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The Molecules of HIV
The Molecules of HIV
A semi-improvised and non-traditional spinach+paneer curry that came out particularly well - the lime flavour zings the top of it nicely. Makes 2 big portions; takes about 20 minutes.
In a good-sized wok, heat up some oil and add the cumin seeds. Swirl them around and then add the onion and coriander. Let this fry for 2 or 3 minutes (while you chop the garlic maybe) then add the garlic and mix it all around. Let this fry for 2 or 3 minutes more until the onion is nice and soft and then add the chopped tomatoes. Give this a stir then let it simmer gently for 5 minutes or so while you do the next bit.
Heat about 2mm of oil in a frying pan. Chop the paneer into bite-sized cubes. Put the flour and 2 tbsp garam on a plate, then toss the paneer around in it to coat. Then fry the paneer in the hot pan, giving it maybe 2 or 3 minutes before turning it all over and giving it 2 or 3 minutes more. It should fry to a nutty sort of brown colour.
While the paneer is frying, add the juice and zest of the 1/2 lime to the tomato mixture. Tip the paneer onto a plate with a piece of kitchen roll on (to drain some of the oil off). Pile the spinach into the wok - you'll need to add a large volume, cos it shrinks as it cooks - and stir it in, then add the paneer and stir that in too. Let it cook together for a minute or so.
Serve it all with the 1 tsp garam sprinkled over at the last minute, with some alfalfa on top, and warm chapatis.
I'm glad to say the thesis corrections have been approved so my PhD thesis is now in its finished form - available here:
The title is "Making music through real-time voice timbre analysis: machine learning and timbral control". (Tip for future PhDs, try to choose a title that you can say in one breath...)
I'm really grateful to all the fab people in C4DM - I've got so much from being in a research environment with so many people knowledgeable about such a variety of cool things - and, well, I don't want to rewrite the whole acknowledgments here (they're on page 3) but all the people who took part in experiments or just chatted about research. (Including the folks at humanbeatbox.com)
The thesis is available under creative commons. And, because I uploaded it to archive.org they also seem to have converted it into some crazy ebook formats, so you can presumably read a garbled version of it on your kindle if you like ;) probably best to use the original PDF if possible, though (the TeX source is also included).
Developing music-playlisting software is really difficult: it keeps giving me monster tracks that I just have to listen to.
Here's an example: in our software SoundBite I gave it a seed track Elephants by Food for Animals. It then made a playlist of things it thought were similar. Here's the results:
I defy anyone not to go mental to that playlist. There are a couple of weird matches (generally the indie ones I don't hear a connection - Decemberists and Life Without Buildings) but the others fit the approximate atmosphere of that input track so well, it's really quite impressive. If someone had asked me to think of things similar to the seed track, I would probably have said Saul Williams and some Clouddead maybe?
I've just been at SMC2010, the Sound and Music Computing conference. It's the first time I've been so one question I had was, what differentiates it from other conferences in this research area like NIME, DAFX, ISMIR, ICMC? What's its specialist subject? The answer is that it deliberately tries not to over-specialise, they keep the topic broad to encourage cross-disciplinary thinking, and there's a good strong representation of young researchers so it's a good place for fresh ideas and making new connections. My paper about timbre remapping came across pretty well I think.
One reason I was keen to go to this conference was that it was hosted by UPF's Music Technology Group in Barcelona, because that group is the main place where people have done research on very similar lines as my PhD topic of beatbox-based control. It was great to meet Jordi Janer whose PhD was about singing-based control, and Marco Marchini and Hendrik Purwins who presented a poster about a kind of rhythmic beatboxing equivalent to the continuator - give it a piece of rhythmic audio and it will try to continue by chopping up the sound and outputting patterns in (hopefully) the same style. The most interesting part of their work is the automatic approach to clustering, where they hierarchically cluster all the sound events, and then let the system choose the appropriate clustering level (i.e. how many clusters to lump the events into) at playback time, by judging how 'informative' the markov-model resynthesis is at each level of clumpiness.
Also interesting was Ho-Hsiang Wu and Juan Bello's poster about representing the musical structure of a song. We all know that many songs have repetition in them, whether it's verse-chorus-verse-chorus or something else - and we can analyse this automatically from the audio, for example by detecting repeated sub-sequences of chord patterns or timbre. Their contribution is to visualise this detected repetition using 'arc plots', pretty little monochrome rainbows that reminded me of the kind of information aesthetics practised by Information Is Beautiful. The end result is that pop songs create little plots which generally all look quite similar but with little shape differences that you could spot by eye, whereas I imagine classical music pieces would probably each have their own visual signature that could be quite different. Could be a nice way to get an instant visual impression of the musical structure of a piece of recorded music.
The keynote talk by Ricard Sole was thought-provoking, discussing the theory of complex networks, with some results of his created by applying this theory to languages, software, and other things. Sound and music wasn't mentioned, but I know it's useful stuff that was food for thought for many people. (In our group we have some researchers who have looked at this kind of thing already - when you consider the network of MySpace bands & friends, for example, that's a complex network where issues of small-world-ness, hubs, etc. Which reminds me, I wonder how Kurt is getting on with his thesis... :)
In fact some of the research presented at SMC was grappling with these issues too, such as the work by Martin Gasser et al showing that the problem of hubs in music similarity (i.e. songs that keep getting returned as good similarity matches to various input songs, even if they don't sound that similar) may be affected by the "homogeneity" of the audio in the music database.
The concert programme was packed full of things: lots of soundscape-based work, and more generally electroacoustic stuff. My favourites out of those were Impulsus I by Lina Bativa (an audio-visual piece which had a great narrative energy despite being really abstract), and Juan Parra Cancino's reacTable performance which I mentioned in my post about the reacTable.
But one of the things I was most grateful for was the deliberate non-art-music session. Electroacoustic stuff is all very well, but I can't generally cope with so much of it packed into a week and after all, this is a broad conference where many of the researchers are working on pop music, techno, breakbeats, and stuff like that. As the conference chair (Xavier Serra) said, it's actually quite difficult to get the non-art-music in the conference, since research conferences aren't usually their scene and most of the good examples of techno-enhanced popular music are quite happily making music in front of normal crowds... So, many of us were glad to spend an hour listening to Japanese pop made using Vocaloid, and a dance set made using Loopmash. (Sergi Jorda also told me he had hoped to get a dance music set in the reacTable concert, but the performer wasn't available.)
This is something that we need to work on as a research community - the SMC hosts did well, assisted by the fact that some of their own technology has gone directly and quite notably into music tech used by producers - but it's one of those things that's going to need a constant bit of extra effort to try and encourage that kind of thing into these conferences.
At the SMC 2010 conference I had the opportunity to encounter a reacTable (a tabletop music interface) for real, with an introduction and some tuition by its creator Sergi Jorda. I remember being happy for them when Bjork took a reacTable out on tour, this new music technology getting an airing in front of many thousands of people and generating media interest etc - but at the time, I didn't find the youtube clips particularly inspiring, the reacTable seemed to be being used as a kind of glorified effects unit and slider controller. It wasn't really clear whether the reacTable was an interaction paradigm of its own or just a pretty way to control pd.
Under the hood, the reacTable is indeed controlling a patcher language for audio/music, i.e. something that will be familiar to many electronic music makers. But the basic interaction design is the key. For example, the reacTable is deliberately made circular, so that there's no "privileged position" and small groups of people can interact together on an equal footing.
The screen is physically not small (about 1m across maybe) but the blocks that you put on it have their own physical size and can't be "minimised" or duplicated like virtual things can - so the interaction is restricted to quite small graphs with a small set of generator/FX units. This limitation constrains it to be more of an instrument-like experience than an unbounded field of electric possibility - not a bad thing, a difference that creates different results, and ensures the system keeps to a manageable level of complexity.
A colleague of mine (Robin Fencott) is studying group interaction in these kind of situations, looking at public/private distinctions and whether people feel willing to modify "each other's" work on a collaborative interface. So I was interested to see how these issues played out on a reacTable, and there are a couple of subtle aspects that bear upon this. For example, the synth/FX blocks on the table are quite "promiscuous" - by default they simply connect to whichever suitable unit is nearest, meaning that if another block comes near, they may instantly disconnect from whatever they were previously linked with and pair with that instead. This starts to break down the distinction between different people's work on the table, since it's easy to accidentally connect your blocks with someone else's, and the physical limitations of the space (already mentioned) make this quite likely. On the other hand, though, different sub-graphs are assigned different colours, mainly to enhance the visual understanding of what's going on, but that does create a slight hint of "mine-vs-yours" when mine and yours are different colours.
Another important aspect of the physicality is that it provides for physical moves similar to what DJs do (scratching, cross-fading, etc). I don't mean the reacTable could be used for scratching - I mean I can imagine reacTable performers evolving a repertoire of physical gestures which make the most of the connection between their hands and the blocks - like DJs did once they discovered that a vinyl mixer could be used for more intricate stuff than simply crossfading every four minutes.
This potential was shown really well in a performance called KVSwalk_SOLO by Juan Parra Cancino, who proved pretty definitively that the reacTable is more than just a glorified pd GUI. He did a solo performance (so it didn't make use of the multi-player potential, but never mind) where he showed off some really deft gestures as he added, pushed, pulled and juggled the blocks around the reacTable surface, and made a great structured piece of music as a result. That for me was the decider - I won't say that Juan Parra is a virtuoso on the reacTable but he convinced me that such a thing is possible.
I've repeatedly expressed suspicion about DAB radio, and it seems that takeup is not what the industry hoped for. The BBC managed to cause a big spike in the 6music audience size by threatening to close the station - but then the bulk of that spike was DABless in the sense that the 6music online listening figures doubled compared against a year earlier (listening hours 642,734 in May 09; 1,384,216 in May 10), whereas RAJAR's figures (for a slightly different period since May 10 not available at time of writing) show the overall listening hours grew by around 75% - implying that the growth happened preferentially in online rather than DAB listening.
On Radio 4 there was some discussion today about whether someone buying a DAB radio today would expect it to last as long as a trusty FM radio that they've had for years. (Unfortunately the producers decided to drag the discussion out over multiple days so they only posed the question, claiming the answer will come tomorrow, bleh.)
This is something I hadn't particularly thought about - of course I know that DAB is not destined to last very long, due to various well-known factors such as inferiorities vs. FM, lack of DAB as standard in cars, and the growth of wifi and 3G - but then I remembered that the industry has even published a new improved version of the DAB format called DAB+. This was announced back in 2006, and even though it isn't currently in use in the UK and there don't seem to be any plans to do so, it seems odd to be stuck with an "old" version of the technology when the new one has already been in existence for years. Would you really go and buy a CD rewriter, now that there is not only DVD but also Blu-ray, and now that Apple has taught the big music industry players how to do downloads? What would be the point? It won't be too long before it's difficult/expensive to find blank CDs.
I'm not suggesting that the UK is likely to leap from DAB to DAB+ any time soon. But there are other countries using DAB+, and indeed there are other digital radio standards, and I'm concerned that we might end up stuck with the Betamax of the digital radio world.
So will our existing DAB radios work with DAB+? No. DAB+ is not backward-compatible with DAB, so if you're paranoid about the longevity of your radio then I suppose you'd need to check on the box and make sure that it says it does DAB+. (Frankly I wouldn't put a large bet on DAB+ either, I'd argue that a more generic medium like wireless internet is going to carry the radio of the future.) I went and checked the model of DAB radio that we bought our grandparents for Christmas not so long ago, and the answer is no. The rather reassuring and sturdy-looking design of the radio we bought them may be illusory.
