Artist Collaboration

Artist communication and collaboration
-Collaboration
-Sharing ideas with people
- A network society

A Network society
The internet allows interconnection and interactivity between artists. The internet offers a place for like minded people to gather and discuss their interests, and there is support on the internet that may not be available to the individual user.
There are three different types of networks; social, economic and information. They are fairly self explanatory; the social network is who you know, whether it is friends to support you or corporate entities to peddle your artwork to.

Street Art
Street art is marginalized and are generally not seen as 'true' art by the general public. Street art is also very elusive, hiding in corners and little used alleyways. It is not meant to be seen by the general public, it is rather secretive and exclusive; you have to search to find it.

Street Art has made its presence known online, through websites that showcase their art. The websites allow communication between artists, as well as gaining feedback from viewers.

One such website is woosterCollective.com. The WoosterCollective is a"site dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world." (www.woostercollective.com)
The art on that site is posted by the artists themselves, and it also has links to other street art websites, as well as other street art projects and collectives. WoosterCollective allows you to post your reactions to the art works present.

Produser
A produser is a cross between a consumer and a producer. There is a growing trend of users who are becoming produsers; users who produce the content, but also consume it at the same time. Produsers is influenced by the gaming sector and the End-User Agreements as well as the Open Source Movements.

Machinima
Machinima is a cross between machine, cinema and animation.

Machinima is an example of emergent game play, and a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends. Machinima is taken from screen shots within a game and is edited to create a new work. Machinima can be created through multi-player collaborations, as many people gather to follow a set routine or script.
Because of the controversial nature of Machinima (as it is effectively using someone else's artwork and could be subject to copyright infringements), Machinima is a political protest combined with entertainment.

There is a website dedicated solely to machinima at: www.machinima.com/

What is sound?

According to The New Penguin Dictionary of Music, sound is "The substance or the medium of music. Music is an art of sound unfolding through time, and an art of time unfolding through sound." (http://www.credoreference.com)

Sound is made from vibrations, transmittede from the object making the vibrations to the ear through fluctuations in air pressure.

Every sound has a distinct makeup of sounds from the sound spectrum. There is a fundamental pitch or frequency that dominates the sound, along with a large number of further sounds (called Harmonics) that we perceive but don’t distinguish from the fundamental.

Pitch is directly proportional to sound vibrations; the faster the vibration the higher the pitch.

“Timbre is a term that relates to the perceived type of sound coming from a sound-generating source”:

A violin timbre is percieved as the sound coming from a violin. A cat meow timbre is percieved as coming from a cat.

The number of harmonics in a sound, and their strength in volume is dependent on the size, shape and materials of the sound producing object. In the majority of tuned musical instruments there is a standard set of harmonics known as the overtone series. The strength of harmonics change from one instrument to the next, allowing us to perceive the difference between a note played on a violin and the same note played on a piano.

The most simple sound has a fundamental and no harmonics, referred to as a Sine Tone. Sine Tones do not occur in nature but are synthetically and electronically generated

Sine tones are used as a basis in hearing tests. At birth we can hear frequencies up to around 20,000 Hz. Many sounds or timbres contain frequencies as high as this within their harmonic spectrums.
As we age we lose the ability to hear high frequencies, this furthered through any damage we do to our ears.

An important characteristic of sound is the way that it is shaped over time, referred to as the sound’s amplitude.

"The amplitude of a wave is the maximum displacement, or the maximum value, it attains from its mean position during a cycle. It is both positive and negative. With sound waves, the greater the amplitude, the louder is the sound." (http://www.credoreference.com)

Amplitude is most often described with four terms, known as ADSR:
~Attack
~Decay
~Sustain
~Release

Attack is the period leading up to the sound reaching full volume. In many instruments it is virtually instantaneous.

Decay occurs after the sound has peaked. The decay occurs before the sustain.

Sustain is a 'constant' volume that the sound remains at until the key (or whatever is producing the note) is released.

Release is how quickly the sound fades once the note has finished the sustain period (the key has been lifted).

Analogue Additive Synthesis

The first purely Electronic Music works appeared following the establishment of a music studio dedicated to the production of electronic music in Cologne, Germany (the WDR) in the early 1950s.

Sound Sources:
1. Generators:
~Sine Tone Generator
~White Noise Generator
~Square Wave Generator
2. Modifiers:
~Filters
~Ring Modulator
~Reverberation
~Variable Speed Tape Recorders

Stockhausen’s Studie II was composed in 1953. His second work from the Cologne WDR studio, this work uses layer upon layer of sine tones added together to form the timbre of each note in the piece.

Early Digital Sounds

In 1957, Max Mathews, an acoustic researcher at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, wrote his Music I software for the IBM 704 computer and used it to generate the first examples of digital audio.

Further developments in Matthew’s software saw his Music II (1958) being capable of producing 16 different wave forms. By 1961 with his Music IV, he was able to generate both vocal and musical sounds. Music V would become the basis for a range of computer music software used through the 60s and 70s and still in use today.

In Chowning’s Stria composed in 1977, the octaves are no longer 1:2 but are based on the Golden Ratio(1:1.618). The overall form/structure of the work is also based on the ratio, and sections contain pitches that enter temporally according to the ratio.

American John Chowning was inspired by the work of Risset and developed the theoretical basis of FM (Frequency Modulation) synthesis in 1971-3. FM synthesis was adopted by Yamaha in 1983 as the synthesis engine of the most popular synthesizer of the time, the DX7.

The Fibonacci series is a sequence of numbers, where each number is added to itself. The Fibonacci series is used to determine tunings in music. The sequence goes: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. Each number is the sum of the previous 2.

0 + 1 = 1
1 + 1 = 2
1 + 2 = 3
2 + 3 = 5
3 + 5 = 8
etc

A further digital synthesis technique is known as Analysis/Resynthesis. A real-world recording is made and analyzed to determine the fundamental and the sound’s harmonic spectrum. Using this information the sounds are recreated within sound synthesis software then manipulated.

One of a series of “chatter” pieces by American composer Paul Lansky, Notjustmoreidlechatter (1987) uses Analysis/Resynthesis of the human voice. In this piece we hear only one voice, that of Lansky’s wife, reciting text from Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” wherein Jane speaks of her unusual dreams. Yet we hear “countless unintelligible voices (high, low, fast, slow) that bombard the listener.

MIDI

By 1981, the electronic music market had become large and chaotic and the Roland company saw the need for an industry standard. The MIDI 1.0 specification was released in August 1983, and MIDI became an industry-wide standard protocol, allowing any device of any manufacturer to talk to any other device of any other manufacturer.

The first Macintosh is released in 1984. Quickly realizing the creative potential for music using the computer’s graphical user interface, software developers quickly produce music software such as the MIDI Sequencing package Performer in 1985.

In 1985, Digidesign company founders saw the Fairlight CMI, and decided to emulate the computer based sample display but on the newly introduced Apple Mac computer. They developed their Sound Designer software for editing stereo audio files for use in digital samplers and CD mastering. Sound Designer becomes the basis of Digidesign’s Pro-Tools (1991) now the industry standard for digital recording.

The first versions of Max were initially developed by Miller Puckette in 1986 at IRCAM, Paris, as realtime control software for IRCAM’s 4X synthesizer. Beginning in 1988, David Zicarelli translated Max into a MIDI software product. He then brought audio modules into the Max environment to create Max/MSP, a graphical programming environment in which onscreen objects are connected via 'patchcords' to control the sound output from a Mac.

Digital Hardware & Software

In 1979 the first polyphonic digital sampling synthesiser, the Fairlight CMI (Computer Musical Instrument) was released. The technology was designed in Sydney and is a major precursor to digital audio for the first Mac audio software.

Around 1982-3 the Japanese synthesiser company Roland released the TR-808 drum machine and the TB-303 Bass Line machine. The sounds of these would in the following few years become characteristic of the first Techno and House music.

In 2000 the Swedish company Propellerheads release Reason, an all in one software studio for music production with MIDI and audio loops.

Ableton Live software was released in 2001, aimed at live and real-time music performance on a laptop.

In 2002 a tactile MIDI controller was released called Korg Kaos Pad, continuing a history of music technologies from the 80s and 90s that includes MIDI drumkits/pads, MIDI wind instruments and guitars.

In 2004 Jazz Mutant made one of the first transparent multi-touch controllers, the Lemur. It is a music controller with a true multi-touch screen interface. The software allows the user to design their own interface on a Mac and use the interface on the Lemur to control music software.

A History of web events

In 1990 Usenet was created. Usenet is a combination of the words "user" and "internet", and is a large discussion system spread out over many servers. One large usenet is the website "netjam". In Netjam, MIDI files are sent to a server to be accessed by the members, who would work on the files and repost their edited content.

In 1993, Mosaic, the first web browser containing a Graphic User Interface, was designed. Mosiac is named as being the browser that opened up the web to the general public. Many characteristics of the original Mosaic can be seen in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, popular browsers in use today. The Mosaic browser was discontinued in 1997.

In the mid 1990s web browsers could support the playback of MIDI files (.mid) using Quicktime. Audio files in WAV and AIFF format could be downloaded. 1 minute of CD quality audio, with the available bandwidth of the time could take 25 minutes to download.

By 2000, RealAudio, Windows Media Audio, Quicktime and MP3 were available and could handle both streaming and downloading, resulting in much faster downloads.