Randy Jones
visual music and softwarenews
Max/MSP/Jitter Classes
I’m doing a series of Max/MSP/Jitter classes in Seattle over the next few months. Some of these are at 911 Media Arts, and I plan to do a special small one at the SEAC Clubhouse as well.
Multitouch Prototype 2
Here’s a demo video of the controller I made for my thesis project at the University of Victoria. My thesis is available here, and hopefully gives enough information that a motivated person can make one of these with a nice audio interface, $50 in materials and a lot of patience. If you try it, let me know!
Multitouch Prototype 2 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.
New 2up.jit.centroids
A Max/MSP/Jitter external I made in 2004---how time flies---just got a major update to fix some long-standing bugs. Improved match algorithm is improved. Help file is now in Max 5. Price: still free.
Chladni Videos
Chladni Patterns 3 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.
It’s been a hectic few months in a very good way. The summer proper was spent finishing and defending my M.Sc. thesis, this wonderful indian summer afterwards has been about playing couple of very different live shows: an ambient party in Mendocino county, and our own Decibel Festival. Both were amazing in different ways and in general I feel lucky to be doing such stuff, though getting prepared for these things it’s true I’ve invested a lot of sitzfleisch making technology when I could have been gardening. Now I get to share more of the results, though, the fun part of the process, and I’ll be documenting here at least a little. As a start, I made some movies yesterday of the waveguide mesh model I used in my thesis work.
Vids on Vimeo
I put some of my work on youtube a while back, but was never happy enough with the result to bother broadcasting the fact. Vimeo, however, is pretty badass, so now I can put some decent videos on the net without editing my site. Here’s a little piece called “OVNItos.” I did it in 2006 to test out render_node. Check this channel in the future for new live cinema pieces, more documentation on my multitouch controller project, and so on.
New Eyes for the Mind
Here is an essay I wrote for The Cinematic Experience, published by Sonic Acts Press, Amsterdam. In which I point to some ideas from the history of experimental animation that can shed light on where it is we are going with Live Cinema. And hopefully address some of my pet peeves without being too peevish. I’ve corrected a couple of typos and resisted the urge to do anything about meanings.
Mobile Billboards
I’ve just written a nice letter to the Mayor that will probably get a form-letter response. The jist was: should driving a truck in the city all day, for no other reason than hauling around a billboard-sized ad, be legal? ‘No’ has been the immediate answer from everyone I’ve bounced this off of, and I’m not talking about the Adbusters set. People hate these things. It seems like you could make some pretty cut-and-dried laws about this kind of thing. Ads on trucks already hauling stuff: OK. Ads on trucks hauling no stuff: NOT OK. Maybe a politician eager to establish himself as a “green” candidate could see some profit in this idea. Or maybe that’s naïve of me because of the power of the ad lobby, but anyway I spent half an hour turning my annoyance into action, and that feels good.
Check this out: an online brochure that promotes mobile advertising as “an environmental choice.” Why environmental? Because it reduces waste. Waste of what? Your ad dollars. It looks like they are recycling cars into metal shoes too, that’s good to know.
Lachenmann in Vancouver
This Saturday I’ll be in Vancouver helping perform live electronics for a very special concert of works by Lachenmann and Nono. Lachenmann is visiting to lecture, so we hope we do a decent job. Making the Max patch for Nono’s tuba piece has been an educational experience, one about which I hope to write more later. But for now, just the show details:
Vancouver New Music, the University of Victoria, the UBC School of Music and the Goethe-Institut are pleased to host Helmut Lachenmann, one of the most influential European composers of the 20th and 21st century. With Special guest Helmut Lachenmann, Max Murray, tuba; Dániel Péter Biró, live electronics; Randy Jones, live electronics; Kirk McNally, live electronics; Jee Yeon Ryu, piano; Franklin Cox, cello;AK Coope, bass clarinet; Franklin Cox, cello; Jee Yeon Ryu, piano Works include Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau by Nono; 15’;Serynade, 25’, Pression, 10’, Allegro Sostenuto, 35’ by Lachenmann.
More info here.
“And I Don’t Mean the Writer’s Day. ”
I’ve been reading some Amy Hempel lately on Chuck Palahniuk’s strong recommendation. Like just about all writers I respect, she has an utter lack of pretense and a way with packing as much meaning into as few words as possible. Traits that translate well into music, and that I hope for my own work to have. This interview at powells.com sums up her approach in about fifty words that sum up three-quarters of everything you need to know to make good art in whatever field.
Interviewer: When you teach creative writing, is there one piece of advice that seems to resonate more than others, seems to work, with students?
Hempel: Not so much a piece of advice as a question to keep in mind, which is the most basic of questions: Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.
There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I’m not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential? The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone’s life better, or make anyone’s day better? And I don’t mean the writer’s day.
