Your first USABLE Purr Data (Pure Data) synth

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.

My Music

Inspired by a Quora answer I gave today. Do I listen to my own music?

I’m currently in a phase of listening heavily to my own music. Particularly my work-in-progress.

And really enjoying it.

In fact, I’m probably not sufficiently objective or critical of it. I find the slapdash sketchiness of it charming rather than problematic. ;-) 

It does what I want from music, it has the kind of tunes I like, against the kind of instrumentation I like, and rhythms I like, and experimentation I like. Without anything that I don’t like. Or which I find unnecessary.

Now, at the same time, I wish it was better. I wish it was more skilful. I wish it was less repetitive. (It is, I have to admit, very repetitive, made on looping DAW software). I really wish I was better at music. I wish it was more sophisticated. More elegant. More trendy and more admired. And certainly I wish it was better mixed and mastered to sound better on other people’s sound systems.

But I no longer wish it was different. I don’t wish it was somehow closer to genre norms, or more like artist X. It’s exactly like artist ME, in the kind of messy between-genre that I make. And that’s exactly what I want to make and want to listen to.

I struggle to be objective. I see flaws. But I don’t know how to improve on them. Every time I go to change something I feel that I’m losing something as well as gaining. And that’s hard to handle. I know that hurts the objective quality. I’m sure everyone else will hate the music because the flaws glaring at them.

 

That’s the (possibly not very) strange paradox. I simultaneously don’t trust the music is good enough for anyone else to like. But it’s the only thing that I could like this much.

New EP : Fernanda Design Tree, on BandCamp, SoundCloud etc.

I'm back to doing a lot of music at the moment.

Particularly cleaning up old sketches and half-finished tracks and polishing them into something that rest of the world might actually want to listen to.

This week I launched my new EP on BandCamp.


 

Music 2019

Some music related stuff I've been doing recently.

Here's a quick recap :

I wrote a "Global Ear" column for The Wire magazine on the Brasilia underground / noise / experimental scene. And made a playlist you can listen to now.

You want to know about the future genres of music? Check this recent Quora answer I wrote about CineBeat.

Want to make Trap in Sonic Pi? Watch my video tutorial.

Meet the Turtorial

Uploaded a "Turtorial" to the Patterning tutorial.

It shows you how to use the built-in "turtle" and "l-system" functionality of Patterning to create more organic forms.

The new Alchemy Islands

I've just refreshed the Alchemy Islands site.

That's home to Patterning and now some other old "algorithmic design" and crazy art projects.

All of which are in the process of being refreshed.

August is Patterning-month, so the focus is there.

I finally sat down and played with devcards the other day, a wonderful innovation in ClojureScript world that let you write and test small fragments of UI code in self-contained "cards".

I've used this to redo the Patterning tutorials, so now you get can see tutorial pages like this, where the code is actually running live in the browser. (Note it might take a few seconds to render, even more on a cellphone.) But yeah, the whole library is running in the browser and generating those patterns live, thanks to ClojureScript.

As always, props to the awesome geniuses of the Clojure / ClojureScript world.

A Month of Patterning

August is Patterning month again.

I'm back to work on the Patterning library. And, in particular, getting it working properly in the ClojureScript, in-browser version. I'm going to be using devcards, figwheel, spec and other good tools in the Clojure community.

I'll be revamping the site, posting new images here, and new versions of the code.

Watch this space ...

This part of town. My corner of the internet.

It's basically becoming a derelict wasteland. It's falling to pieces. Neglected. The flows of life, of information, of "voice" have moved elsewhere.

I've successfully avoided the clutches of Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp. Only to be similarly addicted to Quora. And increasingly dependent on Telegram for actual social stuff.

I have online existence. But not "here".

And I'm not only talking about this blog : Composing.

I'm talking about many of my online presences.

I'm talking about ThoughtStorms wiki, which has retreated from an open forum for debate. Via the idea of the Smallest Federated Wiki to a closed, but federal. To now an entirely personal closed thinking space. Perhaps inevitably, given the increasingly hostility to be found online. But is now full of outdated, half-baked, deprecated ideas.


I'm talking about my so called home-page which is now three years out-of-date.

I'm talking about the presentations of my projects which are languishing on public but unvisited static pages. Because, again, these aren't part of the flows  of life.

I am no longer living "publicly", putting what I do online. I don't even know if I want to be living "publicly" in such a way today.

Or to put it another way. I fragment over various places online and IRL. And each fragment has freedom to be what it wants. Unconstrained by the other fragments. How much do I want to try to reunite and reintegrate my fragmented personality? Or do I enjoy the small sense of "privacy" that remains when I allow these fragments to have independent lives of their own? Is becoming the "dividual" the only way to avoid being signed, sealed and delivered into the hands of the machine learning mind controllers today?

But how do you even "live" in a world where "existence" is increasingly tied to participating in the right flows?

Don't ask me. I have no fucking idea.

But ... what I do know is that it's a mess around here. So ... it's time to knock down a lot of stuff and build something new.

So ... in the next few months, I'm going to blow up this blog : Composing. I'm going to be blowing up Synaesmedia. And, perhaps most shockingly, I'm going to be blowing up ThoughtStorms Wiki. And a bunch of other sites.

None of that means that everything is going away entirely. 

What's still valuable will come back in some form.

But I'm going to make big changes. I'm going to break links. (Who cares about broken links?) I'm going to break names (what do my names even mean? Alchemy Islands? Gbloink? Mind Traffic Control? Why are they stuck with the crumbling signifieds they're currently pointing to?) I'm going to break online libraries. (Is anyone really using the ThoughtStorms libraries? If so, pay close attention to what's happening in the online repos)

I just over a year, I want to have achieved a thorough clearing out of the junk and cruft from my online life. And be focused on fewer, more live and dynamic, channels, better suited to today's internet and my current interests.

Improvisation using some of my new software for BSBLOrk.

I'm really enjoying playing with Protoplug for scripting your own VST plugins in Lua.

This sketch uses 3 scripts with the plugin.

My own Waveflavours synth (playing the ever-evolving drone chords). The default "midi chordify" (that chord isn't programmed, it's being generated automatically from single notes) and another self-written variation that chooses random notes from a chord which is driving the u-he's "Triple Cheese" plugin.

All these scripts are hosted in FL Studio, which is also providing the drums.

Protoplug is really exciting to me, because I can finally turn FL Studio into something scriptable, and which I can use more like the way I was using Sonic Pi, to experiment with algorithmic composition.

Update : You can find my scripts for ProtoPlug on GitHub

2017 Q2 : Composing to Focus on Music?

Context : 2017 Questions

I've actually managed to do quite a lot of music-related stuff in 2016. From organizing MusicHacking events in Brasilia, to more music for dance, to technoshamanic remixes to podcasts and more.

This year I want to explore more raw, self-built, "ataripunk" style electronics.

And more free software. How do I produce more, "finished" music using things like Faust and Sonic Pi and Ardour and qtractor etc.

And electronics?

I want to get more of it out there and people listening to it.

Speaking of which, if anyone ever felt the need to own any (or all six) of the official gbloink!tunes albums while making a small contribution to my future works they are now all up on BandCamp :












One thing that I'm pondering is how to represent my music.

For a while I've depended on SoundCloud as my main music showcase. But actually I want to write more about making music. Particularly with Sonic Pi and Faust and other free-software. Where should I do that?

Well, how about a blog called "Composing"? Even if it has been mainly for political venting in recent years.

So ... here's the question ... should Composing return to being my main music / music-software etc. blog?

One reason my activity declined here a bit (apart from Google doing an appalling job of keeping Blogger a cool and relevant platform while things like Medium and WordPress rolled over it in terms of ease of use and functionality) is that I don't like to be so dependent on Google or give them primary control of my content.
If I do choose to focus on music here in the next year ... I'll need to have a back-up / mirroring strategy. Maybe RSS-grabber but ideally something that creates content I own first, and mirrors it here.

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).

Society of the Query Reader

My conversation with Aharon Amir on Search Art and the language of search is now published in the Society of the Query Reader.
Available as a PDF or other online formats linked from the page.

Patterning : Sacred Geometry

Patterning : Curvacious

Patterning : White Album

Patterning ...

OWL Screenshots

Over on SmartDisorganized.

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!