Nick Collins
Went to see Nick Collins speak at Plymouth today about his PHD research towards Autonomous Musical Agents and Machine Listening Technology for Concert use. I was pleasantly surprised when he almost immediately started playing breakbeats at us.
Nick is the creator of BBcut, which was later adapted into LiveCut, a very handy squarepusher emulator. His latest version of this, BBCut2 provides event analysis of live audio streams, inferring beat structure and creates a database of events with which the track is processed. Mmm, glitchy.
From what he showed us BBCut looks to be a extrememely effective tool, and can be used with Supercollider, so I'll be downloading that this evening.
Nick has also been woking on systems for machine listening that analyse live audio streams, and track beats, and can analyse notes and their features such as pitch, attack and timbre. He showed en excellent AV clip that had been processed in this way, and was being replayed - in a Tom Jenkinon stylee.
Clever....
Heres his websiteHe's also a member of TOPLAP who do life coding as audio performance
Their WIKI is here and also
Klipp av, Well cool.
My current project, preliminary to the final work for this is to create a simple program which will allow macs to sing.
Heres one example of using the command line with the system voice.
Electricity as interface.
"Electricity has another special value. We now know that the neural signals that control the body, carry sensory information, and are related to thought itself, consist of electrical impulses sent from nerve cell to nerve cell. This is not a purely electrical phenomenon because the impulses are produced and passed on by chemical means, but neural activity has a strong electrical component, which is why it is possible to create physical interfaces between a living nervous system and electronic devices." From Digital People; form bionic humans to androids, Sidney Perkowitz. p.63.
Voltaic Pile, the first battery.
A breakthrough that Volta announced in 1800—the Voltaic pile, a stack of alternating zinc and copper disks, separated by cloth or cardboard soaked in salt water. That was the first electrical battery, a device to produce a steady flow of current. Within a year, Humphry Davy of the Royal Institution in London attached two carbon electrodes to a massive battery and obtained an intense white glow, thus discovering the carbon arc, the earliest form of artificial electrical lighting.
