I found this old video of mine while looking at some old backup CDs. Back in the early 90s, while playing with Gryphon Software’s “Morph” software, I accidentally stumbled upon a technique for making a still photograph or painting look like a hologram. The basic idea is that you make a mirror image of the photo, by flopping it horizontally in Photoshop. Then you morph from the original to the mirror image, using still-image morphing software, matching the left-eye to the flopped right-eye (which now looks like a left-eye), and so-on. The result is that the image in the photo looks like it is turning it’s head slightly, as you can see. There’s a point in the middle of the sequence where the face is completely symmetrical. One of my earliest tests of this method was done with an image of the Mona Lisa. It also works nicely with the portraits on currency.

I’ve been posting the above ad at local chess clubs in Los Angeles, in preparation for a June concert in which a live chess game will be translated into music.

Contact me if you have leads. Thanks!

The other day I found this DIY music box kit over at Think Geek, but they were out of stock.

So I found a supplier in the UK, called Grand Illusions. They actually carry two models, including one with a larger number of tines (20 tines covering a 2 1/2 octave diatonic range ). Naturally I got the big one, and a packet of extra blank strips. :)

Now I’m wondering if I can use my Mindstorms parts to build a Lego robot that will punch the holes and turn the crank, so I can automatically convert MIDI files to music box strips… We’ll see. Right now I’m just having fun making stripey patterns.

UPDATE

Well here’s my first hand-punched piece (aside from the stripey pattern shown above) : A little music box etude based on an old piano piece of mine. Took about an hour to plan and an hour to punch.

Music Box Etude #1

I found it helpful to place dots on the paper with a red marker first, so I didn’t have to do too much thinking about alignment when punching the holes. When I was done punching the holes, the table was littered with little notes.

The music box disc I’m getting prepared, mentioned in the previous post, looks something like this.

Here’s a simulation of what it would sound like, played on an antique Stella music box, assuming the box’s spring-wound mechanism has the strength to play the first chord, in which every tine sounds at the same time.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that many modern synthesizers also have problems with that first chord, due to an arbitrary maximum number of simultaneous voices.

This digital simulation was produced by Music Box disc maker Jack Perron.

Whitney Music Box on Stella

HensTooth Discs is a small business – essentially a one-man operation, located in New Hampshire that specializes in cutting discs for antique music boxes.

Owner Jack Perron seems to offer a valuable formula for having a happy future: Find something you love that your friends think is a little weird. Pursue it with dogged determination. As a result of Jack’s passion for putting new music on old music boxes, he has developed a considerable amount of expertise on the subject. People come to him from the world over to get new discs for their beautiful machines. A little eccentrism is a good formula for success, don’t you think?

Icelandic singer/genius Björk came to him when she wanted to write some music box music for her 2001 album Vespertine. The track “Frosti,” from that album features a recording of one of Jack’s discs, specially made for Björk, and not only recorded for the album, but used on tour, and his discs appear elsewhere on the album as well. I didn’t know this until recently, and had assumed the recording was a digital synthesizer. Such is the effect that digital technologies have on the music industry. We recognize quality when we hear it, but we don’t know from whence the quality comes.

But the quality of Jack’s discs certainly shines through in this live performance, recorded at the Royal Opera House.

At the moment, Jack has been working with me to produce a disc by which I’ll be able to play a more tangible version of my composition Whitney Music Box (which people sometimes mistake for a historical recreation of a piece of John Whitney’s music- it’s actually a piece of Whitney’s motion graphics DNA that I have set to music.).

Jack has been absolutely wonderful to work with, and I hope he can cut a few Whitney-discs for other fans of the piece, something I am sure he’d be glad to do. The pattern on the discs is quite beautiful, although we’re both a bit worried that some antique music boxes may not be able to perform the piece in it’s entirety, because the first chord involves playing every tine on the jukebox at the same time, and most mechanical jukeboxes aren’t strong enough to manage it.

Look here for updates (and recordings!) of the progress of this fun little project, one of several I’m currently working on related to mechanical music.

Oh, I’ve been bitten by this mechanical music bug big time.

I’m now working on composing some new music for an orchestrion. This will be no mere weekend-long project (as most of mine tend to be), and hopefully I can share some audio snippets with you as work progresses.

I imagine most of you don’t know what an orchestrion is. It’s a kind of automatic or mechanical music instrument that combines features found in other mechanical instruments to make a whole “orchestra”: piano, organ ranks and percussion. In the early 1920s, orchestrions were a relatively common component of dance halls and amusement arcades, but they, and most other automatic instruments were largely displaced by the economics of radio and higher quality recordings, which could deliver a greater variety of music much more inexpensively.

Most people associate the sound of orchestrions with carnivals, perhaps because antique carousel rides sometimes use them (or band organs, which are similar) to provide the music. They also tend to evoke “old timey” associations, because the type of music typically played on them often dates from the early 20th century. Here’s a sample:

I Want to be Happy, performed by SOFI, arranged by Craig Brougher

However, I have a strong (and quite possibly insane) belief that these associations are too narrow, and that the musical potential of these instruments is much wider. I believe they are capable of making less anachronistic sounds that can be more deeply felt by the listener. This is the counterpart to my belief that music composed by (or with the aid of) machines is capable of greater emotional affect in the listener than the dreck produced by Microsoft Songsmith or Band-in-a-Box.

As a long time practitioner of mechanical composing – that is, using machines as an aid to composition, I think the most appropriate performer for an automatic composition is an automatic instrument. To date, I’ve used computers a lot, but computers don’t have huge ranks of organ pipes and triangles.

There’s no denying that pretty much every Orchestrion recording I’ve heard is a little silly, and there’s nothing wrong with that! Seriousness, like utility, is overrated (see previous post on this subject).

The Orchestrion I’m composing for, SOFI, is the inspired creation of Craig Brougher, a mechanical instrument specialist who built her in Kansas City. SOFI can produce piano, organ, xylophone and various percussion sounds.

Amusingly, Craig and I have musical tastes that are from very different corners of the universe, but we both agree that Orchestrions are capable of far more than carnival novelties. I’ll be preparing MIDI scores here in Los Angeles, which Craig will test and record in Kansas City.

I’m planning a piece for SOFI that will contain (significantly more elaborate) versions of the visual-process-music techniques I developed for my Whitney Music Box and Wheel Music.

This music probably won’t be as pleasant to listen to as I would like it to be. This is one of the reasons I use visual animations with my music. I think the visuals help provide an explanation for what is going on, and help the ear anticipate what is going to come next.

“The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.”
W. H. Auden

My paraphrase of that quote is “The eye likes surprise but the ear likes comfort.”

My solution to that problem is to provide visual scores with my more complex music. I started this practice in college with a long tape loop piece called “Wound Room,” although at the time I didn’t have the means to synchronize the score display with the music. I don’t know if the technique works, but it certainly seems to have garnered my Whitney pieces more appreciative listeners than if I had simply released the audio tracks and explained them in words. People like a good show.

Combining visual process music with an orchestrion should make a fun, noisy, and anachronistic show! Sadly, Orchestrions are not exactly what you would call “portable,” but I’ll climb (or haul) that mountain when I get to it…

On Twitter, there are a lot of bots that will auto-follow you if you say certain magic words. This is easily accomplished using the Twitter API – I’ve done it for fun (try saying “Beetlejuice” on twitter), and I’m definitely not the first. I’m sure some of you have experienced being mysteriously followed on twitter by a robotic-looking stranger.

I thought it would be interesting to measure the level of activity, so I made a “Honeypot Bot” script, that uses the twitter account HoneyPotBot.

Every minute and a half, this bot recites a collection of words which come from a dictionary. In addition to common English words, the list includes celebrity names, the names of music acts, place names, and the names of all the companies in the S&P 500. Those words are the honey that attract the bots – scripts other people have written that are targetting certain keywords, or scripts that just auto-follow people at random.

I’ve been running the Honeypot Bot since March 26th, and as of this writing (March 31), it has collected 152 followers. If you look at the account, you’ll see fewer followers, because some of the accounts have been invalidated by twitter, and some have ‘unfollowed’ after a few hours.

If you look at the accounts, you’ll see that most of them have much bigger “following” lists than “follower” lists, which is a telltale sign of a auto-follower script at work. Looking at the lists of people these bots are following, you can identify the words the bots are interested in, which include

airplane
ballet
Beckett
Berlin
breakfast
Brisbane
chiropracter
cinema
coed
Deepak Chopra
Dr Phil
dressage
flexible
frugal
gallop
golf
harpo
kobayashi
moroccan
Oprah
poker
Ringo Starr
shoes
Whitest Boy Alive
Zend

…just to name a few.

Among the automatic followers are a network of chiropracters (I’ve been followed by eleven so far), who all appear to be based in different cities, but have identical looking webpages and twitter accounts – most with the same identical avatar – I assume they are all using the same marketing service for chiropracters.

Now, to be clear, my bot doesn’t show that there are only 152 auto-following bots on twitter. I imagine this is a mere fraction of the true total. The cleverer bots don’t follow on single words, like “chiropracter.” They combine words, like “need + chiropracter”. The problem with single words is that you really have no inkling about the context the word was used in.

For example, TheHobbyGuy is auto-following everyone who says “airplane” and “helicopter”. But why are those people saying those words? It could just as easily be to say “i wish the helicopter would stop flying over my house” as to say “I have an insatiable love of model helicopters”.

Clearly, OprahToday is not being very discriminating by following every person who mentions “Oprah,”, “Harpo” and “Dr. Phil.” How many of those people are fans of Harpo Marx, or complaining how Dr Phil is exploiting that crazy octuplet woman?

And unfortunately, those undiscriminating bots are going to ruin it for the discriminating ones that are trying to use more accurate targetting, and provide useful services. There are lots of folks jumping on the Twitter-marketing bandwagon right now, and these 152 undiscriminating auto-followers are just the tip of the iceberg. In a few months, the twitter spam problem is going to get significantly worse, and the signal-to-noise ratio much, much lower.

I’ve added a new collection of Slitherlink puzzles to the site, which feature six-different tile layouts.

Enjoy!

Today, on the spur of the moment, I decided to visit the Nethercutt museum in Sylmar, which I had heard about a couple of years ago when I was researching automatic music instruments. The museum, an unexpected display of wealth that sits on the corner of an industrial park in an economically depressed area — all yard sales, grafitti and auto repair shops — is one of the San Fernando Valley’s hidden gems. I am reminded a bit of the gustatory majesty that is Brent’s Deli, sitting in an unassuming strip mall next to a carpet outlet in Northridge.

Most people visit this place for the classic cars, which are clearly the focus of the collection. The museum houses well over a hundred antique, classic and unique cars, including lots of Packards, Deusenbergs and Rolls Royces.

I am more interested, however, in automatic music instruments, so I happily skipped past the gleaming vehicles to check out the nickelodeons, orchestreons and music boxes that can be found, mostly unlabeled, in a central aisle of the museum. A lot more instruments, including a Wurlitzer Theatre Organ, are housed in the imposing edifice across the street, but this requires a guided tour to see. A very muscular security guard blocked the doorway, so I’ll have to come back after making reservations, or perhaps attend one of the occasional silent movie and organ concerts.

One of the most interesting instruments on display in the auto showroom is a Bow Front Violano Virtuoso, shown above. According to various sources only 13 to 17 of these bow front models are known to exist. The specimen at the Nethercutt museum still works, and many of the patrons inserted nickels to hear it play “old-timey” music, perhaps unaware that the machine they are putting their nickels into is worth about 3 or 4 million nickels.

I took a few close-up photos with my cell phone of the prominently displayed automatic violin mechanism, which is very cool. There is a set of 4 rotating wheels which act as a bow on each string. Each wheel receives rosin from a feed which sits above the bow wheels. The strings are separated from the fingerboard of the violin, and connected to what appears to be an automatic tuning mechanism. When played, the strings are pressed with a series of metal fingers. The mechanism appears to have been inspired, in part, by the Hurdy Gurdy, which dates back to the 10th century.

On Tim Trager’s Website, there is a very cool set of photos of a scanned brochure showing the Mills Novelty factory where these instruments were made, around 1915. A couple of the cards are shown below.

Whoever made this had too much time on his/her hands.
— Truth-lover

Some people have way too much free time on their hands.
— MattK

Someone has a little too much time on their hands – the result is cool.
— specialk420

Who has the time to think something like this up?
— kristen_kish

OK…someone had wwwaaayyyy too much time on their hands…but it is kinda fun! :)
— myron

Do you have too much free time? :-)
— Tom on Formosa

I won’t spoil it for you, the only thing I will say is that someone has waaay too much free time on their hands.
— Jedicraft