pulsewidth

There’s been a dearth of posts here and i’d like to apologize for that. Life kind of got in the way, as it does, and other matters took up time that could have been spent doing the scant blog updates that I do. I suppose I fell in to the trap of thinking no one notices this blog and I could get away with being slack. Well, it turns out people do notice, even if you haven’t done all of the fancy stuff to get your blog noticed. For those folks on the Noisefanatics blog: look for more posts in 2012, and thanks for visiting. I hope you found something useful here.

December 19 is World Merzbow Day, celebrating the birthday of Masami Akita, acknowledged by some as the ‘most important artist in noise.’

Here’s a track I made to commemorate the day:

Trainspotter section:

i used these two pawnshop guitars, a Boss Metal Zone, A Digitech Death Metal, a DSI evolver, and my two bent Denelectro fab Echo pedals. This all was fed in to a Behringer Xenyx 1202FX mixer and recorded with a Zoom H2.

A while ago I tried my hand at no-input mixing as a sonic exploration. The results were gratifying, but I didn’t record anything that I generated with my original setup. Time, however, marches on.

Recently I’ve taken up construction of devices for sound generation. These are devices inspired by Handmade Electronic Music by Nicolas Collins as well as various other sources. The first device I built was a matrix mixer.
My matrix mixer is a 4 x 4 passive mixer, similar to that described in HEM. With a matrix mixer, any input source can be sent to any output source. One obvious task for such a mixer is to send a source to multiple destinations, such as effects. The fun starts when one takes the output of said effects and feeds them back to the inputs.

I’ve used my matrix mixer, some handmade tone generators and some commercial effects units in performance of late.Here it is, at the bottom left. along with the other stuff:

The first outing I used this stuff was the 10th edition of Waves of Fury, an open stage noise show curated by Mark Lowe. Between the feedback layers and raw electronic sounds I was able to do a passable low-power power electronics set.

The same setup was trotted out again for the Dorkbot Ensemble Tour, a three stop junket undertaken by our Dorkbot cell here in Regina to spread the wonders of sound art. That’s another story, however.

Here are my solo pieces from the tour. Normally I would have posted these on Soundcloud, but I seem to be shy of space there. Instead, check ‘moose jaw dust’ and ‘saskatoon dust’ here:

soundscapes made with objects, instruments, and of course, Linux

This recent experiment falls in to the ‘me too’ category, but I’m still pleased with the result. I saw a recent blog article describing the use of an induction mic, essentially a coil of wire, to collect electromagnetic sounds from various bits of equipment. By wiring a coil or an inductor of some sort to a plug and amplifying the signal one can discover a new, hidden soundscape . Nicolas Collins has of course discussed this at length in Handmade Electronic Music and shows excellent examples of what can be found in the netherworld of electromagnetic radiation.

The coil I used in my experiment was retrieved from an eviscerated hard drive. .
My initial attempt to record its output failed, though. It turns out that this coil has a very low output, and I could not provide enough gain adjustment on the line/mic in of my computer. Better results were obtained using my USB audio interface as it has a hardware input gain adjustment. Soon enough I was capturing noises from my laptop harddrive and looping them in Pure Data. Eventually I sent the output of each loop through a filtered distortion, then through delays and reverb, as I usually do. The whole mess sounds like layers of fuzzy, synth-like feedback, but one of the loops captured some sort of a bump, for lack of a better descrition. This bump became the sparse bassline of this improv piece.
For your consideration: induction
pulsewidth-induction by ernst.pulsewidth

This is the equipment I’m going to use for an upcoming no-input mixing performance. For the past couple of days I’ve been practising, if you will, making sure that I can keep the various layers of feedback at bay, for a performance I’ll be doing on Friday. It’s very informal, but I thought some preparation was in order. I’m going to be trying a new performance setup: a no-input mixing board. in the most basic form, the no-input mixer consists of a mixer with the outputs plugged in to the inputs, creating feedback loops. Using the EQ on a mixer channel allows for tonal variations from piercing screams to low rumbles, depending on the EQ. Further variety comes from the addition of effects units in to the feedback loops.

What I’ve enjoyed most about this endeavour is the knob-twiddling physicality of controlling sounds that can sometimes go quickly out of control.

If you check the image out on Flickr there are notes naming each device, but since you’re here this is the lineup: the rackmount devices are a Deltalab ADM 1024 digital delay (light blue) and a Korg SDD-1 digital delay (dark blue, yellow knobs). The mixer is a Behringer Xenyx 1202FX. You also see the Korg KP2 and MiniKP KAOSS Pad effects units. Finally, on the upper right, thereis a Zoom H2 recorder which I was using to record my practice. Perhaps I’ll post some examples of what this stuff sounds like after I’ve done some editing.

Here’s a picture of some gear I use to make music. In this photo are my netbook and a bunch of Korg stuff. On the left are my Korg Mini-KP and KAOSS Pad 2. In front of my netbook are my Korg NanoControl and NanoKey, and above the KAOSS Pads is a little old Yamaha MM-10 mixer I use from time to time.

On May 18 I joined a new fraternity. That was the day I finished building my Monome 40h kit. It’s been a while since I built anything electronic, but I got it to work, after a lot of slaving over a hot soldering iron.

For the uninitiated, the Monome is little more than a box of buttons that light up. For electronic musicians it represents a unique way to control the software they use. Brian Crabtree, one of the creators of the Monome has wrtten mlr, a loop player/slicer using Max/MSP. This is the app that is most associated with Monome. Other programs have been written to control Ableton Live, the defacto standard for laptop music.

The Monome 40h has 64 buttons in an 8 x 8 grid (64 = 40 in hex). The kit version of the 40h consists of a logic board and the button grid. Building the logic board was fairly straightforward since is had a fairly low component count. The Amtel controller and the Max chip, two large integrated circuits were provided with sockets, so unless one was to install them backwards there was no way to damage them. The button board was another story altogether. Each of the 64 buttons required the installation of an LED, and a diode. The diodes, however, are surface mount diodes, which means that they are very small and are soldered to small pads rather than in to holes in the circuit board.  It took a couple of hours to solder all 64 of them, allowing time to rest my eyes. The LEDs were next, at it was with them that I shot myself in the foot. In my zeal to get the project done, I soldered all 64 LEDs in backwards. It took a while to sort that out, but with the help of the very benevolant Monome forum community I realized the error of my ways. To effect the repair I had to go and buy a solder remover, a small manual vacuum. I did a few of the LEDs with solder wick, but that took alltogether too long. The solder vacuum was also more effective removing solder from the plated-through holes of the button grid board.

After correcting the button grid it was time to test my work…again. Since my computers run Linux, I used serial-pyio, a utility written in Python to communicate with the Monome. Once I connected the Monome to my netbook using a USB cable I started serial-pyio. Serial-pyio comes with some test utilities that test both button and LED functionality, and my Monome passed with flying colours, or colour, in my case, green.

With electronic functionality proven it was time to house the circuit boards in a case. Most Monome builder take the opportunity to house their kit in a unique case. My favourite is a case built from Lego. I chose a clear acrylic case from Curious Inventor. My case is somewhat large, but it will allow for customizations, such as LEDs for ambient lighting,
and various devices to connect to the logic board’s analogue inputs (accelerometers, pots, and so on). I may even try to put a micro-aquarium in it.

I’ll be using my Monome with axiome primarily. It provides better visual feedback of what the loopers are doing and the buttons provide more immediate control of axiome. While axoime is a very cool I felt I needed to search for other apps to use with the Monome. My search was quickly rewarded on the Monome forum. Grain allows the user to perform granular synthesis on two sound buffers with the Monome providing control over grain position, position randomization, grain length, pitch and volume. In addition, up to 64 button presses can be recorded for each parameter, allowing sequencer-like control. Grain is written in ChuCK, and thus viable in Linux. I hope to post some pieces made in Grain soon. Stay tuned…

Here’s a couple of photos during construction Monome stuff

After a lot of research and hand-wringing i finally bought a netbook. I chose the MSI Wind, primarily because the price was right, but also because it seemed to have the best combination of features. I’ve had it for roughly a month now and I’m pleased with this little computer, but it took a bit of work getting there.

The Wind is fairly typical of the netbook style laptop in that it is powered by an Intel Atom processor and comes with 1GB of RAM out of the box. The Atom runs at 1.6 GHz which isn’t fast by today’s standards, but it it more than adequate for most tasks. MSI equipped the Wind with an 80 GB hard drive rather than a solid-statee drive. I was attracted by the idea of having fewer moving parts in my laptop, but I also like to to have more storage than is offered by the current array of solid-state drives installed in netbooks, so I’m happy with MSI’s choice. Another feature that sets the WInd apart is the 10 inch screen. This makes the Wind a bit bigger than other netbooks, but that extra size also allows for a larger keyboard as well. The build quality of the Wind is quite good. It’s seems fairly solid for a small laptop.

When I brought the MSI Wind home I knew I’d have to perform some tweaks, both hardware and software. The software part was farly major, but quite easy to fix. The Wind has Windows XP installed, which is not the way I roll. Before I even powered it up I attached a portabble DVD drive and loaded it with the Ubuntustudio 8.04.1 install CD. The install went as smoothly as one could imagine. After performing all of the post-install changes that I usually do, I had Ubuntustudio installed and personalized.

The hardware tweaks that I performed on the Wind were very easily accomplished as well, but have warranty-voiding written all over them. The Wind has no little service hatches over the RAM slot or other areas of interest inside the chassis. One has to remove the entire bottom panel to access the RAM slot and the wireless card, the other device of interest. I easily installed anothe 1GB SODIMM, bringing the RAM complement to 2GB. The stock wireless card in the Wind is a Realtek 8187. It turns out that this card has abysmal support in Ubuntu 8.04. This led me to the MSI Wind wiki. The advice therein described compiling new drivers for the Realtek, and I did indeed try that, but the solution that I ultimately followed was the replacement of the realtek card with an Intel 3945abg wireless card. This card was immediately recognized by Linux and works very well.

The only thing I have a problem with on the MSI Wind is the touchpad. I’ve owned or used IBM laptops at work and at home and have gotten quite used to the trackpoint, that little thing that looks like an eraser in the middle of the keyboard. It’s not that bad, but it’s my understanding that MSI switched from using a Synaptics touchpad to a Sentilec, which means that scrolling with the touchpad is broken. C’est la vie, I guess.

Overall I’m quite pleased with the MSI Wind. it’s reasonably sturdy and has enough computing horsepower for all of my day-to-day computing needs. I’m in the process of tweaking my Ubuntustudio install in hopes of making the Wind a decent portable audio workstation. I’ll report on this later….

It would seem that Asus started something with their EEE PC. Mini-notebooks, AKA netbooks or MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices)seem to be all the rage among PC manufacturers. Some of the noteworthy entries are the MSI Wind, the Acer Aspire One, and, as revealed over at Engadget, the Dell E and E Slim. All of these should be available on North America by the end of the summer. Asus is still going to be in the game with their EEE 1000. The EEE 1000 boasts a 10 inch screen, keeping in line with the MSI Wind and the Aspire One. The Dell E will have an 8.9 inch screen, but will offer other connectivity options such as Wimax and 3G data. The E Slim will feature a 12 inch screen, and like the MSI Wind, EEE 1000 will sport a mechanical hard drive. Interesting to note that almost all of these devices come with a Linux-based OS as an option(the Wind comes with Windows XP). The Dell E and E Slim will even feature Blacktop, a Linux OS that will allow ‘always on’ capability. The Aspire One offers similar functionality with its Linux Lite OS.

Asus has already sold a few hundred thousand EEE PCs already, even though they’ve only got a 7 inch screen and a rather small keyboard. The attraction seems to split buyers in to two camps: those that are looking for a basic portable computer for web/email type chores, and those that see pontential in the EEE as a device meant to be hacked and extended, both with hardware and software. I’m sure this next wave of netbooks will garner the same attention. I know I’m certainly interested.

I’ve officially retired my Thinkpad T23. Linux ran well on it, even the old Prism II wireless card worked using WPA2-PSK, although I have to say the antennae weren’t the most sensitive. I quite enjoyed using that machine, but there are some bad hardware problems that have arisen, so it’s time to find a replacement. Some of the candidates are:

HP TX2108 tablet

LG E300

Dell XPS 1330

I’ve even been considering a couple of the mini-laptops that seem to be popping up like dandelions on a lawn. Some of those are:

Asus EEE901

MSI Wind

Hp 2133 Mini-Note

As you can see, I’m looking for a small form factor laptop. I’m not looking for a desktop replacement, but for something I can throw in my knapsack that doesn’t weigh a ton.