Disqus - Latest Comments for nseaver

Re: Björk’s Biophilia ‘Virus’ Lets You Kill a Cell to Hear a Song (with Video)

nseaver — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:52:49 -0000

You may have to update the app through the app store before you can get the song. (I had an update notification this morning, for which the release notes just said that it made "Virus" available.)

Re: http://dazzleeffect.tumblr.com/post/8179008041

nseaver — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:23:51 -0000

Yes!

Harman was illuminating, and, since he's been in frequent contact with Latour, reads like an authorized gloss. I'm sure Mei would find reasons to frown at his take on We Have Never Been Modern, but somehow bringing Latour back to old-school metaphysics was quite clarifying for me. I saved the big ending chapter on Object-Oriented Philosophy for some time when I'm feeling overly philosophical, but Harman helps concretely by casting Latour as a peculiar type of materialist/relationalist who manages to make a lot of things that had seemed appealing but disparate come together.

Not sure what I'll do with it, but it will definitely affect my framing, in the way that my previous amateur Latour reading already has.

Re: http://dazzleeffect.tumblr.com/post/8179008041

nseaver — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 11:08:46 -0000

Also, grabbing more at surprise than familiarity, I wanted to paraphrase my favorite philosopher of surprises, John Cage. He defines his "experimental music" (roughly) as designed to produce unexpected sounds, sounds that surprise him. Here, surprise (as opposed to familiarity, one might say) is an indicator that the world is speaking — that you've removed your own agency enough to encounter something truly exogenous. Now, as someone skeptical about the speaking capabilities of the world, I don't necessarily buy it: we've got that whole theory-ladenness of observation thing, and efforts to remove one's own subjectivity or to produce an objectively independent system are never entirely successful.

But, this shaking up of familiarity and surprise is useful, I think, because it suggests a need for other axes of inquiry, different from self/other, subject/object, actor/world.

N.B. this is written two coffees deep, and in the middle of reading Graham Harman's _Prince of Networks_, so try to make sense of it at your own risk.

Re: http://dazzleeffect.tumblr.com/post/8179008041

nseaver — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:59:27 -0000

The framing you bring up here is interesting, I think: we can only be "surprised" by the familiar if we aren't expecting things to be familiar. So:

Victorian anthropologists, anticipating psychic unity, etc., would not be surprised by familiarity, while the folks above anticipate difference and thus find familiarity remarkable? Interesting how this cuts across our ideas about who does the most othering.

Re: http://dazzleeffect.tumblr.com/post/7980594237

nseaver — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 09:05:59 -0000

my_zipper, my_yogurt

wow

Re: http://dazzleeffect.tumblr.com/post/8179008041

nseaver — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:24:31 -0000

Constantly!

Being in a place that used to be home, meeting people who it turns out know all the same people as I do, talking with MIT grad students about computer music and music computing — familiarity is by far the most common relation I have to this summer research. Finding difference is turning out the be the more difficult task.

I keep coming back to Matti Bunzl's article on Boas, Foucault, and native anthropologists: I am in the strangely doubled position of being the native anthropologist of a repatriated anthropology. Not only do I not have the distance between, say, Evans-Pritchard and the Nuer, I don't even have the distance between Latour and the Salk Institute. So my anthropological strangeness emerges entirely as the result of an attempt at perspective-shifting: look at the people who have been around you for the last few years, but be an anthropologist this time.

I think this may be part of the weirdness that is my access trouble: I feel like I'm already on the inside.

Re: http://dazzleeffect.tumblr.com/post/7980594237

nseaver — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 09:04:46 -0000

Yeah, getting access later has been the name of the game. The request framing has been a little weird: I proposed a six-week summer visit back in March (they're expanding the office, so there's extra desks about). I now think that was an error (although I thought I had to go big, since I only had rare chances to talk with them face-to-face while I was in CA), because they seem worried about how formal it is? If I had just started having casual meetings, it would have been easier to build up.

Since we're into that six-week period, I think they're a little confused about what I could still want (haven't said "a whole year of this, in a few years!"), so I need to just get in the damn office and then I can make it all clear, I think.

On ABBA, you're close but backwards: those are terms weighted by how strongly they correlate with the band. (So, if you searched this system for "ABBA," it would give you these as commonly associated — i.e. nearby — words.) The dissertation it's from is called "Learning the Meaning of Music" — the idea is that there is more to a song than its audio signal (ho ho, culture!) and that natural language processing techniques can find those associations and make them computationally available. (So you could search for "funky" music, and, based on what people have written online and in reviews, get some.) The company calls this stuff their "culture" side; they also do audio signal processing, which is, of course, the "objective" side.

Re: http://dazzleeffect.tumblr.com/post/7181339351

nseaver — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:28:15 -0000

That no bills photo is amazing.

Re: In C In Live

nseaver — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:17:30 -0000

That would explain it!

I look forward to seeing what you come up with as a drift solution. It seemed to me that, beyond the basic implementation issues, there was a bigger issue: what "automatic" system would be most "faithful" to Riley's original? How should they decide whether or not to advance, if we're trying to either model human players or make an ideal score follower?

Re: In C In Live

nseaver — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:15:05 -0000

Fun idea! I'm glad the file was of use to you.

I haven't gotten around to playing with Max for Live (and I think this post either pre-dates or is from the very start of it), but I seem to recall seeing an implementation that did use Max for Live to solve the drift issue.

Re: http://acousmata.com/post/876066754

nseaver — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:36:42 -0000

:-O

Re: http://acousmata.com/post/846043955

nseaver — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:59:34 -0000

Stunning. In some ways it seems like a more "accessible" alternative to Nancarrow—still pushing the affordances of the equipment, but without the difficulties of fine-tuned tempo canons or unwieldy pitch decisions.

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/729084888

nseaver — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 06:12:22 -0000

I had forgotten about that video! It was really marvelous, and a nice example of the possibilities that arrive with controlled tempos and aggressively strict formal arrangement. (Ah yes, R. Kelly's rigorouly formal music. Take that, Karlheinz!) I think I will blog it.

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/749779505

nseaver — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:08:12 -0000

"piano"

Re: A Request

nseaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 18:50:24 -0000

good thoughts! I'm working on collecting these for the summer school class on experimental music I'm teaching at MIT starting in July. In the version I taught last year, we tried I am sitting in a room: http://noiseforairports.com...
(I think we should try it again, though!)
And I did a two mic version of Pendulum Music: http://noiseforairports.com...

I like the Earle Browne suggestion too; I think I'll add it to the day we do Treatise as another graphic score!

(and of course, at any chance I get, I will try and do something bieber-related)

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/712464488

nseaver — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:41:08 -0000

That is for sure! They mention that in the article, but of course don't go much further into the ramifications.

The general implication of the article, of course, is that these things are somehow innate. The real takeaway for me is that they are not innate, but rather connected (and that scientists do the darndest things).

Re: http://avantpost.tumblr.com/post/704598437

nseaver — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:44:49 -0000

Aw, shucks.

(isn't the swarm programming cool, though?)

Re: Under Construction

nseaver — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 11:14:00 -0000

Yeah, I noticed that. It might make things a little browsier—I think they generally zigzag down the page—and completists always have RSS, but I'll see how I feel after a few days. (The designer is reportedly working on a single-column version right now, too.)

Web design: not my forte.

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/677140301

nseaver — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:15:25 -0000

testing...

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/677140301

nseaver — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:32:32 -0000

ha! that's great!

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/631134122

nseaver — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 20:01:31 -0000

Thanks for commenting!

The project is very cool. For audio graffiti, I can't think of any specific projects I've seen recently, but in general you've got two categories: sound installations (so speakers in the urban space, maybe like the Neuhaus piece in Times Square: http://www.nytimes.com/2006... or rfid/geolocative markers that would trigger audio files in a player (so you wouldn't hear anything unless you were seeking it out. i've seen urban "audio tours" like this.)

Keep me posted; the projects seem great.

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/631134122

nseaver — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:06:49 -0000

Thanks for commenting!

Keep me posted; the projects seem great.

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/556045282

nseaver — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:36:34 -0000

there is always room for more kircher!

http://noiseforairports.com...

(also, I like the parallels between our blog name grammars/subject matters)

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/554608543

nseaver — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:03:42 -0000

Thanks! This looks great!

Re: http://noiseforairports.com/post/407980270

nseaver — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:32:40 -0000

:-) Depends on what you mean by pinnacle! In terms of reproducing ability, I think a lot of people would agree with you (although I basically have a wooden ear and need some hand-holding to really hear the differences). In terms of the market though, sales are basically peaking in 1925, and after that, things aren't so good for the industry (in spite of all the amazing developments pumped out 1925-1930 to try and reverse the tide).

And I was trying to be ironic about the price: reproducers ain't cheap! (Weren't then, not now, and the rolls were expensive too! Of course, things like the Ampico salesmanship guide say "but compared to paying to have a private Rachmaninoff concert in your home, the cost is almost nothing at all!").

Glad you're reading.