And to follow up – my review on RJDJ’s latest app, in beta testing, Project NOW – the “perfect music for every moment”. Basically it is a fancy, glorified version of iTunes shuffle/genius, compiles your musical preferences by your own feedback of whether they #win or #fail. The catch – it selects music based on its estimation of location/environmental/directional/motion conditions. So it reads the calendar, clock, weather, ambient level, motion, location, etc. and spits out a song selection that is “perfect for that”.

Technical note: I am using this app on an iPhone 4. Don’t bother using it on anything less than a 4, it will eat your battery like cake for breakfast in 10 mins flat.

To start, I must admit, I am not a big iPod listener (I only listen in very limited situations – now I drive, before I found transit way too loud to listen) and not a big music listener at home – as in, not constant, only when I am already in the “mood”. So, with that in mind, here’s what I found to be Project NOW’s most critical features:

•  it is a HUGE battery drain. constantly scanning location makes listening to music – what should be a very low-bat experience – a very “expensive” one
• too much babysitting for the app to “learn” my preferences, too ongoing. I’d rather spend some time to initially set it up, asnwer some questions, rather than constantly babysit it.
• the changes to the environment “modes” are too sudden – in fact, several times i was happy i finally found a song to listen to and i guess i moved, and it went away….replaced by another song that was apparently “more perfect” for that next moment. Errr?#fail

Overall, pretty interface, easy to use, interesting idea vagely reminiscent of tinkering with your own Sims music universe (and all the nerdy goodness that goes along with it), but it adds up to a very battery-and-intervention heavy experience that i can replicate much more
simply by making a playlist. And ultimately, the “perfect” music for a moment in time is not so much determined by environmental factors, more so by mood, imho. And that would be very hard to do in an app. Yes, quiet/loud, still/moving can connote some different genre choices but not necessarily. Many times I saw what the app gave me for say a calm/still selection and I thought to myself – “i can totally see why it chose it, but I don’t feel like listening to this right now” And here’s an internal conflict – app asks you to rate a song selection by #win or #fail, but when I press #win and get ready to listen, if any of the monitored conditions happen to change, that’s right….the app phases out my current song – the song I was most happy to listen to – and cues in another song – a song that I now have to go back and rate, and decide if I want or not. getting back to the song I was most happy to listen to becomes an ordeal. Makes for a veeeeery disjointed listening experience. Well, what does it sound like you ask? I took the liberty of recording a small progression of songs, using Project NOW, take a listen here:

A recent interview I accidentally came into with Co-op radio Soundscape programme hosted by Brady Marks urged me to rediscover my previous work with RJDJ. Since I’ve been driving, it’s been honestly less enticing to use soundtrips and such, and work hasn’t allowed me that much time for playing around with interactive music and process composition. While preparing some new recordings for the broadcast I came to appreciate it once more – and was especially excited to discover a ton of new user-generated scenes. I kept forgetting they show up under interactive and not soundtrips. This is a short one I did in a nosy area near my house walking to the taco place. I am having to upload these sounds to Soundcloud, because honestly, I feel like RJDJ has completely abandoned what I thought they stood for, which is building a community around creating, composing, sharing and exploring reactive music, augmented listening and such.

Perhaps I was wrong all along, but after Inception – which I’d still applaud for its clever and aesthetically/musically striking design (a little boo for using Hollywood commercial music) – after that, it’s all been downhill in my most humble opinion. The scene uploading, the RJDJ app, the RJC1000 software are no longer (or not currently, for a while) being updated due to developers being busy with other projects – Dimensions and a brand new project, called Project Now. Those however, to me, are the components that made RJDJ a community, an open-source mobile music movement, and not just a company for apps. I was expecting a newer, better RJC1000, with more options to create more striking augmented soundscapes. With Dimensions I was expecting an auditory treasure hunt – a geo/art cache app with sounds. Perhaps because of my foundations in soundscape listening and composition, and acoustic ecology, I had been wrong all along, and RJDJ is actually just an alternative music label, a support platform for delivering commercial music, I don’t know. But I do know that they started something maybe they didn’t even expect, that has now been dropped by the wayside. if there seems to be any spite in my words, it’s only passion because I care. Or I did. But I’m just one person.

Groove Coaster is a not so well known iPhone beat-matching game I heard about on … of all places, Feminist Frequency. Unlike the few other imitation Guitar Hero’s out there, like Rock Band, GH, Tapulous, etc. Groove Coaster is reminiscent more of the rhythm-point stylus game Osu! (original Japanese title Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! for Nintendo DS) and later reincarnated as Osu! the PC social network. I was an early adopter of the online Osu! and subsequently acquired the Japanese Nintendo version (which highly disappointed btw). But back to Groove Coaster. Don’t be fooled by its bit-art icon. I mean, I do wish they made a better one. But the game’s graphics are simple and beautiful with a simple 3D aesthetic, and the beat matching is inuitive. The tracks are fun and campy, kinda dancy, so far I’ve unlocked a bunch of content with more to come in-game (that’s right! you don’t have to immediately go purchase in-game content) and the game is pretty challenging to play.

Just a little Prezi thing I put together for last day of class (Cmns258) a bit of a hodge-podge of different initiatives, projects, uses of sounds and listening that are, at least in my view, transgressive and interesting.

Sadly I wasn’t able to record any of this experience which is prompting me to write…but it is understandable I couldn’t really bring a recorder into a bikram’s studio. The environment there struck me for two reasons, first in a good way and then in an off-putting way. The class started with a series of breathing exercises, long inhales and exhales. In a class of 30+ people the effect was amazing. Everyone exhaling at the same time made the sound not only full and rich but take on an almost modulated, off-phase quality because of the tiny delays between individual breaths. I felt like I was listening to a skillfully made electroacoustic composition. The breath felt amplified as natural a process of amplification as can be – a result of exaggerated listening…

Then the instructor put on a close mike and started the main part of the class. Now, my surprise wasn’t so much because of the novelty of using amplification for a generally small room of quiet yoga practitioners. My comment isn’t even about how amplification changed the relationship between her and the class. It’s more about the way she used her voice, which somehow thematically connected for me with the amplification itself. She spoke in sharp, forceful sequences fairly persistently like an aerobics instructor, or better yet – a bootcamp personal trainer to “go longer, go faster, go deeper, go more, stop” into our yoga poses. The jarring of the physical environment – one of sweaty delirium and the sharp vocal feedback was hard to deal with, to say the least.

No doubt I’m not going back there (http://www.bikramyogavancouver.com/)

This is just a quick note before I forget, but I don’t have any pictures or recording yet, an aural experience I had with my new car (Tron). It’s an automatic but the shift box is a little unfamiliar to me. And generally the sound of its engine is familiar because I’ve been driving Echos for ages. So when I took the car on the highway and it started revving up more and more I got concerned. I had a friend there too and we had the same reaction. Long story short, I asked her to look at the manual and I – duh – realized I had to shift from 3rd to Drive mode (for some reason those are separate). What was acoustically interesting was how much the sound of engine revving in its refusal to ease up, growling dangerously, in a harsh harsh timbre, was frustrating to our ears and our minds. The moment I shifted and the car automatically went into higher gear, my friend and I breathed an audible sigh of relief, as the sound fell and the timbre lost its edge, going from an angry growl to a soft purr. We actually talked about it after because it was such an ‘invisibly’ obvious moment and a very aural moment at that. Oh, Tron.

I feel like noise is implicit in a lot of my posts, epsiecially the aural postcards posts, but I often won’t feature it directly or elaborate on particular offending instances. Where I live is a fairly noisy location. Even during the night, the road is a thoroughfare for cars, ambulances (close to major hospitals) and various sirens and engine noise. To add to that, last summer there was construction for at least a couple of months fixing the outside envelope of my building, which essentially involved a lot of drilling into the outside concrete, and sounded like (sound 1). Now that that’s done this summer, the mall across the street has decided to do roof repairs or something rather, which involves them using a truck generator that has a large hose protrusion into the roof either sucking up or dispensing gravel. The sound is a combination of loud machine humming drone and the sound of millions of sharp pebbles shooting up and down a tube. It conveniently starts at 7:30 in the mornings, including weekends. The picture is the generator truck with its hose.

It’s been a little while for aural postcards for me … And I’ve actually collected some good ones but haven’t put any up. This weekend was LANcouver, a LAN gaming event at an old warehouse behind Great Northern Way campus…It was a rich and amazing aural atmosphere that included pretty much drag queen techno from the 90s blaring over the general hum-drum of excitement over various gaming events, mixing in with the muted soundscapes of each major game – Starcraft II being the, well, star of the show, Mario Cart, as well as the new Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II. To the side were the magic and warhammer miniture figure battle games, encased in a curiously quiet, introspective soundscape broken only by the sound of flipping pages through large paper instruction manuals, measureing precise angles and moving around the change physical perspective.

One of the recordings I made on the last day (hear below) was inspired by the early morning atmosphere of a Counter Strike (or Halo or something rather) raid in the back of the space where one guy – the “leader” presumably periodically shouted either platitudes or colourful insults and exclamations at the game and his co-gamer friends. This organic soundscape was – from where i stood – mixing in with a front display of a Counter Strike walkthrough on a large projection screen, narrated live by a game commentator, amplified and played through speakers to a small audience, and at the same time being recorded for subsequent broadcast. The simultaneous naturalness of live-amplified speech and its redundancy only contributed to a uniquely gaming space sonic environment, in addition to the very particular vocal style of narrating a walkthrough. A unique and interesting acoustic community with obvious strain of power dynamics of voice in the case of co-op mission players, and an un-imposing style of game narration; the mixture of situated aurality and broadcast-ready voice; and a backdrop of techno, along with generous helpings of pure guarana energy drinks – errr..unforgettable!