Ken’s Blog

Today I found myself in a bit of a fugue state, and it wasn’t all that bad. So I decided I would make a candy button machine to create fugue states.

Drawing inspiration from Xiao’s comment about the circle of fifths, I realized that if I could make a melody go around the entire circle of fifths, then my machine could use every candy button of the rainbow.

Coincidentally, today I reached page 152 in Vernor VInge’s novel Rainbows End. That’s the page where it is pointed out that the title of the book is actually a declarative sentence (and, when you think about it, a very sad sentence at that).

But in fact rainbows do not end, because rainbows are actually completely circular. Like Skittles.

So I decided to make a candy button rainbow fugue machine. In other words, a machine to generate never-ending fugues that go all around the circle of fifths, visiting every color of the rainbow on the way.

As you can see in the picture below, the machine has 12 spiral arms arranged around a circle (the circle of fifths, in fact). Each arm consists of the four notes of a dominant seventh chord in some random order, as candy buttons.

There are only two kinds of controls: less ↔ more to vary the number of voices, and thin ↔ wide to vary how far those voices spread around the circle of fifths.

It’s surprising how many musical variations you can get with just those controls. But don’t take my word for it. Try out the applet for yourself, by clicking on the image below:

The 1917 song I’m Always Chasing Rainbows, by Harry Carroll and Joseph McCarthy, borrowed its melody from the middle section of Frédéric Chopin’s 1834 Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp minor.

There have been many recordings of this wonderful song by everyone from Bing Crosby to Alice Cooper, but perhaps my favorite was the achingly sad rendition by Judy Garland in the 1941 film Zeigfeld Girl.

One of the things that intrigues me about the candy buttons representation of music is the way it blurs the distinction between musical score and musical instrument. I’ve transcribed the first few bars of I’m Always Chasing Rainbows onto a strip of candy buttons. The image below links to an applet that lets you play the song by moving your mouse across successive rows of candy buttons (it’s up to you to play with the correct rhythm).

Or you can roam your mouse freely over the applet, using the score as a kind of musical keyboard, to create your own melodies. The original melody you create will be a kind of collaboration between you, Harry Carroll and Frédéric Chopin.

Happy rainbow chasing!!!

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?