frey

i just dug this up out of an old hard drive – it’s for a project for school, back when i was studying eloctroacoustic composition at Victoria University.

MP3

sociocultural meanings

What it does
————

Compresses digital audio signals, allowing them to be transmitted across computer networks with significantly reduced size and thus cost and technological requirements.

Lossy compression format: discards audio information considered ‘unnecessary’ to the faithful reproduction of the sound. Uses a combination of filtering systems and transforms to turn a time-domain signal (PCM waveform) into a frequency-domain signal.

How it is used
————–

digital broadcast

share files

How its function and use translates into sociocultural meaning and potential use in sound art
——————————

Reduced transmission cost radically lowers barriers to entry
- For free, anyone can share anything with anyone from anywhere on the world.
-> crude
-> defenders
-> anne westphalen?
-> sami abu shumays

Collaboration with people around the world
-> exquisite corpse

Complete shift in the relationship between distributors, publishers, and creators. Why go on to iTunes and download music for $1.99 when you can access piles of high-quality music for free?
-> westphalen
-> speakeasy

Access to vast archives
-> wax cylinders
-> intro inspection

Industry fear of this ->
Copyright strengthening, embedding of DRM into technology to support a dying industry
–> lessig
-> christina
-> intro inspection

in popular music, shift to single, unfocussed listening, loss of fan loyalty: complete commodification, further extension of capitalism into music on one hand;
on the other hand, massive democratisation: myspace

Since I couldn’t find this in an easy-to-use format anywhere else, here’s how you use gnuplot to plot a list of numbers sent in with stdin:

(echo plot \"-\" with lines; cat numbers.txt) | gnuplot

numbers.txt is a list of numbers, with or without terminating semicolons. Scientific notation is ok.

(30 minutes later) … and, here’s how to write a pdf graph of each text file in the current directory:

ls *.txt | perl -e 'while(<stdin>) { chomp; system "(echo set term pdf; echo set yrange [-1:1]; echo plot \\\"-\\\" with lines; cat $_ ) | gnuplot > $_.pdf"; }

(and so I don’t lose it, here’s how to generate a whole bunch of testunits:

perl -e 'for ( $i=1; $i<60; $i+=5 ) { for ( $j=$i+1; $j<150; $j*=1.5 ) { print "#X obj ".($i*40)." ".(int($j))." testunit $i-".(int($j))." $i ".(int($j))." senergy;\n"; } } ' > 1.actions/testunits.pd.txt

)

I’ve updated ofxOsc to v0.2 – now with OSC Bundle support. Check it out here.

I’ve added a bunch of documentation about my Wind project, which was developed during a New Interfaces for Performance residency at O Espaço do Tempo. You can read it here.