Music Animation Machine

This is very cool. This small program will play back any MIDI music file and display any of 14 different animations based on the musical content of the file (things like note values, intervals, part movement, and others). To use the free Music Animation Machine MIDI Player, you have to download, unzip, save, and run it on a PC (the .exe file runs directly - it doesn't require an installation program). Windows includes a default wave-table synthesizer, so it should work on any Windows machine with a sound card (if you have hardware or software synthesizers or other MIDI playback devices, it should also work with those).

Many of the animations look best when playing classical music which tends to have more distinct moving musical lines than most popular music, and it comes with several sample classical pieces. You can find tons of classical (and other) MIDI files all over the internet. Bach is especially visual (and sounds good too). The space bar starts and stops the playback.

Matt Bors Wins Cartooning Award

My favorite editorial cartoonist by far is Matt Bors. So I was happy to learn that Matt has been awarded the 2012 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning (check out some of his work on that page, or look through his blogged archives). He is fearless and funny. Nobody gets a pass from Matt Bors - not Obama, not God, not even Steve Jobs! Though like me, he does seem to have special feelings for Rick Santorum. Matt really deserves this award. Congratulations!

Unexpected Facts

London-based HSBC is one of the largest banks in the world, and they advertise a lot in airports. On my recent trip to China, I noticed some of their current advertising posters which feature interesting or surprising facts with the tag line "We find potential in the most unexpected places. Do you?"

One that especially caught my eye was, "Of all the people in the world who have ever lived to be 65, two-thirds are alive today." I guess that makes sense given that during most of human evolution, life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (at least according to Thomas Hobbes). Here are a few others I like, found in this article:

•  0.3% of Saharan solar energy could power Europe.
• Only 4% of US films are made by women, compared to 25% in Iran.
• Right now, there are over half a million people traveling the world by air.
• Over 138 million people work outside their country of birth.
• There are five times more people learning English in China than there are people in England.
• The U.S. has more Spanish language newspaper readers than Latin America.
• Recycling one tin can saves enough energy to power a TV for three hours.

I assume these statements are more or less true, though I don't know the assumptions or calculations involved. I just find them thought provoking.

Love/Hate With Apple

I've got this love/hate thing with Apple (I'll admit it's mostly love).

The hate part: today's new iPad announcement that has finally made me really want one. It's hard to explain why. Better screen, faster processor, better camera? I don't exactly know. But it seems like it's ready and would be really great to have for recording and other things.

The love part? A new GarageBand update (v1.2 for iOS) that addresses my two biggest complaints. There's a "piano roll" note editor for MIDI parts (now if they would only add MIDI export!). And they added "smart strings" that sound really good based on my limited playing with them. There's also a multi-device "jam" feature that works over Wifi that might be cool. Best of all, immediate gratification: I downloaded the free update this evening. It seems to work well on my iPod Touch, but it also contributes to the hate part: now that I've really figured out how to use GarageBand efficiently, I want to use it more for songwriting and making demos, even when I'm home. If only that iPod screen were just a little bit bigger... wait...

Brand New Tune: "Maybe Not"

I just got back from a business trip in China. Nothing much to report besides a very busy schedule, but since I had some 40 hours of time on airplanes, I managed to work on some songwriting, thanks to music apps on my iPod Touch. The one I'm using most these days is Apple's GarageBand (GB). I wrote about this app last month, but since then, I have really figured out how to use it effectively. The interface design is absolutely brilliant (OK, it's Apple, I know). It really is the ideal interactive sketchpad for creating new music (at least music that is based mainly on keyboards, guitars, drums, and vocals, though you can also record any acoustic or electric instrument you like - unless you're on an airplane). The "smart" instruments are able to generate various instrumental riffs and patterns based on the chords you play. You can also play manually though the tiny keyboard and guitar simulations are tough to use on the iPod Touch's small screen (still resisting buying an iPad). Semi-automatic is also possible (e.g., a palette of chords is presented with buttons that are easier to play than the conventional keyboard but still offer some expression and inversion features).

On the way home yesterday (13 hour flight from Shanghai to Toronto), I wrote a new song and made a rough demo, pretty much complete except for vocals which I did today. This song is called "Maybe Not," and the lyrics are pretty strange. But I mostly like it, and even though the demo has some quite rough edges, I uploaded a version to SoundCloud just now, for comparison with the studio version (TBD later this week I hope). A work in progress and a sample of my songwriting process and what is possible on a mobile device these days (with a powerful app like GarageBand).

At the start I inserted 4 bars of the bare bass riff that inspired the whole song. This was an "autoplay" option that GB offered when I chose upright bass, 3/4 time, 92 bpm, and a G minor to D minor chord change. I just started scatting to this as a loop and the song was born. I used "smart drums" and "smart bass" (automatically following the chords, key, tempo, etc. I defined) and played the electric piano chords manually from the "smart keyboard" chord palette.  I'm thinking the bridge may not work. The transition (to a G major chord) is too abrupt but Roger can help me fix that, or I will rewrite it. The last verse probably should get its own lyrics too (and a proper ending). I will post a studio version when it's done, maybe later this week.

Cool Optical Technology

A couple of years ago I attended a technical talk by Dr. Ren Ng, now the CEO of a company called Lytro. He talked about some aspects of the optical and mathematical methods now incorporated in Lytro's "light field camera." It's a pretty amazing technology now available as a product. Roughly speaking, by capturing additional information about the direction of light entering the camera when the picture is taken, digital images can be focused and zoomed after they are captured. This "Shoot Now, Focus Later" article from NPR explains the basics and includes a couple of interactive examples. Dr. Ng's Stanford Ph.D. thesis (PDF) explains a lot more.

New John Mayer Music

I really like John Mayer's songwriting, guitar playing, and most of his recordings. He's written a number of songs I wish I wrote. He's got a new album in the works called "Born & Raised," set for release on May 22, and the first single is a gentle, confessional-sounding ballad called "Shadow Days" (streaming from his blog post). It didn't really do much for me on first listen until about two-thirds through when there's an instrumental bridge with a nice George Harrison-like slide guitar lead. It's a decent song but I wouldn't say it's one of his best, though some of his recent tunes have taken a few listens to really grow on me.

I have to admit that the songs from his first three albums still work better for me. He really blows me away on many of these recordings, and I have spent a lot of time listening to, analyzing, and learning some of these songs. One of my favorites is 83 (video), a nostalgic look back at the innocence of childhood. Simple and moving.

American Taliban?

As if the aptly named politician Rick Santorum were not already sufficiently stomach-turning (and he was), his recent comments about not believing in the separation of church and state combined with his toxic views on the rights of women have really pushed him beyond outrageous for me. What sort of country would Santorum like to lead if by some horrible fluke he were actually elected president?

I have a pretty good idea from a couple of amazing "science fiction" books I read and reviewed here in 2006. Octavia Butler's dystopian novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents present a near future America where white ultra-right-wing religious politicians have created a Christian version of Taliban society. It comes complete with Bible-sanctioned suppression of women and even slavery.

Despite the dark circumstances, these books are really wonderful, uplifting, life-affirming, and even spiritual in nature. But the starting point in 2027 is scarily plausible. As I wrote in 2006:

My biggest impression of this pair of books is that the environment within which the story takes place rings all too true. It struck me as the future “facts on the ground” of an America that continued to ignore “inconvenient truths” of global warming, poverty, inequality, and abuse of power until it was too late, and then gave even more power to religious fundamentalists, who blamed the problems of society on the victims, and on superstitious ideas along the lines of “these problems are God’s punishment for the wicked ways of people who are not enough like us – good, God-fearing, white, conservative Christians.”

Streaming My Google Music

Sometime last year, Google announced their Google Music (Beta) program and I asked to be a beta user. It was something of a pain to set up, because at the time, Google had not worked out deals with record labels to allow them to distribute central copies of MP3 files based on some evidence that you already own that music (Apple is doing something like this with their iCloud service). This meant that I had to upload all the music I wanted to have out there, and it took some effort and several days to do this (their music uploader application has since improved so this would be easier now). But I ended up with 19,767 songs on Google's server (it's free for up to 20,000 songs).

This is nice, but in practice it was not very useful because all these songs are also on my PC (on an external drive that I travel with), so it's easier to play them in iTunes if I'm using the PC. I didn't worry about because I thought that Apple's then-coming iCloud music service would solve all my problems since I'm an iPod and iTunes user anyway. But when that service launched, it wasn't as good, easy, or cheap to use as I had assumed (long story).

Cut to the chase, Bruce: I just discovered that there are several Google Music "client apps" for the iPhone and iPod Touch that allow me to access, search, and stream music from my online Google Music collection. I installed a free one called Melodies and it worked well on both wifi and on 3G on my wife's iPhone. So I spent 99 cents to upgrade to the "pro" version, mainly to get the shuffle feature.

This is really great, because even though I carry 4000+ songs on each of my two iPods, there are times when I want to hear something obscure that I haven't bothered to copy to the iPods (where I need to save room for recording and other apps). Here's a more detailed review of the Melodies app.

Obliviosity (New Song!)

I recently discovered a cool guitar chord I never knew before, Gmaj13. Sort of jazzy and major seventh-ish (major seven chords are a major favorite of mine). This song was the almost immediate result.  That often happens with a new chord, instrument, synth sound, music app, etc. - new sounds suggest new songs. It's a good thing.

As for "obliviosity," it probably should be "obliviousness" but that doesn't sound as good. Am I really that oblivious? Well, one person's obliviosity is another person's ability to focus on a task. So I don't know.

Obliviosity

You said, you were gonna be leaving  
But you wouldn’t say where to
I tried a little bit of reason
A little bit of “what the hell is going on with you?”

OK, so I’m a little bit clueless
It’s like I’m looking at the world through soda straws
But what I might lack in smoothness
I try to cover up with other flaws

Chorus
Obliviosity is my forté
You could even say it’s my specialité
Obliviosity is very very me
If you can figure out how I can get a clue
Could you help me out?
And let me know too?

Bridge
I know I drive you crazy
But I don’t mean to hurt you
I’d give the moon and stars to you
If I only knew where they were…

Words & music by Bruce Irving (c) 2012

Wow! Scale of the Universe 2 (Interactive Flash)

Yes, there are a lot of things that are "the coolest thing ever," but this is definitely in the running for that illustrious and ever-changing title. "The Scale of the Universe 2" is an interactive Flash activity with a slider that goes from a scale of 10**(-35) meters (ten to the minus thirty-fifth power, very small) to 10**27 meters (bigger than the known universe).

This "interactivity" was created by Cary Huang. It's similar to the famous "powers of ten" movie except you can control it in both scale and speed (about 13 seconds to go from smallest to largest at maximum scroll rate) and you can click on objects to learn more about them. It comes complete with spacy background music. Awesome! Thanks to Matt Bors for posting this on Facebook.

Garageband App Rocks!

You can have too much of a good thing, and I may be approaching that point with music making apps on the iPod Touch. I've got a bunch, some of which have already given birth to songs (or at least fragments of songs), which is their main purpose for me. I wasn't even going to try Apple's Garageband 1.1 app because I already have at least two recording studio apps that are working well for me. But for $4.99, I said what the heck. It's a huge app (over 500 MB), but that's why I bought a new 64 GB iPod Touch a few weeks ago.

And wow, is it amazing! Although it "only" has 8 tracks and lacks some of the features of Music Studio 2.0 and Multitrack DAW, it's really the ideal sketch-pad for developing song ideas. The biggest things for me are the "smart" instruments that can automatically generate drum, bass, guitar, and keyboard parts with many variations, based on the chord progression I play. Smart drum parts are based on a grid with loud/quiet and simple/complex axes, where you can drag various parts of the virtual drum kit. I set the tempo and then move these elements around until I get a drum part that sounds interesting. Then I choose a key and play around with the pre-defined chords for that key in the smart guitar, keyboard, or bass screens until a song idea appears (you can also define your own chords). I'll record a minute or two of these parts, then "scat sing" into the audio microphone - this will suggest melodies, rhythms, and sometimes words. Then I may switch to real guitar to work out the song structure. Et cetera.

The "smart" parts are all MIDI tracks, playing back with sampled instruments that sound pretty realistic even on the guitar parts. This means the file sizes are pretty small until you start adding audio tracks. One thing that is lacking is a "piano roll" view for editing the individual notes of the MIDI tracks (and there is also no MIDI export or copy/paste). But that's OK, since I don't expect any of these GB tracks to be parts of final recordings. If I do get anything that is so brilliant it needs to be used, I can figure out how to export that track as audio (or something).

Garageband for iOS has many more features. Here's a more detailed review of the 1.1 (iPhone) version. And here's an even more detailed review of the original iPad (1.0) app. While it would be nice to have more screen real estate to work with (i.e., an iPad), Apple has done a great job of adapting the user interface to the small iPhone/iPod Touch screen, and it's really quite easy to use, as well as supremely portable.

Optics for Mars

JPL's new rover "Curiosity" is en route to Mars, set to arrive in August 2012. A recent NASA press release describes an interesting aspect of the optical sensors carried on board the rover. A special test chart is installed to allow for calibration of camera systems for resolution and color. The chart includes a 1909 Lincoln penny (hey, it's Lincoln's birthday today!) as a familiar size and detail reference, more for public engagement than for any specific science or engineering need.If you zoom in on the above image, you can see that the black & white test chart resolution samples are labeled in cycles per millimeter, the typical unit used by optical engineers to define image quality. A "cycle" is a pair of black and white lines (cycling from white or bright to black), so 2.0 cycles/mm means that two black/white pairs will fit into a millimeter of width (so each bar will be 0.25 mm wide). Higher cycles/mm correspond to finer detail in the image (smaller pixels in a digital image). This chart will be used to calibrate the instrument called MAHLI (Mars Hand Lens Imager) that will provide close-up images of mineral and soil samples.

Happy Darwin Day!

February 12, 1809 was a pretty good day for humanity. Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on that day, Lincoln in Kentucky, Darwin in Shrewsbury, England. I'm a big fan of both of these guys. In the U.S., Lincoln's birthday is now celebrated along with Washington's birthday on President's Day (or maybe not). While it may not be widely celebrated in the United States (where only 39% of people "believe in" evolution, more than in Turkey), today is Darwin Day, "an international celebration of science and humanity." So happy birthday, Charlie Darwin. I'm going to wear my "gradual change" t-shirt in your honor (picture above).

Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902!)

Today's Amazon MP3 Daily Deal is a new album by the French band Air for $3.99. Normally I'm not a big fan of Air's electronic/pop music, but this is an interesting special case. They composed a new soundtrack for the 1902 silent movie "Le Voyage Dans La Lune" which has recently been restored to its hand-colored original state (the video is included with the MP3 download). This 15 minute film is said to be the very first "science fiction" movie. Loosely based on Jules Verne, it depicts a trip to the Moon in a hollow artillery shell fired by a huge cannon.

The trip is fast and the shell hits the Man in the Moon right in the eye (so much for the science!). The band of intrepid French explorers soon encounters angry Moon natives and of course fighting ensues. They retreat to their capsule, which has been conveniently placed on a cliff with a rope attached to the nose, which one of the men uses to pull the spacecraft over the edge (I had always wondered about the return plan with an artillery shell spacecraft and no known cannons on the Moon). It quickly falls to Earth for an Apollo-like water landing, whence the explorers are rescued and hailed as heroes.

Considering this was made a year before the Wright Brothers flew, it's really pretty impressive despite a few liberties taken with the physics. For the price of a latte and 15 minutes, it's an amusing piece of space pre-history. And the music is OK.

New Song: The Play's The Same

Last week I recorded another song for my new album project. "The Play's the Same" is about refusing to grow up. Jethro Tull had an album called "Too Old To Rock 'N' Roll (Too Young To Die)." But how can you be too old to rock 'n' roll? I love Roger's lead guitar parts on this tune. Here's a rough mix (note: I'm using the SoundCloud HTML5 widget below, which works on most recent browsers including non-Flash mobile browsers like the iPhone, but at the moment it may not be working in Firefox - use this link instead):

Insanely Great Music Apps

Music making apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch keep getting better. In the last few weeks I've gotten several new ones that really raise the bar (all available on iTunes):

Music Studio 2.0 - This seems to be the most full-featured iOS "DAW" right now, integrating audio and MIDI recording like a mini version of Sonar X1 (though still not nearly as full-featured). The audio recording is new in the recent 2.0 version. At about $14, this is one of the more expensive apps I have ever bought, but for what it can do, it's quite a bargain. The MIDI instrument samples are not fantastic quality (file size for one thing - as it is this is a 300+ MB app), but they sound pretty good through headphones, and you can always export the MIDI (and WAV) tracks for further work on PC or Mac-based recording software.

Strumstage - This is the most naturally playable guitar app yet (although iShred and Guitar Studio are close). The key here is that there are only three large "frets" that are used to choose from a palette of seven pre-selected chords (there are pre-defined palettes, plus you can define your own). Since it's easy to finger the chords, you can concentrate on strumming or picking. Take a look at this video to see what I mean. It also has drum and bass backing parts you can choose from a small list (the bass parts key off the chords you are playing). You can spend another couple of dollars and download additional guitars and rhythm kits inside the app.

Animoog - From the makers of classic Moog synthesizers, this app creates some amazing sounds and is almost infinitely controllable. Check out the demo video (makes me wish I had an iPad but it works fine on my new fourth generation iPod Touch). This is a $30 app which I got for 99 cents during its 30 day introductory period. Check out the demo videos on this page.

Ah yes, that new iPod. That has really increased the average cost of these apps. But (rationalization alert!) I had been wanting to get a new iPod Touch for at least a year - higher res display, faster processor, more memory (64 GB), cameras, and especially a built-in microphone. Just being able to record a song idea without having to find and plug in an external microphone is a major advantage. I also bought a new attachment called iRig MIDI which allows me to connect the iPod to a MIDI keyboard or to the MIDI interface on my PC. This works with Music Studio, Animoog, Thumbjam, and many other music apps that support the "Core MIDI" standard on iOS.

Every one of these tools (ok, toys) has at least one song hidden in it, waiting for me to carve it out, like a statue from a block of marble (often the "statue" just looks like a smaller block of marble). I haven't given up on real instruments either. Last week I received a Rover mandolin that I ordered as a Black Friday deal on Amazon for $83 (it was out of stock for two months). It's clearly a starter instrument, but it sounds OK and is surprisingly playable. I've already got two new songs in work based on the five chords I've learned so far.

Songs I Wish I Wrote

As a songwriter, there are many writers I admire and a lot of songs I've heard and said to myself, "I wish I wrote that." I just found a list I started some years ago. I hate top 10 lists, so here's more or less my top 13, excluding Beatles songs of which there are many I wish I wrote (yes, even "Get Back"). Not exactly in order, and I'm sure I've missed some obvious favorites. But I would have been happy to have written any of these songs.When I used to do gigs, my wife thought for years that I wrote "To Make You Feel My Love" and a couple of John Mayer songs. But I owned up and gave credit to Bob and John.

1. Something So Right (Paul Simon)
2. More Than You Know (Billy Rose)
3. Let’s Stay Together (Al Green, Al Jackson Jr., Willie Mitchell)
4. Your Song (Elton John-Bernie Taupin)
5. To Make You Feel My Love (Bob Dylan)
6. Stop This Train (John Mayer)
7. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight (James Taylor)
8. Marie (Randy Newman)
9. America (Paul Simon)
10. Wild Horses (Mick Jagger-Keith Richard)
11. Crazy Love (Van Morrison)
12. Take It Easy (Jackson Browne, Glenn Frey)
13. Winning the Battle, Losing the War (Kings of Convenience)

While I aspire to writing the smart love song (see: Paul Simon), I can see I have a soft spot for the sappy love song too. Oh well.

You Have To Laugh...

I'm trying to not pay much attention to politics this early in 2012, but the many antics of the Republican presidential candidates are just too much like a car crash - you don't want to look, but you can't help it. There are two guys who spin this stuff with all the decorum and hilarity it deserves: Andy Borowitz with The Borowitz Report, and Matt Bors with his amazing political comics and blog posts. Laughing is better than crying.

New Year, New Music

Happy new year to all! For me, 2011 was a good year for the most part. I visited my daughter in Paris in March (among many other travels). I learned to land a tail wheel airplane (to be continued come spring, I hope). I made progress in learning to work at a large company (after my small company was acquired in fall of 2010). And I started to get back into songwriting and recording, with a big assist from music apps on my iPod Touch. Music apps allow me to use time on long overseas flights and weekends between countries to get some songwriting done.

Songwriting and recording make me happy, especially when I work on the recording with Roger Lavallee, producer and instrumentalist par excellence. I spent a few hours with Roger at the Tremolo Lounge this past week recording two songs "nearly final" and starting on a third. These are brand new songs, the two nearly-final ones written in December, inspired in part by the Black Keys. As a result these are probably the most rocking tracks I have ever done (thanks be to Roger who played all the instruments - I just sang and made comments on the arrangements, solos, mixes, etc.). You can listen to the (fairly smooth) "rough mixes" on SoundCloud if you like:


2012 will include a LOT of business travel, so I'm glad I've figured out how to write songs and make rough demos with my iPod on the road. 2012 will also include a new album, probably by summer or early fall, with a mix of new and old songs (or maybe all new if my writing streak holds up) and maybe half rock and half acoustic/ countryish/ jazzy/ whatever (i.e., my usual eclectic non-style). I plan to record some songs on my new recording gear at home, but I'll probably end up doing most of it with Roger.

And what about space and astronomy? I hope to find time to read, write, and simulate more in 2012. So many interesting things and so little time!