Category: Uncategorised

Composers of Colour and Music Tech

It seems to me to be the case that a lot of music tech books seem to lag a bit in noting the musical and technological contributions of people of colour. I’m looking for resources that address this and to make up for my knowledge deficit. One obvious location to search for and collect this kind of information is wikipedia.

Therefore, I will post here a list of wikipedia articles for composers of colour who work with music technology for free music, art music, experimental music, creative music or in other genres derived from jazz, classical, noise, etc.

I have a few goals in creating this list here, the most urgent of which is making sure my lectures this term are appropriately diverse. When this list is long enough, of course, I want to move it to wikipedia, but in the mean time, I will edit this list to add names to it as they come up. I will additionally create a second list of people who are not listed on wikipedia.

My starting point for these names is wikipedia itself. I will be going through the List of Composer of African Descent and reading the existing articles. As I go through them, I’ll also look at who these composers collaborated with and trying to discover if these collaborators also belong on the list. I will also go through this list of non-western composers to see who already has wikipedia articles and who needs them. I also intend to go through the lists of past Other Minds fellows. I suspect there may have been a lot of stuff in the 60’s and 70’s and so will be asking around composers I know who were working in that era.

Obviously, these starting points will leave many gaps and so I’d be really happy if this was a collaborative project. (Again, these are my very early working notes and I want to move this to wikipedia very shortly – as soon as I have around 40 names.) This could be a great project for a meetup or a project for students to write short articles for composers who are missing them. Note that the enforcement of wikipedia’s notability guidelines is sexist and racist in practice. Therefore, collaborations are more likely to resist the whitewashing of the site as editors can watch out for spurious deletions.

If you can see missing names, please leave a comment. Or, if this project already exists and I’ve just failed to find it, please do let me know.

Has an article

(this list has no moved to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_electroacoustic_composers_of_color)

Needs an article

Dreams of my Mother

Here are two dreams I had years ago, some months apart.

Shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer, I dreamt I was in my parents’s bedroom. My mother was stood outside her wardrobe, her suitcase open on the bed. She was putting things into it. Gently, slightly sadly, she told me she was packing for along trip and didn’t know if she would be coming back.

A month or so after she died, I dreamt I had run into her, in a farm yard. I hadn’t seen her for some time and was happy to see her there. We were making small talk, but I had a nagging feeling that something important had happened concerning her. I had forgotten something crucial to our exchange. Suddenly, as I neared waking, knowledge of the past few months returned to me. Surprised, I blurted out, ‘You’re not supposed to be here!’

‘Oh,’ she said agreeably, and walked around the corner of a barn out of sight.

‘Wait!’ I ran after her, turning the same corner, but she was gone, nowhere to be seen.

Vegan Yogurt Review: Silk

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Silk soy products are the bog standard soy you find in America. All the big stores stock it. It is, as my brother likes to praise things, inoffensive. In a land where bland is king, silk reigns. And fair enough, as a good soy milk (if used as a replacement for dairy) should fade to the background.

Their soy yogurt is as competent as one would expect. It’s got a good texture and a yogurt tang. There is a background note of beanyness, which is surprising, as their soy milk completely lacks this.

This is the soy yogurt one is most likely to see, say, staying in a hotel or if one shops at Safeway. It does the job. Silk is as reliable as ever.

4/5 stars.

Vegan yoghurt reviews: coconut dream

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I went to the Berkeley Bowl yesterday and bought many varieties of non dairy blueberry yogurt. I shall now review them.

Today’s yogurt was picked to start because it came open on the bag on the way home and needed to be eaten imminently.

It is a coconut base, which is at least as easy to perceive in taste as the blueberry. It lacks the normal tang of acidophilus flavour, but it does contain cultures.

The texture is a bit glue-y. Reading the label reveals that it was thickened with corn and tapioca starch, which probably caused this. The label says it is low fat, but the nothing in the ingredients list suggests that fat was removed from the coconut. I presume that the starches were used not as fat replacements, but just to get it to sit right on the spoon. Also, my experience of cooking with coconut milk-replacement is that it’s difficult to turn it into custard. Agar agar can help and maybe it would have been better to use that.

This is miles better than the fake yogurts i used to get 15 years ago, but as everything vegan has improved so much during that time, I feel this yogurt could also have gotten a bit better than it did. I’d feel pleased to see it on a hotel buffet or whatever, but it’s not the first one I would pick in the grocery store. I give it 4/10.

The future

http://livecoding.tv is a site where you can watch people write code live. Like write a text editor. Because this is what’s entertaining in the 21st century. It’s meant to be educational.

It is also apparently only men.

Breathing code is another public coding platform. Or a conference, rather. Or something that lost money.

FARM workshop on functional art, music, modeling and design was a success.

TopLap is or was a fun community. It needs more participation.

Computational literacy. Chris Hancock in 2003 wrote real-time programming and the big ideas of computational literacy. It emphasises experience. Real time code makes for real time interaction.

Here is a slide showing a continuum between bodies and theories. Live coding is somewhere in the middle. Action thinking with live coding.

Discussion:
What next?

Q: are performances meant to be an academic or  scientific exercise or how should it be curated?

Maybe instead of a conceptual frame work instead a description of the kind of output or environment?

For an academic conference, things should have some novelty.

Things could be partly open call and partly curated. Curators need to be somewhat neutral.

Dance music is interesting and can be rigorous, or is that even a valuable thing to aspire to?

Livecode.TV is not an open platform.  We could take live streaming out to the wild. Interact with normal people.

Which performances should be public?

What about other at forms?

Could there be some youth outreach in the next conference?

Kids algorave or some such

Algorave school dances

Trying to avoid product oriented output.

SuperCopair

Collaboratively live coding SuperCollider through the cloud.

Remotely located synchronous interaction. People use Dagstuhl, Gibber, etc.

SuperCopair uses atom.io. it allows you to remotely collaboratively edit a document. They used the pusher. com cloud service.

Pusher cloud service uses push data. Sending a character is avg 230ms from San Palo to Ann Arbor.

It is easy to setup. No sync in clock.

You can run code locally or globally or remotely (only).

They’ve added permission control.

Users tend to want to  collaboratively fix bugs.

This package is available in atom.io.

Live coding as a part of a free improv orchestra by Antonio Goulart and Miguel Antar

He is doing only code and not processing other people.

He does no breast tracking. Joe to communicate well with other improvisers. They try to be non idiomatic.

Performers should be able to play together based only on sound with no knowledge of other instruments. They try to play without memory.

Acoustic instruments are immediate, but live coding has lag, which provides opportunity to create future sounds.

He didn’t used to project code, so as to not grab to much attention. But the free imprison acoustics guys Jammed More together, so he thought screen showing would help people play more together.

This did help, and does not distract audiences, so they kept it.

It turns out that some knowledge of each others instruments is needed to play well together. Should instrumentalists learn a bit of code to play with live coders? Or is that too much to ask? Would it be too distracting when they’re trying to play?

http://soundcloud.com/orquestraerrante

There is a discussion about projection in the question section….

Extramuros: a browser coding thingee by David Ogborn et al

Uses node.is, which he says is duct tape for network music.

It supports distributed ensembles and has language neutrality. Server client model.

Browser interface, piped to language from server.

It is aesthetically austere.

There have been several performances.

It is also useful for projecting ensembles live code. And for screen sharing. And for doing workshops with low configuration. (He says no configuration)

Running this means giving access to a high priority running thread on your machine…

Future work: it allows for JavaScript and osc right now. They want to do event visualisation. There are synchronisation issues. Phasing is an issue. What about stochastic stuff? When people write unpredictable, untimed code, unpredictable, untimed things happen. Apparently this is bad.

We are being made to participate. In tidal.

Live writing: asynchronous live coding

People collaborating can be Co located out distant, synchronous or asynchronous.

Asynchronous live coding is a thing, like sending code over email. There are ways to communicate etc. Open form scores, static code, screen cast, audio recording

Music notation is meant to allow this. He says live coding is improvised or composed on real time. So how to archive performances or rehearsals.

Studio can be recorded or there are symbolic recordings, like code or notation. Code and notation are not equivalent. In traditional music, midi files are between the recording and the score. it has time stamps etc.

What is the equivalent of a midi file for live coders?

He’s showing Gibber in a web browser. It records his keystrokes with time stamps, saves it to a server, and can be played back.

Livewriting.eecs.umich.edu
http:// Livewriting.eecs.umich.edu

There are other systems like this, like threnoscope by Magnusson.

Show us your screens. Happens outside of live coding. Game streaming. Programmer streaming for not live coding.

Writing as music performance. Write a poem, sonority the typing and do stuff based on character content.

Written communication is asynchronous. Recording keystrokes can make writing into a real time experience. Or reading. Or whatever.

As there is no sense of audience, the experience is the same as non live writing. The trading experience is really different, though.