten more detail on. They seem to really be into break beat cutting and this might be because they already liked it or because I talked about BBCut. I gave them some how to program drone stuff, though, and nobody seems to be writing drone pieces.

Then I went to Brum, where we had a guest speaker who was talking about how to master electroacoustic music for CD. He said we could all get a very decent home studio for only £5000. It was like he forgot that he was talking to students. I don't have a room that I could convert into a proper studio like that, and if I had £5k extra lying around, well, actually, music gear is probably my second priority at the moment, so that's not entirely unreasonable. Until I get regular full time employment, though, it's not on my budget. I guess I could mortgage my dog or something, but that's risky.

Saturday

I haven't been getting much done lately, so I haven't been going out much, on the idea that if I sequester myself at home, I'll quit procrastinating. This doesn't actually work. So Saturday, I decided to go out and ended up having a kind of a surreal evening. I came home at 4 am with 3 different hand stamps.

I skipped dinner so I could go to the FTM London meeting, which is once a month. It's a support group kind of thing and only the third time I've ever been to a such a meeting in my life. I had some useful conversations and the people there are good guys, and I should keep going, but I'm not a huge fan of the support group format. I don't actually understand what the parameters are about what I'm allowed or not allowed to talk about, so I'll just say that it was good to be reminded that I have more surgical options than the ones presented to me last week.

After the meeting, several of us went to the Black Cap in Camden and had something to drink. This was the source of my first hand stamp, as they start charging a cover at some point after I arrived, so a security guy came by and stamped everybody already in the pub.

I ran into a friend there and she said she was going to something called Duckie at the RVT and asked me if I wanted to come along. It was packed to the gills. I've only ever been to Wotever-related events there, so I've never seen it so stuffed or so gay. It was 95% gay men, I think. I saw somebody else I knew there who was in to noise music and talked (shouted, really) to her and her partner for several minutes and then retreated outside with the smokers. We went back in for the stage show. There were two women dressed as tea ladies, stacking tea cups and pouring tea into them, on a table. It was already kind of surreal, as the music could have been part of the Leave it to Beaver soundtrack, and they had done some choreography that was supposed to invoke the idea of sexiness without actually embodying it.

Then, just in time for the last cup to be filled, the tea pot was empty! So, one of the women stood up on a chair, hiked up her shirt and pissed into the tea pot. Then, they dropped a tea bag into the pot, swirled it around for a moment, poured the contents of the pot into tea cups and both performers sipped at them. Thus ended their act.

I tried to suavely hide my look of open-mouthed-shock. I'm from a more prudish country and obviously gay men in London must want to go out and watch women do things with piss, and that's perfectly fine. And anyway, it had to be faked, as she weed for quite a long time, so it was obviously some sort of water bottle or something hidden under her skirt.

The pissing performer turned out to be friends with my friend. Which is how I learned that she had been complaining a bit about the vast quantities of water she'd had to drink before her act in order to be able to produce enough fluid at the end. Um, wow. So I saw the liquid version of two girls, two cups. Awesome.

At midnight, I left to go hear Danse Macabre play a gig very near my house. The drummer had texted me the address and then said I was on the guest list. So I showed up kind of drunk and then noticed that she had gotten me on the guest list by saying I was doing sound for them.

They were playing in a straight, mtf-crossdresser fetish bar. So there were a lot of leering straight men around, being lustful. And a lot of middle aged drag queens in extremely fabulous cocktail dresses. The entire club was structured around the male gaze. I retreated backstage with the band and drank more.

Then they were on and I was in the sound booth. I've only done live sound once before in my life and it was a total disaster of feedback and mics crapping out. But the band said they'd already sound checked and I shouldn't have to adjust anything, it would be fine. So they got on stage and immediately the feedback started. The person who sound checked them had no idea where it was coming from. I finally worked out it was form the mics for the backing vocals, but then somebody who actually knew what he was doing came charging back and asked me if I was actually a sound engineer. I said no, so he started twisting all the knobs on top of the board and not only did the feedback go away, but the band sounded way better. He then said things would be fine and wandered off.

The band had a new line up. They have a sax player now, who I could barely hear, so I kept pushing her mic hotter and hotter and she kept playing farther and farther from the mic. Arg. Later, I found out that the sound checker put her way too hot in the monitors, so she could hear herself blasting. Rather than turn that down, the woman told her to play quieter! So the saxophonist was on stage, trying to play sax quietly into a microphone!

I really should learn how to work a PA for public events. It would be a really useful skill.

Also, the male gaze is reaaaaly troubling.

How to Write BBCut FX

2010-11-02T20:36:00.003Z

First, here's my file:

CutMask : CutSynth { 
 var <>bits,<>sr,<>bitadd,<>srmult; 
 var synthid;
 
 //makes SynthDef for filter FX Synth 
 *initClass { 
 
   StartUp.add({
  
  2.do({arg i;

  SynthDef.writeOnce("cutmaskchan"++((i+1).asSymbol),{ arg inbus=0, outbus=0, bits; 
  var input, fx;
  
  input= In.ar(inbus,i+1);
  
  fx = MantissaMask.ar(input, bits);
  
  ReplaceOut.ar(outbus,fx);
  
  }); 
  });
  
  });
  
 } 
 
 *new{arg bits=16,sr,bitadd=1,srmult=1;
  
 ^super.new.bits_(bits).bitadd_(bitadd).sr_(sr ?? {Server.default.sampleRate/2}).srmult_(srmult);
 }
 
 setup { 
 //tail of cutgroup
 synthid= cutgroup.server.nextNodeID;
  
 cutgroup.server.sendMsg(\s_new, \cutmaskchan++(cutgroup.numChannels.asSymbol), synthid, 1,cutgroup.fxgroup.nodeID,\inbus,cutgroup.index,\outbus,cutgroup.index, \bits, bits);
   
 } 


//can't assume, individual free required for cut fx
//synth should be freed automatically by group free
 free {
  cutgroup.server.sendMsg(\n_free,synthid); 
 }

 renderBlock {arg block,clock;
  var samprate,bitstart,bitarray,srarray, s;
  
  s= cutgroup.server;

  bitstart= bits.value(block);
  samprate= sr.value(block);
  
  srarray= Array.geom(block.cuts.size,samprate,srmult.value(block));
  bitarray= Array.series(block.cuts.size,bitstart,bitadd.value(block));

  bitarray= 0.5**((bitarray).max(2)-1);

  block.cuts.do({arg cut,i;
  
  block.msgs[i].add([\n_set, synthid,\bits,bits]);
  
  });
  
  //don't need to return block, updated by reference
 }
 

}

What I did there: I took CutBit1.sc and did a saveAs CutMask.sc. Then I changed the name of the class to CutMask.

In initClass

I changed the synthdef name to cutmaskchan

I changed the arguments to the SynthDef

I put in my own code for the fx = line. That's where the magic happens!

In new

I changed cutgroup.server.sendMsg to so it uses my synthdef name and my synthdef arguments

In renderBlock

I changed block.msgs[i].add( to have my synthdef arguments

since mine doesn't change, I could skip sending anything, afaik

Chiptune, Dub, BBCut

2010-11-02T20:17:00.002Z

This is based off MCLD's Dubstep Patch, with a modification to make it output a Pulse wave and then using some BBCut from a previous post.

(
var bus, sf, buf, clock, synthgroup, bbgroup, loop, group, cut1, cut2, cut3, stream, pb,
  cut4, out;


SynthDef(\dub, {|out = 0, amp|
 
    var trig, note, son, sweep;

    trig = CoinGate.kr(0.5, Impulse.kr(/*2*/ 1.5.reciprocal));

    note = Demand.kr(trig, 0, Dseq((22,24..44).midicps.scramble, inf));

    sweep = LFSaw.ar(Demand.kr(trig, 0, Drand([1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 16], inf))).exprange(40, 5000);

    son = Pulse.ar(note * [0.99, 1, 1.01]).sum;
    son = LPF.ar(son, sweep);   
    son = Normalizer.ar(son);
    son = son + BPF.ar(son, 2000, 2);

    //////// special flavours:
    // hi manster
    son = Select.ar(TRand.kr(trig: trig) < 0.05, [son, HPF.ar(son, 1000) * 4]);
    // sweep manster
    son = Select.ar(TRand.kr(trig: trig) < 0.05, [son, HPF.ar(son, sweep) * 4]);
    // decimate
    son = Select.ar(TRand.kr(trig: trig) < 0.05, [son, son.round(0.1)]);

    son = (son * 5).tanh;
    //son = son + GVerb.ar(son, 10, 0.1, 0.7, mul: 0.3);
    //son.dup;
    Out.ar(out, son.dup * amp);
}).add;


 // groups
 synthgroup= Group.head(Node.basicNew(s,1)); // one at the head
 bbgroup= Group.after(synthgroup); // this one comes after, so it can do stuff with audio
        // from the synthgroup
 bus= Bus.audio(s,1); // a bus to route audio around

 // a buffer holding a breakbeat. The first argument is the filename, the second is the number of
 // beats in the file.
 sf = BBCutBuffer("sounds/drums/breaks/hiphop/22127__nikolat__oldskoolish_90bpm.wav", 16);
 
 // a buffer used by BBCut to hold anaylsis
 buf = BBCutBuffer.alloc(s,44100,1);
 
 //  The default clock.  90 is the BPM / 60 for the number of seconds in a minute
 TempoClock.default.tempo_(180/60);

 // BBCut uses it's own clock class. We're using the default clock as a base
 clock= ExternalClock(TempoClock.default); 
 clock.play;  
 
 // Where stuff actually happens
 Routine.run({

  s.sync; // wait for buffers to load

 loop = (instrument:\dub, out:0, amp: 0.3,
    group:synthgroup.nodeID).play(clock.tempoclock);

  /* That's an Event, which you can create by using parens like this.  We're using
  an event because of the timing built in to that class.  Passing the clock
  argument to play means that the loop will always start on a beat and thus be 
  synced with other BBCut stuff. */
  
  // let it play for 5 seconds
  5.wait;
  
  group = CutGroup(CutBuf3(sf, 0.5));
  group.add(CutBit1.new(4));
    cut2 = BBCut2(group, BBCutProc11(8, 4, 16, 2, 0.2)).play(clock);

  
  // start a process to cut things coming in on the bus
  cut1 = BBCut2(CutGroup(CutStream1(bus.index, buf), bbgroup), 
   BBCutProc11(8, 4, 16, 2, 0.2)).play(clock);

 2.wait;
 
   loop.set(\out, bus.index);
   
 "bbcut".postln;
 
 30.wait;
 
   cut4 = BBCut2(CutGroup(CutStream1(bus.index, buf), bbgroup), 
    SQPusher2.new).play(clock);

   
 });
)

I think it would be cool to run the drums through a 4 or 8 bit MantissaMask, but first I have to figure out how to write FX.

The Bottom Surgeon (aka The Dick Doctor)

2010-10-29T20:58:00.003+01:00

The doctor's surgery was about a block from Regent's Park. He's in private practice and the office was incredibly posh. The waiting room had what looked like 18th century prints, in four colours and several nice sofas. I felt under dressed compared to the furnishings.

The sign in form asked for my credit card details and insurance information. I told the receptionist I was on the NHS and she told me to fill out the other parts of it. I overheard the patients before and after me saying the same thing, so maybe Friday is NHS day.

I went up to the doctor's office, which was smaller and had two oil paintings hanging behind the desk of what looked like impressionistic Parisian street scenes. Rather clichéd art, alas, but hardly the focus of why I was there.

The doctor was a big man and spoke in a relaxed manner. He asked me my height and weight, my allergy information and what musical instruments I play. Have I had any previous surgeries? I told him about the benign tumour I had many years ago and he examined the scars on my wrist. "This is important for this kind of surgery" he explained and then asked if I was right or left handed. "So you want to get a phalloplasty." I said I wanted a meta and asked if I was in the right place. He explained that he calls them all phallos.

I didn't take notes and I wish I had, so some of this is not in the same order as it actually happened. My impression that a meta is only one operation was in error. It's actually three operations, depending on what happens. He said that 2/3rd of people who get it are unhappy later. Skinny people do have the best results, as it sticks out more. He told me about how they move everything they can away from it, to increase the sticking out. Natural dick growth happens over the first four years people are on T. I've only been on it for 3 years. The people who have the biggest dicks starting out will have the biggest dicks at the end.

In the first op, they do a hysto, if the patient is having one, add the waterpipe, move stuff around and build a scrotum. They start out giving the patient two catheters, one through his belly to his bladder and one in his new dick. They take out the one in the dick after a week, because it's irritating, and leave the other one for three weeks, to give the waterpipe a chance to heal before sending wee down it.

There's a 30% chance of developing a leak, either at the tip, which can split or at the base. If there's a leak, they give it a while for the patient to otherwise heal and then try to fix the leak. I've heard elsewhere that this is difficult and doesn't always work the first time.

Then finally, they add in silicon prosthetic bullocks. He opened his desk drawer and pulled out a bag of ovular, squishy balls. He showed me one about the same size as the end of my thumb, above the top knuckle. He said it would be that large and then pulled out another, clear ball and said it would be made of the material in the second ball. The first one seemed small, but it's not like I have a lot of experience with how big they normally are. He said they had to use small ones or it would dwarf the meta-dick.

I gave the material a squeeze. Again, not much basis for comparison, but it seemed kind of firm. If I sat down hard on something, I might bounce a bit. He emphasised how durable the material was, "You can pierce it with a needle or stab it with a knife, and it will be fine," listing several things I hope never happen to me. He took another, much squishier one from his drawer. "I used to use these. They're nice and squishy, but I kept having to replace them when they sprang leaks." I said I appreciated durability.

If I got a hysto at the same time, it would be two days in hospital, assuming that was done lacroscopically. However, the lacroscopic surgeon he works with isn't in London, but a hospital out in the country. I wondered if it was similarly posh to his offices, but didn't ask. That hospital is just off the main line from Paddington, which does not sound like it would be a fun commute while one has a catheter protruding from one's abdomen.

Then, back to work shortly afterwards. All the wounds are in the same area, so that apparently makes things simpler. He talked some about complications, but I've got them all jumbled in my head now. Apparently, smokers have the worst ones. So he's quit operating on smokers. Fortunately, I do not smoke.

He also said that skinny people have the best results, since it sticks out the most and many (but not all) skinny people can wee through their fly. The rest cannot. Which is probably related to the unhappiness factor. This truly makes a very small dick, which is not considered usable for 'normal' sex. However, it is my understanding that it's a dick that has normal spontaneous erections and, provided, one sleeps with yoga practitioners, it's possible to manage to stick it places.

He was generally fairly negative about the meta, so I asked about the normal phallo.

That used to be 4 operations, but they've got it don to 3, he said proudly, contracting his earlier statements about how given the complication rate, one shouldn't get to caught up on the number of operations.

They take skin from the patient's arm or belly and use it make a shape like a sausage roll, attach it to the existing blood supply and hook up nerves. He showed me some photos of post-surgical penises, that he had on his blackberry. They were on the large side, but they looked just like any other dick. (Again, not much experience, although one does see them a bit in pron.) The first was an arm one and the second was a belly one.

Of course, if you use the belly, you don't get any erotic sensation, he explained. "So the belly is out," I said. "Everyone says that!" he said.

He drew some pen marks on my arm, one of which intersected my tattoo. They would take one of two sets of veins and arteries leading to my hand and two sections of skin, leaving only a narrow strip. They would shape the donor skin "like a sausage roll" and sew it on, connecting up my existing blood supply and connecting nerves. They take some of the nerves from my existing dick and connect those up also, so most people get a mixture of erotic sensation and normal sensation. The existing dick can be stuck sort of under the new one, left out on it's own or taken off completely, but that's an extra thing and makes everything somewhat more complicated.

My tattoo would end up part of the waterpipe and not be visible. They replace the arm skin with skin from the patient's bum. "So it comes with a free bum tuck" he said. "I'm 9 stone, I don't need a bum tuck." He said if there was not enough skin on my bum, they could peel the surface off of my thigh and do a thinner layer of skin. Other surgeons do it that way routinely and it can also have a good result. He showed me a photo of a skin-grafted arm.

"Oh, I forgot about the head!" and explained how they built that, but I was thinking of half-peeled thighs and feeling alarmingly like crying, so I don't recall what he said.

He looked at my left arm and tested the blood flow to see if it would be good enough for me to sacrifice half of it. He said it would be fine. They had one patient, about ten years ago, who's hand died, but that guy was a heavy smoker and that probably wouldn't happen to me. Most blood flow problems happen to smokers. Some of them lose their entire penis. He's stopped operating on smokers because of the complications.

He took out a BMI chart and looked up my BMI and said it was a bit low. The layer of fat under the patient's arm skin was what provides girth for their penis. He told me I should try to put on a stone or two. "Not, muscle; fat." Once they made the penis, it would be "diet-proof" but eating more fat wouldn't make it get any bigger either.

He asked if I had a partner and when I said no, he asked if I was looking. They don't do the final stage until the patient has a partner or is looking. He took two devices out of his desk drawer. They were like those fat, ergonomic ball point pens, but half again as long as those normally are. One device just had one of those things and the other had two. He pointed at the single one and said they would use that for me, as I'm thin. Also attached to the devices were small squishy pumps and a bulb, maybe 10% bigger than a kiwi fruit.

The phallic portion would go in the phallus, the pump in a bullock and and the bulb somewhere in my abdomen where I wouldn't feel it. He squeezed the pump a few times. Water comes from the bulb and goes in to the phallic part to make it stiff. When one is tired of being stuff, they squeeze another part of their bullock to release the seal and squeeze the water back into the bulb.

A dick that reliably gets hard and stays hard as long as you want isn't all bad, really. He said the infection rate for adding these devices was 10%. I said this sounded high. He explained this was an achievement compared to the previous rate. The infection can take up to a month to become apparent. After that, one's body forms a protective shell around the devices and starves the bugs of food. they give antibiotics for a few days after the operation and then wait to see if an infection develops.

The devices are fairly complex and fail at 1-2% a year. This is why they don't do that part until the patient has a partner or is looking, he said.

I asked how long I'd be unable to work and he said it would be a month before I could use my left arm again. I don't know if that means actually a month or is like the "two weeks" my last surgeon told me.

He told me to go think about it. They don't want to force people to have operations. Patients need to be sure of what they want. I asked if I called back tomorrow and said I was certain, how long it would be until I would have the operation. "3 to 6 months" he said.

I could have a willy in 3-6 months.

I thanked him for his time and said I would call him after I'd thought about stuff and then went looking for fatty foods, feeling completely freaked out.

. . .

It took me many weeks after the last operation to regain my mental focus, so if I got an operation in the next 3 -6 months, the chances of me actually graduating are quite low. I've already made some sacrifices for this stupid PhD. In for a penny, in for a pound. It would be really stupid to bullocks it up (so to speak) in the home stretch.

If I do not graduate, my plans to stay on in the country are not going to work out very well (unless I could get married, but I suspect a bandaged wiener may impact my ability to find somebody to marry). So I would have to have the operation and then bugger off right afterwards. Given that I'm entitled to NHS coverage on the basis of being a student, taking this and then leaving without even graduating seems more than a little morally suspect. Assuming that I could get all the operations finished before my visa ran out, which seems unlikely.

If I'm trying to get a job right after graduation, which seems wise, it might be problematic to take sick leave right away. My next likely break where I could lay about recuperating is the summer of 2012. Of course, by then, with the cuts, my NHS funding could evaporate. And the massive cuts in university-level arts education may mean that I can't find a job and I have to leave anyway. So a planned delay may well mean starting over in another country or it could very easily mean never. I strongly suspect it means never.

I am literally sacrificing my right nut for my PhD.

And my left one.

The next time I'm in a pub's bog, in a cubicle with no latch on the door, hoping nobody notices that I'm sitting down to wee, I'll be sure to think how fucking awesome my PhD is.

. . .

I feel completely freaked out. Indeed, even if my PhD weren't at stake, and I was certain exactly what I wanted to do, I'm not ready for another round of surgery. My chest still hurts and last week a blob of pus came from what I had thought were healed scars. I need 6-8 months for my chest to settle down before I can call it healed. I know some men do move this quickly, but arm, bum, chest and bits is a lot of things to be healing all at once and my uneducated guess is that this probably increases the chances of complications. An infected dick would be disconcerting, but a numb dick would be a personal tragedy.

Whatever I do, it's a few months of pain and then I'll have the results of it for the rest of my life. I think that provides a useful perspective. I should take time to think, but really, I know what I'm going to do and it's terrifying. However, step one is to wait.