Students in my Audio Recording Techniques III (Spring 2023) course at the University of Oregon had ten weeks to recreate a recorded song of their choice. They voted on reverse engineering The Cardigans “Lovefool” from their 1996 album, First Band on the Moon. The goal was to get the song as close as they could […]

In the spring of 2022, students in my Audio Recording Techniques III course at the University of Oregon recreated Phoebe Bridger’s “Kyoto” from her 2020 album, Punisher, from the ground up. I used our 2022 class song as the foundation for Cyberduck AI’s challenge to use Grimes’ AI voice in a creative context. I uploaded […]

Students in my Audio Recording Techniques III (Spring 2022) course at the University of Oregon had ten weeks to recreate a recorded song of their choice. They voted on reverse engineering Phoebe Bridger’s “Kyoto” from her 2020 album, Punisher. The goal was to get the song as close as they could to the original recording. They […]

Custom-built sub kick microphone.

Over the summer, I produced five sound sculptures centered around fire-affected areas of the 2020 Holiday Farm fire. The work was part of the Soundscapes of Socioecological Succession (SSS) project that was funded through a Center for Environmental Futures, Andrew W. Mellon 2021 Summer Faculty Research Award from the University of Oregon. Through field recording […]

This is a short article on creating video spectrograms (time-frequency plots) of audio files. Includes link to open source code.

Are we ready for technologized random-order concept albums? Random Playback is a music album that explores using dynamically looped playback to generate a unique listening experience (and which never ends).

Wildfire is a 48-foot long speaker array that plays back a wave of fire sounds across its 48-foot span at speeds of actual wildfires. The sound art installation strives to have viewers embody the devastating spread of wildfires through an auditory experience. Wildfire employs sound to investigate how the climate enables destructive wildfires that lead […]

Sound art installations that require digital computing, especially projects that rely on advanced software, demand added insurance of stability in order to remain up in an unattended space for extended periods of time. For exhibitions, this time period can mean a month or more with hours that vary from business hours to a taxing 24-7. […]

The keywords in this question are distribute and streaming. Digital distribution is the delivery of your music to digital service providers like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, TIDAL, Napster, Google Play, Deezer, among many other streaming platforms. Digital distribution companies (CD Baby, DistroKid, RouteNote, Mondotunes, ReverbNation, Landr, Awal, Fresh Tunes, Tunecore, Chorus Music, Symphonic, etc.) […]

The students in my Audio Recording Techniques III (Spring 2019) course at University of Oregon had ten weeks to recreate a recorded song of their choice. They voted on reverse engineering Supertramp’s “The Logical Song” from the band’s 1979 album, Breakfast in America. The goal was to get the song as close as they could […]

A video walk through that shows how to utilize Logic Pro X functions to create a MIDI sampler and to generate rhythmic MIDI material to drive the sampler in just 3 minutes. Listen to my track “Informatics” on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/2L66Qioblp5FaBQwPzwcex?si=SHiqnMdQSdWyCnOLq1ciNw that uses the technique.

While teaching Data Sonification at the University of Oregon, we talked a lot about inference preservation, communication of idea, filtering and bias of data, and by extension, tool building as a process for supporting sonic hypotheses. To that end, I wanted to empower students with their own work inside Kyma, so we spent a class […]

By Jon Bellona and Ben Salzman. (Note: This post is a part of a presentation with Ben Salzman at the 2018 Kyma International Sound Symposium in Santa Cruz, CA.) [Above photo: Nancy L. Ford] On Music faculty at Hamilton College since 1979, Samuel Pellman devoted his life to making music with students and turning them […]

The students in my Audio Recording Techniques III (Spring 2018) course at University of Oregon had ten weeks to select and recreate a recorded song of their choice. They voted on producing a recreation of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop.” The goal was to get the song as close as they could to the original recording. They recorded […]

Ever since Cycling 74 introduced the idea of packages in Max 6.1, I’ve been pretty excited. Previously, there wasn’t a great way to distribute and install tools, objects, externals, media. And if you wanted to use anyone else’s tools, you had to wade through the murky collection of application directories and dump in single files–an unfailing way to […]

Tired of software, longing for the touch and feel of circuits, I’ve been looking for something to satiate my sonic hunger. And, I wanted to get my hands dirty. So, I placed a small order of electronic parts with mouser.com. Additionally, ever since having discovered that the cigar store in Staunton, VA sells nice wooden cigar […]

Lately I’ve been having fun with the spectral analysis tool inside Kyma. This post is to document a quick introduction to Kyma’s Analysis Tool. Specifically, I will document how basic smoothing of frequency and amplitude augments the sonic character of a slow playback via an analysis file. After performing an initial analysis using Kyma’s Analysis Tool (Cmd-1), […]

Tools help us carry out particular tasks and functions. Hammers drive in nails. Saws cut wood. In the digital realm, we also use tools. Faders control volume, buttons trigger sounds. However, in software, things are not always so clear cut. Faders don’t have to control volume, and buttons don’t have to trigger sounds. The examples of […]

Selecting a portion of an audio sample is something that we do often. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) like Logic and ProTools or even Sample Track Editors like Peak and Audacity allow users to select a portion of audio. The process of selecting audio with a mouse for out-of-real-time control (and in the comfort of one’s […]

Over the last few months, I’ve been interested in data zooming, where a finite range of data (say 0-1) can be magnified and explored in greater detail. We are all familiar with the paradigm. In Microsoft Word or Photoshop, for example, you zoom the view (e.g. 125%) and in the same amount of screen real estate, […]