Ollie Bown

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.

My colleague Taras Kowaliw has been doing some research into creative image generation using evolution. Contribute to science by being a part of his survey!

“Hands Free”

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.

Hands Free is on the 3rd Wednesday of each month for January, February and March at the Guildford Lane Gallery, Guildford Lane, Melbourne, 7-9pm. Free entry / donations.

Opening night, January 20th: Duets between software by Ollie Bown and performances by Brigid Burke (clarinet, bass clarinet) and Adrian Sherriff (trombone, shakuhachi). Solo set by Brigid Burke with electronics and live video. Generative performance by Gordon Monro.

Workshop: 3rd to 5th August: Goldsmiths Digital Studios / Electronic Music Studios
Concert: 6th August: Cafe Oto

I ran a workshop involving some superb programmers and musicians in August. Involved on the computer music / programming side were Sam Britton, Matt Yee-King, Tim Blackwell, Bill Hsu (from San Francisco), Oliver Hancock, Daniel Jones, Michael Young, Nick Collins, Tom Mudd, Sebastian Lexer and Andrew Robertson. The performing musicians were Eddie Prévost (drums and percussion) and Finn Peters (sax and flute).

Here are some recordings of the pieces I was involved in. The first with Finn Peters, uses a CTRNN as a flamboyant pattern producer (an ‘f’ in the PfQ terminology of Blackwell and Young) for a generative music process. The CTRNN is modulated by various analysis processes. It is not directly controlled by rules though, so the sense of interaction is very subtle. I excused the algorithm at the time as being ‘belligerent’, but have recently written a paper with Michael Young (CC10, Lisbon) concerning modes of interaction, where we propose systems such as these as embodying a negotiation strategy (as opposed to a mirroring strategy).

LAM Ollie and Finn

The second uses the same analysis tools and CTRNN but plugged into Sebastian Lexer’s generative resampling tools, performed with Eddie Prévost on kit. The point here was just to have fun with the modularity of our various systems by getting them talking over OSC, and seeing how relevant Tim and Michael’s PfQ approach really is (as opposed to a more holistic approach). The piece sounds completely different of course, the evaluation really lying in how powerful this is as a working methodology. In short, it felt good.

LAM Ollie, Seb and Eddie

(These recordings were made by Coda Mastering.)

Finally, here’s a short video of the night, with some views, filmed and edited by Kostas Chondros.

I’m currently working on running similar events at the Guildford Lane Gallery in Melbourne in the first 3 months of 2010 (those are the hot months).

A while ago Sam and I (Icarus in other words) wrote a track for an interesting compilation called Favourite Places (Audiobulb Records) alongside some great producers. The idea is that each artist choses a favourite place and makes a recording of that place, and then makes a track out of the recording. It’s a cool theme prompting some interesting variety and something that we naturally related to as we both find making music about places very intuitive, although it’s not so much about places as simply attached to them, concerning them.

Main event details here: http://www.dialogues-festival.org/2009-inspace

Following our performance in the 2007 dialogues festival, Icarus are returning to Edinburgh (on 09.09.09 no less … ) to help the festival celebrate its 10th anniversary and its new residency in Edinburgh’s first dedicated digital art venue. It will be the first chance to test out the unique loudspeaker configurations and also work out where to the put the performers and the audience in this new space. The live set will be accompanied by a specially commissioned film by Martin Hampton, support acts tbc.

A little late, but at last the film of Driftnet embedded here…

The Sonic Ecosystem project has been taking up quite a bit of my time recently. It has been running in my absence at the Cube 37 gallery in Frankston, near Melbourne. It ran last week at Shunt, the dark damp stony vaults underneath London Bridge Station, which are a perfect setting for sonic artwork. I hoped to finally get some photos of the work in situ at Shunt, but they didn’t materialise. This week I am in Montreal at ICMC 2009 where the installation is one of only four installation pieces at the conference, this time running without the visuals. It has received a lot of positive feedback. Some people caught some z’s in it’s immersive sound cocoon.

Below is an updated video of the piece in action. Each line represents an agent living in the environment, an agent corresponds to a sound in the soundscape. Essentially, the principle of the piece is that sounds evolve over time so as to find compatible ways to coinhabit an environment with finite resources.

Sonic Ecosystem #2:001 from Oliver Bown on Vimeo.

The height of the line represents their energy, which is determined by a simple (but not-so-simple because it has been hand tweaked) resource model based on a relation between the sound made by the agent and the collective sound of the installation environment (see below). The line goes red when the agent’s energy is sufficient for it to reproduce. Sometimes agents’ energies drop below zero, at which point they will die with a certain probability (also meaning that they might get lucky and make it back from the brink). The width of the line and also the dots at the bottom of the screen show the energy of the sound they are producing. The numbers represent the ID of the sound file each agent is playing, which is genetically determined. This means that you can spot evolutionary lineages as groups of agents with the same ID, or similar IDs. All of these agents will also make similar sounds, so a populous species will produce many layers of the same overlapping sound. The rotating discs represent the activations of the neural net used by each agent, which maps the features of the input sound (of the environment) to controller value that modify the sound produced by the agents (sample position, granular size, rate and randomness). The behaviour of the nets is also genetically determined, and means that agents can develop adaptive behaviour over time.

The Resource Model

Inspired by the seminal work of di Scipio, “sound is the interface”. This model places the agents in a biofeedback loop with the sound they produce, so not the literal instantaneous audio feedback that di Scipio explores, but a very indirect feedback process, best described as a loosely coupled system. Agents’ fitness is not defined by a strict fitness function but by a resource model that determines the health of agents. Given a coarse spectrogram of the sound, an agent gains health by making sound in each frequency bin with the following rules: the more overall sound in that bin, the less available health, the available health is divided between agents in the ratio in which each agents contributes to the sound in that bin. I’ve been playing with variations on this rule. A couple of hacks were necessary to avoid certain horrendous sounds: it was necessary to punish too much broad noise, and also helped to limit the energy gain to just the best band for each agent, rather than the sum over all bands.

Health also decays at a given rate, which increases with age.

These health values then determine evolutionary outcomes in a straightforward manner. An upper threshold determines whether agents can reproduce, and a lower threshold determines whether they die, with a given uniform probability.

The Agent

Agents contain various genetically inherited behavioural information. An agent plays a sound file, chosen from a list. The agent is also given a start time and a range from which they can play sound from the file. Agents also respond to the information about the environment with a neural net which determines how the sound is played back, this includes the scrub position (granular sample playback is used), and grain size, interval and randomness.

The Framework

The framework supporting this model provides modes for running the agent and sound world in different ways, in particular facilitating batch processing and interactive exploration of the model parameters. See the paper for more details.