Evan X. Merz

I'm pleased to announce the release of Disconnected, an album of algorithmic sound collages generated by pulling sounds from the web.

I prefer to call this album semi-algorithmic because some of the music is purely software-generated, while other pieces are a collaboration between the software and myself. Tracks four and six are purely algorithmic, while the other tracks are a mix of software-generated material and more traditionally composed material.

The software used in the sound collage pieces (1, 3, 4, 6) was inspired by Melissa Schilling's Small World Network Model of Cognitive Insight. Her theory essentially says that moments of cognitive insight, or creativity, occur whenever a connection is made between previously distantly related ideas. In graph theory, these types of connections are called bridges, and they have the effect of bringing entire neighborhoods of ideas closer together.

I applied Schilling's theory to sounds from freesound.org. My software searches for neighborhoods of sounds that are related by aural similarity and stores them in a graph of sounds. These sounds are then connected with more distant sounds via lexical connections from wordnik.com. These lexical connections are bridges, or moments of creativity. This process is detailed in the paper Composing with All Sound Using the FreeSound and Wordnik APIs.

Finally, these sound graphs must be activated to generate sound collages. I used a modified boids algorithm to allow a swarm to move over the sound graph. Sounds were triggered whenever the population on a vertex surpassed a threshold.

Disconnected is available for download from Xylem Records.

I recently supplied the score for the latest episode for the Office Problems web show.

This week Erin and I will be down in Long Beach to participate in SoundWalk 2013. The End of My Career will be played at one of the locations.

Sonifying Processing shows students and artists how to bring sound into their Processing programs. It takes a hands-on approach, incorporating examples into every topic that is discussed. Each section of the book explains a sound programming concept then demonstrates it in code. The examples build from simple synthesizers in the first few chapters, to more complex sound-manglers as the book progresses. Each step of the way is examined at a level that is simple enough for new learners, and comfortable for more experienced programmers.

Topics covered include Additive Synthesis, Frequency Modulation, Sampling, Granular Synthesis, Filters, Compression, Input/Output, MIDI, Analysis and everything else an artist may need to bring their Processing sketches to life.

"Sonifying Processing is a great introduction to sound art in Processing. It's a valuable reference for multimedia artists." - Beads Creator Oliver Bown

Sonifying Processing is available as a free pdf ebook, in a Kindle edition, or in print from Amazon.com.

Downloads

Sonifying Processing The Beads Tutorial

The Beads Library was created by Oliver Bown, and can be downloaded at http://www.beadsproject.net/.

Press

Sonifying Processing on Peter Kirn's wonderful Create Digital Music

Sonifying Processing on Rekkerd

Sonifying Processing on Mostly Noise

This week What Will Come from the Vacuum is being played in Trauenkirchen, Germany, as part of a exhibition called Physik und Musik. This piece was written as a response to images of scientific equipment.