Hi! Right now I am on a broken-cars adventure to Erie PA to run in a half-marathon on an island. I will definitely suck, even not wearing a costume. But then on Monday I am going to Zurich. So I wrote this Tom 7 Entertainment System tune called Theme from Zürich. It is pretty weird chord-wise but especially for its superposition of triplets and power-of-two rhythms. I also think it is kind of catchy.
irony alert: I know that Swiss Miss is not actually Swiss. (For example its logo would probably be in Helvetica)
style="color : robin's egg"
(11 Jun 2009 at 23:51)
I made this Tom 7 Entertainment System tune tonight instead of following through on the other projects I told myself I'd do. It's called style="color : robin's egg" and it does kind of go Rogue in the middle for a bit.
Tom 7 Entertainment System Hero (show and demo reel)
(16 Apr 2009 at 20:14)
Hey, okay. Finally I have the videos ready to reveal secret project 7H, which is called Tom 7 Entertainment System Hero.
This is part video game and part performance art piece. The video game is essentially an implementation of Guitar Hero, where the songs are Tom 7 Entertainment System tunes. Some of these are ridiculously intricate and most have weird time signatures, which makes for advanced play. It supports keyboard on Mac, Windows, and linux or real USB guitar controllers (like the XBox 360 ones) on Mac and Windows. That includes accelerometers and whammy bar. The best introduction is to watch the demo reel:
This video has a bunch of clips in it, mostly from the Show at Belvedere's. You'll see a bunch of things. One is that I actually mess up a lot when playing. I'm better than this but two things contributed to my mistakes: (1) I was kinda drunk since the show started like 3.5 hours late and I got free beer for being a "musician" and (2) in the last week before the show I was sprinting to get all the software and hardware working, so I actually didn't practice hardly any of these songs more than the one time it took me to decide to put them in the setlist. Once it's available publicly I will challenge you to high-score battle to prove it. Hardware you ask? I didn't build the guitar or drums of course, but I did build the Laser Suspension Womb, which to be more pithy I sometimes call my "USB laser hat." It's a hardhat with a bunch of very bright LEDs and actual laser diodes embedded in it, powered by 1.5A, worn on the head, and connected to the computer via USB implemented on a custom circuit board with a PIC microcontroller. The in-game music and events ("drums were kidnapped!") trigger the lights and lasers to play along. I have a clever hack so that it doesn't need special drivers on any platform, though that's not helping penetration much because there's only one of them. This was my first real hardware project in my adult life, but now that I know how to do it I hope to do more (especially input devices, i.e., "instruments"). It's much better in 2009 than I recall from sticking paperclips and resistors in the parallel port in 1993.
Rock Band drums are supported too. Unlike the guitar, which has a goal pattern for you to match, these are totally freeform. Commodore 64 samples are played in response to drumhits. I wish the controller supported some kind of velocity sensitivity, because that is kind of important for drum expressiveness, but too bad so sad.
Techno details: The implementation is almost all in Standard ML using SDL, except for the low-level sound synthesis thread and the interface to the USB laser hat. That stuff's in C. It's easy to mix them. The code has some shortcuts in it for sure and deserves to be cleaned up (lots of them introduced in that last week sprint) but it also has some really nice parts, like the algorithm that matches your input to the score. The matching is ambiguous, so there's an on-line dynamic programming algorithm to be maximally generous to your playing. (I don't think Guitar Hero II had this maximally generous algorithm, which was one of the reasons I started working it out like a year and a half ago, but I do think that GH III and on do it right.) The finger patterns you're supposed to match with the guitar, which I call the "score", is generated automatically from MIDI files. To turn a T7ES MIDI file into a T7ES Hero game file, I have to assign instruments to each of the tracks, and then pick which tracks or track parts are supposed to be played on the guitar. The rest is automatic, save some tuning parameters. "genscore" has a model for how closely a candidate score matches the original MIDI (for example, if consecutive MIDI notes are rising in pitch, then it's better for the fingers to also be rising on the fretboard) and then it solves for the optimal assignment, measure-by-measure. I thought that I would need to modify the score after this to get good quality, but it actually works amazingly well. Some of the stuff it comes up with is super fun, like I would assume was created by a human with a good sense of fun. No. Only cyber-brain.
Here's the last two songs of the regular set in full. In this you see that you can actually play drums and guitar at the same time if you're good enough (I am not). 2 player mode? Maybe soon:
I don't know if I'll ever get the opportunity to perform this again (befriend T7ES Band Page on Facebook for guaranteed notification), but maybe. Either way, I'm looking forward to sharing the software with you guys, which I will do as soon as I finish the auto-update and high score table, so that we can compete with each other and I can release song packs.
Tom 7 Entertainment System show at Belvedere's, March 27
(22 Mar 2009 at 02:25)
I know I've mentioned this before, but now there's a poster. And it's coming up soon. I'm playing with William Sides Atari Party, X-Buster, and Bit Mummy. I don't really know anything about how this is going down (like band order or timeframe) other than the 8pm listing, but I am fairly certain it is really happening. Performing this video game music is not as obvious as performing stuff that's created in the first place with guitars and the mouth. But I have written some software and I am working still on some hardware and I promise I will not just sit behind a laptop, at least. And Belvedere's is a pretty cool spot, in Lawrenceville. Come if you want. Unlike the incessant Sick Ridiculous shows, this may be the only chance to see this project live, like, ever.
PS. The show at the Lava Lounge was really fun. Thanks for everybody that came! :)
Ah, spring. I am currently struggling to keep myself from going for a long body-busting run, because the weather is truly ideal for it. I pushed myself a bit too hard this week and now I am feeling that stress-decompression sickness, and I don't want to exacerbate it. Probably the solution will be to work on projects in an outdoorsish coffee shop. Some things:
The Tom 7 Entertainment System show at Belvedere's on March 27 is now confirmed. I'm playing with some noise-chiptune dudes "Bit Mummy", "X-Buster" and "William Sides Atari Party" from Chicago. I'm pretty much ready to go on this but there are a number of things I've dreamed of that could make the performance sweeter, and so I want to do some hacking to that end. Also I said I'd make a poster, though this one is nicely nostalgic.
SIGBOVIK is coming up rapidly, and I want to have a couple of papers/projects in this. I have one that's about half done now, and that I can probably finish in tomorrow's Program Committee meeting. If you have good ideas or papers rejected from seriouser/lesser conferences, acceptance is guaranteed for this peer-reviewed publication venue.
I think in two weeks I will be done paying off my student loans. I ordered a new guitar as a premature celebration.
After this I was gonna upload and post another video from our show last week, but my Earthlink DSL is fritzed right now and the online live service nonsensical, so I resort to posting this incomplete update from phone. :(
#1: Steelers win Superbowl. You've probably also heard about this, so I just wanted to mention: (a) I have Steelers theme song covers; (b) Now Steelers have more Superbowl victories than any other team (6), which is Six Ridiculous; (c) My playoffs beard now becomes my private property, which means I can shave it at any time or link it to some other event out of my control (d) This was probably the best football game I've ever seen, though it could have been better with an intentional safety—which apparently Tomlin was planning to take (!) if only we had not gotten an accidental safety instead; (e) Guys, intentional safeties are so sweet, like rocket-jumping, or shooting yourself through the shoulder to kill the bad guy standing behind you at the end of the movie. Do you like it when I put other single characters (?) in parentheses in the middle of the parenthetical-letter-delimited list? Or is that confusing?
#2: You are hereby invited to our first real Sick Ridiculous & etc. gig on Saturday February 7 at 9pm at Smiling Moose. I am pretty sure this show is going to really happen unlike last time because, for example, we are the featured event on Smiling Moose's web site. We're playing with two other bands: one which comprises our friend and his friends and which I like a lot (reminds me of Steven Malkmus side projects, but bearded), and one that I don't know but their music sounds good on the Myspace. Because I have a particular kind of hangup about this, I want you to know that I don't expect any person to come just because he or she's my friend (except Nels; you gotta come dude because you are in the band), nor does becoming a "fan" obligate you to attend future concert outings. But, more people makes it more fun for everyone. If you are dying of grad school destitution and cannot afford, I will pay your cover and buy you a drink. This animated concert poster may or may not hypnotize you into compliance:
I also have a highly probable but not finalized gig for Tom 7 Entertainment System on March 27 at Belvedere's, with a few other chiptune bands. Please place a tick mark in your calendar. This will be my first time performing that stuff publicly too (though I conveniently have some hot technology in the works for it), and a rare opportunity.
The thing about T7ES music is that it's just the right length of project, like an hour with no stress about scheduling or anything. Obvious that I have to finish it right now, and then it's nice icing to make a album cover for it and think of something clever to put in the lyrics field. Especially when I can finally click again after a week of keyboard-only computing! So here is this week's song, a tune chiamatoGnocci Dokie. There are two things to say about this song. One is the middle quiet wandering 7/4 part right before the melody comes back is not awesome. I know this. I tried my darndest to add something to the stereo sinewaves line that made sense, but I did not darn it enough. Second is that the whole point of this song was to exercise my exceedingly minor theory that guitar players find the chord played with all guitar strings open in standard tuning (EADGBE) to be more pleasing than average, just by virtue of having heard it a lot and reminding them of a nice guitar. (I wonder if they are also attracted to guitar-shaped people more, too?) It is not naturally a nice chord. You can tell from its name, Em7add11. Depends who you ask. I thought there was some common mnemonic (like Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge) for remembering EADGBE but I could not find one, otherwise a reference to that would be the name of the song. Point is I think I get a little titillated when I hear this in the same way that symphonygoers probably feel when the symphoniers are tuning up. This song doesn't use that chord directly because it sounds truly ass, but its main line can be played on the guitar without using any fingers on the left hand. Like this: (high)E, B, G, D, B, D, A, (low)E. If that line makes sense I think you are a guitar player or crazy. If that line does not make sense I think you are not a guitar player or you do not like ear experiments.
Happy voting day! I wrote this T7ES song tonight: Many Happy Returns. Now I am going to an election party.
By the way, if you visit radar.spacebar.org to read Tom 7 Radar (rather than using RSS syndication) you have probably noticed that I have implemented categories and applied them to a lot of old entries. (See for example favorites and album a day.) That's kind of useful since a lot of stuff that I do gets posted only to this weblog and there is no other way to find it. Not at all obvious is that you can also get an RSS feed for any category. Just take the category name, replace spaces_with_underscores, and subscribe to a URL like
http://radar.spacebar.org/f/a/weblog/rss/1/5/t7es
to see all the posts having to do with Tom 7 Entertainment System. (Always use the number 1 after rss or it won't work, and the number 5 is the maximum number of most recent posts to show. For most syndication software 5 should be plenty.) I use this to, for example, post customized news feeds on the last.fm pages for my various bands. You can use it for whatever you want, which is probably nothing.
NEW: Still Yet More T7ES tunes, blah, blah
(02 Sep 2008 at 23:16)
It can't be helped. When I'm in the mood I keep doing it. Here are two new Tom 7 Entertainment System songs:
Theme from updn. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I first realized at the age of nearly 29 that "updn" exhibits perfect rotational symmetry in many fonts, which is pretty lucky because taken as the opposites "up" and "down" it's also sort of self-describing. I'd like to claim that this song has some kind of rotational symmetry too (that would be an interesting experiment), but it is just a song. It does have some parts that go up and some parts that go dn, though. Perhaps too much so.
Theme from msiegler. This one is unusual in that I had finished it enough to record it to MP3 and have it on my MP3 player over the weekend and I decided that I liked it enough that I needed to fix up a lack of ruling during the midsection by adding in some more ruling. So I gave it another shot this evening and I'm glad I did because that's when I added the ripcord freakout portamento stuff, which is now my new favorite part. While writing this one I really tried to own some of the weird chords that came up, not brushing their hair really at all, and just surrounding them by (relatively) easy melody to make them fit as best I could. (e.g. the uneasy part near the beginning that goes G♭7sus2, D♭, G♭m, B♭dim—B♭♭5 or the E7♭5 before it loops.) (I don't really know the names of chords aside from the easy guitar stuff nor do I think it really matters, but I bet that if I looked these up they'd look impressively weird, which they do.) I like this one better than the above.
These are clearly new-phase songs (I was looking at the Beatles's Let It Be LP just recently and found it pretty ironic-sad that it claims boldly "This is a new phase Beatles album!" on the sleeve), but you'll perhaps notice that I headed off that dangerous trend that would have suggested that these be 7 and 12 minutes long, respectively. Brevity is the soul of wit.
