Algorave Cafe Oto

Nearly ten years on since the first Algorave, worldwide instantiations of the event continue to connect an international community of audio-visual artists experimenting and playing with algorithmic tools. Algorave spans programming paradigms to celebrate the collaborative culture of open source and experimental sound while maintaining a strong root in dance music, making it a space naturally inclined to share, teach, and encourage self-learning. Algorave is many things and continues to evolve. Many parties, workshops, meet-ups, and festivals later, Algorave remains a lively crossing point for experimentation, but more importantly for fun.

Bringing this ethos to Cafe Oto, the evening will showcase work by audio and visual artists:

Deep Vain
Eye Measure
hellocatfood
Hortense
Jude Marcella
Mahalia Henry-Richards
Miri Kat
Renick Bell
Seth de Silva
Yaxu
+777000

+ special DJ set from hmurd

Expect a relaxed atmosphere and quick-fire sets from ambient to gabber and back. At its best, Algorave softens the tech wall of mystery, opening exchange between performers and audience.

ALGORITHMS ARE INFECTING DISCOS AND RUINING LIVES

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“.. not so much a revolution as a de-volution, a rolling back to the backend of music production, where the possibilities of the encoded information inside computer software is open and endless” – Mixmag

Audio Porn, 10th December

On 10th December I’ll be taking part in the HFWAS event Audio Porn

audioporn

Join us at P Cafe on the 10th December for our last event of the year! Audio Porn is the theme for this night of spoken word and sound based performance. Be warned explicit imagery may be aroused in your minds eye.

£3 entry on the door.

I’ll have a short video and audio installation called Breathless. Plus there’ll be wine!

Zen audio hack

Awhile back I acquired a Creative ZEN Stone mp3 player. It was a a little scuffed around the edges but otherwise a perfectly functional mp3 player. For some time I was using a pair of regular headphones but then I tried using in a pair of iPhone headphones (and then later HTC headphones). The results are somewhat weird. Take a listen:


Original song: Fade to Daft by Look What I Did (download for free from here.) I had to record this by placing my headphones on my microphone for reasons that I’ll explain later.

You may not be able to hear it but it sounds like one of the channels is being muted, whilst the other sounds like it has an echo effect. Also, it sounds as though the bitrate has been reduced to about 24kbps!

At first I couldn’t understand why this was happening so I consulted fizzPOP (who have just started hack sessions again) and it’s apparently due to the rings on the headphone jack.

Headphone hack

Wikipedia, which is so obviously a reliable source, informs me that this is a TRRS plug, the extra ring being used for the microphone/control button. This extra ring is obviously interfering with the devices and making it sound glitchy. Naturally my first instinct was to record it, but this presented many problems.

First, in order to record the output of the player I needed a male to male 3.5mm cable that uses TRRS plugs. A quick Google search revealed that these don’t exist so I had to make my own.

Headphone hack

Some of thinnest wires in the world evar!

As I had discovered earlier, the headphones capable of reproducing this glitch are iPhone headphones so I soldered two of the cables for these together, essentially creating a male to male 3.5mm cable with TRRS plugs. Happy times! 🙂

Or so I thought.

The problem I now still face is that the socket on my laptop is obviously capable of accepting TRRS plugs without glitches so the audio comes out clear when recorded via Audacity (well, it would be clearer were it not for my crappy soldering skills!).

This is where I require help from those more adept with audio than I. Is there a way to record the glitchy sound in the same “quality” as it is output from the mp3 player? The recording above was made by holding my headphones to my laptop microphone, which doesn’t faithfully reproduce the truly weird audio experience (though does produce a lo-fi aesthetic).

It’s Just Noise!

As readers of my blog will know by now you can easily import any data into audacity and play it as audio. However, most data that you’ll import and then play will just turn out as noise. That is simply because there’s too much noise in the image i.e. too many colours and too much data. So, if you reduce the amount of colours and data in theory you get something a little bit more pleasing to the ear. Experimentationing time!

These were my initial two shapes that I worked with:

And the resulting sound, when looped a lil’ bit:

It’s not much but it shows definite potential. I’ve yet to work out how colour affects the sound, but I’m getting there

The next logical step is to of course run a glitched image through this process! I worked with this image for the sound then used ImageMagick to crop the image to 30x30px squares and used FFmpeg to arrange them into a video.

It’s noise, but I like it 🙂