Links

Some inspiration from this week (or so)

Love this (free download) series of one minute soundsculptures / loops:
https://machinefabriek.bandcamp.com/album/minuten
Thinking about them left playing all together in a darkened room somewhere.

Also exploring music that is an evocation of place, real or fictional. This is an interesting example. “…a psychogeographic investigation into a world of abandoned Underground stations, Quatermass, eighteenth century secret societies and the footsore reveries of a modern Flâneur.”:

And this beautiful, tactile (if slightly creepy) synth design:
http://www.electronicbeats.net/the-feed/beautiful-occult-synthesizer-lets-conjure-dark-droning-soundscapes/

Interesting Quartz piece about algorithmic accountability. Ties in with the Creative AI talk I attended in January, where there was some discussion about AI being left to run things without checks and balances (tested in versions of the game Civilisation) invariably leading to world destruction:
https://qz.com/1211313/artificial-intelligences-paper-clip-maximizer-metaphor-can-explain-humanitys-imminent-doom/

REALLY tempted to get tickets for this, even though it’s in another country. “A workshop on the radical potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in combination with robotics to change human bodily experience.”:
https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/tickets-workshop-human-machine-configurations-by-marco-donnarumma-and-ana-rajcevic-43197660365

Also an honourable mention to Damon Krukowski, whose talk at Second Home Spitalfields about his new book The New Analog I attended last week. Damon discussed the ways in which the switch from analogue to digital audio has influenced the way we perceive and think about everything from time and space to love, money and power. His use of the sound engineer’s distinction of signal and noise and the difference in a digital world (basically, there is much more signal and less noise in the digital realm) was particularly thought-provoking.

Inspiration for the ‘Space Rock’ audio player

I want to make one of these. Imagining them as a limited edition for a band or artist, loaded with samples of their work, so the user can create their own soundscapes. Could be a version using the Voyager Sounds collection?

And also a nod to the interactive tilt radio by Luka Or, whose shape initially inspired the ‘Space Rock’.
https://www.designboom.com/design/tilt/

Hacking AI monitoring and surveillance systems

Machine learning systems are very capable, but they aren’t exactly smart. They lack common sense. Taking advantage of that fact, researchers have created a wonderful attack on image recognition systems that uses specially-printed stickers that are so interesting to the AI that it completely fails to see anything else.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/02/these-psychedelic-stickers-blow-ai-minds/

Harvey is one of a growing number of privacy-focused designers and developers “exploring new opportunities that are the result of [heightened] surveillance,” and working to establish lines of defense against it. He’s spent the past several years experimenting with strategies for putting control over people’s privacy back in their own hands, in their pockets and on their faces.
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/anti-surveillance-state-clothes-and-gadgets-block-face-recognition-technology

When human vision is no longer the only game in town, don’t leave home without this umbrella studded with infrared LEDs visible only to CCD surveillance cameras, designed to let you flirt with object tracking algorithms used in advanced surveillance systems. Use in pairs with a friend to train these systems to recognize nonhuman shapes and patterns more common to dreams and hallucinations than to your average city street.
https://survival.sentientcity.net/umbrella.html

Music from other sources

A bit of research today, looking at sound and technology, particularly AI.

George Philip Wright’s Vochlea gadget transforms human voice into instruments

Ripple Player iOS app

Description
Creating playlists is a burden. Shuffling songs is annoying. That’s why Ripple was born.
With Ripple player, creating playlists is no more than a simple click. All you need to do is select one song as an origin, and a playlist will be automatically generated for you. The playlist will be random, yet containing songs coherent and matching each other well.

Advanced Algorithm
– Generate local coherent playlists
– No Internet access needed
– Fast and Accurate

Household objects become musical instruments with Sound Pegs by Nick Brennan

And finally…

Beyond Artificial Intelligence

Have been reading Beyond Artificial Intelligence, a series of essays exploring the ‘Disappearing Human-Machine Divide’. The book is not what I expected, but is provoking lots of thought on how interactivity could become frictionless. The chapters so far consider how people can connect with each other and / or machines without serious hardware. This includes an example of sending nerve impulses directly between two human beings.