Colin Sullivan » music

My Music Listening History

Colin — Mon, 31 May 2010 17:50:04 +0000

Here is a pretty awesome graph of my music listening history (generated from last.fm scrobbler data):

Last.fm listening history since Oct 2006.
View as: pdf png

It encompasses all of my listening history since October 2006, when I first started using Last.fm. If you are actually going to look at it, you may want to start from the right (most recent).

Generated courtesy of lastgraph (lastgraph.aeracode.org).

Concert

Colin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:40:05 +0000

Concert is an online collaborative organizational tool for sounds. I am developing Concert as part of Software Design and Documentation class here at RPI. See our wiki for more information.

The idea behind Concert is that many groups of musicians, like [ ], record practices and riffs with the intention of going through them later and picking out the good from the bad. With our band anyway, this has not been working. Mostly it is because the recordings are on my computer, and we have yet to sit down altogether and sort through them all. When we have time to get together, we prefer to work on new material, or simply play, thus producing more recordings.

Concert solves not only this problem of choosing the good from the bad, but also solves the problem of organization of the various audio “segments”. Concert will allow all the members of a group, say Tim, Garrett and myself, to collaboratively listen to each of the audio recordings that we have piled up on our own time. A user of Concert can then highlight a segment of one of these audio recordings and “tag” it, effectively organizing parts of the audio recordings. Other users in the same group will be able to see these changes, and add/remove audio segments from these tags.

On the technical side, we have a few challenges to face. One challenge is on the backend, with the audio manipulation. We are hoping to provide the functionality for a user to download an “audio segment”, that is, a segment of an audio file that they have previously uploaded. Another set of challenges, which are the ones I am trying to deal with, are on the client-side. We are hoping to use HTML5 instead of flash for the audio playback. I have already solved a few quirky issues that I’ve found with this new technology, and overall it seems fairly solid.

Overall, we hope to have a small working prototype of Concert by the end of the semester. We’ll see where this takes us.

Fibonacci Composition

Colin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:22:18 +0000

This semester, for “Interactive Arts Programming” class, I will be making an interactive composition based on the Fibonacci sequence. The piece will involve me playing the bass line of my composition, while a computer takes my performance as input and generates algorithmically determined accompaniments.

Objective

My objective is to write a bass guitar composition and design algorithmically determined accompaniments, all based on the Fibonacci sequence.

Goals

Finish writing a composition that I once started on my bass revolving around the Fibonacci numbers
Design various accompaniments to this bass line also revolving around the Fibonacci sequence
Experiment with digital audio effects, the parameters of which are manipulated based on Fibonacci sequence
Experiment with manual manipulation of different parameters of the auto-accompaniments
Experiment with multi-channel audio
Use a MIDI foot pedal, or other sensors (accelerometer), to manipulate these parameters during performance of the piece

Implementation

I am hoping to achieve these goals by creating a few smaller projects to tackle each of them, and then bringing all of the techniques together in the end.

Input

Using the MIDI pickup on my bass guitar, I will not only depend on pitch analysis from the audio signal, but a mixture of information from the MIDI and the audio signal, to ensure that the correct note value is used throughout the rest of the program.

Accompaniments

The MIDI from the accompaniments will be generated with Max, then sent via MIDIpipe or some other method to Logic or Live, so it wont sound like garbage.

Digital Audio Effects

Instead of creating effects from scratch, I will experiment with MSP/ChucK patches that have already been created, and merely manipulate various parameters of them based on Fibonacci sequence.

Manual parameter manipulation

I will experiment with manipulation of the parameters of the accompaniments themselves, as well as parameters of the audio effects/channels, to see what sounds good.

Multi-channel audio

It would be interesting to send these accompaniments through multiple channels, to achieve a surround sound effect. I will do the audio channel management in Max/MSP.

In the end I hope to have flushed out this composition I have in mind, and to have some natural sounding, algorithmically determined accompaniments in the piece. My goal is not to merely generate these accompaniments in an arbitrary way, but to ensure that the piece is still pleasing to listen to. I do not want knowledge of my development process to be a prerequisite for listening to the piece. It should stand on its own.

My Last.fm listening history

Colin — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:17:09 +0000

My Last.fm listening history…Graphed out like awesomeness. Click here.

Thoughts on art

Colin — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 04:43:30 +0000

Is music not part of art? Two times yesterday I heard different people mention music and art as two separate entities. Music is a form of art the last time I checked. I don’t understand why people insist on referring to painting as “art” and music as “music”. It’s strange.