Containerized Particulate

Here’s a few days worth of time-lapse footage from outside my window. Sound thrown together last night. March weather. Zany.

How’s the Weather from Jared Arave on Vimeo.

Hey look, it’s another picture of a Max patch, what a surprise.

The plan was to explore the compositional potential of difference tones, by making them a little more immediately accessible by way of a little tone generator synth thing. I’m at a bit of a dead end though, because it seems to me that the volume levels necessary to get the effect to work are so high that my hearing and my sanity would be completely shot before I ever got around to finishing anything. Similarly, someone would really have to crank the playback volume to be able to subject themselves to the highly unpleasant sensation that difference tones provide.

If all that’s adaquate endorsement, try it yourself: here. As for me, I’m putting all this on the back burner, and filling under ‘not so cool’.

Rupert is a self oscillating sound thing, largely the creation of one Justin Smith, ported from PD to Max5 and tweaked by myself. Basically, you draw in some waveforms, twiddle with some sliders, and you’re off. A pretty astonishing range of sounds are possible; clicky rhythmic stuff, drones, noise washes, melodic phrases. It’s hard to say exactly what each slider does, so I didn’t. Sometimes a control will be extremely responsive, other times, not so much. Just experiment and have fun (and be sure to take the waveforms out of the initial ‘noise’ state, or you’ll get just that).

download here (Max 5 Runtime Required)

Also, if you happen to have an iphone / itouch and the mrmr OSC controller (available free from the app store) you can download the control file for rupert here, and use your new-fashioned gadget as a remote control – What fun! All you need to do is get rupert running on your computer, get rupert.mmr loaded into mrmr, then give mrmr the IP of the machine running the synth (hopefully). Supports multiple clients, for collaborative mayhem.

Enjoy; Any feedback is much appreciated (pun intended).

So, the unwieldy process of editing 3+ HTML pages every time I wanted to edit the ol’ webpage finally pushed me into PHP land, where I’ll be blindly fumbling about for the next several months. Java script and .css aren’t really my native languages, but I hear immersion’s a pretty good way to learn these things. Oh, and if you’re reading this via deathbyhonor.com/blog, just point your browser to http://deathbyhonor.com; it’s integrated now.

Also, Dames:

I bring up Busby Berkely not only to offset the horrible teduim of the 1st half of this post, but also because I see his aesthetic all over the place, as digital mirror and kaliedescope effects become more accessible (particularly to young editors). I’ve seen countless of these unintentional, digital Berkley-alikes – particularly after introducing the Jitter ‘jit.rota’ object to a workshop full of students – and this is fine. It’s just constructive to bear in mind that this territory was covered 70+ years ago, without the aid of computers, and that Berkely’s work can serve as an excellent starting point for investigations into one’s own contemporary digital hyper-geometric-kaliedeography.