It’s oddly apropos that bits are coming together, here on the eve of the (calendar) new year. Bits of technological, musical, and epistemological* flotsam and jetsam seem to be accumulating into useful shapes in my immediate vicinity.

To wit - this person has posted a handful of schematics and sound clips regarding the construction of circuits exhibiting chaotic behaviour, and using said circuits to control synthesizers. In other words, a chaos-driven instrument is within reach of my handy laser screwdriver soldering iron.

I’m very excited.

*more on this later - I’m still working on putting it into words.

After a most excellent holiday weekend with friends and family, followed by an unbelievably boring 3-day workweek, yesterday found me back at work on the 1st floor bathroom project. Between bouts of cutting, hammering, and cursing I would pop up to the studio for coffee/cigarette/surf breaks. One of the things Dan and I discussed last weekend was DIY instruments - cigar box guitars, whamolas, mbiras, and etc. I’ve been thinking this week about various ways to build simple things that make interesting sounds - those thoughts led me to the most excellent Atlas of Plucked Instruments.

Whilst stumbling around the Atlas, I came across what can only be described as an acoustic whamola - the Dan Bau. It’s a single-stringed instrument with a buffalo-horn lever at one end (not the top - you play it horizontally on a tabletop) that’s used to vary the pitch of the string. Just to keep things interesting, the playing technique relies upon harmonics, not the actual plucked pitch. I found more info here, and sound clips there. Doesn’t look like one would be all that hard to build - the only sticky bit will be finding an appropriate material for the lever.

I wonder if the guys who built Les’ whamola knew about this instrument, or if this is an example of Jungian whatchacallit at work?

(Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.)

Just think, this time next year you’ll be listening to the OVO Christmas album…

Something I’ve been meaning to do for several years is write a Yule tune, and this year I’ve managed to whip one up. Enjoy the holiday - in whatever way it pleases you to celebrate.

the long dark has come
the long dark has come
the sun king dies, and in a star-field lies
for the long dark has come

embrace the night
embrace the night
bank the fires while the moon hangs high
and embrace the night

give thanks for the turn of the wheel of the year
share blessings and harvest with all
keep faith in rebirth and in unconquered sun
and when the dawn breaks sing your praise

the long night is done
the long night is done
the newborn light shines ancient and wise
on each of us
for each of us
every one of us a sun

Found a couple of interesting-looking pieces of ambient music/sound generation software:

• sounder
• ambient grains

Anyone know of anything else cool? I’m looking for ways to capture the song of the ghost in the machine…

OK, so I’m late to the party, but this is friggin’ cool!  Jack is a killer audio routing widget for linux that allows multiple applications to participate in audio I/O streams.  There’s been no direct equivalent on windows, AFAIK, except for ReWire, and that’s not universally supported.  This port of Jack seems to have an ASIO backend, so all your audio apps can see it.

I’m in the midst of rebuilding my windows box, as much as I love linux, the audio support isn’t quite there yet (least not with my hardware), so I’m gonna remain a fence-sitter for a while longer.  More news after I give it a play and see what happens…

Thanks to Dan turning me on to the wyrdfolk goodness from Some Dark Holler, I’ve been craving a banjo for about 6 months. Scored an old 4-string at an auction last night, photos and new sounds a forthcoming…

Update: It is apparently a tenor banjo (17 fret, “irish” tenor) of unknown origin. There are no marking to indicate its origin or maker, just a “Narawco” stamp on the head. Google doesn’t know what Narawco means, and neither do I.

CDM has an article about a new build of Pure Data called Pd-extended. I’ve always been fascinated by Pd (and it’s expensive cousin, Max/MSP), but the learning curve is insane. This new build claims to be better documented and have more of the inner goodness of Pd exposed to the user. The install certainly is painless (least on my Ubuntu box), we’ll see if I can get any noise out of it. I’m hoping it will be useful, and that I can get by brain around it. I’ve been very happy the last few months being MSFT-free, a killer noise-making app would be the cherry on top.

Hurray! Finally an understandable (leastwise to me) explanation of how to string & tune a saz.

A completely insecure, but very convenient on a trusted network, Samba configuration:

• http://www.debuntu.org/guest-file-sharing-with-samba

Tricks to get a Presonus Firepod working with FreeBoB:

• http://subversion.ffado.org/index.fcgi/wiki/InstallOnUbuntuFeisty
• http://freebob.sourceforge.net/index.php/UdevConfiguration