Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 294

Electronic composer Keith Fullerton Whitman on the joys of piles of hardware

Keith Fullerton Whitman has spent decades exploring electronic utterances. He first began playing with them on his Commodore Vic20 when he was ten, but eventually moved on to study music at Berklee. By the early aughts, when software tools for creating electronic music were getting cheaper and easier to use, Whitman was nevertheless digging deeper into the intricacies of making music with modular synthesizers. Unlike softsynth programs that can run on any computer, a modular synthesizer is a free-standing piece of hardware whose only inputs and outputs are electric voltage; the equivalent of making music using C-3PO's entrails.

As he explained in a recent interview with the music software company Abelton, finding your way around modular synthesis is "like building a jigsaw puzzle before you can appreciate the picture." But the opacity of this process eventually gives way to relationship defined by immediacy.

"You can stand at the modular and all it does is make sound,” he said. “What a beautiful thing that is. No diversions, no Facebook, no email. That’s it. It only exists in its own world to make sound. There’s a morning like today, where I don’t want to face the world or get on the internet, so I turn on the modular and by the end of the day I’ll have five minutes of cool sounds."

But the challenges involved can be discouraging for artists. This was part of the impetus for Richard Flanagan's FRACT OSC, a virtual synthesizer video game, where players solve puzzles in order to get the materials they need to outfit a studio and compose new electronic melodies. "There’s a really cool music shop here in Montreal that sells all kinds of modular gear, and even I go in there and go, ‘Oh man, I don’t want to touch anything, they’ll know I’m a fraud,’" Flanagansaid in an interview with Rock, Paper, Shotgun. As a result, part of the aim of FRACT OSC was to simply encourage people to have fun "just tweaking knobs, solving puzzles and making sounds." Putting gear-centric music mixing in the context of game made it less intimidating.

Even so, modular synthesizers aren't for everyone. Rich Vreeland, who created the soundtrack for FEZ under his "Disasterpeace" alias, used Reason's Thor synthesizer program to create his 2011 album, Rise of the Obsidian Interstellar. But the program's UI still relied on digital displays of modules and cord patching, they were just being shown on a computer screen rather than a physical rack. As he confessed to AudioSlap, "I got fed up with the whole visual patch-cables-from-one-rack-to-another interface. It was too much like hardware and I got sick of it."

This hands-on experimentation this precisely why Whitman loves them, however:

"Some of the best sounds that I’ve made have been at two in the morning, half drunk; I’m trying to get a particular sound, then I miss the right jack and get some totally odd squealing noise and think: This is great, I wonder what’s going on here, and I’ve got an output plugged into another output. And they’re fighting each other. That kind of tactility, the way the voltage moves; it’s actually electrically happening in the cable. It’s not a stream of numbers, it’s voltage physically battling voltage. There’s definitely a pure physicality to it that is very attractive to some people."

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Here's what happens when you click this sportscar into "Insane Mode"

As my Auto Shop teacher explained to us in high school, cars from the 1950s had powerful motors for two reasons: Highways and people socializing. A 1955 Chevy Bel Air might hold three couples on an outing, six adults—three across the bench in the front, three in the back—and when merging onto a highway, had to be able to quickly get all that weight up to 55 miles per hour.

To a 1950s engineer, that kind of torque required lots of iron: V-8 engines, four-barrel carburetors and tons of gas. And back then a 13-second 0-60 time was reckoned respectable. But nowadays a Tesla with an electric engine—or say, two electric engines—has cut the acceleration time by some 75%.

Yes, folks, Tesla's Model S P85D ("D" for "dual engine") can do 0-60 in a blistering 3.2 seconds, subjecting the occupants to 1G in the process. It's called "Insane Mode" and here are unsuspecting passengers' reactions (Warning, NSFW):

Here's what veteran auto journalist Damon Lavrinc wrote on Jalopnik after receiving a ride in one:

I got a brief, spirited run in the back seat, and the results are—and I kinda hate admitting this—scary.

Acceleration runs don't freak me out. I've been in cars with over 1,000 hp manned by a competent driver, and I'm able to keep my cool. But something is different in the P85D. When the driver slams on the accelerator, my mind knows we're OK, but my body—for just a few tenths of a second—got freaked out. Maybe it was the torque or the blackened tunnel that we shot into, but there was the briefest moment of panic, which subsided as the twist of the motors started bleeding off.

The P85D will be out later this year; the video above was presumably shot to drum up pre-orders.

This post was originally written by hipstomp / Rain Noe for Core77.

The analog wonderland of Small Radios Big Televisions is coming to PS4

Small Radios Big Televisions looks like it's going to supply a some pretty magnificent worlds to get lost in. The upcoming game, currently in development by the Canadian one-man team FIRE FACE, promises heavy doses of tape-distorted visuals, warbly oscillators, and fun with analog media (or at least the idea of it). And to sweeten the deal, Owen Deery of FIRE FACE announced today that he has secured both PC and PS4 releases for SRBT. According to Deery, this means he's going to be able to produce a "real, full game" with about 4-5 hours of playtime, multiple factories to explore, and dozens of tapes to wreck. There's no final word just yet on when the game will be released, but Deery expects he will have it finished sometime this year.

Multiple factories to explore and dozens of tapes to wreck. 

Along with this welcome announcement, Deery posted a trailer (which you can watch below) that gives those interested a peek into how the game will work. Players search through abandoned industrial buildings looking for tapes that hold items to help them progress through each factory. To get these items, players will have to manipulate the tapes and explore their stunning virtual environments.

Find out more about Small Radios Big Televisions on FIRE FACE's website here. Also, be sure you check out Chris Priestman's early look into the game from back in August.

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