I propose a musical instrument composed of multiple additive synthesizers interacting with a live granulation platform, the visualizer, and a cellphone as a controller with gyroscopes and accelerometers.
The goal of the instrument is obtaining a harmonious and aesthetic musical result with an intuitive interface using cellphone. The development of smartphones equipped with various sensors made the cellphone as the most comfortable and ubiquitous controller that every people have. Meanwhile, even though smartphone has become an essential part of our life, it is true that development of new mobile gesture-based musical instrument is not correspondingly active. Considering the situation, I suggest an intuitive musical instrument which does not require a high level of musical knowledge or instrumental performance experience. At the same time, the instrument is connected with different platforms through the network so that it can be used to obtain even more sophisticated musical results.
The proposed instrument is composed of 17 different additive synthesizers and each additive synthesizer is comprised of 17 sine wave oscillators. Each synthesizer is mapped with the corresponding granulator proposed by Rodney and the visualizer proposed by Mengyu.
According to the grain rate, volume, and the previous position of the granulation, the information is visualized through Mengyu’s system. Through this procedure, the position, distance, brightness, size, and color of 17 objects are determined. In this instrument, the features of the proposed oscillators are determined corresponding to the values. After then, the activation of each oscillator is determined according to the gravity and acceleration data received from the cellphone. Throughout the procedure, the instrument utilizes various information from different platforms and, at the same time, obtains the intuitive control on the timbre, length, amplitude of the synthesis.
!netmusucsb reading "Network Fever" by Mark Wigley. It is interesting and confusing that the author does not locate the concept of networks in cybernetics but rather in real architecture. The certain concept was unfamiliar with me, and I could not clearly define what I should get from the reading. However, I believe being flexible with my knowledge is one of the most important property to learn from the new concept. I tried to follow Doxiadis's stream of consciousness and be inspired. From the statement "the real dimension of cities is not space, but time," I found the beauty of network music. In other words, no matter where music is played, if the players are at the same time, synchronized, we can assume that the players are in the same "city." Before I read this journal, and even while I was reading it, architecture was all about spaces composed of bizarre structures considering mechanics. However, the term "architecture" was actually all about human's life and philosophy. Likewise, I guess music can be the new "architecture" using the current worldwide network. Doxiadis and scholars made a lot of discussions and researches on existing architectural concepts such as settlement preparing network fever. Therefore, it is time for network musicians to reconsider, discuss, experiment, and study on the various concepts of music according to the new network fever.
!netmusucsb "Where Are We? Extended music practice on the internet".
Throughout the contexts, it was a good opportunity for me to understand the overall flow of network music. Meanwhile, it took more times and efforts than expected for me to comprehend the context since it was filled with a lot of musical concepts, terminologies, incidents, and important names. The procedure itself means a lot for me because, first of all, I enjoyed it and motivated.
Since I define myself as an engineer, I could not help to be attracted to the vision of the Artsmesh and the future of HNI. I do not think the future of the network music is only confined in front of the wired laptop. I believe the ultimate goal, which is actually my goal, of network music is ubiquitous music interaction that enables simultaneous musical interaction among people with musical inspiration. The network music will become eventually wireless. Of course, the system should satisfy establishing a shared perception of synchronization among the players. This may be problematic for the current wireless network, but the technical problem, such as the alignment of bandwidth and business models, will be solved eventually.
This situation reminds me of the case of machine learning. The concept of machine learning was derived in 1959, but the sensation of machine learning is actually caused by the development of GPU hardware in late 2000, which was highly affected by the game industry.
Likewise, we can assume the trend of network music will be drastically changed in the recent future according to the development of the network infrastructure. I do not know what will eventually accelerate the procedure. However, I believe we can try to raise public attention and creative fascination with musical interaction by producing meaningful musical results. Otherwise, we may have to wait until the porn market enables the network revolution.
Ben Myungin Lee
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