email interview with frequency magazine

from an e-mail interview with jeremy from Frequency magazine. the interview is discussing listener interaction, skotodesk, process and involving systems

the site you directed me to
was very interesting.
what exactly is meso? *
what are your role(s)
within involving systems? *
is that what you're spending
all of your time on
these days?

yes; realtime video generation; installations for exhibitions and trade fairs; interactive web works, customized interfaces, programming, visualizations, interactive audio. we founded meso about three years ago. it is a combination of a research lab and a service company.
we always try to work at commercial projects which can be remixed in an artistic way, or allows us to refine our tools; also a lot of our clients come to us, because they liked the artistic works. and yes, we do this for our living.
the core of meso is five people: stefan ammon, michael hšpfel, karl kliem, max wolf and me; with a larger group of partners and freelancers working with us regularily.

involving system is a label for interactive audio works. involving systems is three people; karl kliem, martin bott and me, kind of a interactive installations boygroup.

my personal background is computer science, although i consider my work as interdisciplinary with a strong focus on design. most of the works i did in the last years can be considered as group works, which would not be possible without the others.

what do you think
the listener gains
from being involved
in the music making process?

this depends very much of the interface design, and this is a very interesting aspect: we experimented with very different strategies in the last years.

the first series of installations (invsys 2.0, 2.1 and 2.3)* we designed to be very easy to use: automatisms and a very strict rhythmic fundament allowed mostly any interaction to fit into the given musical context. the music was meant to be very generic, which allowed for a clear view on the functional aspects of the music. it was an almost didactical approach, albeit a lot of fun for the visitors: how mostly every loop can generate a magic, when played in a repetive beat; how cutoff/resonance-filtering influences the perception of the music; how the addition and subtraction of individual drum patterns influences the perceived energy, how echo effects change the rhythmic feel etc. in addition to these fun-aspects and the hidden didactical aspect, it was also a group situation where multiple visitors we able to make music together. people can try to do something together, can share experiences. we did various setups: at art galleries, in clubs, at parties, in public spaces, in shops, at conferences etc, to see how the audience would react. we actually designed the piece for being able to withstand the different contexts, and not expose itself on what its meant to be. people going to a "real" art gallery expected to see an artwork; people expected to see a performance turned away after we explained the different controls; people in clubs just used the controls and discussed certain sounds or beats. so there were different aspects the people were interested in, but after all it was the same music. in fact a lot of people with very different backgrounds enjoyed the installation.

later installations, for example invsys 2.7* and brk_b.t*, focused more on the music making aspects; these can be regarded as musical instruments which exploit certain user interface metaphors. invsys2.7 had an integrated record player for recording loops out of our record collection; the music was made by mixing different loops in different patterns. its a kind of utopian dj equipment.
brk_b.t focussed on a sophisticated permutation system to get the maximum out of the about twenty classic drum&bass-drumloops. its about combining and rearranging things and takes a focus on the fact that you can use a minimal alphabet of sounds to make music. for getting musical instruments we made the learning curve steeper; people had to understand the meaning of certain buttons and functions to use the machine properly, it definitly included the possibilities of error. we found mostly djs sitting on these installations, usually for hours.

the heavy rotation revisor* can also be considered as a musical instrument, but with a couple of arbitrary limitations which make it unusable for that purpose. although a massive installation we decided to liberately moved it into the range of a toy. live samples from five different radio stations were continuously and automatically taken and put onto the playing field. the visitors were able to move the samples in a sequencer and make a continuous sound loop out of them. the software based heavily on time stretching, so the outcome had not very much to do with the original radio programme. we didnt like to make this a "real" musical instrument, so we focussed on things like an overwhelming amount of incoming samples, a radar-screen like interface which looked elegant but introduced some unmusical quirks to the sequencing, the inability of controlling the sampling process and the limited lifetime of the samples in the composition, etc.
by introducing the unmusical interface elements we wanted to move the thing away from a discussion of the source material and more to listening to the results. after all you had to interpret the results as music to appreciate what you are doing.

mutable muzzy musics* is a complete different approach: it focusses mostly on the "making music for other people" concept. interactive audio pieces tend to sound horrible for the people not involved with their creation. this was an attempt to build an installation which actually can be played loud, e.g. in a lounge, where a lot of people we just supposed to listen. we sampled two complete cd´s (by mille plateaux*) and allowed people to make a continuous remix with some very easy to use hand controllers by stepping through the individual loops of each track. at this level the interaction is very easy and its quite impossible to do something really wrong. this works by tapping the vast amount of creative input available in each millisecond of digitally recorded music. this installation can be considered as a magnification lens, which also leads to an interesting minimalism in the result. the magnifying lens effect is very interesting from a music listeners view and it also showed a lot of the compositional details of each track. on the other side, the interface was so simple that people could use it even while half asleep; which also adds a very interesting dimension.

does your work appeal
more to people making music
or people interested in art?

i think most of the work is directed in refusing this distinction. there are a lot of other dichytomies like "commercial/uncomercial" "applied/free" "playful/didactic" "serious/funny" "retro/avantgarde" which are hopefully inapplicable for our projects as well. for my personal point i like the situations where audiences mix, as (especially in the music consumer world) thing tends to be too separated.
albeit problematic (uncool, invisible etc.) from the view of a "pure" music-lover or "pure" art-historian, i think there are a lot of lessions to be learned from the mixture. coming from oval i found the music world quite restrictive and i didnt see any point in just releasing one cd more.

why have you titled
the project
involving systems?

you are always part of various contexts which try to involve you in some way. the name is a reflection of ourselves being stunned by certain technologies. of course we hoped that people would be involved in our systems as well. we also liked the professional attitude of the name. actually we were surpised that the .com adress was still free, when we registered last year.
.

i like the idea
of moving away
from the consumption of
recorded music
(on CD and mp3 format)
via listener participation
or interactive music.
do you think
that this is possible
that this practice
can be widely accepted
and used?

definitly; but you have to make the things portable and ubiquituous, which means small, which means very difficult to develop. there are a lot of things we like to do, but it would just being to expensive to develop for ourselves. on pc/mac-platforms everything is quite simple these days. if you are moving to pocket-size mp3-based devices its impossible to develop a working product for an individual artist/musican/developer. so its in the hands of the big companies right now. on the pc desktop and in video games i expect a lot of these kind of things with all that disk space and processing power available. unfortunately most developers seem to be more concerned with putting the same stupid cd-player controls in different "skins" than with thinking about the possibility of re-editing the audio.

i think two aspects are problematic: playback and distribution. you cant put interactive pieces in any readily available player; you cant play them in clubs without delicate machinery, you cant play them at home without noisy fans and bulky boxes. these things need to change. flatrate broadband internet will help playback and distribution a lot, but to make a breakthrough a massive marketing development is necessary. i hope there are enough opportunities for open-source projects and reverse-engineering so that it wouldnt be a purely commercial endeavour (game consoles).

when we developed the ovalprocess prototypes five years ago nobody was interested in releasing it, we didnt even thought ourselves that it would be good to release a cd rom-only. the target audience would have been too small to have any impact.
with involving systems we focussed on events and exhibitions which allowed for prototypical implementations which didnt need the full expensive product development cycle, but of course you will never reach the same amount of people as with an internationally distributed cd-audio.

on the other hand i also see that the ability to do musical improvisation is a very sparse resource. far from anyone can do it in a way which is also interesting for other people to listen to. a typical audio cd contains the work of throusands of hours of work of the most talented people in one hour audio material. nobody would be able to improvise that on-the-fly. but i think moving in a precomposed musical world (like in a first person video game) is quite enjoyable even for less musically inclined people. i think we will see a lot of these things in the personal audio or ambient audio range. but there would be no way that the musican or composer would be superfluous, it would just change their way of working.

to what extent is
computer software
making your project
possible?
i noticed that mmm
used max/msp.
why did you chose
to work with
max?
the first installation were really pre-msp, so really we had to hide a lot of boxes in the installations. we actually bought a huge double king size refridgerator-style ibm mainframe rack from the scrap yard to be able to hide the hardware for upcoming projects. we actually were saving for a fork lift when max/msp was released.
max is ideal for glueing all kind of different things together. msp saves all these dreaded boxes with 2x40 character displays.

programming max is unique because of the "programming while running" paradigm. especially with musical projects you can refine your program without breaking the flow by permanently switching between edit/compile and run-mode. this is something i miss very much when working with other languages. also the user interface is brilliant and allows for a certain craftmanship while handling.
the main disadvantage is that you are struck to the macintosh platform which is lacking hardware support and multimedia capabilities.

tell me about your involvement
with skotodesk?
did you work on
oval process software
as well?
is the process software
the basis for
skotodesk?

process*, as we designed it almost five years ago was meant to be able to take samples from the cd, let the user recombine these pieces and save these combinations to disk as a kind of an "extra track". i liked the idea of playfulness and the ability to extend other peoples material; markus liked the vision of getting automatically endless variations out of his own samples audio samples. features were permanently fabulated, the specs changed constantly, and markus developed a huge amount of marketing hype for process without ever knowing what can be expected from a piece of software. this sounds a little bit harsh, but in fact we split before we were able to fix a release date.

process v0.1 was programmed by richard ross in macromedia director with a screen design by me. i havent really seen richard credited much, but he spent an enourmous amount of work on getting the early process versions running.
when seeing the skotodesk installation in the sony exhibition in berlin, i cannot speak of any difference between the incomplete process betas we developed back then.
it is exactly the same software, but with different options for the future. for the berlin installation markus replaced almost all of my bitmaps, included an improved set of sound samples, removed the unimplemented icons and added this rather contingent decorative plexiglass box. so skotodesk is process v0.11 with a future process v1.0 discontinued after keeping process v0.1 for years in beta stage.

do you know why
oval process software
was not released with
oval process?
releasing different things under the same name was a classic oval strategy. i think markus decided to call the album process because everyone continued to ask for ovalprocess after he was announcing it for years.
but thats just my guess.

back to oval


	from an e-mail interview with jeremy from Frequency magazine. the interview is discussing listener interaction, skotodesk, process and involving systems
the site you directed me to was very interesting. what exactly is meso? * what are your role(s) within involving systems? * is that what you're spending all of your time on these days?	yes; realtime video generation; installations for exhibitions and trade fairs; interactive web works, customized interfaces, programming, visualizations, interactive audio. we founded meso about three years ago. it is a combination of a research lab and a service company. we always try to work at commercial projects which can be remixed in an artistic way, or allows us to refine our tools; also a lot of our clients come to us, because they liked the artistic works. and yes, we do this for our living. the core of meso is five people: stefan ammon, michael hšpfel, karl kliem, max wolf and me; with a larger group of partners and freelancers working with us regularily. involving system is a label for interactive audio works. involving systems is three people; karl kliem, martin bott and me, kind of a interactive installations boygroup. my personal background is computer science, although i consider my work as interdisciplinary with a strong focus on design. most of the works i did in the last years can be considered as group works, which would not be possible without the others.
what do you think the listener gains from being involved in the music making process?	this depends very much of the interface design, and this is a very interesting aspect: we experimented with very different strategies in the last years. the first series of installations (invsys 2.0, 2.1 and 2.3)* we designed to be very easy to use: automatisms and a very strict rhythmic fundament allowed mostly any interaction to fit into the given musical context. the music was meant to be very generic, which allowed for a clear view on the functional aspects of the music. it was an almost didactical approach, albeit a lot of fun for the visitors: how mostly every loop can generate a magic, when played in a repetive beat; how cutoff/resonance-filtering influences the perception of the music; how the addition and subtraction of individual drum patterns influences the perceived energy, how echo effects change the rhythmic feel etc. in addition to these fun-aspects and the hidden didactical aspect, it was also a group situation where multiple visitors we able to make music together. people can try to do something together, can share experiences. we did various setups: at art galleries, in clubs, at parties, in public spaces, in shops, at conferences etc, to see how the audience would react. we actually designed the piece for being able to withstand the different contexts, and not expose itself on what its meant to be. people going to a "real" art gallery expected to see an artwork; people expected to see a performance turned away after we explained the different controls; people in clubs just used the controls and discussed certain sounds or beats. so there were different aspects the people were interested in, but after all it was the same music. in fact a lot of people with very different backgrounds enjoyed the installation. later installations, for example invsys 2.7* and brk_b.t, focused more on the music making aspects; these can be regarded as musical instruments which exploit certain user interface metaphors. invsys2.7 had an integrated record player for recording loops out of our record collection; the music was made by mixing different loops in different patterns. its a kind of utopian dj equipment. brk_b.t focussed on a sophisticated permutation system to get the maximum out of the about twenty classic drum&bass-drumloops. its about combining and rearranging things and takes a focus on the fact that you can use a minimal alphabet of sounds to make music. for getting musical instruments we made the learning curve steeper; people had to understand the meaning of certain buttons and functions to use the machine properly, it definitly included the possibilities of error. we found mostly djs sitting on these installations, usually for hours. the heavy rotation revisor can also be considered as a musical instrument, but with a couple of arbitrary limitations which make it unusable for that purpose. although a massive installation we decided to liberately moved it into the range of a toy. live samples from five different radio stations were continuously and automatically taken and put onto the playing field. the visitors were able to move the samples in a sequencer and make a continuous sound loop out of them. the software based heavily on time stretching, so the outcome had not very much to do with the original radio programme. we didnt like to make this a "real" musical instrument, so we focussed on things like an overwhelming amount of incoming samples, a radar-screen like interface which looked elegant but introduced some unmusical quirks to the sequencing, the inability of controlling the sampling process and the limited lifetime of the samples in the composition, etc. by introducing the unmusical interface elements we wanted to move the thing away from a discussion of the source material and more to listening to the results. after all you had to interpret the results as music to appreciate what you are doing. mutable muzzy musics* is a complete different approach: it focusses mostly on the "making music for other people" concept. interactive audio pieces tend to sound horrible for the people not involved with their creation. this was an attempt to build an installation which actually can be played loud, e.g. in a lounge, where a lot of people we just supposed to listen. we sampled two complete cd´s (by mille plateaux*) and allowed people to make a continuous remix with some very easy to use hand controllers by stepping through the individual loops of each track. at this level the interaction is very easy and its quite impossible to do something really wrong. this works by tapping the vast amount of creative input available in each millisecond of digitally recorded music. this installation can be considered as a magnification lens, which also leads to an interesting minimalism in the result. the magnifying lens effect is very interesting from a music listeners view and it also showed a lot of the compositional details of each track. on the other side, the interface was so simple that people could use it even while half asleep; which also adds a very interesting dimension.
does your work appeal more to people making music or people interested in art?	i think most of the work is directed in refusing this distinction. there are a lot of other dichytomies like "commercial/uncomercial" "applied/free" "playful/didactic" "serious/funny" "retro/avantgarde" which are hopefully inapplicable for our projects as well. for my personal point i like the situations where audiences mix, as (especially in the music consumer world) thing tends to be too separated. albeit problematic (uncool, invisible etc.) from the view of a "pure" music-lover or "pure" art-historian, i think there are a lot of lessions to be learned from the mixture. coming from oval i found the music world quite restrictive and i didnt see any point in just releasing one cd more.
why have you titled the project involving systems?	you are always part of various contexts which try to involve you in some way. the name is a reflection of ourselves being stunned by certain technologies. of course we hoped that people would be involved in our systems as well. we also liked the professional attitude of the name. actually we were surpised that the .com adress was still free, when we registered last year. .
i like the idea of moving away from the consumption of recorded music (on CD and mp3 format) via listener participation or interactive music. do you think that this is possible that this practice can be widely accepted and used?	definitly; but you have to make the things portable and ubiquituous, which means small, which means very difficult to develop. there are a lot of things we like to do, but it would just being to expensive to develop for ourselves. on pc/mac-platforms everything is quite simple these days. if you are moving to pocket-size mp3-based devices its impossible to develop a working product for an individual artist/musican/developer. so its in the hands of the big companies right now. on the pc desktop and in video games i expect a lot of these kind of things with all that disk space and processing power available. unfortunately most developers seem to be more concerned with putting the same stupid cd-player controls in different "skins" than with thinking about the possibility of re-editing the audio. i think two aspects are problematic: playback and distribution. you cant put interactive pieces in any readily available player; you cant play them in clubs without delicate machinery, you cant play them at home without noisy fans and bulky boxes. these things need to change. flatrate broadband internet will help playback and distribution a lot, but to make a breakthrough a massive marketing development is necessary. i hope there are enough opportunities for open-source projects and reverse-engineering so that it wouldnt be a purely commercial endeavour (game consoles). when we developed the ovalprocess prototypes five years ago nobody was interested in releasing it, we didnt even thought ourselves that it would be good to release a cd rom-only. the target audience would have been too small to have any impact. with involving systems we focussed on events and exhibitions which allowed for prototypical implementations which didnt need the full expensive product development cycle, but of course you will never reach the same amount of people as with an internationally distributed cd-audio. on the other hand i also see that the ability to do musical improvisation is a very sparse resource. far from anyone can do it in a way which is also interesting for other people to listen to. a typical audio cd contains the work of throusands of hours of work of the most talented people in one hour audio material. nobody would be able to improvise that on-the-fly. but i think moving in a precomposed musical world (like in a first person video game) is quite enjoyable even for less musically inclined people. i think we will see a lot of these things in the personal audio or ambient audio range. but there would be no way that the musican or composer would be superfluous, it would just change their way of working.
to what extent is computer software making your project possible? i noticed that mmm used max/msp. why did you chose to work with max?	the first installation were really pre-msp, so really we had to hide a lot of boxes in the installations. we actually bought a huge double king size refridgerator-style ibm mainframe rack from the scrap yard to be able to hide the hardware for upcoming projects. we actually were saving for a fork lift when max/msp was released. max is ideal for glueing all kind of different things together. msp saves all these dreaded boxes with 2x40 character displays. programming max is unique because of the "programming while running" paradigm. especially with musical projects you can refine your program without breaking the flow by permanently switching between edit/compile and run-mode. this is something i miss very much when working with other languages. also the user interface is brilliant and allows for a certain craftmanship while handling. the main disadvantage is that you are struck to the macintosh platform which is lacking hardware support and multimedia capabilities.
tell me about your involvement with skotodesk? did you work on oval process software as well? is the process software the basis for skotodesk?	process*, as we designed it almost five years ago was meant to be able to take samples from the cd, let the user recombine these pieces and save these combinations to disk as a kind of an "extra track". i liked the idea of playfulness and the ability to extend other peoples material; markus liked the vision of getting automatically endless variations out of his own samples audio samples. features were permanently fabulated, the specs changed constantly, and markus developed a huge amount of marketing hype for process without ever knowing what can be expected from a piece of software. this sounds a little bit harsh, but in fact we split before we were able to fix a release date. process v0.1 was programmed by richard ross in macromedia director with a screen design by me. i havent really seen richard credited much, but he spent an enourmous amount of work on getting the early process versions running. when seeing the skotodesk installation in the sony exhibition in berlin, i cannot speak of any difference between the incomplete process betas we developed back then. it is exactly the same software, but with different options for the future. for the berlin installation markus replaced almost all of my bitmaps, included an improved set of sound samples, removed the unimplemented icons and added this rather contingent decorative plexiglass box. so skotodesk is process v0.11 with a future process v1.0 discontinued after keeping process v0.1 for years in beta stage.
do you know why oval process software was not released with oval process?	releasing different things under the same name was a classic oval strategy. i think markus decided to call the album process because everyone continued to ask for ovalprocess after he was announcing it for years. but thats just my guess.