CC2 - Week 4 - MIDI Information and Control

First and foremost, a big shout out to John "I <3 Ubu" Delany for allowing me to pilfer his comprehensive ubumenu of MIDI instruments.

Time seems to be the most important ingredient in brewing a successful Max patch, followed closely by love and patience. CC2 this week was a deeper foray into MIDI control in Max, mainly pitch bend, modulation and program changing. I will never doubt the power of taking notes in class, as they pulled me out of a rut on more than one occasion, as did the right-click>help option. One specific problem I had was getting both MIDIin data and MIDIout data out of the midiinfo bidul... uh, box thingy. Notes to the rescue: left input created MIDIout, right input created MIDIin. Then again, this class note was only of limited use- "MIDI Panic button - Difficult". Nevertheless, Matt M and I figured out that 'flush' was the secret. I spent some time trying to figure out how to access program data, but luckily a flashback of the midiparse outputs helped me out- I think Luke showed me it some time ago, but I didn't know what I could use it for. Interesting quirk- when the patch loads, midiparse throws up 9 errors, then works anyway. If it ain't broke...

I have also obviously made visual upgrades to the patch, the main change being the context-sensitive colors of the pitch bend, modulation and others. Originally Luke and I discovered a program called 'mood_color' or something, which randomly changes colour values on an object. While this was nice and psychadelic, I instead ended up programming some of the dials on my keyboard to change colour depending on the value, which resulted in a sort of 'heating up' visual effect. The most complicated part of achieving this was for the pitch bend, as I wanted the colour to stay black while there is no bend, then fade to red for both bend up and bend down. There is an explanation of this inside the encapsulation "p Pitch Colouring" in the patch, and I have provided a pic below.

Big thanks to Dave D, Johnny D and Luke Dipants for regularly helping me out.



Patch File

1. Christian Haines. "Creative Computing: Semester 1, Week 4; MIDI Information and Control" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 22nd March 2007.

AA2 - Week 4 - Drums

The effluent drum kit in EMU was the focus of our attention for this week’s exercise (1). Mrs. John Delany and I teamed up once again, but this time we required someone who can hit things with sticks- John and I are just far too timid. Luckily Matt Mazzone jumped in at the last minute, which sped things up a bit. The ’sweet spot’ of the Recording Space seems to be in front of the bass trap next to the Studio 1 window, much like we had in the AA class, however our testing found that facing the drum kit more towards Studio 2 on somewhat of an angle gave a crisp room sound. Here is our eventual microphone selection and placement:

Kick: Shure SM52; dead centre
Snare: Shure SM58; above
Snare: Shure Beta57; below
HiHat: Neumann KM84; above, aimed at body
HiTom: Shure Beta56A; placed on inner edge, aimed into centre of drum body
MidTom: Same as HiTom
Floor Tom: Shure Beta56A; placed on inner edge, aimed towards the side
Overheads: Neumann KM84s; spaced wider than kit width
Room: Neumann U87; in front, equal distance from walls as to kit


For this recording I took the opportunity to test out something different- a wide spacing of overheads. The result was a definitive stereo difference between the ride and crash, and quite nice in my opinion. As expected, the basketball- I mean kick drum- was quite average sounding, but John and I decided that we got 'a great recording of a crap sound'. The snare came up good in the mix, but only after the above mic was turned down slightly to get rid of some of the inherent plasticy ringing.


The toms were quite even sounding, probably thanks to the use of similar mics for all 3. Overall there seems to be a slight lack of substance for the toms, and at the time of the recording this was the best sound we could achieve. If I was to do it again I would try different microphones- I don't like the idea of the one-size-fits-all Beta56A. I was quite happy with the sound of the hihat while in the studio, however the soon-to-be-ending problem of the Tannoy speakers providing inaccurate bass reflex resulted in a somewhat thick sound. The room mic worked fine, and gave quite an accurate representation of the room sound. The only insert we used was compression on the room mic, so as to maintain the full 'dynamic' of Matt's drumming.

In the end I was relatively pleased with the sound of the recording, but not the sound of the drum kit. It's kind of like recording a singer who can't sing.

Drums with room mic MP3 408KB

Drums without room mic MP3 409KB

1. David Grice. "Audio Arts: Semester 1, Week 4; Drums & Percussion" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 20th March 2007.

Forum - Week 4 - Mass Debate 1

I fail to see the point of student presentations (1), considering my opinion is the only one that matters. Regardless, the topic for today was 'Collaboration', which the Encarta Dictionary defines as "a fibrous protein found in skin, bone, cartilage, tendon, and other connective tissue that yields gelatin when boiled in water" (2). Hon. David Dowling presented a... presentation on the "Symphony And Metallica" collaboration between Michael Kamen and some rock band of mild notoriety. I have heard some of these tracks before, and I felt that the combination of metal guitar and orchestral instruments was fine for a while, but the novelty eventually wore off to the stage where it was embarrassing to be listening to. The conversation afterwards centred around whether the collaboration was a success, which received mixed responses.

The next presentation was from 3rd year Vinny Bhagat, who introduced us to Trilok Gurtu. I found the music very intriguing and would have enjoyed hearing more, however Lady Time (Stephen Whittington) interfered and we only heard short snippets of songs. Next was Will "Ferrell" Revill, who spoke of the collaboration between sound engineers/designers and video game developers. An example of superb collaboration of this sort is between the developers at Bungie Studios and composer Marty O'Donnell for the Halo trilogy on XBOX/X360. Marty is highly involved for the entire development of the games, which allows him to fully understand what sound the game requires in each situation.

The final presentation was from the effervescent 1st year, Sanad, who's topic used a collaboration of Google and Wikipedia to 'bring to light' the irrelevance of the title "World Music". While the talk had all the Sanad zest that we have come to love, supporting content was minimal*, instead relying heavily on unsubstantiated opinion. He argues that the convolution of Eastern society by Western music is a one way street, then strangely alludes to Britney Spears using an Arabic riff and The Chemical Brothers using an Iranian riff. While the overall topic was interesting, I still fail to see why any cultural cross-pollination is so terrible, or why generalisations such as "World Music" are detrimental. The resultant calamity of class discussion was tantamount to the gossiping at a hairdressing salon (and just as meaningful), and in the end there were no answers- just hot collars. This would be a great area of study should Sanad decide to pursue it, perhaps in an essay for Dr. MC.

*University is the expensive exchange of other people's ideas.

1. Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 22nd March, 2007.
2. "Collagen" Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Forum - Week 3 - Dirty Harry

While doing this course we seem to be constantly forced into expanding our views on what constitutes music. Are we so bigoted in our musical taste that we have to have an endless stream of weird crap thrown at us like so much wet fish? For forum this week we all played our part in performing David Harris' creation "Compossible" (1), which roughly translates to "Composition? Impossible!", coincidentally David Harris' life motto. One big problem- this piece would have been very, very easy to create. I could do the same thing in 2 hours, hand-written and photocopied. It doesn't matter who plays what, who does what or what the result is. The notion of every sound being musical died out in the 1980s, when all the 70s hippies realised that you cannot be self sufficient if your only activities are expanding your mind and sharing needles (normally vice-versa).

I listen to such experimental 'music' and think about the era that we live in. In the time of the Renaissance, people rejoiced in the rediscovered musical writings of Ancient Greece- Ptolemy, Plato et al.- and luxuriated in the aural perfection and purity that these studies unleashed. And now, coinciding with the upsurging of computerised technology, some people feel the need to push music in a new direction- a non-musical direction. After untold millenia of studying what makes good music so good and creating vast libraries of techniques and secrets to fully realise our musical potential as a species, are we really going to revert everything to Paleolithic times? Music was created by humans, humans sculpted it to be what it is today, and it is a crowning achievement over the other animals of our planet. Removing almost all of the aspects of harmony, melody and rhythm reduces music to a previous state of our evolution. We earned our 44+2 chromosomes, and I for one will enjoy the fruits of being part of such an advanced species- namely the delicious peach of harmony, the succulent grape of melody and the dionysian honeydew of rhythm.

I could just imagine it now, the future music industry flooded with an army of David Harri, music stores with chance operations cranked up on the instore stereo.

The revolution is coming...

1. David Harris. "Music Technology Forum" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 15th March, 2007.

CC2 - Week 3 - Program Structuring

It's always disconcerting when you look at the empty Max patch window and think about how little you know.

Even though starting was difficult, once things on my keyboard patch started to work it all fell into place. The only hurdles I encountered were getting the MIDI channel selector to work (patched out of the wrong output) and a bug with the pitch class, which turned out to be due to the pitch class formula being to the right of the octave formula, when the pitch class used the octave in its algorithm- right to left order! Patch TXT File





1. Christian Haines. "Creative Computing: Semester 1, Week 3: Program Structuring" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 15th March 2007.

AA2 - Week 3 - Electric Strings

For Audio Arts this week, Johnny D and I formed an unstoppable duo, combining his guitar talent with my... talent, to test out some recording techniques for electric guitar. Even though I hadn't eaten all day. The recordings were made in Studio 2, utilising the deadroom and Studio 2's brand new mixing desk (which is a welcome change from that horrendous 01v Omni thing). We kept in mind the phasing issues in regards to multiple micing, but luckily Corporal Delany knew an industry trick. "3 times the distance" he would say in an authoritative manner, to which I would promptly obey and adjust the second mic so that it was three times the distance from the amplifier of the first (actually we just went by ear, but the industry trick was still good to know). You may notice from the pics that the amp was placed on an upside down table- this was to satisfy my belief that amplifiers sound better on a hard surface, and John's belief that amplifiers sound better on the ground. If they're called 'microphones', is there a 'macrophone'?


Our first microphone setup was the time-honored duo of a Shure Beta57 and Beta58 for close-micing, plus an AKG C414-BULS for a room mic. The result was very homogeneous to the actual room sound, and the positioning of the AKG added in some reverberant low frequencies (which was on purpose- we moved it around the room until we found a bass trap). After some by-ear repositioning, the final position had the B58 2cms from the outer edge of the speaker, and the B57 slightly off-axis and slightly in from the outer edge of the speaker. Gold. Despite the "3 times" rule for phasing, we simply moved the second mic around until there was no perceivable phasing.
MP3 206KB


Our second setup used a Beta57 and one of the new SM52 kick drum mics, however the sound was so disappointing that we did not keep the recording. No matter what position we placed the 52, the sound was flat and unattractive, especially compared to the deliciousness of the B57. Instead we tested out a combination of Beta57, RODE NT3 and the AKG room mic. It took a lot of moving around to get a nice sound from the NT3, and even the best sound wasn't all that great. You can see in the picture that the final position of the NT3 meant it was more of a back up to the B57, rather than anything complimentary to the sound. Definitely not my favourite result, but if I wanted trashy then this would be the setup.
MP3 242KB


We inevitably accepted that the Shure Beta57 was king for the day, so we started to experiment with just the B57 (still in position) and the AKG. This next recording was made with the soundproof double-doors of the deadroom open and the AKG placed so it could pick up the sound passing in and out of the control room. Even though it was so close to the door, there was minimal early reflections- in fact the sound seemed to get fuller the closer to the door the mic was. I also made sure there was as many exposed flat surfaces as possible, including having all the curtains open. The final sound has a nice live 'Studio' sound to it, especially when compared to...
MP3 204KB



... the same thing but with the door closed, curtains shut and a baffle in front of one of the windows. This was a nice, clean sound, however I would imagine some post-production reverb would be required to bring it to life in a mix. Add another baffle and the deadroom would be have been as dead as it gets, but those things are damn heavy, and I hadn't eaten yet.
MP3 254KB


The final sound was a stroke of genius by Sergeant Delaney, whereby we had the Beta57 on the amp and a Beta58 in the control room, aimed at the centre of the strings of the guitar. The combination of the amplified, overdriven output and the acoustic output makes for a clean, almost refreshing sound. It works especially well with virtuosic soloing, as can be heard at the end of the recording.
MP3 238KB