Resonate workshops

The 3-day festival is mainly focussed on talks from industry artists, lecturers and educators, but there were also workshops, screenings, panel discussions and live performances. The workshops were on a range of topics from creating musical applications with Processing and Pure Data, right through to programmatically controlling ARDrones. Sadly we didn’t get to take part in any of these as the limited number of places were taken up very quickly, (something we’ll do better at next year!) but from what we saw by cruising around the main space, people were having a lot of fun, with some very interesting audio/visual results.

A real highlight for us was the other attendees, all from a range of countries, backgrounds and disciplines, all doing incredibly interesting work and sharing a passion for types of work on display at the festival. So, it was a joy to spend the early evenings in a selection of Belgrade’s many fine restaurants with friends old and new. Seriously, the food and drink in this country is insanely cheap and super tasty. Special mention goes to Šešir Moj (translation: My Hat) for the finest combinations of meat, fish and potatoes, accompanied with traditional Yugoslavian song and story telling!

The evenings featured live music from the likes of Pantha du Prince, Mouse on Mars and a slew of local and international DJs. The venue for the late night action was more often than not Building Kluz – a disused shopping centre with grand decoration and a slightly post-apocalyptic ‘gutted’ vibe, which complimented the pounding minimal techno just perfectly…

When returning to the conference venue in the mornings after, slightly bleary eyed and in need of a good coffee (Belgrade loses a point there, I’m afraid) we were treated to a huge range of truly inspirational and experienced speakers. Highlights for me were the talks from Spaces of Play, Memo Akten, Kyle McDonald, Golan Levin and Casey Reas.

After-parties at Building Kluz

Spaces of Play really made me think about what makes a game…a game. Experimental titles such as 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness (where the only interaction with the game is starting the game), The Stanley Parable (which takes user interaction, decision making and whimsical narration to a whole new level) and Proteus were really fascinating to learn about.

Kyle McDonald presented a thought provoking and informative journey through a range of his portfolio pieces, and also highlighted the importance of artists sharing code which overcomes technical difficulties, so that the community as a whole can focus more on the artistic side of creative coding. Experiments such as keytweeter, where for an entire year every single keystroke of Kyle’s was automatically posted to Twitter, offered a refreshing dive into the philosophy behind all of the creative applications of technology and made me consider the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’.

My only criticism of the festival would be that a large percentage of the talks were extremely portfolio-centric, with artists simply taking us through their work recent, piece by piece. This isn’t such a problem when much of said portfolio is of the highest quality imaginable, which it was, but I would have liked to see more in the way of discussion regarding the big ideas behind the art in conjunction with the art, itself. Granted, the panel discussions were better at this, but there’s nothing quite like a captive audience listening to an artist’s deeper motivations behind their work.

This, however, is a small criticism. On the whole, the festival was a fantastic event, and we’ll definitely be attending next year. I would highly recommend that you do, too.

For those of you who missed it, stay tuned on Twitter for news of our next event.

Check out the full portfolio entry for this app here, and get the app from iTunes here.

We’re going to transform the 55DSL unit (ground floor, nearest Liverpool Street station) into pulsating box of sound and light, with people being able to come up and jam all day.

Eventbrite event: http://reactifyctrl.eventbrite.com/

Here’s a preview video of what to expect:

You’ll also notice our awesome new logo and corporate identity, courtesy of the great team at the Portugese design company, Urbanistas Digitais.

We were there mainly to talk about our work with Pure Data. On the Friday we teamed up with Soniqplay, to discuss our recent work on their remixing app where we used libpd as a basis for a new audio back end for their apps. On Saturday it was time for us to show off some of our own Pure Data creations, with a short presentation followed by installing CTRL in the library. Lot’s of great discussions were had after our sessions, and, though we sadly missed the outcome of the hackday, we hope to catch it next year.

Together with a very talented sound artist and composer, Soosan Lolavar, we decided to use a map to feature sights and sounds from the area directly surrounding Boxpark.

Due to quite a tight deadline to create the installation, we had to think creatively to achieve a result that both fulfilled the brief and was interesting to play with. Soosan took to the streets and began collecting photos and sound clips from the areas we wanted to feature, and came back with video and audio for around twenty points surrounding Boxpark. Meanwhile I set about creating a interactive map for Soosan to drop her images and audio into.

We wanted the installation to be interactive, making it more of an exploratory experience for the visitors, so we would allow people to hover over certain areas of the map but decided to group the points into four clusters to make the interaction easier.

Again, due to the short timeline, we needed to work with technology that was suited to quick production times. The tech-stack I settled on was Pure Data for the audio components, Quartz Composer for the visuals, those two communicating via OSC, and an Apple Magic Trackpad for user input. I went with Quartz as it has an easily debuggable graphical interface for creating patches, it’s very suited to interactive work with lots of built in objects intended for user input, and it has a lot of pre-made patches with great looking visual effects.

As expected, the Pure Data patch only needed to be very simple, with all of the audio files on constant loop, with OSC information coming from Quartz for which group of sound samples to fade up. In turn, Pure Data would randomly choose one photo from the cluster and send this info back to Quartz so that the correct photo could be displayed.

Having recently unveiled the first leg of our work in a concert at the National Portrait Gallery, where Peter performed three short pieces written specially for goPlay, we were eager to extend the concepts we had begun exploring earlier in the year. We had a few specific ideas we wanted to try out, but were also looking forward to seeing where the creative process would take us ‘in the moment’ – some of the most intriguing elements of the original body of work came from chance discoveries…

During the week we made lots of good progress with new ideas for the system, along with going back over the existing work and tweaking it. Specifically, we experimented with polyphony and rhythm detection – two elements we were keen to add to the system’s armoury.

Polyphony from a single sound-source (i.e. Peter playing a double-stop on his cello) was particularly interesting because we thought that we were already maxing out the accuracy of our existing pitch detection system with even single note sources, so to be able to identify two separate pitches on the fly was going to be very difficult. Of course, there are pieces of software out there that do a fantastic job of extracting polyphonic pitch information from a single sound source, such as Melodyne, but their code isn’t open-source and embeddable in Pd, so we had to think creatively with the [fiddle~] and [sigmund~] objects (Pure Data’s bundled pitch-detection objects).

In the end, we were able to achieve something reliable enough for Peter to be able to trigger different pre-defined combinations of cello drones by simply playing different double stops. The result was the very gentle, ambient soundscape that can be heard at the beginning of this YouTube video.

While Ragnar was working on tweaking that further, I looked into extracting tempo from Peter’s playing. Whenever we had tried this before, we had strived for the ultimate scenario, where anything Peter was playing including combinations of single notes, dotted notes and tied notes would return a tempo value. Realistically, without some predictability to notes being played, this wasn’t going to be feasible. Instead, we gave ourselves a few helpful constraints on the source material and got great results. Effectively, goPlay would listen out for occurrences of one specific trigger note, and derive the tempo from the length of the gaps in-between subsequent occurrences. This was very reliable, but only gave us half the picture. In order to calculate the time signature, the system counts the number of notes played in-between trigger notes.

After some tweaking and testing, Peter was able to trigger a delay line that was perfectly in time with what he had been playing immediately prior. We also experimented with pre-sequenced drum beats accompanying his playing, which would follow not only tempo, but time signature as well.

Towards the end of our residency we went about tweaking some of the material we had already developed and gave a small performance/explanation to the team at Snape Maltings. Everyone was very receptive to the potential of the direction we were going in, and the questions raised were all interesting and relevant.

We’ll be posting up a video of the first three movements after the break. In the meantime, the Aldeburgh put together a summary week of our time there.

R&D of goPlay is supported by the National Lottery, through Arts Council England’s Grants for the Arts fund.

Our job was to program the iOS app, as well as the augmented sound for each soundscape, which was no mean feat, but a highly enjoyable one nonetheless. Both the app, and the exhibition, have had some great reviews as of yet, and we continue to update it as Nuno takes the exhibition to new places.

The physical exhibition will be taken to various cities of the world (it is currently at Centro das Artes, Madeira), and will hopefully be available in a gallery near you soon. For fellow Londoners, it will be part of Alpha-ville festival in September, so be sure not to miss it. In the meantime, anyone can access a preview of the exhibition online.

Reactify Music were lucky enough to attend another awesome Music Hack Day this January, this time as part of MIDEM in Cannes.

A small pool of hackers (30) gathered at the music conference to put together new pieces of music software/hardware using the hottest API’s and sandboxes available on the web.

Our only criteria for this hack day was to make use of EMI’s new sandboxes of content that they’ve made available to developers. The OpenEMI project is intended to make prototyping new apps and services, which want to use front-line content, a much less painful process, with music licensing traditionally being the big stumbling block for first time devs. This initiative is something that Reactify Music are fully behind, so we felt duty-bound to making something impressive with their content, if not only to show other record labels that this could really work for the industry, and that they should seriously consider following suit…

With that in mind, we sat down to start hacking. Inventory:

• 100 questions to Paul Lamere about using EchoNest APIs (thanks, Paul!)
• 48 hours of hacking
• 15 espresso coffees (coffee machine in the hacking room = awesome)
• 10 changes of direction for the hack
• 8 shredded-carrot salads
• 7 hours of sleep total
• 5 different programming languages
• 4 OpenEMI sandboxes
• 1 red carpet event featuring Justin Beiber

Our presentation can be found at 41:47 into this round-up of all the hacks.

Everyone’s hacks were under the ardent gaze of not only the entire music industry, but a large swathe of the tech industry, too, so the pressure was really on for the presentations. Luckily, after a fair few refactors of the entire project, we came out with something we were pleased with, as it made good use of the OpenEMI content, and was something that could definitely been seen to work as both desktop and mobile apps. We hope to package this into an iOS app or game within the next couple of months and launch with a wide selection of EMI content. Follow us on Twitter to keep up to date with that…

We would also like to thank Paul Lamere and Adam Lindsay for their help with all things code related, and Ben Wundersitz for the awesome GUI. Couldn’t have done it without you guys!

A big thank you to Martyn Davies and Dave Haynes for their organisational skills and enthusiasm. Roll-on the next Music Hack Day!