frey

So if we look at the logs, myspace is responsible for most of my incoming links. Amazing.

And when people like Nelly, who is the creator of this exquisite piece of exquisitude, entitled Vihr:

want to be my friend, who am I to say no?

Ok, check this out:

Transformers teaser trailer

Now watch it again with your screen turned off.

If the sound in the film is anything like the sound on the trailer, then I’m really, really looking forward to this one.

So much of the energy of films is carried by the soundtrack, and yet sound is by far the least hyped aspect of films. I’m currently developing an installation for the Wellington Fringe Festival 2007 that deals with this — the idea is, put someone in a room with minimal lighting/projection and a sound system that responds to their movements, guiding them through a virtual space built primarily from sound. I’ve already written the tracking system, using a camera suspended from the roof, but have a lot more experimentation to do.

I’m drawing a lot of inspiration from horror. A horror movie, especially scifi horror, is usually made or broken based on its soundtrack. I’m thinking the Alien franchise and Event Horizon, which are some of my favourites. But it also applies to games too. I’ve been playing System Shock 2 which is significantly scarier than Half Life but exceeds Half-Life’s already impressive sound design. Things rumble, whirr, and pulse in eery and unsettling ways. Try playing it with the sound off and you’ll feel what I mean — it’s just not the same experience. More info on the game, as well as a download link that is NOT LEGAL (good luck trying to legitimately buy a copy though) is available here.

This project is going to be a lot of fun, I think.

On Sunday afternoon I got up and performed.

It was at Joe Dobson’s (awesome drummer Ginger Brown/Circus Machine/various other Wellington bands) Little Day Out, which is where Joe builds a stage in his garden, invites a bunch of musician friends to come, puts on some food, and about 200 people show up and have an awesome day of music in the sun..

I did a three minute set mostly playing two circuit bent toys.

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The first is Mr Phone, and he looks like this:

Unbent, there are tones on the keypad (but not one tone per key, just one tone sequence for the whole keypad, which it advanced through each keypress), a voice that says stupid things when you press the purple Message button (’Great, why don’t we go for a drive tonight?’ ‘We should get a pizza on Saturday’ ‘Let’s go out, on the weekend!’) and (most importantly) a short sound record/playback function (which is why I got it in the first place). Inside, the noise-making circuitry is based around two Black Blobs, one to handle the tones and the voice and the other to handle voice recording.

Usually when bending a device powered by a Black Blob, about the only thing you can do is under- or over-power the chip, which changes the internal clock rate and sometimes makes it crash in interesting ways. Unfortunately in this case the tone/voice Black Blob proved almost unbendable: any slight deviation from its designed voltage and it just crashes, making no noise at all.

The voice recorder on the other hand proved remarkably susceptible to this type of bend. Varying the supply voltage this way gives complete control over the sampling rate of the record and playback, from a high of maybe 22kHz (giving less than a second of record time) to as low as you could want it (giving upwards of 30 seconds of recording time). Moreover, the voltage is variable both during record and playback, so you can start recording at a 100Hz sampling rate and gradually increase the rate to 22kHz, if you like…

So the bend in this case is just a long chain of variable resistors (pots) inserted between the power supply and the voice recorder Black Blob. The controls are (left-right): Playback/Record/Stop switch and instant-record pushbutton, safety threshold resistor bypass switch, main pitch control pots (x2), LDR bypass switch. The LDR (the little orange thing in the top right corner) allows light-control of the sampling rate (more light=higher sample rate). The safety threshold resistor limits the maximum voltage to the black blob to its designed voltage: as long as this switch is on, it is impossible to crash the chip; flick it off and you can over-power the chip and thus speed its sample rate to crash point (which leads to some interesting effects if you’ve recorded a sample that uses much less sampling memory than is present: the rest of the old sample is sometimes played back after reducing the voltage below crash point).

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This is Astroboy.

He’s got knobs sticking out of his head.

This one is a $2 shop Astroboy phone. It has a keypad that acts as one button, triggering samples. Unmodified, there are a number of telephone-related samples that the phone loops through, and one sample that is this bizarre piece of music that sounds like half of the chorus of a Japanese rockabilly song recorded in a cave and pitched up several octaves.

This one is also a Black Blob device, which means the bend is just a supply voltage control mod. Astro is already an unstable beast: unbent, his sample rate varies quite wildly depending on battery charge and how hard you press the buttons; that’s how cheap and crap the circuit is. But under-powering leads to some lovely things when it crashes, including a kind of squelchy writhing sound, squeals, articulated clicks and, if you’re lucky, the first three notes of the musical/chorus sample being repeated rhythmically. The left knob controls the voltage to the black blob, the switch allows bypassing the resistor built in to the circuit and the right knob controls the bypass current (not totally sure what this does precisely as it’s not the same each time, but it seems to do something…).

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So anyways, I got up on stage and performed these, which was an interesting experience. Playing with things like this it’s as much about showmanship as anything else. You’re less about trying to make ‘music’ in a traditional sense and more about being excited and enthusiastic about something strange and obscure and incredibly geeky. I provided a running commentary, and explained what the toys were, where they came from, and what I’d done to them to bring them to the bent state they were.

I think it was successful, too. There were claps and cheers, and a great number of laughs, which was what I was going for. And when they weren’t laughing or clapping, the audience of about 200 was largely quiet and attentive, which was awesome. At the end I pointed everyone towards this website and told them this was where to get hold of me should they want some noise for their theatre show or pop band. damian[at]frey.co.nz. I’m always here. :-)

And it was a great feeling to make music in public, for the first time in a good while. There’s something about performing: it flushes out one’s brain, cleans out the yucky bits, leaves one feeling grand about the universe again. I forget that, sometimes. That’s most of the reason my tagline is live music with machines, to remind of that.

Joys! I have figured out how to stop getting email spam. I used to get ten an hour and now I’m back down to one or two a day, if that.

Here’s what you do:

• Open a piece of spam. In your email program, set it so that you can view all the headers of the email, not just the standard to, cc, from, and replyto. In Thunderbird you can do this by going View->Headers->All.
• Look for the Received: header. There will probably be a bunch of these lines. Most of the data in them can be and will be faked, so the line you’re looking for is the one that has your email address and your mail server in it. It should look like this:
  Received: from smtp14.orange.fr (smtp14.orange.fr [193.252.23.69]) by [your mail server] with ESMTP id [id] for <your email address>; Wed, 22 Nov 2006 10:32:57 -0800 (PST)
• See the number after smtp14.orange.fr? 193.252.23.69. This is the only piece of data that cannot be faked. It is the IP address of the computer that the spam came from. Copy the number.
• Go to arin.net’s WHOIS search, and enter the number you found above, then click the Search WHOIS button.
• You’ll get a bunch of data, or maybe you’ll be directed on to another database. In this case we have been told to search the RIPE database:
  Comment: These addresses have been further assigned to users in
Comment: the RIPE NCC region. Contact information can be found in
Comment: the RIPE database at http://www.ripe.net/whois
• What you’re looking for is the email address of the administrator of the server that has that IP address. Heading over to the RIPE whois search as directed, we find this:
  inetnum: 193.252.23.64 - 193.252.23.71
netname: MAIL-ESSENTIALS-WANADOO
descr: Projet Mail Essentials
country: FR
admin-c: WITR1-RIPE
tech-c: WITR1-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA "status:" definitions
remarks: for hacking, spamming or security problems send mail to
remarks: abuse@fsmail.net AND abuse@uk.wanadoo.com
mnt-by: FT-BRX
source: RIPE # Filtered.
  In this case we have a nice abuse mailbox. Sometimes there isn’t one, in which case you want to look at the admin-c and tech-c fields (click on the code eg WITR1-RIPE above).
• Once you have an email address to forward the spam too, simply return to the email and forward it as-is to the address, perhaps with a note ‘Abuse to report’ or similar.

And watch the spam dry up and disappear.