Infiltration Lab played a live, hour-long drone/noise set on KBOO FM on February 1st, 2010.

In the unfortunate event that KBOO loses funding or they change their url scheme or de-archives material or bombs hit Portland or whatever, I have also archived the show on archive.org. Hopefully this embedded player continues to work:

A few random tech details: I played the set on my audiopint computer that I built a couple years ago, running some Pd patches that I designed specifically for this show. As usual, the computer (as underpowered as it is!) had no problems keeping up. All sounds in the recording were rendered through Pd in realtime. Some audio material (for the granular synthesis) was taken from a(n unnamed) commercial recording, and the spoken sample material was mixed blind (previously unheard by me) from a psychological tape sourced at the Goodwill bins.

This piece is intended to be a contrast of sorts, a juxtaposition, and an overt psychological response to the reflection of time collapse. There really is no time. If your current self could revert to its earlier self in an instant, what would that event sound like?

Many thanks to Sean for having me. May radio live on!

Dear Belkin,

It's your problem now.

(Sending anonymously. Perhaps I should select the shipping insurance.)

On the transition from New Years Eve to New Years Day I made a recording of the sounds in my neighborhood, similar to the one I made last year. Here's a link to the archive.org page for it in case you want to download it or read more:
http://www.archive.org/details/NewYears2010WoodstockPortlandOr. It has reminded me just how much I enjoy the sound of binaural recording. I'm still tickled by the spacial placement of sounds in a 3D field. If you listen, you should ideally wear headphones and keep the volume very high (I didn't alter the signal and left a bunch of headroom).

Sometimes when I'm prototyping patches in Pd and working at a computer keyboard (without an external controller), I like to be able to quickly map keyboard keys to trigger events.

The vanilla key objects are fine ([key], [keyup], and [keyname]), but [keyname], in particular, likes to send redundant events when a key is held (due to key repeats). As a result, I created [keyonoff]:

This abstraction will take a given key (and an optional timeout duration) and will map a keypress onto a simple 1 or 0, while eliminating duplicates. In other words, when your desired key is pressed, it will output a 1 and will output a 0 iff a zero has been seen from [keyname] and no 1 has been seen within the filtering period. The default timeout period is 50ms, which is suitable for command-like actions, but will need tweaking for time-sensitive rhythmic work.

It's hosted with my other Pd objects, and you can simply download it directly here. Enjoy!

Remember back in the nineties, when Junkyard Wars was the rage and your mom still hadn't heard of the 3rd or 4th round of DIY movement?

Remember Cathy Rogers?

While cleaning virtual house, I stumbled across some of her old band's music videos and basically wondered what she's been up to. The interwebs informed me that her and the SO and babies migrated to Italy and.....

Started olive farming!? Sexy, hip, modern move huh? You'd love to? Perhaps...but silence the hunger pains and grasp the pragmatism of their story. Ok, fine, I haven't read it yet, but I wanna...and I'm rather inspired by the blog and humbled by the guardian article.

Mobility and lifestyle? Freedom and financial security? Simplicity juxtaposed with the complexity of solitude?

Regardless, it's a wonderful story and it sparks the hunger...

In the event of zombie apocalypse, I am your guy for coathanger iron stands!

(but yes crack heads did steal my tools)

So I picked up this nice USB foot pedal at Goodwill on the cheap: I wrote some C code that allows it to act as an "external" (plug-in library if you will) for Pd. Click the above link and you can read all the gory details about how I turned it into a controller for Pd. Demo video is forthcoming.

The midi controller I posted earlier was used to great depth in the missile silo performance that CRM114 Discriminator gave at toorcamp.

I built this little midi controller to trigger samples and control a few Pd parameters: It's based on an old touchtone telephone keypad, a rotary encoder, a two digit LED display, and a USB-based AVR breakout board (the Teensy++). The PC board was hand-etched at home, and it's mounted in a solid white, repurposed jewelry or makeup box, purchased at the Goodwill. Click the above to view more images, read the brief technical spec, and to download the code and circuit/pcb design artifacts.

Sometimes when bogged down by responsibility I can find it rejuvenating to embrace the right kind of distraction.

So my distraction involved hearing a radio cut of the Billy Idol hit "Cradle of Love" and finally following thru on a long-time desire to cut the thing into its most fundamental (read: important) parts: The grunts.

"That's right!" Sir Cyborg Himself. Despite having such a HUGE hit in the 90s, there are probably between zero and 3 people on the planet who actually know all the lyrics -- it's a slurred bozo fest of nonsense sexual innuendo and rockstar spittle. Simply brilliant.

So I leave you with "Rock The Cradle of Love Grunts".