Just going through our CDs, ripping them, and getting rid of them when I ran across this gem from the 1989, Lou Reed singing about how he would raise his kids, were he to have them, as he reflected on the domestic bliss he was in as a married man. Besides being an awesome child-rearing guide, it has some of Lou’s sweetest guitar work ever. Lou Reed – Beginning of a Great Adventure. Enjoy.

Trying out a new look for way music…

Two nights after Christmas, the North Kolkata Kali Puja ended. The standard way to end one of these celebrations is to take the house-sized image of Kali, put it on a trailer, train floodlights on it, take it to the river and toss it in, on the presumption that after the puja, the goddess, like Elvis, has left the premises and that the image is no longer sacred, just a bunch of flowers, plaster, and paint. Oh and on the way to the river, it gets carted through every side street along with half the light show and a bunch of marching bands. The image is so tall, someone is posted by her crown to lift the phone and electric wires over her. The whole thing teeters and wobbles, and it gets pulled through very busy streets, followed by a bunch of devotees ranging from kids to seniors, with the kids running about like a holiday trying to catch the prashad being thrown from the fron of the truck while not missing the view of the image on the back.

At one point, a bus tried to slip by, but got too close, and would have knocked off Shiv’s foot. Even though the whole thing was about to be thrown in the river, and the god was lying under Kali’s foot (its a long but interesting story…she likes to go out at night and party at the burning ghats and stepped over her sleeping god of a pot head husband, Shiv, in order to get out), it would be a no-no for the bus to damage it. So for ten minutes, everyone including the bus passengers, a strolling cop, the devotees and various hangers-about, gave advice to the two drivers as to whether the bus could get past the truck full of deities without touching. In order to do this, the Kali truck had to move back a few yards, which is in effect, stopping an anarchists’ parade and making it march backwards, a messy trick. The driver achieved this by just putting the float in reverse and going. People got the message and backed up rather than get run over, the bus went through, and all was well.

But what about the music you say? This time, for some unknown-to-me reason, all the bands were comprised of bagpipes and drums, each group playing something different, with each led by a shehnai player calling the tune, usually in a completely different, dissonant, and ever-changing key. Be warned if you listen! Crazy sounds within.

Bagpipes? Kali? OK, let’s take the Glenn Beck analysis route and see if we can figure this out…Scotsmen are warlike, play bagpipes and wear kilts, Kali kilt a bunch of men at war, chopping their heads off to make a garland around her neck, ergo, Bagpipes are the perfect instrument to worship Kali. Nevermind that the pipers wore pants.

Synesthesia is the transference of one sense to another, such as seeing sounds. I have a theory, that has been provisionally working out, that during times of flux in the senses, such as when the possibilities of a new medium are first being fully explored, synesthesia becomes more prevalent. If you can see what I am saying, you have one version of it, though cogsci types try to seperate metaphors from the actual “affliction.” For some reason, it usually maps sound onto vision, but I have instead mapped vision onto sound with PRISMM.

Here is another video of PRISMM, this time it is just me. If you missed out last time, this is a max/msp/jitter patch I wrote that makes music from motion. Up and down is pitch, left and right changes the mix of the two synths. Let me know what you think!

Synesthesia is a favorite topic of mine. It is the transference of one sense to another

Arrived in Kolkata after 35 hrs of flying and waiting in airports…spent most of the day watching web pages load letter by letter on my thrilling 56k web connection. Aah, longing for the good old internet of the 90s. Monisha got back about half an hour ago with a 1mbps modem to replace the other one, so I am a bit cheerier.

As promised the other day, here is a very poor quality video of the people’s revolutionary insurrectionist synesthetic music machine, or PRISMM for short. Everyone at the Revolution Books show had a grand time with it. This section is set to a whole tone scale (a spacy thing with no tonal center that Claude DeBussy favored) and uses the piano sound only. Moving the green blobs up makes higher notes, down for lower. The bigger the green blobs, the louder they are. Moving them left and right moves them in the stereo field. And here is a music clip that I made with it using a pentatonic scale and a more complex mix of synth sounds. If I get time, I’ll spring it on some folks in Kol, try to record the output, and post that.

I’ve been thinking about a name for it for a long time, thus:

Whereas it takes people moving, sometimes as little as an eyebrow, for it to work, and it works whether they want it to or not, thus preventing wallflowerism and related ways ofnon-participation, and

Whereas it got its public debut on the 12th at Revolution Books, and

Whereas adding “insurrectionist” to the name adds to the general gist of of the thing, and

Whereas adding said word causes the acronym to be nearly meaningful, and

Whereas it is a vision-to-sound sensory translator (i.e. a machine that performs synesthesia), and

Whereas all the possible names with variants of synesthesia in them sound hopelessly lame, and

Whereas the results sound vaguely musical, and

Whereas computers and max patches are basically machines, and

Whereas the resulting acronym nearly makes sense in the context,

therefore

Be it resolved that henceforth the max patch I spent a semester working on instead of writing like a good historian be so named: the People’s Revolutionary Insurrectionist Synesthetic Music Machine, or PRISMM for short. I figured I better let it out of the bag because pretty soon MS Kinect and the like will be all over this idea, but I’ve had this working since 2007, so remember where you saw it first!

PRISMM works on an object oriented music and vision platform called Max/MSP/Jitter. The patch, as max constructions are called, is only slightly more complex that the Tokyo public transportation system.

I’d love to compile a version of PRISMM to distribute, and in theory it is easy, but the patch relies on some non-standard jitter parts that no one is maintaining anymore on a PC platform, and so I have been unable to package it up as a standalone yet. There are surmountable technical problems, so if anyone knows how to compile (not write) a max extension in C++ so that it will run as a dll under windows, please let me know in the comments or else contact me.

The Revolution Books show went well. I gave the synesthesia machine its public debut. It was a big hit. I have a short video I’ll post once we get internet in Kolkata for those who don’t know what I’m talking about.

DJ Anthony Chang beatboxed to “The Revolution will not be on the internet.” He and his friend Matt were visiting from CA. I will post links to some of their music soon.

Now for 34 hours of flying!!

I’ll be playing at Revolution Books for their open house some time between 3 and 5 Sunday Dec. 12. Hope you can make it for some revolutionary muzak!

2626 S King St # 201
Honolulu, HI 96826-3248
(808) 944-3106

Yes, It is time to give thanks, not for pilgrims getting fed so they could survive another year to get the great American land ripoff going in New England, but for a brand new rreplay tune, atmospheric phenomenon.

Two new experimental tracks from rreplay are available. Pop the player out in the background here and come back to read while you give them a listen.

They are from the more experimental end of our stuff. I think I was having a hard drive problem and had to use a bunch of stuff I don’t normally use for jamming, and we had no drum loops. The first, short piece is modem and dial tone sounds worked through a sampler that I played via my guitar. The second uses chipsounds and something called scanned synthesis. One of the big breakthroughs in the 1980s synth scene was wavetable synthesis, where you could construct one cycle of a sound wave of any shape you desired, load it into memory, and then play it at any pitch. While it opened up new possibilities for synthesis, it also had its limits, the most telling being that the wavetable is static, while the timbre and thus waveshape of acoustic instruments varies over time. Scanned synthesis (pdf) attacks this problem by having the wavetable change over time using shifts to the wavetable so that the sound evolves. The shifts are slow vibrations that vary over time, modelled on struck, plucked, and bowed vibrating objects (like a string, for example), and lately on multi-dimensional creations that exist in more than four dimensions. The result is much livelier, natural sounding synth where the tone evolves with the playing. Strings are actually a lively area of math and theoretical physics work right now, and I think some of the concepts from string theory are working their way into the synthesis method (pdf).

As usual, lots more to listen too at way.music. Please give us a listen.

Just an update of the Todos Somos Arizona July 29th civil disobedience soundscape. The original sounded fine on the computer speakers where I mixed it, but when I played it at H’s party, I was a bit horrified at how loud and rumbly the helicopters were on a pair of speakers that actually had some bass response. So I tweaked the mix a little: presenting the Todos Somos July 29th action soundscape remix, now with less helicopter [mp3]. If you play it on computer speakers or headphones, it won’t sound any different, but if you have a big stereo with good speakers or maybe a good subwoofer, it should be much less anxiety producing now! The sound quality is still all iPhone though. Maybe I’ll get my hands on a good digital recorder for the next time.

Todos Somos Arizona (“We are all Arizona”) is a collective of like minded people opposed to the racism of the new immigration laws being put into effect in Arizona and elsewhere. They are based in Los Angeles. You can find out more about them — and what you can do — from their Facebook page. 24 people are still facing charges stemming from the July 29th protest, and they could use your support.