Dendriet, Haags netwerk voor electronische muziek

I suggest we release a single ASAP. After 300 sales, we'll have our video played at TMF!
(2004, first abstract electro impro record hits the charts, but the charts are uncertain what hit them.)

On night of August the 13th, Thijs and I were doing Toycontrol in Den Bosch on the Boulevard festival, on the Dok-A boat. It was an extremely rainy day. The Boulevard cancelled all outdoor performances, except ours. But as we were missing from the program schedule all together, the festival never informed the boulevard-audience that we would, indeed, play.
Parcival, the owner of the Dok-A boat, made a nice roof for us. The very very brave audience was on the shore, underneath a huge party tent. They witnessed how rain was influencing our electronics a lot, as it did our improvisation. We skipped the rock and roll toy guitar act, as we got totally fed up with the toy guitars after those were triggered again and again by us, by loose cables, by leaking water.
In stead, we played a very noisy version of Toycontrol. Thijs' toy-keyboard did a lot of popcorn noise. That was the initial noise for a concert for electronic rain and thunder, accompanied by real rain and thunder. I hope I can post a video of the performance as well.
My personal favourite moments are the electronic beats thijs does starting at 7 minutes, and the sonic collapse at 19/20 minutes, and the hypnotic concentration shift in the end, that might happen to you as well. Here's the file: TScheeleDKrooshof-ToycontrolDenBosch-rainversion130804.mp3.
More Toycontrol is here.

Sonoloog/pop-producer/(theater)technician Geert Oddens Is comming back from abroad (Limboland). If you've got a job for him, or have a tip for finding one, you can drop it in the comments.

Harold and Jan, can you be encourged to write an Airtunes Core-Audio driver?

The famous Jon Lech Johansen has cracked the code to stream music wirelessly over airport express. I've been longing for that. Unfortunately, his server dies a lot due to his popularity, so I haven't been able to check it out yet. I hope this feature will make airtunes show up as an output device in coreaudio...

Update. The Airtunes sounds very good, far better then I expected. The DAC is not a harsh sonyish consumer DAC, but has a very smooth, round quality. And it's response to itunes is immediate enough to make it a perfect output for Max and SC. I downloaded the source code. To compile it, you need a compiler/library called Mono. Mono is made on top of Fink, so I installed that. But then I need something else, which is too hard to install: it comes with a list with commandline controls that starts with "Okee this is not for the faint of heart." Interestingly enough, I do not see a new program on my Mac. I got very annoyed. This is hours of useless library installing, and in the end, nothing works, or I can ruin my OSX functionality. So why didn't Jon come with a pre-compiled binairy?
Well... Meanwhile I found out more about Jon's "program". It's a commandline tool to drop an allready existing Apple Lossless Encoded soundfile upon the Airport Express. So even if I would have managed to compile it, as it would not have been the tool that I was hoping for at all: Jon's program won't let us connect any soundstream to Airport Express.
The value of Jon's code lies in the fact that it is a simple example of how to play sound through Airport Express aka Airtunes. Now a programmer can sit down to program a core-audio driver for Airtunes, as that will open up the world for wireless lossnessness.

When Thijs and I came back from playing Toy Control (the rain version), Thijs noticed the mice in my room. Though most of them are ADB, there's one white optical pro mouse. I mentioned bowing it, and we tried it. It works beautifully. The mouse arrow responds very stablely, and the led lights up very bright.
This was a pleasent discovery, as I've been modifying ballmice to allow bowing their wheels, but I gave up on that so much that the sheer thought of bowing an optical had not even begun to arise to a higher level of my conciousness. But I'm happy it works now, that it looks cool, and that it won't involve saws, glue and fine mechanics to make it work.
There is, however, a software issues to tackle, as I found out in the ball-mice era. The mousearrow position on screen is not the right kind of data to use for music for several reasons:
The mac uses mouse arrow acceleration: The faster you move the mouse, the more pixels the arrow moves per centimeter physical movement. But more importantly: It's absolutely stupid that the datastream when the arrow stops at the edge of the screen, while still having a part of the bow to rub over the mouse.
Also, if you accidentally click, there's a chance that something important that should not have been touched, is clicked. Accidentally quitting a patch while playing live is a possibility. It will happen.

It there a piece of software that allows a mouse to be unmounted as an arrow-controller, yet makes it available as a speed sensor in Max?

"This one is more humorous than it is useful. Basically I wanted to see if making a compressor (actually, this is more strictly just a limiter) was possible in MSP. Well, I got my answer, and the answer was: maybe."
Here are a bunch of maxMSP patches. Usually other peoples patches are hard to read, but these very open.

I also came across scanning synthesis which is basically wavetable synthesis. It scans the amplitudes of masses of a vritual circular spring and mass system, that lives on a toiletroll carton shaped universum.

Back from the land of north, I bug you people with the news of a major update of my personal website. The projects section has finally taken off...