Event streamed on usual audio channel, and at the same time live video on a MOAP in SL
Taking its form as mostly a live improvisational music project, Echo Starship is heavily influenced by an experimental/psych spectrum of sounds ranging from Drone, Noise, Ambient, Contemporary Minimalist music and all the way to Post-Rock, Krautrock, IDM, Synth Wave elements.
He uses for his performance an arbitrary selection of instruments ranging from electric guitar, prepared instruments, field recordings & samples, synthesizers, electronics, piezo microphones, and other types of โoddโ instruments.
It takes form as a live improvisational exploration of experimental, ambient, contemporary classical, and drone music with performances at various festivals, venues, and internet streams. More at https://ampeff.com/
The list of participating artists is pretty interesting, apart from me. I’m playing Saturday at 3PM SLT, if anyone is interested.
The main venue will be on ground level with stage floating on water and bleacher seating on the RadioSpiral sim. Radiospiral will also take care of rebroadcasting the event on their channel.
Schedule of performers:
Art Opening:
FRI 11am PST Mutant Memory Tom Britt
LIVE MUSIC:
FRI 12pm Mao Lemieux 1pm Jana Kyomoon 2pm Echo Starship 3pm Aleatorica 4pm Cypress Rosewood
I’ll be playing my music at this opening on Sunday, for anyone who wants to come and listen.
I like Selen’s pictures on the walls, inspired by the works of James Turrell.
I prepared some new music and sounds inspired by Selen’s colorful sights, and I hope everything works well.
My basic track is ready, I’m satisfied. To play it in a concert, I will use the technique exposed in a previous post and here.
Why do I want to specify this? Often in these cases we receive unclear requests regarding “live” performances. Anyone who has made any music knows that we only have two hands, and if you don’t just play one instrument and maybe sing over it’s impossible to produce an interesting performance.
Personally, I’m not interested in playing piano bar, I prefer complex and layered compositions, which would require an entire band to perform “live”. And even if that were possible, but it’s not, everyone would have to be in the same room and use the mixer output for feed the stream, because of the high lag affecting audio streams (mean: you play a note, and this note can be listened in Second Life after a delay of 30 seconds or more, and there is no solution).
Sometimes you also hear about double or triple streams, but that’s nonsense: in Second Life the stream applied to a parcel can be one and only one.
So I looked for the most useful workflow for me, and I’m happy I found it, as explained in the aforementioned post: i prepare my basic track and i play over, with my two hands.
All my music can be defined as “live”, and this is both an advantage and a flaw from my point of view. I don’t have a studio version of any of the music in my Bandcamp, it’s all live recordings of me playing them (Revox was once used, now a digital recorder but is the same approach).
A glorious Revox B77 MK2.
This also means that if I want to repeat the same thing, I wouldn’t know how to do it: often these are moments captured on the fly, and who remembers how I did them?
But that’s fine with me, that’s what I want, for me this is “live”, influenced by my moods, ambient around me, my inside. I like to tell a story, if I can, and sounds for me are the colors with which I paint a scenario.
I believe that the real distinction should be that between “I play my own music, produced and played by me using the needed tools needed to try to create the feeling that i want to communicate” and “I play/sing music produced by others“…
It is clear that the first case is the interesting one for me, but it is only my opinion. You can freely continue to call “live” something that for me is intrinsically dead, there’s no problem.
I much prefer listening to a live recording of original music than something fake, perhaps using a MIDI base prepared by others, in a piano bar style. Some are very good at this, no doubt. But it’s not a “live”, it’s a performance sung or played over a backing track, a pre-recorded medium generally produced by others.
The difference between streaming music and live music is in the artist, not the medium. Who can create the โcollective effervescenceโ is the winner, dead or alive ๐
I’ll leave the discussion open, there are certainly different opinions.
During the last meeting with the management of Linden Lab to which I was invited and in which the excellent Project Zero was presented, I asked a question that was quite off topic (but also not, basically we were talking about the evolution of Second Life) to Philip Rosedale regarding a possible and necessary development of audio in Second Life.
Why did I ask him of all people present at meeting?
Maybe someone remembers the virtual world he created some time ago, High Fidelity. Now this virtual world is no more (plans for gatherings on the High Fidelity platform to use virtual reality were scrapped by the beginning of 2019, and the platform became audio-only) and High Fidelity takes care of Advanced Audio Processing quite well, as the name announced from the beginning.
You can listen to some examples on the High Fidelity site, and the approach seems right suited to Second Life, both for Voice, and for the musicians, and for the environmental sounds.
Wear your headphones and try this to understand the topic, for example.
Pretty impressive, right? No, no one is knocking on your door ๐
I remember that during the development of Sansar Linden Lab had started an approach regarding spatial and 3D, volumetric, audio. I don’t know if this experiment with ambisonic sounds was implemented in the final version, it’s been a long time since I visited Sansar. The conditions were very interesting and everyone ran to buy ambient microphones.
But, seeing Rosedale on the other side of screen, I had to ask.
I put on my poker face and asked directly.
“Excuse me Philip, maybe we can hope in the future to have a developement of Second Life on Spatial Audio?”
He looked surprised and responded immediately. After that I was the surprised one, because he didn’t say no but was open to possibilities.
Audio is one of the most primitive areas of Second Life: ambiental sounds for now are based on a mere support for small audio files (max 30 second each, in mono…) to be imported one by one and with some work assembled with scripting, far from what it is possible to obtain today and if you have watched the example video you can quite simply understand what would be possible instead.
I will not fail to remind us of this quasi-promise whenever possible, that would be wonderful, for musicians but for any user of Second Life.
Our Daddio is in real life Gene Maruszewski, a university educated electronic musician operating out of Northern California.
He’s been dabbling in electronic music since 1973 and continues to this day. His compositions cover the broad spectrum from techno to ambient and some genres that have yet to find a name.
His most common tools are his 2 massive modular synthesizers trendy groove boxes, pedals, and effects.
Daddio’s Modular Synth.
โ I got bit by the electronic music bug tripping to Pink Floyd music back in 1969 and resolved to one day learn how to make that kind of spacey music. A few years later the University I attended started an electronic music class.
So I enrolled, and I got my hands on a Moog, the series 3 with a sequencer complement, an EMS synthi, a pair of Revox stereo tape recorders and a 4 track TEAC.
Daddio’s small studio.
I started to listen to people like Pierre Schaefer, Pierre Henry, Walter Carlos, Morton Subotnick and the like. I continued my music education after my move to California at the College of Marin, enrolled in their fine music department.
At first, music was a more of a hobby while I pursued my career in bicycles and I resolved to return to my electronic music endeavors upon retirement which fortunately came early.
Daddio’s Bicycle Synth.
By the turn of the century I was heavily involved in making electronic music, having purchased my first modular synth, a Doepfer a100 system, and have been at it ever since.
Real Daddio’s Modular.
I work largely with a modular but also some pedals and outboard devices; effects, EQ’s, etc., and I also have a couple of the trendy boxes like an MPCx, an Octatrack, and a Keystep Pro.โ ~gm
Daddio Dow has been making electronic music since 1973. He calls himself a music mechanic, assembling various sound bits into eclectic electronica. He draws from influences from before Bach and after Eno. Sometimes ambient, sometimes noizy, you’ve not heard this before.
We are pleased to host him for the last event of 2024 on the roof of The Hexagons.
A song for us avatars: Livio Korobase & Renee Rebane in Digital Holiday.
[Verse] In the land of codes and streams, Where we live our digital dreams, The snow falls bright in shades of blue, A pixel-perfect holiday view. Avatars in festive clothes, Building trees where no one knows, Silent nights in a neon glow, Itโs Christmas in the pixel snow. [Chorus] Oh, itโs Christmas in the pixel snow, Where the virtual winds of winter blow. Lights that sparkle, hearts that gleam, A holiday in a coded dream. Oh, itโs Christmas in the pixel snow, Together, no matter where we go. Across the wires, through the screen,
We celebrate as one big team.
Udio, Studio One, OBS. Video recorded in Second Life. Livio Korobase & Renee Rebane in Digital Holiday
One of the most controversial things about generative AI in the artistic field is undoubtedly the fact that the gigantic databases on which the generation is based are built with data available on the web, without asking for any authorization from the authors. Some sites have specialized in audio generation, but they do not care about the origin of the generated content and instead focus on the creation of web interfaces designed to facilitate the creation of “songs” that sound “believable”.
This also applies to graphics or wherever AI works generatively, so much so that the prompts can be tacked on with the wording “in the style of [famous name here]”, sometimes resulting in somewhat “artistic” results. But who is the artist in this case? Who wrote the prompt or who actually created the snippet that the AI โโbased the piece on?
In my opinion there is no real creative act in this, it is more a question of luck than anything else.
The Singing Poet Society project case instead adds an element that changes the cards on the table. Tony has trained the AI โโ(a process called machine learning) using his own material, aspects that in my opinion constitute the heart of the matter. The AI โโis used here simply as a tool for the construction of a song, it is not ultimately that different from using sequencers or other generative tools in a DAW.
However, knowing that the one singing is the AI โโwith Tony’s voice is a bit shocking, but that’s what actually happens.
I haven’t come to a personal opinion yet and I don’t know what I think, but removing the use of materials made by others from the scene certainly cleans up the perspective.
Anyway, here is the recording of the evening, so everyone can develop their own conviction.
Tony Gerber aka Cypress Rosewood’s Singing Poet Society @ Hexagon 241207 (AI music project). Video by D-oo-b.
Saturday Dec 7 1PM SLT in Second Life, Roof of The Hexagons. Presentation of project, performance and Q&A session with Tony Gerber
There is always a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence and its intelligent use, it seems that the same adjective is used in a inconsistent way.
I really like this Singing Poet Society project, because it is undoubtedly an example of how AI can be used creatively and in an original way.
In an innovative blend of art and technology, Tony Gerber, a visionary artist and musician, has embraced artificial intelligence (AI) with enthusiasm and creative inspirations. His creations contain various musical blends of his own original music and AI music collaboration.
The Singing Poet Society YouTube channel serves as both a platform for artistic collaboration with AI and an educational tool aimed at demystifying AI’s role in creative endeavors.
The channel proudly hosts an impressive collection of 110 videos, each transforming public domain poems from celebrated poets such as Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and other literary luminaries into captivating song videos.
Gerber has harnessed AI driven graphic tools like Midjourney and integrated emerging AI music applications, including the beta version of Udio, alongside traditional video editing techniques to craft these engaging and thought provoking pieces.
“Singing Poet Society” is not merely an entertainment outlet but a source of inspiration and education. Beyond its YouTube presence, Gerber envisions the channel as a conduit for introducing AI into educational settings, particularly within schools and English classes. His goal is to illuminate AI’s potential as a tool for enhancing learning, by enabling students to explore and interpret the rich insights, life reflections, and human experiences encapsulated in classic poetry.
Through this initiative, Gerber encourages students to engage creatively with poetry, fostering their own compositions and song videos, and offering fresh perspectives on public domain, time honored works.
This fusion of AI technology and poetic artistry promises to open new avenues for learning and creation, making the “Singing Poet Society” a pioneering venture in the realm of digital education and artistic expression.
An example of Singing Poet Society channel content. Don’t miss the transcriptions of poetry.
Tony Gerber has been a part of the Nashville art, music and technology communities for 43 years. He has worked with technology as an artistic tool since the 70s and continues with project to inspire younger generations and reinspire older generations with Singing Poet Society.
