Trond Lossius

Max intro workshop at BEK

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 17:58:31 +0000

In February I’ll be giving a one-week intro workshop to Max at BEK. More info can be found at the BEK website.

Jamoma module aliases

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:51:18 +0000

This week I have added a new feature to Jamoma: The ability to use aliases to change the names of modules dynamically. This screencast illustrates how it works.

The main purpose is to be able to change the names of modules on the fly so that they reflect the content that they are currently being used for. Hopefully this will help making cue scripts more content-related and easier to read, edit and work on.

The feature will be available in the next installed, and I hope to get the time to make one the coming weekend.

Impulse response for the Singuhr Hörgalerie

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 20:12:47 +0000

Matt Rogalsky has made some interesting impulse responses available. Quoting his email to the cec-c mailing list:

For anyone who can make use of them – some impulse responses I recorded last year.

The first set is from the larger of two 19th century water reservoirs in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. In recent years this has been a venue for sound installations, produced by Singuhr Hörgalerie. The network of circular brick chambers creates interesting echo patterns and long reverb times.

Dropbox link to download

The second set is from another structure also dating to the 19th c. Fort Jay is an old military installation on Governor’s Island, just off the tip of Manhattan in NYC. These recordings were made in various rooms of its former ammunition magazine. Stone/concrete walls and floors give fairly long reverb times. There are also two IRs from shots fired in the courtyard of the fort, as part of visitor demonstrations of Civil War era drills.

Dropbox link to download

Free for non-commercial use… if you find a place for them, let me know!

I’ll leave these in my dropbox for awhile.

Jamoma channel at Vimeo and a TextMate demo

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:06:19 +0000

Today saw some further work on the TextMate bundle discussed yesterday, and an updated zip file will be posted shortly to the yesterday’s post at the Jamoma blog. I’ve also made a screen cast demoing it, and uploaded to Vimeo.

While at it, I created a Jamoma channel at Vimeo. I hope this will be useful for instruction videos as well as videos showcasing Jamoma in use. Please subscribe to the channel, and if you have videos relating to Jamoma, feel free to add them to the channel.

Ambisonics surround sound libraries

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:44:06 +0000

Surround Factory is a French business founded in 2010 by sound to picture professionals working in the film and tv industry. It was created to promote real surround sound recordings to be used by top notch professionals in the worlds of cinema, HD TV, video games, event creation, institutional, and educational films, amongst other areas.

They offer quite a few ambisonics B-format recordings. After the demise of ambisonia.net and soundofspace.com, this is one of a very few services I know of that are making B-format recordings publicly available.

TextMate bundle for Jamoma cue scripts

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:12:25 +0000

Everyone that has been doing a bit of coding, know that syntax highlighting is extremely useful. In order to simplify manual editing of Jamoma cue scripts, I’ve just added a OSC TextMate bundle to the Documentation repository.

If you want to start using it straight away, you can download it over at the Jamoma blog.

Sound installation automatic startup

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:47:59 +0000

I’ve just “unstalled” the sound installation Lines converging at a distance that has been running at Håkon’s Hall since early July this year.

Before handing the mac mini used for running it back to BEK, I want to make some notes to myself about how I set it up to have the installation run automatically when the Mac was booted in the morning (this was on a Mac running OSX 10.6, so location of settings might vary somewhat in later versions of the OS):

From System Preferences > Accounts > Login Options the Mac is set to automatic login at my account.
In System Preferences > Energy Saver computer sleep and display sleep isa set to “never” (instead the museum hosts were instructed to turn the monitor itself of after having booted successfully). The hard disk was set to sleep when possible. This setting might be checked or unchecked depending on whether files are played from disk or loaded into memory.
In System Preferences >Desktop and Screen Saver “Start Screen Saver” is set to “Never”.
Earlier on, in System Preferences > Accounts > My account > Login items I have added the Max patch used to run the installation. This time I got occational problems with the drivers for the external sound card not being finished loaded by the time Max started, and hence becoming unavailable to Max. For this reason I made an AppleScript, and loaded that instead. The AppleScript would wait for 30 seconds, and then open the Max patch. The script can be downloaded here. If you want to use it, you’ll have to modify it to fit the location of files on your Mac.
Finally the Max patch is set up to automatically instantiate itself and start running audio. Using Jamoma makes this so much easier, as all settings can be controlled using a cue script, providing complete control of the sequence of execution, with possibilities for pauses on the way to make sure that one task has been completed before the next one starts.
One additional issue deserves to be mentioned: In Max 5, if the sound card fails to load at some point, preferences gets overwritten and it will no longer be the default sound card in future boots. In my case instead the non-real-time renderer would be chosen, resulting in no sound. To prevent this, I added instantiation stuff to the patch to ensure that the external sound card was chosen.

DIY low-cost head-tracker

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:00:32 +0000

Spatial Audio Research at TU Berlin has published a tutorial and firmware which allows to put together a low-cost Attitude and Heading Reference System (AHRS) that can be used as a head-tracker for virtual acoustics.

A wired version of the tracker (connected via USB), as well as a wireless version (using Bluetooth) can be realized quite simple using comercially available hardware. The tracker is based on the Arduino-compatible “9DOF Razor IMU” board by SparkFun, which contains a 3-axis gyroscope/accelerometer/magnetometer and a microcontroller to do the sensor fusion.

Patch substitution in live performance

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 09:52:29 +0000

Me and Karen Kipphoff are about to start work on a new project that might become a hybrid stage/installation work, although it is all still quite open.

In the process Karen has started looking into Isodora, as a possible alternative to running live video from Max and Jamoma. I’ve also started taking a look at some of the tutorials. Isadora is a patch-domain program for live video processing, and as such resembles Max, although the modules (or “actors” as they are called) are higher-level functional processing modules rather than low-level building blocks.

The developer, Mark Coniglio, is clearly experienced at live video for stage productions, and it is interesting to take a closer look at the strategies employed for managing patches over time in performance.

One very interesting idea is how patches are conceptualized as scenes. As the play or performance progress, one will move from one such scene to the next, with cross-fading transitions between scenes in much the same way as in e.g. PowerPoint or Keynote.

In Max, I have always ended up with one humonguous patch containing all processing that will ever be needed all the way through the performance, and lots of logistics to handle routing and muting along the way to save CPU and GPU.

One important change in Max 6 is that each top-level patch does audio processing in its own separate thread. Hence audio can be turned on and off independently for each patch. It might be that this opens similar possibilities for patch substitution during performance: All patches could be loaded up-front and positioned off-screen. As they are to be used, they could be moved on-screen, get audio turned on, and then be faded in. Moving on to the next patch, the previous could be faded out again, and then be moved off-screen again.

One could of course also dynamically open and dispose of patches, but based on prior experience, I’m sort of hesitant towards the idea of doing massive memory allocation and freeing in the middle of the heat unless I have to. Anyway all of this is well worth investigating further, and maybe bring into the discussion of possible future directions for Jamoma development.

Teaching activities lately

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:33:50 +0000

The studio used for the Trondheim workshop.

I’ve been doing some teaching over the past few weeks.

Two weeks ago I visited the music technology department at NTNU in Trondheim, giving an artist talk sharing my experiences with work on sound installations. The following day I gave two 4 hour workshops providing an introduction to spatialisation. They have a studio set up with 16 loudspeakers, but most of the students seem to work predominantly in stereo only, with occasional excursions into 5.1. I used Jamoma for the demo. While Jamoma itself was not the topic of the workshop, it provides an easy way of demonstrating and discussing different spatialisation techniques. Within the time frame of the workshop we managed to touch on VBAP, first and higher order ambisonics, DBAP and ViMIC.

Last week I was in charge of a one day workshop/concert on sound in space organized by BEK. For my presentation I did a concenced version of the same material as for the Trondheim workshop, with a brief introduction to the psychoacoustics of spatial hearing, and a demo of the Harpex ambisonic decoding plugin thrown in for good measure. Thorolf Thuestad talked about how he is using Reaper for spatial audio. From his presentation it became clear that Reaper will be my choice of DAW for the foreseeable future. After a break works by Ruben Sverre Gjertsen and Hans-Gunther Lock were presented.

Last Monday I gave a workshop on how to write application grants for VISP, a service organization providing assistance on production for visual artists in Bergen.

And finally, yesterday I gave a two hour lecture on electronic music at the Grieg Academy.

Now I’m looking forward to be able to spend some time at my studio again.

On a side note: This turned out to be be blog post no. 1111, posted on 11-11-11.

Jamoma 0.5.4.rc1

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 09:31:32 +0000

Jamoma 0.5.4.rc1 (release candidate 1) has been uploaded. All issues related to OSX Lion are believed to be solved. There are no major changes as compared to the previous beta 2 release. Still, please give it a try. If we do not hear any complaints, this will be released as 0.5.4 the coming weekend.