Chris McCormick

If yr in London, come check this out tommorrow. I am playing a set using Pd, during the performances section, which should be a lot of fun.

OpenLab 5 : Cafe OTO, 25th April 2009

Openlab are providing a day of workshops & presentations about opensource software, and performances in the evening at Cafe OTO, Dalston. There is a venerable lineup of OpenLab members providing some in depth knowledge during the day and some great performances at night. The preliminary line up goes like this:

DAY: Workshops & Presentations : 12 - 5pm (free entry).

NIGHT: Performances : 7:30pm - 12:30am (5 pounds entry) - doors 7pm

Presentations

• Arduino + PD (Ryan Jordan) : Using Arduino and PureData

• SC + Processing (Daniel Jones) : Using Supercollider with Processing

• Pd/Gem + ergates (Chris McCormick) : PureData audiovisual software

• Groworld (Dave Griffiths) : Permaculture meets online games via guerilla gardening http://www.pawfal.org/dave/index.cgi?Projects/Groworld

• Processing/Java/Eclipse/JOGL/GLSL(Rob Munro) : Techniquies for using Processsing with the Eclipse IDE. http://robmunro.net/video

• Din (S Jagannathan) http://code.google.com/p/din, Boxar http://www.poojyum.com/boxar : A free software musical instrument for performing indian classical music live (but not just)

Workshops

• Fluxus (Dave Griffiths) : (free, 1-2hrs, max 10) The venerable OpenGL/scheme environment. http://www.pawfal.org/dave/index.cgi?Projects/Fluxus

• APODIO (Julien Ottavi) : (1hrs, max 20) Gnu/Linux multimedia distribution LiveDVD

• Introducing Processing for Visual Artists (Evan Raskob) : (10 pounds, 2hrs, max 20)

Performances

• dskg - Uses circuit bended machines altogether with open sources http://www.myspace.com/dskg

• Jeremah - pixelated landscapes of techno beats, music box melodies and processed street noise http://www.jeremah.co.uk/

• Rob Munro - audiovisual work exploring the world between http://robmunro.net/video

• TheNoiser - The Noiser use noise as musicality, combined to an approach of programmatic composition http://www.noiser.org

• PixelPusher - video and sound pieces; interactive art including new musical instruments http://pixelist.info/

• Ryan Jordan - Body-sensor-noise-strobe-hypnosis http://ryanjordan.org/

• Daniel Jones - generative audio-visual works http://www.erase.net

• S Jagannathan - a free software musical instrument for performing indian classical music live (but not just) http://code.google.com/p/din

• Robert Atwood - experiments with the sound created by feedback http://variseq.nongnu.org/

• Chris McCormick - uses Free Software to make bleepy crunchy music http://mccormick.cx

You are all very welcome - see you there.

MORE INFO : openlab

Wow, huge news. There is finally, after all these years, an awesome free and open source audio playing library for the Nintendo DS and GBA. Hooray! This is big news for me as Looper Advance has been built against the non-Free Krawall library for years now and it's always irked me, quite appart from making the GPL license on Looper Advance invalid, and probably illegal.

Hopefully I'll get a chance to update Looper Advance soon and then I can release it properly as 100% Free Software.

MaxMod appears to be pretty comprehensive in that its API provides for mod-playing, sample-playing, and direct access to streaming buffers. This basically means you can write apps which mix and match all three types of audio playback.

maxmod

Yo, this is a killer live set by Maddest Kings Alive who is also my periodical co-collaborator in Chrism + Fenris whenever we are in the same city. Bit-tune lurve and artfully selected chunky loops, this live set really is The Business!

Also good and recently blogged on Offworld is Leaves by Mattison. It's a wicked irie dub of chiptune source material by the artist.

Who needs the record labels? Not me.

Moose and I are in Barcelona for a couple of weeks while I get properly up to speed on the RjDj iPhone code which I haven't really been involved enough with so far, concentrating mainly as I have on the server side of things. We are really digging Barcelona and its lovely relaxed atmosphere, great food, and amazing buildings everywhere. We have even tried to pick up a little local vocabulary. Today we plan on taking a day trip up to Montserrat by cable car.

The social and server side features I've been working on for the last 5 months for Reality Jockey Ltd. along with the rest of the team, are finally online, co-incident with an update of the main app and the albums being made free for a limited time. This is in huge part due to Andie, who really kept us all focussed and moving constantly towards this target. Live site, at last! Feels great.

This is pretty exciting for me as it's the first time a project that I've been a part of has made it onto the Boing Boing network. Offworld post, yay!

In addition to that, RjDj chose to feature a couple of my scenes, which I worked on in my spare time outside company hours: CanOfBeats, and GhostWave, which has propelled them to into the 'most popular' position on the website. They never would have been finished in time if it was't for Frank and Florian's hard work at the last minute, fixing all my horrible bugs and adding nifty features.

My excitement is only tempered by the fact that I wrote a large amount of the server side code, so if it collapses in a heap under the weight of the ogling internet it's probably my fault. It seems to be holding up alright so far though, with most of the heavy content in Amazon's S3 cloud, and liberal use of FastCGI and LightHTTPd. The backend is mostly written in Django + Python if you'd like to know. Python is a king amongst programming languages and it means that I go to work each day looking forward to writing code instead of dreading null pointers, buffer overflows, lack of type flexibility, arcane syntax, and all of the other horrid issues which plague other popular programming languages.

The other huge piece of amazing tech that I should mention and which makes up probably the bulk of the client side code is the free and Open Source (BSD license) Pure Data DSP patching language by Miller S. Puckette. Whilst not a wonderful general purpose programming language, it does one thing and does it superbly. All of the RjDj scenes are actually just Pd patches with a fancy image or two and some custom externals running.

Good times!

Last night I put the finishing touches on an RjDj scene that I've been working on in my spare time called GhostWave. It's a dark algorithmic drum & bass generator which lets you hum the bass lines. If you have the latest version of the RjDj single (free!) installed on your iPhone or iPod Touch, you can simply visit this page from safari on the phone and click the following link with your finger:

GhostWave.rjz

By itself it does very little but make randomly raw semi-melodic noise. Shake it quite hard a few times to start some hi-hats tickering, and then hum a bass line into the mic. To record and loop your hummed bassline, put your finger on the little ghost as you hum your melody in time to the hats. Let go when you're done and the melody should loop. Once you're done, shake it vigorously a few more times to bring in the beat. After listening for a while the beats will fade, but you can bring them back by shaking some more, and you can continue to press the little ghost to record more melody loops.

Let me know what you think.

Have fun!