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Today I decided to try making a simple musical instrument with candy buttons, using my new expanded palette of chromatic musical notes.

One interesting thing about this arrangement is that the six candy buttons that surround any candy button are its half-step, whole-step and minor-third pitch neighbors. For example, the six candy buttons around the candy button that plays a C note will play A, A#, B, C#, D and D# notes.

You can try it for yourself by clicking on the image below to link to the on-line java applet:

Mari’s comment on yesterday’s post about the Candy colored musical keyboard was: “I typed different words and listened.”

Which was absolutely brilliant!!!

Today I tried typing different words and phrases into the applet, and listened to the melodies that emerged. Mostly it sounded more or less like a parody of Schönberg, with “melodies” that seemed rather arbitrary.

Then I spent some time searching for words that would produce a strong lilt. Some words, like “once”, had a lovely melody, and occasionally an entire phrase, like “who am I”, sound as though it could be the melody for a song with that title.

But for the most part the results just didn’t add up. Since my keyboard layout was mapping to the 12 notes of the chromatic somewhat randomly (given the quirkiness of QWERTY), this was to be expected.

But what if we were to map the keys in a way that tried to optimize for mapping words to good melodies? For example, we could map letters, such as “s” or “d”, that often occur at the ends of words to the tonic or dominant note of a scale. And common letter combinations like “th” could map to pleasant intervals, such as the major third.

Of course it’s hard to know, a priori, whether a mapping will be good. So one possibility would be to evolve our keyboard, starting with keys mapped to notes at random. Then we would have the computer “type” a typical text, while we listened for whether interesting melodies emerge.

Then, just as Karl Sims evolved virtual creatures through genetic algorithms, we could incrementally change our mapping in random ways, and always choose the alternative that sounded best.

Maybe I’ll try something like that. 🙂

The I figured that the best way to refine my version of the chromatic scale would be to try to use it for something. And so I have repurposed an old project, in which I had used the computer keyboard as a kind of a piano keyboard. In the new version, I assign a color to every pitch.

In the course of playing with this today, I realized I could just color the seven “white” keys with pastel colors borrowed from our old friend Roy G. Biv (Red / Orange / Yellow / Green / Blue / Indigo / Violet) — with the one notable exception that Red becomes Pink on a pastel palette.

The colors of the five “black” keys — Deep red, Brown, Deep green, Navy blue, and Purple — are chosen so as to lie between the colors of their respective white key neighbors.

The resulting keyboard is certainly more cheerful than the original. The four rows of the keyboard are tuned, from bottom to top, to the even-tempered C# major, C major, B major and A# major scales, respectively. This means that when you play on any row, the row above it contains all the appropriate sharps and flats in their proper positions.

Since the “home keys” row of ASDFGHJK… corresponds to a C natural scale, which contains only white keys, you can see the pastel rainbow laid out on that row. Interestingly, the “F” and “G” keys correspond to their actual respective pitches (you might also find it useful to remember that “K” corresponds to C above middle C).

You can get to the applet itself by clicking on the image below:

It was fun encoding notes of the musical scale as colors in my recently posted Candy buttons musical palindrome machine, but it seems somehow limiting to restrict things only to the white keys (the keys C,D,E,F,G,A,B on the piano).

Why not use color for all of the notes of the musical scale — including the black keys? That would allow candy-based musical machines to be a lot more powerful. We could create Skittles serenades, M&M motets, Reese’s Pieces, um, pieces.

But how to map colors to notes? It’s not so easy to find a sequence of colors that are clearly visually distinct, and also reasonably yummy. I decided I only need to encode one octave, since I can use other cues, like the size of the candy, to distinguish between notes in different octaves.

But even getting a nice set of colors for the 12 notes of the chromatic scale — C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B — can be a challenge.

What I’ve come up with so far does two things: it generally goes around the rainbow, and it also represents the “black” keys by dark colors and the “white” keys by light colors. Hopefully that will make the notes easier to remember and recognize when it’s time to start laying down musical candy tracks:

As you can see from the picture to the left, the seven “white” notes I picked can stand on their own, creating a kind of pastel rainbow. Meanwhile the five “black” notes create a complementary rainbow of dark colors. When woven together, the two sets of colors do a nice job of turning the chromatic octave scale into a kind of rainbow — a spectrum of light to represent a spectrum of pitch. My original plan was to give all of the colors cool candy names, but then I got completely stuck on the light blue colors, because that’s not really a food color. It would be weird to call a candy color “sky”, because then you’d have to “eat the sky”. In fact, that happens to be the title of a very decent book about food and climate change by Anna Lappé, but I have a hard time seeing how making musical candy machines will help save our planet Earth — much as I’d like to help out. Why am I telling you this? Mostly because the picture of the twelve notes and their pretty colors turned out to be really tall and skinny on the web page, and I felt the need to put something here on this side of the page, just to kind of even things out. Feel free to stop reading at any time. There are apparently 25 distinct flavors of M&Ms, but many of them look suspiciously similar to each other, if you ask me. Personally, I think it’s a scam. Skittles originally contained only five colors (Red, Green, Purple, Orange, and Yellow), but I hear rumors that they have since expanded.

Hopefully this “chromatic scale” will be good enough to serve as the basis of a series of machines that I plan to build and post here, to allow people to explore the space of music composition as a game (with candy).

I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon around Hollywood actors. There is a certain category of actor that we are entertained by, but that we don’t even begin to take seriously.

Except for that one serious role.

In other words, there is one performance in one movie, somewhere in the course of the actor’s career, that establishes a level of ability that you’d never have imagined if you’d only seen their other performances. This exact pattern happens in so many cases that I think it can’t merely a coincidence. There must be something at work here.

For example, if you had seen every single Adam Sandler performance other than P.T. Anderson’s 2002 “Punch Drunk Love”, you would think of him mainly as “that guy doing variations on “The Wedding Singer”. Sometimes cute, sometimes obnoxious, always way too full of himself, but essentially playing riffs on the same character, to the same loyal audience of fans. But the character of Barry Egan that he plays in “Punch Drunk Love” is far deeper and surprising, vastly more disturbing and thought provoking, and completely different from the predictable and silly roles he usually plays.

In fact, if the first Adam Sandler performance you ever saw was in that film, you’d probably think you were seeing a major thespian talent, and you’d rush right out and rent his other films. In which case you’d likely be very, very disappointed.

The same thing is at work in the performance Cameron Diaz gives in “Being John Malkovich”. Her portrayal of Lotte Schwartz is so intense, so layered, so unnerving, that it might stay with you for years after you’ve seen the film. And it has nothing whatever in common with the lightweight sexy/comic roles that she is known for.

The list goes on. Kevin Costner in “A Perfect World”, playing an absolutely pitch-perfect psychopath. And of course Will Farrell, whose career essentially consists of the same endlessly recycled schtick in “Elf”, “Anchorman”, and the like — basically all riffs on the same joke. Yet in just one film, he gives a beautiful portrayal of a man experiencing a deeply affecting existential crisis — and holding his own on screen with Emma Thompson — as Harold Crick in the brilliant 2006 film “Stranger than Fiction”.

This is not a new phenomenon. The usually genial and low-key Spencer Tracy will scare the hell out of you with his terrifying portrayal of Mr. Hyde in Victor Fleming’s 1941 version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”. Both Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby leapt completely out of character (to wondrous effect) in the 1954 film “The Country Girl” (for which a shell-shocked Academy gave Kelly that year’s Best Actress award).

Sometimes an actor will get that one breakthrough serious role and then keep going with others. For Brad Pitt that role was Jeffrey Goines in “Twelve Monkeys”. For Bill Murray it was Phil in “Groundhog Day”. For Mark Wahlberg it was Eddie Addams in “Boogie Nights” (bringing us back around to P.T. Anderson).

But for the most part, the light comic actor, having surprised us once with unexpected dramatic gold, will slip back into their usual expected (and highly lucrative) persona, leaving us to wonder what might have been.

Today I took in the wonderful NYU ITP show, which provides an opportunity once every semester for students to show off all sorts of innovative projects on the interface between art and technology. Some pieces are feasts for your inner geek, while others are variously odd, kinetic, musical, dramatic or simply beautiful.

And then there are the thoughtful ones. Every semester a few students create something that makes you really think. One of those projects this time around was Human Cheese by Miriam Simun. Yes dear reader, the eponymous food product in question is made from the breast milk of human volunteers.

This is not the first time the topic of human cheese has been thought of, but it’s the first time I had encountered it. And it really made me think.

One reason I don’t eat cheese is that to raise cows for their milk generally involves getting rid of the (economically unnecessary) male cows. Male calves, in standard practice, are kept alive just long enough to be slaughtered and turned into meat. Which means that every time you eat cheese, somewhere veal is also being served.

But human cheese completely changes the equation. All of the milk is volunteered, on a basis of informed consent.

Yes, I know, on a purely cultural level, serving “human” food probably violates taboos left and right. Yet, ironically, this might very well be the only “animal product” that creates no ethical conflicts at all for vegans.

In any case, it’s certainly food for thought. 🙂

This is a sad post. OK, maybe “sad” is not the right word. Perhaps elegiac.

Once upon a time, in 1941, Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer collaborated on a song called “Skylark”. It was a beautiful song — perhaps one of the most beautiful songs of all time And in a strange way, a way that I would guess its authors never intended, that song draws a line in the sand, a cultural divide between the America that was and the America that now is.

Let me bring you back… There was a time when there was such a thing as “the great American songbook”. It was a magical time, when the soaring melodies of 19th century European music were married to the astonishing chromatic sophistication of early 20th century American jazz. There has not been anything like it, before or since.

In a way the song “Skylark” was the apotheosis of this marriage — a song in which it all came together. If you are the religious sort, you would probably believe that Carmichael and Mercer were assisted by the gods on this one. I’ve been listening to this song, enjoying its rapturous perfection, and I’ve come to an odd and uncomfortable conclusion: Modern singers are incapable of singing it.

I know that sounds strange. Aren’t singers today every bit as talented as the vocalists of seventy years ago? Well, yes, but in a different way. “Skylark” is a song with immense depth of melody and chromaticism — an example of an art that is now long dead. In the modern era of rock and roll — the era in which you and I were born — there is simply no equivalent. In our age there is no such thing as the intricate twisting melody married to a long and subtle sequence of chord changes. Our music is basic, simple, meat and potatoes. It requires the singer to add something to the mix, to provide seasoning.

But “Skylark” needs no seasoning. It is already complete, perfect. It asks only that a singer traverse its beautiful rises and falls faithfully. Consider, for example, the lovely performance by Dinah Shore. No adornment — just a reflection of the perfect creation of the songwriters.

Similarly, Maxine Sullivan gets it. She knows that the song is already perfect, requiring only a faithful jazz priestess to bring the word down from on high to us mortals.

Ella Fitzgerald gets it almost right. She mostly allows the song to do its magic, without trying to reinvent it, although one could argue that she is right on the border of imposing her will on the song.

But modern singers can’t seem to do this. For example, Aretha Franklin adds the modern-vocalist spin, pretty much ripping the song to pieces, and destroying its inherent beauty. There are lots of other examples of this to be found on YouTube. There just seems to be a disconnect. Singers trained on modern pop cannot faithfully render the classic American songbook — they feel the need to enhance, to bend the notes, to modulate the rhythm.

There was a time when songs could stand on their own, when they didn’t need randomly added seasoning to soar. Call me crazy, but I wish we could, every so often, find our way back to that place.

Oh skylark, I don’t know If you can find these things, but my heart is riding on your wings. So if you see them anywhere, won’t you lead me there?

Is it possible to be objective?

I ask this because I’ve come to realize that the human mind works in such a fashion that every little bit of evidence that comes our way is instinctively turned to support what we already believe. In the face of this phenomenon, how can we even recognize objectivity, much less attain it?

For example, I and just about everyone I know recoil with a kind of visceral horror at the phenomenon of Sarah Palin. It’s not just her professed beliefs — it seems to cut deeper than that. The feeling, when I try to analyze it, is that we are peering into the depths of the abyss itself, as though glimpsing a vision from hell, or the antithesis of all that is true and decent and hopeful about America.

Our views disagreeing with her political statements can be stated in terms of objective argument. Yet they are not generally manifested as objective argument, but rather as a collective negative visceral reaction. Which means that those who disagree with her can become incapable of seeing her as anything other than a kind of real-life cartoon character, a cackling villain out of some bad B movie.

In some other parts of this country, people experience a parallel aversion to Barack Obama. In those places, the pervasive sense of distaste goes beyond rational argument. Incendiary words and phrases like “Socialist takeover” and “new Hitler” get thrown about. This sort of opinion is not swayed by any one particular thing Obama says or does, but rather informs everything he says or does, as though his detractors are looking at him through a set of fun-house glasses. By definition, everything he says becomes suspect.

I saw recently that Sarah Palin publicly asked Americans to provide increased support for the suffering people in Haiti. Now, there is nothing bad about such a suggestion. Palin is using her public visibility to bring attention to a worthy cause, and her words will probably move a significant number of people to open their hearts and pocketbooks, and perhaps to volunteer to help in other ways. Yet it took work for me to focus on what she was saying, rather than the fact that it was Sarah Palin who was saying it. I was so used to expecting only the worst from her, that I had difficulty accepting that I was actually hearing something that I agreed with.

I find myself wondering: Are we just experiencing a particular phase in our nation’s history, when political disagreement has metastasized into something destructive? Or are we all experiencing a symptom of something more fundamental — an inability to see and hear the things that people say objectively, on their own merits?

The other day I posted about gathering the tools to convert a frame-by-frame sequence of my computer graphic images to a Quicktime movie. This gives me a kind of doorway into making animated films, but it’s a door that goes only one way.

What if I want to make computer graphic films that incorporate the real world itself? What if I want to mix live-action film-making with computer graphics and stop-motion? In order to do all that, I need the door to open both ways.

Today I figured out what I need to do to close the loop — to start with a video that was shot with a camcorder, and pull it, frame by frame, into my own computer programs.

You might ask why I would bother to do this when there are perfectly good movie editing programs out there. The problem is that those movie editing programs will only let me do what they were written to let me do. If I want to try out one of my own crazy techniques for film making, whether that technique is a different way of blending live action with computer animation, or a way of skipping through time in an odd sort of way, I can’t program somebody’s movie editing program to let me do that.

But once I’ve got everything sitting in my own computer program, frame by frame, then I can pretty much do whatever I want.

It’s like having a shiny new toy. And pretty soon I hope to combine this shiny new toy with my other one — the 3D printer sitting next to my couch. Hopefully I’ll have a few fun things to show in the days to come!

Today I was in a discussion in which people were talking about the future of apps for iPads and other smart tablets. The topic came up of how to customize apps for each individual user. “Imagine,” one person said, “a custom version of Google search for New Yorkers.”

Immediately my mind went to an important culturally defining moment in 1976, when New Yorkers were confronted by the image that perhaps resonated more strongly with their sense of self than any other single image. I am referring, of course, to the following iconic cover that March of the New Yorker magazine, created by the incomparable Saul Steinberg:

 

And that’s when it occurred to me, that all these years later, the killer iPad app for us New Yorkers would not be a custom version of Google search.

No, it would be a very special custom version of Google Maps. 🙂