John Adams's at the 106th Juilliard Commencement

The United States, being both a comparatively young country, and before that, a British Colony isn't known for contributing a lot of big names to the pantheon of great Composers. Babbitt, Bernstein (both), Cage, Copland, Glass, Ives, to name a few. Some of these composers, still living, have already etched their names into history. Among them I include John Adams.

Mr. Adams addressed the graduating class at Juilliard and his words resonated deeply with me. I have found, especially in political discourse, it is of paramount importance to control which issues are discussed because you want the issues raised where your position can be clearly expressed in as few words as possible. If your position requires any nuance whatsoever, you're sunk.

From the address:

But by choosing a life in the arts you’ve set yourselves apart from all that and from a nation that has become such a hostage to distraction that it can’t absorb a single complex thought without having it reduced to a sound byte.

Human beings like simple solutions and simple, binary answers. Reality is rarely so neatly compartmentalized. Often I've lamented our inability to embrace ambiguity.

John Adams continues:

A life in the arts means a life of sacrifice and tens of thousands of hours of devotion and discipline with scant remuneration and sometimes even scant recognition. A life in the arts means loving complexity and ambiguity, of enjoying the fact that there are no single, absolute solutions.

I've often said that great composition has a lot in common with humor. You have to set up an expectation and break it.

John Adams:

In order to achieve that element of surprise you have to set up expectation. The quality of the surprise—what Melville called the “shock of recognition”—depends on how carefully, how knowingly these expectations have been set up.

The entire address is 110% full of artistic wisdom (some contents may have settled during shipment), so I encourage you to read the full address here.



John Adams portrait used under a GNU Free Documentation License.

Lego Nyan Cat

Jeeze. Do I have do do everything around here?

Here is the model in Lego Digital Designer format, which you can use to generate building instructions and also order the kit from the Lego store if you like. It is expensive, though, *gulp* You're better off sourcing parts through bricklink.

051111

Recorded this morning, ostensibly for the could have the skies project. Part of the project philosophy is to keep things raw and unedited as possible, working with the sounds of the environment and whatever happy accidents occur along the way. At around 2:30 you should be able to hear my wife come home from taking the kids to school.

Recorded entirely in MaxMSP using a monome grid and arc.

Download won't be enabled until entire project is complete.

plane - m | vi | cv

I recorded this video with me talking over it, explaining things, but I liked it better without the voiceover, so I left it out.



I've always loved step sequencers and I see the monome as an opportunity to address some of the grey area between the one-knob-per-function analog step sequencer and step sequencers with memory. The idea is to increase the available note range without sacrificing precision and increase the available sequence length range, without sacrificing direct manipulation and feedback. So, when the arc came around it seemed like a useful navigational tool to manipulate a large plane of data.

I've been referring to plane as a platform because there are a number of variations I want to implement using the underlying development. This version is optimized to serve as a control voltage source. As such, it produces a lot of outputs. The top row is step enable/disable which is typically used to fire off envelopes. Plane is generating control voltages directly. There are no intermediate bits of software or virtual instruments in-between plane and the end of the patch cords controlling the modular.

The row underneath it the playback loop ruler. Pressing anywhere in the ruler area moves the playback loop to that location. A chorded gesture changes the loop size. One section of the sequence can be edited while playback is occurring elsewhere.When the loop ruler goes off the visible edge of the grid, it lets you know in which direction the active stuff is happening.

Included is a very nice saw cloud simulation of multiple detuned oscillators with adjustable fatness which you can plug directly into your modular.

Also included is direct, accurate CV control of an oscillator via a closed-loop calibration procedure. Of course, MIDI output is also available.

This version of plane uses scale degrees and passes though my modal scale quantizer, so you can switch scales on the fly. You can also use a MIDI keyboard to transpose.

Or, it can also follow a programmed chord progression score, allowing you to improvise with a step sequencer within the harmonic framework of a lead sheet.

The bottom two encoders on the arc are serving as looping automated CV sources.

You don't have to use an arc with plane, you can navigate with the mouse or keyboard or powermate. Also, you don't need a 512 monome. All monome sizes are directly supported and can be hot swapped.

Here are a couple plane diaries I recorded during development.





I haven't released plane yet, so it isn't downloadable.