Linux Audio Conference 2013

A week ago the 2013 edition of the annual Linux Audio Conference were held in Graz, Austria. Here are my personal highlights which by no means is any assessment, its just what is important for me and I even missed a lot. The proceedings can be downloaded online and the videostreams are now available.

- Csound: a lot of improvements are going to go into the release of version 6, a major code rewrite. New Instrument definitions can be injected in running Csound instances, something which makes it suitable for livecoding. I am not a big fan of livecoding but along with improvements in the API Csound becomes even more attractive for including in own software

- Extendedview: a collection of abstractions for Pure Data to create videomapping. I used and developed further the former patches provided at PDCon Weimar, but this release is very extensive and solve a lot of problems I had before.

- Faust can now generate also LV2 plugins, very nice work by Albert Gräf. So with the same DSP code you can generate diverse plugin formats and in examples externals for Pure Data

- the audio framework Clam got some improvements, have to investigate further. It can be now interfaced via Python.

- quite several alternative sequencer / notation projects with interesting features, like the just intonation sequencer Rationale or Laborejo

- Bill Gribble start his own version of Pure Data. Not sure where this project goes but worth to keep watching it.

- Fernando Lopez-Lezcanos project to recreate the space of Hagia Sophia from Istanbul through convolution was touching and put Fons Adriaenses JConvolver on my map.

- sadly I missed Oscar Pablo Di Liscias talk about the ATS spectral data toolkit for Pure Data, certainly I will watch the archived stream when I have time

- Roman Haefelis netpd looks good as always

- Jeremy Jongepier showed the guitar multieffect software Guitarix running on a Raspberry Pie in low latency

The concerts were a good showcase of audio on Linux and my personal subjective favorites have been the multichannel electroacoustic concerts and performances by Second Sense (
Li Chi Hsiao, Yen Tzu Chang) and Alexandros Drymonitis

Notstandskomitee news

The mastering of the 6. album by Notstandskomitee (actually the 11. if you count also the tape releases) is finished a while ago and will be released soon on Audio Visual Algebra from New York. Meanwhile I had to move out of the nice Block 4 studio in Berlin Kreuzberg and found a new one in an industrial space in Berlin Charlottenburg / Moabit. Not so much is setup right now, only what is necessary to program and rehearse the upcomming live shows. Later I will do the unpacking and cabeling, lot of things needed to sort out.

Next performances are going to be

26. May at LPM in Rome where I also do a Pure Data workshop and

28.June Berlin at Loophole together with ReVerse Bullets, another friends from New York.

While the set is made on one hand this time with Ableton + a lot of custom programming in Max4Live, the visuals are done with the open source game engine Panda3D, controlled from Ableton. Later I will document and share an example, also thinking about giving workshops covering the whole workflow from creating animations in Blender to programming the setup in Panda3D with Python and control it via OSC.

speech synthesis in east Germany

Ok, now it gets nerdy, about speech synthesis. In the 30s Homer Dudley invented the Voder, a speech synthesizer to create artificial speech, without voice recordings or input, see video at bottom. Now compare it with the kinky DDR scifi from the 70s, Im Staub Der Sterne. The excerpt is fun and fetish anyway but take a close listen to the 'computer' voice at 4.22 and 5.28. It has the same analog quality as the voder with the elastic transition between the formants, unlike digital speech synthesis or fake robotic voice done with Vocoders (also invented by Dudley). 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAwX8-1IOFg



So in east Germany they at a functioning Voder in the 70s???? Maybe even here in Berlin? We know they have their version of Trautonium, the Subharchord, but a Voder, how cool is that?

Here the recording from the 1939 Voder to compare: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rAyrmm7vv0

New realtime live visuals

In the last days I worked with open source game engine Panda3D and Blender for modeling to creating the realtime visuals for the Notstandskomitee concerts 2013 on, controlled from my Ableton set and Max4Live via OSC. 

Had to brush up my Python knowledge, but it runs on the same laptop (a Macbook air with Intel 4000 graphics) with realtime shadows, blur shader and skeleton animation dramatic more performant as Processing which I considered for visuals at one point.

Pure Data workshop in Berlin, January

I will provide a Pure Data (http://puredata.info/) workshop for 5 - 20 participants in January in Berlin Kreuzberg (Ritterstr. 3), in two parts, fee for each part is 50.- € including VAT or 80.- € including VAT for both weekends, starting 14:00 till open end:

12./13. 1. 2013 (focus on audio):
- Introduction, History of PD
- messaging, calculations, interfacing (OSC, Midi)
- audioprocessing, history of soundsynthesis and how to rebuilt historic synthesizers with PD


19./20. 1. 2013 (focus on graphics):
- 3D realtime graphics with GEM
- video processing with PDP + GEM inclusive camerainput
- motion tracking


write me if want to join: mktsteiner AT googlemail DOT com, bring laptop, your drinks and food (some coffee/chocolade will be there) and good mood, additionally midi or other controllers....

Notstandskomitee live Berlin tonight

Today is a screaming nice saturday and tonight Notstandskomitee meets Femme Facade at Supersonic Club Berlin, Weichselstr. 15 Berlin Neukölln, 22:00

Kino Kabarett 2006

At Kino Kabarett 2006, where you have 48hours time to conceive and finish a short movie, I made some soundtracks, like this one. Zabel and friends from Reunion came up with this thing and while they were filming, me and Volker Havlik, with whom I had the project Konform together, made the soundtrack. Working title was Gratte Les Couilles which was changed in the similar subtle name Wanker.
Regular listeners of my music will recognize some of my signature sounds, augmented with Volkers guitar works.