What's that? Not what you wanted? Steve's not listening to you. (Photo by mattbuchanan - (CC))

(Note: my gig at Ableton might tempt you to read between the lines of this post to glean information about upcoming plans. Avoid this temptation. Not only do I not have any info here, I would never suggest or imply anything about future Ableton developments on this website. This disclaimer should be implicit, but this is my personal space.)

By now, every geek this side of Cupertino has weighed in on the iPad. So my attempt to add to the noise could easily be seen as just a crude attempt to cash in on a trending topic for the purpose of leveraging website traffic. Fair enough.

But as a geek with a particular niche interest — computer music technology — I hope to bring some fresh perspective.

There seem to be two dominant reactions to the iPad:

1. It’s a big iPod Touch. What a joke!
2. It’s a big iPod Touch. How awesome!

The WankosphereBlogosphere debates the second half of the realization, but everyone’s basically in agreement about the first half: it’s not a keyboard-less laptop. It’s something much less. Or is it more?

The arguments about “openness” and “extensibility” apply about as much to this device as they apply to the iPhone/iPod Touch, which is to say, they don’t. The market for these devices isn’t hackers. It’s consumers. This is for anyone who wants to sit on the couch and have a simple but functional media experience. It’s for people who don’t want endless possibilities, but rather an elegant and safe set of possibilities.

Now, I’m not afraid to get a little dirty trying to make gadgets do unusual things. But even I have my limits. Every couple years, I try a desktop Linux installation just to get a sense of how far things have come. This usually lasts about an hour. Something is ALWAYS broken, and getting it to work requires near-infinite Googling followed by the editing of scary configuration files. Some people live for this kind of fiddling. I find it boring. I have basically no interest in tools themselves — only as a means to get things done.

And this is why things like the iPad are really exciting for me. Because it’s locked down tighter than an El Al cockpit, you can be pretty sure that there won’t be any fiddling with configuration files. It’s just going to work, period. There are already iPhone apps (like TouchOSC) that do multitouch control of musical applications over Wi-Fi. I can’t imagine it will take long for these applications to appear on the iPad as well. Until now, the only viable multitouch controller for computer music applications was a boutique item called the Lemur. It’s gorgeous, powerful and completely unaffordable for most mortals. Now the iPad is here and, at about a quarter of the Lemur’s cost, stands to bring usable multitouch to a price point that many musicians can reach.

Yes, Apple fosters a closed, monopolistic ecosystem. But they also make tools that work. This is important for people who want to get stuff done, and perhaps less important for people who want to sit around and polish their tools.

If you’re still not convinced, consider this: would there be an ever-expanding field of iPhone competitors if the iPhone wasn’t such a game-changer? Perhaps even more important than the iPad itself is the fact that laptop-sized multitouch is about to become a real market segment. For some, this might be exciting because it means more tools and more fiddling. For me, it’s exciting because it promises more ways to get stuff done.

The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is a pretty amazing group.

A couple years ago they managed to blow everyone’s minds with a series of killer performances of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, culminating in a critically-acclaimed recording for Innova. This year, they’ve done it again, releasing a new recording of Terry Riley’s In C along with 18 remixes by electronic artists from all over the spectrum (and world.)

I was honored to be one of those remixers, and even more honored to spend some time with the students in October and November. I visited GVSU, did a little teaching and provided live electronics for performances of In C with the group on their campus and at (Le) Poisson Rouge in New York.

Playing In C at LPR (photo: Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times)

The press around this group makes a lot of noise about how their Midwestern pedigree makes them such an unlikely success story. Maybe some of that is true, but that’s the sort of narrative that sells newspapers; not CDs.

The real reason they’re successful is because they play the hell out of this music.

Go buy their stuff.

Instead, it’s a top-down, highly coordinated effort to create the illusion of a popular uprising. This phenomenon is known as astroturfing.

Let’s examine who’s really behind the scenes:

Rick Scott: Criminal. 1st Class 'chebag.

Before Rick started this group, he made a fortune as the Chairman and CEO of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital business. He’s not a doctor. He’s a lawyer.

During his tenure, Columbia/HCA was indicted for Medicare fraud, and eventually paid nearly 2 billion dollars in civil suits and over 600 million to settle with the federal government.

As Paul Krugman says, you can’t make this stuff up. Why does a guy with a health care rap sheet even have a say in health care anymore? Well, he doesn’t directly. He’s the man behind the curtain, quietly pouring money into maintaining a status quo that made him extraordinarily wealthy.

Dick Armey: Republican. Dick.

Armey was the House Majority Leader during the “Republican Revolution.” He’s the total package: as a professor, he sexually harassed multiple students, and eventually divorced his wife to marry one.

FreedomWorks is hard at work to make sure that health care remains a money-making industry. But they’re not just a conservative non-profit; they actually sell insurance, so they’re directly invested.

Now, it’s pretty clear from watching the heightened emotions at the town halls that there is actual, genuine anger among the people in those rooms. The question is, what is it that’s making those people so angry?

Is it actual concern over actual issues? Or is it the fires of fear, uncertainty and doubt that are being carefully and calculatingly stoked by a right-wing machine that knows how to play the undereducated for suckers?

As Rick Perlstein’s excellent article points out: “the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy.” The Right is practiced and adept at playing off of the horrors of what a liberal administration might bring: boogeymen like “Big Government,” “Socialism,” “Nanny State” and a loss of “Freedom.”

None of this is real. None of these terms even mean the things the Right would have you think they mean.

“Freedom” to the Right means “freedom to make money.” It’s not about personal freedom (the gay marriage controversy should make that abundantly clear.) It’s about unfettered free markets.

The people who want you to believe that universal health care is “unAmerican” are in the health care business to make money. It really is that simple.

The United States remains the only industrialized nation without universal health care. Glenn Beck would have you believe that we’re the only ones that are doing it right, because we have the best health care in the world, but this is false by most metrics. We rank considerably lower than many universal health care nations in life expectancy and infant mortality.

Yelling “we’re #1″ without knowing what that means isn’t patriotism. It’s white noise.

Patriotism means looking at your country objectively and knowing that it’s capable of doing better. It means realizing that taking care of its citizens is self-evidently the right thing to do, and that this is more fundamentally “American” than the free market.

The Right likes to throw the Bible around in defense of whatever their cause du jour might be. The Bible is pretty ambiguous about a lot of things, but it takes some serious mental gymnastics to not understand what the Bible has to say about taking care of people:

‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

Students at the So Percussion Summer Institute getting ready to play Shifty.

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of doing a composition master class at the So Percussion Summer Institute. My piece Shifty was on the repertoire list for the students, and I was asked to come to a rehearsal and talk about it.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like this. Heading to Princeton on the train, I wasn’t even sure that I still knew what composers talked about, or what performers expected them to say. Lately, when I talk to groups, it’s about musical tools rather than music itself. It’s certainly not about my own music.

I was pleased to find that I didn’t make a complete fool of myself. I was even more pleased to find that there’s a veritable army of brilliant, hungry young percussionists out there, full of chops and even more full of great ideas about music.

Mostly, what we talked about was instrumentation. Shifty’s weird, in that the instrumentation is partially left up to the performers. The score calls for each of the four players to build a setup using the following:

1. Kick drum, preferably double-headed and muffled very lightly. The tuning and head selection should be appropriate for funk.
2. Large tom tom, double headed and tuned just high enough to eliminate wrinkles in the head. The drum should be unmuffled if possible and both heads should be tuned to the same pitch to avoid pitch bends.
3. Small drum with short decay and high pitch. (e.g. timbale, bongo, tight snare drum with snares off, small roto-tom, etc.)
4. Piece of resonant wood with short decay and higher pitch than the small drum. A woodblock is a possibility, but found objects are encouraged.
5. Resonant metal with short decay and complex overtones. (e.g. broken cymbal, brake drum, Englehart Crasher, etc.) Found objects are encouraged.

Three of the five instruments are pretty clearly specified. The last two are not. I thought this was a cool idea in principle, but in practice the instrumentation has become fixed over time, as a result of some sort of unspoken rule that “Thou Shalt Play Shifty the Way So Plays Shifty.” So spent many years playing this piece pretty regularly, often in front of groups of other percussionists. It seems that all of these other groups decided that this was The Right Way. Then a video appeared on YouTube a few years ago showing a So performance of the piece, and this further cemented this idea into law. I’ve never heard another group play it a different way; the resonant wood is always a wood block or plank and the resonant metal is always a brake drum and/or a china.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It works great this way. It’s loud and edgy and people like it because it’s drummers doing what everyone expects them to do – play loud and edgy.

The problem is, if everyone plays it this way, it’s clear that they’re not really following the score.

“Found objects are encouraged.”

Go for it. Get an old car door and a log and see what happens. The only thing that could go wrong is that it will suck, in which case you just try something else.

The So instrumentation is just one interpretation. It’s not the “right” approach. In fact, the only wrong approach is to not think about it. This isn’t a piano sonata (and even if it was, there are tons of ways to play those as well, even though the instrumentation is specified.)

As part of the rehearsal with the students at Princeton, they played it the So way. And it sounded great. Then they played it using a tiny setup (little drums, tiny Chinese woodblocks, splash cymbals, smaller mallets – they affectionately referred to this as “Pocket Shifty.”) And this sounded great too! It was a completely different experience, but one that’s entirely within the parameters of the score.

The moral of the story is, take some chances. Music grows like gardens grow – people have to do the work. If you keep planting the same seeds in the same soil, it eventually becomes barren.

The phrase “not even wrong” has since come to refer to ideas that are so malformed that they cannot even be assessed.

Here’s an example: you and I can disagree about the composition of the moon. I could argue that the moon is made of green cheese. You could reply that the moon is made of rock. It’s possible that one (or both) of us is wrong, and experiments and observations could resolve this. We can have a legitimate disagreement.

In contrast, imagine that I argued that the moon was made of green cheese and you countered by saying that the moon was made of lamps(|}hamster16z#. One of us (me) could be wrong. But it’s meaningless to say that your statement is “wrong” because your statement is meaningless. We’ve transcended disagreement; we’re not even speaking the same language.

Now, I’ve got lots of opinions about lots of stuff. I’m perfectly happy to argue with people about these opinions. But there are certain things I can’t begin to oppose because they’re not even wrong.

Here are some of those things:

1. The Earth is 6,000 years old.

We can disagree about the existence of a creator God. We can disagree about which God it might be. But we can’t disagree about the accuracy of radiometric dating without disagreeing about fundamental properties of matter. At this point, we would stop speaking the same language.

2. Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.

Not even wrong.

We can disagree about Sarah Palin’s values. We can even disagree about whether or not an educated person who shares those values is qualified to be president. But we can’t disagree about whether or not Sarah Palin is qualified to be president unless the word “qualified” (or, I suppose, “president”) means something different than what we already agree it means.

3. We know the Bible is true because it is the word of God.

This is an example of a logical fallacy known as petitio principii – “begging the question.” To beg the question is to assume as true the thing that you’re trying to prove.

Disputing this claim is not an argument against the existence of God, or even the truthfulness of the Bible. It is entirely possible for the Bible to be true and for it to be the word of God. But it is not even wrong to claim that we know that the Bible is true because it says so. A statement constructed in this way is not an argument. It is meaningless.

4. George W. Bush never lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

On May 23, 2009, George W. Bush gave an interview for Polish television in which he stated the following:

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.
(source)

At the time this statement was made, the Defense Intelligence Agency had already issued a report stating that the found laboratories were “almost certainly intended” for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons (source). To date, Bush’s claim has never been retracted or qualified. In fact, the quote’s link above leads directly to Bush’s official web archive.

We can disagree about whether or not the Iraq war was justified. We can even disagree about the broader aims of the war on terror. But we simply can’t disagree about whether the above quote is a lie unless the word “lied” means something different than what we already agree it means.

The point of Wolfgang Pauli’s statement was that disagreements are fine, but that they can’t even exist unless both sides of an argument are at least in the same ballpark.

The problem with a lot of current political discourse is that it doesn’t even rise to the level of discourse. What passes for a “position” is often just incoherent drooling that happens to use some of the same words found in actual ideas. These arguments, and their advocates, are not even wrong.

The Vinyl Distortion effect - underappreciated and full of awesome

By itself, this noise isn’t necessarily very interesting. But I like to use it to seed other downstream devices. By combining effects that process this noise, I can create endless combinations of material without every having to write a note of music.

(Here’s a secret: I’m really, really lazy. I like having music get made, but I don’t always feel like making it. If I can design tools to make music for me, I get happy.)

I’ve created a Set that uses this type of working process. Download it, open it, and listen. It begins making noodly abstract machine sounds immediately and requires no user interaction.

If you’re part of the Ableton Share beta test, you can grab the Set here:
http://www.ableton.com/documents/10288ec1d39f

If you’re not using Share (but you still have a copy of Ableton Live/Suite 8), you can grab it here:
http://www.dennisdesantis.com/freebies/Automatic.als

Here are some ideas to make this Set your own:

• Turn off the Vinyl Distortion effect and use an open hardware input on your audio interface as the seed. If the input is being fed by nothing, you might need to boost the gain (often by a lot) to get any sound at all.
• Instead of an empty line input, try using a mic. This works particularly well on a laptop, for example.
• Instead of empty or noise sources, try using actual musical material as the seed. Feed clips into the device chain and see what you get.
• Tweak everything. There are lots of parameters to play with and even tiny adjustments can yield a completely different result.

The short answer is that I’m a technical writer.

(Tip: if someone asks you what you do, don’t tell them that you’re a technical writer unless you want them to go away. It’s like telling them that you’re a mortician or a Republican. You can see the interest drain from their face, and their expectation of now-it’s-gonna-get-lame is palpable.)

The longer answer (and this is where, usually, some interest comes back) is that I work for a company called Ableton. We make software for recording, live performance, composition, music production, etc. Part of my gig involves writing all of the documentation. But I’m also pretty heavily involved in things like sound design, making tutorial movies, concepts for the future of the products, etc.

I also do clinics, user workshops and sometimes one-on-one trainings or demonstrations for VIP artists in New York.

This is an immensely fun job. I get to think about ways to make better tools for musicians and to make music using those tools. I also get to hang out with and teach other passionate musicians and gearheads, as well as hang out with some of my musical heroes.

The job also takes me to Berlin several times a year, a city where I lived from 2003-2005 and which I love coming back to.

Here’s a movie I made for Ableton:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Geeking out with electronic music is basically what I’ve been doing for fun since I was about 12. Now I get paid for it.

Clip art question mark? That means I'm a professional.

No, these are things that are maybe worth a little more thought, and seem to be interesting enough to people that they keep coming up. Thus:

Q. Are you still writing concert music?
A. No, but this isn’t some kind of celibacy vow. I’m up for the right project.

Q. Why aren’t you writing concert music anymore?
A. The short answer is that the cost/benefit analysis just wasn’t working out. I found that I was spending far too long working on music I didn’t much care for.

The long answer involves a careful reassessment of the very first minute of my very first composition lesson. My teacher, Ramon Zupko, sat down at his desk, looked me straight in the eye and asked something to the effect of “Do you know what the job market is like for composers?” I said something like “I imagine it’s pretty bad.” He replied “There is no job market for composers. The only reason anyone should do this is because they can’t imagine not doing it.”

For years, I couldn’t imagine not doing it. Then, gradually, I realized that I could imagine it, and that there were other things I could imagine doing even more.

So now I do those things instead.

Q. When are you going to release another electronic record?
A. Well, “release” and “record” are kind of silly words in 2009, when all music is free and even when it isn’t, almost none of the money goes to the artists. My last two record contracts were basically just ignored by my labels after a while; they simply stopped paying me and eventually stopped replying to my emails. These days, I’m pretty happy doing things like remixes, where the money comes in advance and you never have to think about royalties.

That being said, I do plan to release more new music. But I’ll probably look for ways to do this myself, without having to worry about whether or not I’m going to get screwed by drug-addled label managers.

Q. You sound like a jaded, bitter little bitch.
A. That’s not a question.

Q. You sound like a jaded, bitter little bitch. Are you?
A. No, on the contrary. I’m happier than ever with the music I’m making, and I’m happier than ever with my career. Years ago, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I told them “I want to make a living in music.” And that’s exactly what I’m doing. In fact, I’m involved with more music music now (and from more angles) than I ever was when I thought of myself principally as a composer.

Q. Why did you leave Alarm Will Sound?
A. I couldn’t figure out a way to balance the incredible time demands of practicing all of that hard music with my work at Ableton.

Q. Do you miss playing in Alarm Will Sound?
A. No. I miss the people, but I don’t miss the gig. Again, I just don’t particularly have a burning need to be part of the concert music scene. I guess I miss some of the music, but in the end I’d rather be listening to it than making it anyway.

Q. But don’t you miss performing?
A. No. I absolutely and unequivocally prefer making music in the studio over making music on stage.

Q. Ok, sure, concert music. But don’t you miss performing electronic music?
A. No.

Q. I don’t get it. That incredible moment at the end of a long breakdown, when the crowd is riding every fader and knob turn, their anticipation mounting to a frenzy…and finally, when the tension in the room has reached an unbearable peak, you finally bring the kick drum back in and are rewarded with a roar of approval, hundreds of sweating bodies fully engaged in a quasi-religious frenzy…you don’t miss that?
A. Ketamine is a tranquilizer for horses.

Q. Boy, you sure are a grumpy grandpa, huh?
A. No.

Q. Why did you quit teaching?
A. I teach pretty much all day every day. True, I don’t do it in front of a chalkboard, but I see my job at Ableton as primarily educational. My short stint in academia was pretty fun, but the Ableton opportunity was simply too good to pass up.

Q. Hey, I really like [insert name of track you like]. Can I send you some of my music?
A. Of course, I’d love to hear it. But please understand that there is almost certainly nothing I can do to help your career. I don’t run a label and even if I did, most labels won’t do much for you these days anyway (see above.) Just keep working on it, keep learning your tools, and keep ripping off good ideas from other music.

Q. Would you like room for milk?
A. Yes, please.

I usually get money from concert music performances and money from electronic music. This all makes sense. The payouts are labeled so you know basically where things are coming from and nothing is ever so wonky that I feel that it’s necessary to figure out which exact radio station in Poland played the track and why.

But for the past few statements, there’s also been a payout from MTV – for $1.96.

One dollar and ninety-six cents.

MTV pays me $1.96 every 3 months. I'm a rockstar.

The other side of the statement lists the show as something called “Next,” which I seem to have found at MTV’s website here. It looks like some sort of dating reality show, but trying to figure out more made my soul hurt so I had to leave. If one of you would like to venture into the cave and provide a report, I’d be much obliged. I might even send you $1.96.

Seriously, MTV? My music is used in the background of one of your shows and you pay me LESS THAN TWO DOLLARS?

I’m trying to imagine providing any service to MTV that would pay that little. The guy who delivers tacos on his bike to the interns gets a bigger tip than this.

Autechre will beat you up and steal your lunch money.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of arranging Autechre’s “Cfern” for Alarm Will Sound. Doing an arrangement requires you to listen over and over again to little bits of a piece at a time, which is an entirely weird sort of listening experience and allows you to hear all kinds of stuff that you might otherwise miss.

As I listened, I realized that there’s something that happens in the form of a whole bunch of Autechre tracks that’s pretty bizarre. In “Cfern” it’s subtle, but in other tracks (such as “LCC” from the album Untilted) it’s much easier to hear.

An oversimplified formal diagram might look like this:

Form in Autechre's “LCC”

A = OH GOD MY MIND IS MELTING! BUSLOADS OF NUNS AND PUPPIES ARE FALLING OFF A BRIDGE! TOO MUCH INFORMATION!

B = calm down

Two-part forms are common. What’s uncommon is the huge disparity between the information density in the first half versus the second half; the first three minutes are clenched-teeth frenetic insanity, while the final four are like a warm bath.

Even more interesting, however, is that it isn’t just the macro-level that’s “front-loaded” like this. It happens at the micro-level as well.

Here’s a transcription of the basic two-bar pattern that repeats through the A section:

Here at the phrase level, we see the information density is again much higher in the first half than in the second; like a fractal, the large-scale form is represented at the small-scale.

I hear this kind of structure over and over again in Autechre’s music. I’m not sure if this is something that they’re doing intentionally, but it’s definitely a characteristic part of their sound.

When I’m not busy spraying milk out of my nose because of something Sarah Palin said, this is the sort of crap I think about.

(Aside: I found a review of Untilted that discusses form in “LCC” as well. Or at least it uses the word “form” over and over again. As far as I can tell this is just hipster word salad with a side order of pretentious.)

Come see Alarm Will Sound play my arrangement of “Cfern,” along with a bunch of other crazy stuff, at Le Poisson Rouge on July 22.