[spectre] MUTE article on Pure Data + free software for sound

[derek holzer]

Give It All, Zero For Rules! by Mattin

http://linkme2.net/3s

On the 13-14th of December 2004 Mute hosted a Pure Data workshop in East
London. Musician and PD abuser Mattin gives a breakdown of the themes of
the workshop, surveys some artists and artists groups using PD, and
scrutinises the relationship of free software to 'free', experimental
and improvised music.


Why free software in free music?

Arriving from the position of playing improvised music, I am interested 
in trying to question how a musician is supposed to interact with his 
instrument; in my case a computer. In other words, what I want to do is 
to play the instrument against the grain and to expose the way a 
computer constructs you as a user.

In order do this I use various rudimentary tactics such as playing just 
the hardrive, bowing the case of the computer or using the plastic box 
as a resonance box. I direct my attention towards the things the 
computer demands from the user as much as the things it can do for you; 
the need for constant attention to the screen, the need to turn the 
machine on, etc. For me it is important not to make hierarchies between 
the sounds that the materiality of the computer would produce, over the 
ones that could be produced with software. Playing this way makes the 
computer an electroacoustic device in itself, interrupting the 
ideologies behind music software. Improvisation makes implicit a 
constant search of making sounds or reusing found sounds always with an 
emphasis on that very process in production. What you find, you have to 
give a use, and to use this to serve your own needs without having to 
change your own approach to music making. As we will see later on, much 
of music software does exactly the opposite, that is, allows the 
musician to produce easily a genre of music.

The machine that I was hitting was a G3 Powerbook, the same machine that 
musicians like Kaffe Mathews, Tujiko Noriko, Merzbow, Pita, Fennesz, 
Hiaz (farmersmanual), Zguiniew Karkoski and many more use, or have used, 
in the past. At a point in the late nineties it became the new icon of 
electronic music. Artiness, coolness, glitchiness and Mac were all in 
the same pack. As with rock music, all seemed all to be a matter of 
style. The Mac, an icon signifying artistic production could become a 
substitution for the lack of performance that usually computer players 
offer. Now, there are emerging artists like Jason Forrest who are 
showing us the possibility of hyper performance in front of the 
computer. His performances do not produce anything new, but instead, 
import an image from another genre of music (i.e. disco & rock). The 
spectacle keeps making you produce cultural overdose. The more obviously 
you give, the more obviously you get recognition.


'I smashed a G4 laptop computer one time.' Jason Forrest (aka Donna Summer)

The destruction of iconic musical hardware feeds into two processes of 
myth making, that of both the performer and the commodity-instrument. It 
is an intensification of the moment that diverts our attention from the 
performance of music production, a diversion elsewhere into the image of 
the intense rockstar giving you all possible clichés at once for just 
the price of an one-man-computer-band. In staging the brand, does the 
performer want to demonstrate the value of the computer? Does it really 
matter whether it was a PC or a Mac? Or is it just a case of: 'think 
different' pay the same?

Things are developing very fast in the world of free software, and what 
in the past would have been a PC running windows can now be a powerful 
sound tool running GNU/Linux. The development of software has been 
decisive in the way computer music has been developed. A classic 
question among computer musicians is, what software do you use? In some 
cases there would not be the need to ask, as the sounds would be easily 
identifiable with certain software, just the same as a guitar pedal or 
an amplifier. Although there were many computer musicians who would just 
press the space bar to play a soundfile (and I have nothing against 
this), new software would bring the possibility of processing sound in 
real time, not just soundfiles but instruments, environment sounds, even 
errors (the already mentioned pastiched glitches). This means now that 
musicians using computers have more possibilities at their disposal to 
improvise in live performances. The computer musician finds herself not 
in the studio, but in a situation.

Much music software is still proprietary, made by companies whose 
primary concern is to increase their sales. Making the software appear 
as close to hardware as possible can momentarily distract the user from 
its virtual quality, making him pay for his weightless gear. Regardless 
of this commercial relationship, my key question here would be: how does 
this software condition the user?

'I used a lot of cracked commercial software for a lot of years when 
doing sound and I always got a couple of feelings out of it. One feeling 
was that you get these fancy programs with these fancy user interfaces, 
but at the end the more they have created this environment that's very 
easy for you to use, the more they've actually determined the kind of 
work you can make with it. If you look at a program like Ableton Live 
which is used by probably about eighty percent of people making sound 
and performing out live these days, it seems like. It's good for a very 
few things, it's good for working with loops, putting effects on these 
loops and sequencing them, but it pushes you in one creative direction, 
it pushes you into making a certain kind of music, really it pushes you 
towards German techno more than anything else.' Derek Holzer


There is free software available that can do the job of very expensive 
proprietary software, like Ardour (a multichannel digital audio 
workstation), Jack (audio server), Jackrack (effects), Ladspa (plugins), 
Rezound (graphical audio file editor), but for performing live, the most 
useful is likely to be PD (aka Pure Data), a 'real-time graphical 
programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing'. PD 
gives you the freedom to construct your own instruments and give them 
any parameters you want. It can also do much more than that, but you 
would have to develop your programming and mathematical skills, as 
numbers are extremely important. If you want to get into the theory see 
Miller Puckette's Theory and Techniques of Electronic Music.

There have been a lot of interesting new situations developing from 
people using free software that question the whole idea of presentation 
of a performance. During a tour in USA in 2003, Dion Workman and Julien 
Ottavi produced long performances in which they would arrive at the 
venue to soundcheck, start playing straight from the soundcheck during 
the arrival of the audience and continue for as long as the people from 
the venue would let them (sometimes performances lasted six hours). They 
played using PD patches programmed with the possibility of doing random 
automatisation. Julien Ottavi is part of the Apo 33 collective in 
Nantes. They organise many events and workshops that range from teaching 
Pure Data, to philosophy, political activism and art but always with a 
relation to audio and its social connotations. CIA, an installation that 
I have seen by them consisted of many wires attached to computers 
running PD. The audience would go into the space, would hit any of these 
wires, and this would provoke a reaction in the computers from which 
they would start to generate lots of sounds and combinations of sounds. 
Thanks to complex mechanisms of automatisms from PD patches the audience 
would improvise with the space but not in such a clear way as call and 
response.



Openmute organised a Pure Data workshop in London on the 13th and 14th 
of Dec. 2004. The workshop was run by Aymeric Mansoux and Derek Holzer. 
It was an introduction of how to use PD, along with externals such as 
GEM, PDP and PiDiP for a more visual orientation. It introduced briefly 
the many and various possibilities that PD offers. The audience was 
diverse, coming from the visual arts, as well as music production and 
the free software movement. One example of a group combining all three 
of these approaches is the recently formed London-based group OpenLab 
(see below). The poster advertising the PD workshop had an emphasis on 
VJing. This might have been the reason why it was difficult to focus in 
on the most interesting aspects of what PD offers from my point of view 
(sound production and live performance), but as an introduction this was 
helpful.


PD is a program in which lets you do pretty much everything and it is up 
to you what direction to take. It is true that at the beginning it is an 
intimidating interface to work with, but this kind of introduction helps 
you to get a clear picture on how to start your first steps. In free 
software as in improvisation the restrictions are not as clearly defined 
as in other genres of music or proprietary software in which you are 
supposed to follow and obey certain histories, certain codes, certain 
legal rights. Free software activates you as a user as you are often 
confronted with an immense amount of possibilities. What I am wondering 
is whether the new opportunities that free software offers could 
represent in the music the same radical effect that they have on the 
user, and extend this through its presentation. Free software is helping 
to bring into question how the producer wishes to distribute their work. 
With the availability of licences from Creative-commons greater than 
that of frozen items in Western supermarkets, a question of conflict 
emerges: anti-copyright or pro-copyleft?

This text is anti-copyright


Some groups working with Pure Data

OpenLab

This project provides a meeting place for London based artists who use 
and develop open source software as their creative tool. As a result, 
the project will attempt to organize performances, events, meetings in 
London for the participants to share and exchange ideas. Furthermore, 
the project will also promote and demonstrate the use of open source 
software through the performances/events. OpenLab currently is preparing 
its first performance event, which will take place on the 1st of April 
at the Foundry. Since the start of OpenLab at the end of 2004, many 
members have quickly become friends and meets regularly. OpenLab was 
also very happy to take part in the PureData Bigband event in Koln in 
February 2005. We hope to have many friends and all share our resources 
to make great things happen.

http://www.pawfal.org/openlab/


Goto10

Goto10 has been founded in 2003 by Aymeric Mansoux and Thomas Vriet in 
Poitiers, France. At this time the primary goal of this non-profit 
organization was to support and produce local live alternative 
electronic music events. It was a gamble to see if there was an audience 
for such events in Poitiers. It turned out that not only was there a 
large enough audience, they were asking for more. Thus oto10 quickly 
started to setup workshops and exhibitions and started looking for 
partners in some of the rare local institutions that try to support 
digital art and media hacktivism. Today the goto10 team is formed by 
people living in different places around Europe and is part of a network 
of similar young non profit organizations sharing the same vision about 
free software and arts. While the original structure is still based in 
France, and prepares at least one event each month, goto10 is now most 
of all a collective name under which highly skilled artists and hackers 
work together in numerous places in Europe. You may see them in 
workshops, performances, software credits or as producer of unusual 
events. The current projects of goto10 rank from linux live cdroms to a 
series of connected performances. The new website (online in april) is 
meant to provide documentation on alternative free software and 
new-media-whatever cookbooks. Last but not least, in June goto10 will 
launch gosub, its free media weblabel.

http://www.goto10.org/


Umatic.nl

Umatic.nl is an arts group based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Derek
Holzer and Sara Kolster represent the Free Open Source Software
area of this group by giving lectures, performances and workshops
involving the use of FOSS tools for audiovisual synthesis. In their
"resonanCITY" performance, Holzer and Kolster employ Pure Data, PDP
and GEM to manipulate field recordings, photographic or video images
and found objects gathered in the various locations where they have
travelled, creating an improvisational audiovisual journey. Both are
also active in educating artists about the importance of free
software, and in developing end-user audiovisual applications within
the Pure Data environment.

http://www.umatic.nl/info_derek.html
http://www.umatic.nl/info_sara.html



Dion Workman: http://www.sigmaeditions.com/sigma_dion workman.html
Julien Ottavi: http://www.sigmaeditions.com/sigma_julien%20ottavi.html
Apo33: http://apo33.org

For a good explanation of PD and the use of free software in music and 
sound production:
*Stay Free* Martin Howse http://www.yourmachines.org/stay_free.html

Pure Data Community Site
http://pure-data.iem.at/

Miller Puckette own page Pure Data download
http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/



-- 
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 92:
"Intentions
-credibility of
-nobility of
-humility of"