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Making Musical Apps, Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS with Pure Data

Marco Donnarumma — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 22:05:09 +0000

It seems an exciting time for our Pure Data community, with few books coming out, unique projects gathering world recognition and a new Pd-extended 0.43 version that adds lots of implementation we have been wishing for long time, like customizable plugins and even new GUI methods.
Well, soon there will be more info about all this, but by now check this out:

Making Musical Apps
Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS
by Peter Brinkmann
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920022503.do
“Want to turn your mobile device into a musical instrument? Or equip your game with interactive audio, rather than canned samples? You can do it with Pure Data (Pd), an open source visual programming environment that lets you manipulate digital audio in real time. This concise book shows you how to use Pd—with help from the libpd library—as an easily embeddable and widely portable sound engine.”

SoundTransit Project Relaunched by Turbulence.org

Marco Donnarumma — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 12:21:12 +0000

I’m glad to see this archive available on-line again.
Here’s a forwarded message by Derek Holzer.

“After a 10 month hiatus, the Soundtransit project is back thanks to the generous hosting support of Turbulence.org.

SoundTransit is a collaborative, online community dedicated to field recording and phonography. Phonography is the art of recording sounds from the environment around us, with an emphasis on the unintentional sounds which often go unnoticed in our daily lives. An international community of phonographers collect and share their recordings, with interests ranging from recordings of natural or urban environments to improvised situations or soundwalks to the resonance of solid objects or the Earth’s atmosphere

In the BOOK section of this site, you can plan a sonic journey through various locations recorded around the world. In the SEARCH section, you can search the database for specific sounds by member artists from many different places. If you are a member of SoundTransit, you can also CONTRIBUTE your recordings for others to enjoy. The Creative Commons Attribution license encourages the sharing and reuse of all sounds on this website.

During 2010, our previous host in the Netherlands quadrupled the rent for our server, forcing us to move or consider closing. Turbulence.org graciously offered their support, and during 2011 we’ve been working together with them, getting everything up and running again.

Please visit us at

http://turbulence.org/soundtransit

to hear our collection of over 2000 recordings from 471 artists around the world, experience our unique way of traveling via sound and find out how you can help the SoundTransit project.

Huge thanks go out to Helen Thorington, Jo-Anne Green and Jesse Gilbert of Turbulence for their kindness and patience!”

Derek Holzer
Marc Boon
SoundTransit

New GOSUB10 release by 0xA

Marco Donnarumma — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 18:44:32 +0000

expr~ from 0xA is GOSUB10′s fourth release.

0xA is a band made not out of people, but objects and patches. Snippets of codes that bleep and blink are added and modified in the online repository, where it all began. As the repository grows, 0xA evolves with it. Aymeric Mansoux, Chun Lee and Olivier Laruelle are the current active contributors. They have performed 0xA across Europe, North America and Asia in galleries, clubs and festivals.

expr~ is the first music release of 0xA, consists of retro sounding tracks made almost entirely with the [expr~] object in Pure Data. No tweaking of number boxes and sliders, no clever generative algorithms, just switch the audio on and listen.

The source code for this release (implemented in Pure-data) is free software distributable under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 3 or greater). For repository, see: http://gitorious.org/0xa

Copyleft: This is a free work, you can copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License.

Released on 10th October 2010.

== TRACKLISTING ==

01 0xA – Winter_Solstice
02 0xA – 0903-4
03 0xA – Nandsynth
04 0xA – Moving_Souf
05 0xA – Cafe_Kuroshio
06 0xA – Family_Mart

== WHATIS GOSUB10 ==

Dedicated to innovative music and audio/visuals, the GOSUB10 label will feature an eclectic group of musicians drawn together by their shared use of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS).
Freely distributed by stream, download and special DVD releases, and made available through an open license, GOSUB10 is run by the GOTO10 collective – an international group of artists, musicians and programmers, dedicated to FLOSS and digital arts. Brought to life in a intensive four day work sprint but years in the making, the GOSUB10 netlabel is a natural extension of GOTO10′s activities supporting and promoting digital art alongside FLOSS tools through workshops, festivals, exhibitions, writing, and more.

== URL ==

http://gosub10.org

Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies

Marco Donnarumma — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:43:12 +0000

Golden Shield Music | Photo We Make Money Not Art | Piksel

Piksel team just released a full video of my recent presentation in Norway for Piksel 2010.
The talk focused on the current state of IT censorship technologies and a related sonification work titled Golden Shield Music.

Piksel team published other videos related to the exhibition, performances and presentations hosted at Piksel 2010.
You’ll find many interesting projects on the Piksel blip.tv channel.

Among the other projects you will also find the full video of UKI – a viral performance by Shu Lea Cheang with Martin Howse.

Sonicscape with participation of Piksel10 artists Oscar Martin Correa, Marco Donnarumma, Joachim Montessuis, Alejandra Perez, Eleonora Oreggia, Julien Ottavi.

Piksel Festival: http://piksel.no

“Golden Shield Music” reviews on We Make Money Not Art and Wired

Marco Donnarumma — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 15:34:37 +0000

While here in Edinburgh we are drowning in the snow, I thought I’d post a brief note about few reviews published in these days after my appearance at Piksel Festival (hopefully soon you’ll get also a report of the festival).
A fantastic and accurate review of my talk at Piksel “Golden Shield Music: sonification of IT censorhip technologies” has just been published by Regine Debatty at the awesome We Make Money Not Art blog.
Besides, the work has been reviewed on Wired.com and Wired.co.uk, check it here.

Claudius Maximus z→z²+c released on GOSUB10 netlabel

Marco Donnarumma — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 18:40:54 +0000

via Pd announce list

Claudius Maximus’s latest work made with Pure-data is available, including the source code so you can make your own generative fractal music:

http://gosub10.org/GOSUB10-003.html

The Mandelbrot set is possibly the world’s most famous fractal. z→z²+c is a series of sonifications, focussing on the periodic attractors found almost everywhere within the Mandelbrot set. Given just two real numbers (forming one point in the complex plane), dynamic patterns can emerge as the one simple equation governing the system is repeated over and over: z→z²+c

The source code for this release (implemented in Pure-data using GridFlow and zexy) is free software distributable under the terms of the GNU General Public License (version 3 or greater).

Copyleft: This is a free work, you can copy, distribute, and modify it under the terms of the Free Art License.

Released on 17th October 2010.

Track listing:

1. ClaudiusMaximus – The Military-Industrial Complex
2. ClaudiusMaximus – After The Despoilment
3. ClaudiusMaximus – Race Against Time
4. ClaudiusMaximus – Before Civilisation

Dedicated to innovative music and audio/visuals, the GOSUB10 label will feature an eclectic group of musicians drawn together by their shared use of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS). Freely distributed by stream, download and special DVD releases, and made available through an open license, GOSUB10 is run by the GOTO10 collective – an international group of artists, musicians and programmers, dedicated to FLOSS and digital arts. Brought to life in a intensive four day work sprint but years in the making, the GOSUB10 netlabel is a natural extension of GOTO10’s activities supporting and promoting digital art alongside FLOSS tools through workshops, festivals, exhibitions, writing, and more.

http://gosub10.org
http://claudiusmaximus.goto10.org

Concept Store Journal: Art, Activism and Recuperation

Marco Donnarumma — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 12:08:56 +0000

via AHA list

Concept Store Journal

#3: Art, Activism and Recuperation

The latest issue of Arnolfini’s Concept Store journal, themed Art, Activism and Recuperation is out now.

This third edition examines the wider contemporary relationship between art and politics. What are the power relations between art, activists and cultural institutions? Who ultimately benefits from these relationships? What critical role can art and/or activism really have in a situation where radicalism is absorbed by the mainstream? And under such conditions what are effective strategies of opposition? But, above all, the question asked by Concept Store #3 is, what is to be done (with art?)

Contributors: Glenn Adamson, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Franco Berardi (Bifo), Thomas Hirschhorn, Brian Holmes, Ele Carpenter, Freee, Esther Leslie, Geoff Cox, James Panton, Institute for the Art&Practice of Dissent at Home, Platform, Lars Bang Larsen, Sarat Maharaj, Nav Haq, Sevphen Shukaitis, Tom Trevor, Mark Wallinger. Designed by Message & Meaning.

Concept Store is a journal published twice-yearly by Arnolfini, focusing on critical issues of contemporary art and their relationship to wider cultural, social and political contexts. While Concept Store reflects upon ideas explored within Arnolfini’s artistic programme, it is intended to be a critical platform in its own right, operating as a discursive space for commissioned texts, artists’ contributions, interviews and other experimental forms. Each issue guest-designed by a different practitioner.

Alongside the latest edition, previous issues, #1 Art, Consumerism and
the Experience Economy& #2 Possible, Probable and Preferable Futures,
are also available from Arnolfini bookshop priced £5.95.

FFI about Concept Store
Journal and other Arnolfini publications

Editors: Geoff Cox, Nav Haq and Tom Trevor
Advisory Group: Shumon Basar, Binna Choi, Neil Cummings, Maria Lind, Carol Yinghua Lu

Stockists include: Arnolfini; Artwords; Walther Koenig Books; ICA Bookshop; Design Museum; Tate Modern; Pro QM, Berlin; Architectural Association Bookshop
Concept Store in distributed by Cornerhouse.

www.arnolfini.org.uk

Pure Data Convention ’09 Live Recordings

Marco Donnarumma — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:53:55 +0000

I’m really glad to share with you the live recording of my most recent audiovisual concert I C::ntr::l Nature at Pure Data Convention 2009, Sao Paulo, Brasil. The only sonic source is my bass guitar augmented by the self-designed software C::NTR::L v.1.3.

Many thanks to Henrique Iwao for his efforts during the convention and for being so patient to record and order (all?) the performances at Pd Con.

You can listen to the concert with the player below. If you want to download it for free check my download page.

TheSAD – I C::ntr::l Nature Live @ Pure Data Convention 23-07-09 by TheSAD

Besides you may be interested in visiting the unofficial archive of Pd Convention performances at this address http://sussurro.musica.ufrj.br/pdcon09/material.html.
All the material is kindly hosted by sussurro.musica.ufrj.br – Biblioteca Musical Digital do Laboratório de Música e Tecnologia da Escola de Música da UFRJ.

New free release: Ausklang live recordings

Marco Donnarumma — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:36:03 +0000

I’m glad to announce the official release of TheSAD’s fifth solo audio work: the live recordings of my concert at the Ausklang festival in Hamburg on the 28th December 2008.
The music/sounds you will listen to are the result of free improvisation exclusively based on the Electric Bass guitar, processed in real-time with C::NTR::L, the free software i developed in PureData which transform a standard musical instrument in an augmented tool for audio/video processing, thanks to physical computing.
No previous composition neither further editing, everything is improvised and recorded live.

TAGS: nowave, noise, improvisation

The release is produced by Format Noise, brilliant experimental net-label from Germany:

format noise is a sublabel of RAUMKLANG MUSIC and was founded in 2007. format noise is a netlabel and platform for acteurs of electronic music. We release every few weeks a 4 track E.P.! Every album is free downloadable. We see ourselves not only as a typical netlabel but as a platform for experimental arts.

Donwload for free the release and listen to the excerpt here:

http://www.format-noise.com/releases.php?viewRelease=32

More infos about the Ausklang Festival:
http://www.thesaddj.com/report-ausklang-festival/
http://www.hoerbar-ev.de/en/

New Book: FLOSS+Art

Marco Donnarumma — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:02:11 +0000

via: [Pd Announce] Mailing list

Few days ago i received this mail from the incredible efficient, collaborative and stimulating PureData mailing list.
What to say… again another stunning initiative of the FLOSS community. A book analyzing many important issues of FLOSS (Free Open Source Software) and Art.
Don’t know what about you, but i was dreaming about something like this…

thanks to all the contributors…

WHAT:

What does Free and Open Source software (FLOSS) provide to artists and designers – beyond just free alternatives to established tools from Photoshop to Final Cut?
“FLOSS+Art” is the first book to answer this question. It shows how the value of Free Software lies in its differences and creative challenges, as opposed to out-of-the-box and off-the-shelf solutions; how it allows to work and collaborate differently with computers, and therefore enable different kinds of art and design.

The Internet – whose infrastructure is based on free software and open standards – is an obvious example of such an adaptable, collaborative artistic medium. “FLOSS+Art” also covers more traditional artistic domains such as graphic and audiovisual design, and how they shift from customer-centric to community-driven work.

FLOSS+Art critically reflects on the growing relationship between Free Software philosophy, open content and digital art. It provides first-hand insight into its social, political and economic myths and realities.

With contributions by: Fabianne Balvedi, Florian Cramer, Sher Doruff, Nancy Mauro Flude, Olga Goriunova, Dave Griffiths, Ross Harley, Martin Howse, Shahee Ilyas, Ricardo Lafuente, Ivan Monroy Lopez, Thor Magnusson, Alex McLean, Rob Myers, Alejandra Maria Perez Nuñez, Eleonora Oreggia, oRx-qX, Julien Ottavi, Michael van Schaik, Femke Snelting, Pedro Soler, Hans Christoph Steiner, Prodromos Tsiavos, Simon Yuill.
Compiled and edited by Aymeric Mansoux and Marloes de Valk.

With the support of the University of Huddersfield and the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University.

http://goto10.org/flossart
–
ORDER YOUR COPY NOW:

http://www.metamute.org/en/shop/floss_art

http://www.moreismore.net/en/floss+art

http://www.amazon.co.uk/FLOSS-Art-Aymeric-Mansoux/dp/1906496188/
–
FLOSS+Art is triple licensed GNU GPL, GNU FDL and Free Art License. Rather than just providing a “free” PDF, FLOSS+Art.v1.1.eBook-GOTO10 is also available and contains all the Fonts, Images, PDF and Scribus source files that were used to make the book.

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4671426/FLOSS_Art_v1.1

Feel free to branch a translation or fork the chapters!

Introduction to PureData, Max’s Free Cousin

Marco Donnarumma — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:01:25 +0000

An old but really useful article posted on CreateDigitalMusic. For all those that are used to visual programming and they never used PureData. Here you can find some interesting notes about this powerful instrument for real-time audiovisual processing.

By Peter Kirn

Photo by the talented aoifejohanna, via Flickr.

Pd, Max/MSP/Jitter’s free and open-source cousin for Mac, Windows, and Linux, has long been a favorite of software DIYers. It powers the synthesis and processing capabilities of the ReacTable project, made famous recently by Bjork. And its open nature has earned some followers even among Max/MSP/Jitter users (nothing stopping you from using both).
One thing Pd hasn’t been — even assuming you know how to patch — is easy. That’s unfortunate, because there are would-be patchers who can’t afford Max, or who want a full patching environment on Linux, or want some unique features in Pd and its libraries.
Hans-Christoph Steiner has been working for a long time on “Pd-extended”, adding a lot of that polish and documentation, and making the whole thing easier to install. There’s a major new, finished release that came out last week. “Easy” might not be the appropriate word — but “easier”, combined with “powerful” and “free”, might get your attention.
Hans-Christoph himself checks in to explain what Pd is about, and this build, even if you have no previous experience with the environment. Take it away, HC:

Pd (aka Pure Data) is one of the Max family of patcher languages. It is a close cousin of Max/MSP. Pd and Max were both created by Miller Puckette.
It is a visual, dataflow programming language for sound, video, 3D, etc. Basically, anything you can do with Max/MSP, you can do with Pd.
Miller Puckette started Pd as his “version 3″ of Max, and therefore there are some essential differences, but if you know Max/MSP, then Pd will be easy to learn.
The Pd-extended distro is the Miller’s Pd plus the work of over a hundred contributors. It includes a large array of libraries for working with all sorts of things.

There are many features hidden inside of Pd that are basically undocumented. Typical of free software developers, the Pd devs write a lot of interesting code, but are not very good at documenting it (me included).
For this release, we tried to bring more of that code to the forefront. The first part is getting it easy to install, the next part is making the documentation. For this release, the focus was on getting the visual libraries Gem, PDP, PiDiP working and interoperating. Gem was started in 1995 around OpenGL, it also has some pixel operations.
PDP is short for “Pure Data Packet”, and it is based on a 16bit signed yuv format chosen for efficient processing, and PiDiP is a library for streaming and effects for PDP.

This code has been working for years, but is very under-utilized. For the first time, PDP/PiDiP work ‘out-of-box’ on Mac OS X (you’ll need Apple X11, which is an extra install on your Mac OS X DVD).
Gem has support for shaders for at least two years, but there has been no documentation or examples, so very few people used it. Also, there were a couple of key bugs that preventing accessing the full potential of the shaders in Gem. They have been fixed, so there is lots of potential there.

On the usability front, there have been some key changes. You no longer need to mess with the preferences to use the standard libraries, they are all loaded by default.
Anti-aliasing is enabled, and the font has been changed to a more readable one. There is also a .deb package for Debian and Ubuntu, so it’s really easy to install there.

I would like to dedicate this release in memory of Jamie Tittle. He was one of the main Gem developers, and was a key contributor to lots of really great code, like Gem’s shaders and the PDP/Gem gateways.

Visual programming, yadda yadda, open source platform for liberation of … okay, this is really about making sonic mayhem, as are these folks. Pictured: Francesco Rosati and Kurregomma perform the final live set of a three day-long Pure Data festival, co-organized by Francesco and the BuGsLab hacklab/collaborative in Roma, @ Strike s.p.a. Photo by pierlu (who writes to say he climbed a latter to snap this one!), aptly titled Pd Abuse. See: franzrozati.com.

This is the end of this interesting article. I would like to add some useful links to go deep in the Pure Data world. I collected and selected them working in these two last years:

Pd Installers
This is the best page where to download the latest version of PD. Fundamental.
Pure Data – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Public reference and explaination of PD on Wikipedia.
http://umatic.nl/workshop/objects.txt
Description of all the most useful objects you can find in PD.
DELACREW BRUTE VEEJING ++ DRUM&BASS ++ MOTION GRAPHICS » EVE (open source project)
Cool, interesting and super active spanish crew working with Vjing in PD. They developed their own software (EVE) with PD to make vjing.
Qeve development
Project of Husk an italian artist and friend. He’s working on a new personal version of EVE.
Bienvenue sur le site Free Hardcore Improvisation Ltd | Free Hardcore Improvisation Ltd
French audiovisual project. The rough one… I Love it! They build theyr own hardware and software.
telenoika.net – portada
Telenoika.net audiovisual open creative community (Spain)
OpenSoundControl
More weird and nerdy stuff:
(”OSC”) is a protocol for communication among computers, sound synthesizers, and other multimedia devices that is optimized for modern networking technology and has been used in many application areas.
PortAudio – an Open-Source Cross-Platform Audio API
PortAudio is a cross platform, open-source, audio I/O library. It provides a very simple API for recording and/or playing sound using a simple callback function.
Arduino – HomePage
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
YouTube – Pure Data Video Mixer
This is a tutorial that shows how to make a software video mixer using open source object oriented graphical programming environment Pure Data
I C::ntr::l Nature
Software (C::NTR::L) and performance developed by Marco Donnarumma aka The !S.A.D!.
The electric bass guitar is used as sonic source to process in real-time, but also as video controller, thanks to a complex system of audio analysis which recognizes notes, frequencies and RMS, and duration and translates this data in parameters employed to control in a new and specific interaction scratch, speed, length, fading and selection in real time over the video output.

hope this will help some of you!…

DVD – Vision(‘R)Sonic #7

Marco Donnarumma — Sat, 24 May 2008 09:02:19 +0000

SOUND BARRIER (It)

Sound Barrier is a project of audio/video reasearch who explores the borders between image and sound in the era of digital technologies. The starting point is constituted by excerpts of unvoiced cinema footage, mostly taken from motion/fantastic ’60/’70 movies. These excerpts are analysed and manipulated in real-time by specific softwares that extract the informations that afterward will be transformed in sounds.
Sound Barrier is the unnoticeable point where image become sound and sound become image.
http://www.soundbarrier.it

AUDEROSELAVY & EMOTYPE (Fr)

The audio/video set by Auderoseselavy (Vj) and Emotype (live) consists in an improvised collaboration between rétro visual and sample of everyday life’s noises. “Our performance consists in deforming in real-time image and sounds that are usually recognizable to transform its and consenquently create an experimental set.
http://www.myspace.com/emotypewtv
http://www.myspace.com/auderoseselavy

The !S.A.D! – I C::NTR::L NATURE (It)

Live a/v improvising for electric bass guitar, butterfly and customade software C::ntr::l.
I Control Nature is an action of visual and musical improvising. It is the celebration of a hypothetical instinct able to govern everything.
Performance proposes an univocal, synesthetic action, out of every academic and socially correct conception. The aim of the project is to define what “control” really represents.
Live a/v is performed using C::ntr::l the custom-made software created by Marco Donnarumma aka The !S.A.D! using PureData and AudioMulch.
http://www.thesaddj.com/?page_id=12%20#control

THE NOISER AKA NANOFAMAS – APO33 (Fr)

Nanofamas propose a live a/v performance based on the concept of slowness. Economic system and politic power are involved in an endless run toward the last rashness of the instant, based on the concept of relativity and simultaneity, times and also our life-style are accelerating in exponential way.
What remains fo our biological time?
Inside this approach to reality Nanofamas develops a different way to live our times, starting from a moment T, taking the time to put down an element and to stretch it out, to remove it…
http://www.noiser.org

Links:
http://lepoletransversal.blogspot.com
http://vision-r.org

Watch the trailer.