Live Generative Art From Music MRQC 1bb (Mid-Quality)

Sometimes, just sometimes, the world seems to get locked into a wierd over-reaction. Here's just one example. I used software that I wrote to generate moving art from a piece of music. The piece of music was 'Darkside (Instrumental)' by Trystero, which is licensed to, and available for adding to videos on, YouTube as part of the 'AudioSwap' feature. Unfortunately, having uploaded the video, the music was detected by YouTube's copyright infringement check, and I got a rather forcefully written email telling me that copyrighted music from AudioSwap had been detected, and that details of my use had been passed to the copyright owners, who were a company called Rumblefish.

The ONLY option that YouTube provide in this type of case is a 'dispute' mechanism. So I disputed it. I said, excuse me, but this music is available via AudioSwap, and so I should be able to use it on a video on YouTube, and I lost. I seem to have lost because the dispute mechanism only seemed to allow me to say 'no, this isn't owned by Rumblefish' when what I actually said was 'yes, this is owned by Rumblefish'. Rumblefish, the licensors, listened to the music, verified it was what I said it was, and allowed me to keep using it, although the YouTube 'punishment' for me seems to be that they can put adverts on the page when the video plays, and the video is now marked with an annotation that says I lost a copyright dispute. (Neither the ads nor the annotation cause me any problem.)

In the meantime, I have now exchanged emails with Rumblefish, who turn out to be very nice, reasonable people, which is exactly what one would expect from a company that makes its living licensing music.

I really and truly can't understand why copyright has become such a strong area of contention that my usage of a licensed track was treated as if I had done something wrong, when I had only used it in the way it was licensed to be used. Rumblefish confirmed that I was okay to use the licensed music in the way it was licensed, by the way. But the detection mechanism does seem to trigger a whole series of actions in the YouTube machine... I'm not blaming YouTube either here, since they are obligated to protect copyright, and I'm assuming that their actions are completely appropriate in a normal case of copyright infringement.

In one of those 'wish I had been a fly on the wall' moments, I would love to know what Rumblefish thought, when they were asked, by YouTube's automated copyright infringement detection system, to listen to a piece of music which I said was licensed by them via AudioSwap, and which they then confirmed was licensed by them! Either they furrowed their collective brows quite a bit, or else they've seen it all before...

So, I'm now the proud posessor of a few emails which seem to be designed to assert something very strongly, when I understood and had already acknowledged that assertion, and I didn't need to be reminded in such a powerful fashion. And here's me trying to do things completely correctly, legally, etc. What sort of emails do you get if you don't care and ignore legality etc? They must be even more strongly written than the ones I got, which I'm now assuming were mild and routine. I just hope I never see such an email, because it must be truly formidable.

As I say, and as I will keep saying, it is a strange world.

PS3 Type

The recent news that the BBC's iPlayer had been optimised for Sony's PS3 media device / games player actually got me watching bits of TV again. But it also highlighted the awkwardness of using a joypad controller to input text. 'Like painting the hall through the letterbox' is an old but apt metaphor, and it certainly applies here. So I did some searching.




I didn't like the official Sony add-on for the joypad which adds a mobile-phone-sized keyboard, but I did like a USB add-on laptop keyboard that cost the vast sum of £5 / $10. My only regret is that the efficient manufacturing techniques used in the 21st century mean that the top part of the casing is used as the mounting for the keys, and so you can't pull it apart, spray the silver fascia black, and so get a nice match with the PS3's glossy black exterior, but this is a minor point.




The photos tell it all. I used blu-tack to hold the keyboard in place, leaving enough room for the socket cover to flip up, although more recent, matt chrome, PS3s won't require this, but they may require a USB hub. Because my bright chrome PS3 has 4 USB sockets, plugging in the keyboard was easy.






So now I have a PS3 that plays games AND can accept typed input for URLs and any other time you need text. Very useful, and very low-cost. Recommended.







( I got the mini keyboard from the wonderful people at SVP, but I'm sure there are other sources, I just didn't use anyone else, and I didn't want more than one keyboard! )

The Marble and the Dishwasher

I used to be a hardware person. I then lived through the 'hybrid' years, when hardware mixed with software, and knowing how to read, disassemble, edit, compile, and program a 2764 EPROM would enable you to do most things. After that we have the current era, where software is all, and hardware seems to increasingly be little more than a platform to run code on.

But sometimes hardware and engineering do come in useful. Like yesterday when the dishwasher stopped working...

Nope, nothing blocked, no build-up of lime-scale, no broken timer mechanism. Much simpler than that!

The mains switch wouldn't lock in the On position, and so no power was getting to the electrics. A little bit of experimentation showed that something inside the switch had failed, and all that it needed was a little bit of pressure on the switch, and 'normal service' would be restored. Which is why I went looking for a marble.

A glass marble. The one I found was blue glass, with a swirly yellow bit in the middle, but that isn't important here. Armed with the marble and some clear tape (aka Sellotape, but that would be advertising) I placed the marble where a 'pressing finger' would go, taped it in place, and the dishwasher was working again. A victory for hardware, or for bodging - it depends on your point of view.

The picture shown here is with the switch in the 'Off' position, but you should be able to tell that from the position of the marble and the tape...

Of course, with a 13 year old dishwasher, getting spare parts isn't always possible, and I was intrigued that they didn't ask if I had a marble and some sticky tape, but they didn't, and so that was that. Time to start looking for a new one.

Of course, the marble is still fine, undamaged by its ordeal (or lack of), re-usable, ready to be pressed into service as an emergency general purpose fix-it device. What? Don't tell me you've never mis-used a marble?

( Glass marbles are available from toy shops. Sticky tape is available from many stationery shops and office equipment suppliers. Repairing dishwashers with this kind of advanced and highly technical equipment is done entirely at your own risk, and this article in no way recommends the use of marbles and sticky tape for any sort of repair. Do not try this at home. )

The Creative Use of Adverts

I've always been fascinated by the links between people who have things and people who want things. Connnecting the two sets of people together is much harder than it sounds. Blogs are one almost non-commercial examples, whilst adverts are a very commercial example. In fact, the word 'commercial' (as far as I know it is short for 'commercial break') is a synonym for an advertisement on television!

This blog has associated adverts, much like many web-pages, although since I'm more interested in the mechanisms behind the adverts than in people clicking on them, they are hidden away at the bottom of the columns where you have to be very keen to find them. If I was motiviated by income, then those adverts would be at the top of the page, and you might well have to scroll down to read the blog content. Which leads to another interesting thought...

The adverts are tailored to the content of the page, and so if I mention 'Christmas Crackers' like I did in a recent post, then there is a probability that adverts connected to Christmas Crackers will turn up on the page for some viewers. At the moment I'm not sure that adverts for highly seasonal goods like crackers are valuable commodities, so what are good words to attract adverts? Given today's historic Presidential Inauguration, one would assume that 'Barack Obama' might garner some related adverts, and I understand that 'mesothelioma' is highly rated because of public interest in asbestos and cancer.

Of course, if I was programming the placement of suitable adverts on a web-page, one of the things I would be looking for would be pages that were on the subject of adverts, and I would be especially careful about them. In the spirit of live experimentation, you might like to look at the adverts on this page and see if any of them reflect the things I've mentioned. Clicking on them is entirely up to you, of course!

It always points due somewhere!

The magnetic compass has only recently been rendered slightly less magical by GPS systems in mobile phones. I can remember when I was a mere slip of a lad, that the 'shoes to have' came equipped with a compass in the heel, and they had animal footprints instead of tread patterns. (They were simpler, less cynical and less commercial times back then... although if you search the internet for them, you will find that they were made in the 1960s by Clarks and called 'Wayfinders', or 'Trackers' or 'Pathfinders', or...)

But back to the topic. In the recent yule-time holiday, I was treated to cracking open several festive crackers, happy in the sure and certain knowledge that they would contain instantly forgettable throwaway items of little or no value or usefulness. But this year, as the world prepares to plunge headlong into an uncertain financial future, something had gone wrong and I actually got something very different:

A Christmas cracker gift that was genuinely interesting!

I know that this sounds unlikely, but stay with me here. At first sight, it appeared to be a compass, albeit without a shoe attached. But a more investigative examination (CSI-style, but without the flashy equipment) revealed an unexpected bonus: a key ring. Don't leave yet, because there's more: not only was this a key-ring with a potentially useful purpose (the compass for navigation), but there was an additional extra - the key ring was magnetic, presumably so that you could pick up dropped pins as well as navigate. Totally amazing: three useful items all in one!

Almost.
You might have already figured out the inherent problem with this particular combination of features, and so you won't be surprised at the next sentence. Unfortunately, the compass showed a strong preference to point, not to Magnetic North, but to the ring of the key-ring. The multi-purpose device turned out to be more or less useless as a compass, but okay as a magnetic key-ring. I'm counting this one as a 'near-miss' in terms of being useful, but genuinely interesting because I'm intrigued at what warped sort of mind could conceive such a pointless mix of features...

Instead, here's a few alternatives, just on the off-chance that you, gentle reader, happen to be a person who earns a living dreaming up little gifts to put inside Christmas crackers:

• Balloons used to hold pins
• A card counting device to count the number of cards in a pack of cards
• A bucket with a hole in it, embossed with the words of a well-known song
• A USB-to-PS/2 port adapter
• Pads of little yellow notes with incredibly strong glue on them
• A mini-CD of silence recorded at the top of Everest
• One shoe with a compass in the heel (and only one shoe)
• A shoe with a small hole in the heel for a compass
  
• A small black hole with a compass in it
• A small black hole
  
• A compass without a magnetised pointer
• A compass that points to Magnetic South as if it was Magnetic North
• A Higg's boson
  

My visualisations now on YouTube!

Sometimes it takes me ages to 'get around to it', and this is certainly true for putting more examples of my music visualisation research onto the web.

One of the key stumbling blocks has been grabbing video in sufficient quality, but buying Snapz Pro X from Ambrosia software has solved this (very nice software - I've been a happy Ambrosia customer since my G3 days).

So you can now view some video examples here

Absolutely freezing!

There are times when I'm convinced that the world is not an artificial construct: Truman-style. And, rather like Douglas Adams' Infinite Improbability Drive, it has to do with the likeliness of something happening.

In a recent case, one contender for proof of the world being real came at my work Christmas Party, which partly took place in the Absolut Icebar in London. Here, in temperatures just below zero, people pay to stand around and look at ice sculptures and drink from containers made of ice (I hesitate to call them 'glasses' because they are made of water!). There are two types of people in the bar: people whose sole interests are drinking and the other people, and people whose sole interests are why it doesn't feel cold enough and why isn't the ice melting? The first group of people are having a good time, whilst the second group are just rubbing their fingers on the ice and furrowing their brows...

Amazing. Cold. Blue.

That's about it. Probably one of the strangest experiences I've had for some time, and a very strong contender for proof that the world as I experience it is actually real. I can still taste the irony in my soft drink...