Thinking about how much suburban homes look like motherboards, I missed my turn. We missed last week’s installment, so here are two new rreplay tracks this week. “more lost” ostensibly “about” driving in Somervill, MA, where this was recorded, and “we suppose,” because we wanted to call it that we suppose. Hope you did not miss us too much!

Third installment of the weekly track series. Quiet sweet guitar and bass. One of Rich’s favs.

installment 2 of weekly track from rreplay

Gonna try and put up a rreplay track each week. This one floats away on guitar and bass then transforms into the bomdiddybom bewaka before exploding, after which the pieces all float down. Named after the things in your eye that float around looking like they are there but aren’t.

rreplay’s new album, Live from the Uncanny Valleyis available for streaming on SoundCloud:

Ok, so some people have been asking if rreplay’s newalbum, “live from the uncanny valley” is really live. Somewhat ironically, the human automaton that monitors CDbaby titles added “(live recording)” to all our tracks when it caught the title, and I had to get a real human to go in and remove them all after explaining.

The title comes from the idea of the uncanny valley in gaming and animation circles. The idea was first proposed byrobotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970, and much of the research on this aspect of robotics comes out of Japan. I only say this because my partner — demonstrating the disturbing nature of the uncanny valley — responded to seeing a picture of a realistic-but-not-quite-there Asian womanwith “What’s this orientalist shit?” Sending me off searching for another image. I settled on the one at the topafter the one of Christopher Reeves as superman was deemed “not creepyenough” on the forum where it was posted as an example of the uncanny valley. I don’t know, I think it qualifies.

The idea is that people form emotional attachments to images, particularly moving ones, and that as long as an animation is suitably unrealistic, people can make their attachments unpreturbed. But as soon as animations start getting closer to realistic without making it all the way there, people start getting botheredby the familiarity combined with the cognitive dissonance of some parts of the rendering still being off. This gets at the heart of what early twentieth century theorists called the “uncanny.” Supposedly, if animation gets good enough, it can make it across the uncanny valley and into photorealism without setting off our alarms. Figures that the gamers on reddit would think that Superman, a White Guy if ever there was one, would get there first. And let’s just avoid altogether various Hollywood plastic surgery disasters…

OK, but what about the album? rreplay’s new album is not live in any traditional sense, although all the parts are recorded at once in a live fashion with no overdubs. It is thus part of the way there. But there is more to its uncanniness, which in the aural realmis not always a bad thing (at least that is where we are placing our bets).

In synthesized music, when the sound is suitably distant and artificial, it is comedically cheesy. To escape that trap, it needs complexity and a dynamic between predictability and unpredictability. It is probably no coincidence that one of the adjectives that crops up most often in describing the uncanny valley’s visual realm is borrowed from the sonic: “dissonant.” The past decade or so has seen the fetishization of the analog warmth of early synths, with their unpredictable, non-linear quirks that come from the imperfect renderings of math in vacuum tubes, rare earth, and silicon. Analog synths are generally far enough away from any acoustic instrument to not enter the downward slope of the uncanny valley, although some of the renderings could be supremely creepy, as in synth/singer 70s nowave duo suicide’s uncanny ghost riderwith its interplay of anxious and urgent vocals over an unquantized sequenced backing. Not always a bad thing.

With the digital, the uncanny valley comes back in force. Much of the supposedly cold clinical feel of digital music probably arises from the audio uncanny. In digital, there are no non-linear, erratic human elements unless they are put there, whether programmed, or viathe filters of digital controllers, or via underlying touch. I’ll refrain from demonstrating the bad with some 80s DX7 synth hit because it will undoubtably be someone’s favorite song.

The feel, touch, and timbre of a piano, an acoustic guitar — or for that matter, an electric played through a tube amp — are alldifficult to emulate. Digital synthesistshave long had problemsemulating “real” instruments because the variables are simply too many and too ineffable to get all of them reduced to algorithms even with mega-gigabite round-robin samples — though great music continues to be made. The best answer I have found (partly because I can’t afford the latest greatest bestest synths and samplers, partly because without overdubbing, I would need a computer farm to play them live anyway) is not to break on through to the other side a la Superman via more and better algorithms, but to mix the controllers (and like a good controllerist, I like to get as many of those digital balls in the air as I can) and digital (vst) synths with the touch and feel of electric and acoustic guitar, themselves emulated digitally at the amplifier end — and in the case of the acoustic sound, via convolution — but played on an actual guitarand bass at the other.

The mixing together of the two in”Live from the Uncanny Valley”makes for what we hope is an uncanny adventure, strangely familiar with a dose of dissonance, perhaps even sometimes disturbing, but always recognizable for thatwhich it is a simulacrum of by the human touch on the guitar and bass underlaying all the maths and controllers. Hope you will give us a listen — preview will play the full album.

Also, if you are in Honolulu, please stop down at Manifest in Chinatown Weds, 5/13 from 6-8 for our record releaseparty, featuring an uncannily live performance from rreplay crossed with the dj sounds of count weevil.

 

 

rreplay is releasing its second album,live from the uncanny valley, on Weds, May 13, from 6-8 at Manifest in Chinatown. Eric and I hope you can make it to celebrate. This will be perhaps our one and only live gig, so don’t miss it! You can listen to the whole album by clicking preview at the link above.

count weevil will be laying down beats in a chill kinda LA style, and he may keep going when rreplay is on.

For the uninitiated, rreplay is an experimental improv duo. Rich plays guitar through the laptop, synthesizing it, granulating it, chopping it up, and sometimes just playing it. Eric plays fretless bass, also through the laptop, providing melodic and rhythmic grounding and ever leading the improv process into and sometimes back from more adventurous territory. We both work on the beats, and chop them up some more while playing. I’d describe the music, but you can listen for yourself above and live next Weds. Hope you can make it!

Manifest is at32 North Hotel Street. They have excellent food and great drinks. Happy hour is 5-7.

I recorded this a few years ago (2009) and never got around to mixing it, although I listen to it fairly regularly while doing something else. It is a cinematic/ambientish/listen-while-you-are-working kind of groove that develops slowly around a tubby bass line with a tone borrowed from dub and a laid back beat with polyrhythmic cymbals.

The development comes from two places. First, at about 4:38, the guitar gets looped and run through a granulator thingie called splonki, an oldie from Andreas a.k.a. ioplong at SmartElectronix that turns the flangy distorted lead guitar into a gritty organ sound that changes the groove. Then the whole thing gets gradually taken over by manipulating the filters and delay times on (sadly no more) arcDev Industries’ wonderful echo contraption, the echotank, with some midi controllers.
n.b. Andreas’s section of Smartelectronix seems to be down. You might try to resuscitate it from archive.org’s wayback machine if you want the plugin. Arcdev used to be at http://arcanedevice.com/ if you want to try the wayback machine on that.

As usual, FB probably people need to come to way.net to listen.

 

I ran Qi again last night on the walls of Kennedy Theater at UH Manoa as part of the preliminaries to the fiftieth anniversary celebration/performance of the dance program. Here is a short video of a few of the people who used it. Don’t miss the little person at about 2:40. I didn’t ask permission from the people in here and don’t know who they are, so if you see this and you are in it and don’t want to be, let me know and I’ll edit you out.

Performance can take some interesting turns. Performativity comes from the idea that your performances and utterances do not just say something but do something in the world. The past two Friday nights, as part of the preliminaries for the fiftieth anniversary dance concert at UH Manoa’s Kennedy Theater, dance professor Kara Miller invited History professor Richard Rath to set up his interactive motion-to-music installation “Qi” projected on an outside wall of the theater before the show on two of the Fridays of the show.

In it, dancers, cars, and passers by “do something” with their motions, namely make music. The results were projected on the side of Kennedy theater and music made by the audience filled the air outside the theater the two nights of the installation. A couple of ideas are at work in the installation in conjunction with performativity. One is that music is often synesthetic, transforming actions in one sense modality, say vision — as in sheet music — or touch, as in the fingers on a guitar, into another, hearing. In this case the transformation is somewhat direct, as music gets made by moving the balls of green energy, the “qi,”around the screen with one’s motions in order to make music. The installation is also meant to break down the distinction between audience and performer, as often times people discover the instrument through being in the picture on the wall that they are looking at and hearing their motions come out as music. In other times and places, especially before the advent of recorded music, music making was something that everyone participated in, without the formal distinction between audience and performer. Qi points to the artificial nature of that divide while looking forward in new ways rather than back to some romanticized version of the past.

Two highlights that I did not capture were a little girl about age ten who just had a blast with it, and an older couple who did Tai Chi, which worked really well. I did not get video of either though.

There has been a great series of articles on motion to music controllers the past week or so over at Create Digital Music. All of them are cool, but they require some extra piece of hardware like an iPhone attached to your wrist or a Leap Motion, or a kinect. Qi is a max/msp patch that I wrote using the cv.jit computer vision modules. the only hardware is the video camera that comes with the laptop (ok, I used a cheapy USB cam so I could aim it away from me, but the onboard cam works too). People seem to get the idea immediately and have fun doing it, although the occasional detached arm waving in the picture is me giving the two second tutorial: “up for higher notes, down for lower, different synths on left and right sides, bigger circles=louder.”

 

Just a reminder that my motion-into-music contraption will be making music as long as somebody is moving outside of Kennedy Theater before the performance tonight. UH Manoa. 7-8 PM. Outside stuff is free. If you are around come by. Last week was a blast, come by this week if you can. To get an idea of what it is, see the videos (note to self: smile next time, its fun).