[ale] OT: Music Composition == Information Architecture Design

[arxion]

This Cellist, Zoe Keating, performed at Atlanta's EyeDrum Gallery
recently. Since then she seems to have become a bit of a nerd star.

She uses a Mac laptop and some fairly state of the art commercial
music software to do live performance "layered looping".  Taking
the basics of multi-track recording further into the digital realm,
the technology allows her build complex pieces performed in real time,
in effect becoming a one person Cello orchestra one measure at a time.

Wired just posted a some pixeo interview pieces with her where she
compares the music composing process to her day job of working with
information architecture design and web programming**:

Abridged Interview:
< http://tinyurl.com/keatingintrvw3m >

Full Interview:
< http://tinyurl.com/keating10m >

Performance Piece:
< http://tinyurl.com/zkeatingplays6m >

Article Reference:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/05/keating/


This all caught my eye because I'm a volunteer with Eydrum AND
I've recently taken to doing a little music composition in a similar
process.  I got a couple of cheap (~$50) Nano-Korg midi controller
devices as holiday gifts and have finally found some time to play
with them using Garage Band and it's nice library of instrument sounds.
Performing live with the velocity sensitive drum pads and micro keyboard
I've managed to quickly get up to speed and layer together a few
interesting little sketches that are evolving into actual songs.

It's a lot of fun, so I'm looking to expand the tools and move this into
live performance. However, to keep things affordable I'll be doing more
with Open Source and GNU Linux solutions.  I'm happily finding there are
a plethora of OSS music & midi composition tools that would seem to  
compare
pretty favorably to the commercial offerings. The one that seems most
interesting, though, is a a modular programable processing environment
called Pure Data.  The package is GPL, (fully) cross platform and very
mature, having also been forked into a psuedo-compatible (and expensive)
commercial product called Max/MSP.  Anyway, if a real-time graphical
programming environment for audio, video, and graphical processing
that runs well on GNU Linux sounds interesting to you, check it out  
here:

< http://puredata.info/ >
(also --
< http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Data >


peace
aaron


** (sorry if the pixeo streaming is weak, but it looks like they're
using some M$ based crap service for distribution and its been sucking
out loud on my system; really bad audio sync, stutters and hangs and
frozen video all over the place. I had better luck with the direct
urls, but still...)