Gbloink! 2020

I gave a workshop in December on writing music sketches for Android devices in Processing.

And in preparing it, I discovered that there's a new audio library that's standard in Processing 3.0, called Sound. That works on both desktop and Android apps.

So in the last couple of days I decided to try an experiment.

I got a Processing draft of Gbloink! I'd done a few years ago, that didn't play its own sounds, just sent OSC messages to a PureData patch - which worked but was a faff to set up - and swapped out the OSC messages for playing simple notes using this new Sound library.

And, it works.

Obviously, it's not a sophisticated sound at the moment. And not even as rich and varied as old Windows MIDI from the original Gbloink! which is now 22(!!!) years old.

Nevertheless, it's a promising start. It feels like finally it might be possible to produce a reasonable new version of the program that can run more or less out of the box, and be fun and pleasant to listen to.

I'll be working more on this over the next few months. And on some other "Sound Toys" I've made, that have only ever existed as slightly klunky experimental versions for live use, but weren't packaged for general consumption.

I have a feeling that this year, that will change. And I'll finally have something fun for you all :-)

If you want to try the new Gbloink!, it's currently available for Windows and Linux from this page : http://gbloink.com/play.html 

When I find someone with a Mac who can make the Mac download, I'll make that too. And, obviously, I'll be working on getting it onto Android. That's the real holy grail of this.

Gbloink! on Scratch

Nice one! A 16 year old re-implements Gbloink! on Scratch.

In other news, the Gbloink! site is back up. Now just a static thing made with Bootdown.

Gbloink! Site Down

The Gbloink! site is down. Compromised by spammers probably via WordPress. I'll clean it out and it will be back soon(ish).

Gbloink! ... in the Browser!

Oh yeah, I'm on a roll, at the moment, of actually "releasing" stuff I've been doing over the last few months.
This one's really exciting for me : a version of Gbloink! that's written in CoffeeScript / Javascript and running in the browser. Longer story over on the Gbloink! site.
Try it here ... but be aware it's still pretty experimental. However, it is Gbloink! And it runs in the browser. w00t!

Tape

Found an old tape with more Gbloink! music on it.

Baubles on BandCamp

Finally! Baubles, one of the original Gbloink! albums, is now available for download on BandCamp. The perfect ambiance for sitting in your arm-chair by the flickering fire on a snowy evening, contemplating a fir-tree decked with shiny coloured glass balls.

Zewp! is the anti-Gbloink!

This evening I took a look at the official Gbloink! page, and realized it was, er, pants.

Now I've got a video on YouTube and a couple of sets of gbloink!tunes up on SoundCloud, there was a danger that Gbloink! could look and sound quite respectable.

But the site itself was an embarrassment. (Count that as a BIG failure for GeekWeaver and for my sad lack of CSS skills. OK, my general resistance to web-design and CSS naivity is a large part of it; but if I'd had a working copy of GW, then I'd have been more tempted to tinker and try to improve matters.)

So I figured : I'm paying for hosting on Webfaction. I can have as many Wordpress blogs as I like. Why not put one to some use? I quickly discovered that Wordpress is formidably good these days. Very simple to set up on Webfaction. With a huge ecology of plugins that install themselves (I didn't know that!) And great templates.

It didn't take long to find a template I liked, pull the video from YouTube, install a SoundCloud plugin, and generally make a whole new-look for the old Gbloink! material.

So, I present: the new http://www.gbloink.com.

The controversial thing I've added is the Facebook "Like" button. I'm pretty conflicted about this. On the one hand, the purist in me doesn't like to give a company as evil as Facebook more power over the web, and my online existence. On the other, there is so clearly a wave of new infrastructure being constructed by Facebook and the other internet playas, and it's at least necessary to understand what's going on. And, anyway, playing with Wordpress plugins to engage the new web trends gives me an exhilarating sense of ... keeping up. :-P

A couple of questions you may be asking :

1) OK. But Gbloink! was written 13 years ago? What's with that? When are you going to get on and either a) write a new version or b) do something else of musical interest?

2) Hmmm ... thinking of moving *all* your blogs to WP, then, are you?

To which the answers are :

1) God knows! Last night I checked out London's mind-blowing OpenLabs' OpenNight which left me wildly inspired and a little bit overawed. These are hardcore open-source, experimental music geeks who do livecoding in Scheme, hack their own electronic instruments and even sing their explanations about using Bézier curves to model sound-waves. The previous time I went, one guy was DJing with mind-control!

Like I say, a bit overwhelming. I definitely want to get in with this, and maybe do a performance at some point; but not sure if I have anything awesome enough yet.

Still ... I'm starting to think :-)

2) Well, my immediate thought is OPTIMAES. The Ning site got flooded with spam. And now Ning plan to charge. Meanwhile it looks as if Wordpress have social network plugins. It's possible I can have most of what Ning gave me, in a space I have more control over, and am *already* paying for. So, it's likely that I'll experiment with migrating OPTIMAES there.

Keep you posted ...

Yay! I got Gbloink! on YouTube.



Update : More on Gbloink!

If you liked (could cope with) my longer, more leisurely and minimalist music (eg. the recent Serra / Reich / Glass Removals ) then you might enjoy this track from sometime early to mid 90s :

Ambient #1 : I picked up a razor and I ....

I'm slowly digitizing some of my old tapes from the pre-digital period. So all kinds of juvenilia are turning up. Not all of it great, but a lot I find kind of interesting in a lo-fi, amateur way. This was basically a live keyboard improvisation (my trusty Kawai K1) into an echo box and onto 4-track tape, onto which I'd already recorded the "on with the hits from London" radio loop. After the main improvisation set the overall structure and most of the ideas I added a couple more echoey keyboard parts and samples (including rhythmic loops and my doing breathy whhhisssshh sounds).

While we're on the subject of my long compositions, don't forget The Great Grimpen Mire, the first Gbloink! epic.

Here's more stuff I haven't been paying enough attention to.

Guitar Hero

vs.


Kaossilator (vs. Ghostradioshow)

Wow! These are fantastic; especially when considered together.

I really never watched a Guitar Hero video before. :-)

But what a synthesis of music and game cultures! And lights! And virtuosity. And performance.

Of course, it's "karaoke" in the sense of putting creativity on rails. And yet it hints at much potential for new instruments with new movements, new user interfaces, new syntheses of sound, light and motion.

The Kaossilator seems like more of a "real", freer instrument. Undoubtedly there are still many constraints, but it's closer. Once again the novelty of the UI unlocks novel performance possibilities, even if the resulting music (nice as it is in this video) sounds strangely unaffected by it's unorthodox origin.

How do we get Gbloink! (not necessarily the program, but the true spirit of "synaesmedia") into these damned things?

Update : or is Guitar Hero actually a degeneration towards karaoke from this?

Interesting ... Grotrian

And Ball Sequencer

Here's a sentiment with which I can whole-heartedly agree :

The world needs more gbloinks ...

Indeed it does. My continuing idleness and inability to figure out what language / library / platform to develop for is to blame, as usual. Joe Holmburg has inspired me to look into Processing and I'm starting to think he might be right - although it pains me to write Java.

I'd like to do a new Gbloink! in ActionScript / Flash but, as I think I mentioned, there doesn't seem to be any support for Midi or virtual synths there. (Which I find totally crap, if anyone from Adobe is reading this post!!)

I think Gbloink! would make a perfect Chumby widget and that would justify me buying one.

Ah well ...

Anyway, without that to look forward to, I just want to announce that, for bizarre Jonesian reasons that I may explain in a minute, I just succeeded in copying the Midi module out of Gbloink! (which is VB, after all) into ... ahem ... Excel. And it runs fine in VBA.

Which means, musical spreadsheets ... w00t!!

To quote the immortal words of a Google-luring spam-blog, :

Everyone best black casino jack las slot vegas do this. you angst spreadsheet circus a chess last refreshed a shootout of hours. The genocide nugget wonder expenditure katharine propinquity as the progeny bantu arrowhead ever. It has "reinvented" itself as an successfully late vacation, shopping, entertainment, and best black casino jack las slot vegas destination.

Or rather, what I meant to say, I've decided that my next musical opus is going to be written in Excel - and provisionally code-named "Spreadsheet Circus".

Googling the phrase uncovered the above text, which will act as a kind of heuristical guiding star for the work. (Pull it apart and find lots of interesting imagery of casinos, cards, gambling, shootouts, angst, genocides, bantu arrowheads, slot-machines, spreadsheets, circuses etc. What more could you want in a magnum opus?)

After all, I don't see why it should be only Gisel who gets to do weird, crazy artistic stuff.

Oh, and as part of the ongoing (and accelerating, I hope) revamp of my site, I've put the whole Great Grimpen Mire up for your listening pleasure.