Delinquency

For those distraught by the dearth of mathematically themed writings in this space, may I suggest my shared items in Google Reader, easily accessed either by the first of the above links, or in the sidebar of this page, entitled "And what have I been reading?"

My distractions from these posts have not been all work. I've written before about the great strides being made in human-computer interaction, especially regarding tools for musical creation. Last Saturday night I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Björk (or B. Guðmundsdóttir, for the sake of nomenclatural purity) perform at the Shoreline amphitheater, with M. Bell at the helm of a reactable. This instrument, first pointed out to me by J. Hopper (who is inexplicably nigh invisible to Google), is similar to the audiopad from MIT's media lab, but with a crucial difference: it is out of the prototype stage, and in front of a mainstream audience. Hopefully commercialization is not too far off.

Let the CHI flow

For the purposes of this post, that's Computer-Human Interaction, not the Chinese concept of life force.

I made my way to PARC again last Thursday to hear a great talk about how the landscape of electronic entertainment is changing thanks to developments in HCI. It really says something about my interests that so many of the topics that T. Blaine covered were already familiar to me. Off the top of my head, these include: Guitar Hero, Karaoke Revolution, the DS, the Wii,
D'CüCKOO, audiopad, and Jeff Han's multi-touch interface. What ties her interests together amongst each other, as well as with mine, is how custom hardware can facilitate musical creation through intuitive human manipulations.

Of all the above, only Karaoke Revolution uses the single most intuitive human tool for sound, the voice. One of the more interesting projects underway in the realm of speech-and-song control of computers was covered in this space earlier; unfortunately, this wonderful creative tool is still not publicly available.

However, an even greater voice-controlled application has just been released. Have you ever heard a song on the radio, but not caught the attribution, only to have that catchy hook running through your head, leaving you wishing that you knew who wrote the song? Thanks to midomi, you need wonder no more! Just sing into your browser and find all the covers of "Fly Me to the Moon", or who's done that "Doo-wah-ditty-ditty-dum-ditty-doo" song. They're still in "invitation only" beta, but not to worry; if you want me to get you past the velvet rope, just let me know in the comments.

num·ber: a musical selection

A. Gelfand (any relation to I. Gelfand or S. Gelfand?) has written a pair of stories for Seed and Wired concerning R. Mahanthappa and his new cryptologically inspired album, Codebook. I highly recommend that you give it a listen; between Gelfand's articles, the label's site for the recording, and the artist's myspace page you can listen to most of the numbers on the CD.

I really appreciate his approach to mathematical composition. He describes his initial cipher of J. Coltrane's "Giant Steps" as "unplayable", specifically wishing to avoid "the appearance of random noise." Rather than leave the melody of "Frontburner" in its raw encrypted state, Mahanthappa "had to tweak his coded message until it could be classified as music."

Perhaps it's an overstatement to assert that it wasn't music before the "tweaks", but I'm sure that it's much better music on their account. It's refreshing to see serial elements used as a stimulus for creative expression rather than a programmatic straitjacket.

Art, technically

Seed magazine interviewed Matmos, ostensibly about their use of an enigma machine in their forthcoming album, although their conversation turned more generally to their use of "scientific" sources in their music. Who knew that one of the fringe benefits of getting Ph.D. in English would turn out to be access to the vaults of a cryptography research company?

Matmos, as well as their more well-known collaborator, perform a truly amazing feat; they produce art that is positively brilliant and at the same time accessible. I suspect that this ability comes out of having impeccable technique and formidable instinct while having the ear steeped in popular musical culture.

The new generation of audio ransom note

Wired's music guy, E. Van Buskirk, interviewed S. König about his software project cum musical mash-up collage tool cum political statement on intellectual property, sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!. It's not only an interesting idea, but there are also numerous computational challenges to making it work, and work so well. I want to know how he does all that! I suppose I'll find out when it gets sourceforged.

Freed from economic and social constraints, I would volunteer to work on this without a second thought.