Glacial Communications

This show was loosely based around the idea of the four elements:

1. Air (breathing sounds, Tuvan throat-singing (a recent obsession of mine which will be revisited in a future episode), wind sounds)

2. Water (waves, ships, whales, the leaking air conditioner in the air studio)

3. Earth (plate tectonics, seismics, digging, Mt. St. Helens, etc.)

4. Fire (um, fire )

This was actually a live performance. I was using my Yamaha AN-200 sequencer and GarageBand, and widget was playing guitar and triggering samples on her laptop. I know some of the samples came from freesound.

Since GarageBand 1.1, the program has had the little-known capability of using SoundFonts as a sound source (using the DLSMusicDevice AudioUnit). It’s not perfect, but it does work for simple 1-instrument SoundFonts (as well as the first voice of more complicated ones). Also, the excellent (and free) Crystal AudioUnit can use SoundFonts as an oscillator source. However, both applications want you to keep your SoundFonts in a separate directory. We can fix this with a Stupid Unix Trick(tm).

Crystal wants its SoundFonts in ~/Library/Preferences/CrystalSoundFonts/. GarageBand (and the DLS AU) want them in /Library/Audio/Sounds/Banks/. Since this is more of an OS-central location, we’re going to use that as our SoundFont repository.

Step 0: be sure to close any AU Hosts you’re currently running (GarageBand, Logic, Rax, etc.) It probably won’t make a big difference, but hey, a little caution never hurts.
Step 1: Move the contents of your CrystalSoundFonts folder into /Library/Audio/Sounds/Banks/. (you can do this with the Finder or Terminal. Your preference). Delete the (now empty) CrystalSoundFonts folder.
Step 2: (I find this to be easier in Terminal, so open it. It’s in /Applications/Utilities/)
Enter the following in your Terminal window:
cd ~/Library/Preferences
ln -s /Library/Audio/Sounds/Banks/ CrystalSoundFonts

Step 3: There is no Step 3, unless you count closing Terminal and firing up GarageBand again!

What we did here was make what’s called a “symbolic link”, or symlink pointing the CrystalSoundFonts directory to /Library/Audio/Sounds/Banks. Now when Crystal looks for SoundFonts, it will find them in /Library/Audio/Sounds/Banks.

I’ll probably have some more SoundFont-related material in the future, as I’m trying to build Swami on OS X (and currently failing miserably). Anybody have a nice all-in-one build (a la Gimp.app)?

Started off slow, with some selections from this
Some of REM’s new “The IRS years” set
A Star Trek Record
A Winston Churchill Record
Some GarageBand improvisation
Oscillator Drift
Some Tibetan folk music from a CD titled “Songs of Tibet”
Something I did a while back called “Hey Hey we are not the Monkees either”, as well as a few other old tracks.
some more GarageBand improv

A CD titled “Soma”, that’s pretty New Agey in a bad way

Mark Mothersbaugh’s Joyeux Mutato

some horrible video blogging by the people referred to here

A Christmas album performed on rubber bands

Allen Ginsberg’s “America”
a couple of other poems I’ll fill in later

A Pauline Oliveros CD whose title I forget made its way in for a minute or three

So, for a while I’ve had a sound in my head.

It’s best described as a shape (I guess it’s a triangle) bounded by the following “lines”:

• The more electronic side of NDW
• Belgian “New Beat” techno
• Circa 1983-1986 Factory Records output, specifically the Electro sounds (New Order’s “Confusion”, SXXV’s From The Hip, etc.)

I managed to flesh a little bit of a track out last weekend. Not done by a long shot, but it was something.

There’s also an electronic “New Age”-ish (but hopefully not lame) album-y thing that popped into my head yesterday. Think 1970’s Tangerine Dream, and Jimmy Cauty’s post-Orb Space project (not to be confused with the other bands out there calling themselves Space).

And I do intend to collaborate with Mr. ET. We just keep not getting around to it.