Mental Map of Integer Computer Operators

In celebration of the coming arrival of my good friend Ezra Buchla on campusius, I will present a mental map of integer computer operations.  They are the candy of DSP.  Ezra has built a sound computer using blackfin, which he says is fixed point, I think he said at 32.32...  A gigabyte of frac pernt!  Floating point is going obsolete because it causes too much heat.  Meanwhile fixed point, which is old, can also be new.  Aleph Sound Computer.  Shnth.  Roulette::Mixology Festival::NYC::February 8 and 8+1.  Ezra lectures in SuperCollider class on integers math in the Aleph.

The mental map is on the first floor of the BMA, Baltimore Museum of Art.  It occurs in my dreams but also when thinking about algorithms during the day.  It is like a transparent overlay over the math.   It takes the form of a gift shop, lit well with fluorescent lights, but it is not the gift shop of the BMA, which sells postcards and cutesy Baltimore paraphernalia.  Instead, it is more like the giftshop of a science museum: crystal growing kits, bug boxes, maybe some sea monkeys.  One other point about the giftshop mental map: it is not in the actual floor location of the BMA giftshop, but rather it occupies the area where African and Native American artefacts can be seen; their faded leather geometries and totemic forms transmute into hypercolor plastic toys for science boys and tomboys. 

This mental map can be seen when figuring basic integer dsp algorithms mentally, such as random number generators, bit shift operations, arithmetic and logic, fixed point multiplication, which provides for intergrators and thus resonators, mechanical triangle wave oscillators, and my favorite derivative of that: the nume deno oscillator.

Microcottage @ Connecticut attic

 A microcottage is an entity, constructed for the purpose of cottage industry.
It will appropriate unused space, such as this unheated attic with asbestos floor tiles...  It has a skylight for day work, no water, so it must be brought up.

 The soldering and prototyping area consists of found lawn furniture and other student items, a fan, storage of components and circuit boards, and glue!

Micro cottage now has a cnc machine for rapid construction of quality wood items.  It is a Probotix, run by mach3 on XP.   The code is generated programmatically in Ruby.

 A programming area with various wood species scattered.

 Inside the dust room, you can see various stocks leaning against the wall.  Ciat Lonbarde uses the laminated hardwoods technique to achieve maximum stability and stripiness.

Bed for dog naps and consulting with health insurance professionals.

My Paper on misinterpretation, ancient tunings, ends with paper circuit

First in a series of papers talking about philosophical underpinnings of circuit making and tuning:
Importance of Unrecorded Music

Sidrax and axe

Just finished a big work: updating the sidrazzi organ to become the "sidrax" shown in the bottom of the picture.  Its syntax is similar to the "tetrax" which has 6 bananas for each bar:

• two orange outputs represent a voltage readout of the push and pull exerted on the bar.
• two green inputs are the glitchifiers for each oscillator
• one blue input is fm modulation for each oscillator
• one red output is the triangle wave output for each oscillator

In addition, there are gray inputs on the sidrax: one for each knob master pitch and master chaos.  The chaos response is updated to be more subtle, with many grains and whirlpools on the way to complete noise.  Each bar now has the long desired, simple slider pitch control rather than a button.  This allows a lot more control of the individual tones and also to set up situations where there is a composed arrangement of low and high tones.

Also pictured, in the middle, is the new "axe" which can be a combination of tet, sid, and on and on, to make one nice self contained organ, like in church!

Ordering

Shinth History High Zero 2013

Frontispiece for shinth lecture.

As High Zero 2013 approaches the geography of Baltimore, I am summoned to prepare lecture notes for a workshop there, on the Shnth handheld squish synthesizer.  I visit the squash courts of my college in order to gain inspiration but only gain a headache.  However, this reminds me of my collegiate pursual of another courted sport in the past, the sport of racquetball.  For I am not a noncoach of this sport, that of the blue balls that bounce around the room at high velocities, requiring all the inbuilt jerk processing of the human brane to comprehend where it may go next and how to act.  This pursual of intuition was essential in developing the idea of the Shinth, and also a hatred of knobs.  

Phirst let me back up and point out something essential in this discussion, that it is the history of a synthesized word.  The word, "shinth" was initially composed of "shit" and "synth", and was not self deprecating at all.  Rather, it was to point out the glory of thrown away sounds, of alley trash, and yes, of broken fart systems from too much ham.  Later, as this history will point out, the word was appropriated for a digital synthesizer, the "shnth".  Here, with the loss of the vowel "i", it carried a different synthesized meaning.  It is more derived from the abstract sound meaning of the consonant "sh"; the sound of data like as heard on the old modem connections, programs and instructions transmitted at high speed over wires which sounds like the noise produced by the mouth in this consonant.  The rest of the word, "nth", besides carrying the implication of synthesis, also was found to suggest, the idea of discrete numbers; the variable "n" and its cardinality "nth" is used in quantum physics to refer to quantum numbers, which are not gray but integers that express key properties subatomically.  The Shnth of 2013 uses only integer math to synthesize a wide range of classic sounds, including triangle waves, granular synthesis, filters, water, "horses", and strings. 

Now let us set the clock back as far as possible to see where the shinth came from.  In Providence, after a tour of synthesizers and simple string instruments and gongs, I began a process of building my first "rollable synthesizer".  The rollable synthesizer is a theme that I came back to over the years, and it hangs on the wall to be played but also to be experienced as a convenient, and pretty sound installation.  It features the wiring and also exposed circuit boards that synthesizer art cherishes. 

Playing the rollable synth, hanging from a log

The design of the rollable synthesizer I found to be quite pleasing.  Inspired by a high school art history project, where I was chosen by Mr. Hudenberg to write a paper on Jackson Pollock plus recreate one of his art pieces, or shall I say I received Jackson Pollock by chance operation of picking his name out of a hat.  It was a great assignment, because Pollocks work is actually really fun to recreate and has a great ability to hang on the wall, and embellish canvas in a modern, non representational way.  Finding some historical house paint in a Providence dumpster: colors matched to the 200 year old houses added an extra twist of locating the piece in the place it was built.  Later pieces made in Baltimore used more funky, ghettotastic colors.  The rollable synthesizer had an extra merit, or shall we say it was designed to fill a need, for a portable synthesizer that had presence.  Hung on the wall or other mechanism, the performer in a wonderful, upright position rather than stooping over gear.  Then rolled to pack away neatly.

Rolled up

In retrospect the rollability is least important, however the hangability brought out unseen new dimensions of interface.  The ability to watch a synthesizer like a piece of art, and as I said play it in a standing position, brought out great possibilities for using the sound in space without having the sound object in the center; later with my wife this was used to great effect in dance pieces. 

Having given some history of the form of the rollable synthesizer, I would like to now point out its role in the prehistory of the shinth.  A reading of Deleuze convinced me of the importance of the plane of rhizomality, where circuits interact on an equal footing and not in hierarchical ways.   The rollable synthesizer was a first step to achieving this rhizomality, by abstracting connections into a wordless space.  Although the formal connection points were classed into a binary category, either input and output, the goal was to eventually obfuscate this distinction by making every point both an input and output.  This is an idea passed on to me by Twig Harper, who would later play the shinth in a tour. 

Another prefigure of the rollable synthesizer is that its circuit boards were exposed "trace side out", and could be played circuit bent by touching with fingers.  This reflects my first foray into formalizing circuit bending.  I loved the people involved in it, and the creative, DIY culture around it, but I had a personal problem with using toys for it.  I wanted to make instruments that were designed for that modality, along with all the previous modalities of traditional synthesis, such as patching.  Thus an important initial fact was that they were to be played by hand, not circuit broken with metal, but only bent by human flesh.

One final thing about the rollable synthesizer: it was a collection of twittering modules. Paul Klee's painting, "Twittering Machine", is the inspiration here, and it has also been reproduced verbatim in Deleuze's Thousand Plateaus.  It is key because it offers an aesthetic of machines as beautiful multiplicity, not threatening but also not quite under the complete control of humans.  Rather we can crank the machine and watch it perform wonderful intricate movements.  It's not like we're programming it or texting it, it's more like we have a visceral interface with it.  The crank may seem mechanical, but I can offer a short metaphor to heal that: my dog when I was a kid, you could crank his tail around and that would "wind him up" and he would run around being the spanky little thing that he was.  The rollable synthesizer was a collection of twittering modules, and this means that each was trying to not be a monolithic synth module, like a VCO, but rather things more idiosyncratic, and the difference between modules was more like the difference between birds; there is an inner organic feeling difference rather than a purely rational function.

So here we have the groundwork for the Shinth: visceral touchability, twittering machines, and perhaps the idea of alternative playing postures.  The Shinth proper, was the proposal for a grant in 2003 from the Daniel Langlois Fondation pour L'art la Science et la Technologie.  In it, I described wanting to build a synthesizer conducive to intuition, by touching.  The shinth would not require any patching on the part of the user, since the twittering machines within were wired together on an inner, organalog surface.  The outer surface, in the non traditional format of "trace side out", could be touched to inject electronic noise into ones body, and it is this noise that could be heard by putting metal spoon in mouth which was connected to amplifier.  The Shinth was and still is dangerous, and brings up images of the electric chair.  Current is passed through the body.  Later ideas eliminated the spoon, however potent the analogy may have been.

Twig Harper plays Shinth

The Shinth was "marketed" to the burgeoning noise community of the naughts.  We had a tour across the continent of U.S., being stopped several times by the authorities.  Hard electronic noises were had, but it was also found that subtle ones could be brought out by softer touch.  No really, it wasn't actually marketed.  However, the opportunity to make the shinth brought out a twist in my life that started my business in making analog synths, often based on some notion of touchability.  I found, during the tour, that I could put the shinth out with a tape recorder and blank, 5 minute tapes, and audience members could make their own mixtape of shinth sounds.  The spoon and touch interface was easy to pick up and offered instant gratification with twittering machine sounds.

Chol plays Shinth

Now I have presented the historical shinth.  Many other prototypes of this touchable concept were developed in intervening years.  The Din Datin Dudero took this controversial, and dangerous "trace side out" circuit board and added a layer of wood around it.  The wood protected user and synth from breakage at critical nodes, and allowed curating of the most important sandrodes, or "androgynous nodes", to bring them to the surface for playing with hands, wires, or even worms.  Fourses and Fyrall were "coffee table versions" of the Din Datin Dudero.  They all used some version of the infinitely touchable brass node which projects from a wooden chassis.  Later I made analog organs with flexible bars to control the envelope, kindof like the function of the spoon but with much greater expression and noise elimination.  But even with the bars, there was always a sort of electronically touchable interface, using brass nodes.  I also created several paper circuits like "Mr. Grassi", which used touchable brass nodes to trigger harsh but very diverse noise sounds, like a simplified shinth for 5 year old boys. 

Then in 2010, I met Steve Korn and he asked, "what about a digital version of all this work?".  For a while we were naming it "chub", because I had a habit of calling all "chubby" USB devices that name.  But of course there are problems with that word, and in the search for a new word, we took the shinth because of all the touchability ideas, and the idea of containing a twittering machine, and changed it, as I said above, to accomodate the new idea of digital synthesis.  Now we can proceed with the tutorial on programming the shinth, using shlisp, in a graphical environment, called "Fish".

Mental Map of Paper Topics

I had a dream, I was looking for a paper topic.  First, I was looking for my computer, to do some programming, then I gave up because it was all the way on the westside.  Then I was wandering on the streets of North Baltimore, trying to figure out how to use my time before picking up my son at the daycare.  Walked by a funny conversation in the street, on "what crickets eat" versus what other small animals eat, like frogs.  I gave up on picking up my son early at the daycare, and I went to the public library.  There I decided I was looking for a book, one that I already had: "Music in Greek and Roman Culture, by Giovanni Comotti".  Wandering through the mouldering stacks, I gave up on finding this tome, and then decided to at least sit down at one of the nice windows terminal computers and type some text.  Searching the library, most computers were used.  Some ice hockey dudes were eating subs at one.  Likewise, lacrosse chicks were gossiping over sprained ankles at another.  One had some computer code on it but its user was absent, I imagine he had long red hair.  Actually many computers had projects going but users absent; I interpret this is a metaphor for my own multiple projects at various stages of fermentation or fallow.  A few students, perhaps chemistry majors, were typing furiously at microsoft word.  What were they saying, it obviously wasn't facebook but how can you write a paper so fast without taking it personally?  I guess you can always write a letter to your boyfriend as an official microsoft document too...  Searching the whole library, I could not find a terminal.  Until I almost gave up and was just about out the door, dwelling on its threshold where the office plants are in the tiled atrium, near the help desk; this is where I spied one free computer, that no one had claimed because it was probably to close to the aging librarians at checkout.  I thought, maybe I should ask these librarians for a hard diskette, like from the nineties.  Like in a dream, one showed up right in front of the computer; I didn't need to ask for it!  So I sat down, no excuse but to type: I googled "Ancient Greek Music" and got some results that were in Italian, in Greek.  Now this is where the dream ends, because it was a useful dream, the kind that is a process to a waking state of new knowledge.  I didn't even have to type anything into that computer in the public library.  The dream was about giving up, not deciding, letting computers and books go fallow,  listening to the subconscious environment, and creating a Mental Map of neighborhood streets and public library to wander in, so I could wake up with a paper topic: "The Application of Ancient Music to Electronic Music".  Chapters:

1. Personal History, making musical instruments inspired by the ancient ones.  On misinterpretation: we truly have no "recordings" of the ancients, and why this is important.
2. Ancient Music and analog synthesis.  Sounds to imitate nature, such as crickets, frogs.  Lessons on the platonic way to play a synth.
3. Ancient Music and computer music.  Tunings as theorized and transmitted by the ancients: Plato, Pythagoras, Archilochus.  Misinterpretation part II: Kathleen Schlesinger, Harry Partch.

On Creating a "Game"

I have to write a "game".  A computer game to be exact.  A squishable computer game to be super exact.  One that gives the ethos of Mario to my new product, the Shnth.  You see, Mario was the game that came with the console, nintendo.  MikeyWalker, as you shall see this game is called, is the game that comes with the console, the shnth.  Now I will begin by disclaiming that this article will be derivation heavy.  In fact, every word or symbol is to be examined historically, strictly.  First, the back story is "Mario", from "Mars, the god of war"; that is appropriate because usually, up until the computer game "myst", games are all about warfare.  Mario headbutts and stomps, but it is basically war against koopas.  Also part of the back story is "nintendo", meaning, "the way of waiting patiently for heaven".  A company established way back in 1889, when it did not have computers, but instead painted cards, hanafuda, for playing games.  The cards were pretty and flowery, but the game was in fact based on probability and other things useful things for Mario.  Also, the idea of painted cards was reincarnated in Macintosh's hypercard stack idea, and in general the idea of buffering graphics. 
But mostly i am sitting on the porch, still, asking the question, "what is a game?".  It has a player, who usually would sit in the middle, who punches monsters, no?  What is a monster?

Monstro Monstrare Monstravi Monstratus

Monster, of course, comes from latin.  It simply means: to show.  Or, the idea that a monster is a physical manifestation, "a showing" of an abstract fear.  Probably the first incarnation of "monster" was in Pinocchio, whose final challenge was Monstro the whale.  Monstro actually was not a villian in that he did not eat those who were helpless; he needed to eat food to survive. At Shbobo, our goal is not to show you fear, but to show you synthesis and perhaps some quantum mechanics.  So, this term, "monster", can in fact be repurposed here.  It will mean, some sort of operator that MikeyWalker can punch to resonate a synthetic tone. 
Punching, unfortunately, cannot be eliminated.  it is the ultimate squishable violent action.  Unlike a gun, which is triggered by binary action, punching can be hard, soft, jiggly, etc.  The energy of punching is transferred through MikeyWalker's toonhands into the "monster", whom we shall describe more of.

Chubes 

Mikey's enemies are chubes.  That means that they are composed of hard edges, vertices, in a quadrangular arrangement.  Quadrangles: square, rectangle, parallelogram, trapezoid, rhombus, and of course, the kite.  These can all be seen as rovibrational squishes of the square or rectangle.  Rovibrational implies that the worldview seen by Mikey can be rotated, but that the monsters walk on cartesian paths.  Mikey is a nomad, and an atom.  His enemies dwell on the striations of his world.  It is a series of library rooms, each containing generated chubes.  Chubes are square, whilst Mikey is organoform:

The goal is to punch the chubes in rhythm with their natural resonance, derived from their shape, width and thickness.  Then they fall over and moulder there, becoming an edible shroom of recycled data for Mikey to grow with.  You see, the analogy is that of humans always striving to be more than their machine, a la the Matrix.  But here, we not only conquer the machine, we can eat it after our allies the fungus reprocess it.  Vis a vis fungi that can eat oil, PCBs. 

"On any particular axis..."

So goes a line from Feymann's introduction to physics, about quantum spin.  You see, spin is integral no matter what axis you measure it on, as proven in the SternGorlach experiment.  That was to be the key to how Mikey works without openGL.  As of august, 2013, I was to write this game exclusively in Juce, with monsters as a simple square component that resonates in width and height.  But due to overtaxing of CPU, application of AffineTransform is out of the question, also in light of the fact that CPU is generating synthesizer sounds from each monster: showing us the sound of the enemy.  So, no monsters are tilted.  But this contrasts with the firstperson idea of Mikey, who waddles through the world rovibrationally, inducing that the world must rotate around him.  Two solutions: use openGL and do a smart mesh of vertices for the worlds of chubes encountered; or keep chubes always in the normal axis and read them as a quantum experimenter does: as a probability wave in the axis in question.  Would bring up some strange physics, but that is our goal at Shbobo, no?  Basically would have the broken nineties computer game feel of things stuck to the x and y axis, with no GPU unit installed. 

Conclusion

Either use SDL, a lightweight C framework, and openGL 2d meshes for a classical MikeyWalker program, or Juce and no GL for a radical, but broken seeming quantum MikeyWalker.  He must also be able to upload his theme to the shnth: transcribe Mario's theme with its intense quintuplet syncopation and mutate based on the organoform:martian:rectilinear motif.
All worlds must be scriptable: they have a moon.  Is Lua a good language?  It seems so, if I were to do what I was told, that Lua is good.  It is compact, and I listen to other's opinions.  I guess Ruby would be too big, because rooms of chubes don't really need radical OOP.  Lua means moon.   We'll leave it at that for the moment, and come back to this as development progresses.  I guess I'll leave with a few keywords of files on my desktop: SoManyJaggedShards, an "abstract game" by Neil Moody, that uses openGL and SDL with many rotations and object oriented "monsters"; lua; Juce; SDL; chubes use the wave equation or harmonic oscillator; worlds use the hanafuda concept mixed with the idea of "moons".