My first YouTube: a new generative music algorithm

I've been working for a few weeks on a new generative music algorithm: Kepler's Orrery.
It starts with a gravity simulator, and makes bodies whir around the screen with mutual attraction.
Then whenever they collide, they play music.

You start with a world, with bodies that have mass, position, and velocity
(or rocks), add instruments and melodies, and let them go.

So I took one of the worlds and made a video and posted it. Check it out:

www.youtube.com/watch

and then here's the next one:
www.youtube.com/watch

musical chorten

backdate: sevennineteenohsix. Sakye monastery, south.

My habit of plonking everything I pass to perceive its idiophonic potential seems to have paid off. In the center courtyard of the Sakye monastery stands a small chorten-shaped object made of sheet metal (I learn later that it's an incense burner not a chorten). By small I mean a box 8 feet wide, 3 feet tall, with a six foot egg on the top. These things show up in the middle of courtyards, next to stupas, etc. Often made of stone, they have a hole in the egg that burns stuff. fragrant stuff.

Walking by on the way to see the monastery I causally plonked it. It rang! I plonked somewhere else. It rang a different note: sewwter. Elsewhere: antoher tone. Maybe five or six notes. "Drumming again," our guide Nima chuckled. "Yep." And then I started playing it.

Gamelan-like riffs of four high notes; 2 & 3 note bass figures. Linked rhythm & melody lines. I was really getting into it. Soon I was surro8unded by young monks wondering what the bleep I was doing. I stopped & showed them the different notes. One or two of them got it, but mostly they just listened to me. Then one of them found my book mof sketches, and the sounds stopped. I came back several times to play it (& unsuccessfully record it), and each time ended up surrounded.

I had been lamenting that we hadn't had much contact with people. An hour off the plane on the first day here got me into some pretty cool conversations & connections. After that is was mostly big-city interactions -- distant, guarded, or else trying to sell us something.

Sakye is a much smaller town, & people were more curious and more willing to to connect. E.e. after walking up to the ruins of the northern monastery (just across the river), & drawing a picture of a portion of a broken wall and the big white chortens (stupas) on the hill, I walked over to them. A grizzled old monk was there. He saw me and gestured emphatically to see my book. Afterbeing not too impressed with the drawings, he then told me that they were called the "five high lama chortens" and proceeeded to tell me who or what each one was for, or who was in them, or something. I don't really know, since all this conversation happened in tibetan (his side), and quizzical nods (my side), and he wrote down something in tibetab on my drawing that later seemed to be (not quite grammatically correct), the five high lama chortens.


Smaller, more remote towns: better connection with people than in the big city. More on this later...

Boom Boom Tssssch!

After five days walking, landroverring, gawking, and gasping for breath in incredible remote rural areas --

the villages in Tibet have been what has made the biggest impression on me, with their rock and cement, or rock and mud, or herringbone-patterned dried yak dung patty walls. Every house has prayer flags flying on flagpoles from the corners. Baby yaks run everywhere; tibetan pigs have straight tails that look like they wag -- though they're probably just switching off flies. Motorcycles abound, often with 4 foot wide bales of hay strapped on. Even cooler are the tractors that look like they have a lawnmower on poles attached to a small flatbed. They make a godawful noise, and hold one driver and a whole lotta stuff.

There are terraces running up every flattable space in the river valleys; some even up to 15000 feet! The ground has been lusher than I'd imagined at that height. Piled-rock irrigation ditches bring the mountain stream water here & there. Thick grass covers everything. Not long grass, though, because of the yaks. The architecture is really cool. Hard to describe here. I've got loads of pictures of what the houses look like, and a few drawings. Mostly one-story, with stone walls everywhere -- yards for pigs; walls around fields to keep the yaks out so the grass will grow to make hay to feed the yaks in the winter. Some walls have yak dung patties piled on them for winter fuel. Some walls have the patties flattened against their sides. My brother says his house is too cold in the winter, so he's going to get him a yak dung stove.

So anyways, we get back to Lhasa. Big big-city overwhelm. We trek through hordes of grasping merchants who continually call out "haloo! looky looky!" for our business (and then quote obscenely high prices when we point at an item).

Finally we make it to the stairs going up to the restaurant, and a monk is standing there. He sees me and says "Boom Boom Tssssch!" I look up, and it's the monk I was beatboxing with a week ago! In a huge crowded city a good distance away from his monastery. He was stopping at the phone booth at the bottom of the stairs. We were both rather surprised & happy to see each other, even though we couldn't actually talk to each other.

Yaks

yak butter lamps
yak butter tea
yak curry
boiled yak heart (very tasty!)
yak hair wool.
yak dung stoves (not as smelly as you might suppose).
the sound of yaks chewing grass & mooing (in stereo, from inside a small group).
the sight of young yaks gamboling down the hill.
yak jerky, wrapped in candy-sized pieces. (to be snuck into the proverbial candy jar?)

Just back from a trek that was aborted because we would have had to camp in the snow where the yak's couldn't eat. (Not to mention that hiking at 16,200 feet pretty much pushed me to the limit). Tomorrow morning off on a land rover trek to the west. The pics'll get uploaded at the end of the month. See y'all then.

The sound of Rain in the potala

Up early for an 8am entrance to the potala. Taxi took us to the wrong entrance. So we ran down the road to get there in time (well, I skipped, following the old adage that if you gotta get somewhere fast, but don't wanna look like you're in a hurry, skip. And at 12 thousand feet. pant. pant)

So we've climbed a zillion stairs, had our ids and tickets checked for the nth time, read the NO PHOTOS! EVER! signs. saw a cute little cat in a room full of old scriptures. Stare at it and it miaows & then leaps onto the rail to get petted). Then it starts raining. I'm on a balcony overlooking the new copper roof of the rest area/tea place, hearing the pinging of the raindrops, so I turn on my minidisc recorder. The sign says no cameras and no videos, but didn't mention sound recording... But still, I get nervous whenever the green shirted gendarmes pass by in their meticulous peaked caps. I'm wearing a lavalier mic in an inconspicuous place, but remain furtive.
The sound of the rain filters in & out as we pass through different rooms and see 3-D mandalas and huge stupas with 3000kg of gold plating -- the tomb of the 7th (or 5th?) dalai lama. And the water rushing through pipes that drain the various levels.

Finally as we left, walking down the long path in the pouring rain, the sounds of the rivulets, tinged red from the painted twig walls, sometimes remaining in the pathside guttters, sometimes chortling over a little inadvertent waterfall.

I got about 40 minutes of recording. It'll take a while to edit down this one.

Teaching beatboxing to Tibetan Monks

Stopped at a little monastery called Nyeitang Drolmachakang along the way from the airport to Lhasa,
. Got to talking to some monks,
primarily in chinese, with a few words of english thrown
in. I only remember enough chinese to put in a word or
two and catch some of the conversation. Mostly Tony
translated. For some reason they really liked my bald
head and goatee.

I asked the monks if they did the low
throatsinging thing, and while tony was trying to
translate it, I just did it. So did they, then I
taught them some beatboxing (singing drum noises) and
some step-slap-clap body music rhythms. They really
liked that. They brought us sweet tibetan tea and made
us tsampa, the roast barley flour that's mixed with a
bit of tea, rolled into little balls (all with the
fingers) and eaten for all the morining meals here.
I've wanted to try tsampa ever since reading about it
25 years ago, and this was my first time! Then I did
some more singing tibetan songs with one of the monks,
kind of call-and-response or round style. They showed
us the monastery and the relics from 1055 when the
founder of the monastery, Atisha, came over from
India. We got a really good behind-the scenes tour
that most tourists usually don't get.

While one monk was showing us the relics and telling us stories, the other one kept pulling me aside to do more beatboxing and rhythm stepping. We both laughed & laughed. And then sang some more. I did an air trumpet & beatbox version of mac the knife, right there in the middle of the temple! I was both elated, amused and embarrassed, all at the same time.

I gave them a cd of some of my recent compositions. We were presented with the white silk greeting scarves, and finally moseyed back on down the road.

Haunted Garden in Keyboard magazine.

The trip to Keyboard HQ was intriguing, the interview fun, sushi lunch afterwards scrumptious, but the article about sound art at burning man (by Michael Gallant) turned out even better!

www.keyboardmag.com/story.asp

Dusty Tea Party! (& art sale)

Oh, it's been too long since I've had a tea party, and my live/work space (that I'm living in & working on with Dr. Yo, Hallie, and Matt) isn't done yet, so we can't have our housewarming party yet. But damn! I'm gonna have a tea party anyways. And an art sale. I've got my room jam-packed full of paintings and drawings and photocollages and stuff. And I need to raise money for my burningman project and because my enemployment just ran out. So all that. Sunday june 26th. tea time. (that's 3:30 in these parts).

Here's more details:
art.net/~simran/SoundSculpture/DustyTea/