Tina M.K. Madsen on LAC 2026

From the desk of Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen: 
"Back after a great Linux Audio Conference at Maynooth University in Ireland, and it is always a pleasure to be in good company with fellow Linux Audio and FLOSS enthusiasts! As a DIY and Open Source artist and user, it is crucial that these communities and gatherings exist. 

At LAC, we performed the piece Occurrences as TMS (a duo consisting of artist Malte Steiner and myself), for which we have created a cybernetic system that registers and processes each our sonic input coming from metal percussion and tactile resonance via piezo-microphones. The computer then responds to our playing and calculates control data, not only for internal sound synthesis but also for an external DIY modular synthesizer and real-time generated visuals.

Overall, the system holds an open source backbone and runs from a Linux computer as well as it uses Pure Data for the analysis, processing, and responding with internal synthesis and controlling the external synthesizer hardware which TMS has been developing over the recent years. The process is further visualized by a custom software written in Python. The usage of open source software is important for us to both have full access to the technical infrastructures and develop these further as well as being independent from the corporate world.

Photos of our performance by Iain McCurdy.
TMS' travel to LAC26 has kindly been supported by Art Music Denmark
"

datasonification workshop

Picture from Malte Steiners workshop Saturday the 14. February at Äänen Lumo, Helsinki (FI), showing how to process statistical data with Jupyter Lab and Python to make them suitable for datasonification with programs such as Pure Data. Photo by Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen.

b4 DigiDrone

After the successful debut of the b4 DigiDrone synthesizer (pictured below) on two concerts in Helsinki, I am now developing a bigger version for the studio, based on a more powerful microcontroller as the brave Seeed Xiao Samd21 used here.

The source code for the b4 DigiDrone is available on GitHub:

https://github.com/HerrSteiner/SAMD-Synthesizer

Gravel at Code&Share Aarhus

On tomorrows Saturday Malte Steiner will present his new open source live coding system Gravel at Code&Share in Aarhus DK, 13:00-17:00 10.December 2022. An alpha version for Linux, Mac and Windows is to be expected soon...

Programmable Audio Workshop Grame, France

https://paw.grame.fr

I was always interested to get into FPGA development but one reason holding me back is the convoluted situation with the necessary toolchains. Proprietary, often Windows only and complicated licensing, for some you need to take a course to learn how to pay for them. Hopefully it changes towards a more open and welcoming experience and this conference tomorrow is quite interesting about FPGA and audio, and can be attended via stream.

What I learned from one month usage of GODOT 3D Engine

What I learned from one month usage of GODOT 3D Engine

I finished an artpiece in GODOT for an online exhibition and I am really happy with it. The exhibition opened yesterday as a part of the AMRO (Art Meets Radical Openness) festival in Linz and you can check it out here or if you can't be bothered walking through the adventure like interface, its directly here:

https://block4.com/vr/price/price.html

 being part of my artproject The Big Crash, art for the pending burst of the real estate bubble. Tomorrow morning I give a lightning talk at AMRO about the usage of 3D engines in my art and GODOT is a central part of it.

But some points I found out:

- lightbaking didn't work for me, all kind of weired artifacts occured. A great rewrite of the lightbaking is underway and to be expected for version 4. I baked in Blender so it was no problem for me

- never ever use OGG Vorbis for short sounds which programmatically got exchanged in one player. I attached 2 sounds to one player node via the animation timeline and all kind of nasty pops and static occured at full volume. This is a absolute showstopper, it can damage speakers and hearing. It seems to be known so hopefully a fix is on the way. Workaround is to use WAV files for short sounds. Anyhow, OGG Vorbis sounds for longer looping background noises works perfectly, its only when they get exchanged in one player some buffers seems not cleared correctly.

- HTML5 export on Safari seems to miss the shadowmaps. Other browsers are fine. Also the crosssite tracking issue occurs only in Safari, when a Godot project is referenced in an IFrame on another server. That can't be fixed I guess.

- HTML5 export on IOS has the audio crackling and stuttering, in all browsers. Someone found a solution and posted a different WASM file which fixes it, its again a buffer setting issue, guess it will be fixed soon.

- Couldn't get WEBVR / WEBXR to work, hope it would be soon fully supported, would be great for drive-by VR worlds. Not everyone is capable to install an application on his or her VR device.

Linux Audio Conference 2018

this years Linux Audio Conference is in Berlin
https://lac.linuxaudio.org/2018/
and highly recommended.
We wont make it this time as we still on tour with one more concert in Helsinki to go.

Raspberry Pi

Block 4 is pioneering the usage of Raspberry Pis in artistic context since 2013 so we decided to put out more documentation about it inclusive software and schematics. These pages shows how to get 8 channels of analog data in the easy way, with the MCP 3208 a/d converter IC and even provide an external for Pure Data to access it in your patches:

http://www.block4.com/index.php?id=159

We use it for our project TMS to create effect processors with the Raspberry Pi which can be controlled by sensors with a higher resolution then Midi. The first concert with our custom device have been in London which can be seen some posts below...

A free Max4Live device from Notstandskomitee

I shared one of my MaxForLive devices, a timedomain based freezer made of 16 independent delaylines, good for creating drones. A concept I keep implementing on diverse platforms and used for instance on Notstandskomitee album The Golden Times but also for TMS in form of a PD patch on our Raspberry Pi based effect unit.

http://maxforlive.com/library/device/4403/b4freezer16

Raspberry Pi, best way to program it?

Continue to experiment with Raspberry Pi, still not decided which software route I should go:
Python, C, C++ with QT, or Java. For me its necessary to have access to the Raspi Cam, accelerated graphics with OpenGL ES and OpenCV. I tried Java8 and followed this steps http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=73489&p=528225 to get it running and it works. Framerate is low but I have to conduct more tests, it seems to run OpenGL accelerated anyway...

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.

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....

!Linear, first interactive media art piece for e-reader

This is one of the first, possibly the first interactive media art piece for e-reader. I am fascinated by the esthetics of the electronic ink which is different from the usual backlit color screens. After several years working with projections this is first of my artworks which needs a proper lighting. It is also interesting to work with and around the inherent limitations like the latency in the response and switching of the screen, complex animations are not possible without flickering.

!Linear (pronaunced nonlinear) is about interactive storytelling from user generated content, a mashup. Pictures are taken and processed from Flickr and their tags are displayed, user can choose from the provided tags how the next image will be searched. The selected tags combined form a sentence and creates with the images a non linear story. Read on at block4.com...

Logcat Nyan Android

while programming for Android (soon more about the results) I discoverd the logcat symbol in Eclipse, love that small icon, attached resized. Its for the log output and shows a Nyan Android.

videomapping with Pure Data

my pd abstraction and examples to download and explore videomapping in Pure Data and Gem, created during my artist-in-residency in Open City, Chile.
http://block4.com/index.php?id​=142

Wonderland Wednesday

the desktop sharing feature of wonderland

just attendend the Wonderland Wednesday meeting, first time for me in 3D chat for years. In the 90s we created a lot of artistic multiuser VRML worlds and had meetings via Blaxxun servers. After they went down there was silence but I kept looking for open alternatives, to create surreal multiuser experiences. Finally the open source Open Cobalt and Open Wonderland are good enough so I guess I will start to use Wonderland, also because I program Java but have a vague idea about Smalltalk, on which Cobalt is based.

What I like on Cobalt is that its based on P2P technique so they dont need a server. And its easier to jump from world to another.

trippy desktop sharing feedback

The Java based Wonderland has better looking graphics but uses much more ressources. But its has more optional modules to plugin and add features and development seems to happen faster. The default avatars and the worlds, as you can see on the pictures, are boring but everything can be customized easily. Both programs are mainly for business and education but I dont intend to simulate the real world.
New experience for me was the usage of voice chat, back in the 90s we had not the bandwidth for that fancy stuff, just text chat to communicate.

sqlite tool

When working with SQLite Databases (hint: IPhone), this can come handy as an editor/management tool:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5817

introduction into Arduino hacking

Found this nice and simple introduction into hacking with Arduino, so for instance you can create your own USB controler for music or interactive installations:

http://tuxradar.com/content/arduino-hardware-hacking-part-1
http://tuxradar.com/content/arduino-hardware-hacking-part-2
http://tuxradar.com/content/arduino-hardware-hacking-part-3

bugfixing time!

remember that I wrote about the bug in deStatik? Fortunally I could fix it a while ago. I guess I have the line from the examples of OpenCV where the mainloop is stopped when no frame can captured from the camera. In deStatik the image processing is done in a separate thread and that break statement lead to a simple stop of that routine while the rest of the program continue to run but didn't get any motiondata. It makes sense in examples and debugging sessions but its not good to have break statements in application which have to run 24/7!

But I wonder why it didn't happend in the first place in Graz. It had a month time to show up on two computers.

Anyway, tonight I fixed a small but annyoing bug in Minicomputer, not showing the patch and multinames correctly. So far its in the svn repository only.