Dick Pountain/Idealog 275/01 June 2017 15:44
I'm sitting at my desk typing the sentence "I've never really been a gadget person" with a waist-high pile of old gadget boxes glowering in my peripheral vision. Nevertheless I stand by my assertion: many of them are years old and relate to photographic rather than computer equipment. I don't see a therapist so can't answer why I keep them: initially rational (might be faulty and need returning), eventually quasi-rational (may become collectors' item so keep the box). By and large though I'm really not. I upgrade my mobile and laptop around once a decade. I have all the camera gear I'll ever need. I don't go in for smart watches, fitbits, digital recorders or the like. Except. I just bought two gadgets to do with music making. Sorry.
In my last column I explored the way modern digital tools affect various creative endeavours, and proposed that a human being always needs to be in the iterative enhancement loop to make aesthetic judgements about when to stop. Well, since then I've taken this argument a few steps further, assisted by my two new gadgets, namely a guitar looper pedal and an Akai MPKmini keyboard. To take the latter first, this keyboard connects to my Lenovo laptop which runs Ableton Live.
Anyone who creates EDM (electronic dance music) will have heard of Ableton, a production-and-performance system in which, as well composing tracks, you can also arrange and perform them like a DJ. I'm not producing EDM myself, but as I've described here before, my interest lies in experimental algorithmic music. Playing the MIDI files my system generates through the Microsoft GS Wavetable synthesiser bundled with Windows is good enough during composition, but its instrument voices aren't really good enough for public consumption, so my more successful efforts I post-compose in Ableton using its superior instruments, and also some AWE32 SoundFonts.
Ableton is a very clever program, developed partly at the University of Berlin using advanced "granular synthesis" theory: it's enormously flexible, mixing sampled audio seamlessly with MIDI, changing tempos while maintaining pitch, its "warp"engine syncs different clips automatically, and much, much more. However it's also one of those mega-programs like PhotoShop, or the 3D animation program Maya, for which a mere human lifespan is too short to find all its (literal) bells and whistles, let alone use them all. I originally chose it because its user interface does *not* imitate a rack full of brushed aluminium knobs and dials: I'm not a sound engineer so that stuff isn't home to me.
My algorithmic music is getting steadily more capable, now displaying far greater rhythmic and dynamic complexity. Shortish passages can sound alarmingly like some six-armed Indian deity playing the piano, but it still has difficulty with long-range structure: pieces longer than three or four minutes tend to betray their mechanical origin. Dividing the code into shorter movements, generated as separate MIDI files, is one way around this, but another is to intervene myself. So thank you FaceBook for showing me that Akai mini ad. For £60 this little beauty, with its 25 keys, 8 pads and 8 knobs is just perfect. I can play a MIDI file in Ableton and overdub parts of it using the keyboard, but better still, map the whole piece onto the Akai so that each key I press sounds a whole multi-instrument phrase in perfect time. When combined with the Akai's built-in arpeggiator this makes for terrifying displays of orchestral pseudo-virtuosity that I may one day inflict on the unsuspecting public if they don't behave themselves.
And what about my other gadget? That belongs in the curious domain between the analog and the digital, a tiny Donner looper pedal that records two separate tracks of guitar of 10 minutes duration via a foot button. The guitar rig I've built up over the years incorporates a 10W Marshall practice amp with a variety of effects, a vintage Zoom digital drum machine and a micro-mixer, all feeding into this new looper. I can now generate some unfeasibly complicated algorithmic/orchestral backing track in Ableton, output it to a WAV file on my tablet and plug that into the mixer, then play live guitar over it. Or I can snitch a few seconds of bass from my favourite Dave Holland album on Spotify, into the looper, and put some drums onto it played with my fingers on the Zoom's pads. The looper has built-in reverse and speed-up effects so I can pretend to be in one of Bill Frisell's great trios, if only for a few minutes. Virtual Reality isn't the only way of using digital technology to live in a make-believe world, and you don't bump into things so often in a sound world...
Wednesday 1 November 2017
WHEN TO STOP
Dick Pountain/Idealog 274/05 May 2017 11:06
You're probably familiar with the expression "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but what exactly do you think it means? The obvious interpretation is relativist: what I find beautiful need not be what you find beautiful. But we could also take it literally, namely that beauty is property of, or a process within, the human eye (or visual cortex, or brain in general) rather than a property of external objects.
My two main "hobbies", regularly chronicled in this column, are fiddling with photographs in PhotoShop Elements 5, and composing algorithmic music using my own software recently rewritten in Python. What these activities have in common is firstly that they are both pursued on a computer, and secondly that they are both iterative in nature: I make a change, look at it or listen to it, decide whether or not it's for the better or the worse, accept or reject it, then make another, and so on until I'm sufficiently satisfied to stop and call it a finished "work".
You may have already spotted that this is the very same process practiced by artists of all eras, on all materials and in all styles - with one exception made possible by the computer and the digital nature of its material. That exception is that in most real-world materials, the step changes are irreversible. That's most clearly true for a sculptor who chisels off chips of marble that can't be replaced, but partially so for an oil painter who applies daubs that can't be removed, only overpainted, or a water colourist who lacks even that option. Writers, before the advent of word-processing, had recourse to crossing-out, the india rubber, Tippex or the waste-paper basket. None of that matters so much as does the end point of the process, knowing when to stop, and in this the computer hinders rather than helps.
That tempting Undo icon means I could go on fiddling with the same piece until death, or the heat-death of the universe (whichever comes first). There is a defence against such runaway fiddling though, and that's the number of parameters involved. When processing a photo I have available 120+ filters, 23 blend modes and 20 other adjustments that, when applied even to just two layers, makes for 3 billion possible combinations per iteration, and I make dozens of iterations. Documenting all the parameters for each step, to make the whole process reproducable, would be impossibly tedious, but in any case I don't want to. I'm happy to play on the same level field as Michelangelo and Beethoven, even if my game is far less impressive.
Playing on the same field is another way of saying that it's our eyes, ears, arms, legs, brains that decide when to stop, the decision that creates what we call beauty. (Actually it's noses and tongues too, if you're prepared, as I am, to include cooking and perfumery as arts). This ability to know when to stop may have been hard-wired into our brains by evolution. Animal brains contain many pattern analysing circuits, some imparted by evolution, some further trained by early experience. On the evolutionary side it's been suggested that colour vision offered a dietary advantage in distinguishing ripe from unripe fruit (many carnivores lack it), and it's also deeply involved in sexual display, and hence selection, particularly among birds and insects.
When Pablo Picasso drew a freehand squiggle it always looked better than my own squiggles, and I propose that's a matter of radii of curvature: some curves are right and some are wrong (too acute, jerky). In other words some curves are just sexier than others, and I'll leave the evolutionary "explanation" to you. We could analyse this mathematically using line integrals, div, grad and curl, but that would be pointless. Our pattern circuits are connected to our limbic system, source of emotions, that is, of dopamine reward. No amount of maths can substitute for looking, then feeling good at what you see.
Another possible evolutionary advantage of curve sensing is for landscape recognition. I used to spend time in a small croft near the sea in northern Scotland, where the seaward skyscape was dominated by seven distinctive humps of hills that we, of course, called the Seven Sisters. I can still imagine that shape if I close my eyes, leading me to hypothesise that this ability to recognise your home landscape may have had great survival advantage in the epochs before roads, church steeples or GPS. To zealots of strong AI, I'll just say this: we might analyse all such sensual recognitions and turn them into algorithms, but so far there's no way that a computer can *feel* good, and without that it can't have any real understanding of what beauty is.
You're probably familiar with the expression "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but what exactly do you think it means? The obvious interpretation is relativist: what I find beautiful need not be what you find beautiful. But we could also take it literally, namely that beauty is property of, or a process within, the human eye (or visual cortex, or brain in general) rather than a property of external objects.
My two main "hobbies", regularly chronicled in this column, are fiddling with photographs in PhotoShop Elements 5, and composing algorithmic music using my own software recently rewritten in Python. What these activities have in common is firstly that they are both pursued on a computer, and secondly that they are both iterative in nature: I make a change, look at it or listen to it, decide whether or not it's for the better or the worse, accept or reject it, then make another, and so on until I'm sufficiently satisfied to stop and call it a finished "work".
You may have already spotted that this is the very same process practiced by artists of all eras, on all materials and in all styles - with one exception made possible by the computer and the digital nature of its material. That exception is that in most real-world materials, the step changes are irreversible. That's most clearly true for a sculptor who chisels off chips of marble that can't be replaced, but partially so for an oil painter who applies daubs that can't be removed, only overpainted, or a water colourist who lacks even that option. Writers, before the advent of word-processing, had recourse to crossing-out, the india rubber, Tippex or the waste-paper basket. None of that matters so much as does the end point of the process, knowing when to stop, and in this the computer hinders rather than helps.
That tempting Undo icon means I could go on fiddling with the same piece until death, or the heat-death of the universe (whichever comes first). There is a defence against such runaway fiddling though, and that's the number of parameters involved. When processing a photo I have available 120+ filters, 23 blend modes and 20 other adjustments that, when applied even to just two layers, makes for 3 billion possible combinations per iteration, and I make dozens of iterations. Documenting all the parameters for each step, to make the whole process reproducable, would be impossibly tedious, but in any case I don't want to. I'm happy to play on the same level field as Michelangelo and Beethoven, even if my game is far less impressive.
Playing on the same field is another way of saying that it's our eyes, ears, arms, legs, brains that decide when to stop, the decision that creates what we call beauty. (Actually it's noses and tongues too, if you're prepared, as I am, to include cooking and perfumery as arts). This ability to know when to stop may have been hard-wired into our brains by evolution. Animal brains contain many pattern analysing circuits, some imparted by evolution, some further trained by early experience. On the evolutionary side it's been suggested that colour vision offered a dietary advantage in distinguishing ripe from unripe fruit (many carnivores lack it), and it's also deeply involved in sexual display, and hence selection, particularly among birds and insects.
When Pablo Picasso drew a freehand squiggle it always looked better than my own squiggles, and I propose that's a matter of radii of curvature: some curves are right and some are wrong (too acute, jerky). In other words some curves are just sexier than others, and I'll leave the evolutionary "explanation" to you. We could analyse this mathematically using line integrals, div, grad and curl, but that would be pointless. Our pattern circuits are connected to our limbic system, source of emotions, that is, of dopamine reward. No amount of maths can substitute for looking, then feeling good at what you see.
Another possible evolutionary advantage of curve sensing is for landscape recognition. I used to spend time in a small croft near the sea in northern Scotland, where the seaward skyscape was dominated by seven distinctive humps of hills that we, of course, called the Seven Sisters. I can still imagine that shape if I close my eyes, leading me to hypothesise that this ability to recognise your home landscape may have had great survival advantage in the epochs before roads, church steeples or GPS. To zealots of strong AI, I'll just say this: we might analyse all such sensual recognitions and turn them into algorithms, but so far there's no way that a computer can *feel* good, and without that it can't have any real understanding of what beauty is.
A GLINT OF CHROME
Dick Pountain/Idealog 273/07 April 2017 11:19
Taking on a new computing platform was furthest from my mind, but it just happened anyway. I'm still basically wedded to Windows (albeit in v8.1) which I've wrestled to a stalemate that works well enough, only needing a reboot around once a quarter. For mobile I'm equally wedded to Android, via my 7" Asus tablet and HTC smartphone, with Google providing the interface between the three devices via Gmail, Contacts, Calendar and the beloved Keep, plus a little help from Dropbox. But now they are four...
PC Pro's publisher, Dennis Publishing Ltd, is on the last lap of preparing to move office, after 20+ years, from one 1930s block in London's Fitzrovia to a smaller one nearby. The new offices are extensively refurbished, very much in Silicon Valley style with lots of wide-open meeting and relaxation spaces and almost no horrid "open-plan" partitions. The CEO of Dennis Publishing is James Tye, whom regular readers may remember was once Editor of this very magazine and is hence very IT-savvy. When deciding the IT infrastructure for the new building, James chose one as radical as the interior design: as many staff as possible would be issued with Chromebooks in place of PCs, and the company LAN mostly replaced by The Cloud. There are necessary exceptions, like the accounts department which still needs its servers and software suite, and the designers who still need Macs to run Indesign, but the LAN will cease to be the main data store for everyone else, and most internal communication will be via Slack, Gmail and Google Drive.
They're buying upwards of 200 HP Chromebooks, whose 12+ hour battery life makes entirely wireless working feasible (the building has designed-in Wi-Fi with three incoming fibre lines for redundant backup) so people can work in places other than their desks. During a tour I expressed admiration for this brave leap into The Cloud, but though curious about Chromebooks, I stressed my Android/Windows devotion. James immediately and generously offered to loan me a Chromebook to see for myself whether they do everything I need.
What arrived wasn't an HP but a Dell 13, purchased during their evaluation phase, with a smart illuminated keyboard and magnesium chassis. Spec isn't everything in a Chromebook since much of the oomph is supplied at Google's end, but this one does look and feel good, with Gorilla Glass screen and trackpad that are noticeably superior to my own Lenovo Yoga. More disconcerting was turning it on to a practically blank screen. On closer inspection there was an unlabelled round icon in the lower left-hand corner that brought up the Google app launcher, familiar from my other devices, containing the Chrome browser, Gmail, Maps, Calendar , Translate, Keep and all. More surprisingly there were also several of my mobile apps - Guitarists Reference, GIF Maker, The Guardian and Pocket - that I'd assumed that as Android apps I'd have to replace. Of course all my calendar, contacts and Google documents were there already, which is the whole point.
After a couple of weeks I'm writing this on the Chromebook, in a Google Docs editor that’s just as responsive as the LibreOffice Word or TextPad I normally use. What still drives me mad though is the absence of a Delete key: you have to use Alt-Backspace which my brain knows but my fingers don’t (and perhaps never will). My brain on the other hand has difficulties with the Chrome OS file system, whose use of "download" and "upload" is the opposite of what I mean and deeply counterintuitive. I've put up a lot of my data on Google Drive, but still find it harder to navigate than Windows. I know I should just create and store all new stuff in the Cloud, but as a crusty product of the PC revolution I need to know stuff is on my local hard drive too.
What I do most, apart from writing, is process my photographs and program in Python, so how do these fare on Chromebook? After trying dozens of photo editor extensions, Sumo Paint has about 75% of the Photoshop Elements features that I need, though it's unfashionably Flash-based. As for Python, I can run small modules on the Skulpt interpreter Chrome extension, but it won't import all the modules of my large music project. For that I'd need a full Python 3.4 implementation which means either installing a Linux distro, or running Android apps (QPython) which the Dell won't do by default so I'd need to switch to unstable beta-developers' mode. Both are tech hassles I can do without. Google is really missing a trick with its failure properly to integrate Chrome OS with Android, because that combination could really give Apple and Microsoft sleepness nights.
Taking on a new computing platform was furthest from my mind, but it just happened anyway. I'm still basically wedded to Windows (albeit in v8.1) which I've wrestled to a stalemate that works well enough, only needing a reboot around once a quarter. For mobile I'm equally wedded to Android, via my 7" Asus tablet and HTC smartphone, with Google providing the interface between the three devices via Gmail, Contacts, Calendar and the beloved Keep, plus a little help from Dropbox. But now they are four...
PC Pro's publisher, Dennis Publishing Ltd, is on the last lap of preparing to move office, after 20+ years, from one 1930s block in London's Fitzrovia to a smaller one nearby. The new offices are extensively refurbished, very much in Silicon Valley style with lots of wide-open meeting and relaxation spaces and almost no horrid "open-plan" partitions. The CEO of Dennis Publishing is James Tye, whom regular readers may remember was once Editor of this very magazine and is hence very IT-savvy. When deciding the IT infrastructure for the new building, James chose one as radical as the interior design: as many staff as possible would be issued with Chromebooks in place of PCs, and the company LAN mostly replaced by The Cloud. There are necessary exceptions, like the accounts department which still needs its servers and software suite, and the designers who still need Macs to run Indesign, but the LAN will cease to be the main data store for everyone else, and most internal communication will be via Slack, Gmail and Google Drive.
They're buying upwards of 200 HP Chromebooks, whose 12+ hour battery life makes entirely wireless working feasible (the building has designed-in Wi-Fi with three incoming fibre lines for redundant backup) so people can work in places other than their desks. During a tour I expressed admiration for this brave leap into The Cloud, but though curious about Chromebooks, I stressed my Android/Windows devotion. James immediately and generously offered to loan me a Chromebook to see for myself whether they do everything I need.
What arrived wasn't an HP but a Dell 13, purchased during their evaluation phase, with a smart illuminated keyboard and magnesium chassis. Spec isn't everything in a Chromebook since much of the oomph is supplied at Google's end, but this one does look and feel good, with Gorilla Glass screen and trackpad that are noticeably superior to my own Lenovo Yoga. More disconcerting was turning it on to a practically blank screen. On closer inspection there was an unlabelled round icon in the lower left-hand corner that brought up the Google app launcher, familiar from my other devices, containing the Chrome browser, Gmail, Maps, Calendar , Translate, Keep and all. More surprisingly there were also several of my mobile apps - Guitarists Reference, GIF Maker, The Guardian and Pocket - that I'd assumed that as Android apps I'd have to replace. Of course all my calendar, contacts and Google documents were there already, which is the whole point.
After a couple of weeks I'm writing this on the Chromebook, in a Google Docs editor that’s just as responsive as the LibreOffice Word or TextPad I normally use. What still drives me mad though is the absence of a Delete key: you have to use Alt-Backspace which my brain knows but my fingers don’t (and perhaps never will). My brain on the other hand has difficulties with the Chrome OS file system, whose use of "download" and "upload" is the opposite of what I mean and deeply counterintuitive. I've put up a lot of my data on Google Drive, but still find it harder to navigate than Windows. I know I should just create and store all new stuff in the Cloud, but as a crusty product of the PC revolution I need to know stuff is on my local hard drive too.
What I do most, apart from writing, is process my photographs and program in Python, so how do these fare on Chromebook? After trying dozens of photo editor extensions, Sumo Paint has about 75% of the Photoshop Elements features that I need, though it's unfashionably Flash-based. As for Python, I can run small modules on the Skulpt interpreter Chrome extension, but it won't import all the modules of my large music project. For that I'd need a full Python 3.4 implementation which means either installing a Linux distro, or running Android apps (QPython) which the Dell won't do by default so I'd need to switch to unstable beta-developers' mode. Both are tech hassles I can do without. Google is really missing a trick with its failure properly to integrate Chrome OS with Android, because that combination could really give Apple and Microsoft sleepness nights.
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