Other, Metablogging, The World

I began a new website back in March, but until now, other projects have kept me from being able to launch it (and in the meantime I stopped posting to the old blog).
As you can see, the new website is now up.  I had to launch the site a little earlier than I had planned since the old site broke and because of this the teaching content and RSS feed are still missing but coming soon.  Also, once I settle on a media player interface, there will be some audio and video going up on the site as well.  In the coming weeks, I will post some links to some old material that never made it up on the blog and some random pictures as I experiment with image uploading systems for the new site.
In other news, check out the new website launched for Punkte, my electroacoustic improv duo with pianist John Aylward.
Bios coming to this site and punktemusic.com after my gig tonight.

When teaching Music 9 last term, I wast telling students about my first assignment in the Intro to Electroacoustic Music class I took during my undergrad at Brandeis. Our assignment (while learning tape-style editing techniques) was to transform provided recording of a some speech into another phrase. Since some of the students seemed surprised by this assignment I thought I would post my version (I will admit, I could probably do a lot better job at this now, but I posted my original version of the assignment). I was asked to transform the following sentence: "One thing you can always be sure of is the stupefying anger of field mice." into: "Bee stings are no fun. You can always ice them. Sugar."

So much to say after such an extended break from posting--how to begin? Let me begin with a timeline not of reality but of continuity (i.e. a table of contents) (the next question is, is this table of contents for you the reader, or purely an organizational tool to help me jump back into posting?):

1. Search Engine Battle
2. Starting school at Dartmouth
3. Time Travel
4. Some projects soon to be online for you (and I) to look forward to...

Search Engine Battle

To avoid helping my nemesis, I will not get into all the details of this battle. Here's what you do get:

Shortly after arriving at Dartmouth, my information (photo, website, email) was being posted to the Digital Musics website and I was getting my accounts to all the related servers when Spencer helped me discover that for certain search terms I'm not top of the rankings. I won't tell you who or what beats me, but it could (and at least once has) lead to some humorously unfortunately--and potentially unpleasant--mistaken identity. This was my reminder that I had been neglecting the blog (although it probably wouldn't have made a difference in this specific search circumstance--check out that alliteration). I will be back in full force with the normal Roth-news updates that have been posted in the past as well as some writings on topics associated with digital music/electroacoustic music--including the relationship between those terms (which will begin in the next section).

Starting school at Dartmouth

Last month I started my M.A. at the Dartmouth Digital Musics Program. The move away from Boston went more smoothly than I had imagined and so far I've been having a lot of fun here. I've been learning a lot of cool math behind DSP techniques in seminar with Michael Casey, working on some interesting music in the Contemporary Music Lab with Doug Perkins, and there is cool new music in the pipeline. Between the current students and faculty, this also turns out to be a great time to be at Dartmouth when it comes to doing some improvisation. Perhaps best of all--now that I'm back in school--is having time to focus on my art and various technology projects.

Time Travel

The complete lack of posts since April was not because there was nothing interesting going on to post about, but I had so many cool projects that were going on that the blog got neglected. I will give a brief update on my summer activities, but stay tuned for some "Time Travel" posts over the next month where I will post about some of those past events in more detail.

At the end of the course I took with Hans Tutschku at Harvard, John Aylward and I performed a new improv based piece of mine--Substantive Take, for piano, Rhodes electric piano, vibraphone, marimba, tam-tam, and live electronics on the spring Hydra concert. Thanks to Bert van Herk for diffusing the electronics.

I spent a lot of time up in Maine working with Mary Anne Driscoll playing in a her septet for a gig in Portland and later to play at the Hope Jazz Festival. We worked on some great music, but mostly got a good start for some even cooler things to come. There was talk among the band members of putting together another gig in Belfast this fall, so hopefully we end up putting that together. Mary Anne and I also began some work on some duo material (both free improvisation and non-standard versions of standards) for piano, voice, and vibes. We also began talking about some voice, vibes, and live electronics work as well.

Quite a bit of my time up in Maine was helping my parents set up their new gallery before it opened. Stay tuned for more info about this as well as the multimedia system I've designed for them.

Also while up in Maine, I had some time to play some live electronics improv with a few guys up there. In addition to a bunch of Gilbert's Open Mic appearances, I played a gig at Zoot with Owne Cartwright, Jason Dean, Clint Hartzell, and Charlie Hendrick.  Charlie, Owen, and I also played a party with a number of other bands at a party over Labor Day.

Back in Massachusetts, I was doing live sound and recording work for the BIMA and Genesis program at Brandeis.  I have to say, some of these high school students I was recording really surprised me.

John Aylward and I also continued on some improvisation projects that grew out of the Hydra performance in the spring. By the end of the month we plan to have a demo ready highlighting three distinct styles of acoustic and electroacoustic improvisation. Stay tuned for a link and info on upcoming gigs.

Some projects soon to be online for you (and I) to look forward to...

I am very close to completing a Max5 programing project for Hans Tutscku; I have been designing a preset management and interpolation system.  I have been working as much as possible to make the system useable in any master patch that implements a similar interface/DSP separated design his improv patch--"Monster"-- that I have been working with. When I am done with this project I will be documenting these objects as well as some of my other Max tools (the "rothMoves" package rm.*). Once I have everything documenting, I will be opening a new section of my website to host all my published Max software.

Before John comes up to play with me in Hanover, NH at the end of the month I will be finishing the mix of Substantive Take from the Hydra concert to post online (he won't let me get away with not doing it). While he is here at the end of the month, we will be finishing our demo and that will be going online as well as we begin booking gigs.

Any more news on my iPhone software developments will stay offline until beta testing is done and things are submitted for launch.

* * *

Well, that post seemed to stay under control in length. More frequent posts to come!

On Monday I drove over to Worcester with John Aylward to talk to his undergrad composition students about live electronics, free improvisation, and the performance of Vincible they heard a week before (and a little about Sad Mac too). I heard from John that the Monday after the concert they had a discussion about the piece in his class. While a number of his students were fascinated by this new type of music they had been exposed to, some were skeptical about the musical validity of the piece, whether it was music or performance art, etc. I went into the seminar hoping that to have to justify the validity of my music--I guess I've been to too many composition colloquia with graduate studets where they really ripped appart the composer's ideas. It was good they turned out to be so respectful/receptive, since we had a lot of topics to cover in a very short amount of time (we ran over a half hour, and most of them didn't seem to mind!). Overall it was a fun day. Right away instead of sharing there true reactions of the piece, they were asking questions about how the score worked. When the students heard the Vincible examples appropriately mixed, it cleared a lot up for them. Having the score explained and then hearing the best examples of how it worked from the concert they started get/hear the form of the piece (it was pretty cool seeing that click in some of their minds). Before I came in, there was one student who was planning on learning Max over the summer for an installation project he is planning, but by the end of the seminar it seemed like there were a few more of the students that were interested in diving into Max-land. There is one bit of sad news that came out of this Clark visit. When John and I went to lunch between his classes, he brought along a prospective student from Switzerland who had come to meet with him. The sad news is that even she had heard about Brandeis' VERY poor decision to close the Rose Art Museum and sell parts of the collection.

After I had a chance to listen to the room recording and direct recordings from my laptop from the Clark Vincible performance, it turns out (as I suspected) the performance ended up falling short of my goals for the piece. Andrew and Dave did manage to pull off a few of the sections nicely, the schedule of that day did not allow for enough time to fully go over all of the techniques of the piece. Listening to this recording reminded me of how important it is to develop an improvisational style with your ensemble through regular practice. It is true that Vincible is designed to be performed without overrehearsing the entire form, it was written for two sax players who I had improvised with on many occasions and we did have more time to go over the specific techniques required for the piece. The other trap we ran into last weekend at Clark was a suprisingly limited time to setup and soundcheck the electronics--I'm honestly surprised that even though their were level issues, that the technical side of things went as smoothly as they did.  I had to make a mix of the recording anyway for my lecture at Clark tomorrow so I figured I'd add it to my very ignored MySpace page. When I first added music to MySpace, I was really using it as a quick and easy way to put some samples online for some bandmates to listen to (this included some REALLY sloppy laptop improv we recorded while rehearsing). I decided those rehearsal improvs should be taken down since they were not for public consumption. I am hoping to get a proper recording of Vincible done in May or June but, for a limited time, I am putting the Clark recording on MySpace. Also for my Clark lecture, I decided to make a new stereo mixdown of the Sad Mac recording I did with Peter McMurray in December. At first I was thinking of mixing together two of our takes: overall I thought the form and content of the piece came out better in take 8, but some parts (particularly the diffusion) were better in take 6. I had gone through both of the takes section by section to decide on the best material to use and I just couldn't bring myself to edit them together--it would destroy the improvised nature to make a "cheat" recording like this. Also, since at the December recording I had decided on a new and improved interface to help me in my improvisation of the electronics part and the diffusion that I was hoping to try it with David Guerette (when we both have time) I figured it was not worth dwelling on perfecting this recording--time to move on. Again, this is going on MySpace for a limited time appearance. In addition to these pieces, I thought that Lauren Signal 2 would make a longer-term stay on MySpace. I decided to add some mild compression to all of these, figuring it would help people out listening on crappy computer speakers so they don't crank the quiet parts and then get blown away by the loud parts--I'll have to listen to them and see if I like it or not. Unfortunately, for these longer improvisations, I am forced to use some extreme compression to fit within the MySpace upload limits. I have added a new project to my list: either find or code a better media player for my myspace page (and homepage) to list these items as higher quality MP3s. And now for the moment you have been waiting for, the link: Roth's MySpace Page (also on the sidebar). I also wanted to show my YouTube page a little love and uploaded the CUNY performance (mentioned in this post) of Phi Fun 2. Unfortunately, YouTube only allows 10 minute videos, so I had to break it into to parts (hoepfully in a decent spot). Check it out below:

So even after some encouragement from Jean-François, and visiting the Dartmouth Digital Musics Studio and finding out I had been googled, I still have not updated this blog since November. I am now making my return. The last event I was supposed to blog about were two Altaira performances in December. First, some students from CUNY invited us down to participate in an electroacoustic music concert in Manhattan. We took the stage for the second half to play our set of original improv and aleatoric material: Christian Gentry's Symbols, James Borchers' Pleiades, Peter McMurray's Mixtape Vol. I, and the first public performance of my video-score based improv Phi Fun 2 (video of this will be coming next week to YouTube). After our set, the CUNY guys came on stage to join us for a performance of John Cage's Four^6. I learned a big lesson while we were performing symbols: make my top level patch uncloseable!  Later that month, Courtney Brown invited us to open for her at Outpost 186 in Cambridge. We played the same set as we played at CUNY (unfortunately, the projector did not have quite enough lumens for a proper Phi Fun 2 performance, but it gave me some ideas for my next video piece). The lineup for these gigs was as follows (no etc. listings necessary, it should be implied when it comes to Altaira): James Borchers - percussion Christian Gentry - piano Peter McMurray - tenor saxophone Roth Michaels - live electronics Peter van Zant Lane - bassoon (at CUNY) / electric guitar and electric winds (at Outpost 168) Then I was off to Maine to visit family for the holidays and lock myself away to work on some new projects. Some of these projects included interface design/prototyping for OSC-based iPhone controller software, piezoelectric timbre manipulation and trigger system for hand percussion (tested with congas), piezoelectric foot-gesture-controller to use with vibes (REALLY buggy at the moment), more preliminary work for my next multimedia installation/composition Please Handle Inside, and some design work and hardware prototyping for an interactive multimedia system for retail environments I am developing first for my parents new art design gallery and then to sell the installation and software package to other high end boutiques. More recently, I have been taking Hans Tutschku's seminar on composition for instruments and live electronics over at Harvard (and the fantastic HUSEAC). While the FFT techniques have not really been new material, being the first time I have done any Max/MSP learning in a class format this has really improved my teaching ability in one of my weaker area electronics instruction. It also has been enjoyable to participate in the collaborative atmosphere of classroom instead of working alone at home on projects--plus some interesting music to listen and discuss (listen to Stockhauen's Mixtur if you haven't before). As part of the course, I have started work on a duo piece for keyboards (rhodes and piano) and mallet percussion (vibes, marimba, and tam-tam). John Aylward has graciously volunteered to perform it with me. I recently had the opportunity to participate in an improv workshop with Nettle and then see them in concert at Brandeis. Jace Clayton (a.k.a. DJ/Rupture) directed the laptopping section in the workshop where the five of us had a chance to do a show-and tell with our setups. Here I met a very interesting artist (improviser with beats and video) Grey Filastine. After some chats with Grey, I was convinced to take some of the Max5 patches I was planning to soon release and make them into VSTs (so that means I'll be updating my Max4.6 versions for all of you not in Max5-land yet). I'm curious to see which VSTs end up interesting Filastine and others. Hopefully this leads to some interesting collaborations in the future. This week I just finished up a recording, mixing, and mastering project from Brandeis-based band Mochila (soon their myspace will be updated with samples from the album). It was fun working with Mohammad on this project and if you are in the area, you should be sure to check out their performance as part of the Brandeis Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Arts on April 26th. Now the present: Tomorrow I will be joining members of saxophone quartet Element 114 during their concert at Clark University for a performance of my trio electroacoustic improvisation for two saxes+vibes. It should be a great night and an exciting performance as I get to try out the update version of the patch! In conjunction with this performance at Clark, I will be giving a lecture/colloquium on my music at the beginning of April--part of which will include a master-class style discussion of an undergrad project involving a Theremin-like controller. Stay tuned for various media I claimed will be posted soon and blog posts about some of these upcoming events!

Last night I was talking with my friend Jean-François and I got motivated to start to catch up on my blog posts. Three weeks ago I got a chance to discuss some of my iPhone OSC controller ideas with the MIT E-Club. Since I did not realize I was going to have the floor for the whole meeting I did not have a formal presentation ready but just explained my ideas and about what my goals should be in a market that is already filled by competition at low price points--not low for iPhone software, but low for professional audio tools. Orignally, my main goal was (and still is) to design interfaces for my own personal projects and then develope these ideas into commerical releases to at least make back my investment in joining the developer program. The group at the meeting brought up a bunch of interesting ideas for variations and other software ideas to differentiate my brand. Some of these ideas are definitely worth pursuing as companion software to have ready for my initial commerical release, but others really only could be toys on a mobile device. The purpose for me now in releasing this software is to create professional quality tools that can allow people to work in new and creative ways and so I do not think I am interesting in pursuing ideas that would not have any professional use. The biggest thing I learned was I need to remember my audience when presenting these ideas. Before this meeting I had only shared my ideas with fellow musicians who already understood the concepts and issues at hand. Next time when I bring some more developed ideas to the E-Club I will need to be sure to include an introduction presentation to ensure no one is left behind in the discussion. I am not sure yet if I will be offering any sort of beta program for this software, but if you are interested, please let me know using my standard contact form.

I was installing a blog on another domain I will be hosting when I accidentally overwrote the directory housing this blog. Frantically I called Media-Temple to find out they charge $125/hour to hunt down files on their backup servers. Luckily for me I--after calming down a little--had my own backup that would work just fine. It is a good thing all my content was in a database or else I might have found myself rewriting posts that were made since I last backed up the PHP files running the blog. There were some minor losses when I restored from the backup (like the lion /facepalm picture in this post), but nothing that cannot be fixed. Later today after I get some sleep I will fix the missing image files and serve up a new post about my latest programming project: iPhone software.

Yesterday while waiting for assistance at an Apple Store I was playing with an iPhone 3G and I decided to take a look at my website. As I was typing in the URL I realized how simple it would be to complete if I could use the ".com" button on the iPhone keyboard. I had already made sure all the other rothmichaels.* domains forwarded correctly for my email after a little bit of confusion when someone tried emailing me at rothmichaels.com, but I had never gotten around to forwarding the other domains I own because some were in use. As of now, to both make remembering the URL easier and/or to make typing it on an iPhone easier www.rothmichaels.com and blog.rothmichaels.com are redirected to the appropriate sections of my website. I realize I got some complaints about the ".us" when I first started using that domain for my email, but I didn't feel like ".com", ".net", or ".org" really would fit my content very well (even though I went on a rothmichaels.* domain shopping spree before setting any of them up). The other benefit of the ".us" domain is that if I end up abroad in a few years, I could start another location based website whose distinction could be language and/or content. Don't worry, a more exciting post is coming soon.

The coming soon sign is down and content is officially online for my website: www.rothmichaels.us With having some content appear via the blog and the Max/MSP Course postings, I decided the days of having a blank text homepage were over. Currently the site is small (links to blog content, Max/MSP examples, mailing list, and contact page), but I will evolve the current Max5 inspired site to make room for new content over the next few weeks as time allows. The plan is to create a media player to showcase a selection of my music and art. I also am going to add more biographical information in addition to some of my Max/MSP code and pages on my current projects. If you want to stay up to date with changes on the website, subscribe to my mailing list. During the content adding process, I will be working on developing the website UI and the blog UI so that when I am done all parts of the site will be using something based on this current Max5 inspired UI. P.S. The colors on the non-blog sections of the website are not exactly the same colors I use for patching, but they are close.