Olivier Pasquet _Feb 12 2012.

nested rhythmic trees representation generated by jtol and visualized by rhino for 完璧な回

download jtol 01_2012

jtol is built and used by jt rinker and olivier pasquet. It is a library dedicated to real-time pattern generation that can be applied to architectural design, music, dance, everything requiring constructed evolution in space and time.

We are dealing with multi-scaling and multi-dimensions where rhythm is considered to be a skeleton onto everything else is attached (pitches, params…). A simple example would be a long 1d envelope belonging to a rhythmic nested tree. This simple example could be a compositional technique using complex LFOs with discrete events.

Jtol was first using python in max. It handled an independent data structures similar to a kind of nested jitter library. It is inspired by libraries like athenaCL, numpy, scipy, abjad, pyevolve, pwgl and open music.
A newer version is now using the bach library in max. bach is much more convenient, sharable and faster. Since it is based on a set of max abstractions, it can sometimes be very cumbersome to program sequences with iterations. A text programming is sometimes much more suitable. Years have shown a mixture of text, graphs and software UI gives the best solutions; ableton and cycling74 have understood that.
Some generative music devices will come for max for live.

This is not an exhaustive tool and it contains possible unique artistic ideas that can be bothering for others. Releases are laborious. So feel free to use it and debug it but do not blame us if it is too old or if there are bugs.

Here are some possible interests for jtol:

ENP-like notation in max, nested tree system for rhythm

braid theory, tessellation

cellular automata and multi-agent systems

chaos

sieves

permutative, serial functions

multi-order markov chains

multi-set

quantization, interpolation and extrapolation

pitch functions

genetic algorithms

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+++ jtol.bach.ratio

jtol.bach.ratio gives rational values from a tree representation. Inspired by ENP notation, it is very pretty and convenient for rhythmic musical structures where durations are filled in rational ways.
Ratios are nested with parenthesis in order to make a multilevel tree.

Each ratio before a new parenthesis level is the total duration for what is inside this parenthesis.
For instance, simple musical tuplets would be expressed this way:
• ( 1 ( 1 1 1 ) ) => ( 1/3 1/3 1/3 ) => ( 0.333 0.333 0.333 ) (Σ 1)
• ( 1 ( 1 1 ( 1 1 1 ) ) ) => ( 1/2 1/6 1/6 1/6 ) => ( 0.5 0.1667 0.1667 0.1667 ) (Σ 1)
There is a very close relation with spatial tessellations like voronoi‘s one where the delaunay triangulation would be practical.

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+++ jtol.bach.reduce

jtol.bach.reduce reduces the depth of trees.
For instance, if we have the following tree:
• ( 2 1 ( 1 2 1 ( 1 1 ( 1 1 1 ) ) ) 1 1 1 ( 1 1 ( 2 1 ) ) )
=> ( 2 1 ( 1 2 1 ( 1 1 ) ) 1 1 1 ( 1 1 ) )
=> ( 2 1 ( 1 2 1 ) 1 1 1 )
=> ( 2 1 1 1 1 )
A reduction of deepness is very convenient for playing with the degree of complexity of a rhythm. Questions relative to tempo and scale similarity (starting point for fractals) rise from this process. Nevertheless, it is a question of tiling.
Raphael Robinson wrote an interesting paper about aperiodical hierarchical tilings in 1996.

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+++ jtol.bach2score

jtol.bach2score gathers a time tree representation for bach.score. Time signature is calculated from incoming tree and note value. Notes all have the same pitch.

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+++ jtol.bach.henon

jtol.bach.henon is one of the available generators I am working on. As an example, this one performs the Henon map, a non-linear two-dimensional discrete deterministic dynamical system.

For most generators, each parameter can be a scalar, a vector or a tree. This allows a cell-by-cell and a step-by-step control for the generated forms.

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RHYTHMIC TREE EXAMPLE 

Two jtol.bach.scramble scramble one same rythmic tree at two different depth levels. Resulting trees are then put together then shown into a traditional score notation.

Download Video: Closed Format: MP4 (Baseline)

11_2011

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Seven is an interactive installation composed by Thomas Goepfer, Robin Meier and Olivier Pasquet. The graphic part has been designed by Samuel Toulouse and Nicolas Ballu. The piece is a commission by Reciproque and the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton. The first exhibition started on nov 16th 2011.

The Louis Vuitton Cultural Center in Paris was presenting a thematic exhibition around sound and music. Inside the rotonde at the very top of the Champs Elysées shop, visitors can create, play then record musical machines inspired by other pieces from the exhibition. Seven iPads are presented in a circle and mounted on music stands. Users always get something musical and appealing whatever they are experimenting. Seven sound generators are controlled by seven music generators. Each interface is dedicated to both a unique music generator and a specific sound. Some are simple and direct when others are more complex and need more time to experiment with.

The work is presented as a playable septuor people can explore and experiment with. A recording can be kept by downloading it here on SoundCloud.com and advertising it on Facebook and Twitter.

download _11_2011

op.soundcloud uploads sounds to SoundCloud.com to share them online. AIFF, WAVE, FLAC, OGG, MP2, MP3, AAC, AMR and WMA files are the accepted formats.

In order to login, you need a user name, a password, a “client secret” and a “client id”. The “client secret” and “client id” are found when registering an app on soundcloud.com. I left you the choice to do it yourself or use the ones provided in this help patch.
It is then possible to add tags, delete an uploaded file, change copyrights and access properties.
When a file is uploaded, the external gives the url on which one can then have access from a web browser.

The help patch also contains an example for uploading a stack of files from disk.

Soundcloud API: 1.0.2 (nov 2011).








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07_2011

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完璧な回 is a print on plexiglass. It is one generated score of one musical retrograde canon. The piece is part of my work on music materialization. It was first exhibited at the 10 years anniversary of Tokyo Wonder Site in late July 2011.

watch a zoom here

Before being reduced to two dimensions, points find their optimized 3d position thanks to the Galapagos genetic solver. For the fun story, each slice has the same amount of dots and its wideness only depends on that. Below are short visualizations of the evolutionary system:

Used softwares are Rhino, Grasshopper, VRay, MaxMSP and ImageMagick.

01_2007

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Nadèle 1954 is an audio visual piece. It expounds a 1959 science fiction movie and transposes it to another piece staggering between my abstraction and figuration from the actual movie. I have chosen the 1959 version of The World, the Flesh and the Devil. This Ranald MacDougall movie is based in part on two sources: the novel The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel and the story End of the World by Ferdinand Reyher.

The plot is rather similar to many other movies like The Last Man on Earth in 1924, the wonderful The Last Man on Earth from 1964, the 1959 On the Beach, the 1971 The Omega Man, the 2000 On the Beach, or I Am Legend in 2007. Those movies describe the fantasy a single or a small group of men will one day be the last human beings to live on the planet.

1959 movie poster

The movie makes an impressive visit of an empty Manhattan in which the hero discovers he is not alone. A lady and another man rise into the story. The situation slowly evolves from a Jean-Paul Sartre No Exit (Huis Clos in French) between existentialist individuals to a more general scale. That scale would rather relate sociological situations and behaviors in a more current context than the one characterized in the movie.

Many people ask why I entitled it Nadèle 1954. The N is for the negation, the negative and the lack of presence. The date 1954 is simply because of my interest for the year 1954 when post-war technological progresses mixed with the fear of a nuclear apocalypse influenced artists and intellectuals of that time. Adèle stands for the name of the lady.

nadèle 1954 second character

Ranald MacDougall merely made a socially engaging drama by covering taboos like interracial rivalry, cultural differences, selfishness and mental collapsing. The transformed version of the movie enhances a cataclysm poetry of an empty city like New-York. But the main plot resides in the relation between those three persons with their respective psychological characteristics. Traits belong to their own personality, to the exceptional situation and a particular moment of their life. Affects take over the importance from all other plots in the movie. It reaches a point when both males compete and chase each other, ready to kill and die although they are the last remaning living men. This situation is a usual one in everyday’s life. Love is not sometimes only a question of duality but a question of triality. Two persons and a third entity that probably is the extra one, the one that has to move back and find a place, and moment, when it will become second entity. This third unstable entity can be human, an external element or a social/cultural group different from others. This is not a generalization in psychology but rather an interesting poetic point of view.

nadèle 1954 pictures

The movie and the sound consist on a well chosen continuous filter effect. The result is a long and slow evolution of sound and moving images where time frames interlace one another. The work focusses on two main ideas: contour and time persistence.

The visual contour I build is very similar but simpler than algorithms such as the VRay Toon Shader. I use MaxMSP Jitter for doing that. Many movies make use of this technique to generate cartoons from real film takes. The audio contour is quite similar since I am working in the spectral domain and simply look for peaks. The mapping between the analysis and its re-synthesis (additive synthesis) is artistically empirical. It does not make use of mfcc or any other process after the spectral analysis for the sound or edge detection for the image. The result sometimes sounds very minimalistic and “dronic” (drone). Sometimes, pure tones rythmically arrive from the deepness of a long reverb. One could make connections with some “esthetical movement” close to Ryoji Ikeda works.

cartoon maker from real image vs. audio spectrum peak extraction

Time persistence is a very rich subject because it is a projection of movement to space. Cinema applications like time slice effects or slit-scan use this property. In the movie, a slight motion blurring effect is used only on some chosen elements in the image. This allows elements from the image to escape contours and thus make ghosts images. The effect is similar to a resonance or a reverberation. In the movie, time does not effectively slow down, the reading of the audience does. Since this resonance happens during all the movie’s duration, its dramaturgic evolution deeply becomes times and leaves its own interpretation and perception to the spectator. It also results some kind of relief impression giving the impression of a new perspective.

one of the nadèle 1954  max patch and visible blur

03_2002

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Ecosphere is a piece from Rand Steiger commissioned by Ircam and Ensemble Intercontemporain in 1999. It was created by Ensemble Intercontemporain and directed by Patrick Davin on March 1st 2002 at the Grand Salle of the Pompidou Center.

Rand Steiger precisely describes the piece on his website. I simply copy here the program note:

The earth has a complex and delicate balance of ecosystems that sustain a diversity of life forms. Human intervention is now altering this balance in unprecedented ways, most notably from rain forest eradication, and the various effects of global warming. The geographer Robert Bailey has classified terrestrial ecosystems into four domains (polar, humid temperate, dry, and humid tropical) divided into 15 regions. All of the earth’s land mass fall into these 15 classifications in various percentages, from savanna (17%) to hot continental (1.4%). This is a dynamic equation that human intervention is altering quickly and dangerously.

last rehearsal at the Grande Salle of the Pompidou Center

This piece draws on Bailey’s classifications as a formal model. There are sixteen sections (in one continuous movement) that take their temporal proportions from the percentages of their corresponding ecosystem, presented in the following order (with cities given as one example of where each ecosystem may be found):

	1. atmosphere 		            9. tropical steppe (Khartoum)
	2. subarctic (Fairbanks)           10. tropical desert (Djibouti)
	3. tundra (Reykjavik)              11. rain forest (Manaus)
	4. warm continental (Tallinn)      12. savanna (Madras)
	5. temperate steppe (Volgagrad)    13. temperate desert (Taschkent)
	6. marine (Paris)                  14. subtropical (Sydney)
	7. hot continental (Nagano)        15. prairie (Montevideo)
	8. mediterranean (San Diego)       16. icecap (Byrd Station)

Some data about each regions climate is taken into consideration in developing the material for each section, particularly the way temperature and precipitation change over the course of an average year. But other then this, the music is composed freely, with no attempt to illustrate. I do not seek to create a musical picture of these systems, but rather use this data as a model for a journey through a varied musical terrain. I also wish to celebrate the present diversity of ecosystems, and lament the gradual erosion of this diversity and corresponding extinction of numerous life forms.

Ecosphere is scored for flute (with piccolo and alto), oboe (with cor anglais), 2 clarinets (with bass, and contrabass), two horns, trombone, 2 percussionists, 2 keyboards, and string quintet. The keyboards control sample players to simulate various plucked and struck instruments, with a computer deployed to dynamically retune the samples in a just relationship to the fundamental frequency of each phrase. Real-time audio signal processing is deployed on all of the other instruments for spatialization, resonance, reverberation, delay, cross synthesis, and just intonation pitch shifting.

Rand Steiger expresses his gratitude to Eric DeVischer and Alain Jaquinot for their support, to Miller Puckette of UCSD for his software development, and to Olivier Pasquet of IRCAM for his indispensable assistance with the technical realization of this work.

On the morning of 11 September 2001 a terrible act of cruelty occurred in my place of birth, New York City. Perhaps a work of art seems trivial in light of the disastrous consequences of this act. But however insignificant it may seem, I must offer this piece in dedication to the memory of the victims of this tragedy.

Rand Steiger has released a recording on cdemusic.