Peter B "Misophonia" Bio

Peter B is webmaster of ciat-lonbarde.net, where he develops analog synthesizer products, such as "Sidrazzi Organ", "Tetrax Organ", "Plumbutter", and "Cocoquantus". Other activities at ciat-lonbarde.net include paper circuits, free synthesizer designs for various noise/chaotic touch sensitive interfaces. Peter B has conducted workshops in Berlin, Providence, Vancouver, California, Montreal, DC, and Manchester. During a typical workshop, synthesizers are built, either from paper or kitted form. If the synthesizer is installation oriented, such as the "Deerhorn", participants and Peter B then realize it vis a vis the architectural space of the workshop. If the synthesizer is performance oriented, such as "Mr. Grassi" or "Sidrazzi Organ", then there is an ensemble to end the workshop. However, most of Peter B's life form is spent soldering. He is also webmaster of shbobo.net, which produces the new "Shnth", a "squish synthesizer" that uses computer music to emulate the processes of the analog synthesizers.

Peter B, drawn by Angela Guyton

Peter B has misophonia, a psychological condition wherein he reacts uncontrollably to small, human sounds. A typical meal with Peter B will find him agitated and perhaps angry, because he is exposed to chewing sounds, tupperware sounds, or bowl clinking. This condition leaves him stranded in most social situations, a captive of his own anger, who must seek the quiet dark closet at these most important moments. The upside of it, however, is its usefulness to the craft of synthesizer debugging, as it leaves him more attentive to the subtle variations of timbre and distortion and the mechanisms they imply. Misophonia is a rage directed at other people, but it is rare to feel rage at the sounds of a machine, an animal, or a child, whose sounds are "innocent". The trigger is an intimation of habit, gluttony, sin, or perhaps self ignorance, behind another adult's small sounds, and how these sounds are performed in public. Like gum chewing but with every sound it is examined and found faulty in the misophonists mind.

So you can see there are two faces to Peter B; the visionary, looking out through clear and broad glasses; and there is the criticizing, myopic, fearful of sound, looking sallow and spectre like through thick coke bottle spectacles.

Packaging Videos

http://www.youtube.com/user/teraminato

 Through my son watching YouTube, I have become aware of a massive leviathan trend, that of the "opening candy packages" format. Go ahead and search it. It's not commercials for products at all, just this weird kind of candy fans, usually adults, who feel the need to document the ripping of mylar skin and breaking virginity of foils and tubes, like digital trophies, memories of a primal experience of opening intestinal cavities and having sweetmeats that spill out.

You have major personalities, like Teraminato or Leokimvideo, who really like to talk and show off experiments and flashy editing for their purchases.  I think it is a livelihood for them.  Then you have the mellower, hand actors, who like to talk in a hushed voice while displaying the chocolate and candies tumbling out.  The best ones though, are the anonymous hand actors who don't speak.  Some even wear white gloves.  These "instrumental" package openers do a lot of model trains and little model thingies too.  Like special edition "eggs" with a figurine embedded within.

"tarou yamada"

 OK, now that you know what I'm talking about, and maybe you've watched a few, why am I talking about this meme?  Well first of all it's not really a meme, more like a subconscious drift to want to hear the packaging and see it opened in a controlled, almost scientific setting.  For the pure videos, which feature the sound only of the packaging, I realize the wonderful relationship between the microphone of the camera and the object at hand.  The little cameras have perfect fidelity for these sounds: they are actually very fine grained and high frequency, suitable for a small mike.  We all know that mylar generates ultrasound.  The hidden allure of these videos is how they document all the little sounds of the pedestrian:

•  jostling and scrunching a mylar bag
•  little shakes of chalky candies in a paper tube
• the sound of fruit lozenges on a crystal plate
• aluminum foil stripped from a hollow body of chocolate
• gum papers folded according to directions to make a party favor
• an off camera narrator sampling the candy and sucking it stalkingly 
• fumbling with collector tins and their incidental sounds
• styrene: like the sound of crisp fruits, but modernly corn syruped

http://www.youtube.com/user/DisneyCollectorBR

Faces by Kiri

My son created several faces to represent various things.  Here they are:

Kari and Malique as archaeotechno/pinebransch geurillas

starts with PRISM

PRISM: Darpa's total information awareness, to make a massive, anamnesiacal data mine, also gave rise to Manning, who could easily surf agencies interconnects to accumulate a mass of leak material.  He is "manning the machine".  The unstoppable force of surveillance prods us to cast eyes on asia, where the people have been dealing with its forces.  In 80s China, a form of poetry called MengLong- vague and foggy- arose due to censors' frequent perusal of every and all literary magazines to search for explicit displays of anti-party sentiment.  MengLong was a way to create intel content that transcends the smeltable or of trad data mines.  In MengLong, dada and surrealism are the lingo, altho the teleological message may be political in intended receivers; the mass of surreal data is important to highlight PRISM- Darpa- Bush/Obama's essentially scatalogical mission with fluorescent thread.  How can you mine surrealism?  Can you melt down dreams and forge a sword? I recommend everyone practicing daily MengLong tweet, let's phill the prism with pataphysics!

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On my son's 3rd birthday, we are faced with the terrible twos becoming worse as he faces his own ego, embraces it, becomes King, and generally wreaks havoc.  I'm not so sure it can be prevented, but in meditating on it, I wonder how things would be if the 3rd party was somehow austere, like a ceremony, with lessons about the self, zen koans, rather than candy and cake?

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Fish, in English, like "deer" is a tube of paste rather than a countable thing.

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Tom Cruise and his interface. A Utopian interface is a "screen" where all settings, data, or documents can be swiped, massaged with the greatest of ease.  He buys a box of cigs.  How does the utopian interface hold up to a mental map? I write this blog on hotel paper b/c it will be typed anyway, but some of the most important things I prefer to keep unwritten, unnotated, or unlisted.  I paint once in about every four years, if I have accumulated the materials for it, i.e. from art students' trashcans.  I've painted a volcano with animal ghosts fleeing it, a horseman's journey through fox-conifers, and with my son, an abstract cloud/mineral painting depicting our "mica walks", embedded with actual pieces of that rock. Back to the subject at hand: what is a dystopian interface, and i mean cybernetically? Well we won't try to answer that and only say that an interface, no matter how utopian, still cannot hold a candle to a mental map, a thought pattern that is well meditated.  So I prefer to focus on antedated or obsoleted interfaces: Macintosh OSNine, Csound on the command line, the idea of a beige blocky box, a la Corey Arcangel.  Line.  These leave space for the mind to flourish without being completely sapped by interface.  The Shnth as beige blocky box.  Here, beige is made out of sycamore. It is a purely sonic interface, without visuals. It is touched and squished and these gestures change the sound. What visuals are had on host, consist of a tube of fish. shbobo.net