EMUSIC-L Digest Volume 10, Number 4 Today's Topics: "Magnetic Filings" - Views & Reviews (3 messages) Unplanned soundtracks and 8-track request Standardized synth bus proposal Atari AT MIDI programming questions (3 messages) Quadraverb sys-ex data request Acknowlegements (2 messages) D-50 modification questions Your EMUSIC-L Digest moderator is Joe McMahon . You may subscribe to EMUSIC-L by sending mail to listserv@american.edu with the line "SUB EMUSIC-L your name" as the text. The EMUSIC-L archive is a service of SunSite (sunsite.unc.edu) at the University of North Carolina. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 22 Nov 89 14:33:00 EST From: Chris Iverson Subject: Re: The tape comments Here's another collective post of impressions of (and responses to impressions of) Magnetic Filings, hereafter known as 'the tape': I've been listening to the tape virtually every morning and evening during the drive to and from work, which subjects my spouse, with whom I carpool, to music which she otherwise would not listen to. The first day I picked her up after work (with the tape already playing), she said 'Hmm, that's different..' The second day I picked her up (with the tape already playing), she said 'Oh, listening to *that* stuff again, huh?'. The third day, same scenario, she said nothing, but gave me one of those looks which prompted me to turn on the radio instead. (sigh) I guess normal folx aren't ready for us EMUSIC musicians yet.. I, on the other hand, continue to be impressed by the tape, more so with every listening. Ctan's comment on 'THE RAFT' that there is more to be found with each time through applies to every piece on there. BTW, ctan, if you fall asleep to the sounds of 'DIGITIZED HORSES', I bet you have some wierd dreams. I liked the printer sample, too, but didn't recognize it as an Imagewriter (I or II?). Actually, I played this one specifically for my wife (since she is a horse person): got another one of those looks...oh,well, *I* liked it, anyway. Funny thing, after saying that MEDITATIONS OF THE MONK was hard to grok, I found it stuck in my head for two full days. The more I listen to it, the more I like it. Wierd, but interesting. (somebody tune that guitar!) Nick, the reason I said SUDSTERN was a nice piece of art was because when I listen to it I 'see' the music as if it was a series of images on canvas. I'm not really sure I can explain it very well, but your piece and THE RAFT evoked definite images in my mind when I listened to them (and not always the same images on subsequent listenings). Most of the other cuts on the tape hit me on a purely emotional level, but yours and David Mantripp's had very strong imagery (IMHO), hence my comment about art. Jari, thanks for the compliment. You are correct in assuming that there was alot of difficulty involved in doing WADITIS real-time on a four-track. The original tune was written about 13 years ago (and was performed at a New Year's Eve concert by my band as a warmup act for Steppenwolf, believe it or not), so I had lots of time to come up with frills and crap to stick into it. The actual recording that is on the tape took close to 40 hours of "studio" time to complete, even more if I include retakes because of engineering stupidity (I engineered it myself, of course) like accidentally erasing the entire left channel when punching in for a solo part. I think I spent a few hours just tweaking the bass part to get it to sound 'just right', only to lose all that to the degradation in sound quality from ping-ponging the tracks around so much (bass part? you mean there's a bass part in there?). Just wait until I get my Proteus/U-220/Xx-Xxxx... Oh, BTW folx, I just got word that there's this poor hungry three-year-old in Rumania that has arterial pneumonia and has been given about thirty days to live. He has only one wish, to see the world before he croaks, so he wants everyone to send him a plane ticket to some exotic location. If you want to help him achieve his goal, send a prepaid plane ticket to me, and I'll forward it on to him... Sheesh, -chris ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 Nov 89 16:07:00 EST From: MCINTYRE@MSUPA.BITNET Subject: Thanks for your comments Thank you to all who have commented on MAGNETIC FILINGS. To answer Cecilia's question, "Meditations of the Monk" was commissioned to accompany a slide show that would fill in between movies at the local foreign/art movie theater. We never saw the slides, although we had seen the photographer's work when we played at his exhibit opening. He used a Polariod SX-70 camera and would frequently manipulate the picture as it was developing; e.g. drawing on the picture, stirring the colors, tossing the picture into the freezer or a toaster oven. To my knowledge he never did the intended slide show. Actually, we submitted four pieces and "Meditations of the Monk" was not the one he selected, but it was the Reverend's favorite. The only guideline he gave us was that the music should be between 12 and 15 minutes long. To our amazement all four clocked in between 13'02" and 13'08". Totentanz was commissioned to provide music for two movies a friend of ours was making. This time we did get to see the images we were supposed to be accompanying. Our friend brought his projector over and showed the movies on the wall while we played along. Except years later when he finally finished the project, he made no attempt to sync the music to the film, which would not have worked anyway as the final version was projected at a slightly different speed than the version we had seen while recording. Yet there were several places where changes in the music matched the action on the screen as it had all been carefully worked out. Once we did get to match our music to a movie in real-time. The local library was showing a 1921 Danish film "Witchcraft Through the Ages", and we accompanied, our first performance with a drum machine. John McIntyre Physics - Astronomy Dept Michigan State University ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 23 Nov 89 16:09:35 GMT From: Nick Rothwell Subject: Magnetic Ramblings Ok, my turn... (disclaimer - I listened to the tape for the second time last night, so I'm typing in my impressions from memory...) Joe McMahon's pieces are fun. This is what makes them so good, I think - I've heard a fair amount of "serious" academic music like this, but it seems to take itself rather too seriously. Liquid Crystals and Third Rail are, as Joe says, fun on headphones. I like the Digitized Horses as well - how was the sound done? My favourite piece at the moment (though, there's so much good stuff here, and it's so varied, that I can't decide...) is Chris's Ruminations. I love this sort of chorused/flanged acoustic guitar work, but then I was a Steve Hillage fan in my formative years, with all those songs about mystic rays, leylines, Pyramid Power and finding our own inner energies and so on. Please don't take offence, Chris! The synth work in Ruminations is excellent because it's nicely understated and fits perfectly without dominating the music. Jari's stuff is very nicely arranged. Imperventus keeps jumping from style to style schitzophrenically, which makes it a real blast. I'm particularly impressed with the percussion work since it sounds like somebody's really playing the drums. The D-110 drum sounds aren't that realistic, so this is quite an achievement. Chris Iverson's piece has some nice ideas, and I love those drums! What are Roland SuperDrums anyway? Totentanz (the name fits, that's for sure) reminds me of the synth stuff of the early 70's, like Schulze's Cyborg piece, for instance. It's definitely growing on me. I kept thinking of the Nick Cave concert in the film Wings of Desire, for some reason - a huge mansion ballroom with a band making weird noises on xylophone and guitar. The North Indian Ragas. Now, these are a real blast. These things are almost hypnotic, and I keep finding myself almost singing along to them (it sounds as silly as it sounds, if you see what I mean). I'm certain that after listening to this stuff for a while, your brain melts and flows out of your ears. The music is better than I expected from reading the liner notes, I must say. I'll follow up a couple of points people have made about Suedstern (he says, delicately dropping into the vernacular) to try and kick off some more "in-depth" discussion (unless we're bored with this, in which case, yell). >Nick (no need to add Rothwell, we all know him, don't we?): Besides the most >enviable setup this fella has *taste*| The mood sure comes through. The "enviable setup", you'll notice, doesn't have any tape. For the same outlay of cash I could probably have gone for 8-track, a 16/8/2 desk, SMPTE and far fewer synths. What I have instead is the ability to hear the whole thing at one go, and Suedstern will play direct from Performer once I've set up the initial mix. I don't have much musical "imagination" and would probably find it hard to think in terms of laying down and bouncing tracks without being able to imagine the final result. So, I need a large number of instruments, since I can only use each one once at a time. The piece is full of little intervals like the bit where the opening D-50 backing has to be taken on by the MKS-7 so that the D-50 can go and change costume to come back as the moog solo. Anyway, swings and roundabouts. I'll never be able to get the thickness and richness of sound you hear on, say, Oxygene, because I'm not doing all that analog processing and reprocessing. I think my piece suffers from rather a clinical, thin sound as a result. But, I can work quite quickly when I have an idea (not too often right now, alas). In fact, the Matrix-6 didn't feature since at that time it needed 110V and the transformer was busy feeding the patchbay. The SPM 8:2 did a good job of phasing the EQ on the percussion, but it's never done anything reliable since I bought it, so it's out of circuit at the moment. I now have a Super-JX rack which sounds beautiful and takes the load off the D-50 for the reason I mentioned above. >Nick, the reason I said SUDSTERN was a nice piece of art was because when I >listen to it I 'see' the music as if it was a series of images on canvas. >but yours and David Mantripp's had very strong >imagery (IMHO), hence my comment about art. I don't think that was my deliberate aim, actually, though I tend to try and "think in pictures" when I can. In fact, I have to have some image in mind otherwise I completely lose track of the composition process. The piece I'm working on now is coming along, but I don't have an "image" for it, so I'm a bit stuck. I think it's quite easy to give the impression of pictures, though it's difficult to do well. All I did was use the MKS-7 for some wind effects and the TX-7 for the gong thingy. Then at the end, a blast of rain and thunder, and that was it. (you get to guess which synth did the thunder...) I didn't have any clear images in mind when doing the piece, although the opening pan-pipe-and-chord-sequence was probably influenced by Tangerine Dream's Church Theme from the Wavelength soundtrack, and I was probably thinking of Vangelis's Soil Festivities when doing the ending. I think Klaus Schulze is the master of image music (Dune, Mirage, X are all excellent examples). One helpful hint that I was given, which proved very useful indeed, was to do the final mix through a grotty system (I just ran the stereo mix into my 10-year-old ghetto blaster), and set the levels and eq from there. Then, I found that the mix through the studio monitors sounded a *lot* better than when I started. >Oh, BTW folx, I just got word that there's this poor hungry three-year-old in >Rumania that has arterial pneumonia and has been given about thirty days to >live. Actually, the last "poor kid" message was, from local accounts, quite true. He was on television recently. He doesn't want any more cards...! >-chris Nick. -- Nick Rothwell, Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh. nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk !mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ "You're gonna jump!?" "No, Al. I'm gonna FLY!" ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 22 Nov 89 17:27:09 EST From: MTG@CSI.COMPUSERVE.COM Subject: Hello, folks! A comment and a question... Hello! I don't believe I've introduced myself or posted before, so allow me to do so first. I'm a musician in Columbus, Ohio; a solo band known as The Evolution Control Committee (a name chosen for the absurd paradox of such a committee, rather than to invoke controversy). I play my sampler, synth, accordian, piano, drum machine, found instruments and whatever else I can employ. I've been The Evolution Control Committee for a couple of years now, but I started piano 15 years ago (in second grade) and have played lots of instruments since then. Now, on to the questions and comments... I saw John's message, ending with: > ... Yet there > were several places where changes in the music matched the action on the > screen as it had all been carefully worked out. I have a projection TV at home that I picked up in our company auction (for $63!), and the sounds goes through my stereo. Since the sound and video are so disconnected from each other, it's easy as well as mighty interesting to just not bother turning on the sound but play some music along with the video. It's surprising when you do that how often the sound seems to "sync up" with the video by chance -- that is, musical changes hitting scene changes, or lyrics matching the actions on the screen. One of the funny ones I did was in playing an extremely cheap Christmas-oriented animation along with Negativland's song "Christianity is Stupid", which was preceeded by a song I did called "Have Some Candy" (right at the chorus, the kid's start dreaming of their Christmas candy... ...PERFECT!). Try it sometime! And now, a question: I'm thinking about getting an 8-track... right now I use a Tascam Porta-Two (4-track cassette). I remember hearing a year and a half or so ago that Tascam had actually made an 8-track cassette that really worked... has anyone ever used this? Does anyone know what one goes for these days? Any suggestions for a decent, INEXPENSIVE 8-track that I could look into? Thanks! _Is___________________________________________ ________________________there_ | ___ | | | Mark, G., of... The | volution | Do you realise that if | | |--__ | the plastic dinosaurs you | | |_/_ \ ontrol | give your kids were flesh, | | "If you're | __ | bone, and alive, they would | | opposed to \_// \ ommittee | eat your kids whole with- | | opposable thumbs..." | | out even saying grace? | | \__/ | So There. (tm) | |_any__________________________________________|______________________escape?_| ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 25 Nov 89 21:34:09 CST From: "David M. Stowell" Subject: Standardized bus systems The comment was made a week ago that the situation with electronic instruments would be greatly improved if a standard bus & card interface, complete with standardized user interface. This was compared with the evolution of the MS-DOS would through the IBM-PC's bus. (Excuse me if I seem a bit behind---I no longer work at the U of Ill., and only read my mail about one every week or two.) Excuse me, but if that happens, I'm heading for the nearest ARP 2600 I can find and using that.... I find the level of standardization offered by MIDI quite enough to allow modules to communicate, and I do not believe that futher standardization would help us as musicians. It would encourage us toward more homogeneity, a result the corporate music structure would only delight in. This is also encouraged by most samplers and preset instruments, but that's another diatribe... I also find the comparison to the IBM-PC telling. While the XT-AT bus system may have become a standard, it should be noted that IBM is abandoning that standard in favor of the MCA bus, and Compaq's "Gang of Nine" is promoting it's EISA architecture. While uninamity existed for a while, it will now be some time before a standard PC architecture dominates. Do we want to put ourselves in the position of being dependent on a rigid architecture when a similar fate could befall it? And I still use a Korg MS-10 synthesizer (c. 1978) for bass work. All analog. Complete with patch cords. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 26 Nov 89 19:50:00 EST From: AD0834@ALBNYVMS.BITNET Subject: Atari ST Librarian To ST programmers/MIDI experts, I am trying to write a patch librarian for a 520STFM and a Roland D-10 keyboard. I am having problems because the input buffer on the ST isn't large enough to hold the 256 byte blocks that the D-10 sends, and unfortunately, I don't seem to be able to write a program which will snag data from the buffer fast enough to prevent it overflowing. Basically, my problem is this: I need to change the size of the MIDI input buffer on the ST from the default 128 bytes to 256 (or more) bytes. Does anyone know how to do this?!? Better yet, does anyone know of PD MIDI librarians? Thanks, (and DESPERATELY yours,) Andy Dickinson (AD0834@ALBNYVMS) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Nov 89 02:19:02 EST From: uucp@NLUUG.NL Subject: ST Midi buffer Andy Dickinson writes: > Basically, my problem is this: I need to change the size of the MIDI > input buffer on the ST from the default 128 bytes to 256 (or more) > bytes. Does anyone know how to do this?!? Better yet, does anyone know > of PD MIDI librarians? You *can* increase the size of the midi buffer. Call xbios(14,2) returns the adress of the midibuffer information. With that information you can change the buffer's characteristics. I'll describe the information in a general (text) format, since I don't know what language you're using. The first four bytes form the midibuffer adress The next two bytes form the buffer size (change to '1024' or so) The next two bytes form the buffer head (change to '0') The next two bytes form the buffer tail (change to '0') The next two bytes form the low mark (change to '0') The next two bytes form the high mark (change to '1023'); If you change the midibuffer adress, remember restore it on exit. As for the second part of your question: I'm looking for one myself. I don't 'hate' programming, but if there's a way to avoid it... +-------------------------+------------------------------------------------+ | Ad Aerts | It's a shame each of my messages sees more of | | AERTS@HUTRUU52.BITNET | the world than I ever will... | | aerts@media00.uucp | | +-------------------------+------------------------------------------------+ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Nov 89 06:04:55 EST From: alnitak@TARDIS.CS.ED.AC.UK Subject: Re: Atari ST Librarian I'm also the process of writing such a program, could you please let us know what language you are using to do this in. I came across exactly the same problem as you describe, so my solution (rather than to increase the standard buffer size) was to write a short machine code routine which would wait for a SysEX start (0xF0) byte, then read all of the data until the SysEX end (0xF7) byte. The only problem with this is that the routine cannot be interrupted by the user (well, not at the moment, anyway), and so will hang until a SysEX message is actually received. I'm also currently working on a MIDI `mapper' for the ST. This is written entirely in machine code, and I'll probably release it into the public domain once I've finished it (well, the early versions I'll definitely release, the later versions I might market as budget MIDI software). Ray Bellis --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ray Bellis JANET: alnitak@uk.ac.ed.cs.tardis BITNET: alnitak@tardis.cs.ed.ac.uk INTERNET: alnitak%tardis.cs.ed.ac.uk@cunyvm.cuny.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Nov 89 16:42:27 EET From: Jari Riitala Subject: Quadraverb sysex data? Well well, here I'm again| I recently bought me a Quadraverb (I love that Lezlie|) and it has become evitable I'm going to need an (editor/)librarian to ping-pong the patches here and there and everywhere as John Lennon (or was it Paul?) once stated. Now the question is: 1) Anybody know about the format of the bulk dump data (all patches / less that all patches)? Is there a description somewhere on the net? 2) Anybody already written this program for PD? Did you write one for yours, Nick? (s**t, you've got a Mac and you talk c) Jari PS. Nick, thanks for the kind words about my "drumming". I hate to believe it but quantization makes miracles. Of course if I had pads and a drummer... well, that's a goddam wish. I bought with a friend just the other day this funky little Yamaha toy - it has 4 (too small) pads, horrible internal sounds and little drums stix included but it talks MIDI with 15 velocities (too coarse and it forgets everything when you turn it off) so let's see when I get to whack it. ------- this message was authored by ------------------------------- Jari Riitala now: t6m-riit@mammutti.utu.fi soon: jriitala@kontu.utu.fi -------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Nov 89 16:17:00 EST From: "Daniel J. Graham" Subject: D-110 I'd like to thank those who responded to my queries about the D-110. I've sent off for a video from California that claims to make it understandable. I'll write a review of the video after I see how useful it is... Dan Graham ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Nov 89 09:23:24 EST From: "AED-FD Homesh R. Lalbahadur" Subject: U110 sample player I too would like to thank those who responded to my question on the U110. I recently saw the Roland ad for the 'soon to be released U220' rack unit. 'Sounds very promising'. I also heard the Proteus 1 for the the first time; pretty good.:[ : Holmes L ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Nov 89 11:14:00 EST From: "b.klassen" Subject: D-50 modification rumours ... hey, D-50-oids ... I have heard rumours about two items for the venerable D-50 that made me drool. This first is a mod that makes the D-50 truly multi-timbral (8 tones at once via MIDI). The second is an internal memory expansion that's supposed to add 8 internal banks. This stuff is supposedly third-party, but Roland has supposedly started (or will be starting) to handle it. Anyone else heard anything like this? Well I'm on the subject, I've had problems recently with my D-50 reading its memory cards. It sometimes takes 5 minutes of dicking to get it to work. My schedule is such that I can't part with the unit until after the New Year. Any suggestions? I've tried cleaning the contacts, but to no avail ... brian ---------------------- End of EMUSIC-L Digest **********************