ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTE is a live radio station playing every Absolute Radio broadcast simultaneously (Absolute 60s, Absolute 70s, Absolute 80s, Absolute 90s, Absolute 00s, Absolute Classic Rock).

Described by critics as "So ontologically terrifying it reminds you how incredible life is" (Paul Bennun), "Radio for those who understand the horror of existence" (Tulta Behm), and "The end of history" (Hestia Peppé), it will be broadcasting for a limited time only. Don't miss it.

ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTE

(To play in iTunes, right-click and Copy Link Location; in iTunes, hit cmd-U and paste the URL.)

Below is a 5-minute excerpt (recorded 2013-03-08, 17:14)

An extended version of Radio Reconstructions is installed at new art/science space LimeWharf over the next six weeks. It's the first in a series of temporary residencies hosted there, and resonates nicely with their general ethos:

LimeWharf is an evolving project that aspires to immerse guests and practitioners alike in thematic journeys. The core values of our programming are centred around building a positive relationship to the future, connecting the old and the new, meshing crafts with technology all in a non-market driven process-led series of experiments...

It's been a good opportunity to reflect on how the piece links together the history and nostalgia of analogue radio with the futurist technology of digitally-controlled tuners and algorithmic analysis. I expect that when the Mac Mini controlling the installation has gasped its last bits, the venerable radios distributing the audio will be still going strong.

It has also given us the opportunity to think about the separation between the physical apparatus of the installation, and the sound that is heard through it.

We have started considering the installation itself to be akin to a semi-autonomous instrument, which has a particular space of timbres and behaviours associated with it -- in this case, the space of locally-receivable radio broadcasts, and the capability to record, arrange and analyse those broadcasts into pitched fragments.

We can then compose scores for the piece which determine the dynamics of these behaviours over time. Here, we are scoring for grain amplitude, duration and diffusion, and two EQ parameters.

Separating score from instrument means that we can write multiple distinct scores for the installation, exploring different capacities and approaches. We have composed two new 30-minute scores for Radio Reconstructions, which are designed to be played at specific times and capitalise on the fact that we know in advance what is scheduled on major FM stations -- so, we can navigate between programmes with an awareness of the kind of content that will be played, juxtaposing talk radio chatter with distant shortwave broadcasts with local Citizens Band static...

Both of these scores will be broadcast on art radio station Resonance FM. Listen in on their website at 8pm on Tuesday 12 March and Tuesday 19th March.

Next month at the Barbican, James Bulley and I are debuting a new piece of work which harnesses the tiny sound-systems that 6 billion people carry around with them each day.

xtet uses mobile phone handsets to create an ephemeral multichannel sound system, which only exists for as long as the event itself:

By broadcasting real-time audio to the audience's wireless mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, mp3 players, etc), the audience itself becomes a temporary speaker system comprised of countless distributed sound sources, forming a uniquely spatial and participatory experience. The movements of listeners cause the music's spatial formation to shift and grow, akin to the reactive motions of a shoal of fish.

It is both a platform (as a method for streaming multiple unique audio streams over HTTP, with HTML5 display) and a series of works; we are composing a number of pieces of music for xtet as a medium, considering the unusual set of constraints that it imposes. These include not knowing ahead of time how many speakers will be present, and writing for highly treble-weighted playback.

xtet I (α, β, γ, δ, θ, μ) is the first in the series, commissioned by the Barbican and Wellcome Trust for Wonder: Art and Science on the Brain. It is modelled on the patterns and characteristics of neural activity, taking the relative lengths of key types of neural oscillation (alpha waves, beta waves, delta waves...) and using them to determine the structure and timings of musical events.

It's a much looser, higher-level interpretation of cognitive patterns than something as rigorous as the neural nets of The Fragmented Orchestra, but basing the piece on the emergent properties of thought seems like an apt way to start writing for an installation which is itself wholly dependent on collective activity.

We're also excited to be incorporating xtet into the Marcus du Sautoy performance lecture on consciousness, using it to diffuse James Holden's trance-inducing musical material across the audience.

We prototyped it for the first time yesterday, with much assistance from a generous throng of Barbican volunteers, and it was quite magical to hear James's analogue sounds splinter and shimmer across the auditorium.

More information: xtet

The Listening Machine is an orchestral sonification of the online activity of several hundred (unwitting) UK-based Twitter users. Created with cellist Peter Gregson and Britten Sinfonia, it has been a vast adventure combining studio recordings with a chamber ensemble, countless hours of coding towards a growing generative compositional toolkit, and delving into the mechanics of linguistics, prosody, and natural language processing.

Key to the compositional process is a system to translate the flow and rhythm of a text passage into a musical score, based on ordering the formant frequencies of the human voice, which characterise the qualities of each vowel sound. We determine the piece's musical mode via sentiment mapping, and then generate individual note-wise patterns by translating syllables into notes in the current scale. As several Twitter users are typically active at the same time, the result is multiple, intertwining melody lines, tonally related but structurally distinct.

The Listening Machine launched at the start of last month as part of The Space, a great new BBC/Arts Council initiative encouraging National Portfolio organisations into the realm of online content. With a team of BBC broadcast technology ninjas, our contribution is a piece of music which lasts 6 months and is quintessentially digital: using data sourced from internet discussions, and streamed solely over the web.

But maybe the most exciting part has been the combination of algorithmic processes with thousands of fragments of orchestrally-recorded refrains. The objective was always to create a piece of music which sounded organic, and -- in spite of its metronomic pulse -- the results aren't too far from what we envisaged. See the website for information about the compositional process.

The other integral part of the project is the graphic design, created by the excellent Joe Hales. Joe is more typically found creating design for print, and we wanted to translate this page-based aesthetic to the screen, presenting the project almost as if it were a textbook.

With some judicious JSON and HTML 5 <canvas> voodoo, we animated his cog-and-dial visualisation to present a continuous representation of The Listening Machine's state at any point. The collective's mood, activity rate and topics of conversation are displayed live on thelisteningmachine.org, similarly reflected in the musical output.

The Python code behind the algorithmic composition parts is available on github.com/ideoforms/isobar; the text analysis framework will be released in due course.

The Listening Machine can also be found on Twitter @listenmachine and facebook.com/thelisteningmachine.

In an abominable act of oversight, one of the major projects keeping me occupied in 2010 has yet to receive an official announcement here. So, I'm belatedly pleased to herald Variable 4, an environmental installation taking place on the other-worldly shingle plains of Dungeness in May 2010.

In partnership with James Bulley, and with kind support from the PRSF and Campbell Scientific, we're building a system which will be embedded into the desolate landscape and equipped with an array of meteorological sensors. Using algorithmic compositional techniques, it will then respond sonically to the real-time weather conditions, transforming and recombining a bank of precomposed movements and recordings via a multi-channel all-weather soundsystem.

It is taking place over a single 24-hour period, from noon till noon on 22-23 May, and so encompasses one complete daily cycle of solar and environmental conditions. For those not living in the Romney Marsh area, there will be a couple of coaches operating from London - booking info coming soon.

It's been a bit of a baptism of fire as far as project administration goes; who'd have thought that licensing and insurance concerns could occupy so much time? Current top of the anxiety checklist is ensuring that local fisherman aren't somehow entangled in wiring as they begin their 3am working days. Anyhow, we're finally well into the composition phase - leveraging Max For Live and the endless generative musical possibilities that it offers.

We'll be documenting the compositional and technical development on the Variable 4 blog and twitter @variable4, releasing relevant sourcecode and patches wherever possible.

Imperial's Complexity and Networks group are hosting a day-long meeting on music, beauty perception and neuroscience this coming May (Wednesday 19th). With a focus on the neural correlates of creative and aesthetic processes, and the complex dynamics thereof, it's one not to miss for art-and-emergence junkies.

See the attached list of talks (PDF) for more info.

Final push on getting together this belated report on the Dagstuhl seminar Computational Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Approach I attended a couple of months ago. Features such diagrammatic gems as the attached, depicting ongoing interactions in group improvisation.

The first (and, most likely, last) analogue hackpact entry: a gleeful hour spent playing with "The Putney", more commonly known as the Electronic Music Studios VCS3 (courtesy of James). The unit's matrix-based routing is quite unlike any modular or integrated interface I've seen before, more akin to a strange, solitary game of Battleships.

It's also pretty well-equipped for an antiquated monosynth, with a sexy radiophonic spring reverb, ring modulation and input channels to modulate arbitrary audio inputs. Capable of some screaming 60s tones, and very, very addictive.

(audio CC available as by-nc)

Attached is the audio recording of my segment of Songs for Dynamical Systems, the workshop-plus-gig I recently mentioned, part of the Live Algorithms for Music network. The workshop itself was enormously stimulating, bringing up many interesting issues that only emerge when a software system is forced to improvise entirely autonomously with a human performer -- mostly the class of judgments which are entirely intuitive to a musician, and broadly without generalisable rules. Without any symbolic input, for example, how can an autonomous system gauge when to cease playing?

The gig itself, which was the culmination of a feverish few days' collaborative coding (using the P/F/Q = machine-listening/algorithmic-sequencing/machine-synthesis trio that constitutes the core Live Algorithm philosophy of modularity), showcased an impressively wide range of approaches and sonic palettes. It was also great to see collaborative performances pulled off with such panache, with OSC used for communication between participants over a wireless network.

My approach, audible in the recording above, was to develop a minimal responder that would roughly mimic Eddie's playing along a number of axes, each of which corresponds to a high-level musical feature (density of onsets, loudness, roughness/smoothness, frequency centroid, etc). Due to the noisiness of these measurements, and a certain degree of chaos inherent within the sequencing system, this is never remotely as linear as it sounds on paper! I also adopted a vaguely agent-based approach to positioning the sounds in stereo space, with a notional 9 agents responding autonomously to Eddie's playing.

Eddie himself was applying extended techniques to his tam-tam, with bowing and scraping supplemented by a motorised set of wire-beaters that he has affixed to it. It was an enthralling performance to watch, despite the nerves inherent in watching a bunch of piecemeal code attempting to play along with such a marvellous performer.

Thanks to Ollie Bown and Sam Britton for the recording.

Currently in Pittsburgh, PA for NIME 2009, a packed 3-day conference featuring the cutting edge of musical interface design (pdf program). This afternoon featured some neat robotics with Shimon, the mechanical marimba player, and writing instruments for sound control from the folk at MIT's Responsive Environments group.

En route here, we stopped off for a few days in New York. This gave us the opportunity to visit the great people at Eyebeam, whose hospitality was unrivalled (though it did help to inadvertently wander in during their weekly open-studio hours). We also caught the superb Tangled Alphabet exhibitions at MOMA, followed by Sophie Calle's stunning "Take Care Of Yourself" at the Paula Cooper Gallery. One nine-hour drive later, the sheer verticality of New York has given way to Pennsylvania's expansive forests and rolling hills. Driving through Squirrel Hill Tunnel on Interstate 376 was a highlight; $25 tolls, less so.

Now on CMU's wireless so will again be checking email sporadically.