Ollie Bown

Short edit of film ‘Strecken’ by Britt Hatzius featuring ‘Spin’ by Ollie Bown and Lothar Ohlmeier. Screening at Cafe Moskau, Berlin in July 2009.

Melbourne, my home for almost two years, is a place of skinny jeans, skinny lattes, skinny bikes with skinny tyres and skinny cog-sets, but surprising few people playing electronic beats on their skinny MacBook Pros. They’re like a faux pas on the Melbourne gig scene, unless you’re the (not particularly skinny) Robin Fox (who I saw do a wicked set with two skinny percussionists at the generally very skinnily-attended Overground show the other day, although they were doing all the beats).

In Sydney, however, there seems to be much more of an electronic music vibe, and it only recently came to my attention that a moderately unskinny man called Peter Hollo has been belting the tunes of Icarus out on his radio show. He recently interviewed us for the magazine Cyclic Defrost. What a guy! He also has a band called FourPlay, which I’m sure you’ll agree takes some nerve.

Perhaps Sydney is after all the greater of the two cities!

Members of the Not Applicable Artists — myself, Sam Britton (aka Isambard Khroustaliov), Tom Arthurs and Lothar Ohlmeier — have been invited to put on an innovative performance at the North Sea Jazz Festival involving Live Algorithms. We’re performing as part of the Non-fiction Programme alongside the awesome likes of Fennesz, Knalpot and Machinefabriek.

It should be a great gig, except the innovative bit is that Sam and I won’t be there. We’re sending software to perform on our behalf, and we’re tying to make the software as pro-active and ‘present’ as is reasonably possible given the current state of research in this area — which as this blog shows is a bit of a passion of mine.

I’m excited. Sad to be missing one of my own gigs, but mildly satisfied about the carbon emissions savings I’ll be making as an absentee ‘performer’ (which could be the way to go if I stick in Australia). Hang on, that means I’m missing out on a free pass to the North Sea Jazz Festival! We’ll be back to Amsterdam next year for a residency at STEIM where we will be working on Icarus‘ new album and live show.

I’ve recently been playing with evolved “decision trees” as a new technique for getting interesting generic behavioural dynamics upon which a generative performance system can be built, and the approach has turned out to be quite powerful, and more manageable than my previous work using CTRNNs. What’s nice about them is they can create interesting dynamical systems behaviour through feedback, but you can also grasp what it is the tree is ‘thinking about’ quite easily. They’re also very efficient, and they can be made to grow during evolution, so that they get more complex over time, and can be made to be adaptive in realtime, by slowly tweaking any decisions that always turn out to go the same way. Another nice thing about them is that they provide both discrete output in the form of categorical decisions, and continuous output in the form of a changing internal state. I don’t really know much about their use in other areas but I suspect they’ll be amenable to some fruitful visualisation and analysis. The evolution is very crude at the moment. Much to do!

I expect to write the project up in a journal paper after the show, sometime towards the end of the year, and maybe even release some of the software. Of course, I’m using my favourite library, Beads, for the job!

I’ve just made a model inspired by Daisyworld dynamics which will become the basis for an installation artwork.

The dark areas are patches of shadow. Eventually, in an installation context, these will be replaced by shadows made by people.

The little rapidly changing dots are a dynamically evolving population of Daisies. Daisies can evolve to become adapted to most temperatures, but the unshaded areas are just a little too hot, so they only manage to get established in shaded areas. As the sequence runs the shadows appear, then join up, then disappear (this bit is just a simulation of how shadows might fall in the real installation). When they first appear but remain separated, two different populations of daisies emerge and find a sustainable equilibrium in their isolated island of shade. Daisies can also regulate their local temperature a bit, but not enough to handle the hot sun (see below), and initially this is not necessary because they quickly become adapted to the natural temperature of the shade.

When the shadows become joined the daisy populations can intermingle. As long as the two populations are not in competition then two populations can coexist at a higher population density. These daisies are not in competition because daisies coming from the left edge have different initial food preferences from daisies coming from the right edge (although food preferences are also evolvable). The food preference is indicated by the colours left behind as agents eat (agents that like red food leave behind a green trail). At the higher population density caused by the two species coexisting, the daisies become able to advance into the ‘hot’ unshaded parts of the environment, because collectively their ability to regulate their local temperature is greater. When this happens a whole new area of food suddenly opens up, so the population flourishes and bursts out of the shade. Following a common ‘collapse‘ style dynamic, their initial success can backfire as the resources become too rapidly diminished, as happens at the end of the clip. At this point it looks more like some forest fire simulations.

Sounds like a species I know!

This is an edit by Martin Hampton of his amazing movie that has been the backdrop to our live Icarus performances over the past year (and continuing). The track was recorded live (slightly manipulated) and will be appearing shortly on our live album “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Note our Australian live dates for March 2010.

Icarus: Uke ‘Em from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

It’s Hands Free III.

Hands Free is a night about software doing things. Musicians and programmers come together in duets between instrumentalists and pieces of software, along with other experiments in autonomy.

This month we have works by Peter McIlwain, Mark Pederson, and Isambard Khroustaliov, who will be delivering a live system from the UK, and performances by Brigid Burke, Adrian Sherriff and Melike Ulgezer.

Works

Mark Pederson: Invisible Territory, generative music work (with performance by Adrian Sherriff)

Peter McIlwain: live performance using Nodal

Isambard Khroustaliov: Axiom, generative music work (with performance by Brigid Burke)

Mark Pederson: Fragments of Sainthood, generative music work (with performance by Melike Ulgezer)

Ollie Bown, Ross Bencina, Brigid Burke, Adrian Sherriff: Double Prosthetic Duo, improvisation.

Details

Date: 17th March 2010.

Location: Guildford Lane Gallery, Guildford Lane, Melbourne 3000.

Time: doors 6pm, music 7 – 9pm.

Entry: free / donations.

An epic occurrence. Icarus is playing some shows in Australia. This is our first Southern Hemisphere appearance, and just 4 dates:

Thursday March 25th – Canberra

• The Street Theatre, Cnr childers St and University Avenue, Canberra ACT 2601
• with Shoeb Ahmad, Reuben Ingall and Luke Penders
• Doors 8pm, entry $10/5

Friday March 26th – Sydney

• Bon Marche Studio, University of Technology Sydney, 15 Broadway, Ultimo NSW 2007
• with Jon Hunter, Shoeb Ahmad, Jordan Bryon
• Doors 8-11pm, entry $10/5

Sunday March 28th – Melbourne

• The Toff in Town, 2/252 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000
• with Ross Bencina, Infinite Decimals, Casey Rice (DJ set)
• Doors 8-11pm, entry $14/10 on the door ($12/8 presale)

And an extra Melbourne show on March 31st brought to you by Audio Actions:

Wednesday March 31st - Melbourne

• The Empress Hotel, 714 Nicholson Street, Fitzroy Nth, VIC 3068
• with Part Timer, Of Pigs and Monkeys, Casey Rice (DJ set)
• Doors 8-11pm, entry tbc.

We’ve also been invited to do an interview with Cyclic Defrost, and ABC Classical around the same time.

And more epic still is that despite a conspicuous lack of time to work on Icarus we’ve put together a live album from our 2009 European tour. As ever, I thank Sam for his boundless energy in sorting out some of the finishing touches. The album is called “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”. Sam suggested the name after reading Candide. I’ve just finished reading it too. It’s very much worth it. It certainly gave me the impression that life is fairer in the 21st Century than it was in the 18th, in Europe at least. But maybe Candide lived a bit of an unorthodox life. What has it got to do with our album? Well, like Candide we travelled around Europe in a frenzy with good times and bad, chance meetings, and things tending to come together in unexpected ways. Besides that, it reflects the general predicament of Icarus, which is a musical project that takes much inspiration from tangential circumstances. Beyond that I’d be spreading the analysis a bit thin. It’s a name for a musical work, after all, and as with the artwork, below, you should just let the free associations run wild.

Physical copies of the album will be on presale during our Australian shows. After that it will be available through the Not Applicable site.

Hands Free is a night about software doing things. Musicians and programmers come together in duets between instrumentalists and pieces of software, along with other experiments in autonomy.

This month (Feb 2010) Hands Free will feature software works by Arne Eigenfeldt, Oliver Hancock, Michael Young, Ross Bencina and me, Ollie Bown, featuring performances by Brigid Burke, Adrian Sherriff and Jeremy Marozeau.

Works

Arne Eigenfeldt : BeatBox

Arne Eigenfeldt is a composer, software developer, researcher in intelligent music systems, and associate professor of Music and Technology at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. He will not be attending the Winter Olympics (©). BeatBox is created by Kinetic Engine, a multi-agent polyphonic rhythm generator created by Arne Eigenfeldt. Agents collaborate to form complex rhythms, while attempting to satisfy the performer’s control over density.

Ross Bencina : Live Processing using AudioMulch

Ross Bencina is a sonic improviser who develops his own performance software called AudioMulch. AudioMulch will transform live sound from everyday objects into a surreal soundscape of processed sound.

Michael Young : Piano_prosthesis

Michael Young is a composer and senior lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-founder of the UK Live Algorithms for Music network. Piano_prosthesis is from a series of improvised ‘compositions’ in which performer and machine engage in an equally-based process of mutual listening, learning and response. The system classifies the improviser’s musical behaviour; each classification is then tied, in performance, to a particular stochastic musical output: The improviser is invited to respond to or mirror this process, which consequently increases in range and complexity as the performance unfolds.

Ollie Bown : Hybrid Evolved Network

Ollie Bown is an electronic musician and researcher in adaptive and evolutionary approaches to art and music. His hybrid evolved network is a modular system consisting of evolved and hand-coded components that interact to produce a dynamical reactive musical behaviour for improvisation.

Oliver Hancock: chor-respondent

Oliver was educated in New Zealand and has just completed his PhD at the University of York. He lectures at Leeds College of Music. His pieces are inspired by nature; he uses classic chaos algorithms and also invents his own compositional systems. chor-respondent generates pitches which are consonant with the live performer’s playing. It is somewhat unpredictable, but has a tendency to create phrases with a sense of harmonic cadence.

Details

Date: 17th February 2010.

Location: Guildford Lane Gallery, Guildford Lane, Melbourne 3000.

Time: doors 6pm, music 7 – 9pm.

Entry: free / donations.

I have been using my (currently unavailable) multi-agent framework library (see ICMC paper) and my Beads computer music library to do multi-agent sound design for squidsoup in their new work Ocean of Light. It’s going to show briefly at the Kinetica Art Fair in London from February 5th – 7th 2010, then hopefully in some other guises in some other place.

It’s a beautiful installation consisting of 12 x 12 x 14 LEDs in a cuboid sort of curtain that you can walk though. The sound is multichannel, panning around in response to the location of agents in the Ocean of Light world. This is my first completely remote collaborative project working on a physical installation (rather than just abstract software). There were quite a few challenges working remotely, in particular making sure that all the computers involved had the right versions of software installed and up to date, and were talking to each other. Also, designing sound for something I’ve never seen.

I am now well adapted to discussing technical details over Skype with someone who is drinking coffee when I am drinking beer and drinking beer when I am drinking coffee. This took a bit of getting used to.